Temple again guilty of murder
Slain wife’s family says she ‘can finally rest’ after retrial; jurors now weigh sentencing
A Harris County jury on Tuesday convicted David Temple of murder in the 1999 death of his pregnant wife, opening the door for the former Katy-area football coach to be sent back to prison several years after an appeals court reversed his original guilty verdict because of prosecutorial misconduct.
The panel of seven men and five women handed down the decision following almost eight hours of deliberation and 18 days of witness testimony, including evidence prosecutors withheld during the initial trial and which led to the reversal. In the end, jurors convicted David Temple of murder for a second time, rejecting the defense attorneys’ claim that an alternate suspect, a teenage neighbor, fatally shot Belinda Temple.
As state District Judge Kelli Johnson read the verdict, Temple cast his face downward, sweating and suppressing tears while his family members, including his adult son, burst into a chorus of sobs.
Just feet away, siblings and friends of Belinda Temple let out audible sighs of relief, comforted that the man they have long believed killed her could be locked up once more.
“This day’s about Belinda; this has nothing to do with David Temple,” her brother, Brian Lucas, said after the verdict was read. “Maybe Belinda can finally rest.”
David Temple was taken into custody Tuesday afternoon after jurors heard testimony to determine his sentencing, which could be probation or five years
to life in prison.
As he was taken into a holding cell, Temple looked back at his mother, who wiped her eyes with a tissue.
“Tell daddy I love him,” he said. David Temple’s family members, along with attorney Stanley Schneider, declined to comment on the decision. Lisa Tanner, a prosecutor with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, said she would withhold any statements until the end of the trial’s punishment phase.
Testimony in the retrial revolved around two competing timelines of events on Jan. 11, 1999, the day Belinda was found shot to death in her master bedroom closet. David Temple told authorities that he came home from a trip to the park and store with his 3-year-old son and found his wife dead amid an apparent burglary.
Prosecutors argued that the husband — who was in the throes of a secret relationship with a coworker — had executed Belinda with a close-contact shotgun wound shortly after she arrived home from work and a trip to pick up soup for her sick child. He washed his hands, changed his clothes, and left for the store, before returning home and staging a crime scene, state attorneys said. At some point during his shopping trip, prosecutors said, he ditched the murder weapon, which was never located.
Temple’s defense lawyers contended that their client didn’t have time to murder his wife, given a “narrow window” of opportunity when they were both home alone. They argued that the killing occurred while Temple was at the store, and was carried out by a 16-year-old neighbor who had a bone to pick with Belinda, who was also his teacher at Katy High School.
The neighbor testified during the retrial, telling jurors that he skipped the last class period of the day on Jan. 11, 1999. He said that he spent much of the afternoon on a mostly fruitless quest to find marijuana, and several of his high school friends corroborated parts of his story.
Early in the trial, Belinda’s coworkers painted a portrait of the special education teacher, speaking emotionally about her passion as an educator and a mother. She was joyous and full of light, and generally the more talkative half in her relationship. Her friends also highlighted an ugly side of the marriage, where they said Belinda was forced to pull most of the weight at home, even in the late stages of her pregnancy.
David Temple did not take the witness stand. His second wife — the coworker with whom he had an affair in late 1998 and early 1999 — only testified as to the beginnings of their relationship. They married two years after the murder, and she filed for divorce in Fort Bend County in early July, amid the trial.
While the case itself has maintained a grip since Belinda’s death in Katy and the Houston area, ongoing court proceedings attracted the national media spotlight.
A jury found Temple guilty in a 2007 trial, but he was released from prison in 2016 when the state’s highest criminal court reversed the conviction, finding Harris County prosecutors deliberately withheld evidence and robbed the former Alief Hastings football coach of a fair trial.
The court ruled that Temple’s rights were violated because of the misconduct of Kelly Siegler, a former prosecutor known for courtroom theatrics. She later became the star of her own reality TV show, Cold Justice.
The 2016 opinion concluded that Siegler didn’t give defense attorneys full access to reams of pages of information, including a detailed investigation into the alternate suspect, the teenage neighbor. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office recused itself from the case, appointing the Texas Attorney General’s Office as special prosecutors.
On Tuesday, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said she respected the jury’s verdict in Temple’s retrial.
“Public trust and public safety depends on every defendant getting a fair trial,” she said.
A new legal team also represented Temple. The attorneys replaced Dick DeGuerin, a legendary defense lawyer.
The length of time between Belinda Temple’s murder and the retrial presented a challenge for the new attorneys. The jurors frequently ran into testimony where witnesses had trouble recalling certain details, citing the 20 years between the event and the most recent court proceedings.
After the verdict was delivered, Belinda’s brother said that he always knew jurors would reach the same outcome as they did in 2007. David Temple was guilty from day one, he said.
Victim’s advocate Andy Kahan, who has worked with the Lucas family since 1999, said he was relieved that justice had finally been reached in the case.
“The bottom line is, David Temple is not just a one-time convicted murderer,” he said. “He has now been convicted twice, and that speaks volumes.”
Jurors will continue deliberations in the punishment phase of the trial on Wednesday morning.