Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (32 page)

“I don’t think there was anything to it at all or Belinda would have tiddle-taddled to us, because she tiddle-taddled to us whenever he wouldn’t do certain things,” Maureen said, dismissing her son’s infidelity as nothing to be concerned about. “[If it were true] we would have had an indication, but I’m not going to discuss that with you, Brenda.”

“I’m not going to say who I talked to, but I heard that he is still seeing somebody down there, and that just tears me up,” Brenda said.

“Yeah,” Maureen agreed, again.

“A teacher at the same high school he’s at. She’s going to the football games. I mean. I mean, I don’t know if y’all know about it or not…. I’ve heard she’s been up in the stands.”

“Who are you talking to, Brenda?” Maureen asked, sounding peeved.

“I’m not going to say,” Brenda said.

“Then I’m not going to answer you…. People need to mind their own business,” David’s mother said, sounding angry. “Answer me right now, Brenda. Do you think David murdered Belinda?”

Having had enough of the charade, Brenda said, “I really don’t know, Maureen. He plays all these games.”

Maureen Temple hung up, and the telephone went dead.

O
n the first day of January 2000, Belinda Temple’s murder was erased off the homicide division’s open-case board. A new year was starting, one that would bring new murders to solve. On January 11, Debbie Berger and Cindy O’Brien met with Tom and Carol at Belinda and Erin’s grave to mark a sad event, the first anniversary of the murder. They banded together, beside Belinda and Erin’s monument with the phrase: W
E FEEL THE TOUCH OF ANGEL WINGS
.

That same afternoon, Schmidt sat in his county-issued car outside a suburban Houston home. A car pulled up and two women got out, one carrying a baby. Once the women were inside the house, Schmidt walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Pam Engelkirk, David Temple’s college girlfriend, answered the door. The woman she’d arrived home with was her mother. The irony was that just that day, Pam had mentioned to her mother that it was the first anniversary of Belinda Temple’s murder.

As the detective listened, Pam recounted her years with David, including the day her football-star boyfriend pushed her into a wall. It was another piece in the puzzle, further evidence that David had been prone to violence even before he’d met Belinda, but it wasn’t enough.

“I can’t sleep at night because of this case,” Schmidt confided. “And I won’t until justice is done.”

That winter, a friend in Katy saw David get out of his car in a parking lot and walk up to a restaurant. He went inside and grabbed one of the fliers asking for help solving Belinda’s murder out of the window. He tore it up, stuffed it in a garbage can and then walked back to his car. He got his son out and brought him inside the restaurant to eat dinner.

In Nacogdoches, Tom was losing patience. He pored over his own timeline of the events of the murder day, everything he could glean from reports on the murder and what he’d heard from detectives. At times he wondered if someone in David’s family had stashed the murder weapon. Were Ken and Maureen covering for their son?

That winter, still struggling with all he knew, Quinton called Schmidt and offered to give a new statement. This time, Quinton supported what Tammey had told detectives, that the Temples’ marriage had been troubled. Schmidt took notes and asked questions, his ears pricking up when Quinton mentioned something he hadn’t told police before: that when he’d helped David move out of the Round Valley house and in with his parents, Quinton had seen an open box of shotgun shells.

It would seem strange how David would so quickly learn what was going on within the investigation. On an evening not long after Quinton gave that statement, he saw David following him in Katy proper. David pulled into a parking lot, and Quinton pulled in behind him. David got out of his truck and stormed up to Quinton’s truck door.

“What are you telling police?” David barked.

“The truth,” Quinton said.

“Keep your damn mouth shut,” David ordered. He glared at Quinton, furious, then turned and walked away.

Afterward, Quinton called Schmidt, asking for not the first time: “What’s the holdup? Why don’t you arrest David?”

“We’re not going to have another O. J.,” Schmidt responded. “When we arrest him, we’re going to have everything we need. It’ll be a done deal.”

While he didn’t disagree, having David free to follow him, to confront him, gave Quinton Harlan no comfort.

That February, Ted Wilson drew up another search warrant, this one for the unit David had rented at an Uncle Bob’s facility. Schmidt wanted to see if the shotgun shells Quinton told him about were still in storage. A copy of the warrant was served to Looney, as David’s attorney, and Schmidt and Holtke, who’d been promoted to a detective in homicide, descended on Uncle Bob’s, with its row after row of garage doors off a maze of corridors. The manager cut off the lock to the unit, and Schmidt and Holtke sifted through their prime suspect’s possessions. The shotgun shells had disappeared.

Hoping for a break in the case, Schmidt drove to Kevin Temple’s house to talk to David’s younger brother and his wife, in case they might be willing to tell him something that could help. “They wouldn’t talk to me,” the detective wrote in his report.

After a second grand jury that didn’t indict David Temple, Ted Wilson and Donna Goode had little involvement. “There wasn’t anything new, no new evidence,” says Wilson. “There wasn’t anything for us to look at.”

The Temple murder book stayed on Mark Schmidt’s desk, but for many, the case went cold. “Mark kept beating himself up about the case, saying I should have done this or that. But if the evidence isn’t there, you can’t make it,” says Shipley. “Mark wouldn’t let the investigation die.”

Early that year, Heather told her mother that she was seeing David Temple. At first, Sandy Munson admits, she worried. “We were very concerned,” she says. “We were wondering if Heather could be in danger. We didn’t know David.”

In Franklin, Sandy would say that she and Heather’s twin, Shannon, spent hours discussing the relationship, whether or not David could be the killer. At Easter, Heather brought David to visit for the first time. Over the coming year, the family would get to know him. “We were very cautious, and were up one side and down the other wondering about him, talking about if he could have done it. We really ran him through the mill,” says Sandy. After a while, she and Shannon came to the conclusion that David couldn’t be guilty. Why? “David just seemed like a big teddy bear. That’s the way he always was with us. And we trusted Heather’s judgment,” says her mother. “If she loved David, he must have been a good man.”

When Heather told her mother about how she’d ended up dating David, she’d maintained that they hadn’t reignited their relationship until a year after Belinda’s murder. “Heather said that they were just friends, and it was quite a while before anything romantic happened,” says Sandy. “Heather said David couldn’t have murdered Belinda, that he loved Belinda, and if she were still alive, he’d be with her.”

In Houston, Heather’s roommate, Tara, had a very different impression. She’d seen the Valentine flowers David sent Heather just weeks after his wife’s murder, and then saw David showing up at their town house. One day, a few months after the murder, Tara arrived home and found David helping Heather plant flowers outside the town house’s front door. But it often seemed all wasn’t well. At times, Heather told Tara that the relationship was over. Afterward, David called and left angry messages on their machine: “Sorry I let you get close to my son,” he said in one, sounding as if he were livid.

Minutes later, he called back and said: “I’m the best thing that ever happened to you.”

Not long after, Heather and David made up. “They always did,” says Tara.

When Heather moved out of the town house, Tara had the impression it was because her friend and David wanted more privacy.

That spring, 2000, the
Katy Times
discovered the search warrant for David Temple’s storage unit. Tammey didn’t know anything was wrong until someone at the school where she worked brought it to her. In the article, the reporter quoted the warrant, which read that someone David worked with had given a statement to police saying that he’d seen shotgun shells in the Round Valley house. That same coworker’s wife, according to the
Times
, told detectives that Belinda and David weren’t getting along and that Belinda had confided that they’d gone for long periods of time without speaking. Included in the article was also the first news account of David’s affair with Heather.

Frightened, Tammey called Quinton at work to warn him. “It didn’t say Quinton and Tammey Harlan, but it might as well have had a picture of us blown up above it,” she says. Tammey knew David would have no problem figuring out they had been the source, and that David would be enraged and looking for her husband.

While they were talking, Bobby Stuart, the head coach, walked into Quinton’s office and said, “Come with me,
now
.”

As ordered, Quinton followed Stuart and they went to talk to the school’s principal.

“David was pissed off and looking for Quinton,” says Tammey. “They were worried about what he might do to him.”

While Quinton waited, the principal called the district’s main office, and the personnel director rushed to the Ninth Grade Center. As the morning developed, Quinton soon realized that he wasn’t the one the district would back. Instead, with the school year’s end only weeks away, the personnel director suggested Quinton take his sick days and find a new position.

“He said it was for my own safety. I couldn’t understand why I was the one being forced out,” says Quinton. “They all knew that David was guilty. Why was I the only one standing up saying the truth? This guy killed his wife. They all knew he did it.”

Meanwhile, detectives showed up at Tammey’s school and took her to collect their oldest, Sydnee, from her grade school, then to the day care to pick up the Harlans’ two younger daughters. Quinton rushed home and for the second time since Belinda’s murder, the Harlans threw clothes into suitcases. The detectives escorted the family to Quinton’s parents’ house.

“That fall, we took jobs in Fort Worth,” says Tammey. “It was like we vanished. We didn’t know if David found us, what he’d do.”

In truth, Quinton wasn’t alone. One of the other coaches, Bill Norwood, left Hastings that spring. Rather than being forced out, he left because he couldn’t bear looking at David, suspecting what he’d done. “I couldn’t stand seeing David every day,” he says. “I couldn’t stay. I left and moved away to East Texas, because I figured David had murdered Belinda, and he was going to get away with it.”

In May, Dean Holtke sent another batch of specimens from the Temple murder case to the FBI. While in Houston, Brian Lucas met with Schmidt at a coffee shop. They’d gotten to know each other well, and the two men talked about the case, but also about their lives. Although he was sympathetic with Tom Lucas, the detective didn’t deny that the constant phone calls from Belinda’s father were taking a toll. “Your father is driving me crazy,” he told Brian.

“Why can’t you get the FBI in on this thing?” Tom Lucas demanded in his booming voice one day on the phone with Mark Schmidt. “Seems to me that they might be able to help. Aren’t there more tests that could be done?”

Explaining that it wasn’t the federal government’s jurisdiction and that he was continuing to investigate, the detective tried to defuse Tom Lucas’s anger, but as the case dragged, Belinda’s father was becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Despite the pressure it put on him, Schmidt didn’t blame Tom. With two daughters of his own, the detective understood how frustrated Tom must have been.

When Schmidt didn’t offer any good news, Lucas wrote to the governor and asked to have the Texas Rangers assigned to the case. The letter from Austin he received in return explained that the Lone Star State’s legendary investigators don’t intercede in a case unless a law enforcement agency requests help. Then another disappointment, when a producer from
America’s Most Wanted
responded to one of Tom’s letters and rebuffed an invitation to investigate. The TV show only looked at unsolved cases, the producer explained, not those where police believed they knew the murderer but were unable to prove it.

More than a year after their daughter’s murder, Tom and Carol were increasingly distressed by what they saw as a lack of action on the part of the police. Belinda’s death seemed to be tearing the family apart. “My parents were obsessed with the murder to the extent that we felt they weren’t involved with any of us,” says Brian. Although the family hadn’t been close, they drifted further apart.

The Lucases had found another source of support from Parents of Murdered Children, an organization founded by victims’ families that held monthly meetings in a Houston church. “It was an opportunity to talk to folks who walked in our shoes,” says Tom.

Over the years, at times, Mark Schmidt went with the Lucases. “We’re working hard,” the detective told those gathered. “Someday we’ll come through.”

At the meetings, Tom and Carol met a tall, lanky man named Andy Kahan, who worked for the Houston mayor’s office as an ombudsman, aiding the families of crime victims as they interacted with police. It was the only post of its kind in the nation, and Kahan had carved out his own niche, becoming a go-between for families dealing with law enforcement and one of the nation’s leading advocates against murderabilia, possessions of convicted murderers sold as souvenirs, such as John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings.

At one meeting, Tom confessed his desire to take justice into his own hands, to stake out David’s house or school with a gun. By then, both of Belinda’s parents were relying on antidepressants to help them survive their daughter’s death. “Am I the only dad who thought about retaliation?” he inquired. When he asked who else in the room had considered such an action, the room filled with raised hands.

At times, Tom and Carol talked to Kahan, hoping for help. Being from the mayor’s office, the victims’ advocate could often get answers when parents couldn’t. But when Kahan talked to the detectives, he came away able to do little for the Lucases. “It was one of those times when I couldn’t help,” says Kahan. “Some families can lose themselves in a murder. Brothers and sisters lose not only a sister but their mother and father. It causes incredible strain. The Lucases were in a terrible Twilight Zone. They were lost, trying to find a light at the end of the tunnel.”

What Kahan found out from detectives is that the Temples weren’t showing any interest in closing the case. They hadn’t called or talked with law enforcement about Belinda’s death since the first week. “I work with families all the time, and they want the murderers of loved ones found,” says Kahan, who became a sounding board for Tom and Carol. “That the Temples weren’t pushing law enforcement spoke volumes.”