48 Hours - Playing by the Rules?

Episode Date: March 13, 2016

A popular football coach is serving life for killing his pregnant wife.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to this podcast ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app today. Even if you love the thrill of true crime stories as much as I do, there are times when you want to mix it up. And that's where Audible comes in, with all the genres you love and new ones to discover. Explore thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. Listening to Audible can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits,

and even your overall well-being. And you can enjoy Audible anytime, while doing household chores, exercising, commuting, you name it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert

to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military. And when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. Real people. Real crimes. Real life drama.

Real people, real crimes, real life drama. We, the jury, find the defendant, David Mark Temple, guilty of murder as charged in the indictment. David Temple was convicted after a six-week trial by a fair and impartial jury for executing his wife and unborn child. He was given a life sentence. He's sitting behind bars and that's where he deserves to be. My name is Kelly Sigler. I was a Harris County prosecutor for 21 years. You have the right to expect us to tell you the

truth. The last murder case I handled here in Harris County was the David Temple case. David Temple was, in Katy High School, a big man on campus because he was a big football star out there. Belinda Temple, the kind of girl that nobody could say anything ugly or bad about. They had a son named Evan, and the facts of the case were just so different and horrible. We've been covering the case of David Temple for eight years, and he has always maintained his innocence. Now, dramatic new developments may give him a shot at freedom. I've known it from day one that this day would come,

and we're getting close to the end, I know. We're getting close to the end, I know. This has been a 16-year journey for David and our family. And we are here today to say again, David is innocent. I do not believe David Temple got a fair trial. No person with eyes and ears and half a brain can say David Temple got a fair trial. Mr. DeGaran made the argument that there were more than one burglar. Dick DeGaran was the trial lawyer for David Temple.

Dick did the best that he could with what he had. We object to the message. You stay in the record. There are new attorneys with new ammunition. On my left is the complete investigative report. This was never seen. This is what was suppressed. Did you turn over the 1,400 pages of police reports? No. Every single thing

under the law Mr. DeGaran was entitled to, was turned over to him. I care about what I do. I care about the process, and this process shook me. Kids in Katy, lots of them got shotguns. There were alternate suspects in this case. What in the world do they have to do with who killed Belinda Temple? Nothing. She lied, she cheated, and she broke the rules.

That's not in the record. Now, the former prosecutor is on the defensive. Eventually, everybody's going to understand that the truth is what happened in that courtroom, and it's all going to finally be over with. We call upon the Harris County District Attorney to immediately reopen the case. If David Temple doesn't get a new trial, the due process is dead in Texas, and we should all just go home. I'm Richard Schlesinger.

Tonight on 48 Hours. Playing by the rules. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly. Introducing the best idea yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the bolder risk takers who brought them to life. Like, did you know that Super Mario, the best-selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye? Or Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala? From Pez dispensers to Levi's 501s to Air Jordans, discover the surprising stories of the most viral products.

Plus, we guarantee that after listening, you're going to dominate your next dinner party. So follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. It's just the best idea yet. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But

did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, early and ad-free on Wondery Plus and the Wondery app. I'm innocent. My family knows that I'm innocent. My close friends know that I'm innocent. David Temple is serving life for the 1999 murder of his wife Belinda. She was eight months pregnant, but he has always denied having anything to do with it. You know, two angels left to go to heaven a long time ago, and justice hasn't been served one day for them yet. And I pray every day that that will happen

and that my name will for once and all be cleared. You know with all your heart, David Temple is guilty of murder. This was one tough case. It took more than eight years to bring Temple to trial. Harris County did an excellent job of collecting evidence and processing the scene. Back then, Steve Clappert was an investigator for the DA's office. He says Belinda Temple's murder unnerved the Houston suburb of Katy. Temple grew up there and was a high school football star.

After college, he brought Belinda back to his hometown. We were married in January of 92, college sweethearts. She was an incredible woman, incredible wife, an incredible mother. Belinda taught special ed at Katy High. David coached football in a nearby town. Their son, Evan, was just three and a half when David told him he lost his mother. It's the saddest thing that you've seen as a boy that's just being broken. Just immediately the tears that came out of his eyes. When we spoke with Temple just after his 2007 trial, he told us his version of what happened the day Belinda died.

David said Belinda stayed home that afternoon while he took Evan out to run some errands. They are seen on this surveillance tape. We stopped, got two drinks, and I picked up a bag of cat food. He said when they got home, it was clear something was wrong. The back door is open and it's cracked with glass. I took my son across the street and banged on my friend's house and handed them heaven and asked if they would call 911. 911, go ahead ma'am. Somebody has broken into my neighbor's house. David ran back to his house and he says discovered Belinda's body slumped on the floor of their bedroom closet.

A cordless phone was by her side. I just walked in, my wife, I believe she's been shot. It's got blood everywhere. She was killed by a shotgun blast to the head. Neither she nor her unborn baby ever had a chance. Have you felt for her to have a pulse? Yes, she doesn't have one. She's gone. She's gone. She's gone. She's gone. Temple told police he had no idea what had happened, but as is routine, the police were sizing him up. Usually you go to the closest people, and David, of course, was her husband, so he was immediately of interest. And from the beginning, they found reasons to doubt David's story.

For one thing, they wondered how a burglar got past the dog, Shaka. If this was a burglar, then the dog certainly would have bothered them. This is the actual door, right? Right, this is the actual door. Dean Holtke, then a crime scene tech, told us in 2007 that he thought the break-in looked staged. If the door is sitting in this position closed, and an intruder is going to make entry and break it out here, you would expect to see the glass straight out this way. The broken glass would go straight out.

Exactly. But you found it off to the left. Yeah. What did the placement of that glass tell you? The door had to have been open when the glass was broken. The TV was down on the floor, but it's not unplugged. If you're there to steal a TV, first you're going to unplug it, right? But here's what really caught the detective's attention.

It turned out that David Temple was cheating on his pregnant wife. He'd been seeing a teacher named Heather Scott. Do you think the affair with Heather was one reason that the jury might have turned against you? Oh, absolutely. There's not a doubt in my mind. That being unfaithful doesn't make me a murderer. To this day, Temple insists it was nothing more than a brief fling and that he never stopped loving Belinda. Would you have stayed married, do you believe, given your involvement with Heather?

Absolutely. Police believe they had their man but could not arrest Temple because there was no hard evidence connecting him to the crime. No forensics, no fingerprints, no DNA. There were no signs that Temple had cleaned up. No glass or blood was found in his truck. And despite an exhaustive search, police never found a shotgun they could connect to David Temple.

There is no evidence that points towards me because it's impossible for there to be any. Because I did not kill my wife, plain and simple. But there was nothing plain and simple about this case. I've not seen a case anything like this. Especially because one of Temple's neighbors had had run-ins with Belinda before. You're not going to believe what happened.

And he had lied about his whereabouts on the day she was shot to death. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty. Her specialty? Representing some of the city's most infamous gangland criminals. However, while Nicola held the underworld's darkest secrets, the most dangerous secret was her own. She's going to all the major groups within Melbourne's underworld, and she's informing on them all. I'm Marcia Clark, host of the new podcast, Informants Lawyer X. In my long career in criminal justice as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I've seen some crazy cases, and this one belongs right at the top of the list.

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or Spotify. I think the thing that makes this case so well-known here in Harris County is because of the way Belinda was killed. It was 2004 when Kelly Siegler got her first look at the case against David Temple in his wife's murder. It was more than five years after the crime, and nobody had been arrested. I thought, this is a really good case. But this was not an easy case. No cold case that's a circumstantial evidence case is ever going to be easy, Richard. They're all going to be hard.

Siegler had a well-earned reputation for high energy, high profile, and highly dramatic prosecutions. Like you're mad, like you're afraid, like you can't, can't stop. And she believed she could make a case against David Temple with the evidence she had. What did you have? So many little pieces. You have the dog, the stage burglary,

and the timeline that he tried to put together so perfectly, but he didn't quite pull off. So David Temple was arrested. It took three years to bring him to trial and into Kelly Siegler's crosshairs. So who is David Temple? You're going to hear a lot about him in this trial. He's a man who nobody ever said no to. Kelly Siegler is Texas tough, but so is Temple's lawyer. Kelly Siegler is Texas tough, but so is Temple's lawyer. Like that. Dick DeGaran is famous for helping billionaire Robert Durst get acquitted of murder.

When I heard David Temple hired Dick DeGaran, I'm going, geez. The two lawyers have clashed many times before. How do you describe her? They do not like each other. I can't trust a word. David Temple did not kill his wife, Belinda Temple, and the evidence will show you that he did not. But Siegler was confident and says the motive in this case is one of the oldest in the book.

It's true that David had an affair. That doesn't make him a murderer. Not only did Temple cheat on his wife, but a year and a half after Belinda was killed, he married Heather Scott, his one-time mistress. She was the reason why David Temple finally made up his mind to end his marriage with Belinda by executing her. It doesn't look good, and that's what the prosecutor harped on all during the trial. Siegler actually called Heather to the stand. We weren't allowed to record the witness's audio,

but the former mistress downplayed the affair. That was just so, come on, so contrived. Nobody in the courtroom bought that. DeGaran's key witnesses were brothers who lived directly behind Temple's house. I heard a loud boom, boom. They were young boys when they told the police they heard what sounded like a gunshot. How many times did you hear that? One. Hello.

The boys had started watching the movie Dr. Doolittle a little after four, and nine years later they remembered the exact point in the film when they heard that sound. Right there, right here, stop it here. Using that point as a time reference, the defense figured they heard the boom around 4.30, and that is a critical time because David and his son Evan were seen on that store security video at 4.32. When they heard the gunshot, David Temple was six miles away. They were little kids and probably pretty impressionable, and who knows what they heard, when they heard, or why they heard it. Siegler says it's hard to remember specific times now, but when we spoke to her in 2008, she spelled out her theory of what happened, saying that Temple murdered Belinda around

four o'clock and then covered his tracks. David Temple made a sweep through the house and made an attempt to make the house look like it had been burglarized. He broke the glass in the back door, and then he took Evan and went to some places there in Katy to try and get himself on videotape to alibi himself as quickly as he could. That plan failed, she says, when a witness who went to the same high school as Temple said he saw him driving about a mile off the route Temple said he drove that day, but close to these rice fields. Well, what do you think he was doing out there? I think that's where he went to get rid of the shotgun.

But you never found the shotgun. Do you know how many rice fields there are in Katy, Texas? And creeks and ponds? The evidence will show that David never had a 12-gauge shotgun. DeGaran says the weapon wasn't found because Temple never had it. Police zeroed in on Temple, he says, ignoring other potential suspects. The family had long suspected this thug that lived next door. And we just didn't have any proof of it. Riley Joe Sanders was a troubled 16-year-old

who first claimed he'd been in school all day when, in fact, he was not. Belinda had told his parents he was perpetually truant, and she had tangled with him and his friends for leaving broken beer bottles in her yard. I learned that he failed a series of polygraph tests on his knowledge of the murder. I learned that during the trial, for the first time. It also turned out that Sanders, seen here in 2008, had borrowed his father's shotgun without permission. He had access to the kind of shotgun used in the murder,

and he was in the area when the murder took place, and he had a history with Belinda Temple. Okay. He was a 16-year-old kid. Do you really think a 16-year-old kid is going to walk into his neighbor lady's house, a teacher that he respected and did like, and blow her brains out when she's carrying her nine-month-old daughter inside her body? Why in the world would he do that? At trial, Siegler called Sanders as her last witness. He denied having anything to do with the murder, but admitted skipping out of school that day and driving around the neighborhood with friends smoking pot.

He said he got home around 4.30 and took a nap. He came down here voluntarily to walk into a courtroom to face Dick DeGiarin, at that time, the meanest, baddest defense lawyer in the United States of America. We're not required to prove who it was. We don't know who it was. But in closing, DeGarren told jurors that the boy next door was a better suspect than David Temple. There's more evidence that it was Joe Sanders and his buddies than there is that it was David. But Siegler said David Temple was the one with the motive. You better believe he was serious about Heather and you better believe he was done with Belinda in his mind. David Temple was convicted and sentenced to life. Every ounce of air that you had in your body was

just taken from you at one time. Today, eight years later, DeGaran says he knows a lot more than he did back then about Riley Joe Sanders and about Kelly Siegler. How would you characterize Kelly Siegler's behavior in this trial? Outrageous. I hate to admit that I was snookered, but I was. When David Temple stood trial, Steve Clappard, the longtime investigator for the Harris County DA, did not know the case very well. His only role in it was to drive Temple's neighbor Riley Joe Sanders to the airport and return some property to him. Kelly asked me to ship a shotgun back to him. He was living in Arkansas at the time. But then, five years later,

a new witness got in contact with attorney Dick DeGarren. We're on the record at 2.46 p.m. Daniel Glasscock, who knew Riley Joe Sanders in high school, said he wanted to clear his conscience. He said back in 1999, he overheard Sanders talk about a burglary that escalated. I remember him saying nobody was supposed to be there. When he went to the house, as he went upstairs, the dog attacked him. He shot the dog, heard Belinda,

put the dog in the closet, and they panicked and ran. It was confusing. The Temple's dog was not shot. But Glasscock seemed to believe that dog was code for Belinda and that Sanders could be involved in her murder. I really believe that an innocent man is sitting in prison for something he didn't do. DeGaran gave Glass-Cock's videotaped statement to the district attorney's office, and investigator Steve Clappert was told to check it out. He said he panicked and ran.

Was it awkward to be investigating a case that your office had successfully prosecuted? Yes. Clappert needed to know more about the case. So he read the old police reports. All 1,319 pages. And he quickly became concerned. And what did you think when you read that? I thought, wow.

The name Riley Joe Sanders was all over the reports. Does it say how many times? It does tell you how many times. But you can look at all that. You can just click down. There he is again. There he is again. Sanders and his friends gave varying accounts

about where they were and what they were doing on the day Belinda died. There he is again. Does that indicate to you that he might have been a suspect? There was an extreme amount of interest in him. Clappert was obligated to give the reports to Temple's new lawyers, Stanley Schneider and Casey Gautreaux. And they say a lot of what was in there was never seen before by the defense. Stuff was hidden. Who hid it? Siegler hid it. Siegler hid it, and she hid it well.

For example, Dick DeGaran says prosecutors hid information about this shotgun. It belonged to Riley Joe Sanders' father. Sanders admitted in court that before the murder, he took that gun without permission. Jurors did not hear that police were told one of Sanders' friends, Cody Ellis, had hidden the gun under his bed. And the fact that it's hidden, that's evidence of guilt that you're hiding something. How a sheriff's deputy got a hold of that gun is a mystery. The details of exactly how that deputy got the shotgun were unclear all the way up until the trial. How can that be? Because the deputy didn't write a supplement.

Why not? I don't know. There was nothing sinister about it. Doesn't that seem odd to you? It doesn't to me, no. Shotguns cannot be individually identified with ballistics. Siegler claims the murder weapon was never found, but that shotgun had a lot of the same characteristics as the one that killed Belinda. It was a 12-gauge. It has spent, reloaded, double-up buckshots showing it.

It's the closest thing to a murder weapon law enforcement was ever able to find. And reloaded double-hot buckshot shell is pretty specific. It's pretty unique. It's the same gun that Clappert ended up returning to Sanders after Temple's trial. Did you wonder about that weapon that you sent back to Riley Joe Sanders? Yes, sir. It was a very sinking feeling. It still bothers me. It's something that you can't undo. As Clappert scrutinized the reports, he became interested in another break-in that happened just nine days before Belinda's murder.

Some of Sanders' friends had gotten into a home by smashing through glass, like the Temple home. They'd gone in and rifled through some stuff, and so somebody had taken a CD player, turned it on its side, and left it sitting on the floor. Like the TV in the Temple case. And the TV in the Temple case was the same kind of way. One of the boys had a beef with the man who lived there, and Clappert wondered if Riley Joe Sanders had a beef with Belinda, and whether that

could be a motive for him and his friends to break into her home when they believed she wasn't there. They want to go mess things up. They want to go steal a few things. They want to hurt rather than kill. Riley Joe Sanders had no involvement in what happened to Belinda Temple. He was focused on and he was cleared. Let me say that again. He was cleared. And what cleared him? His own cooperation and truthfulness cleared him. That's all, though, right?

Yes. To this day, Clappert sees nothing in those reports to definitively clear Sanders or his friends. Sanders failed three polygraphs. Some of his friends failed two. But the investigation, Clappert says, just seemed to stall. Looked like they ran into a dead end. And then all of a sudden it picked up,

and it seemed like the entire focus was on David Temple. Guilty of murder. Guilty of murder. Clappert says he wanted to pick up where investigators left off. He wanted to talk to Cody Ellis. I wanted to ask him about the shotgun that he'd hidden for several days from Riley Joe Sanders. We know that they were together the day of the murder. Did you ever get to ask him anything? No, sir. Not one question? No. Clappard says his plans were derailed by other detectives, including Dean Holtke,

one of the first on the scene. Clappard says they got to Ellis first and tipped him off about the new investigation. What's more, Cody Ellis and Riley Joe Sanders both got lawyers who did not want them talking to Clappert. Who found the lawyers? Kelly Siegler, who was no longer with the DA's office. Have you ever done that before? Made sure someone had a lawyer? Yeah. It's a prosecutor's job to make sure someone has a lawyer when you think It's a prosecutor's job to make sure someone has a lawyer when you think they need a lawyer. Detectives also talked to Daniel Glasscock, the man who gave to Guerin that videotaped statement. They made an audio tape of this interview. A jury heard this thing, okay? All 12 of them convicted him. What do you believe their goal was in talking to Mr. Glasscock?

Break Mr. Glasscock down. After five hours of talking, Glasscock wavered on a lot of the details. DeGaran did not tell me, do not say this, do not say that, but I just feel like words were being put in my mouth. When I heard that that witness not only recanted, but that witness admitted that Dick the Urine was the person who fed him the details of the murder case, I was pretty disgusted. Clappert's new look at this old case was not winning him friends in the office. People that I had known for many, many years would no longer talk to me.

But they would shun you? Yes. Like school kids? Yes. He called Kelly Siegler to explain what was happening. He was crying on the phone, apologizing for what it was he was doing to a righteous conviction and investigation. I wasn't in tears. I was upset. My voice cracks. What were you upset about? Well... You ever had the rug pulled out from under you? I believed in that office.

After his long career in law enforcement, Clappert was now a key player in getting a convicted killer a new day in court. From day one, I knew that this day would come. In December 2014, after eight years in prison and after losing two appeals, David Temple's luck changed. The process is in the right direction right now. He was granted a new hearing to see if he got a fair trial or if he deserves a new one. Attorneys Stanley Schneider and Casey Gautreaux hoped to prove that prosecutors hid evidence from the defense, including police reports that focused on Riley Joe Sanders and his friends.

You have a young man who's interviewed on six different days, gives seven oral statements, two written statements, and flunks three polygraph tests. Former prosecutor Kelly Siegler says Temple's trial attorney Dick DeGaran got everything he was entitled to. Dick DeGaran might not have eyeballed with his own eyes the exact statement typed up in an offense report, but what Raleigh-Jill Sanders had to say in all of those statements, the meat of it was known to Dick DeGaran. And she says DeGaran got police reports exactly when DA office policy said he should. That policy at the time was, after an officer finished testifying, right before DeGaran began his cross-examination.

He could look at, but not copy, that officer's reports. It was designed to keep Dick DeGaran with his hands tied behind his back. I don't know how the hell you're supposed to do your job as a defense lawyer when you're given that volume of information in the middle of trial. Some reports were 100 pages or longer, and the defense never got to see reports written by officers who did not take the stand. At Temple's new hearing, Siegler was called to testify, and she described how information was doled out to the defense. You said, I would give them all the discovery they were entitled to, piece by piece, very slowly and very miserably,

they got what they were entitled to have. They got snippets, bits and pieces. They never saw the whole police report. Even doing it the slow way, every single thing under the law Mr. DeGaran was entitled to was turned over to him. And who decided what was exculpatory? The same as in any other case, the prosecutor does. You did?

Sure, that's the way it works. What the hell was that? Gautreaux disputes that Siegler handed over everything favorable to the defense, and she says it all should have been disclosed before the trial. For example, all those reports about Sanders that could be used to argue he made inconsistent statements. He was investigated, he was consistent, he was cooperative, and I believe he was always very truthful. Well, he said that he went different places in different statements. At one point, he says that he saw David Temple's truck leaving the

neighborhood. Another time he says he didn't see David Temple's truck leaving the neighborhood. How's that consistent? His story was pretty much consistent. This is not a minor point. You know this. He said on second thought it wasn't David Temple's truck. But Ms. Siegler, you know that the devil's in the details in these cases. And you know, in this case, he was pretty definitive the first time around. Not really. Yes, he was. He described that truck with tinted windows and those special wheels. That is not true. It wasn't that definitive. It was pretty definitive. That's not the way I read it. Defense attorneys say if jurors knew everything about

Riley Joe Sanders, they might have been more open to Temple's explanation of evidence, like those shards of glass that police found so incriminating. Attorney Stanley Schneider says they could have scattered when David came charging through the door. If that door swung open and hits the hutch, it's going to fly off into the living room. The defense says the man who testified he saw Temple on the road could have been mistaken about the time and day. Shaka! And they say Temple's dog, Shaka,

might not have been as ferocious as police say. I'd direct your attention to the grand jury testimony of Mr. Riley Joe Sanders. And what does he say? Shaka will bark at him when he's cutting the grass, but what about if you're not cutting grass? No, she'll just come over and sniff. At the new hearing, Kelly Siegler spent four days on the stand. The former prosecutor aggressively defended herself. It was very, very repetitious, and it seemed like it could have been a whole lot more efficient.

She was so just blasé about what she had hidden and why she had hidden it. about what she had hidden and why she had hidden it. And I have my client, David, sitting next to me, who lost his wife and his baby and hasn't watched his son grow up, and his family has gone bankrupt trying to get him out of prison. It broke my heart a little bit, and I didn't see that one coming. That was for damn sure. It breaks your heart a little bit now, I think.

Yeah, it does. In the middle of this new hearing, defense attorneys discovered some evidence that never made it to court before. We're at the Katy High School. We're conducting an interview in the investigation of Belinda Temple's death. Audio-taped interviews conducted at Belinda's school just two days after she died. A group of teachers were interviewed one day in the gym. There was nothing of substance on any of those tapes in those interviews. But Casey Gautreaux says those tapes change everything. They would have decimated the state's case. Siegler says Belinda was killed around 4 p.m. Cell phone records show she made a call to David at 3.32, but they don't show where she was. A teacher who had been in a meeting with Belinda gave police a clue.

She left my office between 20 after 3 and 3.30. And, you know, from what other people have said, she made a phone call to David. And, you know, from what other people have said, she made a phone call to David. Defense attorneys say if Belinda made that call from school at 3.32, it would be all but impossible for her to have been home at 4 p.m., the time Siegler said she was killed. But Siegler says the teacher was actually talking about a different phone call. She says she left my office between 20 after 3 and 3 30 and you know from what other people have said she made a phone call to David. Which happened earlier that day.

There's no indication she's talking about this any earlier. That's how I read it because they did have phone calls earlier that day. She makes no reference of that. She doesn't say that it's happening later either. Y'all are reading into that what you want to read into it. Temple's lawyers say if Belinda arrived home after four, Temple would have had just minutes to murder her, clean up, stage the scene, and get his young son to that store where they were seen on surveillance footage. Kelly's timeline can't be. David can't be the

killer. 23 witnesses testified at the hearing, including Daniel Glasscock, who contacted DeGaran and spurred the reopening of this case. He was called by the state. He continued to contradict himself and wound up in tears. His eggs were scrambled so badly by all of those interviews, I mean, he's virtually useless as a witness anymore. It was a lot for the judge to take in. And this judge is tough. Tough on defendants and very tough to read.

He didn't smile, he didn't frown. He didn't scowl. Nothing. Nothing. There's an innocent man sitting in prison and he's been there for a long time. David Temple's attorneys weren't sure they had any chance at all with Judge Larry Gist as they waited for his opinion. What I knew about Judge Gist was that he had a prison unit named after him. That could be bad. You don't get a prison named after you by being pro-defense.

In July 2015, Gist issued his opinion. Stanley is standing there with this opinion rolled up in his hand and a tear in his eye. You're not going to believe it. You're not going to believe it. Judge Larry Gist found that David Temple should get a new trial. He listed facts, 36 facts favorable to the defense that he said the state should have disclosed but didn't, or disclosed too late to be of any use. Seeing a judge that got to see all of this evidence say, this man deserves a fair trial, he wasn't given one, that mattered in ways that I still feel. It was your first victory in this case. I still feel. It was your first victory in this case.

Richard, this is not a victory. This is just the first step. It's the first step because strong as it is, the judge's decision is a recommendation to a higher court, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. That's where David Temple's fate will be decided. How confident are you that the Court of Criminal Appeals will order a new trial? I'm afraid to jinx it. I'm afraid to hope too loudly. Here you are again, waiting for another decision. Is this any harder than waiting for the other ones?

No, I know it wouldn't be harder because this time we're in the right direction. Do you think you will walk out of here? I know I will walk. You know you will walk. I know I will walk out. That won't happen without a fight. The Harris County D.A. has filed an 80-page objection to Gist's findings, aggressively defending Temple's conviction and Kelly Siegler's conduct at his trial.

Judge Gist's findings, when compared to what actually happened at trial, with what the witnesses testified to, his findings are incorrect. Judge Gist is just wrong. Yes, sir, he is. On 36 points. Yes, his findings are incorrect. Judge Giss is just wrong. Yes, sir, he is. On 36 points. Yes, sir, he is. Not one thing that he enumerated is true? Not even one.

Siegler once famously dismissed charges and freed this man, Anthony Graves, an inmate on death row. Reviewing the case, she determined prosecutors withheld favorable evidence. But in the Temple case, she insists defense lawyers got all the evidence they were entitled to. Just because one judge made these ridiculous findings that none of us can understand, he's not the final say. The Court of Criminal Appeals is, thank God. He's not the final say. The Court of Criminal Appeals is, thank God. What this whole case is about is this right here. At a press conference after Judge Gist's opinion was released,

attorneys Stanley Schneider and Casey Gautreaux graphically demonstrated how much information they say was withheld from the defense. This was never seen. This is what was suppressed. This is the first good news David Temple's family has heard in years. My brother has spent eight long years in a Texas state prison. He is felled by a legal system that felled him him, failed their child, failed our family, but most importantly,

failed Belinda. Evan Temple, who was 12 when his father went to prison, was raised by Temple's second wife, Heather. I may be biased, but he's the finest young man that walks this planet, I'm telling you. He's got so much of his mother in him that it's every time you look at him. But Kelly Ziegler says others in Belinda's family are still struggling to cope.

I wish that people could understand what it feels like to be Belinda's family when they're in the middle of this never-ending appellate process that makes no sense. They don't understand it, and frankly, neither do I. As we sit here today, have you heard anything over the last several years since this trial that has shaken your belief that David Temple murdered his wife? No. Ziegler hasn't spoken to her former colleague Steve Clappert for more than three years. Do you believe David Temple is an innocent man? I believe that he did not kill his wife. Clappert says he did what he always does. He followed the evidence. You had to go against all your friends or most of your friends to do it.

That's correct. After a lifetime in law enforcement, he left the district attorney's office. That's Steve over in the corner. And now works with defense lawyers he had battled in court for years. My dad taught me that doing the right thing isn't always the easiest thing. And I think I've done the right thing. It was an awful crime, he says, with no hard evidence. The kind of crime that can haunt an investigator.

Well, I guess the real question is, do you think whoever killed Belinda Temple is ever going to pay for it? Do I think they're going to pay for it? No. Where does that leave you? Empty. And so how do you get justice for a woman who was killed? So how do you get justice for a woman who was killed? The decision is in the hands of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The court may rule at any time.

Do you believe David Temple deserves a new trial? Chat now with correspondent Richard Schlesinger on Twitter.