Dateline NBC - Rosemary and the Motorcycle Man

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Rosemary Christiansen, an admired and worldly woman who came to America for a fresh start, suddenly vanishes from her Florida home. Had she taken off for another new life, or was it something more sinister? Keith Morrison reports in this Dateline classic. Originally aired on NBC on August 7, 2009.

It was a Friday afternoon in August, 1999, on a long, narrow strip of sun-washed beach. It was a good time to be alive. Good time to be in real estate, too, as bright and hot that year as an afternoon on the Florida Gulf. My dad was one of the original founders of Century 21. Jeff Bagans and his family have been in real estate for decades, tending the Snowbird Haven in Tampa. On this one road over here.

And on this particular Friday afternoon, he was getting ready for one of his signature beach barbecues. A semi-regular perk, which not only he enjoyed, it helped attract and retain his excellent team of agents. It was a small, close-knit family, so we'd have office happy hours, office get-togethers, and the whole team would come through, and we'd do beach parties and cookouts and those type of picnics. One of these agents had a particularly interesting background, a diplomat's ex-wife, Rosemary Christensen. Fellow agent Kathy McKinnon was impressed by Rosemary's slightly more formal style.

She was the type of person where she's got nylons with her shorts. You know, she has to have her nails done. But reserved? Standoffish? Oh no, Rosemary was warm, unfailingly friendly. One of the types that you wish you had about a hundred of. Great personality, very loving, very thoughtful, very caring, very empathetic. Her 20 years of diplomatic practice, perhaps? Her worldly experience? Rosemary was born in Australia, but traveled the globe on the arb of her husband, a respected member of the Dutch Foreign Service.

She was a true lady. Laurel Zalowski met Rosemary soon after she arrived in Florida. She definitely had that air about her, and it was an air of taking care of others and, you know, being the best hostess and things like that. A white-gloved existence, the sort of life outsiders envy, and, you know, being the best hostess and things like that. A white-gloved existence, the sort of life outsiders envy, even if inside it was not so splendid after all. How much did she tell you about that former life of hers?

Not a whole lot. I just knew that she wasn't a real happy one. She was pretty lonely. Even so, why would she leave not just her husband but the two young sons they shared, abandon the parties, the travel, the social cachet for the uncertain rewards of hawking Florida real estate? She just wanted to get out on her own. She really hadn't done a lot of jobs from what I understand. She was married and had kids and everything and then when she left, you know, she just didn't know what know what to do trapped in a life that felt more like a prison drawn by independence and the Florida Sun and yes the promise of a

second chance at love Rosemary had a cyber suitor she met this Robert guy online and he had emailed her that he was this top-secret FBI agent and had these houses all over the place, and she arranged to come to the States to meet him. Robert Glenn Temple was the suitor. One meeting with him, and she took the leap to Florida. She was definitely in love with him in the beginning. He was, for one thing, the opposite of all she had known in that other life of hers. He had tattoos. He, you know,

he rode a motorcycle. I didn't see how those two personalities would kind of come together, but you know, opposites attract sometimes, and that's what probably was the case here. The two were married in 1997. She was so into Robert. It was Robert, Robert, Robert. You know, she just was Robert. Her sons occasionally came to visit her in Florida, but her marriage to their diplomat father was part of her past. And now it was, as we said, that Friday afternoon in August. It was the eve of the company beach party. Rosemary was bringing some of the supplies and was always there early to set up. Rosemary had told co-workers she would drop into the office Friday afternoon

to pick up a bowl for the next day's event. They kind of called me and said, you know, Rosemary still hasn't gotten this bowl of potato salad. You know, what do we do? And I said, well, she'll show up. Don't worry about it. But Saturday morning, as the preparations for the party began, Rosemary again uncharacteristically shirked her duties. She didn't show up.

So they phoned her. More than once. No answer. No Rosemary. We knew when she didn't show that something must have been wrong because that was definitely out of her character. Rosemary was never late. She always stayed in touch. But here it was, getting later, and no Rosemary. How late was she before you began to worry? It was a good probably hour and a half, two hours. And that's when some of the teammates and I got a little bit concerned and said we needed to go figure out what might have happened.

But Jeff Bagans and Rosemary's other friends felt quite suddenly that they already knew. Rosemary Christensen had left them. Deep down inside, I knew something had happened to her, that she was gone. But what none of them knew was where, or how, or why. Rosemary Christensen was reliable to the core, a fine example of the diplomat's wife, even though that's a life she'd rejected. So when she failed to appear for the company beach party, failed to return countless phone calls,

a pall hung over the gathering. Something had to be wrong. The next day, a kind of search party was formed to knock on the door of the condo where Rosemary lived with her husband, Robert. All the drapes were drawn, so we could not look in the windows. Her car was there. His motorcycle was there. And that's when I thought something really bad has happened here. The police came then. They entered the apartment, had a look around,

while Rosemary's anxious friends waited outside. At this particular point, we're concerned about her welfare, her location, and her safety. And her husband, Robert? He seemed to have disappeared as well. In the condo, police found an affectionate note from him to her, explaining that he'd gone to visit relatives for a few days.

Jeff Beggins and the others seemed to have no further recourse except to worry. And as one day became two, their worry deepened. As the day progressed and the night progressed and the next day progressed, there was definitely something wrong. We all began to get worried. The disappearance of a woman so respected in her community soon attracted local media. Reporter Mark Douglas was put on the story. Her friends are putting out missing person posters,

and her husband, whom she lived with, was nowhere in sight for days and days. And then, just as suddenly as he disappeared, Robert Temple returned several days later, mystified and worried about Rosemary. He had taken a trip just before she disappeared and said he was in Indiana visiting relatives. So the day he returned, clearly there was a great interest in talking to him. And then he consented to come speak with us and sat down around the pool and proceeded to tell us his story. I miss her so bad. One of angst, one of sadness. Rose and I haven't been apart this long since we've been married. I love my wife. I just want her back. Please, if anybody's seen Rose, know where she's at. Please, just tell her. Just call. The Temple maintained

that while he was sad that his wife had suddenly left as she did, he was sure there was a simple explanation. She ran away with someone else. He must have had a reason for saying this. Mr. Temple came back with a disclosure that he and his wife were swingers

who lived an alternative lifestyle. Rosemary Christensen, the diplomat's wife, a promiscuous swinger? Nothing Robert said could have been a bigger surprise or, for Rosemary's friends, more upsetting. It pisses me off that anybody would say something like that about her. Why would it make you so mad? Because she was just not that type of person. How do you know? Because I know. I've been with her. I've had drinks with her. I've had two glasses of wine. Two glasses of wine. No more. She was my babysitter. But can you ever really know a person? Maybe Rosemary Christensen's prim exterior had been a sort of disguise behind which she kept secrets from her friends at work.

The theory that he presented that she was a swinger who met people online was somewhat plausible. I believe his end of it was plausible, that he was a swinger. He even suggested that she might have gone back to Australia because either she had done it once before or threatened to do it. Well, yes, she had left a life before when she came to Florida. But had she simply walked out again? Rosemary's friends tried to stay optimistic.

Maybe she had a problem at home. Maybe she took off with some friends. Maybe she just went to disappear and collect her thoughts. Those were all the positive thoughts we were having at the time. But just in case, Bagans hired a private investigator, Richard Price, who dug around for a while and then reported the condo provided some interesting clues. Or not so much clues, really, as questions. Rosemary's cell phone, for example. When the police went in, they found the cell phone on the counter. Rosemary always had her cell phone with her. She never was without it. There was more, too, as the detective looked around.

Odd things. Like, for example, some very unusual alterations. Carpet missing. Different paint coverings on the wall. Something certainly was not right at that point. Why would someone remove carpet over a concrete floor or paint over part of a wall and then leave? And leave behind, by the way, a slip of paper on which was written... Well, the detective found the content very troubling. We found a list of ingredients that could be used to clean up, shall we say, homicide scene.

Different types of cleaning materials and flowery scents, things like that. It seemed a little creepy, though yet it could have been perfectly innocent. Somebody stocking up on cleaning supplies. And Rosemary's husband had a perfectly simple reason for those purchases. Mr. Temple was so distraught, supposedly after his wife turned up missing, that he went on a cleaning frenzy in his house as an act of stress relief. And as for that missing carpet, Temple said he'd cut a piece from the bedroom floor because sometime earlier, she tripped and fell, cut her knee, and bled on the carpet,

and they couldn't get the stain out, and now she left him. We're like any other couple. We have our arguments and ups and downs, but everything was fine. Despite his profession of innocence, Temple, as Rosemary's husband, would traditionally be high on the list of usual suspects in her disappearance. Still, police didn't have any real physical evidence against him. All of his explanations had just enough plausibility to keep him out of handcuffs. Weeks went by, still no word from Rosemary. Her friends handed out more flyers, her boss offered a reward for information.

The private investigator canvassed the area and... nothing tangible. Though one bit of information did come up, and it posed a whole new set of questions, not about Rosemary, but about the man she'd been married to. We found out that he had actually had been arrested years before

in a previous marriage in the death of a child. The disappearance of Rosemary Christensen was shocking enough. After all, she didn't seem to be the sort of woman who suddenly runs off without some sort of reason. But then there were more shocks. Her husband's explanation that she was a secret swinger and had probably taken off with another man. No one could find any evidence of that. And then there was news about Robert Temple himself.

He had a past. He had a history back in California involving a child, the death of a child. I think it was an 18-month-old child of his girlfriend who he was eventually convicted of and served time in prison for. It was a long time ago, 1975. A child died of brain injuries after a battering. Temple pleaded guilty and served five years for involuntary manslaughter. Even though...

He insisted that he never harmed that child. He kind of put it behind him and got married to this real estate woman. Moved on, yes. Who was kind of, well, a cleansing in a way for his reputation, I should think. Almost, but not quite. Rosemary's friends found themselves thinking anew about that odd marriage of hers, the warm, sophisticated woman with her motorcycle man. He was the jealous type. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Yes, very much so. If he knew that we were having lunch or something, he'd show up.

He would call all the time at the office if she was showing property, wanting to know who she was with. When Rosemary and I were together, her cell phone would ring incessantly. Her beeper would go off. It would have driven most women out the door, said her friends. But Rosemary? We'd ask ask several times, Rosemary, what are you doing? What is in it for you? What'd she say? Oh, you just don't understand. You know, you just don't understand. I said, no, I guess we don't.

But now everyone was trying to understand, especially when it came out that she had married him even after she'd accused him of beating her before they got married he'd been arrested for domestic abuse against his girlfriend against her against her it's an old story hers no different rosemary first pressed charges and then withdrew them his explanation was that he was drunk. He tripped coming up the stairs, fell into a door. The door slammed into his girlfriend, Rosemary Christensen. Another mistaken case that he explained away is not his fault. But around the office, a few old stories that once didn't make sense now perhaps did. We had sales meetings every morning.

A couple times she never showed up and didn't call in. She was never like that. And to come to find out, she'd had some beatings from him and didn't want anybody to know and have to walk in the office with the bruises. But always the big apology later. He would send her flowers and the girls at the office would say, well, I guess Robert hit Rosemary again because she got flowers this week. And that seemed to work because they stayed together.

The only thing that I can even think of that makes any sense is that he always apologized and promised to never do it again. But then the police discovered that even Rosemary, for all her sweet demeanor, was pushed to her limits once. That's when she found out that Robert Temple had a girlfriend who worked alongside him at a telemarketing center. A couple of times, evidently her and Rosemary had had words. One of the stories was that Rosemary went to their work and that the girl hid under a desk from her. Which perhaps explained why friends had begun to see a new Rosemary emerging, a woman who was getting ready to move on without him.

That was the main problem, is that he couldn't keep her. She started getting a backbone against him. Rosemary, it turned out, had an exit strategy. She'd even seen a divorce attorney. But on that attorney's advice, she decided she was going to stay with Robert for another two months. Two months left of? Of her time in the country to get her citizenship. Rosemary, remember, was Australian.

She wanted U.S. citizenship, a goal she would reach, her lawyer advised her, if she just stayed married two more months. Then, finally, a citizen she could divorce Robert and get on with her life. She revealed her plan to her friend Laurel, but not to husband Robert. She had decided that rather than confront Robert and let him know that she was getting a divorce,

that she, her exact words to me were, Laurel, I'm going to walk on eggshells until this is over. So, did police move in and arrest Robert, charge him with something based on his wife's disappearance? Well, no. There was no proof the temple had anything to do with it. He steadfastly maintained he had no knowledge whatsoever of her whereabouts, and he did what he could to prove his innocence. So have you offered to take a lie detector test? Yes.

If they wish me to, I will. But in fact, that never happened. Why? He hired a lawyer, and the lawyer said, No, we're not going to do that. And that was that. Those closest to Rosemary Christensen kept up their desperate search, now thoroughly convinced her husband, Robert Temple,

knew exactly what happened because he did it. Whatever it was, he must have. The thing that went in my mind is, oh my God, she went home and said she wanted a divorce and he killed her. That's what I thought had happened. It was a soap opera. People couldn't get enough of this story. But as with any story, a few months of no news and public interest waned. I was constantly surveilling the condo to see what was going on. Just that small group of friends maintained their vigil, watching Robert Temple, watching his every move, most days, many nights, month after month. And then one day... When the truck showed up and he started emptying out the condo... A rental truck.

A rental truck. We watched him load it up. Temple was leaving town and he wasn't leaving alone. Robert Temple and his girlfriend, Leslie Stewart, left town for parts unknown. When real estate broker Rosemary Christensen suddenly vanished,

it was so out of character that her friends soon began to fear the worst. I said, something's wrong. And that's when I knew something bad had happened. And then the months went by, and they heard nothing from Rosemary at all. They were convinced husband Robert Temple knew more than he was saying. He seemed off somehow, always had. All those times she showed up hiding bruises while he behaved like a stalker. So yes, they were suspicious.

And yes, they were spying on him at the condo. I'm hiding in the parking lot. And that's how they saw Temple and his new girlfriend loading up a van and heading out of town. They got in Rosemary's car and I followed them across the causeway. This friend was on her phone with police as she followed them. You're talking to the cops. They know he's leaving. They know he's leaving. What did they say? There was nothing they could do. That's what they said.

They had nothing to stop him. Temple's move did not surprise the investigator. I think Robert felt that once he got out of sight, he would be out of mind. And now here he was, not just leaving, but apparently cohabitating with a new and much younger woman. They found out her name, Leslie Stewart, and that she was in her 20s, had a child. But that was about it. Leslie Stewart was and is somewhat of an enigma.

We knew that he had gone on a road trip with her about the same time his wife disappeared. Was she a swinger, too? Yes. According to him, at least. According to him, and we know she was living that kind of lifestyle. Perhaps Temple had found a new soulmate,

and there was nothing anybody could do except offer a warning to young Leslie Stewart. The detectives shared with me that before he left town, they spoke with Leslie Stewart and said, someday you'll be next. They hopscotched across the country, taking odd jobs along the way, until finally all trace of the pair vanished. And back in Tampa, meanwhile, police and Rosemary's loyal friends

reached that sad closing chapter of failed searches. They enlisted the paranormal. The sheriff's department had their dive team do an explorer of a lake where this psychic had told us that he had had a vision. That's where her body was. And, of course, we did not recover a body. Even for those most unwilling to give up the search, it was hard to hold out hope anymore.

The longer it went, it was just more evident that she had met the ill fate of death. Even Rosemary's sons resigned themselves to a terrible resolution. My gut tells me that she's not alive anymore because she would have contacted us. And so now life went on without Rosemary. Her sons grew to adulthood without their mother. Her widower, if that's what he was, Robert Temple, was somewhere far away with his much younger woman and his apparently swinging lifestyle. When Robert Temple left town, more or less the story went away. Happy birthday to you!

And as the years went by, her friends, once in a while, lifted a glass in her memory. We'd have like a little anniversary, you know, drinks for her and stuff just at the time. Here's to Rosemary. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes mysteries just don't get solved. Rosemary's friends never did believe Robert's explanation that she had left him for another man. And there was never any evidence at all to corroborate his wild story that she was a secret swinger.

Now, the friends believe that she was dead, that she had been from the very day she disappeared. But where was her body? Where was the proof? Didn't exist. And so almost everybody eventually just gave up. Almost everybody. I knew, I knew he wasn't smart.

He wasn't that smart. He wasn't gonna get away with it. Something was gonna happen. I just didn't know when. Oh, he wasn't smart. He wasn't that smart. He wasn't going to get away with it. Something was going to happen. I just didn't know when. Oh, something happened all right. It was August 2008. It was nine years after Rosemary disappeared. Reporter Mark Douglas answered his phone and heard on the other end an old friend, a Tampa lawyer named Jay Hebert. He said, I know what happened to Rosemary Christensen, and I've known this for nine years.

The charming Rosemary Christensen, local real estate broker, had inexplicably disappeared. Her husband had moved on to a new life with a much younger woman. Gradually, over nine years, Rosemary's friends got used to the idea that she was gone forever, and they might never even know exactly why. And then quite suddenly, in the still heat of August 2008, a startling development. Robert Temple's longtime girlfriend was talking, and what she said was horrific. Reporter Mark Douglas broke the story. Leslie Stewart had taken investigators and prosecutors to the scene of Rosemary Christensen's grave somewhere near the Suwannee River, and they dug where she told them, and they found her body. All these years, her body had been lying in a swampy grave on property belonging to Leslie Stewart's own father in northern Florida.

Although, according to Leslie, her father never knew what was buried on his land. Inside some sort of plastic container? Yes. The same container purchased at Walmart nine years before that. The news of the grisly discovery spread rapidly through the community of Rosemary's loyal friends. And their reaction? Horror, yes, but also... It's very weird to say I was elated. I was so happy to know that it was finally, finally over.

Everyone wanted justice for Rosemary. But who exactly was to blame? What did they do to her? And why did this woman, Leslie Stewart, suddenly reappear talking? Here is the amazing and to some profoundly disturbing answer. A Tampa attorney named Jay A. Baird had known and kept the secret the whole nine years, a secret he could now reveal to everyone. This was the most heavy, heaviest burden I had ever carried. Leslie Stewart told him the whole story not long before she and Robert Temple skipped town.

But a bear was prevented by attorney-client privilege rules from whispering a word to anyone. It was an oath that I took that lawyers across the country take, and we would hope that our clients, when they come to talk to us about a situation, realize and recognize that what they tell us is going to remain confidential. So, Hebert could do precisely nothing with the information. Leslie could have revealed it all herself, of course, but... She was convinced by Robert not to come forward to the authorities. Did you say to her at the time, you've got to go to the police, you've got to tell them what happened? Absolutely. But in this situation, Leslie was scared. And so, as Rosemary's friends puzzled and fumed, Leslie ran off with Robert, eventually settled out west with him, had a baby with him, a daughter,

and kept the awful secret all those years. And then, an opportunity, a trip away from Robert, gave her the physical and emotional distance she needed. Ultimately, it was when she was able to break away, go to a family reunion that was set up outside of the state of California in Washington state. That's when she phoned Hebert and he put her with the police and they flew her back to Florida, where finally she gave Hebert permission to reveal what she'd told him in confidence nine years before. It was the night Rosemary went missing. Leslie was 22. She'd been having an affair with Temple. She got several frantic phone calls and messages from Robert saying, please come over, please come over as soon as possible. At the condo, Temple led Leslie into his bedroom.

They discovered Rosemary laying on the floor, wrapped in a black kimono-style robe, and obviously was not breathing, and there was quite a bit of blood. Temple, she said, insisted it had been a dreadful accident that grew out of some kind of altercation. Rosemary kept a knife to keep a stalker away. She came up on Robert and poked him in the back of the head with the butt end of the knife and somehow there was some type of struggle, and according to Robert, she fell on the knife. You know, there were apparently multiple stab wounds. One may have been an entry wound or an exit wound. Yeah, fell on the knife five times.

Yeah, one of those things. According to Leslie, Temple told her no one would believe it was an accident, so she helped him clean up, then watched as he hatched a carefully thought out series of lies and cover-ups to explain Rosemary's disappearance. He decided that he was going to start covering up this homicide by creating the charade of Rosemary disappearing on the internet with some swingers.

Leslie said they packed up Rosemary's things to make it look as if she had decided quite suddenly to leave of her own accord. They spread these items all over the area in dumpsters, and they wouldn't put all of it in one dumpster, so if it was found, it might be pieced together. So then she helped him bury the body. She did.

And nine years later, Hebert passed the dreadful details on to reporter Douglas. They stuffed her body into this large Rubbermaid-type plastic bin, and both of them put it in the back of an SUV and drove north. She says that her and Robert Temple buried the body while her father stayed inside his house, presumably unaware of what they were doing. But why? Why would she help him do all this and then keep the secret for nine years? Young, naive, easily influenced by a man that she looked up to that exerted some power and control over her.

Whatever bound her to Temple, the ties began to unravel. Living within Northern California, she became increasingly concerned for her safety. In fact, according to Leslie, Temple had just recently threatened to kill both her and her daughter if she ever told the truth. I think that Leslie had put up with enough at that point. Finally, in August of 2008, alone at that family reunion, she called a bear.

She disclosed over the phone that she had been threatened, and a knife was pulled on her. Law enforcement then thought the quickest, fastest way to get Robert Temple into custody would be to contact the folks in Redding, California and suggest to them that a crime had been committed. Robert was then arrested in Redding where they were living. Leslie Stewart was finally ready to tell everything she knew. And she knew plenty. But was it true? Because there are two sides to this story. This is the gold digger.

Now in custody, Leslie's lover, Robert Temple, had his own and very different version of events. She said, they're never going to believe us. They're never going to believe us. And how are you going to explain me being here and your wife's dead on the floor? It's flat and hot, and the mini malls stretch for miles in all directions from the county jail that housed the man accused of killing Rosemary Christensen. Robert Temple put there, courtesy of Leslie Stewart, the young woman who replaced Rosemary in Robert's bed.

But Robert claimed he had a surprise of his own in store. He didn't kill Rosemary. He simply helped Leslie cover up the crime she herself committed. And from his cell, he started talking too. I didn't call the police, and that was the worst thing. I'm not going to lie, I was scared. And that was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.

Oh, he freely admitted he arranged an illicit evening with then-girlfriend Leslie. The plan, he said, was to meet her at the condo he shared with his wife, Rosemary. But when he arrived... As I went around the building, Leslie's coming out my front door, and she's white, white as a ghost, white as a sheet. And when he went into the condo, he said, imagine his shock when he found his wife's body

sprawled on the bedroom floor. There's blood in her hair, on her face. I'm yelling at her to wake up. This was the real story, said Temple. Rosemary came home unexpectedly, found Leslie waiting in the condo, and in a fury, ordered her to leave. She said Rose attacked her. She said she grabbed Rose and they started struggling, pulling hair.

She thought Rose had knocked herself out because she wasn't moving anymore. But when she got up, she saw the knife sticking in Rose. It was a hunting knife. She must have fallen on it. Must have been an accident. Horrible, he said, of course. But he couldn't possibly know what happened. Couldn't have prevented it. He wasn't even there. I got up to call the ambulance. I swear to God I did. He would have done the right thing and called for help, he said.

He really would have. But his girlfriend stopped him. Leslie grabbed me and put her arms around me and started crying and telling me how they were going to take her child away and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that Rose was dead already. He says she convinced him that no one would ever believe that he was not the killer because of his past, the manslaughter conviction, the abuse arrest. She convinced him, he says, that he would always be the focus of blame, no matter how much she tried to convince everybody that she had

accidentally killed his wife. And so Temple now claimed he helped young Leslie plan the cover-up, took part reluctantly with grief in his heart and respect for his poor dead wife. I bought the biggest plastic tub that I could think of to put her in, because I decided that if we're going to bury her, I'm not just going to throw dirt on her or anything like that. I was going to try to make it as nice as I could. I wanted to make it dignified. I put her special, she had a favorite pillow that she liked. It was a little decorative thing. She always kept on the bed, I'd give her a pillow. He cleaned the apartment, he said,

and then he got into the passenger seat while Leslie took charge. Leslie took the wheel and drove off to find a burial site. He wanted to take his wife, he says, to Georgia, to a place in the woods that she always loved because he wanted to do that one last thing for her. He fell asleep as she drove, he said.

And when he woke up, they were in North Florida. They were pulling into her father's property, unbeknownst to him, because that was not his plan. And then, to keep him in the dark, to make him vulnerable, to protect their own skins, Temple said. Leslie and her father buried the body on the property without telling Temple exactly where they put it. Now I

realized that the only reason she had her dad help her bury it, so I wouldn't know where Rose was at, so I could never turn around and snitch on her later. Just call, just please let us know. So of course he had to do something to protect himself. That's why he finally found the presence of mind to start setting up his own alibi. Nine years ago, when they presented him with the shopping list and the video at Walmart showing him buying that container, they said, aha, Mr. Temple, exactly where is that container? And he showed them. Because during that road trip, he stopped in Tallahassee, I believe, and purchased an identical one so that he could have something to present to them when they asked.

In jail, Robert began a sort of private PR campaign. He sprinkled his accusations against Leslie, his version of the story, through long, convoluted letters, sent them off to lawyer Hebert, reporter Douglas, even Rosemary's friends. Rosemary caught her and they had a fight, and that's when Rosemary fell on her knife, or it was really bizarre, and I read it and I put it down

and had to have a glass of wine, and I picked it back up again, and I'm like, did I just read And I read it and I put it down and had to have a glass of wine. And I picked it back up again. I'm like, did I just read this and read it again? Yes, Robert was true to Rosemary. Heartbroken by her death, Leslie was the villain. Leslie was no Rose. I loved Rose. And even if we were to have separated, I would still love Rose, but I would have never

stopped Rose from leaving me. I wouldn't, you couldn't give me a thousand Lesleys for one Rose. And Leslie, meanwhile, though she declined our interview requests, continued to claim that her version of Rosemary's death is the real one. Still, there it was, one crime, two stories, his and hers. But with one obvious difference. In exchange for her story, Leslie Stewart was granted full immunity from prosecution. I'm not saying that Leslie is a perfect young lady. I'm saying that in this situation,

the puppet master that was Robert Temple was in control of everything she was doing. If you believe him, she's a Lady Macbeth character, she's a manipulator. If you believe her, he's the manipulator. Is he an innocent man falsely accused, or is he just trying to cover up what he really did? We have two people here who know what happened. Both of them are liars. They've both told lies.

Now one of them is telling the truth, and the question is, which one? That would be up to a jury to decide. In 2008, Robert Temple stood trial for the murder of his wife, Rosemary. The key witness against him is former girlfriend, Leslie Stewart. She had been granted full immunity, in part, for agreeing to testify against Robert, and Robert, in turn, decided to act as his own attorney, which didn't help. He was ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder.

He died in 2018 while serving his life sentence. Rosemary Christensen left a life full of travel and style and sophistication to reinvent herself on the sandy shores of the Florida Gulf Coast, where Robert Glenn Temple became her mate and ended up being the architect of both of their fates.