Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder by Kathryn Casey Page A

or try to separate the dogs, and Jackie Cerame even thought that David looked amused.
    “Call your dog off,” one neighbor shouted as they ran toward David. At that, David appeared to snap out of a trance. He moved forward and pulled Shaka off the other dog as a neighbor helped the lab escape. The lab wasn’t badly hurt, but talk of the incident filtered through the neighborhood, fueling even more rumors that the Temple’s dog was dangerous and not to be trusted.
    In most ways, Sheree Fournerat saw David as a good neighbor. When her son, Evan, was eleven or so, he made a game out of breaking the spotlights on the eaves of David and Belinda’s house with a BB gun. Although he could have, David didn’t get angry. Instead he talked to the boy, explaining how dangerous the shattered glass was, especially to little Evan when he played outside. Sheree thought at the time that David must have been like that with his students, kind and patient. She found it difficult to reconcile what she saw in David with what she heard from a niece who attended David’s school, Hastings. “Coach Temple is mean,” the girl said.
    Jackie Cerame came to the same conclusion as Sheree’s niece, but for a different reason. She hadn’t seen David with his students, but she heard him yelling at Belinda. Out on the street talking to a neighbor or working in her yard, she saw Belinda drive up in her Toyota, open the garage door, and pull inside. Before Belinda got Evan out of his car seat, David was at the door leading from the house to the garage, furious, shouting at her to get inside. Cerame couldn’t see Belinda’s face as she walked into the house, but from the tone of David Temple’s voice she knew he was in a rage.
    At other times, when Cerame talked to Belinda out on the driveway, David stuck his head out the door and ordered her inside. Belinda immediately said good-bye, and turned and left. “He seemed quick to anger, and she’d do what he said,” Cerame says. “She didn’t argue with him. Not ever that I saw.”
    At times, Sheree knew Belinda had to have been furious with David, and once or twice she heard the frustration in her neighbor’s voice. “Well, duh,” David said, mocking Belinda about something or other, Sheree never quite sure what.
    “Sure, David. You’re always right,” Belinda replied, venturing no further. Sheree never thought of Belinda as a push-over, but she saw the cold, stern look in David’s eyes.
    “I could practically see steam coming out of Belinda’s ears,” Sheree would say years later. “It wasn’t my husband, but if it had been, I’d have been furious.”
    That December, David and Belinda decorated the house and put deer outlined in white lights in the yard. A handful of David’s football players came to help, as they did off and on with the yard in the summer and fall with the mowing and trimming. Sheree had always assumed that the boys did it because they wanted to, maybe to curry favor with their coach, but that December, she heard one boy grumble and refer to working at Coach Temple’s house as punishment. The holidays came and Belinda convinced her brothers and sister to buy Carol a mother’s ring with all their birthstones. Yet, she saw her parents less and less often. She told no one in the family that David was arguing with her about visiting Tom and Carol, but no one doubted that Belinda wanted to see them. By then, Brian and Jill were spending little time with the Lucases, and Belinda told Jill in no uncertain terms that she thought that was wrong. “She really came down hard on me for not going to Brian’s parents’ house,” says Jill. “Belinda wanted us all to be one big happy family, and we weren’t. And that disappointed her greatly.”
    When David was at a coaching camp over the holiday break, Belinda took advantage of his absence to drive to Nacogdoches to spend one night with her parents. Carol and Tom played with Evan, getting to know their little grandson, but