Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

connection with David, not by those in his inner circle, the upper echelon of the school’s jocks, but by the average kids, the ones not held in high enough athletic esteem to earn his respect. “David Temple was always ready for a fight, and he acted like he thought he was better than the other kids. He was a bully,” says one classmate. “He treated ninety percent of us like we were a step down from him, ignoring us unless he singled us out for some kind of abuse.”
    “Kids walked on pins and needles around David because he had a bad temper, and they were never sure what would set him off,” says a high-school friend. “Everyone, even his friends, knew they didn’t want to be on the receiving side when David got pissed.”
    Always meticulous about planning events, the way he dressed and setting strategy on the football field, when it came to pickup games or any activity, David pulled the particulars together, setting up the teams and making all the arrangements. Even as a teenager, he seemed obsessed with being in control. Sometimes, when his friends didn’t go along, David became peeved. “He’d call us momma’s boys when we didn’t do what he wanted,” says a friend. “David ridiculed us. We didn’t say anything. Most of the time, we just let it go, hoping he’d stop.”
    Still, when he was playing so well on the football field, others were willing to cut David a considerable amount of slack. “Katy is all about football. It’s all Katy is,” says one resident. “Players like to talk about winning with heart and seeing through the eye of the Tiger.”
    There was little doubt that David had more than his share of courage. Once, while running the bleachers, he slipped and sliced his leg open, cutting it nearly to the bone. One teammate looked at the wound and felt like throwing up, it was so bloody and angry-looking. To his astonishment, David laughed. Although taken aback, his friend wasn’t completely surprised; he’d once seen David fall on a piece of plywood with nails hammered through it. That day David suffered puncture wounds but never shed a tear.
    In the stands on Friday nights, David’s family cheered him on. Despite their deep roots, “the Temples were just another family in the rice fields of Katy, Texas,” says one resident. “What they had going for them was a son who was a star football player.”
    Off the field, David talked confidently of the future. He speculated about college at a big-name university, followed by a career in the pros. “David was very physical, built for the game,” says the team’s defensive coach, Don Clayton. “And he was aggressive. That’s what you want to see. He understood that getting hit was part of the game.”
    “Getting hit by David, even at practice, was like getting hit by a freight train,” says Tommy Raglin, one of David’s close friends and a teammate. “On the field, we sometimes used David as a kicker. He was good, and it faked the other team out. They didn’t guess that a kicker would be able to tackle and run the ball.”
    Then disaster. In his sophomore year during the first scrimmage, David, who’d been elevated to the varsity team, hurt his knee, so badly he required not one surgery but two. It could have been a football-ending injury. David was out the entire season. But he was determined not to end his career on the field. “I’ve never seen anybody work harder at rehab than David,” says Clayton. “He was in the gym constantly, working that knee. He worked his upper body and developed incredible strength.”
    Once the knee heeled, David came back tougher than ever. Friends say that he could bench-press 430 pounds, and stories circulated on the high-school campus. The gossip suggested that David wasn’t just working in the gym to build those muscles. Some said he’d begun taking anabolic steroids.
    During the eighties, the drugs spread from professional sports onto high school and college campuses. The word anabolic is