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

filled the parking lot, while TV helicopters circled overhead, and for much of the game all eyes were on the star linebacker, David Temple.
    That year, the fall of 1986, the Katy Tigers won every game and took home a district championship for the first time in twenty-two years. David was the defensive captain, and one of the stars of the team. “He was a hometown hero, and it didn’t matter what David pulled,” says Thompson. “Because everyone just adored him. The little kids wanted to be like him. And the adults wanted to shake his hand.”
    After the games, parents threw parties, or the team went to victory dances where DJs played rock and roll and country and western. David dated a girl from another school, but his prominence was such that many of the Katy High girls wanted to be his girlfriend. At least on the surface, David Temple had it all. He was handsome, powerfully built, had a devil-may-care charisma, and he was high up on the school’s hierarchy, on the tier reserved for the most popular students.
    The season ended when the Tigers lost, 24 to 13, to the Madison Marlins in Houston’s Astrodome on November 15, 1986, but that final loss never diminished the year’s importance. It would seem in the decades to follow that the team had begun a tradition of winning, one Katy High would carry forward. And the members of the team, especially David, would be forever viewed as the players that started it all.
    In early 1987, just weeks after his team’s most impressive season on the field of combat, however, all wouldn’t be well for David Temple. He’d talked confidently to friends throughout his football career of being picked up by a big-name school, the University of Texas, Arkansas, or any of the others in the big conferences that went to bowl games and whose star players signed multimillion-dollar NFL contracts. But by that winter, it was evident that wouldn’t be David’s fate.
    Early on, there had been interest in David, especially from the University of Oklahoma. “On film, David looked good. He was a fine player,” says Clayton. “Before Oklahoma came out to see him in person, they were saying all the right things, calling David a full-tilt guy, that he could play in their program. But the big schools wanted linebackers to be six feet and up. David was just five eleven, and too short.”
    The night the previous fall when an Oklahoma coach came to watch David play football, Clayton had heard the man say, “Temple’s not as big as we thought he was.”
    From that point on, Oklahoma pulled back. They showed no interest in David Temple, and none of the other top-tier schools recruited him. As 1987 began, it became evident that an offer from a big-ticket school wasn’t in David’s future. Although he must have been disappointed, David brushed off the situation with friends, saying it didn’t matter. But to one friend he labeled the height requirement “B.S.,” and groused about the unfairness of it all, pointing out that he was just an inch shorter than Mike Singletary, a Hall of Fame linebacker who played for the Chicago Bears. How much difference that one inch in height made. Ironically, if David took steroids in high school, in the long run the drugs may have hurt more than helped. One potential side effect is bone shortening, and both of David’s brothers were taller than he was. Without steroids would David Temple have grown that all-important inch? There was no way to predict what might have been, but the frustration at being left behind must have stung.
    “We were all disappointed for David,” says a friend. “He’d worked hard. He deserved to be able to grab the golden ring.”
     
     
    Crime wasn’t much of a concern in Katy, Texas. Yet a rash of car burglaries had begun the previous summer, and continued through fall and into that winter. Someone was stealing what was then the latest hot technology, radar detectors. Euphemistically called fuzz busters, they were used to warn when