Texas man gets 2nd life sentence for pregnant wife’s killing
Apr 21, 2023, 3:47 PM
David Temple is shown during his sentencing trial in the Harris County 178th District Criminal Court Monday April 10, 2023 in Houston. David Temple was convicted for the second time for the murder of his pregnant wife, Belinda Lucas Temple, in Aug. 2019, but the sentencing was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle via AP)
Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
(Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle via AP)
HOUSTON (AP) — A former Houston-area high school football coach on Friday was sentenced for a second time to life in prison in his pregnant wife’s killing more than 24 years ago.
A jury sentenced David Mark Temple, 54, during a new resentencing trial, which began on April 10.
Authorities said Belinda Temple, 30, was fatally shot in her home on Jan. 11, 1999, in what was initially believed to be a burglary.
Prosecutors later accused David Temple of staging the burglary at his suburban Houston home and fatally shooting his wife, a high school teacher who was eight months pregnant, because he was having an affair.
David Temple later married the woman he’d been seeing. He had been a football coach at Alief Hastings High School and wasn’t charged in the killing until five years after it happened.
A jury initially convicted Temple of murder in 2007 and sentenced him to life in prison. But Texas’ top criminal court overturned that conviction in 2016 because prosecutors had withheld evidence.
Temple was convicted in August 2019 for a second time. But that jury could not decide on a sentence, prompting a judge to declare a mistrial. This month’s new resentencing trial has been delayed in part by the coronavirus pandemic.
Temple’s second wife filed for divorce in the middle of his retrial in 2019.
Defense attorneys had argued a teenager who lived in the Temples’ neighborhood was the killer.
