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

signs outside Homer Bryce Stadium, on the north edge of the campus, urging their team to victory. And in the stands the student body, wearing shirts in their school colors, became a mass of screaming bodies dubbed the Purple Haze.
    As a 1-AA team, the Lumberjacks traveled by plane, and the stadiums they played accommodated from 10,000 to 15,000 fans. On the football field, as ever, David ranked high on the list of players. Wearing number 42, he’d gained a little weight since high school, coming in at 220 pounds, and his strength was formidable. As in Katy, players dreaded coming up against him, even his friends. “David had a great sense of humor. He joked around all the time. But you didn’t want to be on his bad side,” says Jeremy Rakes, a teammate. “He had a temper.”
    At night, when the players went out, David got in fights in the bars, more often than not with the frat boys he loved to ridicule. One night when he talked to a girl, another student said hello. David picked the guy up and threw him against the wall. David even became incensed with teammates if he felt they weren’t being respectful to one of his dates. “He’d yell and scream and threaten,” says Jeremy, who one night caught the brunt of David’s anger just for talking to his date. “He said I was being disrespectful to the girl, but I wasn’t. When he dated someone, he put them on a pedestal, and if any of the guys got close, David went ballistic.”
    Anything could set him off. One night he showed up at a bowling alley late, and the worker who answered the door said the place was closing. According to the rumors that circulated afterward, David expressed his disappointment by pummeling the alley’s attendant. “We didn’t know if the guy didn’t know who David was or if it was all covered up,” says a teammate. “But nothing ever happened to David.”
    As at Katy High School, the SFA team was a tight unit. Many ate together and lived in the same coed dorm, a low-rise building that resembled a motel, with doorways to the outside. The first two floors housed football players, with women students on the top two floors. During those years, the late eighties, when steroids were a topic across the nation, Jeremy and others heard a lot of talk about SFA players injecting the drugs, but not from David. If he used them, he kept it quiet. While some of the players filled syringes and injected in front of others, if he used them, David didn’t. “I don’t know if David was on them or not,” says Jeremy. “All I know is that on the field, he was tough, and that he had a hair-trigger temper. The rest of us were careful around him, not to set him off.”
    So tough that although he played little during his first year, something both awful and remarkable happened. One night, when the Jacks were playing Nicholls State, from Thibodaux, Louisiana, David tackled a player who didn’t see him coming. It was a legal hit, and a hard one. David struck the other player with so much force that he dislocated two of his opponent’s vertebrae. “David nearly broke the guy’s back,” says Jeremy.
    Maybe Coach Graves shouldn’t have been surprised by his new linebacker’s power and fierceness. When Graves recruited David, a Katy coach told him that David was the “meanest” player he’d ever worked with. That fall, Graves learned something else about David Temple: the defensive player displayed a consuming need to be in charge. “David was a lot about control,” says Graves. “On the football field, even when he was furious, he never totally lost control. What I saw in David Temple was a heavy-minded person. Focused.”
    What players noticed about their new teammate was that the kid from Katy also had a few quirks. When it came to appearances, David left nothing to chance. Obsessive about his clothes, he wore only name brands, like Tommy Hilfiger shirts and jeans and Nike warm-up suits. Everything had to be precisely clean and pressed, and it all