And in the upcoming season of “Cold Justice,” five of the eight cases they tackled have already led to arrests. Siegler and DeGuerin had a long-standing courtroom rivalry. Asked on Oxygen’s “Martinis & Murder” podcast in November whether she thinks DNA or circumstantial evidence is more important, Siegler didn’t mince words: “Oh my God, [circumstantial evidence] is more important — y’all better preach that the way I do!”, “I have two missions in life,” Siegler continued. Kelly fought for justice for Harris County residents and crime victims for over 21 years until she resigned from the District Attorney's office in May 2008. (This included Sanders’s polygraph tests. Support the independent voice of Houston and help keep the future of Houston Press free. The series starred Harris County, Texas, prosecutor Kelly Siegler and her team as they investigated open cases in and around the Texas region. Siegler and Hanak knew the case against Graves was weak. It caused quite a stir when Prosecutor Kelly Siegler reenacted her theory of the murder by bringing the bed into the courtroom. She is the former Harris County, State of Texas prosecutor. He was no longer useful to Temple’s attorneys. After trial, DeGuerin surveyed the jurors to find out why they convicted. She is the former Harris County, State of Texas prosecutor. Use of this website constitutes acceptance of our terms of use, our cookies policy, and our privacy policy. No ejected shotgun shell was found at the scene, but remnants of plastic wadding on the floor indicated that the shell was likely a reload; some hunters like to personally fill a shell with shot. It would become the case that, nearly a decade later, threatens to destroy her reputation and career. The Cynthia Smith case will be featured on the new season of “Cold Justice,” premiering March 14 at 6/5c on Oxygen. After Temple was found guilty, DeGuerin told a throng of reporters gathered outside court that Siegler had finally done it; she’d convicted an innocent man. Cold Justice is an investigative true crime series originally broadcast on TNT and currently on Oxygen.The series, produced by Dick Wolf, follows former Harris County, Texas prosecutor Kelly Siegler and a team of investigators as they re-open unsolved murder cases with the consent and assistance of local law enforcement. DeGuerin had taken over the case in November 2004; by the time he sought an examining trial in February 2005, he had had two months of unfettered access to the case. • Siegler argued that Temple was the only person with a motive to kill Belinda because he was in love with another woman, a woman he wound up marrying; DeGuerin argued that Temple had already ended the affair before Belinda was killed, and that Sanders had a greater motive to kill Belinda because she told his parents he had missed too many classes and that she was upset that his friends had once thrown beer bottles on her lawn and removed her Christmas decorations. Back in Texas in the 1990s and 2000s, Kelly Siegler was a tough prosecutor who won convictions in 19 out of 20 death penalty cases. Hanak had worked with Siegler on a capital murder case in 2008 and felt confident that if anyone could convict Graves, it was Siegler… He continued seeing his mistress after Belinda’s death, and eventually married her. Leitner brought in outside counsel, defense attorney Brad Beers, for a follow-up. Siegler gave Holtke the names of some top-notch defense attorneys, which Holtke passed along to Ellis and Sanders. At the time of the Temple trial, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office had a policy giving defense attorneys a break on the discovery rules by allowing access to the case file prior to trial. On the stand, Temple himself admitted that he had shotgun shells at his house that were in a box “about 5 feet from where Belinda was murdered.” He said he didn’t “know exactly where the shotgun shells came from,” but they “were from previous use.”, Falkenberg also wrote that Clappart “corroborated much of” Glasscock’s story and “gleaned new information from a suspect’s girlfriend.” Here’s what Clappart actually “gleaned,” according to his notes: After interviewing Sanders’s high school girlfriend in 2012, the woman stated she didn’t believe Sanders was guilty, “in part because [she] did not believe Sanders was smart enough to get away with killing someone.”, Another “girlfriend” Clappart spoke with was none other than Glasscock’s sister, who said that her then-boyfriend, while high on pills, said in 2007 that he witnessed Belinda’s murder, and that Temple was not the killer. Clappart would also write in a memo that Minchew and Clegg “hammered” Glasscock, but it was actually Clappart himself who threatened Glasscock by erroneously describing the state’s perjury law. He shot her and then “wiped something from the gun on Temple’s clothes.”. By the time the habeas hearing began in 2014, Belinda had been dead for 15 years, and Temple had been in prison for eight. So it seemed odd when Glasscock told Clappart, “I’m sure you would tell me that I’m not allowed to say it, but, come to find out from Mr. DeGuerin, the dog was in the garage the whole time…”. Washington-Burleson County District Attorney Bill Parham then appointed veteran prosecutor Kelly Siegler and investigator Otto Hanak to retry the case. As a result, Holtke was highly skeptical of Glasscock’s story. • Investigators believed the home showed signs of a staged break-in; DeGuerin argued that the burglary was real and that it looked identical to a break-in committed by Sanders’s friends about two weeks before Belinda was killed. Local media portrayed the case as a clash of legal titans, a courtroom battle having almost as much to do with the attorneys’ egos as it did with the man on trial. She has been at the helm of 68 murder cases over the course of her career and has never recorded a loss thus far. Former Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler, who tried the case, propelled the trial into the media spotlight with a dramatic courtroom re-enactment of the stabbing on the Wrights' marital bed. They even heard from Temple himself, as well as DeGuerin’s alternate suspect, who was called to the stand by Siegler. As she told the Press, “David Temple was convicted by a fair and impartial jury after a long and hard-fought six-week trial. Still, DeGuerin was ultimately able to present evidence against Sanders at trial. Prosecutors did. Four days later, DeGuerin and Schneider interviewed him. Despite the fact that Glasscock didn’t seem to have any independent knowledge of the murder, and despite the fact that he claimed DeGuerin fed him key information, Clappart not only believed Glasscock’s story was solid — he believed it was enough to charge Sanders with capital murder. But he was a formidable defense attorney. “I didn’t even know it was a shotgun until Mr. DeGuerin told me,” Glasscock said. ), Gist also found that Siegler had delayed sharing non-Brady material with DeGuerin until the last minute. If you are unfamiliar with Kelly Siegler, she is a lawyer who has developed a strong reputation for her prosecutorial abilities and a frequent star on the show, Cold Justice. Here is another allegedly serious Brady violation that Gist found: Siegler either withheld or delayed the disclosure of a 1999 written statement from a kid named Randy Hess. Kelly Siegler Net Worth and Salary. Dick DeGuerin and his team have done everything they can to mislead…and manipulate the press and the system in their attempts to blame a 16-year-old teenage boy instead of Temple as being the murderer of Belinda and Erin. After Gist issued his findings, local media pounced on Siegler with a stinging rebuke of her performance in the Temple case. Get the latest updates in news, food, music and culture, and receive special offers direct to your inbox. Nothing improper was done by anyone with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, the DA’s office or by me on this case. Led by show-runner Kelly Siegler, a famous former Texas prosecutor, the show’s team of detectives worked with the SCSO to go over every little detail and interview witnesses (both old and new). But Clappart figured the best way to get to Sanders was through his friend Cody Ellis. But with Glasscock, DeGuerin was back on the trail of Riley Joe Sanders III, his pet suspect at trial. Here is one example of a statement that Gist said was withheld that would have potentially swayed the jury in Temple’s favor: In 1999, a Katy High School teacher told detectives that a student, a friend of Sanders’s, said that he was at Sanders’s home the night of the murder, and that another friend there “made a comment that if you put a pillow up to the shotgun, it will muffle the sound.”. Holtke had processed the Temple crime scene in 1999 and was intimately familiar with the facts of the case. Temple's conviction was the last of several high-profile Houston cases Siegler tackled. Three months after the Durst trial, Siegler got her own taste of the spotlight when she prosecuted a woman named Susan Wright, who was accused of stabbing her husband 193 times and burying his body in the couple’s backyard. It’s unclear how this is a Brady violation, since no one on the prosecution or the defense has ever argued that a pillow was used in the commission of the crime — in fact, both medical experts testified that the shotgun barrel was pressed directly against Belinda’s head. As recounted in Shattered: The True Story of a Mother’s Love, a Husband’s Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder, Kathryn Casey’s in-depth 2010 book about the Temple case, Siegler played these recordings for the jurors, who heard Temple tell Lucas he was wearing his watch and ring the night of the murder, which is why they weren’t stolen. Lead fragments recovered at the scene also indicated that the pellets used in the crime were double-aught, a common size. He told Clappart he didn’t know at the time if the kids were talking about Belinda. Kelly Siegler Biography This is what you need to know about Kelly Siegler, an American prosecutor and Television personality well known for playing the lead role of the crime TV show, Cold Justice. • A witness testified that he saw Temple driving south from the vicinity of his parents’ home on the afternoon of the murder, putting him in a location off the route he said he had driven that day; DeGuerin said the witness was mistaken. He told investigators that he was in the vicinity of Belinda’s home the day of the murder, which would make sense, seeing as how he lived next door. In 2010 and 2013, the 14th Court of Appeals and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the evidence, though circumstantial, was enough to support a conviction. The Houston Press may earn a portion of sales from products & services purchased through links on our site from our affiliate partners. Garcia assigned two cold-case detectives to interview Glasscock. For a few months in 2012, DeGuerin and Schneider put great stock in their new witness, a 28-year-old gymnastics teacher named Daniel Glasscock, who in 1999 was a student at Katy High School. It’s unclear why Gist even included it as a finding: The only reason the name “Gutierrez” came up was that, in a single 1999 statement, Sanders referred to Carlos by that name. When asked again why polygraph exams would come up in a hearing devoted solely to gunshot residue, Harmon said, “I can’t answer that question, man.”. When Siegler and her team are successful working with local law, she said that they don’t high-five each other, but instead enjoy a kind of relief, because “you didn’t get everybody’s hopes up for nothing.”, “Mothers and fathers’ hearts are still breaking,” Siegler told “Martinis and Murder,” adding, “Somebody’s gotta do this job.”. Sources mentioned that she has never lost any cases and arguments. And the proof seemed to be right there in Gist’s findings, just as Temple’s attorneys had promised. The oldest case they examine on the show was a case from Siegler's home county in Texas that had gone cold for 31 years. Ultimately, Gist recommended to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Temple’s conviction be overturned and that he receive a new trial. Gist’s findings don’t acknowledge that DeGuerin simply took a legal gamble and lost. Lift Up Local, Kelly Siegler became an executive producer of the unscripted TV show, Cold Justice. He also accused Siegler of interfering with developments in the case four years after she left office, saying she worked in concert with a detective to intimidate a witness who came forward with information pointing to the real killer. Held to the highest standards — and rightly so — prosecutors can be accused of nothing worse than railroading an innocent defendant. Maybe she caught Sanders by surprise, and he shot her in a panic. Beers also wasn’t crazy about Clappart’s capital murder warrant, so the two decided on another approach: Clappart would arrest Ellis on old traffic warrants and then surprise him with Glasscock’s story. Ultimately, the findings tell a misleading story of yet another innocent man sacrificed on the altar of prosecutorial ego. Except it wasn’t. “I didn’t think we were gonna solve that one,” she said, adding that although all the witnesses in the case were in their 20s at the time, they also were all at a bar. Siegler’s career was tarnished overnight. We believe in the system and that the truth will prevail.”. Three days before Christmas 2014, former Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler found herself on the witness stand in Houston, defending her work in one of the most high-profile murder cases in Texas history. Glasscock told DeGuerin he overheard a conversation in 1999 between Sanders and a friend named Carlos Corro. When the Press emailed her for comment, she replied: “I have nothing to say to you and neither does my family. • Temple’s statements to the investigators the night of the murder showed inconsistencies; he couldn’t remember which park or parks he’d taken Evan to, and he claimed that he’d put Evan in a car seat, even though the car seat was actually in Belinda’s vehicle; DeGuerin said the statements weren’t inconsistent and that detectives bullied and harassed Temple. The series ran from 2013-2016 on … Producing stories on everything from political scandals to the hottest new bands, with gutsy reporting, stylish writing, and staffers who've won everything from the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi feature-writing award to the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. RELATED: DA Kim Ogg will review David Temple case because of controversial prosecutor Kelly Siegler Lawyers for David Temple, an Alief football … Kelly Siegler is a former State of Texas prosecutor who was a bureau chief for Special Crimes Bureau. At the 2014-2015 hearings before Judge Gist, Temple’s attorneys argued that Siegler buried or delayed the disclosure of evidence incriminating DeGuerin’s alternate suspect, Belinda’s student and 16-year-old neighbor. Later, a Harris County Sheriff’s Detective subpoenaed records from the Investigation Discovery network and found that the show not only didn’t air when Glasscock claimed, it wasn’t broadcast the entire month of May.). Asked for actual details for the very first time, Glasscock started to express concern about how DeGuerin interviewed him. • Investigators couldn’t understand how an intruder could have gotten past the Temples’ aggressive dog, which was in the backyard and had prevented the first responding officers from getting in the house; the officers were close to shooting the dog until Temple emerged from the house and put the dog in the garage; DeGuerin argued that the dog was in the garage at the time of the murder and was let out into the backyard only later. But it’s not. For two and a half months, DeGuerin, Schneider and appellate attorney Casie Gotro argued that they’d uncovered even more proof that Siegler buried evidence pointing to Temple’s innocence and another suspect’s guilt. Siegler and her team frequently tackle cold cases without DNA evidence and aging witnesses. For over 21 years, Kelly fought for justice for Harris County, Texas residents and crime victims until she resigned from the District Attorney's office in May 2008. “She’s a teacher and she just cares about me,” he told the grand jury. The Four Most Important Action Items For New Texans HC David... Houston Press Readers Don't Cut Deshaun Watson Much Slack. The prosecutor, Kelly Siegler, was equally famous for her long string of courtroom successes. Join the Press community and help support independent local journalism in Houston. If they had, they would have seen that the findings don’t stand up to scrutiny — they’re a flawed and often contradictory assessment of what actually occurred at trial. But DeGuerin, and everyone else at trial, knew who Carlos Corro was. In the end, Glasscock said he had no first-hand knowledge that Sanders, Ellis or Corro killed Belinda. DeGuerin complained that Siegler had relied on character assassination, but Temple didn’t do himself any favors, on the stand or when he was caught lying in a phone conversation tape-recorded by Belinda’s twin sister, Brenda Lucas. As explained in the State’s response to Gist’s findings, DeGuerin didn’t have Hess’s written statement, but here’s what he did have: Hess’s oral statement; statements from Sanders and his friends about going to Hess’s house; and Sanders’s own testimony on the stand about visiting Hess. CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS: California Privacy Policy | California Collection Notice | Do Not Sell My Info. “Denholm says he had read the voluminous offense report carefully and there seemed to be so many holes,” Falkenberg wrote. Kelly Siegler became a prosecutor in Harris County in 1986. Susan Wright. Glasscock told DeGuerin that Sanders said, “When he went into the house, they went to try to just steal stuff out of the house, whether it be the TV or whatever, but he said the dog attacked them. Neither gun matched the crime scene. 'Cold Justice' prosecutor Kelly Siegler faces possible contempt in Harris County death penalty case, federal judge warns Gabrielle Banks , Staff … Investigators looked into Sanders after he told a TV news crew the night of the murder that he was in school that day and hadn’t noticed anything unusual. But DeGuerin argued at trial that Sanders was mad at Belinda and that the teen had reasons to want to get back at her, citing the beer bottles on the lawn and the missing Christmas decorations. Support Us The tape was played during the habeas hearing, meaning that Gist was able to hear it for himself. Detectives never believed it. Corro had driven Glasscock over to Sanders’s home, and during the drive, he was acting “antsy” and said “shit is fucked up.” Glasscock said he didn’t know what Corro meant, nor did he ask. But the findings don’t hold up. But now Siegler was the one being grilled for how she secured the 2007 conviction of Hastings High School football coach David Temple — a former high school and college football star — for the brutal shotgun slaying of his pregnant wife, Belinda. They heard Temple tell Brenda, seven months after his wife’s unsolved murder, “Belinda wouldn’t want all this. When asked if he planned on sending a corrected copy to the clerk of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Schneider said he wouldn’t because Gist did not want any amended findings presented. Gist’s findings state that witnesses said things they never said; they misstate when DeGuerin was given access to certain records; and they mischaracterize dubious statements as material and exculpatory. You can help by participating in our "I Support" membership program, allowing us to keep covering Houston with no paywalls. If the prosecutors came down hard on Ellis, he’d flip and give them Sanders. Those detectives, along with Beers and Clappart, interviewed Glasscock in September 2012. A slow learner, Sanders saw Belinda for “content mastery” classes before tests. Why weren’t there any witness statements demonstrating Temple’s guilt?”, What Falkenberg left out is this: Two friends of Temple’s who helped him move out of his home after the murder testified at trial that they found a box of shotgun shells. Terms, Kelly Siegler Personal Life; Her Husband And Children HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Kelly Siegler successfully prosecuted more than 60 murder cases while serving as an assistant district attorney for more than two decades in Houston’s Harris County. Internal DA memos show that Holtke was removed from the case after DeGuerin complained to then-sheriff Adrian Garcia. Help, Houston's independent source of local news and culture. It’s also when he first heard about the murder weapon. The witness would eventually recant, but not before triggering a bizarre series of events that also appeared in Gist’s findings as supposed proof that Siegler was trying to protect the real killer, even years after she left office. Because of a paperwork error, deputies mistakenly reported that they had collected both shotguns from Sanders’s father. (During and after trial, DeGuerin claimed that Siegler committed a Brady violation by delaying disclosure of evidence relating to Sanders. At the habeas hearing two years later, Temple’s attorneys would say that the cold-case detectives, Robert Minchew and Eric Clegg, bullied and intimidated Glasscock into changing his story. (In order to prove a Brady violation on appeal, a defendant must prove that the suppressed evidence would likely have changed the outcome of the trial. Veteran Texas prosecutor Kelly Siegler, of Oxygen’s popular true crime investigative series “ Cold Justice,” takes pride in the fact that her team takes on the difficult cold cases that often leave law enforcement frustrated. He told DeGuerin he heard Corro and Sanders “talking about robbing the house next door and how it went wrong.” He told DeGuerin and Schneider he knew at the time that the kids were talking about Belinda. “This case had NOTHING TO DO WITH US!” she wrote. As the detective who subpoenaed the Investigation Discovery network records, he realized Glasscock couldn’t have seen the Temple show when he said he did. She is also one of the major casts. Sources mentioned that she has never lost any cases and arguments. At the time, DeGuerin had taken to tape-recording his conversations with Siegler, transcripts of which surfaced in the thousands of pages of Temple-related material obtained by Temple’s appellate attorneys and provided to the Press. Kelly Siegler Bio, Age, Family, Husband, Daughters, Cold Case, Net Worth From Blessing, Texas, Kelly Siegler is a former Harris County, State of Texas prosecutor, best known as a prosecutor on the reality TV show, “Cold Case” BY Admin March 13, 2020