BY MARK DOUGLAS
CLEARWATER - In interviews with lawyers stretching over three days last month, the girlfriend of murder suspect Robert Glenn Temple revealed new details surrounding the slaying of Belleair real estate agent Rosemary Christensen.
Her statement to lawyers preparing for Temple's trial is a macabre account of violence, lust and betrayal that reads like a Hollywood horror script. The girlfriend, 33-year-old Lesley Stewart, swears all of it is true.
The state's star witness, Stewart spoke about a flight from the slaying that lasted nearly a decade and eventually led her from Temple's arms back to Christensen's unmarked grave.
"All those nine years I believed that nobody would believe me," Stewart said.
In her version of the story, Stewart was a "young and dumb" companion to a violent, manipulative and malicious older man who dominated her with fear.
But Temple, in jail awaiting trial for first degree murder since 2008, claims Stewart is the one who killed his wife in August 1999 after a three-way love affair and who coerced him into hiding the crime.
In both versions, the couple agrees that after Christensen disappeared, they left town together amid deep suspicions that Temple had killed his wife and hid her body.
"Robert told me that the reporters are getting seriously involved in the case," Stewart said. "And we should move."
On the night of the slaying, Stewart was visiting Temple in the Belleair condo he shared with his wife. He beckoned Stewart into the master bedroom, she said, and showed her the lifeless body of his wife, already white and gray with the pallor of death.
She said he persuaded her to help. "I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned," Stewart said.
She told lawyers Temple took charge of cleaning his wife's body, scarred by a large stab wound in the solar plexus and a larger jagged cut near her left breast.
She said Temple told her his wife had attacked him earlier, and during a struggle, "fell on the knife."
Stewart said Temple used a large hunting knife and ran it through the dishwasher twice to remove traces of blood then tossed it like a baton to "show off."
She said a knife later found by detectives in the condo was a decoy. The murder weapon ended up in a dumpster with other evidence.
Temple stuffed Christensen's body into a wheeled, blue, plastic bin he bought at Walmart, Stewart said. As he did, he was speaking in a "very sickly sweet voice … and kept saying 'why did you do this to me."
After the slaying, she said, she and Temple lived as sexual swingers on the run, fueled by drugs and alcohol.
He threatened to kill her if she ever told, Stewart said.
Hiding out at one point in Baja California, she said, they stopped by a cliff on the Pacific Ocean.
"He told me that at the moment we were standing on the edge of the cliff he thought about pushing me over," Stewart said.
Temple grew paranoid about getting caught, even suggesting they drug Stewart's father and take photos of her having sex with him.
The plan was to blackmail him into staying quiet in case anyone ever found Christensen's body in a grave on his property north of Pinellas along the Suwanee River.
In 2005, Stewart said, they had a daughter together.
Three years later, they were living in a camper-trailer in Redding, California, where Temple wanted to join a "survivalist community" in the belief the world would end in 2012.
"He wanted us to prepare for Doomsday," Stewart said.
By then, she said, recurring threats – one involving a "Klingon" knife from the Star Wars saga – drove her finally to reveal her dark secret.
Three thousand miles away, Pinellas County Sheriff's investigators were still trying to solve the case.
Within days, Temple was in a California jail on a domestic violence charge and Stewart was leading a team of investigators to the area where the grave had been dug.
"I remember standing at the river," said Stewart. "And I said out loud to myself 'Rosemary, may you rest in peace."
Temple's trial is set for April 11.
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