Sex. Murder. Mystery. (62 page)

John Schmitz arrived in Seattle less than a week after his daughter called him from Beth Adair's after the arrest. He brought her a car, an Audi Fox, and the promise that he'd stand by her. Mary Kay and Steve showed him the “peaceful coexistence” contract that had been drafted by the Jesuit priest that she and Steve had consulted when they first discovered she was pregnant by Vili.

“It was a contract based on respect for each other and the understanding that what must be done is done in the best interests of the children. There would be no reconciliation and the priest said he wouldn't even pray for a miracle to have us reconcile. We would transition the children to their new life, divorce, and they'd remain with me. I was their mother, their primary parent. After my father left, Steve ripped up the contract. He accused the priest of being in conspiracy with my family.”

“You won't get your way this time,” he said.

Chapter 41

HAD THERE REALLY ever been a graceful way out of the mess that Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau had made of their lives? It was a question that, once Mary Kay was arrested, Kate Stewart could never really answer with certainty. For a time—through Christmas, New Year's, Mary Kay's birthday, even the Valentine's Day a couple of weeks before the arrest—it seemed that there was, in fact, a little room for the concept that things could be worked out quietly and discreetly. But Kate felt that in the long run, it didn't seem possible that “Plan A” (as her former roommate described it) would ever really work: Steve and Mary Kay would divorce, she would quit her job, and Vili would move in with her and the kids.
And they'd be one big happy family
.

Plan B hadn't been any better. It was even more preposterous. Steve and Mary Kay would move away to raise Vili's baby in a new town, far from the prying eyes of those who knew them. It wasn't that Steve didn't love Mary Kay enough to do that; Kate and others knew that he
worshiped
her. But it wasn't up to him alone. His family would never stand for it and his ego wouldn't allow for accepting his wife's student's baby as his own. Once that little black-haired baby was born, it would be all over at the Letourneaus'.

Sometimes, Kate understood, people just can't look the other way. Even if it is in the best interest of everyone involved.

Kate could only hope that the divorce between Mary Kay and Steve would be swift and involve as little finger-pointing as possible. Finger-pointing would lead to defensiveness; defensiveness would lead to nothing but trouble. In reality, this was a divorce for which there was plenty of blame to go around.

But if Steve Letourneau was in turmoil, much of it his own doing. And certainly, there had to be a measure of guilt thrown into the mix. Steve hadn't been exactly faithful. If he was smart, he'd be the last one to throw any stones.

“The marriage had broken down to the point where she didn't even know where he was,” Kate said later. “They could probably have swapped sex stories if they had to or were in the mood to at home. It was out in the open between them. At one point he was going to be gone and told her that he was going to see a girlfriend.”

“Now that's all right? You're okay with this?” Steve asked
.

“Fine,” she answered
.

But it wasn't fine. Mary Kay had reached out to a sixth-grader. Yes, Kate knew, over the years there had been transgressions on both sides. There had always been the understanding, however, that when the night was done, both Steve and Mary Kay would return home. If Steve hadn't strayed, maybe Mary Kay wouldn't have been so inclined to do the same.

During the weeks and months before she and Vili crossed the line to the point of no return, Mary Kay Letourneau was falling apart and her husband was seemingly oblivious.

When Kate and Mary Kay started talking after the two-year hiatus of their friendship, the subject of sex with Steve came up. Mary Kay said that it had never been that great with her husband. The revelation surprised Kate. She had always assumed that sex was the glue that bonded their marriage. But it was more than just mundane sex that troubled her. Steve wasn't the man of Mary Kay's dreams. He had no conviction. No passion.

Steve Letourneau, as his wife presented it to Kate, went whichever way the wind blew. When he was with Mary Kay, “they'd be sleeping in the same bed crying together” and trying to find a way to save their marriage. When he talked with his family he whined about the nightmare his wife had caused.

“He has no backbone,” Kate said. “He is not strong. That's the whole reason she could never love him. He doesn't know his own mind.”

Steve Letourneau loved Mary Kay—which was the strangest part of the whole tragedy surrounding their broken marriage. Though he strayed, though he pushed her around when she was pregnant, it had more to do with his badly bruised ego than hatred for Mary Kay. Mary Kay told her friend that her father had put it in very simple terms.

“How do you expect him to handle it? He's been upstaged by a thirteen-year-old!”

Kate understood where Steve was coming from. “He never wanted a divorce. He loved her. If she called up and said, 'Oh, my God, I made such a horrible mess. I need you so much. We just have to get the kids and move to Canada,' he'd be right there.”

Kate Stewart was another who just couldn't accept Steve and Mary Kay living together once things went from civil to ugly. She was worried for Mary Kay when the violence started to escalate between the two. Mary Kay was pregnant, in a state of confusion, and her husband was hurt, bitter, and humiliated. Not a good combination for resolution or even a truce. Mary Kay told Kate that alcohol had been thrown in the mix and she was even more worried. Steve made frequent trips down the hill to the shopping center for big cans of Foster's. When their car was out of commission, he'd walk the long walk down the hill to the shopping center.

One time Kate overheard a shouting match between father and son when she was on the phone talking to Mary Kay.

“Get out of there! Leave her alone, you big drunk!” Steven's eleven-year-old voice called out in the background.

Some nights Mary Kay couldn't take the yelling and the shoving. She grabbed a blanket and a pillow went to sleep in the van.

Kate could only wonder if the nightmare Mary Kay was living through would really be worth it. Somehow, as incomprehensible as it seemed, Kate understood that her former college roommate loved teenagers. She also recognized that Mary Kay's feelings for the boy were stronger than they had ever been for Steve Letourneau. Yet Kate couldn't help but play the devil's advocate during their phone conversations from Seattle to Chicago. She pressed the notion that although Mary Kay and Vili were “in love,” they were from two very different worlds.

“If you are at a black-tie cocktail party and Vili's next to you and there's a lot of politicians and all these people in the room—
people in high-powered places
. You're in an arena that you are very comfortable in, how will you feel?” Kate asked.

There was no hesitation from Mary Kay. She said she'd be fine.

Her friend pushed harder. “You won't worry about Vili?”

“I've spent my whole life worrying about what my husband was going to say when he opened his mouth; I can't tell you how comfortable I'd be with Vili. He can hold a candle to anyone in the room. I would never worry about what comes out his mouth,” she said.

Several weeks had transformed the tail end of another gray Western Washington winter into a wonderful, wet, and warm springtime. Gregory Heights teacher Mary Newby found herself at an executive board meeting at the Highline Education Association offices near the airport. An HEA director told her that Mary Letourneau was there taking care of her pension and other matters related to her employment as a teacher for the district.

“If you want to talk to her, this might be a good opportunity,” the director said.

The veteran teacher was torn. She wanted to see her former student teacher, but felt she'd get teary-eyed and start to cry. No matter what had been said about Mary Kay Letourneau, it could never shake the sympathy that so many shared. How could it? Mary Newby was like so many others; what she had seen firsthand was a gifted teacher and devoted mother, a far cry from a predatory monster.

Finally, Mary Newby gathered her strength and went out to the parking lot and marched right over to the younger woman. She put her arms around her. It was a moment Mary Newby will never forget.

“I asked her how she was doing, at that point I felt she was on very, very thin ice, emotionally.”

Mary Letourneau, still pregnant, didn't seem upset.

“I'm fine,” she said. “Everything's going to be okay.”

It was almost as if she had found it within herself to comfort the comforter.

“You wrote to me, didn't you?” Mary Letourneau asked.

“Yes.”

Mary Kay smiled. “I thought that you did. I received several hundred notes and just couldn't answer all of them.”

Years later, Mary Newby struggled to get a fix on the attitude of the pregnant teacher in the parking lot that evening. The word that came was “bravado.”

“There was almost a sense of bravado, that everything would work out.”

Mary Newby continued to worry about her former student teacher and the impact of her relationship with the artistic Samoan boy.

“When she finally comes face-to-face with the fact that they aren't going to be together by his choice, what's going to happen with her?”

Chapter 42

OTHER INQUIRIES WITH lawyers had gone nowhere for both Mary Kay and Steve. After her arrest Mary Kay hired David Gehrke, and Steve hired a lawyer of his own, a young Tacoman named Greg Grahn. Steve met Grahn through a referral from his wife, Susan, also an Alaska Airlines employee. At the time, Steve was looking for advice, not necessarily a quick divorce. There were too many issues to be resolved. Mary Kay's criminal arrest, her pregnancy, and the foreclosure of the house in Normandy Park all loomed to cast a pall of uncertainty on people who needed resolution.

More than anything in those early days of the criminal case, Steve Letourneau was embarrassed about the attention his wife and marriage were getting because of her involvement with her student. He met with Greg Grahn in March, shortly after the arrest of his wife.

The thirty-two-year-old lawyer had practiced both civil and criminal law, and had even worked on a couple of child molestation cases. He saw Mary Kay as a pedophile. He wondered how Mary Kay could have hoodwinked Steve. But after conferring with his new client, it became clear that Steve hadn't been tricked by anyone. He simply didn't see the truth because it was so incomprehensible.

“Initially, Steve looked at it as Mary Kay was just taking this pupil under her wing. He thought, 'Hey, it was inappropriate. Teachers shouldn't be having students at the home. That was kind of uncommon, a bit odd. He never really thought it was sexual.”

Why would it ever be?

Steve told Greg Grahn that he believed his wife was starving for attention and Vili was providing what she needed to feel good about herself.

“He thought with Mary Kay maybe it was more of an ego-patting thing for her, that she was just intoxicated that somebody else was finding her to be such a wonderful person.”

Steve said he had tried to be a better husband, a more supportive person. By then it didn't matter. Mary Kay was getting everything she needed from Vili.

Those who knew Mary Kay Letourneau knew she loved the telephone more than face-to-face conversations. She thought nothing of calling to chat about one subject and ending up talking about a million others. During the time she was pregnant, Ellen Douglas was on her calling list. And throughout the conversations that the two shared, schoolteacher Ellen would take notes so that she could share what had been said with her husband, Daniel.

One of the reasons she made notes was simply because Mary Kay seemed so out of it, was so far gone at times, that it was difficult to remember every tangent that she drifted to.

Though facing treatment or prison and pregnant with a former sixth-grade student's baby, Mary Kay didn't seem to grasp that her world—
her old world
—had come to a complete halt.

She talked about staying in the house after Steve was gone.

“Well, we'll have to see what happens,” Ellen said.

Mary, come on and wake up. You don't have the money. You're being foreclosed on
.

She talked about continuing her teaching career.

“Uh-huh,” Ellen said.

You're in denial. Life will not go on as it did. You won't have your children
.

Ellen just couldn't tell Mary Kay the silent responses that went through her mind. It would be cruel. It was unnecessary. It wouldn't have helped her fragile state one iota.

“She was pregnant and life was tumbling on without her and things were happening and it was too late. No matter what I said to her it wouldn't have made a difference,” she said later.

Whenever Ellen Douglas would hang up, by the look on her face and the duration of the call, Daniel Douglas knew his schoolteacher wife had been talking to their troubled neighbor. Ellen referred to her notes and shared what the two had discussed, but not all of it. Though she and Daniel were very close, some of it just seemed too personal to disclose. She shared nothing that was said with anyone at the school where she taught.

Of everything they discussed, one issue seemed paramount to Mary Kay. She frequently referred to Steve's callous treatment of her.

“She needed people to know that he wasn't a goody-goody,” Ellen said later.

Chapter 43

IF ANYONE OWNED the Mary Kay Letourneau story—outside of the principals involved, of course—it was television reporter Karen O'Leary. In many ways it was a good fit. Not only because Karen was an excellent reporter with a surprising reserve of sympathy for the teacher, but also because the two shared some common ground.

Karen O'Leary came from money. Her family lived in exclusive Pacific Palisades in Southern California. They owned a villa in Puerto Vallarta, an apartment in New York, a home in Lake Tahoe—Karen grew up blond and beautiful in the California sun. A tennis star as a teen and at Stanford University, she was fit and driven—the coed with the golden future in television news.