Sex. Murder. Mystery. (75 page)

One face was new to everyone. It was Abby Campbell. Ellen had heard of Abby for a while, though she didn't know much about her, except that she hadn't met Mary until after she became newsworthy.

“My feeling was that she was like a groupie,” Ellen said later.

Outside of Dr. Moore, Abby Campbell appeared to have the most to contribute during the meeting. Ellen thought the woman's running commentary was odd, almost inappropriate. At one point, Abby piped up with her take on Washington State law.

Where did you come from? Who are you? Ellen thought
.

The new friend also provided her opinion about the injustice of it all and how the judge might react to Mary Kay's treatment and what her future might be. Ellen couldn't understand the new friend's role in the whole thing.

You can say all you really want to, Ellen thought. It doesn't matter. It is up to the lawyers and the judge
.

Mary Kay prepared a two-page handout for her friends. She had felt used and misunderstood on her appearance on Seattle's KOMO-Television's
Town Meeting
and wanted them to hear from her. The media and the law had distorted the reality of what had transpired between teacher and student. She had originally written it for the media and gave it to her “media representative,” Bob Huff.

She wrote:

“What is really at the heart of this case is a very personal and deeply painful story of a couple that tried earnestly year after year to provide an enriched life for their children—a home. The family was in need of resources, but proudly private and set on making the best out of every day for them, and their children. The foundation of marriage was not there to endure the complexities of a household, the complexities of life's changes. Boundaries collapsed. The woman here happened to have been a teacher.”

Mary Kay told a friend that Bob Huff never gave her written statement to anyone, though she had asked him to. Months later, she surmised the reason why: “
Mary's not allowed to talk. Her voice is worth money. We can't let her give her voice away.”

One Shorewood teacher heard about the bipolar meeting later. What stunned and hurt her was that it was held at a friend's house. She knew she hadn't been on the guest list for obvious reasons—she was angry with Mary for dragging Shorewood and the teaching profession through the mud with her arrest. She had hurt so many.

“There's a secret thing between us that we can't bring out,” the teacher said of her friend and colleague. “They've never mentioned they did it; it broke my heart. They could have at least told me.”

Mary Kay waited in her cell for the sentencing. She barely slept. Her mind was full of thoughts of Vili, her children, and the treatment that had been prescribed. Drugs to dull her senses and words to turn her children against her. She had told supporters that she had no intention of following the treatment provider's plans. She would never sit down with her children and brainwash them with lies.

She thought of Christmas and how she'd spend it with Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, Jackie, and Audrey—though terms of her treatment specified no contact for six months. She had missed Halloween with her children and that had hurt. Christmas with all her children at Beth Adair's would make up for it.

“Everything's set out in a box at Beth's. Their stockings, the decorations, the presents… everything for Christmas,” she told a friend.

But mostly, as had been the case for months, she thought of Vili.
How she missed him
. His voice was deepening and fine black hair made a darkening shadow above his lip. Nothing could keep her from him. Not Steve. Certainly not the police. During the previous spring and summer Mary Kay had been bolder in her disregard of propriety and the law than many were aware—not even Michelle. Her boldness had been vintage Mary Kay. When she was pregnant with Audrey, Vili had accompanied her to her obstetrician's office. They had gone to the movies, even a drive-in theater with her children. She was Rose and he was Jack from
Titanic
. They had kept no real distance from each other during art classes at Highline, and Mary Kay sensed that some of the others in the class thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend. The couple sipped lattes and mochas at Starbucks and walked arm in arm in downtown Seattle. Mary Kay told a friend later how she and Vili had even sneaked off for a Fourth of July getaway to the Oregon Coast.

“…
each question we asked,
”
she wrote in a poem
, “
only strengthened the truth we knew
… ”

Chapter 64

STEVE LETOURNEAU HAD something he wanted to show Linda Gardner when he came to Seattle for the sentencing. It was a drawing that Mary Kay had done. He never said how or when his estranged wife had done it. It was a picture of the four Letourneau children in front of the house in Normandy Park. All of the kids were sadly waving good-bye. Steve was in the picture, too.

“It had Steve with a really mean face… and then there was me,” Linda said later.

The image haunted her and even scared her a little. She knew that Mary Kay had known all along that it was she who had made the phone call that led to her arrest, but since she never heard directly from Mary Kay, she didn't think she had focused much on that little fact.

But in jail she had time and it made Linda nervous.
What if she told one of her little friends where I lived?

The whole world had come to watch Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who had sex with her student, when the oft-delayed sentencing finally took place on November 14, 1997. In reality, there was no genuine drama underlying the event. Prosecutors and defense lawyers had already hammered out an agreement and King County Superior Court Judge Linda Lau was expected to go along with it. Six months jail, credit for time served, and three years in a sexual deviancy program. With that, she'd skip the seven-year prison sentence.

The charges were reviewed; the psychologists mapped out Mary Kay's mental problems while the defendant stared ahead, or down at a legal pad. Her hair was up, makeup just so, and the sleeves of a sweater covered her spindle-thin arms.

She later told a friend what she was thinking about at the time. “The truth was that nothing anyone was saying was about me. It had nothing to do with me and I knew it. But when [the psychologist] talked about Audrey, my children, then that was about me.”

Soona Fualaau identified herself as a “very private person” and read a lovely statement about Mary and the fact that it was in the best interests of baby Audrey to keep her mother out of prison. She did not agree with what Mary did, but she did not think her son was a
victim
of anything.

Mary Kay stood and read from a prepared statement and the sound bite was made, the kind of sound bite that captures a moment and follows a person for the rest of their lives, or as long as the public cares.

“Help us,” she said, her hushed voice cracking, “help us all.”

A crush of cameras and a round of live
Court TV
commentary and it was over. The teacher/rapist with what one reporter called “soft tendrils” of blond hair faced a few weeks in jail to fulfill the remainder of the six months' time required in her guilty plea. With time off for good behavior, the tearful and seemingly repentant Mary Kay would be free around Christmas. The freedom, of course, would be hollow. There would be no contact with Vili and no unsupervised visits with her children, including Audrey.

Like just about everyone within close range of a television set, Grandma Nadine sat on the sofa in front of the tube watching the news report of Mary Kay's sentencing that November day. Although most were touched by Mary Kay's pleas for compassion, Steve Letourneau's grandmother thought it was a snow job.

You need help all right, Nadine thought. You need a swift kick in the rear and to be sent to the moon.

It made her angry that Mary Kay hadn't publicly acknowledged the impact the relationship with Vili had had on her family. As far as Nadine knew, she never owned up to that.

The seventy-five-year-old woman's loyalty would remain forever with her grandson. She had heard a few things about him that she didn't care to know, but whatever he had done, he didn't deserve the grief his wife had given him.

“An ordinary man would have had her killed. Even if he had an affair, and was a philanderer, an adulterer, what would give her the right to pick on a sixth-grader?” she asked later.

Michelle Jarvis saw her friend on the news that night, too. And when she had the opportunity, she asked about the wrenching plea for understanding and forgiveness.

“David told me to act sorry,” Mary Kay said over the phone. “So I did.”

Not long after Mary Kay talked with Michelle, David Gehrke and Bob Huff seized the moment borne of their client's notoriety and arranged a deal with
The Larry King Show
to appear alongside her on the popular CNN show. Mary Kay didn't want to do it, and unhesitatingly told them of her reluctance. It wasn't that she
didn't
want to be heard. Rather, she didn't want the image of her in jail broadcast. She did not want her children to see her looking like a common criminal.

“I was
not
going to do a face-to-face from jail,” she confided later. “David and Bob are practically jumping up and down telling me to do it, do it. They kept asking what it would take to make me comfortable. It was almost funny. They were focusing on such superficial things—my hair, and my makeup, what I would wear. They'd even get me a new blouse.”

A producer came to the jail to set things up, but Mary Kay refused to talk to her. She had already said she didn't want to do it. David Gehrke and Bob Huff were in the air flying back east for the broadcast.

“They weren't real happy with me,” she said.

The image of Mary Letourneau in tears begging for forgiveness was haunting and would never be erased from the memories of those who loved her. But a question still lingered. What had caused Mary Letourneau to throw everything away? In her office at a Highline elementary school, former Shorewood principal Patricia Watson gave the question serious and heart-wrenching thought, as she had from the first day she'd heard the news of the arrest. She saw Mary's relationship with Vili as the tragic result of a breakdown, “a metabolic imbalance that sent her off the edge.”

It wasn't the troubled marriage. It wasn't that her mother had not loved her enough. It wasn't that she had been in the pool when her brother died. Or the miscarriages. It was, Patricia believed, the
sum
of all of those things piling on top of each other.

“Every day was worse,” the elementary school principal said. “All the different things that happened to her, there was never any relief. She had a breaking point.”

Mary Kay's former principal also wondered what role the third and fourth child might have had in their mother's overloaded psyche. She didn't doubt that she wanted Nicky and Jackie, but perhaps they were more than she could really handle.

“Two kids she could manage, and school and home and keep it together. The third kid might just have been more than she could bear, and the fourth one just rocked it completely.”

Chapter 65

IT STARTED WELL before sentencing, but David Gehrke didn't address it. But as the winter holidays approached, it got to the point where he couldn't ignore it. The groupies surrounding Mary Kay Letourneau were working overtime telling her that the plea, the sentence, her lawyer's strategy, had been a complete and sinister travesty. David was the target of most of their wrath and he knew it.

Mary Kay had been getting the message that by listening to David's advice she had blown it big-time. It was love, not rape. It was unconstitutional and she should have challenged it.

“These were all people who didn't know what the law was. She broke it. They don't know what it meant,” David said later. In addition, those bolstering Mary Kay and her fantasy of life-long love with her former student didn't know what strings the lawyer had pulled to keep her out of prison.

“It was not until the day that she pled guilty that I was able to get the prosecutors to agree not to seek an exceptional sentence. They had her pressed that hard and there were several bases to seek an exceptional sentence upward. I felt like I had a good shot to get her a treatment program because of her clean record and who she was. I won. I got her a great deal.”

He could see that whatever he accomplished was in jeopardy and he drafted a letter with the lead-off sentence, “Mary K. Letourneau needs your help!!” and mailed it to Kate, Michelle, Tony, Maxwell McNab, and Abby Campbell. He also sent the letter to Mary Kay's father and her brother, Jerry, in Tempe. He wanted those who cared about her to rally around her in the appropriate way. That meant, he wrote, supporting her treatment when she was released. Bolstering her defiance was not helping her one iota.

Don't keep telling her that she got screwed and that it's love,
he thought.

Certainly David understood some of the frustration with the statutory rape laws and how penalties varied from state to state and, as Tony Hollick had pointed out, country to country. He knew that what had happened between Mary Kay and Vili would not have been a crime at all in some states.

But it wasn't so cut-and-dried.

“In some states she'd have done a hundred months per each act. In Wisconsin,” he said, “I think she'd be doing twenty years.”

The letter angered Michelle Jarvis. She called it “scathing” in its tone and content.

How does he presume to know what advice I'm giving her?
she wondered.

“Dump him,” Michelle had told her friend when the lawyer first pushed the sex deviancy treatment as her only option. “I don't think he's doing well for you.”

“I have no choice,” Mary Kay told her.

“Who's telling you don't have choices?”

“David.”

“You need another attorney and you need other options.”

If not SSOSA, what could be the way out of the nightmare? Michelle discussed the ramifications of Mary Kay saying she was mentally incompetent when she offered her plea.