Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  In the early 1960s there were still orange groves off Irvine Boulevard, not far from houses lined up in the sun along Brittany Woods Drive. It was a beautiful place and time. California was challenging the East Coast as the center of the universe. The Beach Boys had just released “Surfin' Safari”—their first big hit. It was sunshine and beaches. And on January 30, 1962, Mary Katherine Schmitz was born. She would be her father's staunchest ally and, some would say later, her mother's greatest disappointment.

  No one wanted to talk about it years later, and no one wanted to put much importance on the fact. What would happen later with Mary Kay was not a bonding problem. But the fact was that Mary Schmitz had an injury that made it impossible to care for her new baby daughter for several weeks. As the baby stayed with the neighbors across the street, her mother convalesced in her bedroom.

  Later, the woman who cared for the Schmitzs' firstborn daughter refused to talk about the cause of Mrs. Schmitz's need for convalescence. She believed it had no influence on their daughter.

  “They loved Mary Kay then, and they love her now,” she said.

  When John Schmitz returned to Brittany Woods Drive, he always made a beeline for the neighbors' to hold his daughter in his arms. Every day. Mary Kay's blond hair was but a faint downy glow around her little head. But her brown eyes were enormous. No father could have been more pleased.

  “Sons are wonderful,” said the neighbor who took care of Mary Kay. “But to a father, a daughter is extra special.”

  If mother and daughter didn't bond, as had been suggested, those closest to the family in those early years didn't see it. It appeared that the little blond-haired girl was her mother's pride. It was true that Mary Schmitz expected a lot from her children, and probably more so from her sons.

  “When Mary Kay was a little girl,” said the neighbor, “… I can still see that front bedroom fixed like she was a little princess or something. Mary always seemed to be there to help her and Mary Kay went right along with it. So she had to be very happy with her mother.”

  No matter how busy they became, no matter where they would live, the Schmitz children were always foremost in their parents' minds, according to the neighbor.

  “They never forgot the kids,” she said.

  The tide was moving in the direction of conservative upstarts in Orange County—more so than just about anywhere in the country. John Schmitz, with his David Niven mustache and sharp-as-carbide-blades wit, was in the right place at the right time in 1964. It didn't matter that he was a card-carrying member of the right-wing John Birch Society, the anticommunist organization founded in 1958 to promote conservative causes. In 1964, when Mary Kay was two, her father found his arena. He was elected state senator.

  None were more proud of John's victory than those in Tustin and at St. Cecelia's. He was the pride of the congregation. Choir director Richard Kulda, a conservative, though no John Bircher, admired John Schmitz as a legislator and a man. A reelection followed two years later, and by the end of the decade, a bid for the U.S. Congress. His campaign bumper sticker read: “When you're out of Schmitz, you're out of gear.”

  “John has a brilliant mind, witty, conscientious. Good-humored. He was not easily ruffled, a fighter pilot. In mortal combat you cannot get ruffled, you have to be thinking every instant. You've got to use every bit of brainpower you have,” Richard Kulda remembered.

  During his six years in the California legislature many argued that his finest achievements were in curtailing sex education in the classroom and limiting the availability of condoms where young people might get their hands on them.

  “More self-discipline is needed,” he said.

  By 1970, three more siblings had joined Mary Kay and her three older brothers. When Mary Kay was three, her sister Terry was born, followed by Elizabeth and, lastly, Philip, born in March 1970.

  “John and Mary loved having three boys, then three girls, then a boy. It was so wonderful. And so tragic later,” the close family friend and neighbor later said.

  In the years of his heyday as the king of the quip, John Schmitz became beloved by reporters looking for a loose-cannon quote that could guarantee outrage and increased readership. John Schmitz became known more for what he said than what he did. Whenever he opened his mouth, John Schmitz supporters cheered and his foes wondered if he'd left enough room for his foot.

  “They like to be called gays,” he once said of homosexuals in search of political clout. “I prefer to call them queers.”

  Sometimes charm was slipped into the mix and his remarks came off as one-liners, given like a political Johnny Carson.

  “I may not be Hispanic, but I'm pretty close. I'm a Catholic with a mustache,” he said.

  When the Schmitz family left for Sacramento or later for Washington, D.C., their good Brittany Woods Drive neighbors' joy for the family was tempered with personal sadness. Though they kept in touch and saw old friends and neighbors whenever they came to town and attended fund-raisers—for which Mary Schmitz had made her daughters' dresses—it wasn't the same.

  “When we got to Washington, John took us to the White House and everything. I got to sit in Tip O'Neill's chair,” said the neighbor. “We were so happy for them.”

  It was June 1970 when John Schmitz moved his family to Washington, D.C., to fulfill the time remaining on a congressional seat won in a special election. Mary Kay would later say she made the transition easily, basking in the attention reflected from her father's admirers. There were parties to host, Easter eggs to roll on the White House lawn, and photographers to smile for at every turn. Heady stuff for an eight-year-old girl. Her father was at the top of his game at that time and he knew it. Things were happening for her mother, too. Mary Schmitz was more than a wife; she was a savvy political partner. She was passionate about her political and religious beliefs and every bit as adept—many felt more so—as her husband when it came to tapping into the strengths of the conservative constituency. She attracted a following by campaigning against the ERA and was dubbed a “West Coast Phyllis Schafly.” Like her husband, she was a fervent right-to-lifer who considered abortion nothing short of murder.

  If John Schmitz was the leader of the band when it came to Orange County Republican politics, as one adversary later characterized him, his wife was equally powerful and accomplished. Mary Schmitz was a captivating public speaker, and an articulate crusader for conservative causes. She was more than just a woman standing behind her man—though she espoused the ideal that that's where women belonged.

  Some friends of the family felt sorry for Mary Kay, and her sisters Terry and Elizabeth. The emphasis in that household was always on the sons. It was a man's world and John and Mary Schmitz made no bones about it and the fact that they wanted to keep it that way. When the Equal Rights Amendment died, Mary Schmitz had a cardboard tombstone put up in her front yard as a cheeky reminder of her greatest achievement.

  “Their prejudice extended down to the women in their family,” said a friend and political adversary of the Schmitzes many years later. “Women were low on the social scale. Here was this woman espousing antiwoman values. Her own daughter, who was as bright as hell, could have gone to Stanford like her brother did, but didn't.”

  It wasn't the money, though most people knew that the Schmitz family wasn't rich. The truth was that John Schmitz, political gadfly extraordinare, could have gotten his daughters into any school in the country. If he had wanted to. If his wife had wanted to.

  But Mary Kay was a girl.

  “What was she going to do?” the friend asked. “Go off and get married and have kids.”

  Chapter 2

  IT HAD BEEN foggy every morning for a week before the sun burned off the milky haze to reveal the sparkling waters of the Orange County coastline. In the afternoon the temperatures would rise near eighty degrees and air mattresses were rolled out, beach balls pumped up. But half the summer was gone before the new house at 10 Mission Bay Drive in Corona del Mar would be Southern Cal
ifornia—complete with a swimming pool. A pool was as necessary on Spyglass Hill as orthodontics for a perfect smile, a shiny new car, and a pretty wife who made weekly visits to the hair salon. It was de rigueur. When the Schmitz family moved back to California from Washington, D.C., they did not return to Tustin. Instead, they moved up. Way up. Just south of Newport Beach, Corona del Mar was an area of affluence and power. It was hibiscus and bird-of-paradise. John and Mary built a beautiful new home in the hills high above the Pacific. While it was true that only one room in the house had an ocean view—Mary Kay's—they could see the blue when they drove toward town and the coast highway.

  On Saturday, August 11, 1973, John and Mary hosted a barbecue party to celebrate summer and the completion of the pool just two days before. It was a pleasant mix of a few political cronies and friends, including the family from the old Brittany Woods neighborhood in Tustin. It was the year after John Schmitz ran for president of the United States on the American Independent Party ticket. He didn't win, of course. He hadn't expected to. He ran to keep the dream alive.

  Mary Kay, eleven, and her baby brother, Philip, three, joined the other Schmitz children—John, eighteen, Joe, sixteen, Jerry, fourteen, Terry, seven, and Elizabeth, five—and kids from the neighborhood in the water as the adults enjoyed cold drinks and the perfect vision of a California summer day: the blue water of the pool, the orange of the sun, and the sound of happy children. Nothing could be lovelier. Those who were there that day recalled the event as being a typical Schmitz affair—devoted friends presided over by the charming John and, of course, Mary, the mother of his children, the soldier for her husband's dreams.

  By Monday afternoon all of the joy of the pool would be drained forever. Its blue shimmering surface would always be a backyard reminder, silent and still, of a family tragedy. Just after three-thirty that afternoon, Mary Schmitz removed the plastic life preserver from her toddler son's slender body and sent him to the bathroom. She went inside to work in her office while Mary Kay and her brother Jerry played in the shallow end.

  A few minutes later—maybe a half hour, no one could pinpoint how much time had passed—someone noticed that the three-year-old was missing. It took only an instant to find him at the bottom of the swimming pool. Somehow, though Mary Kay and Jerry were in the same waters, neither had seen Philip slip into the water and splash.

  No one saw him struggle. He just slipped under and was gone.

  Hurd Armstrong, a thirty-two-year-old Newport Beach motorcycle cop, was the first on the scene. A distraught Mary Schmitz, who kept repeating the same sentence, met him.

  “I only left him for a minute. Just a minute.”

  She led him through the house to the pool where he found little Philip, who was as blue as the water, tiny and lifeless, lying in the sun on the edge of the pool. Water matted his dark blond hair to his small head. His eyes were closed. The other Schmitz children watched from the inside of the house as their mother and the motorcycle cop hovered over the baby. Everything was spinning. Everything was happening so fast.

  Newport Beach firemen arrived moments later and tried to revive him with oxygen and heart massage, but the effort appeared futile. Seconds later, a tornado of helicopter blades fanned the brush in the vacant land behind 10 Mission Bay Drive. A police helicopter landed. Hurd Armstrong cradled the little boy in his arms and handed him over the fence that cordoned off the wild of the hills from the groomed yard. The hospital was only four or five miles away. No one said whether the boy would make it or not, but most already knew that it was bad.

  “That night when I got home my wife knew that my day had involved a tragedy with a child. She always knew,” Hurd Armstrong said many years later. “Whenever something happened with a child it lingered for days. I wasn't myself.”

  The doctors at the intensive care unit at Hoag Memorial in Newport Beach couldn't save the baby. He was pronounced dead eighteen hours later.

  “We were all there,” Mary Schmitz said to a reporter. “I don't know how it could have happened.”

  The headline on Tuesday in the Corona del Mar Pilot was marked in letters more than an inch high:

  JOHN SCHMITZ' SON DIES IN NEWPORT

  Those who knew him then—and later—would all agree that it was the most devastating time John Schmitz would find his name on the front page, though there were many, many times when the press was less than kind or when scandal would riddle his image, his world.

  Richard Kulda, the choir director from St. Cecelia in Tustin, was devastated by the news of the drowning. His wife and Mary Schmitz had been pregnant at the same time with their last babies. He prayed for the Schmitz family, but he knew that they'd be able to get through the tragedy because their Catholic faith was so strong.

  “Mary and John were good troupers,” Richard said later. “They have to carry on. You have a duty. Mary's face was so drawn she obviously suffered just horribly when he died. When you have a lot of children it is a comfort.”

  Philip James Schmitz was buried in a little white casket in a grave in Ascension Cemetery near El Toro. Tourists now tromp past the child's grave to pay their respects to Nicole Brown Simpson and to remember her tragic life. They know nothing of the boy buried in the same cemetery and the impact of his death on another woman, a sister.

  Years later, people would look back at Philip's drowning to search for answers as to its possible effect on his oldest sister and what happened to her more than twenty years later. How did it weigh on Mary Kay's mind? Did she feel responsible? Was she?

  Willard Voit, a family friend and a political supporter of John Schmitz's, understood through his conversations with the family that Mary Kay had, in fact, been in charge of watching Philip.

  “I don't know if it triggered what [mental illness] she got. I know it had to be a very heavy item.” Willard stumbled for words. “I'm saying it could be related,” he said. “I know that the event could be the source of some of Mary Kay's disorder. Jerry might have been there at the same time,” he said later. “But I know that Mary Kay had been given the responsibility of watching Philip. It was horrible. Horrible.”

  It was shortly after the drowning that a girl named Michelle Rhinehart met Mary Kay Schmitz. Over the years the subject would come up and there was no doubt that Mary Kay's heart was broken when Philip died that August afternoon, but she never told Michelle that she felt responsible.

  “She adored her little brother. She said he had more life at three than most people have… he was really a bright spirit. It wasn't her fault. She had nothing to do with it.”

  Even so, Michelle would later admit that the three-year-old's death did have a profound impact on Mary Kay. There were times when Mary Kay didn't want her children near the water, especially a pool; she was even reluctant to let her kids take lessons. The drowning was a piece of the puzzle that, when put together with other traumas, explained how Mary Kay ended up where she did.

  “The thing that is so phenomenally amazing is how she continues to deny that any of these things had any impact on her,” Michelle said later.

  The drowning also had an impact of incredible consequence to John Schmitz.

  “That's when we feel that John really lost it,” said a neighbor from Tustin, alluding to events that would take place a decade later.

  Mary Schmitz was stoic about the loss of her baby. It wasn't her style to make a scene, to toss her body on the casket, or even to shed a tear. Not in public, anyway.

  “They took it better than most people. I would have been very emotional,” said a friend.

  It was a family tragedy, the kind many families must deal with. The Schmitzes were the kind that could deal with it. Years later Mary Kay would tell a friend that her family never blamed her for the drowning. The whole idea of blaming someone for an accident was an unnecessary hurt.

  “I am upset if anyone blamed anyone,” Mary Kay said. “It is such a sacred, private tragedy. No blame should be put on anyone and none ever was. Not on me. Not on my mothe
r.”

  The day before Philip drowned Mary Kay was out by the pool. Her baby brother, fearless and determined, wanted to show his sister that he could swim. As she watched, the three-year-old stepped to the edge of the pool and jumped in. He sank to the bottom like a stone and Mary Kay went to get him.

  “It wasn't but a second, but I looked through the water at him. He was standing on the bottom of the pool looking up at me. I can still see his eyes. Looking at me and saying so much. I thought I could, but I guess I can't. Save me. And I did. It wasn't but a second when I reached down for him and pulled him from the water. His eyes had said so much to me then. And they speak to me now. His eyes haunt me now.”

  Chapter 3

  IT DIDN'T HAPPEN every time, but sometimes when Michelle Rhinehart Jarvis drove her white VW convertible “Lamby” up the hills above the ocean near Corona del Mar, she'd catch a whiff of a fragrance that would send her back, way back to the time when she and Mary Kay Schmitz were young girls. When a little moisture from the Pacific mixed with the fragrance of the wildflowers, the bougainvillea, and the eucalyptus, it would come back to her. It was 1998 and like Mary Kay, Michelle was a mother. She had two little girls—Danielle and Kylie—and a son, Michael, named for her husband, a multi-media developer and designer. Michelle's life in Southern California was the busy-working-mother-with-never-enough-time routine she had once imagined Mary Kay's life had been up in Seattle.

  She pulled her car to the side of a canyon road and looked around.

  Bleached white condominiums and gated communities of pink stucco had obliterated much of the visual beauty of a raw landscape. There had been a time when hawks circled and coyotes sometimes made it down to where the houses lined up in glistening rows on Spyglass Hill. There had been a time when two girls slid down the hills on paper bags, or spent all day following a coyote's trail. Time had marched on and all of that was gone now.

  But even all of the progress couldn't mask the scent that brought back memories. The sweet, salty smell of ocean and canyon. The smell of summertime and youth.