Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  “I thought she was really young,” Amber Fish recalled some years later. “I always thought she was really young in how she looked and acted. She always made us feel older when we talked to her. She respected us. She talked to us all the time. We always felt like we were on a real communicative level with her.”

  Angie agreed with her twin.

  “She would go down to our level. She made me feel like an adult when I was thirteen or fourteen. I think it was because she asked our opinions about the kids. She didn't just say, 'You need to do this and this… ' She asked for our input. When we were there she had us interact with the family so we felt more superior, on her level.”

  The Fish girls also adored Steve Letourneau. At twenty-eight, the handsome man was in perfect shape, outgoing, and fun to be around. Their adoration went deeper. With their father out of the picture, the girls' only male role model was Steve. He was the other half of the perfect family that had been missing in their own lives. Steve spent time with his children, worked in the garage, and redid the kitchen cabinets.

  Amber Fish later wondered if what she had seen in those early days was an illusion.

  “I thought they were the perfect family. That's what was so shocking about it. We knew there were arguments and disagreements, but they were beautiful, all-American people. I really thought they were honestly the perfect family. They were bustin' ass,” she said.

  The condition of the Letourneau household was the opposite of the Fish family's condo. If Joy Fish kept a stable, spotless, and orderly home for her three daughters, Mary Kay's house was utter chaos. All day, all night. Nothing happened on schedule. Dinner was served at ten P.M. so often that the twins thought nothing of smelling the barbecue smoke wafting into their bedroom at that late hour.

  Steve's making dinner again.

  Piles of school papers, toys, and books grew in every place possible, from the kitchen to the living room to the bathroom to the risers leading upstairs. Sometimes Mary Kay asked the girls to come over to help her get organized. While the house was cluttered, Mary Kay was positively fanatical about cleanliness at that time.

  “She hated dirt and dust. If there were crumbs on the table, the minute she walked into the house she grabbed a sponge to wipe up any crumbs,” Angie said later.

  When Mary Kay needed help grading papers, she sometimes turned to the neighbor girls and the three would be up until two A.M. carefully reviewing student papers. A few times the Fish girls stayed the night because it was just too late to go home.

  The girls chalked up the perpetual chaos to the different schedules of a two-income family. Steve worked a late shift at Alaska Airlines and Mary Kay was a schoolteacher with work that was carted home because there was not enough time in the day to get it done.

  And throughout the maelstrom of their lives, it was clear that Mary Kay had the upper hand. Steve was a follower.

  “It was Mary Kay's way or no way, basically,” Amber said later. “They did what Mary Kay wanted to do.”

  Only once did the girls see Steve lay down the law. When Mary Kay cut her finger and wanted to go to the emergency room, Steve told her no.

  “They fought about it forever. I remember she got so pissed. She was bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. And Steve was, like, 'You're not going to the emergency room for that!' “

  The Fish girls figured it was a money thing. Money always seemed to be tight—at least cash was hard to come by. Whenever it came time to pay the girls for baby-sitting Mary Kay would say Steve would pay them. Steve would say Mary Kay would pay them. It was the old “check's in the mail” without the need to involve the postal service.

  The girls didn't care. Whenever they were paid they were paid well, but the money didn't matter. The Letourneau condo was a hangout, a place to gather with the all-American family and share their dreams or problems. Mary Kay was always willing to engage in long discussions with the girls.

  “We used to talk to her all the time, and she'd get so sidetracked,” Angie recalled. “We'd talk about one thing and five minutes later a whole new subject would come up. We spent a lot of time over there.”

  To hear Steve's grandmother tell it, Mary Kay was a selfish girl who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. What she wanted most, besides attention, was money. Grandma Nadine would never forget the time Mary Kay told her and her other daughter that Sharon should fork over the bucks she “should have paid for child support” when Sharon and Dick Letourneau split up.

  Nadine bristled. Sharon had paid for plenty, and Steve and Stacy Letourneau never went without anything because she didn't support them. Besides, it wasn't any concern of Mary's.

  “But she wanted to make it her business. She wanted the money,” Nadine said later.

  “It was money that she should have paid for Steve to go to college,” Mary insisted.

  Nadine looked at her and snapped, “Look, Steven is married. What do you mean?”

  “She should be paying for his college education.”

  “She doesn't owe him anything. For your information, you've got it all wrong. Who paid for yours?”

  “Grants, student loans,” Mary Kay said.

  “Which Steven is still paying for! Loans after loans!”

  “Well, I differ,” Mary Kay said.

  Nadine had had it with her grandson's wife.

  “You can differ all you want, little girl, but I really don't care,” she said.

  By the spring of 1991, Mary Kay was twenty-nine and expecting her third baby. She loved being pregnant. She was not one of those complainers about morning sickness, feeling bloated or fat. In fact, she seemed to thrive on the pregnancies.

  “She was cute pregnant,” Angie Fish recalled. “She had all these cool maternity outfits.”

  Amber corrected her sister. Those weren't maternity clothes at all.

  “All the clothes she wore could be worn as maternity clothes. A lot of the time she would wear Steve's T-shirt with pants. She wore her 'maternity clothes' even when she wasn't pregnant, like a red jumper. She could pull it off.”

  Chapter 18

  MANY OF THE neighbors at Carriage Row would agree that Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau and their children were nothing short of a beautiful family, all golden. Even so, no one could deny that the Letourneau children were allowed to run around the complex with little supervision. It wasn't that Mary Kay really lost track of her kids. As one neighbor put it, “They were in different directions.” Life at the Letourneaus' was tumultuous. It would become even more so in September of 1991 when Mary Kay and Steve prepared to welcome their third child. As always, there was never enough time to get everything done. Mary Kay even worked the morning she went into labor.

  “Steve,” said Shorewood's principal at the time, when she reached him on the phone, “you better get in here and get Mary and get her to the hospital. If you don't, she's going to have the baby in the classroom.”

  At ten pounds, Nicholas was Mary Kay's biggest baby.

  Mary Kay told all her sitters that she had some rules. The kids didn't get any junk food. No one could chew mint gum in the house (“I hate the smell!”) No soda pop. For snacks, she preferred graham crackers, honey, and lots of cheese. In fact, the Letourneaus often made the trek to Costco to buy a mammoth brick of cheddar and a stack of tortillas for quesadillas—a family standby. Halloween candy was rationed for more than a month. And the kids seldom had McDonald's or other fast food, unless someone other than their parents took them.

  There were plenty more “Letourneauisms,” according to the Fish twins. “Bum” was used for “butt” or “bottom.” Rules were posted on the fridge and children were marched over to the refrigerator for refresher courses in how to get along. Art was loved. Music was played. And fun always ruled.

  Amber Fish defended Mary Kay later when people questioned her parenting skills.

  “I still think she was an awesome mother, but as far as running the house it was really hectic.”

  The family tried having
pets a few times, but given the way the Letourneaus ran the house, they couldn't make a go of taking care of anything. It was hard enough to take care of themselves. A pair of rabbits lasted a few months, before going over to live at the Fish condo.

  But more than anything, the biggest factor in their lives was their inability to make it anywhere on time. Mary Kay, friends used to joke, would be a day late to her own funeral. Like others who would come in and out of their lives, the twins learned Letourneau Time. No one bore the brunt of the tardiness more than the baby-sitters. They learned to add an hour or two to Steve and Mary Kay's estimated return time, but even that usually wasn't enough. And most annoying of all, there was never a call to say they were running late.

  Amber blew it off and accepted the tardiness as “just the way they were,” but Angie let it get to her.

  No one else's time seemed to matter.

  “Mary Kay would come home after being two hours late and sit in her car for a half hour and go through mail and papers, and I'd be just sitting there waiting to go home. After the kids were sleeping… I was just sitting there. She would irritate me.”

  The lateness was in the coming and going. Often, the twins would get an urgent call asking them to hurry over to help get the Letourneaus out the door for church or a party or a family gathering at Grandma Nadine's in Puyallup. The chronic tardiness was as puzzling as it was irritating. It wasn't that Mary Kay and Steve were running late because they'd overslept or had forgotten the time of the event. It seemed like pure disorganization. A gift was being wrapped in one corner by Mary Kay while she was doing her hair; at the same time, one of the little ones was instructed where to hunt for a missing shoe. Steve was helping iron a shirt while making a snack because one of the kids was hungry.

  Throughout all of it, Mary Kay remained in charge.

  “She was always focused, now you need to do this, I need to do this… She knew what was happening, but things were lost. And everything had to be perfect before she went out. Ironed, clean. Everyone had to be just right,” Amber recalled.

  Every once in a while Mary Kay would settle down on the ratty sofa or at the table and talk about her past. Sometimes she pulled out pictures of her family, her parents, and her siblings and compared them to snapshots of her own children. She told the Fish twins that she and her mother weren't close, that her father had run for president, and that “Steven was special because he had a twin in heaven.” She kept a portrait of her parents near her kitchen stove.

  She also told the teens next door that she had barely graduated from high school because she was a nonstop party girl. The revelation shocked Amber because it was so different from what she had imagined of Mary Kay's pool-perfect life in California.

  She was a cheerleader, a perfect student…

  And though she spoke of her family now and then, Mary Kay rarely spoke about Steve's family—with the exception of his sister, whom she did not like. In fact, she used Stacy as a weapon whenever she and Steve got into an argument. Mary Kay considered Stacy a pleasant enough girl, but not particularly bright.

  “If I've ever needed to get at him in a fight,” she told Amber one day, when they were hanging around the condo, “I'd say, 'you're just like Stacy,' and that would really get him.”

  It happens in nearly every family and the reasons vary. But Mary Claire was Daddy's little girl and Steven was Mary Kay's pride and joy. Parents and children often pair off and special bonds are formed. In the Letourneau household it was clear to just about everybody that Mary Kay and her daughter didn't get along. They were always at odds. Steven, however, idolized his mother and she idolized him, too.

  “Mary Kay and Mary Claire butted heads a lot. Mary Claire was stubborn and she didn't put up with anything. Steven was Mary Kay's prodigy. That kid could do no wrong. Mary Kay wanted him to be the boy genius and worked at it really hard. A lot harder than she worked with Mary Claire,” Amber Fish recalled.

  And from where one observer sat, the relationship between mother and son was detrimental to Mary Kay's oldest daughter.

  “Mary Claire was most jealous of their relationship, I think that's why she leaned toward Steve so much.”

  There were other factors at work, too. Mary Kay wanted her daughter to slim down, though to any observer the little girl looked just fine.

  She was a child, for goodness' sake, not a fashion model.

  “I know she was very concerned about Mary Claire's weight,” Angie Fish said later. “I remember when we first moved in there and she was three and they were watching what she ate: 'Mary Claire's not allowed to have any cheese.' “

  Steven was everything to his mother. Although the twins felt Mary Kay loved all of her children, she was closest to Steven. The Fish girls remembered “Mommy and Steven Days,” when Mary Kay and her son would go out and do things together, while Steve played with Mary Claire. When Steven got a little older, Mary Kay would take him shopping. They'd return from their outings with tired feet and bulging Nordstrom bags.

  The twins later talked about the shopping habits of their favorite neighbor.

  “She had really expensive tastes—more expensive than anyone I'd ever known—” Amber recalled.

  “And that she could not afford,” cut in Angie.

  “She was way out of her range,” Amber continued. “She brought home bags and bags from Nordstrom when we knew they could not afford it. Shoes for the kids, a two-hundred-dollar dress for herself.”

  Her best friend from her days at Arizona State, Kate Stewart, understood Mary Kay's quandary and her modus operandi. So what if she over-shopped? Who didn't max out a credit card from time to time? Kate always considered Mary Kay a “loves life” kind of woman, one who lived each minute to the fullest. She knew what she wanted and went after it with the kind of gusto that few could emulate. And, more than anything, she wanted to be surrounded by people who lived life the same way. That included her friends, her children, and her husband. Mary Kay was a woman who wanted a lot from the world, a woman who required a lot out of life. Yet there she was, trapped. Trapped in a dull, mundane existence in a crummy condo in Kent, Washington, with a husband she didn't really love.

  Her emotions quietly fraying like blue jeans, Mary Kay deserved more.

  BOOK II

  Teacher

  Mary Letourneau is not only a gift to Shorewood Elementary School, but a gift to the entire Highline School District.

  —A teaching colleague quoting the Shorewood principal's last evaluation of the teacher headed for disaster

  The school is suffering. The teachers certainly suffered tremendously from this. Teachers walk in those classrooms… [and ask,] “what has this done with my standing in my classroom? Are they [the students] going to worry about me?” It chokes me up to think of the impact on them and the students.

  —Gary Roe, grandfather of a Shorewood student

  This is not a case questioning our educational system or the delivery of curriculum.

  —Mary Kay Letourneau in a press release, November 1997

  Before students left, I made sure I gave them a choice of a high-five, handshake, or a hug. H.H.H. I got it from a teacher at Seattle U. and I did it every day with every student since my first second-grade class. It was a way of touching base, ensuring contact.

  —Mary Kay Letourneau on a teaching technique, 1999

  Chapter 19

  IN NEARLY EVERY way, White Center couldn't be farther from Corona del Mar, California. White Center. The name is a big joke among Seattlelites who don't live there. Toss a rock, they say, and you couldn't hit a white person if your life depended on it. Nearby Top Hat is another with a moniker that doesn't fit the ambience of the place for which it is named. Those who live there shrug and acknowledge the obvious.

  “You'd think a place like Top Hat would be a little classier,” said one resident, aware of the irony.

  Though White Center's name is a joke, its nickname is worse. The slogan the chamber of commerce would like to forget is Rat C
ity, from an infestation that local boosters claim has been annihilated, although most know rodents rule the basements and back bedrooms of some of the Seattle area's worst housing. The projects appear tidy and nondescript, and some think they are a cut above some housing in Vili's neighborhood, a world of jacked-up cars, liquor bottles, and water-stained curtains. This is not Compton or Watts, but it is Seattle's version of the hood. Rap and hip-hop pulse in headsets and from boom boxes. Country, Top 40 radio, classical, be damned.

  If other Seattle neighborhoods are more defined by money, cars, and lawn services, White Center is defined by the people and cultures that claim it. Cambodians, Russians, Samoans, and African-Americans run the restaurants, go to the storefront churches, and their children stake out the Taco Time and Dairy Queen on Ambaum Boulevard. When drizzle doesn't send them for cover, some kids hang around the shores of a pond behind Evergreen High School where drug use is so common deals are done in the light of day.

  This is the neighborhood of a boy who would be the catalyst for unbelievable change and dire consequences for Mary Kay Letourneau. This is the neighborhood that would become the home of her youngest children.

  Enrollment at the Highline School District had declined since the 1970s. After Boeing went nearly bankrupt and laid off most of its workforce (“Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?” read a famous billboard) enrollment dropped from 40,000 to just less than half that in the mid-1990s. Perhaps understandably so, those who were left behind to hold down the fort at Burien and White Center in many cases could not afford to move elsewhere. To the south of the Highline School District boundary in Des Moines and Normandy Park and north to Shorewood and Seahurst, however, are the Gold Coast homes of the more affluent.