Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  “You're going to have to call me back. I'm getting my daughter ready for school,” she said.

  The police!

  Later when they spoke, Linda asked the sex crimes detective to promise to maintain her anonymity. She didn't want anyone to know that she'd been the one to blow the whistle on Mary Kay.

  The detective listened as Linda recounted the conversations with her mother-in-law and Steve Letourneau's sister. The detective promised that she'd do her best to keep Linda out of it, but there was no guarantee. The allegations were very serious. Linda told her the boy's name was Billy.

  Later that Wednesday morning, Dick Cvitanich, the Highline area administrator, called to see if Linda would come to the district office to discuss her story with their lawyers. Linda flatly refused.

  “I've already talked to Pat Maley of the King County Police. I'm done.”

  The casualness of the first conversation with the district had been gnawing at Secret Squirrel. It seemed suspicious.

  “Dick,” Linda said before hanging up, “you guys already knew, didn't you? You already knew something before I called, didn't you?”

  “As a matter of fact someone had called last week and tipped us off,” he said.

  As the president of the Highline Education Association, the district's teacher's association, Susan Murphy had fielded more than one call of a purported sexual relationship between teacher and student. Most were untrue and remedied by a quick investigation. But the one coming at the end of February 1997 was different. Joe McGeehan, Highline School District Superintendent, phoned Susan at her Riverton Heights office with a heads up.

  “I need to let you know that we've had a call that one of our teachers is pregnant by a seventh-grade student.”

  It almost required repeating the words, they were so staggering.

  Susan was told that the allegation was under review and had not been made public. She was alerted because, the superintendent said, “it will come out.”

  A teacher in the district since 1969, in the middle of a three-year term as president of the HEA, Susan Murphy had never heard of a female teacher becoming pregnant by a student. She caught her breath as the superintendent told her what little he knew. It was a family member who made the phone call to the district, and at that moment district officials were doing all they could to either verify or disprove the charges.

  The allegations didn't seem like they could be genuine. Conventional wisdom had it that such sexual liaisons only happened between male teachers and their female students, usually in the high school setting. Never had she heard of the reverse. And even more unbelievable to Susan Murphy was the tremendous age difference.

  A seventh-grader and a teacher?

  Susan hoped that the internal investigation and any police involvement would clear the teacher without embarrassment and without long-term career damage. Teachers had been targets for such crank calls from family members or students and parents with axes to grind.

  The HEA president didn't know the woman in question, only that she was described in that first call as an elementary school teacher in her thirties. None of it computed, she later said.

  “What could she possibly, possibly, have in common with a student of that age? That was the initial reaction. Even before the breach of trust, the anger, the embarrassment and all of that.”

  It was not Billy. It was Vili. The night at the marina had not been forgotten by the district security director and the officers who had heard about it through the district-employee wife of a cop. When they thought of Mary Letourneau and a relationship with a student, they came up with only one name. Like a charades game, it sounded like Billy.

  After calls to the school district, and the Des Moines Police, about that early morning at the marina the previous spring, Detective Maley drove to Cascade Middle School in White Center to see Vili Fualaau. It was shortly after 10 A.M. when she came face-to-face with the boy. He was slight framed, a little over five feet, with a shy, almost sweet demeanor.

  Later, in her report she wrote:

  “I asked him what kind of relationship it was. He was very quiet and did not say anything at that time. I asked him if it was a boyfriend-girlfriend type relationship. He said it was. I asked him if it went any further than that. Vili said they had sex.”

  The detective knew what she had. She arranged for an emergency joint interview with an assistant King County prosecuting attorney and drove Vili downtown. There, Vili told a story that included the exchange of rings, love letters, and, finally, sexual intercourse starting in the spring of 1996.

  The prosecuting attorney wrote Vili's version of the first time:

  “He said he spent the night at her house and it just happened… Mary's husband was working… the kids were asleep. He said they were in the den watching shows, he thinks Braveheart. He said she started talking to him about psychics and stuff like that; that a psychic she supposedly talked to said she was going to have a hard life, and told Mary that she was going to meet someone with dark skin and be with him… then they just did it.”

  Vili told the lawyer and the cop that Mary Kay said her husband beat her and that he shouldn't tell anyone what had happened. She could lose her job. He also acknowledged that his brother and his best friend knew about the relationship.

  His brother had walked into the bedroom at the Normandy Park house one time and saw them together on the bed.

  After the interview with the thirteen-year-old Samoan boy, Pat Maley took the boy back to his house and drove to the school, and minutes later Mary Kay Letourneau was called out of a Shorewood staff meeting. It was 4:30 P.M.

  “I think you know what this is about,” Pat Maley said.

  Mary Kay stood there for a moment with her hands at her sides. Her face was white. Her red Nordstrom T-shirt and black pleated skirt hung over her belly. It was clear she was six months pregnant.

  “I think I might have an idea,” Mary Kay said.

  One teacher who saw her leave with the police officer assumed that there had been a death in the family, maybe a terrible traffic accident involving Steve. It looked rough. She hoped Mary Kay would be all right.

  It was out in the detective's car that Mary Kay Letourneau was arrested for rape of a child. She was upset, but focused on two things. She wanted to know if Vili was all right and she wanted to know what would happen to her class. Would she be returning to school? Detective Maley told her that she thought Vili was doing fine, and that Highline security would probably be contacting her about her job.

  In the interrogation room at the King County Police precinct in Kent, May Kay began to unravel. She cried and stopped. And cried some more. Mary Kay told the detective that she didn't know what to say or do. She wanted to know how Vili's family felt about her and the situation. She wanted to know if it was Steve who had turned her in. The detective refused to answer. When Pat Maley asked about the letters that Linda said Steve had found, Mary Kay said Steve sent them to his family in Alaska for safekeeping. She described the letters as a “blackmail tool.”

  The detective wrote: “She said he was using these letters… to keep her from leaving him and obtaining a divorce.”

  When the detective pressed Mary Kay for the identity of the father of the baby she was so visibly carrying, the teacher said there was a “99.9 percent chance” it was not Steve's.

  “I told her at that time that I hoped it would be her husband's and not a thirteen-year-old child's baby. She said she did not want it to be her husband's.”

  Mary Kay cried some more. She told the detective that she was tired of being alone and she had found comfort in the relationship with Vili. She knew the relationship was wrong, but there was a reason for it. They were in love. But the detective wasn't listening to her.

  She later said she thought the detective was cold and sarcastic.

  “Just the way she asked the questions,” Mary Kay said, mimicking a snotty, condescending voice. “It was like, 'so where's the ring?' 'So tell me about this psy
chic' “

  That evening, Mary Kay found her way to Shorewood music teacher Beth Adair's Seattle home. The visit cemented a bond that would grow stronger over time. In her fifties, divorced, with children ranging from a teenager to one about Mary Kay's age, Beth Adair had known Mary Kay since her student teaching days at Gregory Heights.

  “We had a connection and an understanding,” Mary Kay said later. “Beth is a wonderful woman and we connected on that level, woman to woman. She understood me. She considered us her kids, Vili and I.”

  The music teacher scooped Mary Kay up in her arms and told her she'd be all right. That night there were tears and phone calls. Mary Kay called her father and told him what had happened. John Schmitz promised he'd come see his daughter; he'd bring her a car because Steve would have the van. She'd be able to get through it. When she finally got home it was after three the next morning. Steve and the children were asleep and it felt so good to be home. In some ways, she thought, it felt like nothing had changed.

  But it had.

  The sun came up and the children were dressed for school. But their mother wasn't taking them that day. The balance of the hurried morning race had been altered. Mary Kay watched the clock, and as it moved closer to 9:05 she knew just how different her world was about to become. She wasn't going back to Shorewood Elementary. She thought of her class back in room 39. The children had left HHH the day before, never to see their teacher again.

  “I tried to put my heart out to each one of them,” she said later. “I imagined myself in front of the class, the clock, the bulletin boards, and their faces. I went around the room looking into their faces, each one, sending them an angel of peace to let them know it would be all right and I hadn't forgotten them.”

  The baby would be ultimate proof, of course, and Vili Fualaau's statement was on record about the sexual relationship. The case wasn't a difficult one for law enforcement. But the why of it all was more elusive than in most cases. It was the papers gathered under a search warrant from Steven Letourneau, Sr., that same day that provided the greatest glimpse into what was going through Mary Kay Letourneau's mind. Steve handed over a sheaf of papers, notes scrawled on scraps, comments made on envelopes. The author was his wife, Mary Kay. But was the writer the person so many admired and loved? There were six pages of lists of song titles and the recording artists, but, oddly for a schoolteacher, names were horribly misspelled. “Maria Carle—You 'll always be a part of Me; Witney—I'll ALWAYS LOVE YOU; Dion Warwick—That's what friends are for.”

  The downward spiral that had begun so many months ago had quickened its pace as indicated by the coherency of the writings. Her handwriting was erratic; and her thoughts reflected a woman falling apart. Mary Letourneau found herself falling faster and faster toward the point of no return. She wrote of attending a late-fall family wedding in Chicago, dancing with her father, and thinking of Vili. Steve had called the Schmitz home before Mary's arrival and warned them that their daughter was headed toward big trouble. He refused to elaborate, telling them it was something she had to tell them herself.

  When she returned she made some notes in her journal, but then the neat handwriting had started to reveal the stress of the author. Her words were ruptured, the edits were careless, the phrasing typical of a schoolgirl:

  “So I told my mother and father everything! I told them about he baby. I told them about you even that you are under age (not exactly how young—I think they think you're about 15).”

  She wrote how after she told her father that Vili was one of her students, he said he remembered the boy. Mary gushed how “my mom acted like she likes everything about you… ”

  But according to the notes, Mary and John Schmitz were also worried. They warned their daughter that she could be in “big trouble” if someone found out. Her letter continued:

  “… promise on your life not to ever ever no matter how someone questions you to ever tell about us—not even a kiss can be told… ”

  Other notes were revealing, too. Among them was the briefest communication, but fifteen words, that suggested a dynamic not considered.

  He had written:

  “Who said you can put your Legs Raped around ME.”

  Mary's note back:

  “I was just getting comfortable.”

  If either cop or husband had taken a moment to really assess what was going on between teacher and student, they might have found a clue in the smallest exchange—not in the obvious spelling mistake of “Raped” instead of “Wrapped.” The note had been written when speaking was not advisable. More than likely when Steve was asleep in the bedroom and Mary and Vili were camped out on the couch watching videos. She was trying to snuggle and fantasize about a future with Vili. And yet she was apologizing for wanting to be close him; Vili was telling her to back off. Not because he didn't want to have sex with her, but maybe he just didn't want the closeness for which she had longed.

  Who had been in control of the relationship? For those who bothered to consider the tiny note, a different scenario was possible. Vili Fualaau was in charge. Other missives and writings indicated that Vili called Mary when he wanted sex. He allowed her to see him when it was convenient and didn't interfere with hanging out with his buddies or the young girls he preferred.

  Mary Kay had wanted love and attention. She could only have Vili's attention when he gave his permission.

  In another note she wrote:

  “I see and feel you wanting me to fill in for the sex you're not getting from your school girlfriends. That's not why I'm in your life. Don't call me ever to be a fill in.”

  She was functioning like a junior high girl writing lists and making plans for a fairy-tale future. They were a reincarnated love. She worried about getting his mother's permission to see him; her parents' support when she needed it. She was a girl in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. A favorite song asked the question:

  “How could it be wrong, if it feels so right?”

  Rumors percolated through the Shorewood neighborhood that something bad was brewing at the elementary school. Real bad. A teacher there was in big trouble. Word around the area was that soon “everyone was going to know some shocking news.”

  Danelle Johnson didn't need anyone to tell her who was in trouble.

  “God, I know it is going to be Mary Letourneau. I just know it,” she told her husband. “All those seventh-graders going down there. It's gonna be her.”

  As the hours ticked closer to the disclosure of “something big breaking at Shorewood” Danelle saw something in her son that suggested he knew a bit more about what might be happening.

  She remembered later a time just before the news broke when her son, Drew, was out in the yard sobbing uncontrollably. It was as if his heart had been thrashed. He refused to say what it was that was hurting him so. After much prodding from his mother, Drew finally gave a lame excuse that some girl had dumped him.

  Then they all learned what so many had suspected. It was Mary and Vili.

  Danelle was dazed—not that it was Mary, but that it was Vili. She loved Soona Fualaau's son. He was a wonderful and talented boy. But she couldn't fathom what people were saying Mary Letourneau had done.

  “I just couldn't imagine a grown woman having an affair with him. I couldn't even imagine the concept of what she could have possibly been thinking.”

  There's a little break area on the ramp at SeaTac International Airport where Alaska Air employees can escape the wintry chill of the tarmac and catch a cup of coffee—Starbucks, of course—and share the latest in passenger horror stories and, if there was any, a little airport gossip. If anyone had heard what was happening at the Letourneau house in Normandy Park, they kept it to themselves. It was so ugly that no one dared bring it up.

  Finally, Steve Letourneau approached some employees shortly after he had been contacted by Pat Maley of the King County Police.

  Usually a somewhat affable presence, Steve was apparently upset about something and wa
nted to talk. Joe Bendix, the flight attendant and former neighbor from Carriage Row condominiums later described him as “just heartbroken and freaking out.”

  The look in his eyes telegraphed that he was in great pain.

  “I want to tell you something before you read about it in the paper,” Steve said, choosing his words carefully. “Mary's been having an affair with one of her students.”

  “Oh, well, you know things happen,” Joe said. While he heard the word “student” he hadn't considered the idea of age. In his mind, he thought that the affair involved a young man, maybe one she had taught who was now in high school or maybe even older. Mary had been teaching for some time and it was possible, Joe Bendix thought, that the student was nearly grown. “Student” didn't mean a child.

  Steve was taken aback. Embarrassed as he seemed, it was clear that his message wasn't getting through to Joe.

  “This kid is like a year older than Steven,” he said, to hammer the point home. “She was arrested for having sex with one of her students.”

  Joe didn't know how to respond. He said he was sorry and he hoped everything would be all right. Though Steve hadn't said anything about the depth or duration of the affair, Joe concluded that it had been a fling, a one-time transgression. A fluke.

  “Things will work out,” he said. “Things will be okay.”

  Later when Joe told Fran what he had heard, the two of them could make no headway in understanding what Steve had disclosed and what they would later read in their newspaper. Fran had never really cared for Mary Kay. She thought she was snooty. So Steve's revelations naturally brought forth some disdain and, very surprisingly to Fran, a measure of unexpected sympathy.

  She didn't think what Mary had done was okay by any stretch.

  “Even if you are unhappy with your spouse it's not grounds for having a relationship with a child—even if you think you might be in love with him. Or are you just grasping for attention? I really think she has a problem,” Fran said.

  Her husband didn't disagree. And while neither of the Letourneaus' flight-attendant former neighbors knew what was going to happen with what they had once considered “the perfect family,” they hoped Steve would get custody of the four children.