Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  It wasn't his heart that worried Kate Stewart. She was a bit more practical than her college friend was. She didn't want to see Mary Kay go down for the count and spend the rest of her life branded as some kind of sex pervert.

  “What am I going to do?” Mary Kay asked, phone pressed against her ear.

  Kate was direct as always: “You need a new lawyer.”

  Like Michelle, though not to as great an extent, Kate had also gone to work to find a new solution for Mary Kay's legal troubles. She talked to other lawyers. Friends. Anyone with a germ of an idea about what could be done for Mary Kay.

  “I don't think he's been telling you the whole truth about pleading guilty,” she told Mary Kay during a phone call that summer. “Don't go there. Once you go there, you are eliminating so many other things that are possibilities that could help you later on.”

  Mary Kay wasn't sure. Her head was spinning and she told Kate that she was on overload. She wanted to trust David Gehrke to do the right thing and he didn't think there were any other options to discuss.

  “Excuse me,” Kate shot back, “but you're paying him. It is his duty to lay all of the options on the table for you to choose.”

  Kate named some options that would be lost if she took the SSOSA treatment. She'd lose the chance to be with all of her children, lose the chance to nurse Audrey, lose any kind of house-arrest program. She'd be giving herself over to people who thought she was some kind of boy molester, a freak. As David Gehrke outlined it to his client and to her friends it was either SSOSA treatment or prison. If she didn't plead guilty there'd be no SSOSA.

  Far away as she was from Seattle, Kate felt she could see things very clearly, and she was worried. She was convinced there had to be a better way.

  Mary Kay had needed a psychologist who would help her out of the mess she had made of her life without ruining her future. Friends helping her were outraged that David Gehrke seemed to let the prosecution roll over him when it came to selecting evaluators. It just didn't make sense to Kate or Michelle that the prosecution had to approve evaluators that were supposed to help the defense.

  “Most unheard-of thing I've ever heard,” Kate said some months later. “All kinds of things went on like that, and David would advise her and tell her, 'That's just the way it works.' That's bullshit!”

  It frustrated her even more when word came back that the prosecution was dismissive of a finding of a bipolar disorder.

  “Then the prosecution accuses her of personality profile shopping. That she was just trying to get the right one. Aren't they doing that to nail her?” Kate asked.

  Mary Kay Letourneau had increasing doubts about David Gehrke, but she hated the idea of ditching him in the eleventh hour. He kept telling everyone she was ill and she hated being portrayed that way in the media. An article in the Orange County Register ticked her off, and when he said he was quoted out of context, Mary Kay said context or not, words like “obsessed” and “mentally ill” carry weight alone. Later, she conceded that she had even told him what her friends were saying.

  “Don't prove them right, David,” she said. “Will you start showing them you are what I believe you are?”

  She summed it up later: “He did his best, but it wasn't good enough.”

  Chapter 56

  MARY KAY FIDDLED for what seemed like hours, with her hair, her clothes. While Amber Fish watched Audrey, the subject of growing media interest ironed and reironed outfit after outfit for herself and her baby. For Amber, it was oddly like old times back at Carriage Row. Mary Kay was running around the Normandy Park house trying to find the right outfit to wear, ironing and rejecting and making nervous jokes about it. But, of course, this wasn't old times. Steve was gone. All the Letourneau children were gone.

  A short time later, a photographer from the Seattle Times arrived to take pictures for the article Ron Fitten was writing. Mary Kay settled on the simplest outfit and the veteran photographer agreed. She wore an oversize white T-shirt and blue sweat pants; her infant, a white T-shirt and diaper.

  The shoot went well. The Times photographer suggested that the new mother sit on the hardwood floor in front of some boxes—all packed up with no place to go. Even before the shutter closed, the poignancy of the scene was heartbreaking. Mary Kay was swallowed by her T-shirt, swallowed by the boxes around her… alone with the baby—the only thing left in her life.

  Before the photographer packed up to leave, Mary Kay asked if she would do her the favor of taking some personal pictures of Audrey in a little red Samoan dress that Soona had given her. Mary Kay rolled her eyes at the ruffled and lace-trimmed garment. She told Amber that she thought it was “the most ugly thing, but we'll do it to make her happy.”

  The photographer reluctantly agreed. Amber thought the photographer seemed “scared” about doing the favor.

  “You can't tell anyone,” she said.

  “She took the film out right away and gave it to Mary Kay and said, I can get in so much trouble for this.' “

  Mary Kay laughed a little. There wasn't much else she could do.

  “It isn't like I can go out to JC Penney's to get them taken,” she said.

  Even though Katie Hogden would later say there were times when she would break down and cry for no reason, deep down she always knew there was a reason. The reason would emerge after the sobs that shook her body, after she had buried her face into a sodden pillowcase. The reason was painfully plain. It was always about her teacher, her tears seeded by the scandal that had taken a life of its own.

  How can I explain this? To myself? To anyone?

  For a long time she struggled with a poem about her feelings of love and friendship for Mary Letourneau. Each time she tried to complete the verse, she'd find herself scribbling over the text and crumpling the paper into a wad. Over and over.

  I'll never get this right. I'll never be able to explain, she thought.

  At thirteen, Katie was trying to do what adults could not. She was trying to analyze matters of the heart and to find a way to make sense of what had happened. Most importantly she wanted to keep her closeness with Mary undying and forever.

  When people told her to “get over it. It wasn't a real friendship… the lady was old enough to be your mother,” Katie did her best to dismiss them. It was so easy for adults to miss the point. Katie used the same words Vili would use to defend his love for his teacher.

  “Don't judge. You don't know me. You don't know how I feel,” she said.

  Mary Kay Letourneau was uncertain about the effectiveness of lawyer David Gehrke, and she told the twins so on several occasions. She explained how she found him through some neighbors and that he had never handled a case like hers previously. His specialty was drug cases or DUIs.

  As time went on, instead of growing more confident, Mary confessed more concern that her defense lawyer might be out of his element.

  “She wondered a lot if he was doing the right thing,” Amber Fish said later.

  Amber and her sister Angie asked Mary Kay more than once what was going to happen in court.

  She told them not to worry. Mary Kay didn't think she'd have to serve a day in jail.

  “My lawyers tell me that it won't go that far,” she said.

  Even so, she took every opportunity to read up on her case and she made countless notes of issues to discuss with David Gehrke. In fact, for much of the summer it was all she talked about. For a while, she barely mentioned the relationship with the boy that had brought her to the place of ruin in the first place.

  One time she called Amber to let her know that her lawyer was going to be calling her. There was some question about whether Mary Kay had been alone with Audrey—which was a violation of her bond.

  “I don't want you to lie or anything,” she said, “and it really wouldn't be a lie because you have watched Audrey… but if he asked you if you've been watching Audrey and been with Audrey then tell… ”

  Amber knew what Mary wanted. She was asking for an alibi.


  “If he asks if you are living in the house, I'd say no,” Mary Kay told her.

  Amber didn't have to worry about stretching the truth at all. David Gehrke never phoned. She even called his office, but she never heard back from anyone.

  It was the strangest thing.

  Mary Kay Letourneau was not a rude woman. Karen O'Leary had had her share of people slam doors in her face. While a KIRO cameraman waited in the car, the reporter and the woman about to go to jail for the rape of her student stood on the front steps of the Normandy Park home for more than a half hour, talking about the case, Mary Kay's future, and her love for her children. At one point, Karen asked to use the bathroom, and Mary Kay let her inside. The house was in total disarray and Mary Kay made no apologies for it. Why would she? She was about to go to jail. Before leaving, Mary Kay showed her pictures of her four oldest children.

  “I felt sorry for her,” the television reporter said later. “She didn't know what was going to happen. She was actually, at that point, she said, glad to be going to jail to get away from the chaos outside.”

  Mary Kay later recalled the day Karen asked to use her bathroom.

  “I couldn't believe the nerve. She was lucky I had a guest bathroom. When she asked to use it, I thought, is this really an emergency or does she just want to get a little glimpse of the inside of my home?”

  What Karen didn't know that day was that Mary Kay wasn't alone. Vili Fualaau was hiding in a back room listening to a Dionne Warwick CD.

  “We laughed hysterically about it after she left,” Mary Kay said later. “She didn't know how close she came.”

  The reporter and the teacher talked by telephone a few times later.

  “I found her very warm, sweet and vulnerable. And a little delusional,” Karen said, looking back.

  With the exception of Karen and the Seattle Times's Ron Fitten, most reporters had dropped the ball between the time Mary Kay Letourneau's name first appeared on charging papers until she made her most critical appearances in court.

  “Karen was very smart. She spent time with Mary by going to her house. She saw potential for the story to really go big,” friend and school district policeman Nick Latham recalled. “She camped out at district headquarters. She claimed the story and kept at it.”

  Karen O'Leary was well-known in the Normandy Park neighborhood and though she tried with all her considerable persuasive charm, the TV reporter was unable to get any of Mary Kay Letourneau's neighbors in front of a camera. She worked on the Bernsteins the most, talking with Lee quite a few times, but getting nowhere. The calls to Lee irritated Tina.

  “He didn't feel quite as sympathetic of that whole thing. I think he gave negative tones to Karen.”

  Months later she paged Karen, but the TV reporter told her it wasn't a good time to talk. Later, one evening when Tina had company visiting, Karen returned the call. This time it wasn't a good time for her to talk.

  Karen kept pushing and Tina hung up on her.

  “She kind of irked me,” she said later.

  At least to the defendant's way of thinking—if there had been a hero in the media circus that pitched its sleazy tent in front of Mary Kay's home in Normandy Park, it was Ron Fitten. The reporter for the Seattle Times article in the newspaper's July 25, 1997, edition was headlined:

  BURIEN TEACHER'S SEX WITH A YOUNG STUDENT SHATTERS THE BOY'S FAMILY, AND HERS

  It was a sympathetic portrayal by a reporter who had spent time with both perpetrator and victim. She said she was sorry. She loved the boy. It was clear there was enough tragedy to go around, and along with the photographs of Mary Kay and her baby, it begged the question: What purpose would be served by sending her to prison? It was the kind of article that won awards, changed public opinion, and caught the attention of Hollywood bottom feeders. It wasn't skin deep.

  And oddly, though there was a time when he would announce that he was writing a book about the Letourneau story, Ron Fitten's byline became missing in action.

  Kate Stewart would later shake her head at the reason she felt Ron Fitten had been dumped off the story of a lifetime. He appeared too close to the subject, and because of his “on the inside” perspective, very sympathetic. He had become a confidant of Mary Kay's and nearly a surrogate father to Vili.

  During a marathon conversation with Kate that lasted several hours, the reporter told her that what had happened between Mary Kay and Vili Fualaau could not have happened between any other two people. That kind of message didn't go over well at the paper.

  “This thing is so big politically. He's not ready to leave his job… you had a sympathetic writer on the case… and off.”

  The first wave of television movie producers came the summer that Angie and Amber Fish helped Mary Kay Letourneau take care of her infant daughter, Audrey. The wave was small—and nothing like it would become in the months that would follow—as Hollywood beat a path to Normandy Park, Washington. It was an interesting time. The twins felt Mary Kay courted the attention as much as she denied her interest in it. She put up blankets over the sliding glass doors to shield them, yet there were times when the media caught her peering through her temporary partition.

  When the girls asked why she wanted to get involved in a television movie, Mary Kay shrugged.

  “It will be done anyway,” she said, “I might as well have some input into it.” She even teased Amber about casting Shannen Doherty as Angie.

  “Because she's such a bitch,” she said teasingly.

  Amber countered that with an idea about who should play the lead role.

  “Meg Ryan is you, Mary Kay.”

  They both laughed.

  “I just can't wait until the movie comes out!” Mary Kay said with a laugh, as if none of it really mattered to her. Meg Ryan or not.

  Yet she continued to talk about the television deal's viability and how the whole world would want to watch it. It was a modern Romeo and Juliet, a cross-generation saga, a cross-cultural tale. She worried if any movie could capture the essence of her love story. She was also quite hopeful that the film would be a big moneymaker.

  “If anything comes out of this,” she said one day, perched on her hide-a-bed command post, remote control in hand, “I want each one of my children to have a trust fund for college. Maybe this will even put the boy through school.”

  Angie didn't see the point of worrying about the boy and how he might profit.

  What? Who cares about him? What about the others? she thought.

  The delays were over. Everyone in the little Normandy Park neighborhood knew that, as part of a plea agreement, Mary Letourneau was going to jail that first week in August, though no one knew for how long. Some neighbors had avoided her for the mere fact that she had been dubbed a criminal; still others, like Tina Bernstein, had kept their distance because of the awkwardness of the situation. Here was a woman they had known, cared about, and somewhere along the way she had become someone else. A predator. A child rapist. A criminal. For those who knew her at all, none of those labels were appropriate—or even plausible.

  The night before she was going to plead guilty and more than likely go to jail, Mary Letourneau walked over to the Bernsteins'. A certified letter for Tina had been put into the Letourneaus' mailbox and Mary brought it over. Tina could see how the events of the summer had been quite tough on Mary. She was tired and thin. Coming next door had been hard for her.

  The meeting was awkward. There had been so much silence since it all started, Mary hadn't talked to Lee in months. Tina Bernstein had wanted to come over to tell Mary that she still cared about her and her children.

  Tina's voice started to break. “I'm so sorry, but I didn't know what to say or do,” she said. “Every time something new comes out, I'm speechless.”

  Mary started to cry, too.

  “I know,” she said. “I've been putting a lot of people through some pain and confusion. I'm sorry.”

  The women stood there as Mary apologized and tried to explai
n what had happened between her and Vili.

  “She wanted me to know where she stopped seeing him as a boy and where she started seeing him as a man. She was very confused, too,” Tina Bernstein recalled later.

  It was last-minute, as always, but Mary Kay called the Fish girls to see if their brother-in-law could do her hair on August 5. She had two big reasons: there was an interview the next day with Dateline NBC at the Gehrkes' house, and the day after that she was going to jail. The hairdresser called all over the Southcenter shopping area to find a salon that would stay open until he could get there to pick up the right supplies Mary Kay Letourneau needed to get her hair done—cut and foiled.

  “It might be the last time I get my hair done for a while,” she said.

  Late that night, Mary left Audrey with Soona and returned to Carriage Row, parking in front of her old condo, and went to the Fish home. She tried to appear upbeat, joking and telling Amber and Angie and their sister, Lisa, that everything was going to work out. One of the girls had the new issue of Cosmopolitan and read aloud a “love test.” From her makeshift hair salon chair in the kitchen, Mary Kay joined in.

  “I haven't been able to goof around in a long time,” she said, thanking them for the diversion.

  As they did the test, Mary Kay talked about Vili and how the two shared a special relationship that defied all reason. She said she was sorry for the pain their romance had caused so many people, and though she was going to plead guilty in court, it was a legal tactic, not real.

  “The only crime I'm guilty of is betraying Steve,” she said.

  When her hair was done, the girls walked her outside. There was an awkward moment of silence. No one knew what to say.

  “I'll see you in seven,” she said and laughed before getting into her Fox.

  Amber and Angie talked after their friend and former neighbor drove away. Neither one thought Mary Kay was going away to prison; it would be just a little jail time. But not seven years. There was no way.

  Early in the morning of the day of her interview with Dateline, Mary Kay Letourneau had been on the phones trying to locate her children. She knew they were en route with their father on a Northwest Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., to Anchorage, where Steve had taken permanent residence after staying with the Gardners that spring. She worked the phone like a desperate mother or a telemarketer because Steve would not tell her the flight time or number and her sister Liz wasn't even answering her phone. She paged her son over airport P.A. systems across the country. Minneapolis. Detroit. Chicago.