Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  Shorewood parent Nick Mattson had heard stories of the Samoan boy's conquests and refused to give him any slack, even when his wife, Tandy, reminded him that Vili was no longer in elementary school, he was growing up.

  “So what? Is he going after college professors now?”

  Tandy Mattson shook her head. “What I'm saying is that kids his age can understand.”

  “Understand? He's their hero. He bagged a teacher.”

  “You're just jealous that you weren't one of those kids back then.”

  “Granted, what happened was wrong, but it takes two people to do this.”

  “Aw, gee. Don't get started with me.”

  “When Savannah is in sixth grade—”

  “Oh, please,” Tandy said, stretching the word “please” into two syllables.

  Nick ignored her. “—and her teacher's over there molesting her, you're gonna say, 'It's okay, it takes two to tango?' “

  “Oh, mister, she ain't moving out of here till she's thirty!”

  Nick shook his head. His wife didn't get it.

  “It was rape,” he repeated.

  Tandy wouldn't hear of it.

  “There's a big difference between a male and a female.”

  “No there isn't.”

  “Yes there is… ”

  And so it went, from household to household, from city to city. Everyone had an opinion.

  Chapter 58

  AS FAR AS many of the teachers in the staff room at Shorewood knew, there had been no personal relationship between Mary Letourneau and Beth Adair, the music teacher, until after Mary's arrest. And none of them knew how deeply Beth had become involved with Mary and how often she helped out with Audrey during the summer.

  On the surface, it appeared an odd fit. Beth was older, not glamorous and certainly not the live wire that Mary had been. She was a mother and a recent divorcee. But Beth seemed to share at least one characteristic with her new best friend: Beth relished talking about herself and her painful divorce. One teacher who was going through a divorce about the same time handled her pain and legal matters privately. Not Beth.

  “She would just be on the phone and very dramatic. Her divorce went on and on. 'Be nice to Beth. People kept saying Beth's crying.' “

  From September 1997, the music teacher appeared obsessed with the Letourneau saga, making visits to the jail, running errands, talking to Soona and Vili on the phone from the staff lounge.

  “She got way too into it,” said a veteran teacher who was at Shorewood at the time.

  “Beth would be there crying or laughing the whole year long. She was so distraught sometimes she couldn't teach class, so she'd show movies.”

  Her devotion to Mary Letourneau, the woman who had ripped a hole in the heart of Shorewood Elementary, was an insult to those left to pick up the pieces. While they understood that Beth needed to be needed at that particular time in her life, the staff room was not the appropriate command post. She said her involvement was “the Christian thing” to do.

  “Mary needs a friend to help her out,” she said. “Mary realizes it was wrong now.”

  The other teachers agreed—the former teacher needed the right kind of help—but they doubted that Beth's running around town on Mary Letourneau's behalf doing favors for her was the right approach. For months, the teacher group iced out the music teacher.

  “She was totally isolated that year. You'd go into the staff lounge and nobody wanted to talk to her. It wouldn't be that we wouldn't have wanted to talk to her if she wanted to talk about the weather, but all she wanted to talk about was Mary.”

  For teachers outside of Shorewood Elementary it was equally rough. Word—“reminders,” they were called—came down from the district: Remember, Don't touch! Don't be alone! Don't let it happen to you!

  Ellen Douglas and others were miffed by the warnings.

  “That was a choice one teacher made. I was insulted that they were implying that this could happen to just anyone.”

  Months had passed before everything that everyone knew was spoken. One teacher from Shorewood was so upset by the thoughts that had passed through her mind, she never told anyone about them. She recalled an incident in January 1997. It was an “early release day,” and a handful of teachers had gathered in the faculty lounge to work on a school musical production scheduled for the spring. The musical was always the Big Event of the year, a traditional celebration for all students, and the big send-off for the sixth graders who were leaving Shorewood for Cascade Middle School. Beth Adair had been in charge of the program in previous years, and though the music teacher had not abdicated her leadership role in 1997, personal problems had obviously distracted her. The other teachers knew that in order to produce the show, they'd have to step up their involvement.

  Mary Kay Letourneau breezed into the planning session, only to announce that she had to leave right away.

  “I can't stay,” she said firmly. “I have to meet with Vili.”

  A couple of teachers exchanged puzzled looks, but said nothing.

  What could be so important? one wondered.

  “Couldn't you do that later?” another asked.

  “No,” Mary said. “I need to take care of a student's needs. My responsibility with my students doesn't end because they have left Shorewood.”

  Mary left the faculty lounge for her van and was gone for about an hour. It was uncertain if the van even left school grounds, though one teacher later thought that it hadn't.

  “She was so freaking self-righteous about her 'student's needs.' It was loopy. She was so arrogant. It was as if she was saying there was something wrong with us—with anyone—who didn't think the way she did. As if we didn't care about our students after they left our classrooms. Of course, we did. But we also had work to do.”

  When Mary returned to the lounge, her face was flushed. She seated herself at the big blond table, brimming with ideas and acting as if she'd never been gone. But it was not her rosy skin tones that stirred fleeting concern.

  “She smelled like sex,” a teacher said later, still shocked by the scent and the thoughts that ran through her mind that January afternoon. “I thought about it for an instant, but I banished the idea as being an impossibility. It just couldn't be. She was in the van with Vili Fualaau in the parking lot. It couldn 't be that she just had sex with the boy”

  Later, Mary Kay's words haunted the teacher who noticed the heavy, musky smell that lingers after intercourse.

  “She said he has these needs. What was she talking about? Sexual needs?”

  In time, reality would set in and events that seemed odd, but not sinister, were cast in a new light. Another teacher at that planning session agreed with her colleague that the Highline administration had dropped the ball.

  “We didn't know about what happened at the Des Moines pier,” said the teacher. “If someone had bothered to tell us, maybe we could have done something. We didn't have the history that we needed to make the connection between what was happening with Mary and Vili.”

  BOOK IV

  Commodity

  This is their lives, and they're not going to cheapen it.

  —Bob Huff in an August 1997 interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  I was 12 years old and I never fed anyone… I wanted to see what it was like…

  —Vili Fualaau, in Time Daily, October 18, 1998

  How do you say “fuck you” in Hollywood? “Trust me.”

  —David Gehrke in a summer 1998 interview

  I know how to bring out the best in people. To make them understand. I wish it was me out there fighting for me.

  —Mary Kay Letourneau to a friend in 1999

  Chapter 59

  MARY KAY LETOURNEAU paced in her jail cell in Kent. She seemed a frail-looking woman, though of course she wasn't. Her lawyer, her friends, and even her jailers knew that she had a reserve of fortitude unmatched by many. No matter that she was in jail, confined, she still knew when things weren't done prop
erly. She ranted in her young-sounding voice.

  “I can't wear this,” she said. “The fabric is all wrong—it's itchy and I don't like the color.”

  A guard used to the tirade looked on and rolled her eyes while Mary Kay shifted her tiny frame in the yardage of fabric that made up her county-issued garb. It didn't come in any other color but orange, for goodness' sake. The guard had heard the rants before. Everyone had. The Mary Kay the world would come to know was nothing like the inmate guards knew as she awaited sentencing in November of 1997.

  “The real Mary Kay,” said one who saw her during that period, “isn't all that pretty. Funny thing, people like that are never told anything but words of comfort. She seems so weak, but inside she's anything but. Selfish and self-absorbed, that's what she is.”

  Local Seattle boy Ted Bundy had had them. So had Los Angeleno Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker. Although Mary Kay Letourneau's crime was nothing compared to theirs, she did inspire a bizarre and devoted following. The groupies started coming to see her in the fall of 1997 and they didn't let up. Defense lawyer David Gehrke and others close to the Letourneau case had never seen anything quite like it. Whether it was her sun-streaked California good looks, her sweet demeanor, or if it had to do with the titillating nature of the crime, no one could say for sure. But the former schoolteacher, without a doubt, touched a strange chord among a cross-section of people. Men and women from across the country and indeed the world found something in Mary Kay. It was true that from the moment she was arrested in late February letters and phone calls from “weirdos” had bombarded her. But there were other callers, too. Mary Kay heard from people who on the surface seemed as normal as the neighbor next door. Scores of men and women who for some reason or another saw a place for themselves in her life. Some wanted to marry her. Some wanted to mother her. All wanted a connection to the woman they saw in the papers and on the television screen. One guy wanted to set up a defense fund; another announced a Web site, marykayletourneau.com, devoted to the woman behind bars for love. Some were convinced through some form of erotomania—the erotic obsession with a famous person—that Mary Kay was as desirous of them as they were of her.

  Certainly Michelle Jarvis and Kate Stewart were not included in the collection of groupies, but they were unquestionably the most influential members of the “Mary Club,” as David Gehrke liked to call the widening circle of friends and hangers-on. Among the members of the group were Abby Campbell, a Mormon mother of five and wife of a South King County, Washington, lawyer; Max McNab, a writer who had written some unproduced screenplays and the back of a restaurant menu; Beth Adair, the Shorewood music teacher; and Tony Hollick, a fifty-five-year-old “retired physicist” from London.

  Mary Kay, of course, didn't think of them as groupies, but as “true, true courageous people.” She later included Ron Fitten, the Seattle Times reporter, as one among her inner circle. Susan Gehrke also was a common fixture at the King County Regional Justice Center in Kent, but David Gehrke never considered his wife a groupie. She was only doing the right thing by befriending someone who needed it. Skeptical about Mary Kay at first, Susan became so devoted that months later she—like a dozen others—would contemplate writing a book about the extraordinary Mary Letourneau. She even signed an entertainment contract for her “story.”

  But it was Abby Campbell who provided the most vehement support of Mary Kay Letourneau. And it was Abby Campbell whose idea of assistance seemed to be enabling Mary Kay Letourneau to do what she pleased. Some would say actions on behalf of the jailed teacher would have dire consequences.

  “She was a housewife that was trapped with the boredom of raising kids and was taken with the interest and excitement of the story and the involvement. [She] has hated it, but in the long run has reveled in the excitement, the notoriety,” David Gehrke said later.

  Mary Kay needed attention at the time. She was sitting in jail with nothing but her own thoughts to keep her company. When the men and women started coming, she agreed to see them. She was literally a captive audience. One man came nearly every day with a rose for the teacher—though jail rules prohibited him from giving it to her. Others phoned the jail just to see if she was all right. It irritated jailers because she wasn't supposed to be getting a fan club going, she was supposed to be paying for her crime.

  But as time went on, the danger grew. The groupies supported Mary Kay Letourneau. She was in love and it was nobody's business but hers and Vili's.

  “Why are you rolling over?” they'd ask over and over. “Why are you letting your attorney do this? Why aren't you fighting this ?”

  The Fish twins were mystified by all the people who were hanging around the jail. As far as they could tell, none of the hangers-on who had crawled out of the woodwork knew their friend before she was arrested. Before going in to see Mary Kay one time that fall, Amber and Angie noticed a woman with a stack of notebooks and an attitude.

  Who in the hell is she? both wondered.

  As the visiting time ended and the phone service between the glass partition of the Visitors alcove was shut off, there was a raucous pounding on the door. Amber and Angie looked over and saw it was the same woman with the notebooks and clipboard hammering away with her fists to get their attention.

  As they swung the door open Mary Kay was being led back to her cell, and the woman scolded them sternly for taking up all of her time, as if she were their mother.

  “Usually if I get here people will let me in to talk to her,” she said, pushing past and yelling for Mary through the glass. Mary called over her shoulder that she would phone her later. The woman fumed.

  “Like she was so important. But I'd never seen her before,” Angie said later, “so I didn't care.”

  The three exited the building for the parking lot. The woman with the notebooks hurried ahead.

  “Well, who are you?” Amber asked when they caught up with her.

  “Abby. I'm a friend,” she said, turning around.

  “I've never seen you before,” Angie retorted.

  Abby Campbell explained that she was helping with Mary Kay's case. When Angie asked if she knew how they could reach Steve to send a card to the kids, Abby became noticeably bitter.

  “We're going to get those kids back,” she said. “You can help us campaign.”

  Campaign? What did she think this was, some election or something? She doesn't even know the Letourneau children.

  The girls thought she was odd, a middle-aged woman, caught up in something that made her feel important.

  Amber figured Mary Kay had found someone to do her bidding.

  “Mary Kay knows how to use people. She knows exactly what to say and do,” she said later.

  * * *

  More so than some of the others, Kate Stewart could see the true basis of the bond between Abby Campbell and Mary Kay Letourneau. She could readily dismiss what some had said—that Abby was a groupie living through the stranger in jail, enraptured by a tale of forbidden love. As Kate rationalized it, Abby was a woman in need of a mission in life; a person in search of a purpose. It evidently wasn't enough that she had a lawyer husband and a house full of children to raise.

  “Abby was there for whatever Mary Kay needed to do. It's a two-way street, but Mary Kay is the needy one now, so Abby comes,” Kate said later.

  Errands? Abby could do them. Calls to David Gehrke? Abby could make them—sometimes every day. Running down psychologists for Mary Kay's defense? Abby could do it. Kate and Michelle were glad that someone was in place to do what they couldn't do from a thousand miles away. At times, Kate thought her college friend's troubles had “consumed Abby's life way too much.” Abby lived and breathed Mary Kay Letourneau and relentlessly worked the phones and sent e-mails to keep the process moving—even when there was nowhere for it to go. It was almost obsessive and certainly annoying to some.

  One time she called Kate when she was hosting a party at her suburban Chicago home. Kate's physician husband picked up
the phone and let Abby have it. “What's your problem?” he barked into the receiver. “You've got five kids! Get a life! You're following this Mary Kay thing too much. Let it go,” he said.

  Appearances were crucial. Anyone who knew Mary Kay Letourneau knew that. Shopping, grooming, saying the right thing at the right time, all were of the utmost importance. During visiting hours at the jail one time, Amber and Angie Fish made the mistake of mentioning to Mary that she was looking thin. They should have known better. Mary Kay was always worried about her weight. After giving birth to her children she went on a protein drink to put weight back on.

  “Do I really look bad?” she said from behind the glass partition.

  The twins tried to reassure her, but it was too late.

  “Do I look sick? You should see the food they give us. I'll start ordering cookies at dinner. I swear.”

  Mary also obsessed about her hair, which was flyaway and out of control.

  “It's the shampoo,” she said. “I can only order baby shampoo and no conditioner—that's why my hair looks like this.”

  The girls laughed along with her.

  “You don't ever want to get into trouble, you guys. This is not a place you want to be.”

  Amber and Angie agreed. No one wanted to be in a place like jail.

  “Did you see Audrey?” she asked.

  The girls said they had.

  “Isn't she getting big? A little too big for that outfit?” she asked somewhat conspiratorially.

  “Audrey was wearing stretch pants—Mary Kay's worst nightmare,” Amber said later. She asked the sisters to go shopping to get her baby something decent to wear. Beth Adair, she said, could give them the money. Amber and Angie promised they would.

  “Did you see her hair?” Mary Kay made a disgusted face.

  They had.

  “What's wrong with her hair?” Amber asked.