by Gregg Olsen
When Julia Moore arrived that first time, the visit was between the glass panels that separate the jailed from the free in the visitors alcove. Mary Kay was an unraveling quilt of emotions. She had lost weight since her incarceration in the summer. Her red jumpsuit hung on her frame.
She was charming and controlling “in a nice way,” Dr. Moore recalled later, but she was clearly out of touch. She told the psychiatrist that her children wanted the relationship between their mother and Vili Fualaau. She had deluded herself into thinking that Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, and Jackie supported her love for Vili.
“Her bipolar condition was so severe that Mary could only focus on the hypersexual object—the boy—and her involvement in him,” Dr. Moore said later. “She loves her children, but she cannot see the effect on them of the divorce, their separation from her, their mixed feelings about a boy they knew betraying them, Mom betraying them. She does not understand what her children feel.”
Throughout the jail interview, Mary Kay had to use several pieces of paper to keep her thoughts in order and her mind raced from one subject to the next. But it was her emotions that were most revealing. Her laughter would turn to tears, Dr. Moore said later, “with the flip of a switch.” The mood swings were not a result of the subject of their conversation. They were driven, the doctor felt, by a mood disorder. Mary Kay said she slept between two and four hours a night. It shocked her how others had given up on Mary Letourneau and supported a course of treatment in a sexual deviancy behavior modification program. The woman in the red jumpsuit didn't need that. She needed medication to stabilize her moods.
Dr. Moore could see clearly that in March when Mary Kay had been diagnosed as bipolar, no one had noted the rapid nature of her thoughts and the scant amount of sleep she needed to function. Mary Kay's bipolar disorder was marked by hypomania followed by mania. It was a pattern that led to the disruption of her social functioning skills. She had been able to hold it together well enough prior to the relationship with the boy. She had had a family life and a successful career and she snapped.
Dr. Moore believed she could help. She considered the troubled woman a basically good person who needed treatment to “get back to who she is.” One key was to determine if any of Mary Kay's neurobiological symptoms were present in any other members of the Schmitz family. Though she barely scratched the surface of the family dynamics, and suspected there was much more to learn, she wondered most about John Schmitz.
Steve Letourneau was of no help. He referred Julia Moore's calls to his lawyer. Steve had completely bailed out on Mary Kay, despite the fact that she was the mother of his four children—and always would be. Mary Kay's network of friends seemed to include people who had known her for only a brief time and could offer no verifiable history. The only family member Dr. Moore could reach was Jerry Schmitz, the brother in Tempe, Arizona. Jerry wasn't of much help, either. He was matter-of-fact about what was happening with his sister. He didn't believe she suffered from any mental disorder. His dismissal of any concerns was strange to the psychiatrist.
“This is her choice,” Jerry said reiterating Mary Kay's position. “She's just like everybody else. It has nothing to do with any disorder.”
Dr. Moore didn't know what to make of the brother's reaction. His sister was facing prison and he didn't seem all that engaged. The call lasted only twenty minutes.
Julia Moore also turned her attention to pinpointing the catalyst for the events that led to the relationship with the boy. Why had Mary Kay, who had been functioning at a reasonable level for years, suddenly gone over the edge? The trauma of her childhood could have had an impact, but Dr. Moore discounted Philip's drowning, and the Carla Stuckle affair, as significant. She was instead concerned with more recent events, more recent bouts of depression. She made a list of key events. Mary Kay's father's cancer, her disintegrating marriage, her miscarriage—all within a year leading to the affair with Vili—had sent her into the depression that was followed by the mania.
Dr. Moore could see that the Letourneau marriage was a disaster. Mary Kay and Steve were not a good match in nearly every regard.
“She was more cultural, more into talking, into needing new cultural and social stimulation, had plans for her life, envisioned the future. She saw him as not really interested in having a life that much outside of work. Not interested in work being meaningful. But she was willing to tolerate all that for the sake of the kids, until her father got this prostate cancer and she was devastated and she was very depressed and could barely function, turned to her husband for help, only to hear 'What do you want me to do about it?' “
From what the psychiatrist learned during her consultations with Mary Kay, Steve's lack of understanding about her father's cancer was the crushing blow.
“She took it as utter rejection. He [Steve] was never really the man of her life, her father was. With her father dying, who would be the man of her life? She couldn't depend on him. She had to move on.”
Dr. Moore was a caring woman who saw nothing but tragedy in the Mary Kay Letourneau case. She felt that Mary Kay's situation was a problem that had progressed needlessly from a privately treatable problem to an all-encompassing media feeding frenzy.
“I think this should have been nipped in the bud when she was found in the car with apparently no clothes on. But I wish that instead of calling official attention to it, that could've been dealt with very privately with Mary or with her husband, or with her family. I know this is wishful thinking, because this isn't the way law enforcement works. Law enforcement is not oriented to the cause of the crime. Just the crime.”
It was Dr. Moore's conclusion that Mary Kay needed medical help for her bipolar disorder. David Gehrke told the psychiatrist efforts to get her on medication while in jail had thus far proved unsuccessful. A call placed by the doctor to the jail medical staff indicated they didn't buy into the bipolar diagnosis. One doctor said he thought she was merely depressed because she'd been sent to jail. Who wouldn't be depressed?
But after determined prodding by Dr. Moore, the jail doctor agreed to give Mary Kay a dosage of Depakote, an antidepressant. Dr. Moore was pleased; though the drug wasn't a first choice for bipolar disorder, it was an effective antidepressant. Lithium was generally considered a better and faster-working medication, but it took a lot of fine-tuning of the dosage to ensure effective therapeutic levels.
When Dr. Moore saw Mary Kay ten days after she started Depakote, she saw a different Mary. She had been sleeping better and her mental focus had improved. She didn't require the scraps of paper to keep track of what she was saying.
“Her attorney said she could get done in ten minutes what took four hours before. Her moods were more even. She was more realistic about sentencing.”
Not everyone liked the idea of Mary Kay on Depakote. Tony Hollick considered it another major injustice. He was convinced that the antidepressant would take the very things from her that made her such a free spirit and wonderful and gifted dreamer. He saw her forced medication as an attack on her human rights and worthy of international focus. Ironically, the smitten Englishman was on Lithium himself.
And he e-mailed everyone from Hillary Clinton to Amnesty International and the FBI. In fact, he made calls to the Seattle field office of the FBI on several occasions to alert them of a conspiracy involving Mary Letourneau.
“This case could prove to be one of the greatest political scandals in American history. I fully expect numerous leading Republicans in Washington State to be sent to prison… ”
Chapter 63
A SECRET MEETING. It was Mary Letourneau's suggestion and psychiatrist Julia Moore agreed it was a good idea. Dr. Moore wanted an opportunity for Mary's friends to hear her side, some explanation about what had happened to her and how bipolar disorder had contributed to her problems. Invitations were mailed to neighbors, friends, and even a few teachers with the admonition to keep the get-together confidential so that no media would show up with notepads and cameras poin
ted.
The hush-hush meeting in a home of a PTA president near Shorewood Elementary lasted two and a half hours.
The friends in attendance had known for a long time that the Letourneau marriage had been in trouble and, for the most part, they blamed Steve. They characterized Mary Kay's husband as “irritable,” “very demanding,” and “unappreciative of Mary.”
“Some had worried about Mary from time to time,” Dr. Moore said later of the group that gathered that November evening. “They loved Mary. They knew something [had] happened to her, some major psychiatric event. They were hurt and angry that she had done this. But they didn't think she was bad.”
Dr. Moore carefully sketched out the series of events, the chain reaction that had led to Mary Letourneau's criminal charges. She said that Mary Kay had probably experienced hypomania since mid-adolescence. She defined that as being marked by rapid thinking, grandiosity, and elation. Hypomania, she explained, in and of itself is a problem, though many people who suffer from it go un-diagnosed. In fact, people who exhibit this characteristic are often quite successful, charming, and energetic.
That was Mary Kay Letourneau.
As the psychiatrist explained it to the group, if there was a “safe way to have hypomania, we'd all want it.” But it was a roll of the dice, and it frequently led to trouble—sometimes serious trouble.
Although some of Mary Kay's behavior might have suggested a “hypersexual” component—an uncontrollable desire and interest in sex—the psychiatrist was uncertain if that was truly part of her background and her bipolar disorder or not. The hypersexual role was inconclusive based on what she had gathered.
Working with papers and charts, the doctor outlined the sequence of events that she believed caused Mary Kay to fall apart.
She fell into a depression when her marriage began to crumble, according to Dr. Moore. Steve had cheated on her and fathered a baby outside of their marriage. Mary suffered a miscarriage. She had given herself so completely to her role as teacher that she had excluded close relationships with adults who might have seen how devastated she was. She was alone. When her father's cancer resurfaced, it was too much for her to handle.
She flew out of the depression into her hypomanic self, followed by mania. The mania, she said, was marked by pleasure in high-risk activities—for a teacher, having sex with her student couldn't have been more perilous. When Mary Kay lost her grip she found a young boy who was there at the right time. Though he was twelve, Vili became the man in her life. Steve couldn't be that man, and in reality, he never was. Her father, the most important man in her world, was dying.
Ellen Douglas wanted—needed—a way to make sense of what had happened. Why was it that Mary was willing to set aside everything she had held so dear for the love of a boy? The very idea that there was a name for it made it somewhat easier to take.
“I admit I want it to make sense. I need a reason to understand how you could do this when you loved your kids, and even if you don't love your husband anymore and that's breaking up on both parts… I think the bipolar helps us understand.”
One face was new to everyone. It was Abby Campbell. Ellen had heard of Abby for a while, though she didn't know much about her, except that she hadn't met Mary until after she became newsworthy.
“My feeling was that she was like a groupie,” Ellen said later.
Outside of Dr. Moore, Abby Campbell appeared to have the most to contribute during the meeting. Ellen thought the woman's running commentary was odd, almost inappropriate. At one point, Abby piped up with her take on Washington State law.
Where did you come from? Who are you? Ellen thought.
The new friend also provided her opinion about the injustice of it all and how the judge might react to Mary Kay's treatment and what her future might be. Ellen couldn't understand the new friend's role in the whole thing.
You can say all you really want to, Ellen thought. It doesn't matter. It is up to the lawyers and the judge.
Mary Kay prepared a two-page handout for her friends. She had felt used and misunderstood on her appearance on Seattle's KOMO-Television's Town Meeting and wanted them to hear from her. The media and the law had distorted the reality of what had transpired between teacher and student. She had originally written it for the media and gave it to her “media representative,” Bob Huff.
She wrote:
“What is really at the heart of this case is a very personal and deeply painful story of a couple that tried earnestly year after year to provide an enriched life for their children—a home. The family was in need of resources, but proudly private and set on making the best out of every day for them, and their children. The foundation of marriage was not there to endure the complexities of a household, the complexities of life's changes. Boundaries collapsed. The woman here happened to have been a teacher.”
Mary Kay told a friend that Bob Huff never gave her written statement to anyone, though she had asked him to. Months later, she surmised the reason why: “Mary's not allowed to talk. Her voice is worth money. We can't let her give her voice away.”
One Shorewood teacher heard about the bipolar meeting later. What stunned and hurt her was that it was held at a friend's house. She knew she hadn't been on the guest list for obvious reasons—she was angry with Mary for dragging Shorewood and the teaching profession through the mud with her arrest. She had hurt so many.
“There's a secret thing between us that we can't bring out,” the teacher said of her friend and colleague. “They've never mentioned they did it; it broke my heart. They could have at least told me.”
Mary Kay waited in her cell for the sentencing. She barely slept. Her mind was full of thoughts of Vili, her children, and the treatment that had been prescribed. Drugs to dull her senses and words to turn her children against her. She had told supporters that she had no intention of following the treatment provider's plans. She would never sit down with her children and brainwash them with lies.
She thought of Christmas and how she'd spend it with Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, Jackie, and Audrey—though terms of her treatment specified no contact for six months. She had missed Halloween with her children and that had hurt. Christmas with all her children at Beth Adair's would make up for it.
“Everything's set out in a box at Beth's. Their stockings, the decorations, the presents… everything for Christmas,” she told a friend.
But mostly, as had been the case for months, she thought of Vili. How she missed him. His voice was deepening and fine black hair made a darkening shadow above his lip. Nothing could keep her from him. Not Steve. Certainly not the police. During the previous spring and summer Mary Kay had been bolder in her disregard of propriety and the law than many were aware—not even Michelle. Her boldness had been vintage Mary Kay. When she was pregnant with Audrey, Vili had accompanied her to her obstetrician's office. They had gone to the movies, even a drive-in theater with her children. She was Rose and he was Jack from Titanic. They had kept no real distance from each other during art classes at Highline, and Mary Kay sensed that some of the others in the class thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend. The couple sipped lattes and mochas at Starbucks and walked arm in arm in downtown Seattle. Mary Kay told a friend later how she and Vili had even sneaked off for a Fourth of July getaway to the Oregon Coast.
“… each question we asked,” she wrote in a poem, “only strengthened the truth we knew… ”
Chapter 64
STEVE LETOURNEAU HAD something he wanted to show Linda Gardner when he came to Seattle for the sentencing. It was a drawing that Mary Kay had done. He never said how or when his estranged wife had done it. It was a picture of the four Letourneau children in front of the house in Normandy Park. All of the kids were sadly waving good-bye. Steve was in the picture, too.
“It had Steve with a really mean face… and then there was me,” Linda said later.
The image haunted her and even scared her a little. She knew that Mary Kay had known all along that it wa
s she who had made the phone call that led to her arrest, but since she never heard directly from Mary Kay, she didn't think she had focused much on that little fact.
But in jail she had time and it made Linda nervous. What if she told one of her little friends where I lived?
The whole world had come to watch Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who had sex with her student, when the oft-delayed sentencing finally took place on November 14, 1997. In reality, there was no genuine drama underlying the event. Prosecutors and defense lawyers had already hammered out an agreement and King County Superior Court Judge Linda Lau was expected to go along with it. Six months jail, credit for time served, and three years in a sexual deviancy program. With that, she'd skip the seven-year prison sentence.
The charges were reviewed; the psychologists mapped out Mary Kay's mental problems while the defendant stared ahead, or down at a legal pad. Her hair was up, makeup just so, and the sleeves of a sweater covered her spindle-thin arms.
She later told a friend what she was thinking about at the time. “The truth was that nothing anyone was saying was about me. It had nothing to do with me and I knew it. But when [the psychologist] talked about Audrey, my children, then that was about me.”
Soona Fualaau identified herself as a “very private person” and read a lovely statement about Mary and the fact that it was in the best interests of baby Audrey to keep her mother out of prison. She did not agree with what Mary did, but she did not think her son was a victim of anything.
Mary Kay stood and read from a prepared statement and the sound bite was made, the kind of sound bite that captures a moment and follows a person for the rest of their lives, or as long as the public cares.
“Help us,” she said, her hushed voice cracking, “help us all.”