by Gregg Olsen
But she couldn't. Not completely. Because even though Mary Kay had done something so reprehensible, the Letoumeau side of the family could not find it within their hearts to support Linda.
“I'm the villain,” she said later. “I'm the bad person. I shouldn't have turned her in. You shouldn't have. You shouldn 't have.”
At one family event one of the relatives made it a point to remind Linda that “ignorance is bliss.”
But she knew.
“Because they didn't do something right away, I've paid a price,” she told a friend.
What stunned Linda even more was that so many knew for so long. Mothers knew. Fathers knew.
“Mary Kay was the golden girl, all right,” she said later.
One evening in mid-January Linda Gardner got a call from a girlfriend.
“Linda, you'll never guess who I saw at the Super Mall. Mary Kay Letourneau.”
The woman who had started the ball rolling with her call to Child Protective Services and the school district was all ears when the caller said she actually tailed Mary Kay for a while just to see what she was doing at the mammoth discount mall on the outskirts of Auburn. She was with another woman, whom Linda deduced must have been her good friend Abby, the wife of the lawyer.
According to what the friend said, Mary Kay had been walking around in a cloud “la la la la, wanting people to notice her. In fact, she was in one of the designer stores, you know, saying 'I've been out of fashion for about six months, what's in now?' “
For Mary Kay's old Normandy Park neighbors, there had been little contact with the Letourneau children once Steve took them to Alaska for a fresh start, out of the fray. Ellen Douglas and her son, Scott, were among the only neighbors to see the kids in their new household up north. A Boy Scout event brought mother and son to Anchorage, and a visit to the townhouse Steve now shared with flight attendant Kelly Whalen was wanted very much by all sides. It was January 1997, and the television played scenes from the Winter Olympics. The townhouse was immaculate, not a speck of dust anywhere.
“Sunset magazine could do a spread,” Ellen said later.
She watched Jacqueline run around the off-white carpet carrying an open box of grape Jell-0 without a reprimand from anyone.
Don't fall with that mix, Jackie, Ellen thought.
But the place was calm. The kids seemed happy and relaxed. No one talked about Mary Kay and what might happen now that she was free to start her life over. Ellen liked Kelly, she seemed caring and involved and she provided the kind of order that their mother never possessed.
“They seemed okay,” she said later. “Maybe they were wrecks, but I don't know. I know it is going to be tough.”
She and her son left Alaska feeling hopeful that things would turn out all right after all.
* * *
The Mecca Cafe was one of those authentic restaurants where meat loaf was still served, and waitresses worked there long enough to know almost every customer by name. The cafe at the base of Seattle's Queen Anne Hill was a favorite hangout for one of Mary Kay's chief groupies, and had been so for a decade and a half. The friend thought it would be a wonderful out-of-the-spotlight place for Mary's thirty-fifth birthday. She agreed. The guest list was small, a few regulars from the Mecca, Mary, the friend, and Abby Campbell. By one P.M. on January 30, 1998, everyone was there.
Mary arrived in what had become her signature outfit since her release: full-blown teenage regalia that consisted of pedal pushers and a baggy T-shirt. She was upbeat, happy. Conversation was breezy that afternoon and spirits were high. Abby Campbell pulled a batch of photos from her purse and presented them to Mary. Images of Vili and baby Audrey were fanned over the back booth's surface. Abby invited Mary to keep a sampling—but not all of them. The friend who arranged the birthday lunch thought it was peculiar. Mary didn't ask for the whole lot of them. It was as if she didn't mind being told what to take, what to do.
She's a teenager, he thought.
A little while later, after Abby left, the friend leaned over and pounced. He had one question he'd been dying to ask.
“How the hell do you stay in touch with Vili?” he asked Mary.
Mary looked over her shoulder; her eyes darted over the restaurant, up past the row of stools fronting the counter to the front door.
“Abby Campbell and Bob Huff help me,” she said.
The friend had suspected as much, but the answer ate at him. If true, not only were the pair helping Mary to violate a court order prohibiting contact between Mary and Vili, they were putting a fragile woman in a precarious situation. They were adding fuel to a bonfire. Mary Letourneau didn't see it that way. She saw their help as a way to stay close to the man/boy of her dreams.
“I had a bad feeling about it,” he said later. “And, of course, I was right.”
Later, when he confronted the others about what Mary had told him, they denied it. If Mary had been in contact with Vili, then it hadn't been through gofer Abby or lawyer Bob Huff.
“Believe what you want,” the friend said later, “I know what I heard.”
Bob Huff stood firm on the subject many months later. He did not, would not, facilitate communication between Mary Kay and Vili.
“[Neither] Mary nor Vili ever put me in that position,” he said. “They knew I wouldn't do it and they knew it would get me in hot water with the judge and the prosecution. Besides, why would I encourage the relationship between Mary and Vili? I didn't think the relationship was particularly healthy. Let's say that there wasn't equal bargaining power between Mary and Vili. I thought it would be better for him to be without her for a while, anyway. Let him be for a few years… so he can move in another direction if he wants to.”
On the other hand, Bob Huff couldn't absolve Abby Campbell of possibly keeping what she apparently considered star-crossed lovers in touch.
“Abby did a lot of stuff I wouldn't do,” the lawyer said finally.
Chapter 67
IT WAS A typical winter's night. The low temperatures were in the forties and the high the next day would only be ten degrees warmer. Dogs barked intermittently down by Lake Washington and porch lights glowed like fireflies in the 4800 block of Forty-ninth Avenue South, the Seward Park neighborhood where Beth Adair lived. One family even had Christmas lights still on, though it was February 3, 1998.
At 2:24 A.M. Seattle Police Officer Todd Harris was pulling routine neighborhood patrol when he happened across a VW Fox parked in front of the Shorewood Elementary music teacher's home. He could see a woman sitting in the driver's seat, her head turned toward the passenger side. Her blond hair was matted against the glass of the windows painted with condensation. The parking lights of the Fox were on.
The officer ran the plates and drove past the car. Of course, it wasn't against the law to sit outside and talk in a car. Running plates was just something a cop does to pass the time. It was routine. As he passed the car Officer Harris could see that the driver wasn't alone; it appeared there was a passenger with her—though the passenger's seat had been fully reclined. It looked like a young man, a teenager, was with her.
On this night the routine of running the plates brought more than he bargained for. And for the woman inside the car it brought an end to her story.
The car was registered to Mary Katherine Letourneau, a registered sex offender.
The Seattle police officer drove back and pointed his spotlight at the car. In an instant, Mary Kay Letourneau got out and walked toward the beam. In her haste, she left the driver's door open. She was alone, she answered, when the officer asked if she had someone with her. She had no identification; she gave her sister Terry's name when asked who she was. Vili Fualaau emerged from the car and also gave a phony name. Mary Kay said they'd only been in the car six minutes, though the condensation on the glass and on the hood of the car indicated much more time had passed.
“There was great hesitation in both parties in giving their names,” the officer later said.
Later,
Mary Kay said she had gone to a movie by herself, went to Nordstrom, and when she returned, Vili was waiting for her. He had run away from home.
Vili laid out the story differently. He said that he had paged Mary Kay earlier in the evening and she had picked him up. They went to a movie, bought beer, and sat in the car for an hour and a half.
And though no one will ever know the truth, Mary Kay and Vili have told varying stories of what happened that night and the days before.
Just after three A.M. television reporter Karen O'Leary was awakened by a phone call from KIRO's overnight assignment editor.
“Karen,” he said, “you're not going to believe this, but Mary Letourneau's been caught with a sixteen-year-old!”
Karen sat up. “What?”
It must be some other boy. Not Vili, she thought. Vili was fourteen.
The editor filled her in on the arrest and Karen was rocked by the news. She had thought that Mary Letourneau had been fixated on Vili and no other boy.
What? she thought.
And as more information came to her that morning as she prepared for a trip out of town on another scandal story, Karen O'Leary was left feeling sad and duped.
“Everything that had come earlier had been a lie. All of the people that had said Mary Kay Letourneau should go to prison are right. I was wrong. She needed to be in prison. She made no effort to stay away from him. She didn't even wait a reasonable amount of time. She didn't wait a year, two years, five years… ”
Mary Kay has her own special memory of Karen O'Leary. According to Mary Kay, the TV reporter approached her at the Kent jail just after the lawsuit was filed. According to Mary Kay, the breathless reporter was indignant over the suit Bob Huff had filed.
“Maybe she wanted me to call off the dogs or something, I don't know her purpose in telling me that.”
But it was something else Karen said that really stuck in her memory:
“Mary, Vili says he's going to wait for you. Isn't that the saddest thing you've ever heard?”
What is the purpose in saying that? Mary Kay wondered. Out of all the things in the world, what would I want to hear more than that? Why would that be sad? It was Vili's choice and I couldn't have been happier.
The rest of the morning, details were made available. It was the inventory of what was found in the car that provided clues to what might have been going on between the pair and made it clear that whatever Mary Kay and Vili had told police didn't quite mesh with the facts of the case. Under the carpet by the gas pedal, police found Mary Kay's passport. In a little lockbox given to her by pal Abby Campbell were sixty-three hundred-dollar bills. Investigators found books, toys, young men's underwear, shoes, and baby clothing. Receipts for more than $850 from Nordstrom. Two rolls of film and a disposable camera containing more film were sent to the lab for developing. A couple of beer bottles were found, one almost empty, one unopened. Two ticket stubs to Wag the Dog, the movie Mary Kay said she'd seen. A letter from Cascade Middle School suspending Vili from the school for smoking was found, too.
When the film was processed it showed pictures of Mary Kay Letourneau, Vili Fualaau, and their daughter, Audrey. Some of the images were taken indoors; others were out in public. Seattle's Pike Place Market was readily identifiable.
They also found a message pager issued just a few days before.
Chapter 68
MARY KAY LETOURNEAU broke hearts all over town the morning of her second arrest. Among those who shared the disappointment and the sorrow were the Fish twins. How could this be? How could she let this happen? They wondered if she was sick and unable to control herself.
“We thought she was somewhat erratic at times because we knew her personality, but we never put a label on it,” Angie said later.
For those closest to Mary Kay, the ones who knew her before she was notorious, it was an excruciating betrayal that spoke of both mental illness and selfishness. Neither of which were attributes those who knew Mary Kay wished ascribed to her.
As practical and logical as Kate Stewart could be, she had put her marriage at a bit of a risk by standing by Mary Kay and running a media command center out of her century-old Chicago two-story. She'd defended her college friend to her husband's family. She explained all that she could to those she allowed to know her connection with the teacher in love with a student. Kate even accepted that it had been love.
But talking to the audacious and unrepentant Mary Kay from prison after the second arrest brought her no real answers for the questions that ran through her mind daily.
How many crazy things can you do? You don't watch your back. You don't care what happens. You feel as if you are on top of the world. I can do anything! So here she is sitting out in front of her house having spent the entire day with him. Going to a movie, getting a six-pack at 7-Eleven. Saying 'Fuck you' to the court!
For Kate, the greatest bond that she and Mary Kay had when they went their separate ways after Arizona State was the fact that they were mothers.
“The thing I find so difficult and so ironic is that she's a mom who is dedicated to her kids. I don't question the dedication. It is definitely there. What I don't understand is how, how can you make the decision to repeat this business when the most important thing in your whole life is your children. Who you live and die for, dressed, bathed, fed, educated, developed. Called the shots. Ran the house. Everything. Made sure they had the perfect birthday party. Had the right stuff. Not for other people, to impress them. But for her. That was her fulfillment.”
But Mary Kay squandered it all for the night in her car with a teenage boy she had been forbidden to see. Kate would try, but she could never fully accept Mary Kay taking that kind of dangerous, irrevocable risk. Not when she knew that Mary Kay really did love her children. She just had to.
Abby Campbell phoned Michelle Jarvis with the terrible news. If Abby had done so with the thought that Michelle would commiserate with her over the injustice of it all, she was disappointed.
“She damn well deserves everything she's getting now,” Michelle said. “Because she's pissed it all away.”
Her remarks caught the mother of five off guard. “I can't believe you're saying that,” she said.
Michelle sighed. “That's how I feel.”
And she hung up. Michelle had been through good times and bad times, ups and downs, with Mary Kay. Bad times that got her an inch from big trouble, but nothing like this. What else could she say? Her children were without a mother now. And unless there was some kind of a miracle, Michelle knew Mary Kay was going to prison. There was no arguing it or wiggling her way out of it with tearful brown eyes. She'd broken parole. There was no second chance. Cake had used that one up already.
Michelle bitterly gave Tony Hollick the heave-ho that same day. It was high time, she thought.
“I hold you personally responsible for her being back in jail,” she said. “It's your fault. If you had not stirred up all of this crap about how this medication was going to hurt her centers of spirituality, love, blah blah, and all these other side effects, then she would have been on her medication and she probably would have been able to control herself and not be back with Vili again.”
Devastated by the news of the arrest, Tony held back. He didn't debate and he didn't charm. He hurt too much. The woman he loved was in serious trouble and Michelle Jarvis and her ranting couldn't change that at all.
It was a given. Indeed there was the look of shock and anger when eyes met throughout the Highline School District the morning Mary Kay Letourneau was arrested. But there was also the look of bitterness. The wound was gaping and bleeding. The jokes would come once more. But even worse, it was Election Day for a school funding levy and voters were coming into the schools with one thing on their minds—the pretty teacher in the steamed-up car with her former student. They weren't thinking about education and how much it should cost and which programs were worthwhile. No, they were thinking Mary Kay.
The levy lost.
&nb
sp; “Bad feelings were dredged up again and this did not help. There are many of us who believe that Mary Letourneau cost us the election,” said one administrator.
They were all there. The media vultures had descended on Seattle and the King County Courthouse as they always do when they can mix sex, a crime, and a pretty woman into their newspapers and television shows. Producers and cameramen from 48 Hours, The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, and the usual local suspects strung cable like Chinese noodles through courthouse hallways to Linda Lau's courtroom.
For a woman who had jailhouse tantrums over her hair and attire, the Mary Letourneau who showed up at her resentencing on February 6, 1998, had let herself go. Her hair was no longer the sun-streaked coif of a woman out of touch with her crime and the public's perception of it. Instead, she was a mess. She could have achieved the same look by using a garden rake and a can of hairspray. But she hadn't, of course. Her red King County issues were long and limp on her skeletal frame, her face ashen and devoid of blush and lipstick. She weighed barely more than a hundred pounds.
“Mary Kay could have used some Mary Kay [cosmetics], if you asked me,” said one observer.
Testimony from the police, supposition from the prosecutor about what was happening [“she was going to flee”], and an emotional plea for mercy from David Gehrke because his client was out of touch with reality and functioned like an adolescent had little impact on what Judge Lau could do. Mary Kay's tears would have no bearing on the outcome, either. Nothing anyone could do would stop the judge from sending her to prison.
“This is not about flaws in the system,” said Judge Lau. “It is about an opportunity you foolishly squandered.”
Mary Kay Letourneau was led away to face seven and a half years in prison—her original sentence before it was deferred in favor of treatment. But there would be no treatment, now. She had abdicated that in favor of a prison cell. Her home would be the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, just west of Tacoma. The first thing she did was head for the phone to call her children in Alaska. Screw the rules of the deviancy program. She was in prison, but she was free.