by Gregg Olsen
Inmate no. 769014 was instantly the superstar of the Washington prison system, if not the most celebrated or notorious female face behind bars in the entire country. Upward of thirty letters flooded her cell each day and filled the mailboxes of the lawyers and friends in support of her case. Some contained money for the defense fund. One man from Ohio sent $200.
“She is innocent because she didn't force the then thirteen-year-old to have a sexual relationship… He initiated the sexual part of it,” wrote one supporter.
At his home in Des Moines many months after the revocation hearing, David Gehrke blamed the groupies for Mary Kay's downfall.
“I found out that people were covering for her,” he said.
And look at what the “help” got her. He blamed Abby Campbell—“this groupie who was trying to help her, encourage her, and cover for her.” It was Abby who had provided the pager that ended up with Vili. Her actions, David believed, were paramount in setting the events in motion that led to the parole revocation.
“I don't know what [Abby] wanted but if someone had told me about all this it would have been real obvious to me that it wasn't the right thing to do if you were enabling them [Mary Kay and Vili Fualaau] to be together.”
According to David, friends also rushed over to Beth Adair's spare room where Mary had been staying and emptied it out “for fear that there was evidence of Vili” there.
“Then Abby called me on Saturday after the Friday revocation terrified that she had all this stuff… and wanted to know what to do with it.”
David told Abby he'd take care of it and that she should bring Mary Kay's belongings to him. She agreed. She was glad to get rid of the stuff.
The spick-and-span room only made it look like Mary Kay had planned to flee.
It was widely known in the neighborhood that Soona was having a hard time keeping tabs on her youngest son during Mary's month-long release from the Regional Justice Center in Kent. Several times Soona and her oldest children went on Vili hunts, knocking on doors and making phone calls all over White Center.
“His family is very strict and very religious. If he didn't come home, they'd come looking for him, the mom, the brother, and the older sister. They don't stop until they find him,” Danelle Johnson said.
It wasn't the fault of the Fualaaus—at least, not completely. At fourteen, Vili was determined to do what he wanted.
“He didn't tell them the truth. He didn't say I'm going to see my girl, Mary. He didn't come home from school when he was supposed to or he'd leave when they were asleep. They didn't let him go do it. They just felt hurt again,” Danelle added.
Danelle Johnson remembers how upset Soona had been over her son's running around. She was very worried that the authorities would find out and take Audrey from her.
“She thought that they would think she wasn't a good mother,” she said.
Though she could not see it clearly at the time, Danelle Johnson was able to see more clearly with the passage of time. Doesn't everyone? When the smoke of Mary Kay Letourneau's disaster dissipated enough for her to peer through its curtain, she could see that the teacher's legacy was formed from the trust she maintained with her young students.
“They felt like she was one of them. But she knew a little bit more than what they did, so they would do whatever she said. She wouldn't do anything wrong to them. She brought them into this thing. I don't know if it was to facilitate her thing with Vili or whatever. She dragged a lot of kids down with her.”
Chapter 69
WITH THE REVOCATION of Mary Kay's parole, all hell had broken loose and the lawyers were busier than ever. Everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Barbara Walters to Connie Chung courted David Gehrke and Robert Huff. David in particular shuttled back and forth from one satellite hookup to the next.
It was a second chance to make the megadeal that had seemed so certain when the story first broke in the summer. Mary Kay Letourneau's incarceration for an early morning tryst with Vili Fualaau was the fade-to-black ending they needed.
“Now you've got a finish. Now you've got the last chapter,” David Gehrke told producers who had passed on the project during the first wave of attention. “Now it's goddamn, she got what she deserved, or oh, man, this is really tragic,” he said later. “If you just present it in a neutral fashion everybody thinks, yeah, what a story, and you don't have to moralize. Now she's in prison… it's a horrible tragedy or justice.”
David and Susan Gehrke and Bob Huff and his girlfriend flew to New York to discuss the Letourneau story with media queens Walters, Chung, and Sawyer. When they returned to Seattle, Bob Huff sent Mary Kay a packet of information about an interview with ABC (“the only thing he's ever sent me here in prison”). Mary Kay already knew she preferred Barbara Walters and would not consider Connie Chung at all. But Susan Gehrke urged Mary Kay to talk with Diane Sawyer, too. But Mary Kay had already talked with Barbara and committed to her, so 20/20”s anchor would have the exclusive interview.
The prisoner in the spotlight wasn't in a hurry, however. She was sick, upset about being in prison, and didn't want anyone to see her in such a miserable state. When she said yes to the interview, she didn't know that she had to do it immediately. She thought she'd have a few weeks to get her head together.
But the next thing she heard was that Barbara Walters had cancelled the interview. “Then they [Bob Huff and David Gehrke] got all upset. 'You blew it with Barbara Walters, Mary! You've really messed up now! You made Barbara Walters wait! You made Larry King's producer wait for five hours for nothing!' “
Behind the scenes things were coming to a head insofar as David Gehrke and his representation of Mary Kay Letourneau was concerned.
The group of supporters cringed nearly every time he opened his mouth and the groundswell against him grew. When he told a national magazine that his client was “obsessed” with the boy, the outrage deepened.
It seemed that whenever a camera was around, David Gehrke was there. But whenever she needed him, Mary Kay complained to her friends that he couldn't be reached.
“You know after she got sentenced that he didn't go see her?” a friend asked. “How could he not go see her?”
Once two weeks went by without a visit to his client in prison.
“He was in New York having dinner and doing press and other things,” the friend said.
David Gehrke took exception to Mary Kay's friend's characterization of a starstruck lawyer, indifferent to his client's needs. It was true that he didn't see her every day and it was also true that he did let a couple of weeks lapse between face-to-face visits. But he was within reach.
“I've always allowed collect calls from jail or prison and I can almost always be reached by telephone, at home or at the office. But I don't charge enough to babysit clients and hold their hands two or three times a week. Not even the best retained—most expensive—lawyer can afford to do that.”
A week after Mary Kay was sent to prison, Soona Fualaau appeared in “disguise” on American Journal. Mary Kay had what she thought was a better venue: Oprah.
“I can say with all certainty that this young man is the love of my life. Otherwise I would not have put my children through this,” she said during a phone interview. She called back after her time on the prison phone was cut off. She seemed out of touch and the audience was out for blood. David Gehrke and Robert Huff sat onstage looking ridiculous and helpless. Following Oprah's lead that she didn't buy the bipolar excuse, the audience sneered, too.
“Bipolar, fourpolar, or nopolar,” said one from the gallery of mostly women.
The Oprah experience was proof that there was great risk no matter whose show you went on.
“The Oprah people were pretty good,” Kate Stewart said later. “But Oprah slammed her. I don't think it was personal. I think Oprah was stressed because of her own litigation in Texas.”
Kate Stewart didn't run from one talk show to another. She didn't appear in the pages of national magazines to fight for h
er friend. She stayed behind the scenes and pressed on with the campaign for support and understanding. It was a lonely gig. When it became better known among her Chicago circle of friends that she and Mary Kay Letourneau had been college roommates, she found herself in the awkward position of defending Mary Kay to those who had been poisoned by the negative media. Some were embarrassed and dismissive. It hurt.
“You know her,” she told a friend. “You met her at the wedding. You know she's a friend of mine. She's sitting in jail.”
Often she'd be asked if she would feel differently if her son had been involved with his teacher. Of course, she told people, she wouldn't want her son to become intimate with his teacher. No mother would. But on the other hand, if her son was a boy at complete risk as Kate believed Vili had been, and she could not do anything to save him, then maybe the love of his teacher wouldn't be so bad.
She reminded her friends, her husband, and others who didn't get it that it was about two people. Not just any boy and any woman. It had been about two people who found each other and fell in love.
“The mistake she made was breaking the law. She's helped that boy. She's given him the best of life. That boy would be one of the teenagers who commits suicide,” Kate explained.
Sometimes they softened and said they understood.
“She had consensual sex with a teenager. So what?” Kate would repeat sometimes, driving the point home that Vili was not the only teen having sex. “All the other teenagers are out there doing it anyway at thirteen and fourteen, which Vili was doing. They don't go to prison. It's taboo, but should she go to jail for seven years?”
One thing surprised Kate Stewart more than any aspect during the months of the second wave of the media war against her college friend: Why didn't her family and its prestige play a role in creating support for Mary Kay?
Kate expected headlines with more understanding.
“If I read a story in the newspaper and it told me Rockefeller's daughter… well educated, raised conservative Catholic, in a good home. I would think, 'Wait a minute, why would this girl do this?' I wouldn't automatically think she's a nut or pedophile,” she said later.
Kate just didn't get it. Why didn't Mary Kay's background give her credibility?
It wasn't Time magazine or even People. The big exclusive that so many had sought had been given to a rock magazine, Spin. Maxwell McNab also had an assignment to write an article for Mirabella, but it was expected to be a rehash of what had happened during the months he was hanging out with the Mary Club at the jail in Kent.
It was Seattle novelist and journalist Matthew Stadler, sympathetic to Mary Letourneau's plight, who took the Spin assignment and managed to actually speak with the subject of the article. Not long after it was known that he'd gathered access and taped interviews, the supermarket tabloid the Globe called offering to pay for his notes, photos, documents, and any interview tapes that he had accumulated. The writer didn't have to think twice. He turned down the Globe.
KIRO-TV's pursuit was a bit dicier. Since Matthew's brother worked at the Seattle station, several people there assumed they'd have the edge. Karen O'Leary was one.
“Do you have the tapes?” Karen asked.
The writer hedged. “I don't know where they are.”
That didn't seem to suit the TV reporter. Later he learned that Karen had told his brother that he in fact had the tapes and that he'd find them.
“Karen is waiting for the tapes,” the brother said.
Matthew Stadler was furious. “I told her I didn't know where they are and I'm not going to find them.”
Another staffer called next.
“[He] said they'd pay me money if I would find the tapes.”
Not in this lifetime. Stadler got rid of everything. Making quick money by betraying Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't his style. There had already been enough of that.
And deep down, he knew there would be a whole lot more.
Chapter 70
THE BOY WAS Samoan, and, in 1998, people began to focus on that aspect. Was it cultural? Was he some man-child from the island? Lima Skillion, executive director of the Seattle Samoan Center, a social services agency serving the four thousand Samoans and Pacific Islanders in the area, wanted to help, she said, not ridicule. The mother of two put the word out. She wanted to know who the family was. And did they need support?
No one came forward right away. But in time, word sifted throughout the community that the Samoan boy was from White Center and was the son of a single mother. Though KIRO-TV's interview in the park had showed his hands and ring, his face had been obscured. No one knew exactly which Samoan kid had the fling—or was raped—by his pretty, blond teacher.
Not long after Lima's outreach, a local social worker came to inquire about the resources available in the Samoan community.
“[Social Services] had a meeting finding out about how the Samoan community was looking toward this particular situation, case. Nobody knew then who these people were,” Lima Skillion recalled.
She advocated a slow approach, no “jumping into conclusions.”
“They were discussing taking the child—the boy's baby—from these people. What would Samoan people do with this baby?”
She understood through overtures made to the social service agents that the Samoan senior center offered to help take care of the baby. But they really didn't know what could be done. No one knew who the boy was. Or, if they did, they weren't talking.
It was a nudge from a staff member in the parking lot of the White Center Albertson's grocery store that finally clued in Seattle Samoan Center Executive Director Lima Skillion.
“That's the boy's aunt,” the staff member said.
Lima Skillion couldn't believe her eyes and ears. She didn't need to ask which boy. She knew her companion meant the boy who had become the talk of the Samoan community—the boy who was involved with his teacher. She also knew his family. The father of the clan had been a minister. She knew what kind of people they were. From what she had seen over the years, Lima Skillion could not have imagined that that particular family could be involved in such a scandal.
“That mother was always with this family, putting her family together. Telling her children that this is not right and this is right and blah, blah, blah. And how they turn out… we've done our part. You can only do so much. I know he was from a very disciplinary family.”
It couldn't be a boy from that family. “No,” she said that early evening in the parking lot. “That's not right.”
Her staff member nodded. “Yeah. Yeah,” she said.
Lima Skillion put her shopping aside and walked over to Soona Fualaau's sister's car and stood by the driver's window, while the occupant rolled it down.
“Is this true?” she asked.
“About?” the woman asked.
“Is the boy in the news your nephew?”
The woman was surprised and not all that happy about the intrusion, the question. But she admitted that it was Vili, her nephew. It bothered her that it was known among the people of the community.
The aunt was in shock, Lima said later.
“She had just found out that the citizens and people had discussed the case. They were more private people. There was too many people into their business.”
Lima offered to help in any way that she and the center could. She passed a business card through the open window.
The aunt was much happier. Maybe relieved. She left with words that the Samoan leader would never forget. It was a rebuttal to some things said by others in the Samoan community.
“Lima,” the aunt said, “we didn't teach our boy to go do what he did.”
Not long after running into Vili's aunt in the grocery's parking lot, Lima made the same offer of help to the pastor of the Fualaaus' church. She didn't discuss the case, she just told the minister that she understood what tremendous pain the family was going through and that she and all of her resources were there for them. Soona's mother called later
to thank Lima for her concern and for the offer of help. Yes, she said, they had a lawyer.
Some thought the whole affair reeked of the exploitation of a young boy, but Lima Skillion viewed it differently. Though Mary should have known better, she was in love. So was the boy.
“I looked at their feelings,” Lima said later. “They got strong for one another. You know those emotional feelings—right or wrong. You've got to fight with your inner person there, where she acted it out. I know that the feeling was mutual for both of them. I believe it was a love deeper than we can really look at it. It meant a lot to her, this whole thing here with this boy.”
She felt sadness for Mary Letourneau and how things would turn out for her. The boy's family was strong, she thought, and they'd make the best for him. But Mary, Mary was a tragic figure.
“She truly loved him for her to risk a whole lot of her heart, her life. She lost a lot more than he did. It is a sad price to pay if there was true love.”
Chapter 71
IT WAS ALWAYS the same song and dance and Mary Kay Letourneau's lawyers learned the steps and the lyrics quickly. The Hollywood crowd still seeking the rights to Mary Kay's story wanted to secure it by putting a small amount of money down with the promise that when they placed it “with a major production company and major network,” they'd all get a giant payday. But David Gehrke didn't want promises of more later. He wanted it now. So did Bob Huff. They wanted an offer of cash up front.
“We like your connections,” David said more than once. “Your proposal sounds great. Put the figure down on paper and we'll consider it.”
But the producers never did.
“One guy said he had a cashier's check for two hundred thousand and we told him we'd meet him at the airport. Be sure to bring the check. Call us when you're there.”
That hot-to-trot producer never showed up at SeaTac.