Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  Dave Shields had never wanted to be anything but a cop. Not really. Though it was true that he had enlisted in the Coast Guard and had given most of his family and friends the impression that he had a career as a cop of the sea, he wanted nothing more than to be a police officer with his feet on dry ground. Both his grandmother and a close high school friend had died in accidents caused by drunken drivers. The idea that he could be part of a solution to a terrible and senseless problem led him to law enforcement. The former San Diegan came to Seattle with the Coast Guard in 1989; two years later he left in pursuit of his dream. It wasn't easy going. He worked his way up from a fire department job in Des Moines to the marina security job. By the spring of 1996, he was also a reserve police officer in Buckley, a town in the foothills of Mount Rainier, some forty-five minutes away. At the marina he worked graveyard, which he loved.

  Even if the evening is dead, it is almost always resuscitated around one in the morning. Shields and other cops of the night knew that. The last hour before the bars shut down the exodus of the drunk begins. The hardy party folks make their woozy attempts at demonstrating sobriety—direct steps to their car, the key ready, the door pulled open without a false move. All police officers, from the parking-lot rent-a-cop to the seasoned veteran called back into late-night patrol, know that although it may be the dead of the night, things happen after one in the morning.

  At the Des Moines marina, Shields was used to the after-midnight revelers who leave the bars and are drawn to the waterfront to continue the night. Sex and drugs are the usual reason. Kids come down to the water to maraud, smoke, and screw while their parents drift off to sleep in front of the soft blue glow of television sets that never seem to find a respite from use. Sticky, spent latex condoms sometimes pockmark the parking lot like the remnants of a water-balloon fight.

  The tide was way out and in the warmth of the June evening Dave Shields could smell the salty, rotting mud that passes for a Puget Sound beach. He barely needed a jacket; the air was warming. His uniform was a light blue shirt, with a “City of Des Moines” patch on the shoulders. His pants were black and a duty belt dangling with a radio, flashlight, and pepper spray hung around his waist. Dave Shields looked the part of a cop.

  He parked his silver and blue security-issue bike and followed the source of loud music down the ramp to the guest moorage in front of the harbormaster's office. When the tide was out, it brought the boats low and widened the beach. The music—some eighties junk—played from a stereo and bounced off the bank of condominiums that fringed the east side of the parking lot. Dave Shields knew the partiers—“old guys, some in their late thirties, even forties”—hadn't meant to be a nuisance. The sound carried across the black water and hung in the still air. They turned the volume way down and apologized and Shields headed back up the ramp to his bike.

  But at the top of the ramp, something caught his attention. Bursts of red, then white. Dave Shields fixed his clear hazel eyes into the darkness, and in an instant he saw lights flash on a blue Plymouth Voyager with Alaska plates parked in one of the darker areas of the parking lot. The van was facing west. The brake lights tapped again.

  Some guy's getting a blow job, he thought. It happened a lot at the marina. Shields and other officers well knew the shadowy form of a man leaned back from the wheel, touching the brakes with an errant foot, while a head popped up into view.

  From the top of the moorage ramp, he watched it for a second, and the van started up, backing into a landscape island planted with junipers and Saint-John's-wort before rolling a tire up over the curb. The van rolled forward, but when it backed up once more it hit the curb and ran into the island again. The driver was a slight figure, a young boy, Shields thought, though later he was not so sure.

  By now, Shields was suspicious. He watched the van, sure that it was a DUI. The van rolled forward and drove slowly, walking pace, through the parking lot. He cocked his head to his lapel microphone, called dispatch with a possible DUI, and walked along the bushes, not wanting to lose the van by returning for his bike.

  The young officer continued walking in the shadows thirty or forty feet behind the van as it crawled south along the edge of the parking lot abutting the cliff of condominiums. The van turned right, followed along the docks, then turned left again, toward Anthony's Home Port. The restaurant was closed and the parking lot nearly empty. The pace of the van was odd, because it was so slow. The officer wondered how the van had enough momentum to make it over the speed bumps that interrupted the asphalt every few yards.

  The van stopped for a few seconds, and went around the restaurant's waterfront eating deck before circling back around once more.

  What are they doing? he thought. Did they see me?

  The van pulled into a spot in front of a cyclone fence on the edge of the restaurant parking lot and its lights went dark. On the corner of the lot, just in front of the condos, Dave Shields waited for Des Moines's finest to show up.

  Blond-haired, light-complected, Rich Niebush arrived first and checked in with the young security guard. Niebush was a favorite of Shields's, the kind of officer that he aspired to be: direct, professional, and even-keeled. Dave filled in the officer on what he had seen. As Rich Niebush and another officer, Bob Tschida, approached they fixed a spotlight on the van. Niebush could see a woman move from the back and slide into the driver's seat. By then Sergeant Robert Collins was there, too.

  The officers pulled closer to the van and turned on their flashing lights. Niebush got out and walked toward the woman driver. A swipe of light from his flashlight also revealed the figure of a boy under a sleeping bag. The officers exchanged glances. Bob Tschida went to the driver's side to talk with the woman. Niebush stayed on the passenger side.

  “Get out of the van, please,” Tschida said.

  Niebush went around the van to open the driver's door and called to the boy in the back. But there was no answer. The light filled the interior and the officer could see that seats were folded down as if to form a kind of bed. The boy laid motionless, feigning sleep.

  “What is going on here?” the officer asked.

  The blond woman offered no answer. It was as if she didn't hear his words. After some prodding, she gave her name as Mary Letourneau. She was a schoolteacher from Shorewood Elementary in the Highline School District. There was no problem; there was no reason to interrogate her.

  “Why were you in the back of the van with the boy?” Sergeant Collins asked.

  Mary Kay said she was watching Vili overnight because his mother worked a late shift. She told the officers that she and her husband, Steve, had had an altercation less than an hour before and she and the boy left.

  “I decided to teach him a lesson,” she said, “and not return until after he went to work in the morning.”

  She explained that Steve left at 3:30 A.M. for a job handling baggage for Alaska Airlines.

  “We're just trying to get some sleep before returning home after my husband leaves for work,” she said.

  Sergeant Collins radioed for the Normandy Park Police to check the Letourneau residence to see if Steve Letourneau would be able to back up his wife's story. A bit later, Des Moines radioed back that no one answered the front door.

  Next, the sergeant asked Mary Kay what she was wearing. His flashlight washed over her to reveal a layering of four T-shirts and a beige skirt. She had on a thin jacket, no socks, and sandals. (Later officers would differ on what the woman had on that night. Niebush thought she was only wearing a T-shirt. “I did not notice a skirt,” he wrote later in his report.)

  Sergeant Collins told Mary Kay that they were taking Vili into protective custody.

  “You're blowing this out of proportion,” she protested. She was a teacher, a friend of the family's. There was nothing improper going on in the back of the van. She told them she taught at Shorewood Elementary. She said she was thirty-two.

  The officer didn't seem too concerned, telling her that her story made sense, but there
was an appearance of impropriety. The woman was wearing a nightie or a T-shirt and, as far as Shields and the officers could see, nothing else.

  What's she doing dressed like that coming down here? Shields wondered.

  By then Dave Shields had moved closer to the van. Whatever was happening was not dangerous and, without a doubt, far more interesting than lingering back by the condos. The woman was very pretty. Even years later, Shields said he remembered thinking, “Boy, she's got great legs.”

  It was Tschida who spoke to the marina security guard. The cop's dark eyes appeared mystified.

  “This kid's like only twelve or thirteen years old,” he said, his voice trailing off. “And I think he was putting his clothes back on.”

  Shields shook his head. “Oh, shit,” he said. Maybe they were having sex?

  Niebush radioed for more help. Another sergeant arrived a few minutes later. Something was wrong.

  “She wasn't really scared, but she seemed just a little nervous,” Shields said later.

  The officers pressed for answers and grew more concerned the more evasive Mary Kay became. He wondered if she was being held captive by the boy or perhaps he was being held against his will.

  “Who is back there?”

  Mary Kay didn't answer.

  “What's his name?”

  Again, no answer. Finally she said it was Vili Fualaau, a student of hers.

  “How old is the boy?” Tschida asked.

  Mary Kay hesitated for a moment before answering, “Eighteen.”

  The officer told her to wake him, but when she refused, he yelled at the boy to wake up. He wanted to talk with him, but the figure didn't stir.

  What gives here?

  The Des Moines officer called out again. He'd seen his share of fakers and it was clear the kid was awake. His dark eyes were open, though his head lay motionless. Finally, after another admonition, he lifted his head and climbed out from under the sleeping bag. A few moments later, Vili Fualaau told the officer that he was fourteen years old, but when asked for proof, he came up short. Of course, he had no driver's license and no Washington State ID card. He was only a kid.

  Vili said he had been staying at the Letourneau house that night when a fight between Mary Kay and her husband Steve made him upset. He left the house and walked down the hill to the QFC store on Marine View Drive. It wasn't far from the Letourneau home in neighboring Normandy Park, which was on a ridge just above the shopping center. Mary Kay picked him up in the van and they drove to the marina for sleep.

  Mary Kay Letourneau's story seemed odd, maybe even suspect, though it matched Vili's. She became irritated. She told them they were being too extreme, taking it too far.

  When the police told Mary Kay Letourneau that they were going to take Vili to the station, she became insistent. She flat-out didn't want to leave him alone. She was, she explained, responsible for him.

  Just before the patrol cars went back up the hill away from Puget Sound and the marina, Shields huddled with another of the officers.

  “We were kind of talking behind the patrol cars. The whole thing seemed fishy, we were convinced, but our hands were tied. He's in the back trying to put his clothes back on and she's wearing this little nightie thing. She didn't look as old as she is, but I knew she was older than eighteen,” the security cop later said.

  Back at the Des Moines police station, the officers failed to reach Soona Fualaau at her home in White Center, some fifteen minutes to the north. Once more, they pressed Mary Kay and Vili for the name of the mother's place of work. Specifics were not forthcoming.

  “She works for a pie-baking place in Kent,” Vili finally said. Neither he nor his teacher could come up with the name.

  A phone call to the Valley Comm Center turned up the name of a commercial bakery called Plush Pippin. Another call turned up Soona Fualaau.

  The sergeant told Vili's mother what had transpired that night. She was unconcerned and asked to speak with the pair. After both spoke to her, Soona Fualaau instructed the police officer to leave Mary Kay Letourneau in charge of her son.

  “She had said that she feels completely comfortable with him being with her and she trusts Mary and that they could release the boy back to her custody,” Shields recalled.

  What happened that night haunted him when all hell had broken loose and the world was introduced to Mary Kay and Vili.

  “They had already had sex… or were about to have it,” the young marina officer said later. “We all knew it.”

  A day later, the wife of a Des Moines police officer told the director of security for the Highline School District what had happened at the marina between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. An employee of the school district herself, the cop's wife said her husband had told her that the mother had approved the early morning excursion with the teacher. Though the officers on the scene had felt very uneasy, there wasn't enough evidence that a sex crime had been committed. With no crime—no charges—there would be no official action by the police. A report wouldn't be sent to the district.

  Two weeks later, a lieutenant for the police department sent the report to the city attorney for Des Moines. He too was uncomfortable with what happened at the marina. It just didn't seem right.

  Evidently, nothing happened once the report got there. The Highline School District didn't hear another word about the marina, the teacher, and the boy. Not for almost another year. Not until so much had happened that it could never be undone.

  BOOK I

  Daughter

  To put it bluntly, to be free in right and natural law does not mean we are free to break the Ten Commandments… to lie, to covet, to steal, to dishonor father and mother, to commit adultery…

  —John Schmitz, in his 1974 book, Stranger in the Arena

  She was the most beautiful of the children and by far the most devoted to John. She was the one who sat beaming—like Nancy Reagan gazing at Ronnie—whenever her father spoke….

  —Randy Smith, a Schmitz political aide in a 1998

  Los Angeles Times interview

  Let's look at this with reasonable and compassionate eyes.

  —Mary Kay Letourneau to a friend in a 1999 prison visit

  Chapter 1

  IN REALITY IT was the tony homes of Lemon Heights perched on the scorched hills above Tustin that gave the city the nickname The Beverly Hills of Orange County. The majority of Tustin was Middle America with neighborhoods of mostly unpretentious tracts of stucco and tile-roofed houses filled with children freckled, tanned, or burned by the sun. The wealthy living on Lemon Heights looked down on Tustin, or rather past it, to the waters of the Pacific. When John and Mary Schmitz and their sons Johnny, Joey, and baby Jerry moved into a one-story house with a lone palm tree on Brittany Woods Drive in Tustin in the early 1960s, on the surface they were a good Catholic family with moderate means.

  Yet if there was anything to distinguish the family from others in Tustin, it was the indisputable appeal of the parents. John was dark and dashing with the rigid posture of a military man. Mary, with her soft eyes and sweet smile, could play demure, but she was sure of herself in ways that few women allowed themselves at the time. John Schmitz and Mary Suehr had met at a college graduation party at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where both had earned degrees. She was a chemist who set aside a promising career to support the man she loved. But it was more than love. It was also the marriage of conservative and religious ideals that made them such a good fit. John and Mary were a team in life, the afterlife, and, in time, the purgatory that was California politics.

  An eight-year stint in the Marine Corps in El Toro where John was a pilot and helicopter aviator brought them to California. Like so many others who made the military migration during the forties and fifties, they saw California as a golden hope for a life of opportunity. When John left the Marines, like his father and father-in-law, he became a teacher. He taught philosophy and government at Santa Ana College.

  “I'm a good tea
cher,” he once told a reporter. “I've always been able to make a subject interesting. No one falls asleep in my class.”

  Part of what made that a true statement was that the man had an undeniable charisma and wit. He was brash, brilliant, and handsome with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pencil-thin mustache. John G. Schmitz was onstage whether his audience was a single student or a roomful. He was the center of the world. In the beginning, the lightning rod for attention presided over a family that was the envy of friends and neighbors.

  “They were a devoted family,” said one neighbor who still keeps in touch with John and Mary. “The kids all loved each other. It was sort of like, the family that prayed together, stayed together.”

  Indeed, prayer was an important ritual at the Schmitz home. Visitors to the house then—or any other place the family lived—never recalled a single meal when prayer wasn't a prelude to dining. Life revolved around the church. John sang in the choir at St. Cecelia's and Mary hauled the children in their station wagon (“our Catholic Cadillac”) to class each day.

  To supplement his college instructor's wages, John worked part-time at Disneyland as a Cobblestone Cop.

  “That made him a real hero among the kids,” the neighbor said.

  Although Mary Kay has memories of her father as that Disney character, she would later tell a friend she wasn't certain if she actually remembered it or had been told about it so often that she had kept it as memory. “It is a glimpse,” she told a friend many years later, “when I was three years old. Like a Mary Poppins doll I had, or putting my father's hair in curlers at our first house, just a glimpse of my childhood.”

  It was a lovely beginning to what everyone thought would be a wonderful life. Summer nights were filled with the laughter of the boys playing kick the can, hide-and-seek. Summer days they played baseball or football games that stretched for hours. In time, the family would get a German shepherd that John named Kaiser.