Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  “It is something we just never talked about,” she said later.

  The “felony child neglect” charges against Carla Stuckle were eventually dropped, and she was put on six months of social-service agency supervision, but the indignities continued. The Schmitz boys and their father had a meeting at Carla's home after the dust had settled and there was no longer any media interest in the case. One of the boys proposed to Carla that the best thing for everyone would be to put the children up for adoption.

  “Best for who?” Carla Larson, the oldest daughter, later said when she learned of the plan. “Can you imagine the gall? As if my mother didn't love those children?”

  And if that was the Schmitz style, to sweep the mess under the rug and avoid any further embarrassment, it was insulting to the woman John Schmitz had said he loved.

  “I nearly threw him out of my house,” Carla Stuckle told her daughter. “John didn't say anything then but later told me he didn't like that idea and knew I wouldn't go for it.”

  Chapter 10

  BOTH MARY KAY Schmitz Letourneau and Carla Bostrom Stuckle would feel abandoned by John Schmitz at critical times of their lives. Mary Kay needed her father by her side when her world was unraveling and her own personal scandal was sucking her down like a whirlpool; Carla needed John's support when she had the gall to let the world know she'd borne his children, children he ignored. Carla and Mary Kay had barely talked in their entire lives, but they shared something very deep. They both had been hurt by the man they loved more than any other. In little more than ten years' time their lives would end up in devastating tragedy.

  Carla Stuckle did her best to hang on to all she had: her children. Despite working two jobs, she was nearly destitute; her beige stucco house was being foreclosed. Her gas service for her water heater had been shut off so she resorted to heating water on the stove for bathing. Her swimming pool had been drained because her pump was broken and she couldn't afford to repair it. She was gaunt, alone, and bitter. The children hadn't received as much as a card or a phone call from their father for months. Not even at Christmas or on their birthdays.

  She told a reporter in early 1984 that “long after I'm gone, we'll know the reason these children were born. I didn't go through all of this for nothing.”

  For the rest of her life, Carla Stuckle was a tragic figure. Though she was seen at the Tustin trailer park where John Schmitz lived while finishing up his remaining time for his pension, she eventually dropped off the face of the earth. Ailing with the diabetes that ravaged her in her forties, Carla Verne Stuckle had reclaimed her maiden name by the time she came to live in a Midwestern Catholic care community with her children, then twelve and ten, in 1993.

  She was at the end of the line. Carla was found dead a year later in her apartment. She was only 56. No family other than her son and youngest daughter attended her funeral. And while one would have hoped John Schmitz would have taken in John and Genie, he did not. Oddly, it was Mary Schmitz's close friend Jeanne Dixon who assumed guardianship of the boy and girl. When the famed astrologer died in 1997, Carla's children were made wards of the state. They now live in an orphanage.

  The contact with their half-siblings has been sporadic at best. Mary Kay, for one, never visited John or Genie.

  “Some of the Schmitz children—the younger ones—have come out to see the kids, but Mary Schmitz has forbidden it. I don't think she knows about it,” said the spokesman. “Gifts have been sent.”

  May Kay's childhood friend Michelle Jarvis often wondered what happened to John and Genie Bostrom. Not long after the affair between John Schmitz and Carla Stuckle hit the papers, it seemed that the mother and her babies simply disappeared. But John and Genie were half siblings to the Schmitz kids, after all, and in many families that was good enough to called brother and sister. When she asked Mary Kay about it, the answer came through loud and clear. Mary Schmitz had forbidden any relationship with those children. Mary Kay, in fact, had never laid eyes on the children, with the exception of seeing John in his mother's arms at church.

  “Mary Kay told me that they had been back East for Christmas and her mother basically said that none of them could contact those children or have anything to do with them.”

  Michelle thought Mary Kay's mother's edict was “sick” and told her friend so.

  “If it was my family,” she said later, “I'd tell my mother to, you know, go you-know-what herself and I would go and help those children. They're in an orphanage and they've got family! That's sickening. What does John do? Nothing. His kids are in an orphanage… and he does nothing.”

  Those who joined in making the “apple doesn't fall far from the tree” analysis of Mary Kay Letourneau's behavior weren't that far off the mark, according to friends of the teacher in trouble.

  “Look at the parallels with her father,” college roommate Kate Stewart said in the living room of her Chicago home one afternoon in the fall of 1998. “I think that Mary Kay probably has her father's personality. The risk-taking. And his ideals. Here she is in prison and she's not going to be defeated and she still turns around and says to the people there, 'Screw it, I'm not doing that.' ”

  It didn't matter to Mary Kay if her defiance only made things worse for her first in jail, and later in prison. She was the type who had to prove a point.

  “Listen,” Kate once said, trying to get her college friend to make things easier on herself. “It's not going to get you anywhere there.”

  * * *

  Carla Larson, Carla Stuckle's daughter, had some hard times in her life—marriages that didn't work out, periods of poverty during which she and her son, Carl, lived with her father in Montana. There were times when she and her son lived on peanut butter sandwiches and kept their fingers crossed that times would get better. And they did. By 1994, Carla Larson had purchased a little house in Hamilton, Montana, just south of Victor where her relatives lived. The house was nothing special, except that it was hers. It had a view of the Hardees restaurant where her son worked until heading off for the Navy. Though things were better, it had been more than a decade since the younger woman had heard of anything of her mother—an estrangement that had been Carla Stuckle's choice. By 1998, when she first learned her mother was dead and her brother and sister were wards of a Midwestern state, she was a civilian officer for the sheriff and worked nights and weekends at a family restaurant, the 4Bs. Never more would she feel sorry for herself.

  But for years after the affair with John Schmitz left her mother a broken and pathetic woman, Carla Larson always believed that her youngest brother and sister were living somewhere, happily, in California. She had no idea John and Genie were in an orphanage and the thought of it brought anguish and a flood of tears.

  “They have a sister who would have taken them in a heartbeat. If someone had called me when our mother died four years ago, I would have been there. We would have found a way to take them into our home. I was living here in Montana… I would have found some way. They are my brother and sister. They have a father and they have two sisters—and the Schmitz kids, too.”

  She wondered why John Schmitz didn't contact her when her mother died. Carla Larson knew John Schmitz. It wasn't as if he had no knowledge of her.

  Then it hit her.

  She blamed Mary Schmitz. Mary hadn't wanted to take the children in or acknowledge their link to her husband.

  “Why would she take the proof of her husband's infidelity into her own home? That was not Mary's way. That would be asking too much of a woman like her,” Carla said later.

  But John Schmitz, what was his excuse? She couldn't figure out why he didn't stand up for those children when they really needed it. It blew her mind that those children had to live like that when they had a father.

  “Why are those kids in an orphanage?” she asked over and over in 1998. “Those poor kids must think their sister doesn't care about them. They must wonder why their own sister didn't come after them.”

  Chapter 11
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br />   CALIFORNIA WAS FAR away, the shimmer of the ocean from her bedroom window was a cherished memory. Never more would there be phone calls from friends all over Orange County.

  “Hey, Mary Kay, look outside and tell us what the beach is doing!”

  The Carla Stuckle scandal was not relevant anymore, because her father had told her it was not important. And Mary Kay Schmitz was enrolled in classes at Arizona State University, far from it all.

  All of Mary Kay Schmitz's friends were beautiful. That had been true with Michelle in Corona del Mar and it was true of a fine-boned blond named Kate Stewart at Arizona State University where she met Mary Kay in the late fall of 1982. Kate was a political science major and Mary Kay was dabbling in the arts, talking about teaching. And while they were at Arizona State to get their college degrees, both knew that meeting the right man was a possibility, too. The young women dumped their roommates and moved in together when the best apartment in the complex where they both lived became available.

  Mary Kay had just broken up with a man that friends thought was the love of her life—long before a Samoan boy named Vili Fualaau, of course. Mary Kay had entertained the idea that she might marry the guy, though he hadn't asked her. And, she said later, she hadn't gone to bed with him. It was a long time since she'd been a virgin, of course, but for this man she was saving herself for the honeymoon.

  “I'd seen [Mary Kay and the college man] together a few times when Mary Kay was at the apartment,” Kate Stewart recalled. “Then it was over, and I wasn't paying too much attention that he was such a big deal to her. When we got closer she described the whole thing for me. I read the letters and I thought, How could this guy undo this… it shouldn't have happened. I wouldn't say it devastated her. It would take a lot to devastate her. I wouldn't say she's devastated now. You can't break this girl.”

  Kate and Mary Kay never had any classes together. At the time they met, Kate had left her sorority, tired of being told what to do and when to do it. Mary Kay was looking into pledging and, in time, would choose Pi Fi. Their friendship remained strong. Between classes at the university and hostess and waitress jobs at Mother Tuckers Restaurant or the Paradise Bar and Grill, the two were party companions, driving to and from hot spots in Mary Kay's Ford Fiesta without any brakes.

  Mary Kay loved to party.

  “She lives on the edge,” Kate said later of her friend. “She's one of those personalities. She's very outgoing, very nonmainstream. She has her own mind, her own way, and I've accepted that.”

  Wearing miniskirts they had just made—hemmed with tape because there hadn't been time to finish them before heading out one night—Kate and Mary Kay went out to party. That night at a frat party at Pi Kappa Alpha, Kate ran into friends from Chicago and Mary Kay was partying and dancing with a nice-looking guy, blond and buff, a fraternity boy from Alaska named Steve Letourneau. When Kate wanted to move on to the next hot spot, she couldn't get Mary Kay to shake the new guy. Steve even followed them out to Mary Kay's car. Kate got into the driver's seat.

  “They were talking and talking. Come on, let's go. Then I thought, Well, maybe she's really interested in him.”

  As the weeks flew by, Mary Kay and Steve were always together. For Mary Kay, coming out of the breakup that had crushed her, it seemed like a nice diversion. Nothing more. Mary Kay said that Steve Letourneau was fun. And with that, Kate shrugged off the relationship. It was nothing serious and it certainly wasn't going anywhere. Mary Kay was more than the boy from the Pacific Northwest could handle.

  “He was very average-looking. She liked him. So that was fine. They clicked. They enjoyed each other's company. I don't think it was any more than that. He certainly was not a perfect pick for her,” Kate said later.

  But as Kate observed Mary Kay and the new boyfriend, she could see some changes in Steve. He was dressing better, for one. Kate wondered if Mary Kay was performing some kind of male makeover. Some women, she knew, were drawn to men they could mold and transform. Steve could have been that kind of a project for her friend. Looking back on those days at Arizona State and the years that followed, Kate Stewart could never say that Mary Kay ever really loved Steve.

  “She certainly never, never loved him. When I use the word 'love' I'm talking about the bonded-at-the-hip love. Certainly not. If she would have had the opportunity to get back together with her old boyfriend, I think she would have. It would have hurt her to tell Steve that she was going back, but I don't think she'd have thought twice.”

  Mary Kay never planned on marrying Steve Letourneau.

  “In fact she said, 'I'll never marry him,' ” Kate recalled years later.

  But at twenty-two, Mary Kay became pregnant.

  “I wanted someone to tell me, 'It's okay to have the baby by yourself. You'll be able to take care of it. You'll be okay. You can still finish school. Your baby will be loved.' But no one said that,” she said later.

  * * *

  Confusion and worry was all over her face. Mary Kay Schmitz told Kate Stewart that she was pregnant as they stood outside in front of Kate's town house next to her convertible.

  “What are you going to do? I know you don't love him,” she said.

  Before Mary Kay could respond, Kate pushed the point harder.

  “You're not going to marry him, are you?” she asked.

  Mary Kay was uncertain. “I know I shouldn't,” she said finally. “I don't want to. It's not my choice. I'm not sure what I'm going to do.”

  Not long after Mary Kay told Kate that she was pregnant by Steve Letourneau, tragedy struck on campus and she miscarried. She hadn't had time to come up with an answer about marrying Steve; she hadn't told her family she was pregnant. As Mary Kay later recounted to Kate, she had been in class when she started to bleed. The blood flow worsened and she was taken to the hospital.

  “Okay, now I have to tell my mother,” she told Kate. “Now I'm in the hospital, now it's serious. Something's going on. Now, it's just not we're in college and I'm pregnant. It's now, what are we going to do?”

  She called her mother.

  Mary Schmitz was very right wing, a right-to-lifer for whom abortion was always murder. From her home in Washington, D.C., Mary Kay's mother talked to the Arizona doctors and told them that absolutely under no circumstances would a D & C be performed on her daughter. It was possible, she said, that there could be another baby. As it turned out, Mary Schmitz was right. Her daughter had lost a twin, but the other baby would survive.

  Kate parts company with Michelle when it comes to the relationship between mother and daughter and she considers the support Mary Schmitz gave her daughter when she was miscarrying the baby as the perfect illustration. Kate saw something that Michelle never saw. When Mary Kay really needed her, her mother was there.

  “I think her mother has always been there for her but she hides behind her spirituality. I think her mom wants to be there for her, but Mary's always been the high-roller, live-on-the-edge member of the family. It's hard for Mom. 'You're not my straitlaced daughter, but you're probably my most capable if you'd go that route and it pisses me off when you haven't.' ”

  There would be no D & C. But, Mary Schmitz pointed out, there would be a wedding. Her daughter would be marrying Steve Letourneau after all.

  Maybe I can learn to love him. I owe it to my child to give it a try, Mary Kay thought.

  When her best friend left Orange County for Tempe, Arizona, Michelle felt lost and abandoned. She hadn't bothered to make any other close friends because Mary Kay had been more than enough. Michelle dropped in and out of community college trying to figure out what she wanted to do and where her life would take her.

  Mary Kay was off at college and seemed so happy. She was in love with a wonderful man. But suddenly, the relationship fell apart. Mary Kay was crushed by the breakup with the man she dreamed of marrying—before Steve Letourneau came into her life. Depression gripped her for weeks, months.

  “She was almost suicidal when that ended,” Mic
helle said later of the relationship before Steve Letourneau. “She was as low as I've ever heard her. I remember talking to her on the phone and I was really worried about her. Really worried. This was serious.”

  And then she starting talking about Steve Letourneau.

  “Try to imagine where her heart and mind was when Steve came along. She needed someone safe. Someone she knew wouldn't hurt her. Someone she could manipulate.”

  Michelle had no doubts that Steve was a rebound relationship, the change had been so sudden. Mary Kay had gone from the depths of depression to the joy of a new love. And then she was pregnant and married. Lickety-split. It was too swift.

  Michelle would never forget her first impression of Steve Letourneau. He was nice enough, she thought, but Mary Kay could have done much better. She was way out of his league.

  “He reminded me of a puppy. Following her around licking her hand.”

  Michelle knew that her friend's upcoming marriage meant an end to their friendship as they had envisioned it. The closeness they shared would never be the same. She only wished that Mary Kay would be happy. That Mary Kay's deal with her family to marry her baby's father would be worth it. That her dreams wouldn't die because she had to settle for a man she didn't love.

  Chapter 12

  WHATEVER STEVE LETOURNEAU'S role in what happened with his wife—and what drove Mary Kay to do what she did with her student—his background was no Norman Rockwell ideal, either. When he was a boy, his parents, Sharon and Dick Letourneau, moved to Anchorage, Alaska, from Puyallup, near Tacoma, Washington, located near the base of Mount Rainier. Dick Letourneau had a job as a salesman for a food products company and the move was a step up. The Letourneaus' shaky marriage didn't survive long after the move. Steve was thirteen and his sister, Stacey, was nine when their parents divorced.

  Grandma Nadine, Sharon's mother, was heartbroken, not only because of the divorce, but because the children ended up staying with their father. She said it was their choice, not their mother's wish.