by Gregg Olsen
“Sharon didn't abandon them. She lived close to them. She kept track of them every day. She stayed in their living quarters until the kids adjusted to their being apart,” Nadine said later. Sharon stayed nearby and never missed one of her son's baseball games. In time, Steve's mother married a younger man.
Grandma Nadine understood why Steve was resentful of the divorce, but she felt that her daughter Sharon had been made out to be the cause of everything. Years later, the hurt was not completely absent from her words. Grandma Nadine had to admit that though Steve and Stacey loved their mother, they worshiped their dad.
“They had every right to,” she said. “He did everything with them. He was a great father, still is.”
Steve Letourneau returned to the Seattle area for Thanksgiving 1983. His grandmother Nadine had hosted the family gathering in her mobile home in a Puyallup, Washington, trailer court for as many years as most could remember. The guest list included Steve's sister, Stacey, and his father, Dick—Nadine's former son-in-law who had not yet remarried. Among the topics of conversation was the woman Steve had been dating at Arizona State. The pair were having a fling, but Steve wasn't serious about her.
Grandma Nadine later recounted the new relationship in terms very different from Michelle or Kate's versions. It wasn't Steve who was the hanger-on. “She was on his back constantly. Every place he goes she's there and he can't get rid of her. She had her eye on him. He was very preppy-looking, very good looking.
“ 'She just won't leave me alone,' Steve said.”
Grandma Nadine never minced words. “Steven,” she said, looking him straight in the eye and with convincing authority. “If you don't want her around come right out and tell her, 'Look, buzz off.' ”
Later, the grandmother would regret how her grandson had ignored her words.
A few months later, Nadine heard some startling news. Steve and the girl were getting married. Her name was Mary Kay Schmitz, the daughter of a highfalutin senator or something. Nadine was surprised because the last she heard, Steve had wanted to get away from the girl.
Arizona State University was part of the past. The college degrees they had sought would have to wait. Suntanned sorority girls and fraternity boys joined the Schmitz family as they celebrated the hurry-up wedding of Steve Letourneau and almost four-months-pregnant Mary Kay Schmitz on June 30, 1984. Dolgren Chapel at Georgetown University, where John Schmitz had been on sabbatical, was the venue. It was by any estimation a lovely and very Catholic wedding. Leaving no detail unplanned, the bride paid special attention to the music. She had three trumpeters and a vocalist.
“If you ask any of my relatives which was the most beautiful wedding, they would say mine,” Mary Kay later told a friend.
Steve's maternal relatives didn't have the funds or couldn't take time off from work to attend the ceremony. Dick Letourneau and his second wife made it, though. It was just as well. It wasn't the wedding of anyone's dreams, anyway. For Mary Kay, everything was perfect with the exception of a groom that she didn't love.
Back in Puyallup, Washington, Grandma Nadine had worked her fingers to the bone at a local drugstore chain; she had raised her children with love and a firm hand. She was the kind of woman who refused to take any guff from anyone. She didn't like the phoniness that came with money and social standing. Steve was her grandson and when he and his new bride returned from the wedding in Washington, D.C., after dropping out of college, she insisted on holding a reception for her side of the family, since only the money side—the Letourneaus—had been able to travel back East for the wedding. Steve's mother, Sharon, had yet to meet her son's bride. Nadine cooked day and night, spruced up her mobile home, and set a pretty table.
Mary Kay was polite and demure and very beautiful and Nadine took an instant dislike to her. A few minutes after they met, the sixty-something woman with glasses that pinched her nose excused herself and went to the kitchen where her daughters were working.
“Well, wonder when she's due?” Nadine asked.
“Mother!” one of the daughters said.
“Okay, bet me. I didn't have six kids for nothing.”
The younger women laughed it off.
But, of course, their mother was right.
A few weeks later, Steve confirmed that his new wife was pregnant. His grandmother was satisfied that she had been correct.
“It takes two to tango,” she said. “If a girl's gonna lay down with a guy, a guy's gonna take it. I don't care who it is—could be the Pope.”
“She trapped him,” Nadine said several years later, still furious over the situation. “She thought she was getting into a wanna-be Kennedy-type situation because he was the preppy-type kid that was going to Arizona State.”
Her perspective possibly skewed by bitterness, Grandma Nadine would later shake her head at the memory of her first impression of Mary Kay Letourneau. She was uneasy about Steve's girlish and wide-eyed bride with the upper-crust pedigree, and wasn't afraid to say so. Nadine was the type of woman who arrived at instant and ironclad conclusions when it came to sizing up a person's character.
“I knew there was going to be trouble,” she said later.
A few months after Nadine's reception in Puyallup, Steven, Jr., was born at a hospital in Anchorage, Alaska. When Mary Kay and Steve brought their first baby home from the hospital the new mother put him in a family-heirloom bassinet that she had lined with fabric she had ordered from the Paris specialty retailer, Descamps.
“It was just perfect,” she said later of the fabric. “It was a pattern of soft delicate hearts, classic, not the Valentine's hearts, but a more classic look.”
Chapter 13
SOUTH OF SEATTLE and not far from the airport, Kent, Washington, had been in a growth spurt for much of the 1980s. The suburban city was a bland mix of old and new. Ticky-tacky apartments along I-5 and view homes overlooking the Kent Valley and Mount Rainier were at the extremes. It was by far middle and working class.
Traffic had been increasing steadily. Making a left turn down into the valley was becoming more difficult for the folks who lived in the condominium complex called Carriage Row and worked in the basin that had become a sprawl of nondescript aerospace offices where truck farms once flourished. In 1985 Steve, Mary Kay, and their toddler son, Steven, moved into unit 109 of the town-house-style complex done up in theme more akin to Boston than Seattle. The family moved down from Anchorage; Steve had been transferred to the SeaTac hub of Alaska Airlines where he worked handling baggage. Mary Kay was gearing up for classes at Seattle University where she would complete what she had started at Arizona State. She was going to be a teacher.
One sunny afternoon when Joe Bendix was pruning some shrubbery in front of his condominium, he was interrupted by Mary Letourneau. A very casual Mary.
“Have you seen my son, Steven?” she asked.
Joe said he hadn't. He put down his tools.
“I haven't seen him in a while,” she said. “Wonder where he is… ”
Her tone was flat. She was so casual about it.
Hadn't seen him in a while.
Joe Bendix knew the drill. There were plenty of times when Mary would get busy doing something, lose track of the time and her barely-out-of-diapers son. More than once Joe would call over to another neighbor and the pair would canvas the parking lot, the greenbelt, and the edge of the property abutting the apartment construction site in search of little Steven.
Mary's lack of urgency mystified the man.
She's a sweet lady, but only by the grace of God has that little boy made it as far as he has, Joe thought.
Years later he still wondered about it. Oddly enough, he never doubted that Mary loved Steven or her other children. She was a good mother, except for losing track of her progeny.
“This kid was three or so and running around this complex,” Joe recalled. “My next-door neighbor and I would freak out. There was a busy street and they were building some apartments. We'd find him watching the heavy e
quipment on the edge of the construction site. They could have squashed him like a bug. It really shocked me.”
If ever someone needed a new beginning, it was Teri Simmons. The daughter of Fran Bendix, who lived across the Carriage Row complex from the Letourneaus, was fighting a secret disease that in time would nearly take her life. Bulimia had been her secret hell since her parents split up when she was just twelve. Fran went off to flight attendant school and eventually married Joe Bendix, also a flight attendant. The two worked at Alaska Airlines with Steve Letourneau. Teri, a soft-voiced young woman from Texas with a little bit of the Lone Star State in her accent, came to Seattle to start over, finish her degree at the University of Washington, reconnect with her mother, and, God willing, get better.
Almost immediately, the young woman across the complex caught her eye.
“When you first see her she is so stylish, so striking, and such a beautiful woman and so precious that I was a little put off,” Teri Simmons said later. “I thought maybe she was a little, for lack of a better term, snobby. I got to know her a little bit at a time, then all of a sudden we were great friends. Once you get past that facade.”
Though Mary Kay was a mother and wife, she and Teri were at similar places in their professional lives. Mary Kay was trying to finish up her degree at Seattle University, following it with a student teaching stint at a Catholic school in Seattle. Teri was enrolled at the University of Washington. Both women had let things slow them in their plans to complete their education. For Mary Kay, it was motherhood. For Teri, it was her bulimia.
“We were like those little fishin' bobbers,” Teri remembered some time later. “We were all by ourselves and we happened to bump into each other and we stuck. Neither one of us had any other friends. We were very fortunate to have found each other.”
The Letourneaus were a family that was focused on the future. There didn't seem to be much affection between Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau. Their lives were a routine. A marriage more like a business deal than an affair of the heart. The love between them barely showed. But, Teri and others wondered, how could it? Mary Kay was going to school and Steve was always working or taking the odd classes at Highline Community College. Steve was hardly ever home.
“He worked his ass off,” Teri said later. “He worked so hard for that family. They were a family that had a mission that was bent on both of them getting their education and doing what they wanted to do.”
Years later, when his supporters would be few and far between, Teri Simmons would stand up for her old friend and neighbor, Steve Letourneau.
“He never got to finish [his education]. He never got to do what he wanted to do. And Mary Kay did. She got what she wanted and she blew it. If I were Steve I would feel so badly about that.”
The weeks and months flew by. Mary Kay and Teri carpooled to class with little Steven in tow. They clipped coupons for grocery shopping at Albertson's and they hung around the town house, joking and laughing like a couple of teenagers, and sharing their dreams for the future sprawled out on towels at Seattle's Alki Beach. Throughout all of it, Mary Kay had a singular focus.
Now pregnant with her second child, Mary Kay told Teri that she had wanted nothing more in her life than to be a teacher. And she gave the endeavor her all. It was not uncommon to look across the way late at night to see the lights still on at the Letourneau town house. At two, three, four, five A.M. the lights would shine. Somehow Mary Kay could tap into energy sources unknown to most as she cut pieces of construction paper into pretty shapes for her classroom assignments. She was determined to be the best.
In the summer of 1987, Mary Kay, twenty-five, delivered her first daughter at Seattle's Swedish Hospital. The blond-haired baby resembled Steve's side of the family. When Mary Kay held her infant, she looked down on the most beautiful baby girl in the world. In keeping with eight generations of Irish tradition, like her mother before her, she named her first baby girl Mary—Mary Claire. She cuddled her little one as though she wanted the moment to last forever, as though she couldn't let her go. She wanted a closeness with her babies.
“My mother just wasn't that way,” Mary Kay said later. “When I'm with my children, they are in my arms and I'm with them. I sat at my mother's side. That was the way she was. She was the queen, and I was just her daughter. That we're not close doesn't mean that I don't love her and that she doesn't love me.”
Teri Simmons wasn't just off the turnip truck. She had been raised in Dallas, for goodness' sake. But the woman across the way from Corona del Mar had a sense of style that took her breath away. No matter how scant funds were, Mary Kay Letourneau always looked like a million bucks. Even with her hair up in a simple ponytail and her lips tinted with bright pink lipstick, there was no one lovelier. Teri admired that style so much, for a while she even emulated Mary Kay. When they were taken for sisters it was the greatest compliment Teri had ever known.
Mary Kay was a firm believer in the idea that it was better to have one fine thing than a half-dozen average items. Quality over quantity. Clothes were a key example. She'd save up her money and splurge on a garment from Ann Taylor or I. Magnin and wear it until it disintegrated. A green wool short skirt was a particular favorite during the early days at Carriage Row.
“I'll never forget it. It must have cost a fortune. She wore it all the time. It was better to wear something that was perfect and nice, than trash,” Teri recalled.
Her husband was not that way—at least at that time.
“Steve would rather have three pairs of blue jeans from Target than one pair of chinos from the Gap.”
The Letourneaus' town house also demonstrated Mary Kay's ideal that a little of the best was better than a lot of the mundane. The furniture was ratty, but some of the accessories were exquisite. Crystal and porcelain befitting a family of wealth, not a young couple just starting out in life. Appliances were first-rate, too. The vacuum cleaner in particular impressed Teri.
“You could ride that sucker, it was so neat. It was top of the line. Had every attachment.”
And so in the world according to Mary Kay, there was a lesson that Teri Simmons would take to heart and retain for the rest of her life.
“You don't have to have everything the best. You can take one piece, one item and it sort of uplifts everything around it. It was sort of like her. She could walk into a room and the elegance level would sort of rise.”
It was the cruelest kind of payback that Teri Simmons could have imagined. Why hadn't the Schmitz family-Mary Schmitz in particular—stepped in to help? Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau weren't starving to death, but things were so tight that Mary Kay went most of the winter in a windbreaker because she couldn't afford a warmer coat.
Her parents could probably do a little more than they are now, with this struggling family. It's awful, Teri thought. They have the money.
But as Mary Kay explained it, though she certainly didn't whine about it, her family, some thought, had written her off after she married Steve. Her family had expected better things of her. A better husband. Someone more in line with their socioeconomic status.
“They were sort of punishing her,” Teri said later. “I don't know what they hoped to gain from that.”
Teri would never forget the time when Mary Kay got a notice that the post office was holding a package for her. The two went together to get the parcel, addressed to Mary Kay by astrologer and close Schmitz family friend Jeanne Dixon. Opened at the Carriage Row town house, the box held a gorgeous brown wool coat with a trim of sleek black fur. Enclosed was a touching letter from Jeanne.
“Mary Kay was so excited,” Teri recalled. “I don't think it was the coat, I think it was that somebody had mothered her. She loved Jeanne. Jeanne Dixon was the only connection she had with anyone on a parental level.”
Years later people went looking for answers to why things had turned out as they had. For some, like friend Teri Simmons, it was easy to point to the Schmitz family. She viewed Mary Kay as the trag
ic product of a family that largely ignored their daughter because she disappointed them by settling for Steve Letourneau. In time, something dire was bound to emerge.
“I'm surprised it took this long for something to happen,” Teri said.
With the exception of her brothers and the mention of her estrangement with her mother, Mary Kay seldom discussed the Schmitzes. Tears came when she spoke about Philip and how the family “never got over” his death. But she never talked about her sisters. Most peculiar of all was Mary Kay's representation of her father.
“I could swear that she told me he was dead,” Teri said later, puzzled because by then she knew it was not true. “She would tell me how close they were when she was little. But for some reason, I had it in my head that he was gone. I don't think I would have made it up. I thought in my head all this time that he was dead.”
Mary Kay never referred to him in the present tense.
“Maybe if he had shunned her it was almost easier to say he was dead?” Teri speculated.
And despite the turmoil of her past and the estrangement from her family, Mary Kay found time for generosity. One gift that she gave Teri Simmons will never be forgotten. It was a beautiful writing journal, with a black leather binding accented by red corners, made in France. Mary Kay presented Teri with the journal between classes at the university during one of their carpooling days. It was the perfect gift for the troubled young woman who liked to write and who had a need to pour out the hurt in her heart on pages of paper. Though the gift probably took her last dollar, Mary Kay didn't care.
“She wanted to make sure everyone around her that she cared about had the tools they needed to be free, to be liberated,” Teri said later.
That was Mary Kay Letourneau. Free. Encouraging. A giver.
Chapter 14
CIRCUMSTANCES WOULD LATER change perceptions and alter memories, but no one at Gregory Heights Elementary in Burien, Washington, could deny that the pretty young teacher started her career in public education with the kind of brilliance that ensured a remarkable career. Colleagues could easily tick off a list of attributes: creative, enthusiastic, artistic, thoughtful, patient. She was everything any parent would want for their child in a classroom setting. Mary Kay Letourneau, twenty-six, came to the Highline School District 401 in September 1988—it was the third of her student-teaching internships.
