by Gregg Olsen
Master teacher Mary Newby saw a great future for Mary Letourneau and would later tell friends that she had benefited from the experience of working with her in her sixth-grade class.
“I loved working with her because I could say something and she'd add a level to it, then I'd add a level to it. It was a great experience. It expanded my teaching and my thinking.”
Part of Mary Kay's gift was her enthusiasm. Though in her mid-twenties and the mother of two, she had not lost the sense of wonder and excitement of the learning process. Somehow she had been able to retain it.
“We'd talk about something we needed to do and she'd have fresh ideas and ways of looking at ways to approach it, versus the same old stuff.”
Mary Kay was always prepared, always went the extra mile. She was at ease with the students and they liked her. Only once did Mary Newby see any cause for concern.
“One time when she was being observed by her college professor. She was very, very nervous, very tired. It was the one time when her lessons didn't seem as thought-out. It was still okay, but not as outstanding as she had done [before].”
“Is there something going on?” she asked her.
Mary admitted she'd been up very late. She said Steve had been working graveyard at Alaska Airlines and he wanted her to keep the kids up as late as possible so that they'd sleep for him in the morning. She couldn't start her schoolwork until after they went to bed.
“It didn't happen again,” Mary Newby said later. “She didn't offer much more. It was a sleep issue. She was very… now I use the word 'driven'; back then, I thought very 'committed' to doing an outstanding job.”
Mary Newby knew that her student teacher was pressed for money. Steve Letourneau didn't have a terrific job. Tossing baggage at SeaTac couldn't have paid that much and Mary Kay indicated that her husband had been pressuring her to do whatever it took to get her teaching certificate so that she could “go out and earn some money.”
No matter what pressures she had from husband Steve, Mary Kay somehow fueled her ambition to do what she wanted, to shift the priorities of the day to suit her sense of importance. Often that meant setting the bills and worry aside for the fun stuff. With Halloween at hand came the quest for the perfect costume for little Steven. Mary Kay had decided her little boy would be the quintessential dragon. She outfitted her son in colored hightops, a little green tail, and a pullover. She even attached felt triangles to the back of the pullover. But something was missing. Something kept the costume from perfection. She recruited Teri Simmons to help in the search for the right fabric to finish it off.
“She wanted his chest area to be covered with green shimmery stuff to look like scales,” Teri recalled many years later. “We must have gone to thirty different stores! But we found it and she did it. At the last minute we had this perfect little dragon.”
When the hunt was on there was no stopping Mary Kay. If it meant driving around all day with a car running on empty, it didn't matter to her. If it required circling the globe in the quest of something she envisioned, she'd do it. Making do with something less than that was never an option.
Chapter 15
NATALIE BATES WAS one of those who came to celebrate Mary Letourneau's graduation from Seattle University. Mary told her neighbor that it was an “informal” get-together. The word “informal” was important to Natalie, who considered herself “a jeans and sweats” kind of person. To Natalie's surprise, the spring 1989 gathering included Mary Kay's mother and father, just in from Washington, D.C. Natalie wasn't the type to party with strangers, but she was so fond of and so proud of the young woman's accomplishment that she decided to pop over for cake and coffee. It was the only time she'd known Mary Kay's parents to make the trek from back East for a visit. Years later, Natalie couldn't deny that she was a little bit curious about John and Mary Schmitz. Mary had told Natalie that she was not close to her mother.
“It was really strange. I couldn't believe the mother. She was a nice-looking lady with sort of reddish-brown hair, slender and well dressed. But I didn't see anything in the way of love over there. It just didn't seem like a family affair. It was like somebody came to tea… and then she was gone,” she said later.
A lack of interaction between John and Mary Schmitz also struck Natalie Bates as odd. It almost seemed like they weren't connected to each other, bonded like a longtime married couple.
“No closeness,” Natalie recalled.
It was years later that Natalie Bates began to wonder what, if anything, could have caused the tragic turn of events that would ruin lives, make people rich, and send a woman to prison. She remembered the graduation party and the cold vibes she picked up from the parents.
Then one day the answer came to her. It was so obvious, she thought. It must be a lack of love. Mary didn't get any love. Not from her parents. Not from her husband.
“If she had had some love from somebody else, maybe Steve… this would never have happened,” Natalie said many years later.
The relationship with Mary Kay and her parents was complicated, and after a time Steve's maternal grandmother, Nadine, didn't even try to figure it out. Mary Kay acted like she couldn't stand her mother and that her mother didn't care about her. Her father was wonderful and could do no wrong. Such descriptions were at odds with what Steve's grandmother heard from Steve or saw for herself.
Steve had told his grandmother that his in-laws didn't have the best marriage; in fact, John Schmitz had fathered two illegitimate children with a campaign worker.
“This was her Prince Charming father?” Nadine wondered.
Whenever Mary Kay had a baby, Nadine and her daughters would show up with a gift. One time when they were over there, Mary Kay made mention of a present her mother had sent for the new baby.
“I got a box from my mom today,” she said, looking disgusted. “I wish she'd mind her own business. It was something I wouldn't put on my child.”
As far as Nadine could see, it was an absolutely beautiful outfit.
“How's your dad?” Nadine asked one time.
“I don't know,” she said. “I talked to my mom, but I didn't ask her.”
Years later Nadine would wonder how much Mary Kay's parents knew about her daughter's life in Kent. Mary Kay put on such a pretty face about everything. But it wasn't pretty from where Nadine sat.
“It was a big front. It was too nicey-nice. You've got kids running wild, and you'd say, 'Honey, will you take care of the children? Honey, would you see what they are doing now?' “
Their financial situation was perpetually in dire straits, too.
“They were always sending home for money. Sharon said it was constant. Two hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars. Telephone service would be cut off. Didn't have food on the table. Where was the money going? They were making over sixty thousand dollars a year. Where was it going? They had nothing to show for it.”
Steve and Mary Kay's chronic lateness was no joke to Steve Letourneau's grandmother. She was the opposite. When she was required to be at work at five-thirty, she'd show up at the drug and variety store at five just to be safe. But that was her and she did her best not to fault people for running a little late. But not two or three hours, as had been the case with Steve and Mary Kay. And not at Christmas.
She blamed Mary Kay for the tardiness.
“That was her. Control. That was her way of controlling. That's like a kid pooping his pants when he's five. Because he's got the control. That's the way Mary was,” she said later.
But being late for a Christmas celebration and gift exchange, however, would not be tolerated by Steve's grandmother.
“They knew what time we started. I got the table all set. The little kids are running around wanting to open presents. How do you explain to a three-year-old that we can't start yet [because] Mary Kay's not here?” Nadine said later.
Everyone was needed on time because the children had drawn names and if everyone was not there someone wouldn't get their present. Fi
nally, Nadine couldn't hold it inside and have another Christmas ruined. She confronted Mary Kay over the phone.
“No more! I've had it up to my eyebrows! If you want to exchange gifts, you bring the gifts the day before. I don't care if you come from Timbuktu, bring the gifts over here. At least we will have the gifts for the kids,” she said.
If Mary Kay was an outsider in Steve's family it didn't matter much to her and she dealt with it when she had to. Individually, she considered them all right, salt-of-the-earth types. But all of them together in a group was something else. She thought that they carried gigantic chips on their shoulders.
“I don't know what it is all about,” she told a friend later, “but Steve's family—his mother's side—spend every minute of the day thinking that the world owes them something. It is as if they aren't good enough. There is so much negativity there.”
When Gregory Heights sixth-grade teacher Mary Newby picked up the phone in the late summer of 1989, it was her former student teacher Mary Kay Letourneau calling with a good news / bad news scenario. She had been offered a job teaching second grade at Shorewood Elementary, but she didn't know if she wanted to teach that grade level. She had preferred teaching older kids. The principal, she said, was pressuring her.
“Well, you know,” the veteran teacher said, “I've taught every grade and there are wonderful things about each one of them. You'll do fine with second-graders… you'll have your foot in the door.”
Mary Kay said she'd think about it.
Chapter 16
JUST BEYOND A church sits Shorewood Elementary School at 2725 SW 116th Avenue S., down the hill from the trouble and traffic of Ambaum Boulevard, one of the SeaTac Airport area's busiest streets. The neighborhood is older, with lots of “Grandma Houses”—small, single-story homes with mature camellias and driveways without oil stains. In the past few years, some have been torn down to make way for newer, bigger, not nearly as charming homes for a younger crowd of Boeing workers and professionals just trying to get a toehold in a tough Seattle housing market.
The neighborhood surrounding the brick- and glass-block-faced school hasn't changed all that much since the 1950s when the school was a bastion of middle-class homogeneity. The homes are tidy and the yards clean. No autos growing moss on blocks in the front yards. Shorewood remains far enough from White Center and Burien to feel safe at night, though not as many would walk its streets as they did in the past. Today, the school draws students from a larger area, going far to the east to pick up children who live in low-income housing and fixer-uppers-in-waiting. Almost a third of the children enrolled at Shorewood are eligible for the free-lunch program.
The building is unremarkable in a way that makes one wonder if anything, or anyone, of any particular interest could come from such a place. Inside, the school is antiquated, though clean; a victim of failing funding levies. One teacher's father once inquired if the building was condemned. A seagull is the school mascot. Glazed terra-cotta tiles made by students over the years are inset into the hallway walls. The gymnasium walls are painted with college football-team logos from Washington State and the University of Washington.
All teachers are white, which belies the ethnic diversity that has taken root over the years. More than forty languages and dialects are spoken in the Highline School District. At Shorewood, twenty percent of the students are Asian and Pacific Islander, six percent black, four percent Hispanic, and the other two thirds, white. Five hundred students attend the school. Twenty-four teachers stand up in front of their classrooms each day to provide the foundation for the education that will carry their students through the rest of their lives.
But in the end, that world would only focus on two. One teacher and one student.
When Mary Kay Letourneau arrived to teach second grade in 1989 she brought with her an undeniable and welcome burst of enthusiasm. For the shiny new students in her class, she was Mary Poppins and the tooth fairy all rolled into one. The children adored her because she was pretty, young, and probably most important of all, fun to be around. She invited the children to participate in the process of learning.
One teacher who observed her classroom during those early days noticed that Mrs. Letourneau gave her children nearly an unprecedented amount of personal choice when it came to curriculum. Whatever the kids wanted, she allowed.
“She would constantly rearrange things; she never had a lesson plan book. Well, she did, but it was hardly filled in and she never followed it because things would change minute by minute or hour by hour,” the observing teacher said later, though she admitted, “It seems like when the class had big projects to do, they did get done.”
Mary Letourneau seemed to thrive on her own chaos, a deliberate chaos in which she was planted firmly in the center of the storm, ready to sort it all out in the end. No matter how long she had to stay up into the night, she could handle it. It suited her personality. The kids liked it. And as time went on, she became known as a creative teacher, one who didn't line things up in neat rows with all the dots connected. For many, that was her charm.
It started from Day One and escalated only slightly until 1996 when Mary's chaos became a typhoon.
“I think there was always that disorganization, that comfort level, of being able to tolerate more volume than some teachers can. Personally, I think that's one of the reasons some children really adored being in her room. There was not a lot of structure. They got to do a whole lot of things in a different way than they did in a more structured classroom. They were given a lot of different choices,” said one friend from the school.
There was a price for the charm and personality that made Mrs. Letourneau's reputation as a “fun and creative” teacher. It was a price paid by other teachers. Mary Kay almost never made it to a meeting on time—from the very beginning of her tenure at Shorewood. When she'd arrive late for class, she'd shrug it off with a laugh and the look that all harried mothers know…. Day care problems, you know!
It was nothing for Mary to phone a staff member after eleven in the evening to check on something related to an event or project. In truth, few minded. They understood that with two, three, then four children, she had her hands full at home. From what her colleagues could tell, Steve almost always worked nights and often on the weekends, leaving his wife with the lion's share of the day-to-day family responsibilities. She had to feed the children, put them to bed and get them ready for school the next day. If she was at wit's end getting everything done, then she was like a million other working mothers.
Mary had a reputation for staying up all night working on report cards for conferences and barely finishing them as the parents walked into the classroom. Receipts turned into the office for reimbursement were noted not because of their requested sums, but for the time noted on the bottom: “Kinko's copies, 2 A.M.” According to Mary, late-night hours had been a way of life for her even as young girl. It was the Schmitz way. And later in life, she said, it was nothing for her to call her mother or sister after midnight to find out they were just clearing the dinner dishes. Mary Kay was from a family of night owls.
“But Steve was never a part of that life, that late-night rhythm,” she said later. “Partly because of his work, but also because he just didn't function the way the rest of us did. The kids understood it. We all did.”
One teacher who taught some of Mary's former students noticed that every other paper was wrinkled, and had coffee and food stains spilled onto them. The stack of papers looked more like garbage than a sheaf of schoolwork.
But in time, over the years of missed meetings and unfulfilled staff responsibilities, there was the feeling that Mary Letourneau was given special privileges. She was given more slack than just about anyone at Shorewood. One time when she was scheduled to give a portion of a presentation at a staff meeting, she did not arrive.
“Oh, you know Mary, she's on Mary's time,” said the principal as if being on time was not important. Others had families, too. Others had places t
o go. It was irritating and unfair. But even so, for the most part, the staff liked her. She was so very likable.
When his wife made the move from one classroom to another, Steve Letourneau came to Shorewood to help. Her room was overloaded with stuff another teacher wouldn't imagine saving.
“There were papers that she had from kids two and three years prior. These kids are fifth-graders now, why do you want to hang on to that? It was something tangible she wanted to keep,” said a teacher who was there the day of a classroom move.
It was also a sign of a woman so on the go she didn't have time for the most rudimentary of housekeeping chores. A cat box in the corner of the classroom was fetid with feces. The cat Mary had adopted to help illustrate a story she was reading with the class had been gone for more than a year.
Chapter 17
IDENTICAL TWINS AMBER and Angie Fish and their mother Joy, and older sister Lisa, were making a fresh start at Carriage Row when they moved into condominium unit 108 in 1990. The Letourneaus, in 109, were their next-door neighbors. That first day, when the twins returned a naked three-year-old Mary Claire home after the little girl went calling for the neighbors that had just vacated the Fish condo, they met Mary Kay. She was pretty and sweet and in need of some help. Too young for mall jobs, too young for boyfriends, and stuck in the south Seattle suburbs, Amber and Angie answered yes in unison when Mary Kay asked if they wanted to baby-sit. And from that day forward, the dark-haired, dark-eyed look-alikes would come to view Mary Kay, Steve, and their growing brood as close as family. But for the twins, the jewel of 109 was Mary Kay. It was more than that she was beautiful and blond, though most preteens would have held her in high regard for the physical perfection she exemplified. For the Fish twins their love of Mary Kay came from how she treated them and the way she showed a personal interest in them. She was more like a friend than some grown-up.
