by Gregg Olsen
“Every single child in that family had promise, were gifted in one area. Vili's was his art, Perry with his voice, Leni was the athlete, Favaae was a mathematician,” said one teacher.
As is often the case in places like White Center, when personal ambition does not exist and parental support is not there, promises go unfulfilled. Though Leni, the sole daughter of the family, did earn an athletic scholarship, she didn't make it to college.
Vili was Soona's last chance. And teachers at Shorewood knew that if he could develop his talent, he'd have something to hold on to. He had the opportunity to develop a passion and a talent that would carry him through high school.
“Every teacher tried to help him out and be a mentor. It wasn't just Mary who recognized the artistic ability in him and was trying to look outside to try to find help. She might have been the most successful at doing that because she drove him to his art class,” said one who knew the situation well.
As early as first grade and certainly by second grade, Vili Fualaau was seen as a child with undeniable artistic talent. One teacher saw it then and inquired at the YMCA to see if they could help an underprivileged kid. He could benefit from extra attention in an area in which he clearly excelled.
“If you could see his work in first grade it is about like it is now. It was that unbelievable,” a teacher said.
Whether Vili Fualaau was the Second Coming of Picasso or not was a topic of debate. Some considered the boy's artwork provocative and developed beyond his years. Mary Letourneau would nearly bring herself to tears as she thought of Vili's creative genius. Others didn't see it that way at all. They saw his creations as no better or worse than the high school artist who later pumped gas for a living and painted houses on the side.
But to Katie Hogden, her friend's talent was without limit. She noticed it in fourth grade, and two years later it was even more clear to her. Mary Letourneau had seen it two years before Katie when she taught him in second grade. With her love of art and the creative process, Mary had found her perfect student.
Certainly there were reading, writing, and math lessons, but it seemed to some observers that time in Mary Letourneau's room was filled with mask-making, drawing, and painting. When one volunteer parent brought in copies of Monet's water lily series, it was Vili who created the most stunning replica.
“It was amazing to watch him draw,” Katie said later. “It was like he took a picture with his eyes and copied it.”
The only thing Vili seemed to have trouble with was self-portraiture. Though he captured much of his physical appearance, his eyes, his mouth, Vili always made his nose two sizes too small—a kind of Michael Jackson makeover that Katie found both amusing and touching. She teased him in the way sisters or very good friends often do.
“You're Samoan,” she said. “You can't help your nose. It adds character to you.”
Vili would laugh and tease her right back, telling her she was a roly-poly.
“We both knew the other didn't mean it,” she said later.
Of course later media appearances would prove that Vili Fualauu was more a typical teenager than a great intellectual, as Mary and the lawyers would eventually proclaim to the world. Teachers at Shorewood didn't know what Mary was talking about when she carried on about the intelligence and maturity of the boy. They never thought Vili was any more grown-up than other sixth- or seventh-graders.
“He was a boy. He looked like a boy,” said one teacher.
And if Vili wasn't all that Mary made him out to be—though he might have thought so—he certainly had his following within the classrooms of Shorewood Elementary. Said one who knew him at the time: “Everyone knew him. Not everyone liked him.”
Yet when the yearbooks were distributed at the end of the year, no one would have a longer line for signatures than Vili.
There was another side to twelve-year-old Vili.
Said one close friend: “I never knew quite what was going on with him, either. He has two very distinct personalities, and they are completely different from each other. One side you know everything about him, and the other side you don't know anything about him.”
One side was Vili, the other had the nickname Buddha.
Katie Hogden saw through it: “He has one side,” she said, “ 'I'm a little thug, I'm a G [gangster], I'm hard, I know how to take care of myself,' and he'll talk to you for five minutes and he'll pick the personality you like best about him and he'll stick to that personality. Just to impress you, to make that imprint in your mind that you'll remember him now.”
That Vili was the manipulator.
“He'll pay attention to the expression on your face when he starts his personality… I know he uses it for inspiration… The reason we were friends was because I saw right through him.”
Don't play these games, I know you're not like this, she thought.
Katie felt sorry for the Vili that Mary Letourneau would later say she fell in love with—the artist.
“The side where he knew what he wants out of life, but he's kind of scared to let it happen because he thought with his family—his money situation—he'd never get to have it come true anyway. He didn't share that with a lot of people.”
Vili could charm and cajole to get what he wanted.
“New shoes!” he called out to Katie Hogden one morning when she walked in wearing a pair of Nikes right out of the box.
“You can't have them,” she shot back.
But Vili didn't give up. He told her how much he wanted a new pair of shoes, but his mom didn't have enough money to buy them for him. Katie felt sorry for him. Vili must have seen it because he continued to press the point in a niggling way that elicited more sympathy than annoyance.
“I traded him for his sister's Champions that were too small for him so he could have my designer Nike shoes,” Katie said later. “One day I just took them off and gave them to him. He was so happy. Just thrilled.”
* * *
For those who knew Vili, it was plain that no matter what had gone on in his life, no matter what troubles his mother and sister and brothers had endured—and the list was long—nothing hurt like the subject of his father, a convict named Luaiva Fualaau.
Most who knew Vili considered Luaiva Fualaau, a former auto mechanic, preacher, and purported father of eighteen, off-limits. If Vili wanted to talk about him, fine. But smarter kids knew never to bring his name up first. The fact that his father was in prison and the reason for it worried the twelve-year-old, who hadn't seen much of his father since he was two. Luaiva had assaulted his wife, and later another woman. Vili would sometimes describe some of the attacks against his mother when they lived in Hawaii. Violence scared him.
Katie remembered some time later: “He just wanted to make sure that his family was not going to end up like [his father] ended up. He never looked down on his mom for that, I don't think he ever did. He had a lot of hate in his heart for his dad. A lot.”
Chapter 25
THOUGH SHE DIDN'T bring up her family often, kids from the class knew that Mrs. Letourneau had grown up in a sunny world far from White Center.
“She was brought up to be Miss Prissy, Miss Perfect,” said one student who remembered the teacher talking about her past.
Kids from the Round Table also knew her father was somehow involved in government affairs, maybe a senator or something. Mary Kay told the group that she adored her father.
“But she never agreed with any of his morals,” Katie Hogden recalled later.
Mary's mother was another matter.
“My mom gave birth to me and she raised my brothers and sisters, but it was never anything more than that,” she told Katie, who asked about her mother a number of times.
After a while she stopped asking. She wished Mary had a close relationship with her mom, like she did with hers.
Mary's children were occasional visitors to her schoolroom throughout her teaching career at Shorewood. Although Mary professed great love for her children—and Ka
tie Hogden, for one, never doubted it—there was something different about their relationship. It was not the same as how Mary treated the kids of the Round Table.
Katie wondered about that later.
“I know she loved her kids, just like she loved every single kid in that whole entire class, but I don't know if they had as strong a bond with their mom. I don't know if they felt as close to her as she felt to them,” she said.
Katie remembered meeting Steven Letourneau for the first time. Though he was just a year younger, he wasn't connected to his mother like so many others in the class were.
“He just looked at her like a mom. Like, this is my mom. It wasn't like a friendship thing. This is my mom. She loves me and takes care of me, but there isn't a strong friendship.”
Katie's mother, Judy, mulled it over.
“She felt closer to her students than her own children. God knows, she spent more time with them.”
Calls or visits from her husband to Shorewood Elementary during that time frequently meant tears and a knotted stomach for Mary Letourneau. Often she'd just let Steve wait on the phone whenever the office secretary announced a call over the classroom intercom.
“It was like, I'll talk to you when I damn well please,” said a friend from the school.
The kids could see the stress, and at times, members of the Round Table group were sought for comfort. From what Katie could see—and what little Mary had told her—the Letourneau marriage was failing. Katie remembered one time when Steve came to school and starting yelling at Mary in the hallway in front of the classroom. Mary just stood there. When it was over she reached out for her student.
“I just need a hug,” she said. “I'm having a really hard time.”
Katie hugged her tightly. “Yeah, you are,” the student said.
Nothing more was said about what happened in the hallway that day. Nothing needed to be said. Whatever it was, it most likely had been Steve's fault. Students in Mrs. Letourneau's class loved her—Steve Letourneau was a man who lived with their teacher. It was true he was her husband, and she lived with him, but she didn't have much to do with the man. Steve was all wrong for his wife anyway.
“Steve didn't match Mary Letourneau at all,” Katie said later. “His personality from what I could see was completely different from hers. I can understand why she wasn't happy with him. It wasn't a meant-to-be situation. I think she tried to build on it, but it ended up not working.”
Steve didn't make a good impression on his wife's class.
“He always seemed rude to me,” Katie said later. “He wasn't welcoming to our class. He'd bring Jackie in, 'Hi, class!' No hug for Mary. 'Just come out in the hall because I need to talk to you.' He didn't seem like he was very friendly.”
Mary Kay Letourneau was coming undone. Most considered it the result of a faltering marriage made worse by stress and money matters, or it could have been that she had too many children to mother. She was on overload all the time. She looked wan. Things weren't getting better. But how much worse could they get? Mary Kay suffered her third miscarriage—though many didn't know until later that she and Steve had, in fact, been expecting a fifth child.
Mary Kay's reaction to losing the baby was peculiar to the Shorewood teacher who had known her for more than four years. The miscarriage had not brought tears or even much concern.
“It's for the best,” Mary Kay said, seemingly detached from what she had been through a few days before. “I'm not staying with Steve anyway.”
The comment struck the colleague, not because she was going to leave Steve Letourneau, but because having babies was so much a part of Mary Kay and her core values. Teaching, art, and having babies were the world to her.
Former Shorewood principal Patricia Watson was very concerned the last time she saw Mary Kay and her children. During a visit to her old school, Patricia saw the Letourneaus in the parking lot behind the school. Their windshield was cracked and the windows couldn't be raised or lowered. May Kay looked disheveled, far from the impeccably neat woman she'd always been. Her children didn't look quite right, either. They weren't scrubbed and Mary Claire wasn't wearing any shoes.
“All of them were less well kept,” she said. “Unkempt even.”
My goodness sakes, she thought, something has gone awry here.
Chapter 26
IN THE SPRING of 1996, Mary Kay Letourneau told neighbor and teacher Ellen Douglas that she was planning on taking art courses at nearby Highline Community College in order to earn credits necessary to keep her teaching certificate current. Ellen thought it was a good idea, a necessary plan. Mary Kay had often delayed getting the credits and it had reached do-or-die time. If she didn't get them that summer there was a good chance her teaching certificate would be in jeopardy.
It surprised Ellen when Mary Kay said she was thinking about spending the summer with her folks back in D.C. instead. Her mother said she'd pay for her to pick up the classes after the summer. It seemed reckless.
“I kept thinking in my own mind there are so many classes they offer and you have to take however many to get the [right] number of credits. Logistically, you don't have a good record for making it. You'll lose your license if you don't get them now.”
Mary Kay gave in to reason and stayed with her schedule at the community college. She had another motive for it, anyway. She was going to mentor Vili Fualaau by taking some art classes with him. She had even arranged for a $200 grant for a “child at risk.” Besides, he needed a way to get there, and she would drive.
The summer of 1996 was unsettling for the neighborhood kids. Where at one time the Letourneau household was one that invited children with a Kool-Aid mom and all the things that went with that, it was decidedly different with Vili and his older brother Perry over there all the time. Vili, in fact, the Letourneau kids said, spent the night frequently. It was a holdover from the final part of the school year when student and teacher burned the midnight oil getting the sixth-grade yearbook ready for the copy center.
Ellen Douglas's ten-year-old daughter, Jennifer, came home upset one afternoon and told her mother that she didn't like Mary Claire's baby-sitter, Perry Fualaau. Mary Kay was letting the teenager drink beer and smoke in the house. Schoolteacher Ellen gave her head a shake. She knew the Fualaau boys were hanging around, but smoking and drinking? It just didn't sound like Mary Kay at all. The next time she had the opportunity to bring it up, she asked her friend about it.
“Well,” Mary Kay explained, shrugging it off, “it's so nice that he's doing me a favor that I don't want to say anything about it.”
Mary Kay and the Fish twins from the Kent condominium renewed their friendship and talked on the phone more than they had in the past year. Topics always ricocheted with Mary Kay—“What did you have for dinner?” would turn into what she had had for dinner three weeks ago and every day since. But one subject all enjoyed discussing was the world of art. Mary Kay was especially pleased that both Amber and Angie had enrolled in the Seattle Art Institute. Amber was majoring in music and promotion and Angie was aiming for a career in video/film editing. Mary Kay recalled the fantastic job the girls had done on their high school video yearbook. She had spotted their talent back then. And, she told them, she had a new protégé of sorts.
“Yeah,” she said, “I have this friend from school that I'd like to get into the Art Institute or Cornish.” She went on to explain how talented her friend was and how she was even taking art classes with him at Highline Community College and at Daniel Smith, a Seattle art store, to support his dreams. The future for the student/friend was unlimited.
Amber and Angie talked about it later. They were amazed by Mary Kay's dedication.
“I knew she didn't have enough time for her family and school, and here she was taking classes with this student,” Angie said. “What kind of teacher goes to classes with her student?”
Angie later remembered calling Mary Kay in July 1996 to arrange for a visit.
“We wanted to se
e them. It was almost an excitement when she would hear from us. 'Oh, hello! We want to see you!' It was a thrill for us because we loved the family. I would usually make Amber call; I hated calling because I didn't want to get stuck on the phone with her for an hour. She just wouldn't shut up. She'd talk about everything and anything.”
The girls took Steven, eleven, Mary Claire, nine, and Nicky, almost five, to the Burien Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. They left toddler Jackie with her mother at home. It was a good time, like the old times. Mary Claire chattered on about anything and everything and Steven was excited about Amber's new Ford Escort.
“He was just getting into music and he really liked the new stereo,” Amber recalled.
The following month, Mary Kay called and arranged for her two youngest children to be baby-sat by Amber and Angie at Carriage Row.
As the twins entertained the children they asked what their parents had been up to.
“Daddy doesn't like the brown boy who smokes,” Nicky said. “Mommy and Daddy fight about the brown boy.”
Amber and Angie didn't know what to make of the remark. They asked if the “brown boy” was their regular baby-sitter.
Nicky said no.
“Why are they fighting?”
The little boy said he didn't know, and the girls just dropped it.
Chapter 27
AND AS THE days went on during the summer of 1996, Mary Kay Letourneau and her now-thirteen-year-old protégé, Vili Fualaau, seemed inseparable. Vili's brother filled in as a baby-sitter when teacher and student took art classes, went to art supply stores, and visited galleries in Seattle. As a mother, Mary Kay had never been the type to hang out around the house and vacuum; she was always coordinating some activity. But that summer those activities always involved Vili.
