Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  When Mary Claire was invited to a slumber party with assorted cousins at Grandmother Nadine's in Puyallup, Mary Kay said she was so swamped she wasn't certain she would have time to get her there. She was running here and there, one appointment after the next. Classes to attend. Shopping to take care of. To make matters even more difficult, the day Nadine wanted Mary Claire down in Puyallup was the same day mother and daughter were planning on heading up to Anchorage to join the rest of her children and her husband who were already up there visiting. Mary Kay altered her plans, and made arrangements to go as far as Auburn to meet one of Steve's aunts in a kind of relay race. The aunt agreed to take the little girl down to Nadine's for the slumber party.

  When she arrived in Auburn, she not only had Mary Claire with her, but she also had Vili Fualaau along for the ride. She said she was going to fly up to Anchorage that afternoon, on a 4 P.M. flight. The women picking up Mary Claire thought it was strange that Mary Kay had the Samoan boy with her, and mentioned it to Nadine.

  “Why did she have that boy with her?” Nadine wondered.

  Sharon Hume called her mother the next day. Mary Kay hadn't made the 4 P.M. flight after all, she arrived five hours later than planned. But there was more. She was troubled by something else.

  “Mother, she brought this kid, Vili, with her. This kid that she's supposedly teaching art and everything to.”

  “What?” Nadine asked. “She had him with her when she dropped off Mary Claire, but she didn't say anything about bringing him to Alaska.”

  Sharon, who was audibly upset, told her mother that something else was curious. When they arrived at the Letourneaus' Anchorage restaurant, Mary Kay asked Dick Letourneau for the keys to his new truck. She said she “wanted to show Vili the stars. They were gone for hours.”

  What was going on? Mary Kay had left her kids, tired and cranky, at the restaurant for hours? What was she thinking? What was she doing? And all the while when they were in Alaska, Mary kept singing Vili's praises to Steve's family.

  Nadine later recalled how her daughter Sharon felt about the thirteen-year-old.

  “They didn't like Vili. They thought he was illiterate. Also she [Mary] kept saying, 'Isn't he wonderful? Isn't he something else?' Sharon thought, 'What is there about this kid that I'm supposed to think is so wonderful?' ”

  Later, Nadine couldn't shake off the idea that so much had been going on right under Steve's nose. Right under everyone's noses. In Normandy Park, and in Alaska, too.

  “She sat up til four A.M. holding his hand on the davenport downstairs. Steven was in the bedroom. It blows your mind. It was like Steven was hypnotized,” she said.

  Other incidents raised an eyebrow or two among Steve's family. One family member was puzzled by Mary Kay's behavior at the last family gathering she attended. It was a wedding reception. She never once spoke to any adults. She was always hovering around the kids' table, conversing and playing with them as though they were her peer group. It was very peculiar and not like Mary Kay at all. Sure, she was attentive to her children, but she liked to be noticed and praised for her lovely outfits by the adults, too.

  That night she was a child, too.

  When Mary Kay and Vili returned to Seattle they brought with them some art photographs of a pair of puffins nuzzling each other.

  “They mate for life, you know,” Mary Kay told a friend.

  If Mary Kay Letourneau lived for the telephone and its link to the world outside her Normandy Park home, one of her favorite people to converse with was Michelle Jarvis. That had been true when they were teenagers and had continued into adulthood. A four-hour marathon was nothing out of the ordinary; and both women had phone bills to prove it. One particular phone call in late September 1996, however, had been on Michelle's dime. The childhood friend and mother of three hadn't heard from Mary Kay for a while, and assumed that her long distance service had been discontinued for lack of payment—a common occurrence.

  They got on the phone at ten and didn't hang up until after 2 A.M.—on a day both had to work. Mary never needed as much sleep, but Michelle could always feel the residual drag the next day after an all-nighter with Mary Kay. Much of their conversation that night centered around Vili Fualaau, whom Mary Kay considered a particularly gifted student. She said she had realized his potential when she taught him in second grade and the ensuing years only verified his artistic ability. Mary Kay said she wanted to help develop his talent. They discussed everything from showing the boy's artwork in a gallery exhibition for students to finding a mentor among the local artists who lived in the area.

  This is great, Michelle thought at the time. She's got this child that she recognizes this incredible talent in. What an awesome person she is for caring so much…

  Mary Kay had always been interested in her students. But Michelle had never heard such extreme concern for and awareness of a particular individual. From what she gathered, Vili Fualaau seemed deserving of the interest. Mary Kay described him as boy from a troubled home, being raised by a single mother in poverty with a father in prison. His prospects were bleak and she saw his future in his art. Her help could be his ticket out of poverty, she said.

  “It is ironic,” Michael Jarvis, Michelle's husband, said later. “It was his ticket out of poverty. Not how she planned it. Not what she had in mind.”

  In October, Mary Kay called Michelle now living in Costa Mesa to tell her that she had fallen in love. In fact, she was in love like she had never been in love before. She practically gushed into the phone, spewing out adjectives and descriptions of the most wonderful person in the world. He was the person that she had been searching for her entire life. She was not going to settle for a life without love anymore. She'd found the perfect love. There hadn't been any sex, but they were considering it.

  “He's so wonderful. We talk about everything. He's my soul mate… ”

  Oddly, for a woman who showed no compunction about sharing intimate aspects of her love life when she and Michelle were teenagers, Mary Kay didn't provide many concrete details about the wonderful new guy in her life. She offered nothing about his job or his social status. Not even the subject of his ever-important appearance was broached. Nothing much beyond the fact that he was wonderful and she was in love.

  “She told me he was a student and she had a class with him over the summer,” Michelle recalled. “I was thinking he was a student in college that she had met through taking this class. So without coming right out and saying who he was, she led me to believe that he was a college student. In my mind I was thinking he was about twenty or so,” she said later. “But she never really said an age.”

  But she was so happy that Michelle didn't pry.

  I wonder what took her so long to find someone to love? she thought.

  A few weeks later, more news came in another phone call from Mary Kay.

  “I'm pregnant,” she said, “and it's not Steve's.”

  Michelle didn't condemn. She was happy about it. Mary Kay seemed overjoyed and after all the years with Steve she certainly was entitled to some shred of joy. Mary Kay said that the father was the same person, the student, she had fallen in love with over the summer. Of course, there would be no abortion. She was going to divorce Steve and have the baby.

  “Does Steve know?” Michelle wondered.

  “No,” she said, adding that she had recently slept with Steve to buy some time while she figured out what she was going to do. There was no love lost between them and getting him into bed hadn't been easy, but the mission was accomplished. Intercourse had allowed the possibility that the baby was her husband's.

  Michelle didn't fault her childhood friend for the deception.

  “Will Steve believe that it's his baby?” she asked.

  Mary Kay doubted it. “The baby will have black hair,” she said.

  At that point, Mary Kay said she was biding her time. Things were tense enough and adding a baby from her affair to the mix would be trouble. Steve was agitated and suspicious
enough.

  “Mary Kay, I'm very afraid for you,” Michelle said. “I'm afraid of how he will react to this.”

  Her friend told her not to worry. Cake was sure she could handle it.

  * * *

  Whatever was going on at the Letourneaus' house had to be pretty bad. Scott Douglas came home very upset one afternoon and told his mother that Steven's parents were not going to have a party for his twelfth birthday. Ellen Douglas wasted no time in telling her son that they'd celebrate his friend's birthday by inviting Steven over for pizza and videos. The words ran through her mind: “Just because your family is falling apart, doesn't mean your friends don't love you.”

  Later Steve Letourneau talked with Ellen and the subject of the stress in his family came up. Steve said that big trouble had, in fact, been in the offing for a while. He refused to elaborate.

  “I can't tell you now. But you're not going to believe it.”

  Ellen didn't push, though the grade-school teacher was certainly intrigued.

  Don't give me a little bit of the story…. it's like licking the spoon without eating the cookie, she thought later.

  Chapter 28

  GRANDMA NADINE KNEW that something was up with her grandson and his wife, but she had no idea how bad it would get. No marriage was perfect and the rumblings she'd heard about Steve and Mary Kay seemed like more of the same. Instead of brooding about something over which she had no control, she looked forward to filling her mobile home with children and grandchildren for the holidays. Holidays, she knew, were stressful enough without worrying about someone else's marriage.

  But all of that was put on hold when she answered the phone one evening. It was her daughter Sharon, in Alaska. Her voice was ragged and her words constricted. She was upset. Nadine could tell something bad was coming. It was about Mary Kay.

  “Everything I suspected is true,” Sharon said, finally diving into the reason for her call. “She's having an affair with that thirteen-year-old.”

  Nadine sat down on the sofa up against row after row of family pictures. Steve and Mary Kay. Mary Kay and the children. Every combination of every member in the family. All of the beautiful blond-headed kids smiling wide and sweetly. The faces stared down on her as she spoke to her daughter.

  “And she's pregnant.”

  She could barely believe her ears.

  “You've got to be kidding me,” was all Nadine could come up with.

  “No. Steven has all the proof in the world.”

  Nadine's blood boiled. “I'm glad for that,” the older woman said, surprised at her daughter's disclosure, but not shocked. It was a strange feeling. Although the words were outrageous, she believed Mary Kay was capable of such an act.

  “Those poor kids,” she added.

  Sharon swore her mother to secrecy, as Steven had requested. He was going to handle it his own way. Sharon said that Steve didn't want to make it public until he had all of the evidence. And though Sharon had known about it for a while, she needed to talk to somebody about it. She could no longer hold it inside so she called her mother.

  Whether they kept their mouths shut or not, there was going to be no hiding it. The boy was a Samoan and the baby would look like him, too.

  “This will come out,” Nadine said.

  “It will, Mother,” she said, adding that she wasn't going to the authorities, at least not without Steven saying so. They had to think about the four children and what was best for them.

  Sharon had known since shortly after Mary Kay's visit with Vili that summer. Steven had told her. She also told her mother that Dick Letourneau and his wife, Phyllis, knew.

  Nadine didn't breathe a word of it to anyone. She watched and waited. And she wondered. Why was Steven staying with his wife? Why didn't he take the kids from her and dump her?

  Then the answer came to her. Despite it all, she knew that Steve still loved Mary Kay. Maybe the whole thing would blow over.

  “I think Steven hoped she'd lose the baby,” Nadine said later.

  The Letourneau clan didn't keep their vow of silence among themselves. Whenever Nadine and her daughters got together, the subject was the first order of business.

  They felt so sorry for Steve. Outside of his four children, they saw Steve as the true victim in the whole thing. They felt he had been manipulated and brainwashed by his wife and the forces working with her. Nadine thought the priest was supporting Mary Kay.

  “She went to the priest even and talked about it and took Steve. Tried to get the priest to talk Steve out of dissolving the marriage and just accepting the baby and going on.”

  Nadine saw the meetings with the priest at St. Philomena as an attempt to buy time. She couldn't believe that Steve was so naive as to think that she'd really stay with him and raise the schoolboy's baby as their own.

  Kind of hard to do if the baby has coal-black hair and dark skin! she thought.

  She viewed it as more of Mary Kay's manipulation of Steve, whom she was sure was shell-shocked by the disclosure.

  “She was trying to cover her own tracks, that's all she was doing,” she said. “He was still in denial, trying to make himself believe it [that he could raise the boy's baby]. How evil she was!”

  Nadine never believed the pregnancy was anything but intentional and she told family members just what she thought.

  “They planned it. She planned it. Same as she planned the pregnancy with Steve.”

  Sometimes stories would filter from Steve to Sharon to Nadine, an information line that went from Washington to Alaska and back to Washington and pulsed with regularity.

  Some stories brought outrage.

  “She left Mary Claire one night all by herself—a nine-year-old girl—and took the rest of the children, probably Vili, too, to a movie because she was mad at Mary Claire. That was punishment! Steven came home at eleven at night, nobody around. Heard this little [girl] sobbing and went into the living room, curled up on the sofa, sobbing her little heart out. 'Mary Claire, where is Mom? Where is everybody?'

  “You call that a loving mom?”

  Chapter 29

  IN THE FALL of 1996, Danelle Johnson sat at her kitchen table, sucked hard on a cigarette as she tried to figure out what was going on with her thirteen-year-old twins, Drew and Molly. The turn of events was almost beyond belief. The spring before, her youngest two couldn't wait to get out of Shorewood Elementary and into the halls of Cascade Middle School.

  Couldn't wait to leave grade school behind.

  The mother of two children who never excelled at school had very mixed feelings. She didn't know what to make of what was going on. Should she be happy or angry? Without provocation, the children were going to Shorewood nearly every day after class and staying until curfew time in the evening to help Mary Letourneau. It was so peculiar. The first time it happened Danelle asked Drew what was going on at the school. The boy said a bunch of former students were helping their former teacher with class projects, paper grading, bulletin boards. Among the group were Vili and a cousin.

  “I thought it was strange, weird, but how nice. I'm thinking they're safe, going down there after school, helping a teacher and getting involved and interested in education. So, Mary Kay's a cool teacher. What harm could the little thing do? Could be nothing but good for them,” she said later.

  Not long after Drew started hanging out in room 39, his twin sister Molly and her friend Nicole joined in. It was only when the girls started coming home late, saying they had stopped off at McDonald's on Ambaum Boulevard, that Danelle's blood began to churn.

  “But we're helping Miss Letourneau,” Molly said.

  Danelle shook her head.

  “I don't care what you're doing down there with her. If she's not giving you a ride home, then you're not going down there to help her.”

  And as teenagers do when they can, they ignored their mother and continued to go to Shorewood, but they made it a point to get home on time—or at least closer to the 8:30 P.M. curfew.

 
Later, Mrs. Johnson remembered how it was that she allowed her children to hang out at the school so late in the evening. She felt as though her kids were safe with their former teacher's unorthodox after-hours help sessions.

  “I thought it was good for them. I was worried about their schoolwork. Worried about them going from sixth grade to the seventh. They were getting interested in school. I swear to God, I thought it was a help. I couldn't imagine that anything she could do would be wrong.”

  It was sometime after ten P.M. on a school night in October 1996 when Danelle Johnson began to wonder what was really going on at the school. Her son and daughter were in bed and the mother of six was watching television when she heard a knock on the door. It was Mary Kay Letourneau standing on the front step looking agitated and flustered. Behind her was a young boy whom Danelle recognized a friend of her son's.

  The teacher apologized for the intrusion at the late hour, but she had no choice. Her words were rapid-fire and aimed right at Mrs. Johnson.

  “He was helping at the school. He got locked out of his house. His dad's not home. I can't wait around for him to come home. Is it okay if he stays here with you?”

  Danelle Johnson was flabbergasted.

  “What the hell is he doing down there this late at night anyway? My kids are in bed already. They went to bed at nine. I don't understand. Why would you want these kids down there that late at night?”

  “Well, he was helping me with the bulletin board and then he just got locked out. I've got to get home. I don't know what to do,” she said.

  “Yeah, he can stay here,” Danelle finally said, as she led the boy inside and shut the door as the teacher quickly turned and walked back to her van.

  A few minutes later, the impromptu care provider had the kid's father on the phone.

  “Are you sure he's there?” the man asked, as if he'd been that route before and wasn't exactly sure that the call was legitimate.

  Why would I make that up? Danelle wondered.

  “Yeah, I'm sure,” she said. “And he's scared to death that he's gonna get in trouble from you, but I don't think it was his fault.”