Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  There was Audrey, an adorable baby with a cap of black hair. Audrey didn't look anything like Steve, or even Mary Kay, for that matter. The girls wondered if the baby's father had been black.

  With the coast clear and the moment too good to resist, Amber got out the video camera.

  “To show my mom,” she said later.

  The girls called a few friends to tell them about the baby's coloring.

  “Can I come over to see Mary Kay's baby?”

  When Mary returned later, the girls hedged about what they really wanted to ask, and commented on Audrey's black hair.

  “Doesn't she just have the greatest, darkest hair?” she said.

  “Yes,” Amber said. “What is she?”

  Mary didn't bat an eye. “Samoan,” she said. “Her middle name is Lokelani.”

  The girls were still in shock, and later were unable to recall what Lokelani meant, though Mary explained the name's meaning and how it was perfect for her daughter.

  Neither did Mary say who the father was. She said nothing about the boy, whom she still did not name for the girls.

  For as long as the Fish twins had known Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau, they had been on a quest for the perfect couch. The one they had in Carriage Row was typical of many young couples—before a house full of children—it had once been white, but after time it turned an unseemly, dull gray. Of course at the Normandy Park address, such a battered sofa would never do. Mary Kay told the twins that she had finally found her dream piece of furniture and special-ordered a custom fabric. It was a floral tapestry with some pinks and blues and even some yellows. It wasn't cheap. Before it was shipped, Mary Kay said the furniture maker had told her that so many people commented on the unprecedented use of that fabric and how it came together with the style of the couch so magnificently. “They couldn't believe it,” she said.

  “She was in love with the thing,” Angie Fish said later.

  Good thing. For the summer of 1997, the sofa-sleeper was Mary Kay's home base. She arranged it at an angle in the den, a small carpeted room that had three exits and clear sight lines to outside of the house, the front door, and the hallway. The room was dominated by sliding glass doors to the patio. She never closed the sofa—the hide-abed was never hidden.

  “Everything was around her bed,” Amber recalled. “Diapers, dirty diapers sitting there and she didn't get up to throw them away. She just kind of tossed them to the side.”

  A constantly ringing phone in one hand, caller ID box at the ready, the remote control for the television in the other hand, Mary Kay sat at her command post. She was in a foxhole at the center of a storm of her own creation, and she seemingly loved every minute of it. She told the girls she used the caller ID to screen her calls, because a few “weirdos” were phoning and offering their support. They told her that they understood her because they had once loved what the law had forbidden, too.

  “I'm not sick like that,” she said. “They think I'm on their level. I'm not one of them.”

  Drifts of mail blanketed every surface of the room. A little hate mail, but mostly supportive missives. One time Mary Kay pulled out a letter she said had been written by the students of her sixth-grade class. She became teary-eyed as she read each loving word.

  During each of her visits, Amber Fish couldn't help but notice notes and lists written by Mary Kay and scattered throughout the house. Most were directed toward David Gehrke and concerned areas that needed addressing for her defense. But she also posed questions better suited for a fortune-teller than a lawyer.

  “When will Vili and I be back together? What will happen to Vili? Why can't Vili and I be together?”

  The little notes were familiar to the Fish sisters. When they baby-sat for Mary Kay at the condo, the girls frequently saw little lists and notes that Mary Kay had used to organize herself and her thoughts.

  “She was always a list maker,” Angie said later.

  Though she faced a more formidable adversary in the form of the King County prosecutor's office, Mary Kay focused much of her bitterness on her estranged husband. She was angered by the way friends and neighbors and then the public had taken his side by showing sympathy for the man now raising the kids on his own in Alaska. Mary Kay thought “the image” was a whole lot of baloney. At first, she refused to say much against him other than express her disdain for his smugness and holier-than-thou demeanor. Every once in a while, however, she would lift the curtain slightly to expose what had been a very unhappy marriage and a philandering husband.

  “Well, there's a lot more here than you know,” she told Amber Fish one day at the house. “Steve isn't all perfect, you know.”

  Amber knew that. No one was. But as far as she could tell from where she was standing without a father, Steve Letourneau was one terrific dad. He had worked hard to support his family, he played with his children, and he pretty much did whatever Mary Kay told him to do. She, not he, was always the force in charge of their household at Carriage Row. Amber assumed things were the same at Normandy Park.

  But like a dripping faucet that no wrench could remedy, Mary Kay kept dropping hints until hints turned into shocking disclosure. She told the twins how he had beaten her when she was pregnant. Neither Angie nor Amber could really believe it.

  “Steve was never violent,” Amber said sometime later. “We lived in that condo for years and you could hear the disposal running and we never could hear them fighting. You didn't even hear raised voices. Those walls were paper thin.”

  Mary Kay told the Fish twins that Steve had cheated on her. In fact, she claimed he fathered a baby with a girlfriend “before Audrey was born.

  “It's a boy,” she claimed. “The mother is telling her husband that the baby is his, but it's not. I guess they look enough alike.”

  The teenagers couldn't believe their ears.

  Not Steve. Not Steve of all people, they thought.

  Though she talked mostly of Audrey, Mary Kay also spoke of her oldest children. It was Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, and Jackie who were suffering the most, having been yanked like rag dolls from their mother. Mary Kay felt Steve was doing his best to make sure that her oldest children were excised from her life. Forever. She was convinced that he was tossing her letters into the trash. Screening her calls so the kids wouldn't have the opportunity to talk with their mom.

  Sobbing uncontrollably, Mary Kay told Amber about a phone call she had managed to place to the children when Steve wasn't around to intercept it.

  “The minute Jackie got on the phone she started screaming. It was like a scream that she was being murdered, like a scream I never heard… she wouldn't stop screaming because I wasn't there… ”

  Amber started to cry, too.

  No baby should be taken from her mother. It wasn't right.

  There were times when Mary would talk about her plans to regain visiting rights. She told the girls that her lawyers were going to fix it so that Steve couldn't live out of state. They'd have to live close enough to their mother so that she'd be able to take care of them.

  If she thought that she could do all of that, she sometimes let doubt creep in. Mary Kay was smart enough to know a losing battle. And she knew she had caused it.

  “I made a big mistake that hurt my family,” she often said, “but I never would change it. I ruined my family. I'm hurting those I love.”

  Amber and Angie both knew that Mary Kay meant every word she uttered. There was no fix for the mess—not when she felt so strongly that her love with the boy was worth it all. The love with the boy was forever.

  Audrey Lokelani was more than the daughter of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. The baby with the dark eyes and black hair was also a sibling to Mary's four children by Steve. The adults on both the Schmitz and Letourneau sides did whatever they could to ensure that whatever impact this new baby would have on its mother, it would not ruin the lives of the four already born.

  All were in apparent agreement with the strategy, which included
not talking about it and, heaven forbid, not promoting the fact that there was a new sibling back at their olive-green house in Normandy Park.

  “Mary Kay's sister Liz was very upset when they found a picture of Audrey that Mary Kay had sent back East for Mary Claire's birthday. Her sister was very unhappy. 'I should have screened it. I should have made sure that something like that never got through.' ”

  But Audrey was Mary Claire's sister and she knew it. True sisterhood would take time, and who knew what words were said to make the kids feel differently, but a closeness would happen. Yet on the day of her great-granddaughter's birthday even Nadine had to admit later: “Mary Claire was happy because she had a baby sister.”

  And back in the house in Normandy Park, in the bathroom where the family of six all used to converge in morning and evening chaos, Mary Kay, Vili, and Audrey posed in front of the mirror and took a photograph. The flash burned a bright hole in the center of the image, leaving only the tops of their heads to their eyes.

  “We didn't know it then,” Mary Kay later said, “but it was the only family portrait we'd ever take.”

  Chapter 49

  ONE DAY INTO the summer when Angie and Amber were over helping Mary Kay take care of Audrey at the Normandy Park house, she stopped referring to the baby's father as “the boy.”

  “I guess I can tell you his name. Promise not to say anything to anyone?”

  They agreed.

  “Vili,” she said.

  “Billy?” one of the girls asked.

  “No. Vili with a V.”

  She retrieved some pictures from another room and showed them to the sisters. They had done this with Mary Kay before; in fact, the girls considered it something that Mary Kay loved to do. She was forever looking at her children's pictures and remarking on their physical features and whose side of the family was represented in their noses, mouths, hands, eyes.

  She pulled out a picture of Vili standing next to Steven and Mary Claire by the swing.

  “This is really bad,” she said, as if apologizing. “He's a lot older-looking now.”

  Angie studied the photo. The boy was taller than Steven was, but not by much. When she heard he was Samoan, both she and her sister thought he was going to be some monster of a guy—six-feet-four and 240 pounds. But he wasn't a linebacker type at all. At five feet two inches, he was lanky and gawky—and four inches shorter than Mary Kay.

  He was just a boy. The way she had described him, he was really big for his age.

  Mary Kay went on to tell the sisters about how she had wanted to get him into Cornish, a Seattle school for the arts. He interviewed and showed his portfolio there the summer she became pregnant. He was so talented and mature for his age.

  From the photograph, they couldn't see any of it.

  It was also the first time Mary Kay came out and acknowledged the obvious. The baby was Vili's. Although from that first look Amber and Angie knew it wasn't Steve Letourneau's child, they never asked and she never said anything.

  She also pulled out some pictures of Soona.

  “I can't tell who Audrey looks more like. Do you think she looks like… ?” She studied the photograph and looked at her baby. “She could have gotten this dark hair from my mother,” she said.

  And then she suggested something that the girls would never forget. It was so strange. Mary Kay wondered out loud if Audrey could have picked up her dark hair from Steve's mother, Sharon.

  The girls thought that Mary Kay was “totally out there.”

  Steve's mother? What would she have to do with this baby?

  Mary Kay could be glib and laugh at the silliness of the media being camped outside her door, while she cradled a fourteen-year-old boy's first daughter. But inwardly, the stress of the situation was taking its toll. Shortly after Audrey was born Mary Kay developed a rash on her face and consulted a dermatologist. Though the rash was barely visible, she was obsessed about it.

  “Is it getting better? Is it getting better?” she asked over and over.

  She also had fits of tears about her father's cancer. Her reaction was somewhat perplexing to the Fish twins. They too had known John Schmitz was battling cancer—and had been for some time. When Mary Kay first told them back at the condo, she was calm about it. Almost indifferent. All of a sudden the reaction was emotional.

  “I don't want all these family stories coming out,” she said, refusing to elaborate.

  Only one of Mary Kay's children saw baby Audrey that summer and by then, of course, there was no hope that any of her children could be raised with her love child. Even before the baby was born it was inevitable that she would be a symbol of what had gone wrong with their parents' marriage. But she was also a sister.

  Only Steven Letourneau, that summer between sixth and seventh grade, would see his baby sister.

  Mary told Amber and Angie Fish about how she had picked up her oldest son at SeaTac Airport. Audrey was asleep in a car seat.

  “You know Steven,” she said, “he was awkward and hardly talked to me. I know he's very upset with me. I know he's very mad at me, but when I put his luggage in my trunk, I sneaked a peek at him as he lifted up the blanket and saw Audrey.”

  Mary Kay cried as she told the story.

  When she got behind the wheel, Steven turned to her and said, “That's a cool little girl you have, Mommy.”

  The story made the twins cry. They felt so sorry for Steven and his siblings. Sorrier than they felt for Mary Kay and her mixed-up future. Steven, they felt, had an especially heavy cross to bear. Steven had been around Mary and Vili during the previous summer and fall.

  “Steven knew. He knew from the beginning. He knew everything,” Amber said later.

  Ellen Douglas once called herself a “Que Sera Sera” type person. Stuff happens. It just does. The idea that a teacher and a student could fall in love was not so impossible for Ellen to understand. She could see how it might happen with one huge reservation. The age difference was too bizarre to accept. She just couldn't see it. Maybe in a high school setting, but not an elementary teacher and her young student.

  Whenever she tried to rationalize what had happened between Mary Kay and Vili Fualaau, she always came back to the impact on the children involved.

  She never considered Vili part of that group.

  “That child was never a child like Mary Kay's son and my son,” she told a friend. “That was not a little boy playing Legos and G.I. Joe [action figures] and wearing little Ninja costumes and running around the neighborhood like our two little boys were.”

  Vili Fualaau, as Ellen saw him, was not in the same league as other kids that shared his chronological age—at least none that she knew. It seemed that the seventh grader did what he wanted, whenever he wanted to. Obviously, with a father in prison, his family life was outside the norm of suburban Normandy Park kids. Since he was too young to drive, someone must have brought him over to the Letourneaus and left him there—at all hours and overnight. Ellen was convinced that members of the boy's family were aware that something was going on between Vili and Mary Kay.

  “His family knew,” she contended.

  It also became apparent to Ellen and others that a true double standard was evident in the Mary Kay Letourneau saga. The fact that it was a woman perpetrator and a young male victim, though novel and shocking, probably had less lasting impact than if the roles had been reversed.

  “A thirteen-year-old girl getting pregnant is a heck of a lot different physically than a thirteen-year-old boy getting someone else pregnant. The physical difference of what happens to that child's body is different. It is a double standard. We are not equal.”

  Introspection comes easily to a teenage girl's heart, but so does the willingness to believe in someone or something when the most obvious evidence points in another direction.

  Katie Hogden had felt so very close to Mary and Vili and had seen the signs of their closeness—the looks, the fleeting touch of their hands—that she was not surprised later wh
en she learned the two had been intimate or had “hooked up.” It was always in the back of the sensitive girl's mind like a closed door, she later imagined when she tried to explain it. A door that she had chosen to leave locked and boarded up. Always there, but always hidden. For Katie, keeping that door closed probably meant never getting hurt.

  Later, Katie considered that all that she believed had been going on was a teacher trying to save a boy from his family, his past, and a future that was dark and without room for all that he could be.

  “She wanted to help him because he needed the help and she needed the help. He could help her and she could help him. And their souls just like matched. He was her best friend and she was his best friend. Look at them talking… it was just perfect. Once-in-a-lifetime thing”

  Steve Letourneau wanted the whole thing to end. His wife had flung their dirty laundry all over the country and the sooner it was put to rest, the better. He told his lawyer that while he wanted closure, he didn't want Mary Kay to go to jail. Greg Grahn told Steve that he doubted such an outcome from the very beginning. He was sure as a first time offender she'd get a treatment program. Even so, he had doubts as the summer progressed that Mary Kay Letourneau was really a good candidate for any kind of special program. He told Steve that he doubted she was a threat to their children and that she was unlikely to be involved with any boy other than Vili.

  Greg felt his client's wife had some kind of emotional problem that prevented her from remaining in control.

  “It wasn't a love-at-first-sight type of thing. It was a drawn-out process where Mary Kay could have just drawn the line: 'You're a thirteen-year-old child and it's not going to happen.' ”

  Greg Grahn was also alarmed by Mary Kay's insistence that she was still in love with Vili. She appeared to be using love as a defense.

  “Honesty is a defense of slander so love should be a defense of child molestation. 'You can't put me in jail, because I really do love him.' That's just not the way the law works.”