Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  “They have that grease on it,” Mary Kay said in an exasperated tone. The girls gathered that it was some kind of Samoan style. Soona had used some kind of oil to slick up the hair before twisting it into shape.

  Mary Kay was upset about it, but there was nothing she could do. Soona was dressing and grooming that baby the way she would any of her children. When Mary Kay got out of jail and could raise the baby, the grease, the stretch pants, the hideous red dress, would be history.

  Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't an overnight sensation, as so many would later claim when her notoriety pushed her into Lorena Bobbit and Amy Fisher's turf, Tabloid Territory. Hers was a slow-building tawdry story of an inappropriate act by a schoolteacher before it became a media-made tale of a romance gone wrong. The spring that baby Audrey was born saw a steady flow of interest by the local media before the national vultures with moussed hair and journalistic pretense swooped down from Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. In the beginning, maybe before they knew what they had, before they could take credit for creating Mary Kay Letourneau, victim of love, the story was locals-only and media access was rationed.

  One producer from a smaller television show knew that the carrot that had been so freely dangled by Dave Gehrke and Bob Huff had most likely been yanked completely out of reach after the Dateline appearance of Mary and Vili. Calls were no longer being returned. The secretary at the law office had a different excuse each time the producer inquired about catching up with Gehrke. “He's in court. He's out of town. He's with a client.”

  Finally, at wit's end—and knowing full well the concept of being “blown off”—the TV producer made an appointment to make an appointment to set up further discussions to get Mary on his show. It was the secretary, not Gehrke, who telephoned later.

  “She called me back an hour before and said, 'David can't make that time,'… and I had scheduled it a week in advance!”

  This is crap, he thought. The show isn't a big enough player.

  In time, the young producer felt a shift coming from Mary Letourneau's legal team. He felt the lawyers had been friendly, even intimate. David Gehrke faxed some material relating to soccer and his son, just like an FYI that a friend might send. Their attitude in the beginning seemed genuine: “She really needs help. I don't know if we can do the show, but we'll try. We'll really take a look at it.”

  But after Karen O'Leary's interview with Vili Fualaau in the park, things changed. The shift was more apparent as Mary Kay Letourneau became a media sensation, a commodity to be brokered, and a ticket to the good life for the lawyers, her friends, and the Fualaaus. National TV. First-class airfare. Theater tickets. A new suit. Four-star hotel accommodations.

  “I talked to people back east who said money had changed hands,” the producer of the small program said, quickly adding that his program was more honorable and didn't pay for guests. It became clear to members of the media that getting Mary's story out was not as important as “how much can you pay?”

  The producer finally accepted that his show was out of the game.

  With all the wheeling and dealing, blatant or disguised, the producer felt those around Mary Kay were taking advantage of a person who needed help more than she needed publicity. Mary was her own worst enemy, he thought, because she was so very ill and completely unable to be an effective advocate for herself.

  “She was so deranged anyway that I don't know that she could make a conscious decision,” the producer said a year later.

  Chapter 60

  FOR MANY OF the Shorewood Elementary teachers, lessons taught in the classroom were different the fall after their colleague was arrested. What had once been so simple now became impossible. Gone were the hugs to comfort a child in need. Gone were any displays of friendly affection. Nothing like that was appropriate. This hurt many teachers, especially those with younger students. If a child skins her knee and starts to cry, are you supposed to shake her hand? But there was more to it than that. The scandal also changed what and how things were taught.

  One teacher was unsure about comparing the size of a student's hand in a math exercise discussing growth.

  “I thought twice about having his hand compared to my hand,” she said. “Touch would be involved.”

  And touching was wrong.

  Another time a teacher was discussing how ballads were often written to bring out sad and tragic stories. Some kid thought they should write about Mary Kay Letourneau.

  When another teacher discussed Nelson Mandela's incarceration as a political prisoner in South Africa, a kid shouted out an example all the students could understand.

  “You mean like Ms. Letourneau?”

  The teacher changed the subject.

  In fact, she changed her curriculum on the spot. No more of the torn-from-the-headlines approach to current events. There was no newspaper, no magazine, that was a Letourneau-free zone.

  For that very reason, some also stopped doing current events.

  And there were the smarmy jokes about the “private lessons” Shorewood teachers gave their students. It got so bad that some teachers declined to be specific about the name of the school where they taught and even what district. Whenever Highline or Shorewood was mentioned at a conference it brought chuckles and the remark that they were “from the Mary Kay Letourneau District.”

  Most teachers don't take up the profession because they want to get rich. They do it because they believe they can help young people grow and learn. Being associated with a breach of professional ethics occurring in their own school was humiliating.

  What was a mother to do? Danelle Johnson asked that question of herself over and over. Her kids weren't eggheads, but neither were they retarded. She was convinced that with a little support from the Highline School District or even an interested teacher, her twins Molly and Drew could make it through school. For a time, she thought that Mary Letourneau's interest in Molly and the after-school projects might have been the answer. When Mary dumped Molly from the group and months later when the scandal broke, she knew what false hopes she had harbored.

  After she had the twins tested and found they were academically at a third-grade level—not seventh—she played hardball with Highline.

  “I went from being a neglectful, nonparenting, nonhomework-guiding mother to an overbearing, pushing bitch in about two and half minutes,” she said later.

  Seventh grade at Cascade was proving iffy—though Danelle had no idea until later that one of the reasons was that her son and daughter had become so wrapped up with Mrs. Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.

  According to her mother, Molly was having the most difficult time in middle school. She was a truant. She was a runaway. A former classmate from Mary Letourneau's sixth-grade class took Molly to Seattle and attempted to sell her virginity to an Asian gang—or so Molly said later. The girl couldn't stay focused on school and the administration notified her mother: She was disruptive and they didn't want her there anymore.

  Danelle went to the school to straighten things out.

  “I know she has problems,” she told an administrator, “but you are going to help her. She's not going to alternative school. She's not going to another school in the district. I'm driving her here every day until hell freezes over. She's going to get out of the eighth grade at Cascade.”

  “You can't—” the administrator said.

  Danelle cut him off with the coldest look she could make.

  “Do not make me say the L word. Because I will scream 'Letourneau' until the cows come home if it's the only way that I can help my daughter.”

  “We don't want that… ”

  Later, when her best efforts at helping her daughter stay in school were still failing, Danelle recalled her threat.

  “I don't believe that it is all Ms. Letourneau's fault,” she said. “It is unfortunate that my kids got mixed up with that group of kids because they've got a hard enough background. They didn't need this kind of drama to lead them up the wrong way.”

&nb
sp; She saw the school as somewhat culpable. Why hadn't someone from Shorewood stepped in to stop the teacher when this were clearly amiss?

  “If those kids were really down there until ten o'clock at night, if she was in that school so late—until ten—who in the hell is running the place?”

  Chapter 61

  MARY KAY CALLED Michelle from jail to tell her some extraordinary and welcome news. She was not alone in the effort to remain true with her love for Vili Fualaau. A man from England named Tony Hollick, characterized by Mary Kay as a man of “unquestionable brilliance,” offered to lead the charge from the tyranny of her “oppression-based” treatment to a blissful life with her fourteen-year-old lover. Tony Hollick had read about Mary Kay's case on the Internet and contacted her at the end of the summer of 1997.

  “Tony's such a great ally for me,” Mary Kay said with the same kind of breathless exuberance she once reserved for a new boyfriend. “He has such great connections. He's really going to help me. He's a warrior, a freedom fighter.”

  Over the next few weeks, Michelle Jarvis conversed with Tony Hollick by phone and through e-mail. He was certain that Mary Kay Letourneau was the victim of a vast conspiracy involving federal, state, and local agencies. Part of it was to destroy her as payback for her disregard of the unconstitutional law. Some of it, he hinted, was even darker. As they chatted and emailed, Michelle found herself agreeing with things that would later seem beyond bizarre, but in her desperation to help her friend seemed so clear at the time. She saw the prosecution as overzealous and bought into Tony's conspiracy theory that eventually had all sides of the law in cahoots to railroad the schoolteacher who crossed the line. An official with the Republican Party, according to Tony Hollick, said that King County was going to “make an example out of Mary Kay.” That meant a demonstration prosecution. The strict liability statute was also a problem. It took none of the facts of the case into consideration and sent her to the slammer or into a treatment program for which she was not even qualified. Tony Hollick all the way in London could see it. Couldn't anyone else? he asked.

  Much of what Tony had to say seemed to make sense to Michelle, especially since she wanted to find a way to get Mary Kay out of jail and back with her children. But there was that little item that always made Michelle cringe. Tony let it be known that he intended to marry Mary Kay Letourneau.

  “If she would have me,” he said.

  For weeks the calls from Tony Hollick to Kate Stewart were almost daily, too. At first, the mother of three didn't mind their frequency or inevitably lengthy duration, though she could not deny the calls from London did tend to eat up more time than she really had—time from her husband and children. Kate considered Tony highly intelligent, eccentric, “a freedom fighter who happens to be totally enamored with Mary Kay.” His feelings for Mary Kay, however, harmed the effectiveness of the eight amicus curiae legal briefs he “electronically filed” with the courts and other missives he used to attack the enemies of the American woman he'd never met.

  Kate delicately advised Tony to “keep the love part and the enamored part out of it, because nobody is going to take you seriously.”

  But Tony couldn't refrain from letting the world know of his true feelings. He recognized a great injustice and he could not deny that he loved Mary Kay Letourneau. He dispatched e-mails to the FBI, the White House, and the King County prosecutor outlining the ways in which Mary Kay's constitutional rights were violated. If it was obvious that he was in love with Mary Kay, so what? He'd press on.

  No matter if he couldn't leave his heart out if it, Kate was glad for what Tony had done for Mary Kay.

  “He's exposed people who might have done some underhanded things,” she said later. “He's put the limelight on some that have been against her.”

  Michael Jarvis, like most of the husbands of the women who supported Mary Kay, kept out of it for the most part. But when the conversations with his wife, Michelle, and Tony Hollick went for hours at a time, the patience of the pilot-turned-multimedia-developer was stretched to the limit. When he could hear his wife divulge deeply personal information about herself, it made him wonder what the Brit's real intentions were. It seemed weird.

  Who is this guy? What is he getting at? What in the world could that possibly have to do with helping Mary Kay? he thought.

  When Michael asked his wife about it, Michelle dismissed his worries.

  “He's probing into the character of people that were close to her,” she said. “He's trying to understand more about her, by understanding the people that were really close to her such as myself.”

  Michelle didn't care what her husband thought at the time. She and Tony shared common ground. Both wanted to get Mary Kay out of jail and out of the SSOSA program before it took every shred of life from her soul.

  “He's extremely intelligent,” she said later. “He's got these major emotional problems that put this weird slant into everything he does. Which basically invalidates his brilliance. Which is really too bad.”

  But they talked and talked. If he was a little odd, he could be forgiven for it.

  There's someone out there who cares. We aren't alone, Michelle thought.

  At about the time Tony Hollick had come forward, Michelle learned the existence of Abby Campbell, the woman who had so irritated the Fish twins with her lead-the-charge attitude at the jail earlier that fall. Mary Kay praised Abby's support (“she's a wonderful girl and she's helping me out”), but she told her oldest friend that Abby was more a gofer than a key player like herself, Kate or even Tony.

  “She's useful for what she's doing,” Mary Kay confided in her little girl's voice.

  When Michelle suggested that it might be a good idea for her to contact Abby, Mary Kay dissuaded her from doing so.

  “You really can't talk to her, Michelle,” she said.

  Later, when the dust settled and Michelle learned what Abby Campbell had been doing behind the scenes, she figured that Mary Kay specifically hadn't wanted her to compare notes with Abby. Abby was privy to things that Mary Kay had kept from her oldest and dearest friend.

  “Mary Kay is the queen of manipulation,” Michelle said later.

  What was wrong with her? Mary Kay Letourneau's problem wasn't her relationship with Vili Fualaau, but the one with her lawyer, David Gehrke. At least her friends thought so. Few close to Mary Kay had any doubts that David had sympathy for his client and that his tears during interviews were real. It only made their concerns more difficult to reconcile. If David cared so much, why was Mary being labelled a sex offender?

  What Would Jesus Do?. asked his bracelet

  Jesus, some thought, would get a new lawyer.

  Kate Stewart was one from the get-go pushing hard for Mary Kay to get rid of her neighborhood lawyer in favor of someone who could handle the intricacies of the case without selling her out.

  “From the very beginning,” Kate recalled, “he had all kinds of problems. He wouldn't show up. He lives minutes from the jail. He was MIA two or three weeks at a time, not even calling. On the biggest case of his career. That was the writing on the wall right there. She saw it. And he'd go visit her and pacify her. Then he'd send Bob [Huff] in and make her feel better. She's smart. She sees through it. But again, she's needy now, she's there, she's removed from everybody. They kept convincing her. She knew in her heart, she had to get rid of them.”

  “Get them out,” Kate kept advising. Mary Kay was not some nobody who couldn't get a decent lawyer. The attention to her case had brought offers of support and money. “Get rid of them, Mary Kay. You can get another lawyer. There is money all over your name.”

  Mary Kay said she wanted to sever the ties with her lawyers, but she was afraid. She didn't have any money yet and didn't know how much she could get.

  Kate urged her at the very least to hire another legal representative to keep an eye on David Gehrke and Robert Huff.

  “Get someone to watch them,” she said.

  Months later David G
ehrke would become misty-eyed at the suggestion that he didn't do his best on Mary Kay's behalf. He wanted to keep her out of prison and the deviancy program was the answer. And though he believed Kate and Michelle hated him, their behind-the-scenes criticism and blame still hurt.

  “[They say] I'm responsible for Mary Kay being in prison. I don't know why, but I'm responsible.”

  Chapter 62

  IF ANYTHING, JULIA Moore was a striking presence. The psychiatrist's movements were deliberate and forceful. Glasses were lowered when she spoke. Her gestures commanded attention. There was no doubt that Dr. Moore was a believer in her field, not one of the many psychiatrists embittered by the law and its relationship to the medicine they practice. She was a perfect fit for the Mary Kay Letourneau case. She had attended a Catholic convent boarding school in Pennsylvania, and Marquette University in Milwaukee—the same school where John Schmitz met Mary Suehr.

  It was Abby Campbell, through a referral from University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who brought Dr. Moore and Mary Kay Letourneau together. As the new friend explained it, Mary Kay was miserable with her treatment as a deviant, especially the requirement to tell her children that she was a sexual predator. Abby Campbell wondered if something else was at work, something the other evaluators had missed.

  Dr. Moore had followed the Shorewood Elementary teacher's case only marginally, but Mary Letourneau's calm demeanor had struck her whenever she saw her on television. “She was being practically stoned like the Magdalene—by the media and the public—but she came across as being serene in a naive sort of way. What is going on here?”

  In early October 1997, Dr. Moore spent her first hour with Mary Kay Letourneau, the most famous prisoner at the King County Jail. For Dr. Moore, the first jail visit was an audition. Mary Kay wanted to make sure she could trust the evaluator—the evaluator that she would allow inside her mind and share the truths that she claimed were in there, deep. She would judge the psychiatrist by her demeanor, by the questions she asked, by the responses to her responses. Mary Kay wanted control, the power to pass on to Gehrke the name of the woman or man who could set her free without the label “rapist.”