Sex. Murder. Mystery.

by Gregg Olsen

  A crush of cameras and a round of live Court TV commentary and it was over. The teacher/rapist with what one reporter called “soft tendrils” of blond hair faced a few weeks in jail to fulfill the remainder of the six months' time required in her guilty plea. With time off for good behavior, the tearful and seemingly repentant Mary Kay would be free around Christmas. The freedom, of course, would be hollow. There would be no contact with Vili and no unsupervised visits with her children, including Audrey.

  Like just about everyone within close range of a television set, Grandma Nadine sat on the sofa in front of the tube watching the news report of Mary Kay's sentencing that November day. Although most were touched by Mary Kay's pleas for compassion, Steve Letourneau's grandmother thought it was a snow job.

  You need help all right, Nadine thought. You need a swift kick in the rear and to be sent to the moon.

  It made her angry that Mary Kay hadn't publicly acknowledged the impact the relationship with Vili had had on her family. As far as Nadine knew, she never owned up to that.

  The seventy-five-year-old woman's loyalty would remain forever with her grandson. She had heard a few things about him that she didn't care to know, but whatever he had done, he didn't deserve the grief his wife had given him.

  “An ordinary man would have had her killed. Even if he had an affair, and was a philanderer, an adulterer, what would give her the right to pick on a sixth-grader?” she asked later.

  Michelle Jarvis saw her friend on the news that night, too. And when she had the opportunity, she asked about the wrenching plea for understanding and forgiveness.

  “David told me to act sorry,” Mary Kay said over the phone. “So I did.”

  Not long after Mary Kay talked with Michelle, David Gehrke and Bob Huff seized the moment borne of their client's notoriety and arranged a deal with The Larry King Show to appear alongside her on the popular CNN show. Mary Kay didn't want to do it, and unhesitatingly told them of her reluctance. It wasn't that she didn't want to be heard. Rather, she didn't want the image of her in jail broadcast. She did not want her children to see her looking like a common criminal.

  “I was not going to do a face-to-face from jail,” she confided later. “David and Bob are practically jumping up and down telling me to do it, do it. They kept asking what it would take to make me comfortable. It was almost funny. They were focusing on such superficial things—my hair, and my makeup, what I would wear. They'd even get me a new blouse.”

  A producer came to the jail to set things up, but Mary Kay refused to talk to her. She had already said she didn't want to do it. David Gehrke and Bob Huff were in the air flying back east for the broadcast.

  “They weren't real happy with me,” she said.

  The image of Mary Letourneau in tears begging for forgiveness was haunting and would never be erased from the memories of those who loved her. But a question still lingered. What had caused Mary Letourneau to throw everything away? In her office at a Highline elementary school, former Shorewood principal Patricia Watson gave the question serious and heart-wrenching thought, as she had from the first day she'd heard the news of the arrest. She saw Mary's relationship with Vili as the tragic result of a breakdown, “a metabolic imbalance that sent her off the edge.”

  It wasn't the troubled marriage. It wasn't that her mother had not loved her enough. It wasn't that she had been in the pool when her brother died. Or the miscarriages. It was, Patricia believed, the sum of all of those things piling on top of each other.

  “Every day was worse,” the elementary school principal said. “All the different things that happened to her, there was never any relief. She had a breaking point.”

  Mary Kay's former principal also wondered what role the third and fourth child might have had in their mother's overloaded psyche. She didn't doubt that she wanted Nicky and Jackie, but perhaps they were more than she could really handle.

  “Two kids she could manage, and school and home and keep it together. The third kid might just have been more than she could bear, and the fourth one just rocked it completely.”

  Chapter 65

  IT STARTED WELL before sentencing, but David Gehrke didn't address it. But as the winter holidays approached, it got to the point where he couldn't ignore it. The groupies surrounding Mary Kay Letourneau were working overtime telling her that the plea, the sentence, her lawyer's strategy, had been a complete and sinister travesty. David was the target of most of their wrath and he knew it.

  Mary Kay had been getting the message that by listening to David's advice she had blown it big-time. It was love, not rape. It was unconstitutional and she should have challenged it.

  “These were all people who didn't know what the law was. She broke it. They don't know what it meant,” David said later. In addition, those bolstering Mary Kay and her fantasy of life-long love with her former student didn't know what strings the lawyer had pulled to keep her out of prison.

  “It was not until the day that she pled guilty that I was able to get the prosecutors to agree not to seek an exceptional sentence. They had her pressed that hard and there were several bases to seek an exceptional sentence upward. I felt like I had a good shot to get her a treatment program because of her clean record and who she was. I won. I got her a great deal.”

  He could see that whatever he accomplished was in jeopardy and he drafted a letter with the lead-off sentence, “Mary K. Letourneau needs your help!!” and mailed it to Kate, Michelle, Tony, Maxwell McNab, and Abby Campbell. He also sent the letter to Mary Kay's father and her brother, Jerry, in Tempe. He wanted those who cared about her to rally around her in the appropriate way. That meant, he wrote, supporting her treatment when she was released. Bolstering her defiance was not helping her one iota.

  Don't keep telling her that she got screwed and that it's love, he thought.

  Certainly David understood some of the frustration with the statutory rape laws and how penalties varied from state to state and, as Tony Hollick had pointed out, country to country. He knew that what had happened between Mary Kay and Vili would not have been a crime at all in some states.

  But it wasn't so cut-and-dried.

  “In some states she'd have done a hundred months per each act. In Wisconsin,” he said, “I think she'd be doing twenty years.”

  The letter angered Michelle Jarvis. She called it “scathing” in its tone and content.

  How does he presume to know what advice I'm giving her? she wondered.

  “Dump him,” Michelle had told her friend when the lawyer first pushed the sex deviancy treatment as her only option. “I don't think he's doing well for you.”

  “I have no choice,” Mary Kay told her.

  “Who's telling you don't have choices?”

  “David.”

  “You need another attorney and you need other options.”

  If not SSOSA, what could be the way out of the nightmare? Michelle discussed the ramifications of Mary Kay saying she was mentally incompetent when she offered her plea.

  “You were not able to understand what the plea meant at that time,” Michelle said, trying it on.

  “No,” Mary Kay said. “I will not tell people that I was not all there mentally.”

  The SSOSA program was designed for degenerates, not Mary Kay, and Michelle couldn't bear the thought of how her friend would fare with the program for three court-mandated years. It was brutal.

  “He didn't give her any other options. This is the only way you are going to stay out of jail. You plead guilty, you take the lie detector, you go to SSOSA, you tell them what they want, you see the therapist once a week, and take your drugs. What he didn't tell her was that going to SSOSA was worse than prison to her. How do you tell your family and kids that you're a sex offender? She'd rather cut off her arm.”

  Treatment was for pedophiles and baby-rapers, not a schoolteacher in love with one of her students. Mary Kay thought she was misunderstood by a legal system that did not have insight into her heart. She told
friends like Michelle Jarvis that once in a program, she was certain the so-called counselors would see the truth—there had been no victim. She was hopeful they'd modify treatment for someone who didn't belong there.

  “Certainly,” Mary Kay admitted later, “I don't deny that there are dangerous people who violate other people. Is there really a place for them in this society? You have a disorder and you cannot be cured. We can help you control your impulsive behavior. But you cannot be cured.”

  They wanted her to tell her children that she was a child molester. Mary Kay refused. She wouldn't do it. She worried that by doing so, she'd alter their understanding of what had really happened between their mother and Vili.

  “How can you take a child's perception of reality and abuse it? I would lay down my life,” she said, “before I ever said those things to my children.”

  The groupies blamed David and David blamed the groupies. He saw them as enablers who told Mary Letourneau what she wanted to hear—not what she needed to hear.

  “If your friend comes to you with a horrible haircut, you don't say it's terrible. That's what they were doing with Mary. It takes a special friend to draw the line between commiserating with someone to 'Shut the fuck up, you got a bad haircut, it will grow back.' A real friend has to say, 'Get a grip.' “

  David considered the Seattle ones gofers. The intellectual power and support came from Kate Stewart in Chicago and Michelle Jarvis in Costa Mesa.

  “They're the ones whose opinions really mattered,” he said later. “Abby Campbell saying something meant nothing to Mary.”

  When Kate told Mary that she understood how Steve had been a jerk, how unhappy she'd been all these years, and how alive she felt since she found Vili, it validated Mary's feelings.

  “They didn't say, 'Gee, Mary, I don't care if you love him or not. He's a kid. He's your student. You're married. Get a grip.' “

  The embattled lawyer thought that Mary Kay could have been brought back to reality if only Kate and Michelle had stepped in and told her that she couldn't love Vili. It was not going to work. It was going to mean the kind of trouble that would ruin her life. But they didn't.

  It was hard for Mary Kay to get through to her children sequestered up in Anchorage, though she continued to try. Steve had done a good job of keeping Stevie, Jr., and Mary Claire away from the telephone whenever it rang. On a few occasions, the timing would be just so, and mother and the two oldest children would get a chance to talk. Their conversations were drenched in emotion and sometimes ended with a sudden click of the receiver.

  Mary Kay's friends phoned too, trying to pass along messages of love from their mother, but Steve put a stop to those, too. One of the friends pulled an end run and contacted Stevie, Jr., through his e-mail account on America Online.

  According to what Sharon told Nadine, the friend said the boy “ 'didn't have to pay any attention to anyone about his schoolwork, it doesn't mean nothing. You don't have to do it.' He was failing! Steven sent him to summer school. She was a teacher giving him this kind of advice!”

  After that, Steve pulled the plug on the AOL address for his son.

  And as mad as she was at Mary Kay, Michelle, like Kate, didn't give up on the idea that a new lawyer could fix the mess that David Gehrke had made of everything by the guilty plea and the acceptance of the sexual deviancy program. She drove up from Costa Mesa to Orange one Sunday morning and met with one of the lawyers who had defended one of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the Rodney King beating. Michelle gave the lawyer a list of legal concerns compiled by Mary Kay while in jail. He seemed impressed and saw potential in an appeal. The lawyer told Michelle to have Mary Kay call him. But she never did.

  “It was apparent after she didn't get in touch with him that she was not going to listen to good advice. She was determined to do it her own way. He didn't want to waste his time with an uncooperative, high-profile client.”

  A referral to a constitutional law specialist reviewing the case brought the same results. Mary Kay Letourneau didn't call him back, either.

  Though thousands of miles from Seattle, Tony Hollick continued to be a major player in the Mary Kay Letourneau saga. He e-mailed the day and night away and spent countless hours on the telephone with the zeal of a true believer. He was so persuasive in his arguments, so damn charming and convincing, that whatever he said was rarely challenged by Mary Kay and her close friends. And because he was so staunch, the fact that he also was in love with Mary Kay was somehow overlooked. He held power. Even Tony's assertion of a far-reaching conspiracy rooted in hatred for sixty-seven-year-old John Schmitz and his political beliefs, which stripped Mary Kay of her constitutional rights, was accepted by the inner circle.

  Only Michelle Jarvis began to have doubts.

  “When I'd pin him to the wall—'Tony, send me an e-mail with the exact issues regarding the Constitution'—he never could do it. He kept pleading Constitution, conspiracy, and Constitution. 'Send me precise information that I can use with an attorney.' He never came up with it. And Mary Kay was hanging on that as a lifeline in her thread of hope that she'd be able to fight this thing and it never came true.”

  Tony had convinced Michelle, Abby Campbell, and even Mary Kay that their phones were tapped, cars were bugged, or that people were following them.

  “Be careful what you say on the phone,” he'd tell them.

  Perhaps Tony's greatest influence was his suggestion that the antidepressant Depakote would min Mary Kay's creative vitality. It would crush her like a cracker. She should not take it. It was part of the conspiracy, part of why she was more a political prisoner for daring to love beyond the limits of society.

  Free Mary Kay. Do not take the drugs. It is a conspiracy. Mary Kay, listen!

  Outside of a paid appearance by Soona (“I'm a very private person”) Fualaau on American Journal in November, the gravy train the lawyers had sought hadn't come through. Even Mary Kay was disappointed; she wanted an A-list star to play her in a movie, but even a sitcom actress looking to stretch her acting abilities didn't seem as certain as it had. Bob Huff was having a hard time with his negotiations with publishers. According to David Gehrke, publishers said they liked the story of the teacher and the student, but the ending left them flat. There was also something else at work. Some publishers felt a little squeamish over the idea of a grown woman in a sexual relationship with a young boy. That fall a new version of Lolita was in the news, too. It was a critical success in Europe, but American distributors were reluctant to touch it because its content suggested to some a kind of acceptance of the sexual exploitation of a child.

  Mary Kay and Vili had wanted the story sold as a love story, not a woman-in-jeopardy or a true-crime shocker. If it was a love story, how could it be written so that it would have a happy ending?

  Chapter 66

  IN THE FIRST week of January 1998, Mary Kay Letourneau was released from jail. She moved into a spare room at the Seward Park home of former Shorewood Elementary colleague Beth Adair. She was angry that she couldn't see her children, still exiled in Alaska and out of her reach for at least another court-ordered six months. “I don't care what anyone says, I will see my children.” Jacqueline had turned five years old the week before her mother's release. The little blonde, like her three Letourneau siblings, had been without her mom since the spring. Mary Kay was also burdened and upset by a no-contact order with Vili and his mother; and visits with Audrey had to be supervised by a third party. To those who had not seen her for a while, the photograph taken for the registered sex offender's leaflet to hand out to neighbors would have been shocking. Mary Kay wore a teenager's zippered sweatshirt, baggy pants, and T-shirt two sizes too big. Her hair was pinned in back, but unkempt and disheveled. She looked lost and bewildered.

  Later, Mary Kay would admit that she knew she blended in with teenagers. In fact, she and Beth Adair's daughter actually, hung out with the media while reporters kept a vigil near the house after her return to freedom.
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  “None of them knew it was me,” she said.

  What little Michelle Jarvis was hearing from Seattle during the weeks after Mary Kay was released was extremely alarming. The impression she was getting was that Mary Kay wasn't focusing on treatment or repairing her shredded life. The court had ordered sexual deviancy treatment and her acceptance of that as a condition for a suspended sentence was incontrovertible. Michelle didn't like it any more than Mary Kay did, but a flagrant violation of the court's order would send her back to prison and keep her from her children. If she wanted Audrey back, she'd have to do what was required. But she didn't. She wasn't taking her medication; she was using a vitamin regimen instead. She refused to participate with her deviancy counselor.

  She was in love and why couldn't anyone see that?

  Instead of doing what the law required, Mary Kay was prowling around, up all night, sleeping all day, and spending money she didn't really have.

  “She's not dealing in reality at all,” Michelle told her husband. “If it was me, I'd be looking at rebuilding my life. I've a second chance here. I don't want to screw this up.”

  Every time she called Beth Adair's house, she was left with either no answer or word that Mary Kay was out. Messages were left, but she never returned a phone call. Not once. The change startled Michelle. When she was in jail she had called regularly.

  What's going on up there? she wondered.

  For Linda and Kyle Gardner, the repercussions of turning Mary Kay in to the police were lasting and excruciating. While they had been invited to the cousin's engagement party back in January 1997—when Steve and Mary Kay's absence got Secret Squirrel to thinking—they were not asked to attend the wedding that spring. Some family members didn't call anymore. Some ignored them at family gatherings. Being ostracized for doing what she thought was the right thing hurt Linda deeply. When he thought she was wallowing in something over which she had no control, her husband told her to knock it off.

  “Don't let it consume you,” he told her. “You need to go on.”