Sex. Murder. Mystery. (42 page)

Back home, she got another call from her mother.

“They aren't going to let me take him home,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“They're saying I did something to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“That I wrapped hair around his penis.”

Carla Stuckle told her daughter that she had done nothing wrong, but was in big trouble. She had no idea what would happen to her or her son. She was tired and upset.

Sadly, suspected child abuse calls were commonplace in Orange County, and indeed in every jurisdiction in America. But a doctor calling from the Children's Hospital reported a most unusual injury—a hair had been wound around and tied so tightly to a little boy's penis that the member had nearly been severed. Tustin police detective Jim Hein answered the call and immediately went to the hospital.

The doctor explained that such injuries were not completely unknown. Human hair or similar fibers can work themselves into the folds of skin in a baby's diaper area, causing ulceration and infection. But this was quite severe.

The boy's penis had been so damaged that he urinated out a gash in the side of it.

“What was unusual here, the doctor told me,” the detective said many years later, “was that the hair had been tied in a square knot. It had been deliberate.”

He wanted the hair as evidence, but it had been discarded during the reattachment surgery.

“You've got to do something,” the doctor said.

“Well, you sure didn't help me by disposing of the hair.”

Doctor and detective were mortified at the extent of the injury. Although the surgery appeared to be a success, both men couldn't help but worry about the boy's future.

Who was the boy's father? Neither Carla Stuckle nor her daughter and reluctant protector would say. Custody issues were at stake. The detective was convinced that Carla had injured her son, that it was not a freak accident. Jim Hein returned to her house at Drayton Way for an answer.

It was a square knot, for crying out loud!

Carla Stuckle, looking a bit worn and weary, let him inside and offered him a seat. Under suspicion for child abuse, Carla didn't seem too concerned. She almost seemed relieved that her son was at the Albert Sitton Home, getting care, while she went on with the business of taking care of her baby daughter, Eugenie. She wasn't evasive, either. She just seemed to be slow, speaking in a cadence all her own.

Detective Hein figured there wasn't much chalk on that blackboard.

Even so, he wanted her to talk. He needed to know who the baby's father was. That might lead to an answer. He pressed the point and even threatened her.

“Until we find out and get this thing all done, you're going to jail. Chances are you'll never see your son again. Tell me who the father is so I can help place the boy back with the father… Tell me.”

Carla looked blank. She stared past the cop as if there were something of great interest on the wall behind him. Finally, she moved her thin lips.

“Well, it's John Schmitz.”

“John Schmitz?”

“John Schmitz, the senator.”

Jim Hein was dumbfounded. He repeated the name and Carla Stuckle nodded. He figured the woman was out to lunch, a nut, a troublemaker,
certifiable
. She had made it up to make trouble or get money from the politician. He didn't think it even close to true, but she went on. She said they had been lovers for years, that both her son and daughter were John Schmitz's progeny. Carla Stuckle told the detective how she and the senator would rendezvous at various hotels when he was traveling.

“He told me that wherever he was that I was to meet him there,” she said.

She talked about his family, how his wife and children didn't know. It would be a big shock to so many. And though she protested the release of his name, her demeanor suggested otherwise.

She wants the information out. She wants the world to know.

Jim Hein had a hard time believing it. The woman was so haggard, why in the world would John Schmitz want to meet up with her at some hotel?

“Political people normally have the pick of the litter, so to speak. They want to go out and play games, they don't have any problem finding someone to play with. Why he would pick something like that I can never figure out,” Hein said later.

“The only thing that occurred to me was that she had to be a demon in bed.”

The Tustin police detective drove away to find John Schmitz. He left messages all over town, his office, his home, anywhere he could imagine. But Schmitz never called back.

The case brought the inevitable headlines in papers all over the country. The senator who espoused family values was a phony, a hypocrite. Even the little
Tustin News
weighed in:

MOTHER ARRESTED FOR CHILD NEGLECT
THIRTEEN-MONTH-OLD VICTIM ALLEGEDLY SON
OF SEN. SCHMITZ

Mary Kay Schmitz was a twenty-year-old student at Orange Coast College just down the road from Corona del Mar when the scandal first broke. The seriousness of the allegations did not hit her right away. She didn't see it for what it was.

“It never crossed my mind,” she said later of her father having an affair with Carla Stuckle.
Even when she first saw it on the news.
“I thought, my father is such a good man. She's having some legal problems and he's helping her out. That's all it is.”

But it was more than that, of course. And no one in the family knew it had been going on for so long. Who could conceive of such subterfuge? Surprisingly, not Cake, who as “the girl most likely to… ” had become adept at preserving a perfect image. Not even Mary Schmitz, who went on TV as Queen of Family Values, and the champion of brightly burning home fires.

No one.

Chapter 8

IT WAS AT a John Birch Society meeting out in Orange County that Detective Hein cornered the politician with the paternity problem. The detective wanted to know if John Schmitz really was the father, and more importantly as far as the child abuse investigation was concerned, whether he knew anything about the injury. He identified himself and told the state senator what Carla Stuckle had said.

“She's in trouble,” the cop said. “The boy is in the hospital.”

For all his well-known charisma, John Schmitz was oddly flat in his response. “Yes, I know.”

“Well, is it your son?”

“Yes, he is, but I do not and will not support him financially. It is her responsibility to take care of them.”

John Schmitz said he didn't know anything about the hair on the baby's penis. And that was that. The detective didn't let on, but he couldn't believe his ears. Here was this man, the ultraconservative politician who told everyone to take responsibility for their families… and he had two children by some woman in a tract home in Tustin.

For Carla Stuckle, at least according to her eldest daughter, the fact that her children's father had been exposed brought relief. She thought that John Schmitz would be forced into a decision. He had to choose her or Mary. She, after all, was the one with the little babies.

“She was gleeful,” Carla Larson recalled. “She said, 'Well, now he won't be able to get out of it, will he?' ”

It irritated Carla Stuckle that John Schmitz hadn't been man enough to acknowledge his children. Even after they were born, he refused to tell his wife that he had been unfaithful.

The media crush was torturous. Cameras were everywhere; reporters hid in the bushes. Only once did Carla Larson speak to the press.

“I'm very upset at Senator Schmitz for not showing his face and standing by my mother. They are his children, too,” she said later.

Detective Hein drove up from the beach to Spyglass Hill. He had a few more things to ask John Schmitz about the potential child abuse against little John, but the man who loved the spotlight had made himself scarce. Mary Schmitz was home, however.

Mary was cool and polite. She reacted in a way that suggested the events had no impact on her. She said as much.

“I love him and I'm standing by him,” she said.

She said she knew he had a mistress, but that was no concern of hers. In fact, all of it was John's problem.

“She was rather indignant that she was brought into it at all. It was something her husband did and this other woman… it was their affair,” the detective recalled later.

He left Spyglass and drove down toward the ocean highway thinking that Mary and John Schmitz had some kind of bizarre understanding. It appeared to the detective that Mrs. Schmitz had known about the affair and didn't care.

If any in his inner circle knew that he had been carrying on with Carla Stuckle for all of those years, they never let on. Then or years later. Tom Rogers, close friend and onetime campaign finance manger, had no inkling that John Schmitz had played that kind of game. He'd been around politicians for twenty years and had seen dozens who played the field when their wives were back home taking care of the family. Politicians, by their nature, tend to be flirtatious and charming, feeding on the adulation of the people around them. John had an ego the size of California, but he wasn't any bed-hopper.

Though it was never an area they discussed, Tom Rogers tried to figure how it could have happened with John Schmitz.

“Maybe somebody who's egotistical has this kind of admiration, or adoration of a woman. She took night classes. She thought he was everything. John was susceptible to that because he thought really everyone ought to figure he's that good,” Rogers recalled.

Some wondered how he had time for
two
families. It was true he had twice as much energy as most and seemed tireless on the campaign trail or hammering out a deal in the legislature late into the night.
But two families?
How could he have kept it so secret?

Though they did not talk about the Stuckle affair, St. Cecilia choir director Richard Kulda was struck by how John Schmitz exhibited no shame or repentance over what happened. He was the same charming person as always.

“There's something that he did a marvelous job of hiding from all the rest of us, possibly even from himself for many years,” he said later.

As the choir director from St. Cecilia considered it, there was no question John Schmitz had lied with the same facility as he employed when he told the truth. He didn't want to put the label “pathological liar” on the man he had admired for so many years, but Richard Kulda thought it might be within the realm of the man's personality.

“It is possible there is some of that in John. It is possible that Mary Kay could be that way, too,” he said.

Chapter 9

EVEN WHEN THE newspaper and television reporters made her out to be a child abuser, the perpetrator of an unspeakable act—“she tied a hair around her son's penis”—Carla Stuckle continued to put the blame for the affair on Mary Schmitz. Mary hadn't been giving her husband what he needed at home. Carla had a deep hatred for Mary Schmitz. They had carried on the affair for so long, for so many years, that the woman had to be an idiot or completely blind to have missed it. Where had she thought her husband was when she was in bed in the little house on Drayton Way?

Carla Larson, through her own observations and through what her mother told her, didn't get a sense that Mary Schmitz cared one way or another. She had seen Mr. and Mrs. Schmitz at gatherings in public and at their home in Corona del Mar.

“I never got the sense that Mary truly loved John. I saw them together a lot at political fund-raisers. Have you ever watched Hillary Clinton looking at Bill Clinton? That gaze. Mary never ever demonstrated that gaze. She was always looking elsewhere to see who was looking at her.”

Carla thought her mother was wrong to think that Mary didn't know about the affair. The woman wasn't stupid, just pragmatic.

“I think Mary knew. Maybe she didn't want to give up what she had and her position and social status? It was very important for her to be the wife of a senator,” she said later.

John Schmitz had a lot of friends, and most stood by him during the Stuckle affair in 1982. Some figured that he wasn't getting what he needed from Mary and it didn't surprise them that he went out looking for it elsewhere. What did raise a few eyebrows was his woman of choice. Most considered Carla Stuckle a step down from what he could have been sleeping with.

Carla Larson, bitter over her mother's abandonment, would find her already tenuous loyalty wearing thin. At times, she felt sorry for Schmitz.

“He was trapped. He was trapped from the first time they went to coffee after class. When she stuck around to have a conversation with him and he suggested they go somewhere to talk outside the classroom, he was trapped,” she said later.

Yet the young woman also found room to blame John a little, too. Several times she thought of confronting him and telling him that it takes two to make such a mess.

You were the idiot that didn't learn from the first mistake. You kept coming around. You didn't have to. You could have said, “This is enough, woman,” she thought.

The media had a field day with the two-timing politician. Camera crews staked out 10 Mission Bay Drive and didn't leave. John Schmitz never commented on the affair and his wife did little more than laugh it off as her husband's problem.

For those who knew them, and those who thought they knew John, there were broken hearts all over Orange County.

“I could just see what they were doing. They were all holding hands praying for God's deliverance from this plague on their house. And John's leading the sermon,” said Hank Springer, the liberal ying to Mary Schmitz's conservative yang on their TV show,
Free for All.
“I felt so sorry for Mary. She didn't deserve this. Look at the hell he brought down on his family.”

Hank Springer later saw great relevance in the scandal, almost a foreshadowing of what would happen to John Schmitz's oldest daughter a decade and a half later. It was in her genes. It was a lesson learned. Somewhere there was meaning for Mary Kay in what happened with her father and Carla Stuckle.

“They came from a family that whatever they did, didn't matter. It was okay. That God would find a way. They could be purified in this fervor they had, this selfrighteousness. The rules are not for them, not for him.”