Sex. Murder. Mystery. (44 page)

Mary Kay loved to party.

“She lives on the edge,” Kate said later of her friend. “She's one of those personalities. She's very outgoing, very nonmainstream. She has her own mind, her own way, and I've accepted that.”

Wearing miniskirts they had just made—hemmed with tape because there hadn't been time to finish them before heading out one night—Kate and Mary Kay went out to party. That night at a frat party at Pi Kappa Alpha, Kate ran into friends from Chicago and Mary Kay was partying and dancing with a nice-looking guy, blond and buff, a fraternity boy from Alaska named Steve Letourneau. When Kate wanted to move on to the next hot spot, she couldn't get Mary Kay to shake the new guy. Steve even followed them out to Mary Kay's car. Kate got into the driver's seat.

“They were talking and talking.
Come on, let's go.
Then I thought,
Well, maybe she's really interested in him.”

As the weeks flew by, Mary Kay and Steve were always together. For Mary Kay, coming out of the breakup that had crushed her, it seemed like a nice diversion. Nothing more. Mary Kay said that Steve Letourneau was fun. And with that, Kate shrugged off the relationship. It was nothing serious and it certainly wasn't going anywhere. Mary Kay was more than the boy from the Pacific Northwest could handle.

“He was very average-looking. She liked him. So that was fine. They clicked. They enjoyed each other's company. I don't think it was any more than that. He certainly was not a perfect pick for her,” Kate said later.

But as Kate observed Mary Kay and the new boyfriend, she could see some changes in Steve. He was dressing better, for one. Kate wondered if Mary Kay was performing some kind of male makeover. Some women, she knew, were drawn to men they could mold and transform. Steve could have been that kind of a project for her friend. Looking back on those days at Arizona State and the years that followed, Kate Stewart could never say that Mary Kay ever really loved Steve.

“She certainly never, never loved him. When I use the word 'love' I'm talking about the bonded-at-the-hip love. Certainly not. If she would have had the opportunity to get back together with her old boyfriend, I think she would have. It would have hurt her to tell Steve that she was going back, but I don't think she'd have thought twice.”

Mary Kay never planned on marrying Steve Letourneau.

“In fact she said, 'I'll
never
marry him,' ” Kate recalled years later.

But at twenty-two, Mary Kay became pregnant.

“I wanted someone to tell me, 'It's okay to have the baby by yourself. You'll be able to take care of it. You'll be okay. You can still finish school. Your baby will be loved.' But no one said that,” she said later.

* * *

Confusion and worry was all over her face. Mary Kay Schmitz told Kate Stewart that she was pregnant as they stood outside in front of Kate's town house next to her convertible.

“What are you going to do? I know you don't love him,” she said.

Before Mary Kay could respond, Kate pushed the point harder.

“You're not going to marry him, are you?” she asked.

Mary Kay was uncertain. “I know I shouldn't,” she said finally. “I don't want to. It's not my choice. I'm not sure what I'm going to do.”

Not long after Mary Kay told Kate that she was pregnant by Steve Letourneau, tragedy struck on campus and she miscarried. She hadn't had time to come up with an answer about marrying Steve; she hadn't told her family she was pregnant. As Mary Kay later recounted to Kate, she had been in class when she started to bleed. The blood flow worsened and she was taken to the hospital.

“Okay, now I have to tell my mother,” she told Kate. “Now I'm in the hospital, now it's serious. Something's going on. Now, it's just not we're in college and I'm pregnant. It's now, what are we going to do?”

She called her mother.

Mary Schmitz was very right wing, a right-to-lifer for whom abortion was always murder. From her home in Washington, D.C., Mary Kay's mother talked to the Arizona doctors and told them that absolutely under no circumstances would a D & C be performed on her daughter. It was possible, she said, that there could be another baby. As it turned out, Mary Schmitz was right. Her daughter had lost a twin, but the other baby would survive.

Kate parts company with Michelle when it comes to the relationship between mother and daughter and she considers the support Mary Schmitz gave her daughter when she was miscarrying the baby as the perfect illustration. Kate saw something that Michelle never saw. When Mary Kay really needed her, her mother was there.

“I think her mother has always been there for her but she hides behind her spirituality. I think her mom
wants
to be there for her, but Mary's always been the high-roller, live-on-the-edge member of the family. It's hard for Mom.
'You're not my straitlaced daughter, but you're probably my most capable if you'd go that route and it pisses me off when you haven't.' ”

There would be no D & C. But, Mary Schmitz pointed out, there would be a wedding. Her daughter would be marrying Steve Letourneau after all.

Maybe I can learn to love him. I owe it to my child to give it a try, Mary Kay thought.

When her best friend left Orange County for Tempe, Arizona, Michelle felt lost and abandoned. She hadn't bothered to make any other close friends because Mary Kay had been more than enough. Michelle dropped in and out of community college trying to figure out what she wanted to do and where her life would take her.

Mary Kay was off at college and seemed so happy. She was in love with a wonderful man. But suddenly, the relationship fell apart. Mary Kay was crushed by the breakup with the man she dreamed of marrying—before Steve Letourneau came into her life. Depression gripped her for weeks, months.

“She was almost suicidal when that ended,” Michelle said later of the relationship before Steve Letourneau. “She was as low as I've ever heard her. I remember talking to her on the phone and I was really worried about her.
Really worried.
This was serious.”

And then she starting talking about Steve Letourneau.

“Try to imagine where her heart and mind was when Steve came along. She needed someone safe. Someone she knew wouldn't hurt her. Someone she could manipulate.”

Michelle had no doubts that Steve was a rebound relationship, the change had been so sudden. Mary Kay had gone from the depths of depression to the joy of a new love. And then she was pregnant and married. Lickety-split. It was too swift.

Michelle would never forget her first impression of Steve Letourneau. He was nice enough, she thought, but Mary Kay could have done much better. She was way out of his league.

“He reminded me of a puppy. Following her around licking her hand.”

Michelle knew that her friend's upcoming marriage meant an end to their friendship as they had envisioned it. The closeness they shared would never be the same. She only wished that Mary Kay would be happy. That Mary Kay's deal with her family to marry her baby's father would be worth it. That her dreams wouldn't die because she had to settle for a man she didn't love.

Chapter 12

WHATEVER STEVE LETOURNEAU'S role in what happened with his wife—and what drove Mary Kay to do what she did with her student—his background was no Norman Rockwell ideal, either. When he was a boy, his parents, Sharon and Dick Letourneau, moved to Anchorage, Alaska, from Puyallup, near Tacoma, Washington, located near the base of Mount Rainier. Dick Letourneau had a job as a salesman for a food products company and the move was a step up. The Letourneaus' shaky marriage didn't survive long after the move. Steve was thirteen and his sister, Stacey, was nine when their parents divorced.

Grandma Nadine, Sharon's mother, was heartbroken, not only because of the divorce, but because the children ended up staying with their father. She said it was their choice, not their mother's wish.

“Sharon
didn't
abandon them. She lived close to them. She kept track of them every day. She stayed in their living quarters until the kids adjusted to their being apart,” Nadine said later. Sharon stayed nearby and never missed one of her son's baseball games. In time, Steve's mother married a younger man.

Grandma Nadine understood why Steve was resentful of the divorce, but she felt that her daughter Sharon had been made out to be the cause of everything. Years later, the hurt was not completely absent from her words. Grandma Nadine had to admit that though Steve and Stacey loved their mother, they worshiped their dad.

“They had every right to,” she said. “He did everything with them. He was a great father, still is.”

Steve Letourneau returned to the Seattle area for Thanksgiving 1983. His grandmother Nadine had hosted the family gathering in her mobile home in a Puyallup, Washington, trailer court for as many years as most could remember. The guest list included Steve's sister, Stacey, and his father, Dick—Nadine's former son-in-law who had not yet remarried. Among the topics of conversation was the woman Steve had been dating at Arizona State. The pair were having a fling, but Steve wasn't serious about her.

Grandma Nadine later recounted the new relationship in terms very different from Michelle or Kate's versions. It wasn't Steve who was the hanger-on. “She was on his back constantly. Every place he goes she's there and he can't get rid of her. She had her eye on him. He was very preppy-looking, very good looking.

“ 'She just won't leave me alone,' Steve said.”

Grandma Nadine never minced words. “Steven,” she said, looking him straight in the eye and with convincing authority. “If you don't want her around come right out and tell her, 'Look, buzz off.' ”

Later, the grandmother would regret how her grandson had ignored her words.

A few months later, Nadine heard some startling news. Steve and the girl were getting married. Her name was Mary Kay Schmitz, the daughter of a highfalutin senator or something. Nadine was surprised because the last she heard, Steve had wanted to get away from the girl.

Arizona State University was part of the past. The college degrees they had sought would have to wait. Suntanned sorority girls and fraternity boys joined the Schmitz family as they celebrated the hurry-up wedding of Steve Letourneau and almost four-months-pregnant Mary Kay Schmitz on June 30, 1984. Dolgren Chapel at Georgetown University, where John Schmitz had been on sabbatical, was the venue. It was by any estimation a lovely and very Catholic wedding. Leaving no detail unplanned, the bride paid special attention to the music. She had three trumpeters
and
a vocalist.

“If you ask any of my relatives which was the most beautiful wedding, they would say mine,” Mary Kay later told a friend.

Steve's maternal relatives didn't have the funds or couldn't take time off from work to attend the ceremony. Dick Letourneau and his second wife made it, though. It was just as well. It wasn't the wedding of anyone's dreams, anyway. For Mary Kay, everything was perfect with the exception of a groom that she didn't love.

Back in Puyallup, Washington, Grandma Nadine had worked her fingers to the bone at a local drugstore chain; she had raised her children with love and a firm hand. She was the kind of woman who refused to take any guff from anyone. She didn't like the phoniness that came with money and social standing. Steve was her grandson and when he and his new bride returned from the wedding in Washington, D.C., after dropping out of college, she insisted on holding a reception for her side of the family, since only the money side—the Letourneaus—had been able to travel back East for the wedding. Steve's mother, Sharon, had yet to meet her son's bride. Nadine cooked day and night, spruced up her mobile home, and set a pretty table.

Mary Kay was polite and demure and very beautiful and Nadine took an instant dislike to her. A few minutes after they met, the sixty-something woman with glasses that pinched her nose excused herself and went to the kitchen where her daughters were working.

“Well, wonder when she's due?” Nadine asked.

“Mother!” one of the daughters said.

“Okay, bet me. I didn't have six kids for nothing.”

The younger women laughed it off.

But, of course, their mother was right.

A few weeks later, Steve confirmed that his new wife was pregnant. His grandmother was satisfied that she had been correct.

“It takes two to tango,” she said. “If a girl's gonna lay down with a guy, a guy's gonna take it. I don't care who it is—could be the Pope.”

“She trapped him,” Nadine said several years later, still furious over the situation. “She thought she was getting into a wanna-be Kennedy-type situation because he was the preppy-type kid that was going to Arizona State.”

Her perspective possibly skewed by bitterness, Grandma Nadine would later shake her head at the memory of her first impression of Mary Kay Letourneau. She was uneasy about Steve's girlish and wide-eyed bride with the upper-crust pedigree, and wasn't afraid to say so. Nadine was the type of woman who arrived at instant and ironclad conclusions when it came to sizing up a person's character.

“I knew there was going to be trouble,” she said later.

A few months after Nadine's reception in Puyallup, Steven, Jr., was born at a hospital in Anchorage, Alaska. When Mary Kay and Steve brought their first baby home from the hospital the new mother put him in a family-heirloom bassinet that she had lined with fabric she had ordered from the Paris specialty retailer, Descamps.

“It was just perfect,” she said later of the fabric. “It was a pattern of soft delicate hearts, classic, not the Valentine's hearts, but a more classic look.”

Chapter 13

SOUTH OF SEATTLE and not far from the airport, Kent, Washington, had been in a growth spurt for much of the 1980s. The suburban city was a bland mix of old and new. Ticky-tacky apartments along I-5 and view homes overlooking the Kent Valley and Mount Rainier were at the extremes. It was by far middle and working class.

Traffic had been increasing steadily. Making a left turn down into the valley was becoming more difficult for the folks who lived in the condominium complex called Carriage Row and worked in the basin that had become a sprawl of nondescript aerospace offices where truck farms once flourished. In 1985 Steve, Mary Kay, and their toddler son, Steven, moved into unit 109 of the town-house-style complex done up in theme more akin to Boston than Seattle. The family moved down from Anchorage; Steve had been transferred to the SeaTac hub of Alaska Airlines where he worked handling baggage. Mary Kay was gearing up for classes at Seattle University where she would complete what she had started at Arizona State. She was going to be a teacher.