Sex. Murder. Mystery. (53 page)

“Those poor kids,” she added.

Sharon swore her mother to secrecy, as Steven had requested. He was going to handle it his own way. Sharon said that Steve didn't want to make it public until he had all of the evidence. And though Sharon had known about it for a while, she needed to talk to somebody about it. She could no longer hold it inside so she called her mother.

Whether they kept their mouths shut or not, there was going to be no hiding it. The boy was a Samoan and the baby would look like him, too.

“This will come out,” Nadine said.

“It will, Mother,” she said, adding that she wasn't going to the authorities, at least not without Steven saying so. They had to think about the four children and what was best for them.

Sharon had known since shortly after Mary Kay's visit with Vili that summer. Steven had told her. She also told her mother that Dick Letourneau and his wife, Phyllis, knew.

Nadine didn't breathe a word of it to anyone. She watched and waited. And she wondered.
Why was Steven staying with his wife? Why didn't he take the kids from her and dump her?

Then the answer came to her. Despite it all, she knew that Steve still loved Mary Kay. Maybe the whole thing would blow over.

“I think Steven hoped she'd lose the baby,” Nadine said later.

The Letourneau clan didn't keep their vow of silence among themselves. Whenever Nadine and her daughters got together, the subject was the first order of business.

They felt so sorry for Steve. Outside of his four children, they saw Steve as the true victim in the whole thing. They felt he had been manipulated and brainwashed by his wife and the forces working with her. Nadine thought the priest was supporting Mary Kay.

“She went to the priest even and talked about it and took Steve. Tried to get the priest to talk Steve out of dissolving the marriage and just accepting the baby and going on.”

Nadine saw the meetings with the priest at St. Philomena as an attempt to buy time. She couldn't believe that Steve was so naive as to think that she'd really stay with him and raise the schoolboy's baby as their own.

Kind of hard to do if the baby has coal-black hair and dark skin! she thought.

She viewed it as more of Mary Kay's manipulation of Steve, whom she was sure was shell-shocked by the disclosure.

“She was trying to cover her own tracks, that's all she was doing,” she said. “He was still in denial, trying to make himself believe it [that he could raise the boy's baby]. How evil she was!”

Nadine never believed the pregnancy was anything but intentional and she told family members just what she thought.

“They planned it.
She
planned it. Same as she planned the pregnancy with Steve.”

Sometimes stories would filter from Steve to Sharon to Nadine, an information line that went from Washington to Alaska and back to Washington and pulsed with regularity.

Some stories brought outrage.

“She left Mary Claire one night all by herself—a nine-year-old girl—and took the rest of the children, probably Vili, too, to a movie because she was mad at Mary Claire. That was punishment! Steven came home at eleven at night, nobody around. Heard this little [girl] sobbing and went into the living room, curled up on the sofa, sobbing her little heart out. 'Mary Claire, where is Mom? Where is everybody?'

“You call that a loving mom?”

Chapter 29

IN THE FALL of 1996, Danelle Johnson sat at her kitchen table, sucked hard on a cigarette as she tried to figure out what was going on with her thirteen-year-old twins, Drew and Molly. The turn of events was almost beyond belief. The spring before, her youngest two couldn't wait to get out of Shorewood Elementary and into the halls of Cascade Middle School.

Couldn't wait to leave grade school behind.

The mother of two children who never excelled at school had very mixed feelings. She didn't know what to make of what was going on. Should she be happy or angry? Without provocation, the children were going to Shorewood nearly every day after class and staying until curfew time in the evening to help Mary Letourneau. It was so peculiar. The first time it happened Danelle asked Drew what was going on at the school. The boy said a bunch of former students were helping their former teacher with class projects, paper grading, bulletin boards. Among the group were Vili and a cousin.

“I thought it was strange, weird, but how nice. I'm thinking they're safe, going down there after school, helping a teacher and getting involved and interested in education. So, Mary Kay's a cool teacher. What harm could the little thing do? Could be nothing but good for them,” she said later.

Not long after Drew started hanging out in room 39, his twin sister Molly and her friend Nicole joined in. It was only when the girls started coming home late, saying they had stopped off at McDonald's on Ambaum Boulevard, that Danelle's blood began to churn.

“But we're helping Miss Letourneau,” Molly said.

Danelle shook her head.

“I don't care what you're doing down there with her. If she's not giving you a ride home, then you're not going down there to help her.”

And as teenagers do when they can, they ignored their mother and continued to go to Shorewood, but they made it a point to get home on time—or at least closer to the 8:30 P.M. curfew.

Later, Mrs. Johnson remembered how it was that she allowed her children to hang out at the school so late in the evening. She felt as though her kids were safe with their former teacher's unorthodox after-hours help sessions.

“I thought it was good for them. I was worried about their schoolwork. Worried about them going from sixth grade to the seventh. They were getting interested in school. I swear to God, I thought it was a help. I couldn't imagine that anything she could do would be wrong.”

It was sometime after ten P.M. on a school night in October 1996 when Danelle Johnson began to wonder what was really going on at the school. Her son and daughter were in bed and the mother of six was watching television when she heard a knock on the door. It was Mary Kay Letourneau standing on the front step looking agitated and flustered. Behind her was a young boy whom Danelle recognized a friend of her son's.

The teacher apologized for the intrusion at the late hour, but she had no choice. Her words were rapid-fire and aimed right at Mrs. Johnson.

“He was helping at the school. He got locked out of his house. His dad's not home. I can't wait around for him to come home. Is it okay if he stays here with you?”

Danelle Johnson was flabbergasted.

“What the hell is he doing down there this late at night anyway? My kids are in bed already. They went to bed at nine. I don't understand. Why would you want these kids down there that late at night?”

“Well, he was helping me with the bulletin board and then he just got locked out. I've got to get home. I don't know what to do,” she said.

“Yeah, he can stay here,” Danelle finally said, as she led the boy inside and shut the door as the teacher quickly turned and walked back to her van.

A few minutes later, the impromptu care provider had the kid's father on the phone.

“Are you sure he's there?” the man asked, as if he'd been that route before and wasn't exactly sure that the call was legitimate.

Why would I make that up? Danelle wondered.

“Yeah, I'm sure,” she said. “And he's scared to death that he's gonna get in trouble from you, but I don't think it was his fault.”

The father agreed that it would be all right for his boy to spend the night—as long as Danelle made sure he'd get to school the next day.

Years later, Danelle tried to put two and two together.

“Now that I think about it,” she said later, “I'll bet she had Vili out in the van also. She was trying to get rid of the boy so she could be alone with him.”

It was Mary Kay Letourneau's sweet and young-sounding voice on the line. It was mid-December 1996. It was a call out of the blue. Not for Christmas greetings or school fund-raising or anything that anyone might come up with to characterize a call just before the holidays.

“I'm concerned about Molly,” the teacher said.

Danelle Johnson repeated the statement as a question.

“Why are you concerned about Molly?”

“Molly comes down to the school all the time.”

“I know that. Her and Nicole, Vili, Drew—all those guys come down. What's the problem?”

“Well, Molly seems to think that I'm her best friend. That I'm the only friend she has… She tells me all kinds of things and stories about school and life up at the junior high and I don't think she should be hanging around here so much. I don't even know her!”

“She was in your class! And those guys have been helping you for three or four months. What do you mean you don't know her?”

Mary Letourneau sputtered to a finish.

“Well, I don't know her. We're not best friends. I'm kind of worried about her. She should have friends her own age.”

Danelle Johnson was furious. And she was hurt for her daughter, who had mixed up a relationship with an older woman. It was a friendship about which Molly spoke often. It was Ms. Letourneau this, Ms. Letourneau that. All day. Every day.

“All right,” she said softly. “I'll tell her to quit coming down there and bothering you or whatever she's doing to you. Seems to me like you've encouraged these kids to come around there and help you. I don't want to hurt her feelings.”

“I don't want to hurt her, either. I'm just worried about her. She shouldn't think she's my best friend.”

“She has a friend her own age,” Danelle said. “Her friend comes down there with her to help you. They think they're doing something great there.”

“I'm just real worried about her,” Mary repeated.

Danelle Johnson thanked the teacher for her concern and hung up. She was very troubled.

There's something wrong. Why would the kids think they should be going down there and helping her? And why would she call me to tell me she didn't even know Molly?

Later that day Danelle found a moment to talk to her daughter about the call.

“Ms. Letourneau doesn't want you to come around anymore,” she said.

The girl asked her mother for an explanation.

“She says you act like you're her best friend and she thinks you should have best friends your own age. She thinks you're getting way too involved. She asked you to stop—”

“Yeah, whatever, Mom.”

Danelle mulled it over that night and in the days and weeks after. She rationalized it. She worried about it. She figured the kids had become too rowdy and Mary Letourneau couldn't have them around as much. Maybe another teacher complained?

Teenyboppers aren't a lot of fun twenty-four hours a day. Maybe they got on her nerves.

Drew and Vili continued to go to Shorewood, while for the most part, Molly stayed away.

Not long after the phone call from the sixth-grade teacher, Danelle spoke to her new husband about it. It disturbed her that the kids were spending so much time with their former teacher.

“There's something weird going on,” she said. “Why is this woman hanging around with these kids from junior high school?”

Her husband didn't have an answer. No one did.

That Steve Letourneau had become violent and abusive toward Mary Kay to the point of hitting, kicking, and pushing her to the ground had been a shock to Michelle Jarvis. In all the years Michelle had known Mary Kay, she had never once heard of any abuse. Sure, Steve could be a jerk and punch some holes in the wall, but he didn't knock his wife around. But as Michelle learned, a few weeks after Steve found out that Mary Kay had become pregnant in the fall of 1996 things worsened in Normandy Park.

Mary Kay would reiterate some of the things that Steve had been saying and doing, and as the weeks went by, the information she shared with Michelle began to scare her. She not only worried for her friend, but she worried about the four Letourneau kids. In his embarrassment, hurt, rage, whatever, Steve never lost an opportunity to remind them what their mother had done.

“I know it for a fact, because I heard him when she was on the phone with me. She would write down all of the things he said to her. And he said things in front of the children. He would talk about where she had sexual relations with Vili. To little children!”

And always, Michelle Jarvis, more than anyone, would focus on the Letourneau children and how their parents had handled a terrible situation. It seemed that Mary Kay thought only of Vili and Steve was fixated on making Mary Kay pay for what she had done.

“The kids were an afterthought when she did what she did and they were an afterthought for him in that all he focused on was his own rage and his own need to get even or get back at her,” Michelle said later.

Michelle wrestled with the idea that maybe she could take in the children, and she discussed it with her husband. It was more thinking out loud than much else. How could it be otherwise? She had no claim to the kids. They were Mary Kay's and Steve's. She told Mary Kay that once the verbal and physical abuse started, she should take the children and leave. She should call the police and have Steve arrested. But Mary Kay kept insisting that Steve would come around and things would get better. They didn't. As the name-calling worsened, the children were left to absorb it all. Michelle worried that long-term damage had been done.

“The things Steve said about their mother… these kids are going to be in therapy forever. I doubt very much they are going to fully recover. They've been messed up for life. Damage control could have been had.”

The kids were oddly casual about the subject matter and it bothered Danelle Johnson when they told her that Mary Letourneau had been beaten by her husband, Steve—at least that's what she told Drew and Vili during one of the late-night bulletin board sessions at Shorewood Elementary.

The kids related how Mary had told them Steve had hit her and was “mean to her and all of that.”

Danelle wondered about it later.

Why in the hell would a grown woman be telling this twelve-year old-kid about her family life? About her husband beating her and things like that? Where would that come from? And, she wondered, where would it lead?