Sex. Murder. Mystery. (54 page)

Chapter 30

ONE AFTERNOON A Shorewood teacher looked out of her window and saw Vili Fualaau driving Mary Letourneau's van in the courtyard. It was worth a double take. It was so outrageous and potentially disastrous. The van moved slowly toward the window and the teacher worried that the boy was going to drive it right though the glass. He wasn't even a teenager as far as she knew. He was a child. Just as she bolted from the window to avoid a disaster, Mary came running out of the annex to save the day.

The teacher was relieved. Why had Mary given a kid her keys? Why hadn't she supervised him, though it “was possible Vili had taken the keys without permission?

The teacher couldn't help but notice the expression on the boy's face.

“You could see this big smile on his face. 'I'm this evil little person doing something… ' ”

Later when she thought about it, the teacher dismissed it as just “weird interaction” stuff between Mary and Vili. It was not anything unusual for Mary Letourneau.

“Mary was always weird. She did strange stuff.”

Years later a teacher who worked for many years at Shorewood shook her head at the memory of an encounter she had with a student in the hallway near the school library. A girl came up to her and asked her if she knew where Mary was. The teacher thought the girl was looking for a student.

“Mary who?” she asked.

“Well, you know,
Mary.
”

“No, I'm afraid I don't. Whose class is she in?”

The girl got snotty. “Mary
Letourneau
” she said.

The teacher was miffed by the attitude and reminded the student that at Shorewood teachers were addressed by their last name.

“If you are looking for Mrs. Letourneau, I'm sorry,” she said, “but I haven't seen her.”

“Whatever!” the girl said before stomping off in a huff.

The teacher held that little scene in her mind as a perfect example of the boundaries that Mary seemed to ignore.

“She allowed the kids to call her by her first name. She gave them her phone number, address, call anytime,” she said later.

When she told another Shorewood teacher about it, she too thought it was inappropriate—and dangerous. Fostering that kind of closeness wasn't right in a professional setting. It could only invite trouble.

“I don't give out my name and address unless it is an absolute emergency. Parents can send a note to school, leave me a message at the office.” the other teacher said.

For some the noise coming from room 39 was more than they could take. It seemed that no matter what time of day, Mary Letourneau's classes seemed to buzz with a boisterous energy that sometimes seemed to border on pandemonium. Friends seemed to understand that was just the way Mary did things, but newer teachers—teachers who didn't have an emotional investment in a relationship with the woman—found they could tolerate it less.

“Mary had a comfort level that was probably different than some people, but when Mary wanted to have their attention, she had their attention,” said a veteran teacher and friend. “So if she allowed kids to behave in a way that was comfortable for her, but uncomfortable for other people, that was her style of teaching. But she also had very good control when she needed it or wanted it.”

One newer teacher who occupied the classroom next to Mary Kay's bit her tongue until she could no longer take the invasion of noise coming through the walls.

“Sometimes I couldn't hear myself think,” she said later.

After much exasperation and soul-searching, the woman finally went over to tell Mary that the noise level was disturbing her students. She had tried to choose words that would not offend, because she didn't want to cause problems or make Mary feel bad. Nevertheless, Mary was offended.

“The next day she made sure to come over and tell me that we were being too noisy,” the teacher remembered.

Chapter 31

NO ONE COULD figure out her waning sense of style. Mary Kay Letourneau always prided herself on her appearance. Always had. Her hair and makeup had been a priority since those agonizing hours Michelle Jarvis had had to endure in Mary Kay's bedroom back in Corona del Mar. But as the school year went on, people noticed that the woman who shopped at Nordstrom with a maxed-out credit card wasn't dressing that way anymore. Instead of a classic pleated wool skirt and blouse, Mary wore tennis shoes and layers of T-shirts—sometimes as many as three or four at once. She also wore tights and sometimes two skirts—at the same time. Parents noticed, too.

“She never wore anything that fit her,” a mother recalled. “Yet she was so beautiful. It was strange.”

When the kids asked about her layering, Mary shyly explained that her choice in attire was the result of a comment.

“One of my friends said I was bony,” she said.

She wore the layers to cover up what most considered was a beautiful figure, yet somehow Mary had got it in her head that she was grotesquely thin—a nineties Twiggy. No one thought she had an eating disorder. In fact, most marveled at her ability to eat whatever she wanted without gaining an ounce. Even so, it was apparent to many that Mary Letourneau was obsessed about her weight, or lack of it. But there were other options. A number of students at Shorewood favored baggy clothes, the rapper or gangster style. Some wondered if Mary Letourneau was making a fashion statement when she wore clothes that hung on her like a sheet on a drying line. But something else was going on, too. One time she came to class without her usual layers. Instead, Mary wore a woman's long-sleeved cotton T-shirt and a wool skirt. Without mentioning names, she later told a friend what happened: “Somebody was obviously scanning me, giving me the eye, looking at me at places where I wouldn't want anyone to look. He said, 'Hey, now we can see it all.' I went out to my car and put on another shirt. It upset me. I think when I talked to him later I even used the word 'harass' when I said I felt uncomfortable with what he was saying and where he was looking.”

Students tried to encourage her whenever possible. One time when bolstered by her sixth-graders, Mary wore a green dress that was stylish and the Round Table kids told her how terrific she looked. Mary accepted the compliment and wore the dress several more times. She never looked better that entire year.

Though none of them knew it then, the next time they would see that green dress was when their teacher appeared on TV. On her way to court.

Though Mary Letourneau had never seemed particularly happy in her marriage with Steve, things worsened during 1994–1996 at Shorewood Elementary. She told a teacher friend that she had married Steve Letourneau only because she became pregnant. Her Catholic-to-the-hilt mother had put her foot down. “There was no way she was
not
going to marry Steve.”

Mary told the other teacher that she had loved another man and had been engaged to be married, but she had been jilted. Steve Letourneau had been a rebound relationship.

It surprised the Shorewood colleague when she learned that Mary was pregnant with her fifth baby. She knew from previous conversations that Mary hadn't slept with her husband for months. And, equally puzzling, Mary hadn't been the one to tell her that she was pregnant. She learned it from someone else.

“Whose baby is it?” the teacher asked, knowing immediately that her question was odd, but it just came out. She had assumed that Steve was not the father. She didn't know who, though.

Mary thought about it for a second and answered.

“Actually, it's
my
baby,” she said. She went on to say that she knew her body and could gauge her ovulation with complete precision.

It didn't answer the question, but it did confuse the friend.
Was she saying that she was pregnant by Steve, after all? Or had she found someone else and decided to have a baby?

Later when Mary showed her the silvery films of an ultrasound examination, the friend asked if Steve had been accompanying her to the obstetrician's office.

“No,” she said firmly. “This is
my
baby.”

Money was always a big worry for Mary Letourneau and most at Shorewood knew it. Of course, with teacher salaries being what they were, a husband who threw baggage for a living, and four kids with another on the way, money would be an issue for just about anyone. Mary never had any money of her own and it bothered her. Her paycheck was used to pay the mortgage on the Normandy Park house. Steve had insisted.

“Steve had control of the money,” said a teacher who knew Mary well. “Her check went to the house payment because 'that was the house
she
wanted.' ”

Though she said she never wanted the van in the first place, Mary was glad for it because it afforded her an opportunity to do some secret stockpiling. During the 1996–97 school year, the pregnant sixth-grade teacher told a colleague that she had begun to squirrel away extra cash.

“She had secret places in the van to hide it,” the teacher said later. “She wanted to have some money herself.”

The disclosure wasn't that peculiar; the teacher knew that Mary and Steve were having serious marital troubles. Mary freely talked about those problems. But when a teacher tried to talk to Mary about her own finances or any other subject from her life, she doubted Mary was paying much attention.

“It never seemed she was much interested in what I had to say back. I could be telling her something, but I knew her mind was going somewhere else.”

Chapter 32

MARY KAY LETOURNEAU was elated by the pregnancy; she reveled in it. She told her sixth-grade class that she was going to have her fifth baby—
before
she told any of her colleagues at Shorewood. She told them she was due in May, just before the end of the school year. The baby was so wanted and the teacher beamed whenever she brought up the subject. One afternoon seventh-graders Vili Fualaau and Katie Hogden met with their former sixth-grade teacher in the classroom when she brought out the sonogram images from among her drifting sheaves of papers and school brick-a-brac.

Mary traced the lines of the image, pointing out the baby's head and arms.

Katie had never seen her teacher so joyous. “She was glowing with happiness,” she said later.

But so was Vili Fualaau.

“Vili was just so happy too that she was going to have a baby that it was kind of awkward,” Katie recalled some time later when many of her memories had been tarnished by the story that had taken over the lives of her two friends.

“I knew them so well,” she said, “but I didn't pay attention to the most obvious thing. I missed the
big thing
. It didn't occur to me then that Vili had anything to do with it.”

Judy Hogden had a different reaction when she first heard about the impending birth. She thought it was peculiar that Mary had turned up pregnant in the first place. She knew from comments Katie had made that Mary and Steve Letourneau were struggling through a rough patch in their marriage.

“I guess it worked this time,” she said when she talked to her daughter about Mary's pregnancy. “Stranger things had happened.”

Later, when it was hinted that Mary's husband was not her baby's father, Judy couldn't make sense of the man sticking around in the same house in Normandy Park.

“If he knows that's not his child, then why would he stay with her?” she asked.

Nobody in the neighborhood knew what it was, but it was clear that something was going on with the Letourneaus. Some saw changes in the children, particularly Steven and Mary Claire. Steven Letourneau ditched GI Joe action figures for an attitude and the grungy, baggy look of a gang-banger. The change seemed sudden to Ellen Douglas. Steven even adopted the shuffle-walk and the dull, apathetic gaze of a kid who didn't care or who thought the world owed him something.

Ellen talked about it with her schoolteacher husband, Daniel.

“We'd look at him and we'd look at Scott, and say, 'Wow, he's really growing up, but not in a real positive way.' “

Yet Ellen noticed how once he came over to play with her son, Scott, he'd abandon the tough, cool-thug demeanor and be a little boy once more playing with Legos and running around the house.

After a while it dawned on Ellen that the boy's affect had been a complete pretense.
Maybe something was wrong at home?

Ellen and her husband couldn't figure it out. All they could come up with was that the kids were not happy-go-lucky anymore and they didn't know why.

“It made us sad,” she said later. “Something was going on in their childhood. Life was not real happy at home.”

But what was it?

* * *

What on earth is going on here?

The Shorewood Elementary teacher stared at the driver of Mary Letourneau's Voyager. It wasn't Steve Letourneau behind the wheel as the vehicle still adorned with the Alaska plates pulled up the service driveway. It was the end of January 1997.

The teacher recognized the driver as Vili's brother, a boy who, as far as she knew, wasn't old enough for a driver's license.

What the—? she thought. He's underage!

She watched for a few minutes until Mary Kay came bounding out of the building and jumped into the passenger side. She had obviously given the boy her keys to move the van from God-knows-where to pick her up.

The flabbergasted woman followed them as they drove from school. She stayed back a bit, not really knowing why, but only that she was so shocked at the idea of a kid driving a teacher's car. She followed the blue van to a house off Twenty-first and the boy got out and Mary Kay slid behind the wheel and drove off.

The teacher who tailed Mary Kay Letourneau was ready to tell Principal Anne Johnson what she had seen, but she stopped herself. Just like she stopped herself when she nearly hit Jacqueline Letourneau when the little one darted out in front of her in the parking lot one day. Just as she stopped herself the times when the frazzled teacher was late for school—nearly every day—arriving at 9:15 or 9: 20.

“For years it was, 'Oh, that's just Mary. Mary can do this. Mary can do that.' I just thought, that's okay,” she said later.

Reporting Mary in the past for anything seldom brought results, not even a reprimand that the teacher could remember. For whatever reason, the principal did not act. So why should
she
bother?