Sex. Murder. Mystery. (63 page)

So driven, friends thought, there seemed to be no time for the right man. But those friends were delighted when she married not long before the Letourneau case broke. But by the time the case was over, so was the marriage to a lawyer with political aspirations.

For more than fifteen years at KIRO, Karen O'Leary was in the kind of job that ensured she'd never win a popularity contest covering the unseemly of Seattle. Karen reported on the Green River Killer investigation and the infamous South Hill Rapist from Spokane, Kevin Coe. She sat with Jim Lobsenz, a lawyer who would later represent Mary Kay Letourneau, and witnessed the execution of Lobsenz's client, a triple murderer, at the state prison in Walla Walla. And throughout all her stories, Karen O'Leary was always tough, dogged, and when necessary, pushy.

“It's hard to like Karen sometimes,” a former coworker said. “She's a tough broad.”

She didn't know it at the time, but more than ever, she'd need to be tough when it came to the Letourneau case. In time, Karen O'Leary would be fighting for her name, her career, and her dignity when the media circus came to town.

On March 12, 1997, Karen stood with the other pack of reporters in a King County Superior Courtroom to get a look at the thirty-five-year-old teacher in the olive-green gingham dress when she entered not-guilty pleas to two counts of rape of a child. As a sex offender,
a child molester
, she could have no contact with the victim or his mother; nor could she be left alone with her own children. Since she was a candidate for treatment, there would be weeks of tests, counseling sessions, and legal wrangling to see if she could be placed in program under the guidelines of the Special Sex Offenders Sentencing Act, or SSOSA. Otherwise, Washington's determinate sentencing left no room for wiggling. She'd serve seven years in prison. Certainly the thumbnail premise of the schoolteacher's criminal case was remarkable, but not nearly so as how the perpetrator appeared that day in court. It could not be denied that Mary Kay Letourneau was not just any sex offender. Even the reporter who had seen it all was shocked.

“This person was so pretty and sweet-looking and frail
and
pregnant,” Karen O'Leary said later.

And it was the pregnancy that immediately raised an eyebrow.

Could it be the kid's? Karen thought
.

Chapter 44

MARY LETOURNEAU'S REQUEST made Katie Hogden feel uncomfortable. It also made the teenager feel more torn than ever. What was she to do? There was a time when she would have done anything for Mary or Vili or any of a number of people about whom she cared. She never felt used. She hung up the phone and sought out her mother.

Judy Hogden could see the confusion in her daughter's eyes. She knew it had to be about Mary.

“Mary wanted to know if I could pass a message between her and Vili.”

Judy shook her head. She didn't think it was a good idea.

Deep down, Katie felt the same, though she explained Mary's motives. She knew Vili was hurting and there was no direct way to contact him.

But everyone was hurting
.

“She said it was a three-word phrase that would let Vili know that everything would be all right. She said, no, I can't ask you to do that. But if you could tell him 'three words,' he'll know what it means.”

“I'll have to talk to my mom about it,” Katie had said.

Judy got on the phone later. She chose her words carefully, but she didn't allow Mary to cut into the conversation. Judy had some things to get off her chest.

“Before I say anything else, I want you to know we'll always be here for you, we'll always be your friends. If you need anything, a place to stay, to get away from reporters, come here. We won't tell anybody you're here. I don't approve of what you did, but that doesn't change how we feel about you.”

Mary Kay seemed to take it in and seemed to appreciate the support. She thanked Judy Hogden for the offer, but it wasn't likely she'd take her up on it. She was going to be fine right where she was—at home.

“And as far as Katie getting involved,” Judy said, tackling the most difficult part of the call, the reason for her conversation with Mary. “I think you are in some really big trouble and I don't think it's best to involve Katie, even passing along a three-word phrase.”

Mary agreed and apologized for even asking.

“I'm in such a panic for him to know that everything is going to be okay,” she said. “There are three words that if he heard he'd know that everything's going to be okay.”

Judy felt sorry for Mary, but Katie would not be her little dove sending messages from her to Vili.

“I can't allow it,” she said.

Katie phoned Vili after her mother got off the phone. She didn't know what the three words were but if she did she would have told him.
Why hadn't she asked?

“Is she okay?” Vili asked.

“Yeah,” she answered.

“Is she crying?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Did you calm her down? Did you tell her everything was going to be okay?”

Alone in her upstairs room, thinking it over for the gazillionth time, Katie Hogden held on to one great hope that Mary Letourneau was in love with the right guy.

“He was just as concerned for her as she was for him,” she said later.

She wondered what the three words were. Was it so basic as “I love you”? Or was it more creative? Deeper? More personal? She also wondered why she hadn't asked what the words were. Just in case.

When Mary knew that she was not going to be with Vili for a long time because the courts had restricted their contact and some jail time was all but a certainty, she timidly asked Katie Hogden the same question she had posed to so many others. It was a question that none of her friends liked to answer.

“Do you think Vili will wait for me?”

This was difficult. Katie knew that Vili loved Mary at some level, but if it was a lasting love she couldn't be certain. Wise as she was, Katie was only thirteen years old.

She tried to be kind, to keep Mary's sagging spirits lifted. But she wasn't a liar.

“He may not be there when you get back,” she said. “But he'll remember and he'll probably want to come back.”

Mary understood.

“I'm sure you'll always be friends,” Katie said.

It broke their hearts to see the Letourneau family crash and burn. The four kids were about to be scattered to the winds and the parents were living in the same house, but not speaking to each other. Steve slept in the bedroom and Mary Kay stayed camped out on the hide-a-bed. Amber and Angie Fish saw it as the end of the perfect family. They never, ever could have imagined that anything could break up Mary Kay and Steve.

They could never have conceived of Mary Kay falling in love with a student, either.

Almost as much as they wanted to support Mary Kay, they wanted to let Steve know how they felt about him. How worried they were and how much they loved him, too. But he would never look into their eyes.

Only one time did he even make a halfhearted attempt to speak to them.

“He was very short, abrupt,” Amber recalled later. “I kept trying to make eye contact with Steve. I just wanted to talk to him. I never got the chance… ”

Steve didn't appear to want anyone's help.

When people called, he hung up. When a neighbor knocked on the door to let Steve know that he was supported by lots of people, he barely listened.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said before shutting the door.

The twins talked about Steve's behavior with their mother.

“Steve's hardly around,” Angie said, “and he's got a baby coming.”

“He's not around because it's not
his
baby,” their mother said.

The girls thought their mother was way off base.

“There's no way,” Amber said. “Of course it is.”

Joy Fish didn't think so.

“It probably isn't,” she said.

It was too much. The fact that the teacher had been having a sexual relationship with a student was bad enough. Shorewood parent Danelle Johnson thought it couldn't get any worse, but of course it did. Danelle had a better pipeline for information than the Fish girls or their mother. She learned from her children that Mary Letourneau was carrying Vili's baby.

“The kids thought it was just another awesome sign that it was a meant-to-be romance. I thought it was godawful,” she said later.

Parents, for the most part, didn't see it the same way. In fact, few thought the pregnancy was positive proof about anything, other than it
proved
the woman hadn't been teaching birth control. Some fathers joked about wishing they could have had a tutor like Mary Kay Letourneau.

Many played the gender-reversal “what if” game. Danelle had a unique take on that kind of supposition. As mother of boy/girl twins it was easy for her to flip the roles.

“Molly tells me she's in love with a thirty-five-year-old man and they got pregnant to prove their love, and I'm gonna kill the motherfucker. End of story. Same with my son. I'm gonna kill
her
. Mary can be as sick as she wants to be, as demented as she wants, and I
would
,” she said later.

With her honeydew-round belly, Mary Kay Letourneau thumbed her nose at the court order prohibiting unsupervised contact with her children, and the five of them boarded an Alaska Airlines flight to Southern California. They stayed with Michelle and Michael Jarvis and their three children in their home in Costa Mesa. Mary Kay knew her time with her children would be limited for a while and she wanted to spend every minute with Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, and Jackie. Disneyland was their prime destination, and was wonderful as always. Mary Kay reminded her brood that their grandfather had once worked at the theme park as a Cobblestone Cop. Later, they played in the surf at Newport Beach. Mary Kay even took her kids up to Spyglass Hill to drive by the old house and to remember what once had been and imagine the future.

“I felt like it was
us
again and that everything was going to be all right,” she said later.

Michelle was heartsick during the visit, but she didn't show it. Mary Kay was so upbeat and energetic that it didn't mesh with the reality of her situation in Seattle. She was in the trouble of her life. Moreover, she wasn't telling Michelle every detail, either. There was one detail in particular that she hadn't shared with her best friend. It was the identity of the baby's father.

“I knew she was pregnant by someone other than Steve when she got pregnant, but I didn't know
who
. She didn't tell me. I knew who Vili was, she talked about him, but I didn't know he was the father. But going from here to there was like crossing two galaxies to me. Taking it from this kid, to being a father, was a leap that I couldn't even fathom.”

Chapter 45

THE SPRING OF 1997 had not been easy on Soona Fualaau. Her beloved father, just fifty-nine, died, leaving her with a broken heart and a grieving mother. Her hands were also full—
overflowing, really
—with her youngest son's imminent fatherhood and the criminal case facing the mother of his baby. And if she ever doubted things could get worse, they did. The last thing the soon-to-be grandmother needed was any more trouble with the police. But that is exactly what she got that spring, when Vili and his brother shook down a kid for his Fila jacket and a basketball jersey at Cascade Middle School. According to a police report filed after the second-degree robbery incident, one victim was clobbered with a broom handle, the jersey and jacket “ripped from them.” The other was left with the threat that if he called the police “he would be killed.” The boy wanted his jacket returned badly enough to risk it. The police were called, and the Fualaau boys were identified by pictures in the school yearbook.

Later that same day Vili and his brother were read their rights, booked, and fingerprinted at a local police precinct.

One of Vili's lawyers later dismissed the seriousness of the charges and considered it nothing more than “stupid kid stuff.”

* * *

The stress and violence also intensified inside the Letourneau home. Each day closer to Mary Kay's baby's delivery date turned the flame up another notch. By May it was a blowtorch. Normandy Park police officers responded to a 911 call from Mary Kay on May 9. They found the pregnant woman with a red mark two inches wide and four inches long across her stretched stomach. She said her husband had hit her.

“We want to see the law bury you and it can't happen too soon,” Steve had said, according to Mary.

They had argued over the spiral notebook she kept of his threatening remarks and he grabbed at her and struck her.

“The battle has begun,” he said before leaving.

Mary Kay refused to press charges and the officers departed.

But later that day Steve returned. Mary Kay later said she met him outside in the driveway. While Steve stayed in the driver's seat, Mary Kay told him that the police had been to the house earlier and had taken a statement. She didn't think it was a good idea for him to be there. He could be arrested.

A police report chronicled what happened next:

“…
Steve suddenly pulled away and she felt the vehicle bump her and knock her down… She said she struggled to crawl toward the house and at some point [a neighbor] came and took her to the hospital.”

Mary Kay Letourneau was admitted to a Seattle hospital for observation overnight. Her pelvic bone had separated, her left shoulder was bruised, and her left leg and elbows had been scraped by the fall. A day or so later she talked with Steve.

“
He said he wished he had killed her and the baby
”

Weighing in at nine pounds, ten ounces, Audrey Lokelani Fualaau was born on May 29, 1997, at Swedish Hospital in Seattle. Named for a beloved aunt of Mary Kay's and given a Samoan middle name meaning “rose of heaven,” the baby's hair was as black as her teenage father's. And just as John Schmitz had done some sixteen years before when Carla Stuckle gave birth to their son, Vili Fualaau emerged from the waiting room and held his baby in secret.

But Vili wasn't alone, and neither was Mary Kay. Her music teacher friend from Shorewood, Beth Adair, was there to support and encourage Mary and Vili on their happy day. Also in attendance were scads of Vili's relatives—brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles.