Sex. Murder. Mystery. (67 page)

Then he walked off.

* * *

Whenever they met at his Tacoma office or talked on the phone, divorce lawyer Greg Grahn always found Steve Letourneau to be true to form in one critical regard. Steve remained entrenched in his position that he wouldn't get caught up in the blame game that had been a part of the Mary Kay Letourneau saga from day one. Yes, he was pissed off at his wife for dumping him for a kid. Without a doubt, he was humiliated and bitter, but deep down there was some guilt. Pointing the finger at his dewy-eyed wife was not a good strategy. It only made Steve Letourneau look like a bully kicking her when she was down.

“He couldn't exempt himself from it one hundred percent, anyway,” Greg Grahn said later. “So rather than trying to figure out what percentage is his and what percentage is Mary Kay's, he doesn't want to blame Mary Kay in public.”

He had played a part in what happened, and despite what his critics would say, Steve Letourneau knew it.

“You know,” he admitted to his lawyer, “I could have done things that could have stopped this.”

But Steve wasn't paying attention or he was burying his head in the sand during the months his wife carried on with Vili Fualaau. Maybe he was too wrapped up in what he was doing with his girlfriend to step in and save his wife and family from the inevitable min? Hindsight was a killer, and Steve knew it. According to his lawyer, Steve had seen “hundreds of things” that indicated what had really been going on with Mary Kay and Vili.

“He just refused to believe it back then,” Greg Grahn said. “He feels bad about it. He blames himself a little bit for that.”

Chapter 51

FOR SUSAN MURPHY, the president of the Highline Education Association, the day Mary Letourneau moved out of her classroom brought a combination of sadness and disbelief. It was a Saturday, not long after Audrey's birth, that brought Mary, her newborn, and her friend Beth Adair, along with Susan and a school district security official, to Mary's old classroom at Shorewood Elementary.

As for Mary, she had come full circle, returned to the scene of what some considered a crime, the place where she said she fell in love with a boy. For the others there to oversee and help the stroller-toting former teacher, it was the end of what had been considered a promising career.

Mary had been instructed after her baby arrived that she would need to remove all of her belongings from her old classroom. Other than a few books, very little of her personal effects had been sent to her after she was arrested. Susan Murphy was on hand to represent Mary, who was still on the district payroll—though most doubted it would last much longer.

Susan had been told that Mary had “a couple of boxes” to pick up. Mary arrived with her baby in the Audi Fox that her father had brought to her before Audrey's birth.

It was apparent that her vehicle would not hold all she had left behind in room 39.

“It wasn't a couple of boxes,” Susan Murphy recalled later. “It was closets full of stuff. Tons of projects, props from plays. Several closets within the classroom were overflowing with belongings that the district did not wish to store any longer.” The HEA president figured if she were the teacher leaving that classroom, say to go to another school, she would have marched three fourths of what they were hauling out over to the jaws of an awaiting Dumpster. Mary wanted everything. Every scrap, every project.

It bewildered Susan and she had to bite her tongue to avoid what she wanted to say.

What are you thinking? Where are you going to put all this stuff?

Mary, upbeat and excited, wanted it all.

“She was kind of childlike,” Susan later said of Mary's behavior in the classroom. “I didn't get a sense that she understood the severity of the situation. She'd wander from one thing to the next, she was sort of disorganized, kind of wandering around in circles… ”

While the group sifted through Mary's belongings and pressed on with the business at hand, Susan came across a pink detention slip with the name Vili Fualaau. She put it in one of the boxes without saying a word. Susan also got a clue about how the children in the classroom were feeling toward Mary and her successor. Inside a drawer she found notes disparaging Mary's replacement:
“So and So Sucks! I hate So and So!”

Mary went from one item to the next, exclaiming interest and recalling memories that came to mind as she boxed up student projects. She had a kind word for everyone and everything associated with the remnants of all that had once mattered.

When the mountain grew larger, Susan called her husband to bring his car to provide more packing room. Half a day had passed before it was time to caravan over to Normandy Park, unload, and put that sorry episode behind them.

Late spring in the Puget Sound region brings a burst of growth and incessant rain, and in a week's time lawns can be overgrown—with no dry days in sight to mow. But that was not the case at 21824 Fourth Place S. The Letourneau home stood out from the others in the tidy neighborhood. Its lawn was overgrown and dandelions were rampant. Susan Murphy felt another pang of sorrow for Mary and her family. Though she could never dismiss the professional breach of trust and responsibility that Mary had blatantly and seemingly cavalierly forsaken, somehow Susan held some hope that Mary and Vili's story was truly one of a deep and undying love. Even though it was as wrong as could be—and there was no way to make it right in her mind—she allowed herself to hold out some hope for a somewhat happy ending. Susan didn't really buy into it, but even so she hoped for it anyway. Otherwise, she knew, all of this was for nothing.

Mary skittered about the half-empty house and announced that she'd spend some of her free time going through each and every item. She thanked everyone for their concern and help.

Susan Murphy will never forget the sadness she felt for Mary Kay Letourneau, her new baby, her husband, her children, and, because she had devoted her life to it, too, the teaching career that she had squandered.

Years later, that Saturday at Shorewood still brought a sigh from Susan Murphy.

“She was never going to teach again. Her certificate had been revoked. Unless she went somewhere where they didn't care about having one. Or for some strange reason they had never heard of her… that would be pretty incredible. Antarctica, maybe?”

When teachers at the school heard Mary's things were finally gone, they were both relieved and a little angry. They saw her tardiness in retrieving her things as more than just putting something off because it was painful. It was about power.

“She didn't come back until
after
the baby was born, which personally I felt was a little game with her that the kids would know her stuff was still there and she was in charge,” said one Shorewood teacher.

Mary Kay wouldn't have given a single thought to the Shorewood teachers after she left the school with her belongings. She had a bigger problem. She told friends that she thought that King County Police Detective Maley had it in for her. It was personal, Mary told a friend later.

“They were all saying that it was some kind of a Hitlerian mentality going on. That I had sought out a genius in order to give me a better baby than Steve could. Pat Maley was behind that.
What was with her?
I couldn't figure it out for the longest time until David [Gehrke] told me to consider that something was going on between us, woman to woman.

“I've encountered this before in my life, I won't say 'jealousy', but something like that. Resentment. Here I was with the love of my life, and I'm living on the water in Normandy Park, and she's this pockmarked detective living in SeaTac somewhere by the airport. And she will never, ever get to Normandy Park and I have. Never.”

And for that, no matter what her motives, Pat Maley would probably be eternally grateful.

Chapter 52

A TURNING POINT for Amber and Angie Fish came a few weeks after Audrey was born. From that rainy night in late February when they first tried to comfort Mary Kay to their baby-sitting excursions to Normandy Park after Audrey was brought home from the hospital, Mary Kay didn't let on about her true feelings for her former student.

But then she started to refer to Vili Fualaau more frequently. She started to tell the girls that she was in love with him and he was in love with her. They had wanted to make a family. And, against all odds, she was going to do everything in her power to prove it to those against the idea.

“I remember her talking about it,” Amber said later. “ 'Yeah, it's like
Romeo and Juliet
' and I asked her what she meant and she said, 'You know we're forbidden to be together, and I hope it doesn't end up like that.' ”

Amber knew how
Romeo and Juliet
ended.
Was Mary Kay suggesting a suicide pact?

When Mary Kay started speaking of the relationship with her student as a love story, it was such a departure from what the twins understood that they found it hard to process. They had seen the media accounts on television and read some of the legal papers scattered around the house. They knew there was a difference between a love affair and a crime. They also didn't believe Mary Kay was the criminal type. All of it was confusing.

“We really didn't know what to think,” Angie said later.

Although the girls thought of Mary Kay more as a peer than an adult figure, they didn't try to dissuade her from her impossible plans. There was no point in going against her.

“I never thought it would come to the point where she'd go to jail. We just kind of blew it off. We never agreed with her, but the way she was saying, 'I'm never going to jail.' The way she talked about everything, rolling her eyes about everything. It made it seem that it was not that big a deal. It was coming from her… so we didn't think it was a big deal,” Amber said later.

Amber Fish had a good memory and when she learned that Mary Kay had been involved with a boy that she had taught in second and sixth grades, she flashed on an incident that took place four or five years earlier at Carriage Row.

“I can remember one day standing in her kitchen and she was telling us—she came home really late and I don't know if she was with him—but she was telling us the story about this little kid, an incredible artist. He was amazing, smart.”

Amber wondered if this was the same child. Mary Kay had been so animated, so excited that night. Though it was true that Mary Kay was the type of woman who frequently showed enthusiasm for the world around her, this was different. The second-grade boy she was talking about had touched her deeply.

Though Mary Kay thought the world of this child, she never spoke of him again.

Later, when she thought about it, Amber Fish would bet money that boy she had talked about years before was the same one she had been accused of raping.

Amber and Angie knew that Mary Kay was not supposed to have any contact with Vili, but they were certain she broke that rule—though she never came out and confided that she had. There were occasions when she would whisper into the phone.

“The twins are here… I'll have to call you back. “

A couple of times, the girls would later say, Mary Kay held the phone up to Audrey's little round face.

“Yeah, do you want to hear her?”

Those calls were more important than the others were, though they were often quite brief. Mary Kay didn't want to leave the house, partly because of the media mob, but also because she didn't want to miss any phone calls.

“She had her phone in her hand at all times. All of the diapers were around her, the remote control and caller ID in her hands the whole time.”

How much had her great-grandchildren really seen of their mother's relationship with her sixth-grade student? It was a question Nadine had asked herself time and time again. She worried and wondered. She knew that Stevie, Jr., was certainly old enough to figure out what had been going on. In fact, she knew from conversations with Steve and Sharon that the boy had been out with his mother and Vili in the van at night.

“For a cover,” she surmised later of Mary's insistence that her oldest accompany her and Vili on their nighttime excursions. “If Steven had questioned it, 'I had Stevie, Jr., with me, what could be going on?' ”

A telephone conversation between Sharon and Nadine confirmed Stevie, Jr., was not the only one who knew what was going on.

As Sharon told it, Mary Claire burst into tears one day as she sat at her grandmother's kitchen bar.

“What's the matter? Did Grandma say something to hurt your feelings?”

The girl continued to cry. “I love my mom,” she said. “But I don't want to love her because I know that she did bad things and I don't like what she did. But I'm supposed to love her because she's my mom. I saw her and Vili in bed together.”

Sharon Hume was devastated by the disclosure.

“What was I going to tell the child?” Sharon said to her mother, Nadine. “We know your mom did wrong, but your mom is sick. We just have to wait to see how things turn out.”

Later, Steve Letourneau's grandmother learned through his girlfriend Kelly Whalen that Stevie, Jr., saw his mother and Vili in the shower, but kept his mouth shut.

“She probably threatened him,” the grandmother said later.

Later Nadine recalled a photograph that had been taken of the Letourneau children not long after they were separated from their mother. The great-grandmother didn't recognize Stevie and asked a family member who the boy was.

“Oh, my God, he looks like a zombie. He looks so withdrawn and pathetic. Couldn't believe it. It was Steven.”

And as the weeks passed, cracks the size of the Grand Canyon emerged when it became apparent that things had been very ugly in Steve and Mary Kay's household. As if the sex stuff wasn't bad enough, Nadine learned there had also been physical violence. And while no woman deserved to be hit, if there was one who did, as Nadine viewed it, Mary Kay was a good candidate. Steve's grandmother wouldn't put up with any man backhanding her, but she felt Steve had done the right thing because he told her that he had no choice.