Sex. Murder. Mystery. (76 page)

“You were not able to understand what the plea meant at that time,” Michelle said, trying it on.

“No,” Mary Kay said. “I will not tell people that I was not all there mentally.”

The SSOSA program was designed for degenerates, not Mary Kay, and Michelle couldn't bear the thought of how her friend would fare with the program for three court-mandated years. It was brutal.

“He didn't give her any other options. This is the only way you are going to stay out of jail. You plead guilty, you take the lie detector, you go to SSOSA, you tell them what they want, you see the therapist once a week, and take your drugs. What he didn't tell her was that going to SSOSA was worse than prison to her. How do you tell your family and kids that you're a sex offender? She'd rather cut off her arm.”

Treatment was for pedophiles and baby-rapers, not a schoolteacher in love with one of her students. Mary Kay thought she was misunderstood by a legal system that did not have insight into her heart. She told friends like Michelle Jarvis that once in a program, she was certain the so-called counselors would see the truth—there had been no victim. She was hopeful they'd modify treatment for someone who didn't belong there.

“Certainly,” Mary Kay admitted later, “I don't deny that there are dangerous people who violate other people. Is there really a place for them in this society? You have a disorder and you cannot be cured. We can help you control your impulsive behavior. But you cannot be cured.”

They wanted her to tell her children that she was a child molester
. Mary Kay refused. She wouldn't do it. She worried that by doing so, she'd alter their understanding of what had really happened between their mother and Vili.

“How can you take a child's perception of reality and abuse it? I would lay down my life,” she said, “before I ever said those things to my children.”

The groupies blamed David and David blamed the groupies. He saw them as enablers who told Mary Letourneau what she wanted to hear—not what she
needed
to hear.

“If your friend comes to you with a horrible haircut, you don't say it's terrible. That's what they were doing with Mary. It takes a special friend to draw the line between commiserating with someone to 'Shut the fuck up, you got a bad haircut, it will grow back.' A real friend has to say, 'Get a grip.' “

David considered the Seattle ones gofers. The intellectual power and support came from Kate Stewart in Chicago and Michelle Jarvis in Costa Mesa.

“They're the ones whose opinions really mattered,” he said later. “Abby Campbell saying something meant nothing to Mary.”

When Kate told Mary that she understood how Steve had been a jerk, how unhappy she'd been all these years, and how alive she felt since she found Vili, it validated Mary's feelings.

“They didn't say, 'Gee, Mary, I don't care if you love him or not. He's a kid.
He's your student
. You're married. Get a grip.' “

The embattled lawyer thought that Mary Kay could have been brought back to reality if only Kate and Michelle had stepped in and told her that she couldn't love Vili.
It was not going to work. It was going to mean the kind of trouble that would ruin her life.
But they didn't.

It was hard for Mary Kay to get through to her children sequestered up in Anchorage, though she continued to try. Steve had done a good job of keeping Stevie, Jr., and Mary Claire away from the telephone whenever it rang. On a few occasions, the timing would be just so, and mother and the two oldest children would get a chance to talk. Their conversations were drenched in emotion and sometimes ended with a sudden click of the receiver.

Mary Kay's friends phoned too, trying to pass along messages of love from their mother, but Steve put a stop to those, too. One of the friends pulled an end run and contacted Stevie, Jr., through his e-mail account on America Online.

According to what Sharon told Nadine, the friend said the boy “ 'didn't have to pay any attention to anyone about his schoolwork, it doesn't mean nothing. You don't have to do it.' He was failing! Steven sent him to summer school. She was a teacher giving him this kind of advice!”

After that, Steve pulled the plug on the AOL address for his son.

And as mad as she was at Mary Kay, Michelle, like Kate, didn't give up on the idea that a new lawyer could fix the mess that David Gehrke had made of everything by the guilty plea and the acceptance of the sexual deviancy program. She drove up from Costa Mesa to Orange one Sunday morning and met with one of the lawyers who had defended one of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the Rodney King beating. Michelle gave the lawyer a list of legal concerns compiled by Mary Kay while in jail. He seemed impressed and saw potential in an appeal. The lawyer told Michelle to have Mary Kay call him. But she never did.

“It was apparent after she didn't get in touch with him that she was not going to listen to good advice. She was determined to do it her own way. He didn't want to waste his time with an uncooperative, high-profile client.”

A referral to a constitutional law specialist reviewing the case brought the same results. Mary Kay Letourneau didn't call him back, either.

Though thousands of miles from Seattle, Tony Hollick continued to be a major player in the Mary Kay Letourneau saga. He e-mailed the day and night away and spent countless hours on the telephone with the zeal of a true believer. He was so persuasive in his arguments, so damn charming and convincing, that whatever he said was rarely challenged by Mary Kay and her close friends. And because he was so staunch, the fact that he also was in love with Mary Kay was somehow overlooked. He held power. Even Tony's assertion of a far-reaching conspiracy rooted in hatred for sixty-seven-year-old John Schmitz and his political beliefs, which stripped Mary Kay of her constitutional rights, was accepted by the inner circle.

Only Michelle Jarvis began to have doubts.

“When I'd pin him to the wall—'Tony, send me an e-mail with the exact issues regarding the Constitution'—he never could do it. He kept pleading Constitution, conspiracy, and Constitution. 'Send me precise information that I can use with an attorney.' He never came up with it. And Mary Kay was hanging on that as a lifeline in her thread of hope that she'd be able to fight this thing and it never came true.”

Tony had convinced Michelle, Abby Campbell, and even Mary Kay that their phones were tapped, cars were bugged, or that people were following them.

“Be careful what you say on the phone,” he'd tell them.

Perhaps Tony's greatest influence was his suggestion that the antidepressant Depakote would min Mary Kay's creative vitality.
It would crush her like a cracker
. She should not take it. It was part of the conspiracy, part of why she was more a political prisoner for daring to love beyond the limits of society.

Free Mary Kay. Do not take the drugs. It is a conspiracy. Mary Kay, listen!

Outside of a paid appearance by Soona (“I'm a very private person”) Fualaau on
American Journal
in November, the gravy train the lawyers had sought hadn't come through. Even Mary Kay was disappointed; she wanted an A-list star to play her in a movie, but even a sitcom actress looking to stretch her acting abilities didn't seem as certain as it had. Bob Huff was having a hard time with his negotiations with publishers. According to David Gehrke, publishers said they liked the story of the teacher and the student, but the ending left them flat. There was also something else at work. Some publishers felt a little squeamish over the idea of a grown woman in a sexual relationship with a young boy. That fall a new version of
Lolita
was in the news, too. It was a critical success in Europe, but American distributors were reluctant to touch it because its content suggested to some a kind of acceptance of the sexual exploitation of a child.

Mary Kay and Vili had wanted the story sold as a love story, not a woman-in-jeopardy or a true-crime shocker. If it was a love story, how could it be written so that it would have a happy ending?

Chapter 66

IN THE FIRST week of January 1998, Mary Kay Letourneau was released from jail. She moved into a spare room at the Seward Park home of former Shorewood Elementary colleague Beth Adair. She was angry that she couldn't see her children, still exiled in Alaska and out of her reach for at least another court-ordered six months. “I
don't care what anyone says, I will see my children.”
Jacqueline had turned five years old the week before her mother's release. The little blonde, like her three Letourneau siblings, had been without her mom since the spring. Mary Kay was also burdened and upset by a no-contact order with Vili and his mother; and visits with Audrey had to be supervised by a third party. To those who had not seen her for a while, the photograph taken for the registered sex offender's leaflet to hand out to neighbors would have been shocking. Mary Kay wore a teenager's zippered sweatshirt, baggy pants, and T-shirt two sizes too big. Her hair was pinned in back, but unkempt and disheveled. She looked lost and bewildered.

Later, Mary Kay would admit that she knew she blended in with teenagers. In fact, she and Beth Adair's daughter actually, hung out with the media while reporters kept a vigil near the house after her return to freedom.

“None of them knew it was me,” she said.

What little Michelle Jarvis was hearing from Seattle during the weeks after Mary Kay was released was extremely alarming. The impression she was getting was that Mary Kay wasn't focusing on treatment or repairing her shredded life. The court had ordered sexual deviancy treatment and her acceptance of that as a condition for a suspended sentence was incontrovertible. Michelle didn't like it any more than Mary Kay did, but a flagrant violation of the court's order would send her back to prison and keep her from her children. If she wanted Audrey back, she'd have to do what was required. But she didn't. She wasn't taking her medication; she was using a vitamin regimen instead. She refused to participate with her deviancy counselor.

She was in love and why couldn't anyone see that?

Instead of doing what the law required, Mary Kay was prowling around, up all night, sleeping all day, and spending money she didn't really have.

“She's not dealing in reality at all,” Michelle told her husband. “If it was me, I'd be looking at rebuilding my life. I've a second chance here. I don't want to screw this up.”

Every time she called Beth Adair's house, she was left with either no answer or word that Mary Kay was out. Messages were left, but she never returned a phone call. Not once. The change startled Michelle. When she was in jail she had called regularly.

What's going on up there? she wondered
.

For Linda and Kyle Gardner, the repercussions of turning Mary Kay in to the police were lasting and excruciating. While they had been invited to the cousin's engagement party back in January 1997—when Steve and Mary Kay's absence got Secret Squirrel to thinking—they were not asked to attend the wedding that spring. Some family members didn't call anymore. Some ignored them at family gatherings. Being ostracized for doing what she thought was the right thing hurt Linda deeply. When he thought she was wallowing in something over which she had no control, her husband told her to knock it off.

“Don't let it consume you,” he told her. “You need to go on.”

But she couldn't. Not completely. Because even though Mary Kay had done something so reprehensible, the Letoumeau side of the family could not find it within their hearts to support Linda.

“I'm the villain,” she said later. “I'm the bad person. I shouldn't have turned her in.
You shouldn't have. You shouldn 't have.”

At one family event one of the relatives made it a point to remind Linda that “ignorance is bliss.”

But she knew
.

“Because they didn't do something right away, I've paid a price,” she told a friend.

What stunned Linda even more was that so many knew for so long. Mothers knew. Fathers knew.

“Mary Kay was the golden girl, all right,” she said later.

One evening in mid-January Linda Gardner got a call from a girlfriend.

“Linda, you'll never guess who I saw at the Super Mall. Mary Kay Letourneau.”

The woman who had started the ball rolling with her call to Child Protective Services and the school district was all ears when the caller said she actually tailed Mary Kay for a while just to see what she was doing at the mammoth discount mall on the outskirts of Auburn. She was with another woman, whom Linda deduced must have been her good friend Abby, the wife of the lawyer.

According to what the friend said, Mary Kay had been walking around in a cloud “
la la la la
, wanting people to notice her. In fact, she was in one of the designer stores, you know, saying 'I've been out of fashion for about six months, what's in now?' “

For Mary Kay's old Normandy Park neighbors, there had been little contact with the Letourneau children once Steve took them to Alaska for a fresh start, out of the fray. Ellen Douglas and her son, Scott, were among the only neighbors to see the kids in their new household up north. A Boy Scout event brought mother and son to Anchorage, and a visit to the townhouse Steve now shared with flight attendant Kelly Whalen was wanted very much by all sides. It was January 1997, and the television played scenes from the Winter Olympics. The townhouse was immaculate, not a speck of dust anywhere.

“
Sunset
magazine could do a spread,” Ellen said later.

She watched Jacqueline run around the off-white carpet carrying an open box of grape Jell-0 without a reprimand from anyone.

Don't fall with that mix, Jackie, Ellen thought
.

But the place was calm. The kids seemed happy and relaxed. No one talked about Mary Kay and what might happen now that she was free to start her life over. Ellen liked Kelly, she seemed caring and involved and she provided the kind of order that their mother never possessed.

“They seemed okay,” she said later. “Maybe they were wrecks, but I don't know. I know it is going to be tough.”