Sex. Murder. Mystery. (84 page)

The book also described Mary Kay's month of freedom in January 1998 as one sexual escapade after another. She wrote how she even sneaked Vili into music teacher Beth Adair's Seattle house for nights of sex. When Mary was arrested the second time “in the car with the steamed up windows” Vili wrote how she had threatened suicide and how they had devised a “Romeo and Juliet” pact.

Mary later said there had never been any thought of suicide. She had read a biography of Virginia Woolf and learned how the author had loaded stones in her pockets before walking into a lake. She joked, she said, that she could do the same thing.

“The lake was right there… . It was not serious. 'Maybe I could put some rocks in my pockets and walk into Lake Washington'. It was not a threat. It was a joke.”

Soona Fualaau lambasted the Highline School District when spokesman Nick Latham told a TV reporter that her son had lied about going on a promotional trip to France to market a book. According to Nick Latham, the boy had said he said he was going to Europe “to study art.”

“She told us that we had no right to say anything about her son. Nothing whatsoever,” the district spokesman said later.

Chapter 80

VILI FUALAAU WAS in Paris with his lawyers while Mary Kay went into labor and was rushed from the prison in an ambulance driven by Gig Harbor Fire Department paramedics on October 16, 1998. She was taken to St. Joseph's Medical Center in downtown Tacoma while the troop of media, groupies, and friends began to assemble to keep the vigil. A rumor circulated that the
Globe
had offered up to $50,000 for the first photograph of mother and baby. Nurses were put on notice to keep a wary eye for the media. At 36, Mary Kay became a mother for the sixth time when she gave birth to Alexis Georgia Fualaau. But this was not the blissful birth of a baby born to a woman who would take her home and placed her in the family's bassinet lined with the beautiful fabric from Duchamps. It was about a prisoner who handed her baby over to the infant girl's grandmother before being carted back to her cell.

The babies' names remained a point of contention between Soona and Mary Kay. Mary Kay had wanted to name her first baby with Vili “Audrey-Anna”, but Soona nixed it as being too similar to the name of another family member. When the second baby was born, Soona refused to call the infant Georgia. In time, Mary Kay and her friends were the only ones who did.

“I'm getting used to these little fussy battles,” Mary Kay said later, choosing her words carefully. “Soona and I don't always agree.”

The big question after his second baby was born was not how Vili Fualaau felt about being a father for the second time, but whether his “soulmate” would be charged with a second count of rape. Prosecutors had said they considered filing a third-degree rape charge against her, but had decided enough was enough. No more charges would be filed.

“There's no legal barrier to prosecution of Mary Kay Letourneau,” King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng said. “It is instead a question of justice… seven and a half years is a substantial punishment for the conduct involved.”

And poof… if was over. Or some had thought—and hoped—it would be. Few worked the media like the teacher and student.

Vili appeared on TV for money and Mary Kay called in to give her side of the story. She was hurt when Vili went off to France with Bob Huffs teenaged daughter and pictures of the pair appeared in the
Globe
. The tabloid even reported that Vili had several flings with neighborhood girls, though his heart still belonged to Mary Kay.

“I'm still in love with Mary and I still wear her ring. I'm not going to sit around and wait and cry my eyes out. I'm going to keep busy,” he told
Inside Edition
.

Things were tough for the “toast of Paris” [as David Gehrke called Vili] when he returned to Seattle after the book tour. Vili was booted out of school for openly smoking pot on school grounds. Bob Huff showed up with his client to argue the boy's case before the school district. “It was the first time I've ever heard of a suspended kid bringing a lawyer to defend him on a routine suspension. Her son could have taken drug abuse counseling and enrolled back into class. Instead, they fought it,” said a district employee.

TV reporter Karen O'Leary and others who followed the case knew that the whole sad Letourneau affair would never really be over. It would rear up once more and remind the world that the teacher and the student were still around. On the afternoon of November 9, the cracking voice on a police scanner indicated a shooting, a self-inflicted gunshot at a home in White Center. The address seemed familiar and Karen confirmed it for the news crew headed out with a camera: It was the home of Soona Fualaau.

“I was hoping that it wasn't Vili, that it wasn't some suicide. I thought of the love story he and Mary had tried to promote, and I wondered if the final chapter for the teenager had been written,” Karen O'Leary said.

In the middle of the afternoon, Vili's brother, Perry, had been shot in the abdomen while reportedly fooling around with a gun with a cousin. The seventeen-year-old's injuries were severe and he was hospitalized for several weeks, reportedly with the loss of a kidney, damage to his spleen and other serious injuries. Vili, his children, and Soona were not home at the time. Family members said they were living in a hotel paid for by
Inside Edition
.

When KIRO News crews got there, David Gehrke told them the family had no comment.

Later, Karen O'Leary wondered why David would have been there at all. Mary Kay had fired him after she hired the Boston lawyer Susan Howards and filed her appeal in the spring. And, as far as she knew, he never directly handled anything for the Fualaaus.

“He just doesn't want to be left out, that's all,” Karen suggested.

Mary Kay went ballistic at the news of the shooting. Her daughters were living in an unsafe environment. She told a friend that she even phoned in a complaint to the authorities to have her kids removed from Soona's care, but nothing happened.

She also worried about Vili.

“I'm hurting for Vili, the lack of support he is getting. I don't expect Soona and the others to support Vili
and
me. Why would they do that? But they should support who he is and what he should be doing with his life. Vili deserves the recognition for his talent, his genius. I'm struggling with my loyalty to them, when they show none to me,” she told a friend.

Though it wasn't fast enough for her lawyer and the Fualaaus, Mary Kay spent most nights during the first part of 1999 working on the English language translation of the Fixot book. She told friends she was distressed by the gross inaccuracies she found in the manuscript. At night, she pulled out a little aqua trunk as a table and slid a reading lamp close to her bed and worked into the early morning, revising, commenting, and even laughing. A few times she read the passages out loud to her cellmate and the two would nearly roll on the floor in hysterics. It was ludicrous. The last line was the topper. Bob Graham had written a scene that smacked of an old Susan Hayward movie. She was calling out through the bars for understanding. “I beg of you… this is love…
I beg of you…”

From her prison phone—her lifeline to the world—Mary Kay told a friend perhaps the most shocking aspect of her story. Her children were being kept from her, she claimed, because she hadn't finished the revisions for the English version of
Only One Crime, Love
.

Bob Huff bristled at the idea that anyone was keeping the children away from Mary Kay. He remembered seeing paperwork associated with arranging prison visitation with Mary and her babies. It was proof, he believed, of Soona's desire to allow Mary Kay to see Audrey and Georgia Alexis.

“I don't think Soona is that diabolical to pull off this big scam of creating the letters and acting like she's trying if it wasn't really true.”

Mary Kay also feared that they'd release the book without her input. “I will say it's not me… if they step over the line like that. I'll call every news media person I know and they'll put me on the air. I will go down the line on this and Bob and David know it.”

Ghostwriter Bob Graham used his interviews with Mary Kay Letourneau one more time in the winter of 1999 when he wrote a pair of pieces for the London
Sunday Times Magazine
and a London tabloid. The article quoted Bob Huff as saying that Mary Kay had threatened to say Vili had raped her, if he didn't do the right thing and marry her. “That's Mary for you,” Bob Huff reportedly said, “She wants her way, no matter what happens.”

Mary Kay said she wanted to call Bob Huff to ask why he would say such a thing.

“But I can't. He doesn't have a phone that works… at least one that I know of. Can you imagine having a lawyer who doesn't have a phone number?” she asked.

In January 1999, Mary Kay spoke on a Seattle radio show hosted by a DJ known as the “T-man.” A few days after she told the world how much she loved Vili, a letter was dispatched to the station. The prison considered the radio interview third-party contact with the victim, a violation of Mary Kay's sentence. Vili hadn't been on the show at the same time—not even on the same day—but the prison saw it as Mary using the media to get her message of love and hope for marriage out to the teenage father of two.

According to Mary, Bob Huff was livid. “Any time you speak to any sector of the media, the less value your name has,” she recalled him telling her in a fit after the radio broadcast.

The TV movie announced by USA Network also occupied Mary Kay's time and though she didn't have a direct financial interest in it, she was ever hopeful that money would be funneled to her children. Casting was a source of amusement. Tatum O'Neal, Darryl Hannah, Gail O'Grady, even Calista Flockart were mentioned as possible Mary Kays. They were too old, not pretty enough, or too unknown to play the role, but Mary Kay acted as though she didn't care one way or another. It was New York producer Sonny Grosso's and loyal friend Susan Gehrke's project and whatever it was, would be out of her control anyway.

“I very much trust Sonny Grosso. He's like a favorite uncle,” she said. “He would make sure it was true, whatever the movie is… it will be true.”

Mary Kay spent five hours a day in the clinic expressing milk for her baby and storing it in a freezer that the prison bought for her use. “I know other nursing mothers could use it, too. But I feel like it's mine, my own little freezer.” Susan Gehrke made several trips a week to pick up frozen breast milk for baby Georgia. Baby Alexis. Whatever name she was called.

According to what Mary Kay told a friend, after the first of the year, the Fualaaus had found a video of her teaching class and wanted to sell it to
Inside Edition
. They needed the money. For a family who had once lived on next to nothing, who had been on welfare and made do, they needed the cash that Mary Kay's name could bring. Mary was upset about the suggestion of airing the video and said it could not be used. There were students of hers in the video and it was out of the question to get them involved in something like that.

The turning point, if there could be one for Mary Kay, came during the February 1999 television broadcast “sweeps” when Vili Fualaau went before the cameras on
Inside Edition
with a fistful of letters written to him by the mother of his two children. It was an appearance for money.

It was also evident that the rift between Mary Kay and Soona had widened. In one of the five letters, Mary Kay accused Audrey and Georgia's grandmother of “stealing our babies and not caring enough” about Vili.

She also sounded like a girl obsessed with her boyfriend.

“
The only kids you're having are mine… I'll give you 18 if that's what you want, but your babies are mine…
” she wrote.

Eighteen was the number of children that Vili's imprisoned father had sired—the man Vili had once told sixth-grade classmate Katie Hogden he had never wanted to emulate.

But it was the letter with the heading “Test Time” that brought the most attention. She wrote how she threatened “automatic castration” if he even looked at another girl. He thought she sounded a little “crazy,” but he liked the fact that she wanted him to be true to her. After the
Inside Edition
show aired, Mary Kay told friends she was shocked and appalled about the betrayal.

“I told them no and I guess they had to find something else to sell. It is okay for Vili to sell me out,” she said shortly after the program aired. Her voice caught in her throat a bit, indicating that maybe it wasn't so okay after all. “I guess they needed the income,” she said.

Steve Letourneau also found dollars as reason to weigh in and slam his wife once more during the sweeps-rating period. He appeared on the low-rated
Extra
telling the world that Mary Kay had to take responsibility for what she did before he could forgive her. During the tumultuous last two years of Steve and Mary Kay Letourneau's marriage, a total of
four
children were born of their extramarital relationships.

But what of Mary Kay's children, her six “angels”? The four in Alaska were off-limits because baggage handler Steve Letourneau had decided that was best. But what of the youngest? Even during her long summer of waiting for the sentencing, Mary Kay had been allowed to have baby Audrey. She had also seen Audrey in the King County Regional Justice Center. But not at the prison. Mary Kay told friends that the paperwork for which Soona was responsible was the big hold-up in arranging visits with Audrey and Georgia. When the weeks melted into months, through a “third party” Mary Kay confronted the “Samoan Queen.”

“Why is it taking you [Soona] nearly three months for to comply?” Mary Kay had asked.

The purported response from the forty-year-old grandmother was chilling: “Have you finished the English manuscript?”

“Those were her exact words. I almost didn't believe it,” Mary Kay later said. “But others have said the same thing.”

Tensions between Mary, her lawyers, and the Fualaaus escalated in the months since Georgia's birth. Mary told friends that she certainly understood where Vili's mother stood when it came to caring for the two babies. Soona Fualaau deserved respect for taking the children in and, more importantly, for standing up and saying that Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't an evil predator, but a part of their family.
But why wasn't she getting the babies down to the prison?