If Loving You Is Wrong (2 page)

Shields shook his head. “Oh, shit,” he said.
Maybe they were having sex?

Niebush radioed for more help. Another sergeant arrived a few minutes later. Something was wrong.

“She wasn't really scared, but she seemed just a little nervous,” Shields said later.

The officers pressed for answers and grew more concerned the more evasive Mary Kay became. He wondered if she was being held captive by the boy or perhaps he was being held against his will.

“Who is back there?”

Mary Kay didn't answer.

“What's his name?”

Again, no answer. Finally she said it was Vili Fualaau, a student of hers.

“How old is the boy?” Tschida asked.

Mary Kay hesitated for a moment before answering, “Eighteen.”

The officer told her to wake him, but when she refused, he yelled at the boy to wake up. He wanted to talk with him, but the figure didn't stir.

What gives here?

The Des Moines officer called out again. He'd seen his share of fakers and it was clear the kid was awake. His dark eyes were open, though his head lay motionless. Finally, after another admonition, he lifted his head and climbed out from under the sleeping bag. A few moments later, Vili Fualaau told the officer that he was fourteen years old, but when asked for proof, he came up short. Of course, he had no driver's license and no Washington State ID card. He was only a kid.

Vili said he had been staying at the Letourneau house that night when a fight between Mary Kay and her husband Steve made him upset. He left the house and walked down the hill to the QFC store on Marine View Drive. It wasn't far from the Letourneau home in neighboring Normandy Park, which was on a ridge just above the shopping center. Mary Kay picked him up in the van and they drove to the marina for sleep.

Mary Kay Letourneau's story seemed odd, maybe even suspect, though it matched Vili's. She became irritated. She told them they were being too extreme, taking it too far.

When the police told Mary Kay Letourneau that they were going to take Vili to the station, she became insistent. She flat-out didn't want to leave him alone. She was, she explained,
responsible
for him.

Just before the patrol cars went back up the hill away from Puget Sound and the marina, Shields huddled with another of the officers.

“We were kind of talking behind the patrol cars. The whole thing seemed fishy, we were convinced, but our hands were tied. He's in the back trying to put his clothes back on and she's wearing this little nightie thing. She didn't look as old as she is, but I knew she was older than eighteen,” the security cop later said.

Back at the Des Moines police station, the officers failed to reach Soona Fualaau at her home in White Center, some fifteen minutes to the north. Once more, they pressed Mary Kay and Vili for the name of the mother's place of work. Specifics were not forthcoming.

“She works for a pie-baking place in Kent,” Vili finally said. Neither he nor his teacher could come up with the name.

A phone call to the Valley Comm Center turned up the name of a commercial bakery called Plush Pippin. Another call turned up Soona Fualaau.

The sergeant told Vili's mother what had transpired that night. She was unconcerned and asked to speak with the pair. After both spoke to her, Soona Fualaau instructed the police officer to leave Mary Kay Letourneau in charge of her son.

“She had said that she feels completely comfortable with him being with her and she trusts Mary and that they could release the boy back to her custody,” Shields recalled.

What happened that night haunted him when all hell had broken loose and the world was introduced to Mary Kay and Vili.

“They had already had sex... or were about to have it,” the young marina officer said later. “We all knew it.”

A day later, the wife of a Des Moines police officer told the director of security for the Highline School District what had happened at the marina between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. An employee of the school district herself, the cop's wife said her husband had told her that the mother had approved the early morning excursion with the teacher. Though the officers on the scene had felt very uneasy, there wasn't enough evidence that a sex crime had been committed. With no crime—
no charges
—there would be no official action by the police. A report wouldn't be sent to the district.

Two weeks later, a lieutenant for the police department sent the report to the city attorney for Des Moines. He too was uncomfortable with what happened at the marina. It just didn't seem right.

Evidently, nothing happened once the report got there. The Highline School District didn't hear another word about the marina, the teacher, and the boy. Not for almost another year. Not until so much had happened that it could never be undone.

BOOK I

Daughter

To put it bluntly, to be free in right and natural law does not mean we are free to break the Ten Commandments... to lie, to covet, to steal, to dishonor father and mother, to commit adultery...

—John Schmitz, in his 1974 book, Stranger in the Arena

She was the most beautiful of the children and by far the most devoted to John. She was the one who sat beaming—like Nancy Reagan gazing at Ronnie—whenever her father spoke....

—Randy Smith, a Schmitz political aide in a 1998
Los Angeles Times interview

Let's look at this with reasonable and compassionate eyes.

—Mary Kay Letourneau to a friend in a 1999 prison visit

Chapter 1

IN REALITY IT was the tony homes of Lemon Heights perched on the scorched hills above Tustin that gave the city the nickname
The Beverly Hills of Orange County.
The majority of Tustin was Middle America with neighborhoods of mostly unpretentious tracts of stucco and tile-roofed houses filled with children freckled, tanned, or burned by the sun. The wealthy living on Lemon Heights looked down on Tustin, or rather past it, to the waters of the Pacific. When John and Mary Schmitz and their sons Johnny, Joey, and baby Jerry moved into a one-story house with a lone palm tree on Brittany Woods Drive in Tustin in the early 1960s, on the surface they were a good Catholic family with moderate means.

Yet if there was anything to distinguish the family from others in Tustin, it was the indisputable appeal of the parents. John was dark and dashing with the rigid posture of a military man. Mary, with her soft eyes and sweet smile, could play demure, but she was sure of herself in ways that few women allowed themselves at the time. John Schmitz and Mary Suehr had met at a college graduation party at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where both had earned degrees. She was a chemist who set aside a promising career to support the man she loved. But it was more than love. It was also the marriage of conservative and religious ideals that made them such a good fit. John and Mary were a team in life, the afterlife, and, in time, the purgatory that was California politics.

An eight-year stint in the Marine Corps in El Toro where John was a pilot and helicopter aviator brought them to California. Like so many others who made the military migration during the forties and fifties, they saw California as a golden hope for a life of opportunity. When John left the Marines, like his father and father-in-law, he became a teacher. He taught philosophy and government at Santa Ana College.

“I'm a good teacher,” he once told a reporter. “I've always been able to make a subject interesting. No one falls asleep in my class.”

Part of what made that a true statement was that the man had an undeniable charisma and wit. He was brash, brilliant, and handsome with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pencil-thin mustache. John G. Schmitz was onstage whether his audience was a single student or a roomful. He was the center of the world. In the beginning, the lightning rod for attention presided over a family that was the envy of friends and neighbors.

“They were a devoted family,” said one neighbor who still keeps in touch with John and Mary. “The kids all loved each other. It was sort of like, the family that prayed together, stayed together.”

Indeed, prayer was an important ritual at the Schmitz home. Visitors to the house then—or any other place the family lived—never recalled a single meal when prayer wasn't a prelude to dining. Life revolved around the church. John sang in the choir at St. Cecelia's and Mary hauled the children in their station wagon (“our Catholic Cadillac”) to class each day.

To supplement his college instructor's wages, John worked part-time at Disneyland as a Cobblestone Cop.

“That made him a real hero among the kids,” the neighbor said.

Although Mary Kay has memories of her father as that Disney character, she would later tell a friend she wasn't certain if she actually remembered it or had been told about it so often that she had kept it as memory. “It is a glimpse,” she told a friend many years later, “when I was three years old. Like a Mary Poppins doll I had, or putting my father's hair in curlers at our first house, just a glimpse of my childhood.”

It was a lovely beginning to what everyone thought would be a wonderful life. Summer nights were filled with the laughter of the boys playing kick the can, hide-and-seek. Summer days they played baseball or football games that stretched for hours. In time, the family would get a German shepherd that John named Kaiser.

In the early 1960s there were still orange groves off Irvine Boulevard, not far from houses lined up in the sun along Brittany Woods Drive. It was a beautiful place and time. California was challenging the East Coast as the center of the universe. The Beach Boys had just released “Surfin' Safari”—their first big hit. It was sunshine and beaches. And on January 30, 1962, Mary Katherine Schmitz was born. She would be her father's staunchest ally and, some would say later, her mother's greatest disappointment.

No one wanted to talk about it years later, and no one wanted to put much importance on the fact. What would happen later with Mary Kay was not a bonding problem. But the fact was that Mary Schmitz had an injury that made it impossible to care for her new baby daughter for several weeks. As the baby stayed with the neighbors across the street, her mother convalesced in her bedroom.

Later, the woman who cared for the Schmitzs' firstborn daughter refused to talk about the cause of Mrs. Schmitz's need for convalescence. She believed it had no influence on their daughter.

“They loved Mary Kay then, and they love her now,” she said.

When John Schmitz returned to Brittany Woods Drive, he always made a beeline for the neighbors' to hold his daughter in his arms. Every day. Mary Kay's blond hair was but a faint downy glow around her little head. But her brown eyes were enormous. No father could have been more pleased.

“Sons are wonderful,” said the neighbor who took care of Mary Kay. “But to a father, a daughter is extra special.”

If mother and daughter didn't bond, as had been suggested, those closest to the family in those early years didn't see it. It appeared that the little blond-haired girl was her mother's pride. It was true that Mary Schmitz expected a lot from her children, and probably more so from her sons.

“When Mary Kay was a little girl,” said the neighbor, “... I can still see that front bedroom fixed like she was a little princess or something. Mary always seemed to be there to help her and Mary Kay went right along with it. So she had to be very happy with her mother.”

No matter how busy they became, no matter where they would live, the Schmitz children were always foremost in their parents' minds, according to the neighbor.

“They never forgot the kids,” she said.

The tide was moving in the direction of conservative upstarts in Orange County—more so than just about anywhere in the country. John Schmitz, with his David Niven mustache and sharp-as-carbide-blades wit, was in the right place at the right time in 1964. It didn't matter that he was a card-carrying member of the right-wing John Birch Society, the anticommunist organization founded in 1958 to promote conservative causes. In 1964, when Mary Kay was two, her father found his arena. He was elected state senator.

None were more proud of John's victory than those in Tustin and at St. Cecelia's. He was the pride of the congregation. Choir director Richard Kulda, a conservative, though no John Bircher, admired John Schmitz as a legislator and a man. A reelection followed two years later, and by the end of the decade, a bid for the U.S. Congress. His campaign bumper sticker read: “When you're out of Schmitz, you're out of gear.”

“John has a brilliant mind, witty, conscientious. Good-humored. He was not easily ruffled, a fighter pilot. In mortal combat you cannot get ruffled, you have to be thinking every instant. You've got to use every bit of brainpower you have,” Richard Kulda remembered.

During his six years in the California legislature many argued that his finest achievements were in curtailing sex education in the classroom and limiting the availability of condoms where young people might get their hands on them.

“More self-discipline is needed,” he said.