If Loving You Is Wrong (30 page)

“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.

“Every Samoan in Seattle was there,” Mary joked later.

Strangely, presiding over the scene was not the new mother, but the mother of the boy who had just become a father. “She's the Samoan Queen,” Mary told a friend. “She's the matriarch of the family in any way that you can imagine. No question. She is in charge of every move that family makes.”

Before
her
baby was born, Mary Kay wrote a message that she hoped would someday help the child understand her love for Vili and how difficult it had all been. “
People are putting me down. Accusing me of being mentally unfit because I allowed him to love me and I returned that love
... ”

Chapter 46

THE PAST COUPLE of years had been rough on the news team at KIRO-TV. The station changed hands repeatedly. First a CBS affiliate, then an independent, it eventually went back to network status. Shakeups in the newsroom are inevitable during such turmoil. Friends who were no longer on the inside knew that Karen O'Leary was vulnerable. She wasn't over the hill by any means, but she wasn't a fresh-faced kid anymore, either.

Mary Kay Letourneau came along at a time when it benefited the veteran reporter, too. The story gave Karen—rather, she
took
it—a high-profile case at the right time. And though she had a résumé of important Seattle stories a mile long, the teacher-and-student saga was like nothing she'd broadcast before. It had sex, a pretty perpetrator, a boy who said he wasn't a victim, and inquiring minds wanted to know.

It gave Karen the vehicle she needed to prove herself to new management. And she worked it to death.

“That story has made her career,” said a close friend several months after it all happened. “It saved her at KIRO.”

Later, Karen O'Leary would downplay the importance of the Letourneau story. It was only one of many that she covered during that time. The pastor of the state's largest church had been caught in a purported homosexual encounter in a public restroom was another, so was the prominent plastic surgeon who had been charged with assaulting a patient. But even Karen had to concede that none caught the public's attention more than the teacher from Shorewood Elementary.

“Yes, my news director wanted stories about Mary Letourneau,” she said later. “Yes, ratings go up whenever she's on. But that's not why I did the stories. I pay no attention to ratings and never have. If two people watch or two hundred thousand watch, I don't care. But I have bosses who care.”

Chapter 47

SOME OF THE teachers at Shorewood Elementary felt they were in an emotional battle zone without a general, much less a sergeant, in command. It seemed that after the big to-do of the arrest—a four-member crisis team of counselors, the promise of supporting teachers through the difficult time, and the ensuing media firestorm—for the most part district support vanished. The superintendent never came back.

Said one teacher embittered by the abandonment:

“They brought the whole group in that first day to tell us and the children and we did not see them once after that. We never heard from Nick Latham. We never heard from Susan Murphy. We never heard from a single person.”

District PR guy Latham later took issue with the notion that he hadn't offered ongoing support.

“We gave the teachers every opportunity to share their feelings with us,” he said. “I called the school and talked to [Principal] Anne Johnson many times about offers to help. I went through proper channels—through the principal and administration. It is possible, however, that the information didn't get to the teachers.”

The beleaguered teachers had been left to their own devices, while Highline administrators and others seemed to bask in the eye of the television camera. Nick Latham fielded inquiries from media outlets all over the world. Highline Education Association President Susan Murphy taped a segment of Dan Rather's
48 Hours
on CBS. Even Highline superintendent Joe McGeehan got in on the act: he appeared on NBC's
Leeza
.

One person was missing in action on the PR front. Shorewood Principal Dr. Anne Johnson didn't pose for pictures or appear on television. In fact, the principal kept a very low profile—even among her staff. Yes, the somewhat aloof, petite woman with the cropped hair appeared shaken, but as the days passed some contemplated if she was just upset for being caught with a mess in her own backyard. And even more troubling, as additional information was revealed to colleagues, some were left to wonder just how much their principal knew in the first place. Had Anne Johnson been made aware that Highline security had been alerted about the marina incident in June 1996? Had there been parent complaints?