If Loving You Is Wrong (40 page)

“Usually if I get here people will let me in to talk to her,” she said, pushing past and yelling for Mary through the glass. Mary called over her shoulder that she would phone her later. The woman fumed.

“Like she was so important. But I'd never seen her before,” Angie said later, “so I didn't care.”

The three exited the building for the parking lot. The woman with the notebooks hurried ahead.

“Well, who are you?” Amber asked when they caught up with her.

“Abby. I'm a friend,” she said, turning around.

“I've never seen you before,” Angie retorted.

Abby Campbell explained that she was helping with Mary Kay's case. When Angie asked if she knew how they could reach Steve to send a card to the kids, Abby became noticeably bitter.

“We're going to get those kids back,” she said. “You can help us campaign.”

Campaign? What did she think this was, some election or something? She doesn't even know the Letourneau children
.

The girls thought she was odd, a middle-aged woman, caught up in something that made her feel important.

Amber figured Mary Kay had found someone to do her bidding.

“Mary Kay knows how to use people. She knows exactly what to say and do,” she said later.

* * *

More so than some of the others, Kate Stewart could see the true basis of the bond between Abby Campbell and Mary Kay Letourneau. She could readily dismiss what some had said—that Abby was a groupie living through the stranger in jail, enraptured by a tale of forbidden love. As Kate rationalized it, Abby was a woman in need of a mission in life; a person in search of a purpose. It evidently wasn't enough that she had a lawyer husband and a house full of children to raise.

“Abby was there for whatever Mary Kay needed to do. It's a two-way street, but Mary Kay is the needy one now, so Abby comes,” Kate said later.

Errands? Abby could do them. Calls to David Gehrke? Abby could make them—sometimes every day. Running down psychologists for Mary Kay's defense? Abby could do it. Kate and Michelle were glad that someone was in place to do what they couldn't do from a thousand miles away. At times, Kate thought her college friend's troubles had “consumed Abby's life way too much.” Abby lived and breathed Mary Kay Letourneau and relentlessly worked the phones and sent e-mails to keep the process moving—even when there was nowhere for it to go. It was almost obsessive and certainly annoying to some.

One time she called Kate when she was hosting a party at her suburban Chicago home. Kate's physician husband picked up the phone and let Abby have it. “What's your problem?” he barked into the receiver. “You've got five kids! Get a life! You're following this Mary Kay thing too much. Let it go,” he said.

Appearances were crucial. Anyone who knew Mary Kay Letourneau knew that. Shopping, grooming, saying the right thing at the right time, all were of the utmost importance. During visiting hours at the jail one time, Amber and Angie Fish made the mistake of mentioning to Mary that she was looking thin. They should have known better. Mary Kay was always worried about her weight. After giving birth to her children she went on a protein drink to put weight back on.

“Do I really look bad?” she said from behind the glass partition.

The twins tried to reassure her, but it was too late.

“Do I look sick? You should see the food they give us. I'll start ordering cookies at dinner. I swear.”

Mary also obsessed about her hair, which was flyaway and out of control.

“It's the shampoo,” she said. “I can only order baby shampoo and no conditioner—that's why my hair looks like this.”

The girls laughed along with her.

“You don't ever want to get into trouble, you guys. This is not a place you want to be.”

Amber and Angie agreed.
No one wanted to be in a place like jail
.

“Did you see Audrey?” she asked.

The girls said they had.

“Isn't she getting big? A little too big for that outfit?” she asked somewhat conspiratorially.

“Audrey was wearing stretch pants—Mary Kay's worst nightmare,” Amber said later. She asked the sisters to go shopping to get her baby something decent to wear. Beth Adair, she said, could give them the money. Amber and Angie promised they would.

“Did you see her hair?” Mary Kay made a disgusted face.

They had.

“What's wrong with her hair?” Amber asked.

“They have that grease on it,” Mary Kay said in an exasperated tone. The girls gathered that it was some kind of Samoan style. Soona had used some kind of oil to slick up the hair before twisting it into shape.

Mary Kay was upset about it, but there was nothing she could do. Soona was dressing and grooming that baby the way she would any of her children. When Mary Kay got out of jail and could raise the baby, the grease, the stretch pants, the hideous red dress, would be history.

Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't an overnight sensation, as so many would later claim when her notoriety pushed her into Lorena Bobbit and Amy Fisher's turf, Tabloid Territory. Hers was a slow-building tawdry story of an inappropriate act by a schoolteacher before it became a media-made tale of a romance gone wrong. The spring that baby Audrey was born saw a steady flow of interest by the local media before the national vultures with moussed hair and journalistic pretense swooped down from Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. In the beginning, maybe before they knew what they had, before they could take credit for creating Mary Kay Letourneau, victim of love, the story was locals-only and media access was rationed.

One producer from a smaller television show knew that the carrot that had been so freely dangled by Dave Gehrke and Bob Huff had most likely been yanked completely out of reach after the
Dateline
appearance of Mary and Vili. Calls were no longer being returned. The secretary at the law office had a different excuse each time the producer inquired about catching up with Gehrke. “He's in court. He's out of town. He's with a client.”

Finally, at wit's end—and knowing full well the concept of being “blown off”—the TV producer made an appointment to make an appointment to set up further discussions to get Mary on his show. It was the secretary, not Gehrke, who telephoned later.

“She called me back an hour before and said, 'David can't make that time,'... and I had scheduled it a week in advance!”

This is crap, he thought. The show isn't a big enough player
.

In time, the young producer felt a shift coming from Mary Letourneau's legal team. He felt the lawyers had been friendly, even intimate. David Gehrke faxed some material relating to soccer and his son, just like an FYI that a friend might send. Their attitude in the beginning seemed genuine: “
She really needs help. I don't know if we can do the show, but we'll try. We'll really take a look at it.”

But after Karen O'Leary's interview with Vili Fualaau in the park, things changed. The shift was more apparent as Mary Kay Letourneau became a media sensation, a commodity to be brokered, and a ticket to the good life for the lawyers, her friends, and the Fualaaus. National TV. First-class airfare. Theater tickets. A new suit. Four-star hotel accommodations.

“I talked to people back east who said money had changed hands,” the producer of the small program said, quickly adding that his program was more honorable and didn't pay for guests. It became clear to members of the media that getting Mary's story out was not as important as “how much can you pay?”

The producer finally accepted that his show was out of the game.

With all the wheeling and dealing, blatant or disguised, the producer felt those around Mary Kay were taking advantage of a person who needed help more than she needed publicity. Mary was her own worst enemy, he thought, because she was so very ill and completely unable to be an effective advocate for herself.

“She was so deranged anyway that I don't know that she could make a conscious decision,” the producer said a year later.

Chapter 60

FOR MANY OF the Shorewood Elementary teachers, lessons taught in the classroom were different the fall after their colleague was arrested. What had once been so simple now became impossible. Gone were the hugs to comfort a child in need. Gone were any displays of friendly affection. Nothing like that was appropriate. This hurt many teachers, especially those with younger students.
If a child skins her knee and starts to cry, are you supposed to shake her hand?
But there was more to it than that. The scandal also changed what and how things were taught.

One teacher was unsure about comparing the size of a student's hand in a math exercise discussing growth.

“I thought twice about having his hand compared to my hand,” she said. “Touch would be involved.”

And touching was wrong
.

Another time a teacher was discussing how ballads were often written to bring out sad and tragic stories. Some kid thought they should write about Mary Kay Letourneau.

When another teacher discussed Nelson Mandela's incarceration as a political prisoner in South Africa, a kid shouted out an example all the students could understand.

“You mean like Ms. Letourneau?”

The teacher changed the subject.

In fact, she changed her curriculum on the spot. No more of the torn-from-the-headlines approach to current events. There was no newspaper, no magazine, that was a Letourneau-free zone.

For that very reason, some also stopped doing current events.

And there were the smarmy jokes about the “private lessons” Shorewood teachers gave their students. It got so bad that some teachers declined to be specific about the name of the school where they taught and even what district. Whenever Highline or Shorewood was mentioned at a conference it brought chuckles and the remark that they were “from the Mary Kay Letourneau District.”

Most teachers don't take up the profession because they want to get rich. They do it because they believe they can help young people grow and learn. Being associated with a breach of professional ethics occurring in their own school was humiliating.

What was a mother to do? Danelle Johnson asked that question of herself over and over. Her kids weren't eggheads, but neither were they retarded. She was convinced that with a little support from the Highline School District or even an interested teacher, her twins Molly and Drew could make it through school. For a time, she thought that Mary Letourneau's interest in Molly and the after-school projects might have been the answer. When Mary dumped Molly from the group and months later when the scandal broke, she knew what false hopes she had harbored.

After she had the twins tested and found they were academically at a third-grade level—not seventh—she played hardball with Highline.

“I went from being a neglectful, nonparenting, nonhomework-guiding mother to an overbearing, pushing bitch in about two and half minutes,” she said later.

Seventh grade at Cascade was proving iffy—though Danelle had no idea until later that one of the reasons was that her son and daughter had become so wrapped up with Mrs. Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.

According to her mother, Molly was having the most difficult time in middle school. She was a truant. She was a runaway. A former classmate from Mary Letourneau's sixth-grade class took Molly to Seattle and attempted to sell her virginity to an Asian gang—or so Molly said later. The girl couldn't stay focused on school and the administration notified her mother: She was disruptive and they didn't want her there anymore.

Danelle went to the school to straighten things out.

“I know she has problems,” she told an administrator, “but you are going to help her. She's not going to alternative school. She's not going to another school in the district. I'm driving her here every day until hell freezes over. She's going to get out of the eighth grade at Cascade.”

“You can't—” the administrator said.

Danelle cut him off with the coldest look she could make.

“Do not make me say the L word. Because I will scream 'Letourneau' until the cows come home if it's the only way that I can help my daughter.”

“We don't want that
... ”

Later, when her best efforts at helping her daughter stay in school were still failing, Danelle recalled her threat.

“I don't believe that it is all Ms. Letourneau's fault,” she said. “It is unfortunate that my kids got mixed up with that group of kids because they've got a hard enough background. They didn't need this kind of drama to lead them up the wrong way.”

She saw the school as somewhat culpable. Why hadn't someone from Shorewood stepped in to stop the teacher when this were clearly amiss?

“If those kids were really down there until ten o'clock at night, if she was in that school so late—
until ten
—who in the hell is running the place?”

Chapter 61

MARY KAY CALLED Michelle from jail to tell her some extraordinary and welcome news. She was not alone in the effort to remain true with her love for Vili Fualaau. A man from England named Tony Hollick, characterized by Mary Kay as a man of “unquestionable brilliance,” offered to lead the charge from the tyranny of her “oppression-based” treatment to a blissful life with her fourteen-year-old lover. Tony Hollick had read about Mary Kay's case on the Internet and contacted her at the end of the summer of 1997.