If Loving You Is Wrong (41 page)

“Tony's such a great ally for me,” Mary Kay said with the same kind of breathless exuberance she once reserved for a new boyfriend. “He has such great connections. He's really going to help me. He's a warrior, a freedom fighter.”

Over the next few weeks, Michelle Jarvis conversed with Tony Hollick by phone and through e-mail. He was certain that Mary Kay Letourneau was the victim of a vast conspiracy involving federal, state, and local agencies. Part of it was to destroy her as payback for her disregard of the unconstitutional law. Some of it, he hinted, was even darker. As they chatted and emailed, Michelle found herself agreeing with things that would later seem beyond bizarre, but in her desperation to help her friend seemed so clear at the time. She saw the prosecution as overzealous and bought into Tony's conspiracy theory that eventually had all sides of the law in cahoots to railroad the schoolteacher who crossed the line. An official with the Republican Party, according to Tony Hollick, said that King County was going to “make an example out of Mary Kay.” That meant a
demonstration
prosecution. The strict liability statute was also a problem. It took none of the facts of the case into consideration and sent her to the slammer or into a treatment program for which she was not even qualified. Tony Hollick all the way in London could see it. Couldn't anyone else? he asked.

Much of what Tony had to say seemed to make sense to Michelle, especially since she wanted to find a way to get Mary Kay out of jail and back with her children. But there was that little item that always made Michelle cringe. Tony let it be known that he intended to marry Mary Kay Letourneau.

“If she would have me,” he said.

For weeks the calls from Tony Hollick to Kate Stewart were almost daily, too. At first, the mother of three didn't mind their frequency or inevitably lengthy duration, though she could not deny the calls from London did tend to eat up more time than she really had—time from her husband and children. Kate considered Tony highly intelligent, eccentric, “a freedom fighter who happens to be totally enamored with Mary Kay.” His feelings for Mary Kay, however, harmed the effectiveness of the eight
amicus curiae
legal briefs he “electronically filed” with the courts and other missives he used to attack the enemies of the American woman he'd never met.

Kate delicately advised Tony to “keep the love part and the enamored part out of it, because nobody is going to take you seriously.”

But Tony couldn't refrain from letting the world know of his true feelings. He recognized a great injustice and he could not deny that he loved Mary Kay Letourneau. He dispatched e-mails to the FBI, the White House, and the King County prosecutor outlining the ways in which Mary Kay's constitutional rights were violated. If it was obvious that he was in love with Mary Kay, so what? He'd press on.

No matter if he couldn't leave his heart out if it, Kate was glad for what Tony had done for Mary Kay.

“He's exposed people who might have done some underhanded things,” she said later. “He's put the limelight on some that have been against her.”

Michael Jarvis, like most of the husbands of the women who supported Mary Kay, kept out of it for the most part. But when the conversations with his wife, Michelle, and Tony Hollick went for hours at a time, the patience of the pilot-turned-multimedia-developer was stretched to the limit. When he could hear his wife divulge deeply personal information about herself, it made him wonder what the Brit's real intentions were. It seemed weird.

Who is this guy? What is he getting at? What in the world could that possibly have to do with helping Mary Kay? he thought
.

When Michael asked his wife about it, Michelle dismissed his worries.

“He's probing into the character of people that were close to her,” she said. “He's trying to understand more about her, by understanding the people that were really close to her such as myself.”

Michelle didn't care what her husband thought at the time. She and Tony shared common ground. Both wanted to get Mary Kay out of jail and out of the SSOSA program before it took every shred of life from her soul.

“He's extremely intelligent,” she said later. “He's got these major emotional problems that put this weird slant into everything he does. Which basically invalidates his brilliance. Which is really too bad.”

But they talked and talked. If he was a little odd, he could be forgiven for it.

There's someone out there who cares. We aren't alone, Michelle thought
.

At about the time Tony Hollick had come forward, Michelle learned the existence of Abby Campbell, the woman who had so irritated the Fish twins with her lead-the-charge attitude at the jail earlier that fall. Mary Kay praised Abby's support (“she's a wonderful girl and she's helping me out”), but she told her oldest friend that Abby was more a gofer than a key player like herself, Kate or even Tony.

“She's useful for what she's doing,” Mary Kay confided in her little girl's voice.

When Michelle suggested that it might be a good idea for her to contact Abby, Mary Kay dissuaded her from doing so.

“You really can't talk to her, Michelle,” she said.

Later, when the dust settled and Michelle learned what Abby Campbell had been doing behind the scenes, she figured that Mary Kay specifically hadn't wanted her to compare notes with Abby. Abby was privy to things that Mary Kay had kept from her oldest and dearest friend.

“Mary Kay is the queen of manipulation,” Michelle said later.

What was wrong with her?
Mary Kay Letourneau's problem wasn't her relationship with Vili Fualaau, but the one with her lawyer, David Gehrke. At least her friends thought so. Few close to Mary Kay had any doubts that David had sympathy for his client and that his tears during interviews were real. It only made their concerns more difficult to reconcile. If David cared so much, why was Mary being labelled a sex offender?

What Would Jesus Do? asked his bracelet
.

Jesus, some thought, would get a new lawyer
.

Kate Stewart was one from the get-go pushing hard for Mary Kay to get rid of her neighborhood lawyer in favor of someone who could handle the intricacies of the case without selling her out.

“From the very beginning,” Kate recalled, “he had all kinds of problems. He wouldn't show up. He lives minutes from the jail. He was MIA two or three weeks at a time, not even calling.
On the biggest case of his career
. That was the writing on the wall right there. She saw it. And he'd go visit her and pacify her. Then he'd send Bob [Huff] in and make her feel better. She's smart. She sees through it. But again, she's needy now, she's there, she's removed from everybody. They kept convincing her. She knew in her heart, she had to get rid of them.”

“Get them out,” Kate kept advising. Mary Kay was not some nobody who couldn't get a decent lawyer. The attention to her case had brought offers of support and money. “Get rid of them, Mary Kay. You can get another lawyer. There is money all over your name.”

Mary Kay said she wanted to sever the ties with her lawyers, but she was afraid. She didn't have any money yet and didn't know how much she could get.

Kate urged her at the very least to hire another legal representative to keep an eye on David Gehrke and Robert Huff.

“Get someone to watch them,” she said.

Months later David Gehrke would become misty-eyed at the suggestion that he didn't do his best on Mary Kay's behalf. He wanted to keep her out of prison and the deviancy program was the answer. And though he believed Kate and Michelle hated him, their behind-the-scenes criticism and blame still hurt.

“[They say] I'm responsible for Mary Kay being in prison. I don't know why, but I'm responsible.”

Chapter 62

IF ANYTHING, JULIA Moore was a striking presence. The psychiatrist's movements were deliberate and forceful. Glasses were lowered when she spoke. Her gestures commanded attention. There was no doubt that Dr. Moore was a believer in her field, not one of the many psychiatrists embittered by the law and its relationship to the medicine they practice. She was a perfect fit for the Mary Kay Letourneau case. She had attended a Catholic convent boarding school in Pennsylvania, and Marquette University in Milwaukee—the same school where John Schmitz met Mary Suehr.

It was Abby Campbell, through a referral from University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who brought Dr. Moore and Mary Kay Letourneau together. As the new friend explained it, Mary Kay was miserable with her treatment as a deviant, especially the requirement to tell her children that she was a sexual predator. Abby Campbell wondered if something else was at work, something the other evaluators had missed.

Dr. Moore had followed the Shorewood Elementary teacher's case only marginally, but Mary Letourneau's calm demeanor had struck her whenever she saw her on television. “She was being practically stoned like the Magdalene—by the media and the public—but she came across as being serene in a naive sort of way.
What is going on here?”

In early October 1997, Dr. Moore spent her first hour with Mary Kay Letourneau, the most famous prisoner at the King County Jail. For Dr. Moore, the first jail visit was an audition. Mary Kay wanted to make sure she could trust the evaluator—the evaluator that she would allow inside her mind and share the truths that she claimed were in there, deep. She would judge the psychiatrist by her demeanor, by the questions she asked, by the responses to
her
responses. Mary Kay wanted control, the power to pass on to Gehrke the name of the woman or man who could set her free without the label “rapist.”

When Julia Moore arrived that first time, the visit was between the glass panels that separate the jailed from the free in the visitors alcove. Mary Kay was an unraveling quilt of emotions. She had lost weight since her incarceration in the summer. Her red jumpsuit hung on her frame.

She was charming and controlling “in a nice way,” Dr. Moore recalled later, but she was clearly out of touch. She told the psychiatrist that her children wanted the relationship between their mother and Vili Fualaau. She had deluded herself into thinking that Steven, Mary Claire, Nicky, and Jackie supported her love for Vili.

“Her bipolar condition was so severe that Mary could only focus on the hypersexual object—the boy—and her involvement in him,” Dr. Moore said later. “She loves her children, but she cannot see the effect on them of the divorce, their separation from her, their mixed feelings about a boy they knew betraying them, Mom betraying them. She does not understand what her children feel.”

Throughout the jail interview, Mary Kay had to use several pieces of paper to keep her thoughts in order and her mind raced from one subject to the next. But it was her emotions that were most revealing. Her laughter would turn to tears, Dr. Moore said later, “with the flip of a switch.” The mood swings were not a result of the subject of their conversation. They were driven, the doctor felt, by a mood disorder. Mary Kay said she slept between two and four hours a night. It shocked her how others had given up on Mary Letourneau and supported a course of treatment in a sexual deviancy behavior modification program. The woman in the red jumpsuit didn't need that. She needed medication to stabilize her moods.

Dr. Moore could see clearly that in March when Mary Kay had been diagnosed as bipolar, no one had noted the rapid nature of her thoughts and the scant amount of sleep she needed to function. Mary Kay's bipolar disorder was marked by hypomania followed by mania. It was a pattern that led to the disruption of her social functioning skills. She had been able to hold it together well enough prior to the relationship with the boy. She had had a family life and a successful career and she snapped.

Dr. Moore believed she could help. She considered the troubled woman a basically good person who needed treatment to “get back to who she is.” One key was to determine if any of Mary Kay's neurobiological symptoms were present in any other members of the Schmitz family. Though she barely scratched the surface of the family dynamics, and suspected there was much more to learn, she wondered most about John Schmitz.

Steve Letourneau was of no help. He referred Julia Moore's calls to his lawyer. Steve had completely bailed out on Mary Kay, despite the fact that she was the mother of his four children—and always would be. Mary Kay's network of friends seemed to include people who had known her for only a brief time and could offer no verifiable history. The only family member Dr. Moore could reach was Jerry Schmitz, the brother in Tempe, Arizona. Jerry wasn't of much help, either. He was matter-of-fact about what was happening with his sister. He didn't believe she suffered from any mental disorder. His dismissal of any concerns was strange to the psychiatrist.

“This is
her
choice,” Jerry said reiterating Mary Kay's position. “She's just like everybody else. It has nothing to do with any disorder.”

Dr. Moore didn't know what to make of the brother's reaction. His sister was facing prison and he didn't seem all that engaged. The call lasted only twenty minutes.

Julia Moore also turned her attention to pinpointing the catalyst for the events that led to the relationship with the boy. Why had Mary Kay, who had been functioning at a reasonable level for years, suddenly gone over the edge? The trauma of her childhood could have had an impact, but Dr. Moore discounted Philip's drowning, and the Carla Stuckle affair, as significant. She was instead concerned with more recent events, more recent bouts of depression. She made a list of key events. Mary Kay's father's cancer, her disintegrating marriage, her miscarriage—all within a year leading to the affair with Vili—had sent her into the depression that was followed by the mania.