If Loving You Is Wrong (8 page)

“John offered me the magnificent sum of two hundred dollars a month for them,” she told a reporter when she was threatening to sue. She thought $500 was more reasonable. For God's sake, she was living in a modest home in Tustin while his other kids had been raised in the splendor of Spyglass Hill. She wasn't being greedy, she said. She didn't want to have to work a second job at the answering service in Santa Ana.

John Schmitz had always told Carla that a formal agreement hadn't been possible because Mary Schmitz controlled the purse strings. But with their relationship out in the open, Carla saw no reason why she had to beg for money.

Mary Schmitz reportedly held her ground.

“She was unwilling to change her lifestyle to help him pay,” Carla Stuckle said.

In the end, however, John Schmitz was ordered by the court to pay $275 a month.

The Schmitz family's downward spiral continued after Carla Stuckle's name faded from the headlines. The family focused its attention on Mary Kay's favorite brother, Jerry, a twenty-three-year-old Scientologist living in San Francisco. The gentlest of the boys, the Schmitz attack against him appeared as nothing more than bullying.

In January 1983, Mary Schmitz and her two oldest sons had drawn a line in the sand with a bulldozer, with the Church of Scientology and son Jerry Schmitz on the other side. They said they thought Jerry had been brainwashed by the church. He wouldn't listen to reason. He wouldn't forsake Scientology for Catholicism. He wouldn't leave his staff job for the church in San Francisco.

What was wrong with him? Why won't he come to his senses? they thought.

Mary Schmitz threatened to sue the church and asked political crony Jesse Helms to launch a congressional probe. Her son was a victim. He barely slept and worked all the time on Scientology activities.

“I'd like to get him out of the clutches of this beast. Jerry can't be himself. He seems to be wholly unproductive,” she told a reporter.

Son Joe, then a twenty-six-year-old Navy officer, weighed in, too. He characterized his younger brother's responses to criticism as angry and irrational.

It was clear to those who knew the family that it was Mary Schmitz who led the charge. She just didn't get it. Her son was happy. He wasn't a zombie. Of all the boys, he marched to a drummer none could comprehend. He wasn't like the high-powered John and Joe. He was
Jerry.
Couldn't she see the difference?

During the Scientology ordeal Mary Kay had been kept in the dark. Her brother, the family member she was closest to—the one she would later say was second in importance in her life only to the boy who would change her life—never mentioned their mother's crusade. Neither did their parents.

“It is something we just never talked about,” she said later.

The “felony child neglect” charges against Carla Stuckle were eventually dropped, and she was put on six months of social-service agency supervision, but the indignities continued. The Schmitz boys and their father had a meeting at Carla's home after the dust had settled and there was no longer any media interest in the case. One of the boys proposed to Carla that the best thing for everyone would be to put the children up for adoption.

“Best for who?” Carla Larson, the oldest daughter, later said when she learned of the plan. “Can you imagine the gall? As if my mother didn't love those children?”

And if that was the Schmitz style, to sweep the mess under the rug and avoid any further embarrassment, it was insulting to the woman John Schmitz had said he loved.

“I nearly threw him out of my house,” Carla Stuckle told her daughter. “John didn't say anything then but later told me he didn't like that idea and knew I wouldn't go for it.”

Chapter 10

BOTH MARY KAY Schmitz Letourneau and Carla Bostrom Stuckle would feel abandoned by John Schmitz at critical times of their lives. Mary Kay needed her father by her side when her world was unraveling and her own personal scandal was sucking her down like a whirlpool; Carla needed John's support when she had the gall to let the world know she'd borne his children, children he ignored. Carla and Mary Kay had barely talked in their entire lives, but they shared something very deep. They both had been hurt by the man they loved more than any other. In little more than ten years' time their lives would end up in devastating tragedy.

Carla Stuckle did her best to hang on to all she had: her children. Despite working two jobs, she was nearly destitute; her beige stucco house was being foreclosed. Her gas service for her water heater had been shut off so she resorted to heating water on the stove for bathing. Her swimming pool had been drained because her pump was broken and she couldn't afford to repair it. She was gaunt, alone, and bitter. The children hadn't received as much as a card or a phone call from their father for months. Not even at Christmas or on their birthdays.

She told a reporter in early 1984 that “long after I'm gone, we'll know the reason these children were born. I didn't go through all of this for nothing.”

For the rest of her life, Carla Stuckle was a tragic figure. Though she was seen at the Tustin trailer park where John Schmitz lived while finishing up his remaining time for his pension, she eventually dropped off the face of the earth. Ailing with the diabetes that ravaged her in her forties, Carla Verne Stuckle had reclaimed her maiden name by the time she came to live in a Midwestern Catholic care community with her children, then twelve and ten, in 1993.

She was at the end of the line. Carla was found dead a year later in her apartment. She was only 56. No family other than her son and youngest daughter attended her funeral. And while one would have hoped John Schmitz would have taken in John and Genie, he did not. Oddly, it was Mary Schmitz's close friend Jeanne Dixon who assumed guardianship of the boy and girl. When the famed astrologer died in 1997, Carla's children were made wards of the state. They now live in an orphange.

The contact with their half-siblings has been sporadic at best. Mary Kay, for one, never visited John or Genie.

“Some of the Schmitz children—the younger ones—have come out to see the kids, but Mary Schmitz has forbidden it. I don't think she knows about it,” said the spokesman. “Gifts have been sent.”

May Kay's childhood friend Michelle Jarvis often wondered what happened to John and Genie Bostrom. Not long after the affair between John Schmitz and Carla Stuckle hit the papers, it seemed that the mother and her babies simply disappeared. But John and Genie were half siblings to the Schmitz kids, after all, and in many families that was good enough to called brother and sister. When she asked Mary Kay about it, the answer came through loud and clear. Mary Schmitz had forbidden any relationship with those children. Mary Kay, in fact, had never laid eyes on the children, with the exception of seeing John in his mother's arms at church.

“Mary Kay told me that they had been back East for Christmas and her mother basically said that none of them could contact those children or have anything to do with them.”

Michelle thought Mary Kay's mother's edict was “sick” and told her friend so.

“If it was my family,” she said later, “I'd tell my mother to, you know, go you-know-what herself and I would go and help those children. They're in an orphanage and they've got family! That's sickening. What does John do? Nothing. His kids are in an orphanage... and he does nothing.”

Those who joined in making the “apple doesn't fall far from the tree” analysis of Mary Kay Letourneau's behavior weren't that far off the mark, according to friends of the teacher in trouble.

“Look at the parallels with her father,” college roommate Kate Stewart said in the living room of her Chicago home one afternoon in the fall of 1998. “I think that Mary Kay probably has her father's personality. The risk-taking. And his ideals. Here she is in prison and she's not going to be defeated and she still turns around and says to the people there, 'Screw it, I'm not doing that.' ”

It didn't matter to Mary Kay if her defiance only made things worse for her first in jail, and later in prison. She was the type who had to prove a point.

“Listen,” Kate once said, trying to get her college friend to make things easier on herself. “It's not going to get you anywhere there.”

* * *

Carla Larson, Carla Stuckle's daughter, had some hard times in her life—marriages that didn't work out, periods of poverty during which she and her son, Carl, lived with her father in Montana. There were times when she and her son lived on peanut butter sandwiches and kept their fingers crossed that times would get better. And they did. By 1994, Carla Larson had purchased a little house in Hamilton, Montana, just south of Victor where her relatives lived. The house was nothing special, except that it was hers. It had a view of the Hardees restaurant where her son worked until heading off for the Navy. Though things were better, it had been more than a decade since the younger woman had heard of anything of her mother—an estrangement that had been Carla Stuckle's choice. By 1998, when she first learned her mother was dead and her brother and sister were wards of a Midwestern state, she was a civilian officer for the sheriff and worked nights and weekends at a family restaurant, the 4Bs. Never more would she feel sorry for herself.

But for years after the affair with John Schmitz left her mother a broken and pathetic woman, Carla Larson always believed that her youngest brother and sister were living somewhere, happily, in California. She had no idea John and Genie were in an orphanage and the thought of it brought anguish and a flood of tears.

“They have a sister who would have taken them in a heartbeat. If someone had called me when our mother died four years ago, I would have been there. We would have found a way to take them into our home. I was living here in Montana... I would have found some way. They are my brother and sister. They have a father and they have two sisters—and the Schmitz kids, too.”

She wondered why John Schmitz didn't contact her when her mother died. Carla Larson knew John Schmitz. It wasn't as if he had no knowledge of her.

Then it hit her.

She blamed Mary Schmitz. Mary hadn't wanted to take the children in or acknowledge their link to her husband.

“Why would she take the proof of her husband's infidelity into her own home? That was not Mary's way. That would be asking too much of a woman like her,” Carla said later.

But John Schmitz, what was his excuse? She couldn't figure out why he didn't stand up for those children when they really needed it. It blew her mind that those children had to live like that when they had a father.

“Why are those kids in an orphanage?” she asked over and over in 1998. “Those poor kids must think their sister doesn't care about them. They must wonder why their own sister didn't come after them.”

Chapter 11

CALIFORNIA WAS FAR away, the shimmer of the ocean from her bedroom window was a cherished memory. Never more would there be phone calls from friends all over Orange County.

“Hey, Mary Kay, look outside and tell us what the beach is doing!”

The Carla Stuckle scandal was not relevant anymore, because her father had told her it was not important. And Mary Kay Schmitz was enrolled in classes at Arizona State University, far from it all.

All of Mary Kay Schmitz's friends were beautiful. That had been true with Michelle in Corona del Mar and it was true of a fine-boned blond named Kate Stewart at Arizona State University where she met Mary Kay in the late fall of 1982. Kate was a political science major and Mary Kay was dabbling in the arts, talking about teaching. And while they were at Arizona State to get their college degrees, both knew that meeting the right man was a possibility, too. The young women dumped their roommates and moved in together when the best apartment in the complex where they both lived became available.

Mary Kay had just broken up with a man that friends thought was the love of her life—long before a Samoan boy named Vili Fualaau, of course. Mary Kay had entertained the idea that she might marry the guy, though he hadn't asked her. And, she said later, she hadn't gone to bed with him. It was a long time since she'd been a virgin, of course, but for this man she was saving herself for the honeymoon.

“I'd seen [Mary Kay and the college man] together a few times when Mary Kay was at the apartment,” Kate Stewart recalled. “Then it was over, and I wasn't paying too much attention that he was such a big deal to her. When we got closer she described the whole thing for me. I read the letters and I thought,
How could this guy undo this... it shouldn't have happened.
I wouldn't say it devastated her. It would take a lot to devastate her. I wouldn't say she's devastated
now.
You can't break this girl.”

Kate and Mary Kay never had any classes together. At the time they met, Kate had left her sorority, tired of being told what to do and when to do it. Mary Kay was looking into pledging and, in time, would choose Pi Fi. Their friendship remained strong. Between classes at the university and hostess and waitress jobs at Mother Tuckers Restaurant or the Paradise Bar and Grill, the two were party companions, driving to and from hot spots in Mary Kay's Ford Fiesta without any brakes.

Mary Kay loved to party.

“She lives on the edge,” Kate said later of her friend. “She's one of those personalities. She's very outgoing, very nonmainstream. She has her own mind, her own way, and I've accepted that.”