Sex. Murder. Mystery. (39 page)

The doctors at the intensive care unit at Hoag Memorial in Newport Beach couldn't save the baby. He was pronounced dead eighteen hours later.

“We were all there,” Mary Schmitz said to a reporter. “I don't know how it could have happened.”

The headline on Tuesday in the Corona del Mar
Pilot
was marked in letters more than an inch high:

JOHN SCHMITZ' SON DIES IN NEWPORT

Those who knew him then—and later—would all agree that it was the most devastating time John Schmitz would find his name on the front page, though there were many, many times when the press was less than kind or when scandal would riddle his image, his world.

Richard Kulda, the choir director from St. Cecelia in Tustin, was devastated by the news of the drowning. His wife and Mary Schmitz had been pregnant at the same time with their last babies. He prayed for the Schmitz family, but he knew that they'd be able to get through the tragedy because their Catholic faith was so strong.

“Mary and John were good troupers,” Richard said later. “They have to carry on. You have a duty. Mary's face was so drawn she obviously suffered just horribly when he died. When you have a lot of children it is a comfort.”

Philip James Schmitz was buried in a little white casket in a grave in Ascension Cemetery near El Toro. Tourists now tromp past the child's grave to pay their respects to Nicole Brown Simpson and to remember her tragic life. They know nothing of the boy buried in the same cemetery and the impact of his death on another woman, a sister.

Years later, people would look back at Philip's drowning to search for answers as to its possible effect on his oldest sister and what happened to her more than twenty years later. How did it weigh on Mary Kay's mind? Did she feel responsible? Was she?

Willard Voit, a family friend and a political supporter of John Schmitz's, understood through his conversations with the family that Mary Kay had, in fact, been in charge of watching Philip.

“I don't know if it triggered what [mental illness] she got. I know it had to be a very heavy item.” Willard stumbled for words. “I'm saying it could be related,” he said. “I know that the event could be the source of some of Mary Kay's disorder. Jerry might have been there at the same time,” he said later. “But I know that Mary Kay had been given the responsibility of watching Philip. It was horrible. Horrible.”

It was shortly after the drowning that a girl named Michelle Rhinehart met Mary Kay Schmitz. Over the years the subject would come up and there was no doubt that Mary Kay's heart was broken when Philip died that August afternoon, but she never told Michelle that she felt responsible.

“She adored her little brother. She said he had more life at three than most people have… he was really a bright spirit. It wasn't her fault. She had nothing to do with it.”

Even so, Michelle would later admit that the three-year-old's death did have a profound impact on Mary Kay. There were times when Mary Kay didn't want her children near the water, especially a pool; she was even reluctant to let her kids take lessons. The drowning was a piece of the puzzle that, when put together with other traumas, explained how Mary Kay ended up where she did.

“The thing that is so phenomenally amazing is how she continues to deny that any of these things had any impact on her,” Michelle said later.

The drowning also had an impact of incredible consequence to John Schmitz.

“That's when we feel that John really lost it,” said a neighbor from Tustin, alluding to events that would take place a decade later.

Mary Schmitz was stoic about the loss of her baby. It wasn't her style to make a scene, to toss her body on the casket, or even to shed a tear. Not in public, anyway.

“They took it better than most people. I would have been very emotional,” said a friend.

It was a family tragedy, the kind many families must deal with. The Schmitzes were the kind that could deal with it. Years later Mary Kay would tell a friend that her family never blamed her for the drowning. The whole idea of blaming someone for an accident was an unnecessary hurt.

“I am upset if anyone blamed anyone,” Mary Kay said. “It is such a sacred, private tragedy. No blame should be put on anyone and none ever was. Not on me. Not on my mother.”

The day before Philip drowned Mary Kay was out by the pool. Her baby brother, fearless and determined, wanted to show his sister that he could swim. As she watched, the three-year-old stepped to the edge of the pool and jumped in. He sank to the bottom like a stone and Mary Kay went to get him.

“It wasn't but a second, but I looked through the water at him. He was standing on the bottom of the pool looking up at me. I can still see his eyes. Looking at me and saying so much.
I thought I could, but I guess I can't. Save me.
And I did. It wasn't but a second when I reached down for him and pulled him from the water. His eyes had said so much to me then. And they speak to me now. His eyes haunt me now.”

Chapter 3

IT DIDN'T HAPPEN every time, but sometimes when Michelle Rhinehart Jarvis drove her white VW convertible “Lamby” up the hills above the ocean near Corona del Mar, she'd catch a whiff of a fragrance that would send her back, way back to the time when she and Mary Kay Schmitz were young girls. When a little moisture from the Pacific mixed with the fragrance of the wildflowers, the bougainvillea, and the eucalyptus, it would come back to her. It was 1998 and like Mary Kay, Michelle was a mother. She had two little girls—Danielle and Kylie—and a son, Michael, named for her husband, a multi-media developer and designer. Michelle's life in Southern California was the busy-working-mother-with-never-enough-time routine she had once imagined Mary Kay's life had been up in Seattle.

She pulled her car to the side of a canyon road and looked around.

Bleached white condominiums and gated communities of pink stucco had obliterated much of the visual beauty of a raw landscape. There had been a time when hawks circled and coyotes sometimes made it down to where the houses lined up in glistening rows on Spyglass Hill. There had been a time when two girls slid down the hills on paper bags, or spent all day following a coyote's trail. Time had marched on and all of that was gone now.

But even all of the progress couldn't mask the scent that brought back memories. The sweet, salty smell of ocean and canyon. The smell of summertime and youth.

In a moment, Michelle could feel the wind blowing through the open windows of Mary Kay's bedroom on the nights when she'd sleep over on the floor next to her friend. She could hear the water of the swimming pool splashing against its tiled walls while the two of them pretended to flee from sharks.

“
Jaws is coming!
”

Years later when everyone in the world would have an opinion about her friend, Michelle would sometimes roll down her window and breathe it all in and remember. And she'd think how far Mary Kay had tumbled from Spyglass Hill and how inevitable she believed it all had been.

Mary Schmitz had priorities and none of her children felt the need to make excuses for it. It was the way they lived. The enormous house at 10 Mission Bay on Spyglass Hill had marble floors and carpeting that cost more than forty dollars a yard. The furnishings on the main level were exquisite. Years later, Mary Kay still marveled over a couch her mother had selected and how stunning the silk organza fabric covering its cushions had been. To be sure, upstairs was another world. There was no matching furniture, no gorgeous crystal, and no exquisite figurines. No family photos lined the walls. The children's bedrooms were spare in their furnishings to say the least. Mary Kay's bed had no frame. Her windows went without curtains or screens. Facing west, her corner bedroom would fill with the hot air of the California sun. Some of the Schmitz children used drawers set on the floor to hold their underwear and socks.

“There was so much mold and mildew in the bathroom that I couldn't even use it,” Michelle Jarvis recalled.

But downstairs everything was picture perfect.

Mary Kay would later say that it didn't bother her. She was happy to sprawl out on the forty-dollar-a-yard carpet or flop on a beanbag chair when she watched TV.

“What do those kinds of things matter?” she asked later. “My mother's priorities were elsewhere. We were in private school. She entertained downstairs. We weren't put upon. So what if our couch in the TV room was given to us? We were very happy indeed.”

Michelle and Mary Kay met through their mothers, who were casual acquaintances and played tennis together. With Mary Kay's school friends in Costa Mesa at St. John the Baptist, she was isolated from kids outside of her siblings. Michelle lived in East Bluff just down the road from Spyglass.

Mary Schmitz was the one who suggested getting the girls together. They were in grade school at the time. It seemed a good idea to have a friend close by. It was an idea, however, some would later suggest, that Mrs. Schmitz would have liked to reconsider. Mary Kay and Michelle became inseparable.

“I practically lived there. I annoyed her mother to no end,” Michelle said later. “She always called me
that
Michelle. She was dismissive to anyone whose last name wasn't Schmitz and who couldn't help her husband's political career. I couldn't help her in her quest to be mother of the year or whatever her pet project was that time.”

Michelle and Mary Kay's mother didn't hit it off because as far as Michelle could tell, Mary Schmitz cared more about herself and her husband's career. The kids appeared to be window dressing.

“A Rose Kennedy wannabe,” Michelle said later.

While that could have been true, it was also true that Mary Schmitz was not interested in any of Mary Kay's friends, especially Michelle, whom Mary Kay said her mother found “abrupt and crass.” Mary Schmitz was a righteous and busy woman with no time for children that weren't her own. She was the type of woman who would look past a kid in a room and address her own child: “Don't you think it is time for Michelle to go home?” She didn't say, “Michelle, we have some things we need to do. Do you need a ride home?”

It was something they didn't talk about at first. But in time it was the basis for the bond that only strengthened over time. From the darkness of a shared childhood trauma came the light of their friendship. Michelle and Mary Kay shared a common experience that ensured a unique closeness. Both had been molested by a relative.

“I think back on when we first talked about it,” Michelle later said. “[One of her brothers] molested her, but I don't think he actually had sex with her. I think for her it was the fear and the betrayal from somebody that she loved. It happened. I knew about it. I was ten or eleven years old and dealing with my own.”

Mary Kay told Michelle how as a nine- and ten-year-old she used to search for new places in which she could hide when their parents were away.

“Can you imagine her cowering in some closet praying to God that her brother didn't find her?” Michelle asked later. “And nobody there to protect her! Where the hell were her parents?”

On the campaign trail. Accepting an award. Appearing on television.

Michelle didn't fault John Schmitz as much as she blamed Mary Schmitz. A daughter needs a mother to talk to. John Schmitz was running around Washington, D.C., or Sacramento trying to change the world. Mary Schmitz was yammering on television about the virtues of taking care of children and keeping the home fires burning. The hypocrisy of it all still angered Michelle more than two decades later.

“She's never been accepted by her mother.
Never.
Mary Kay couldn't even tell her mother what her brother had done at that age. She knew how her mother would react. She knew her mother would probably blame her.”

Mary Kay would later describe Michelle's recollections as an “exaggeration” and dismissed the sexual abuse as nothing more than “fondling.”

“I don't even feel I was violated. Not my body. I was not forced into anything, but when I decided it was wrong, I said no. And guess what? It stopped.”

John Schmitz wasn't home much. But when he was, he always gave the girls a hug and a kiss. He joked with his sons. He made them laugh. He had a way of taking a song and twisting it around and making it his own and his children loved him for it. But no one in the family would argue that he didn't have a favorite. His first daughter, all blond and brown-eyed, was the apple of her father's eye from the first moment he held her. She could sit for hours still and quiet as he read, just to be near him. He called his adoring and most beautiful daughter Mary O'Cake, Mary Cake, finally just Cake. No one else in the family adopted the nickname.

“No one dared to,” Mary Kay said later. “It was something only for my father to say.”

In Mary Kay's eyes, her dad could do no wrong. Her mother was always in the way; always the killjoy.

When John Schmitz became interested in learning more about his genealogical background, he made several trips to Europe. An excited Mary Kay told Michelle one time that through her father's research, he'd discovered that he was related to the Romanian royal family through an illegitimate son of one of the kings.

“Mary Schmitz did not want the story out because it was too embarrassing to the family,” Michelle said later. “She forbade them to talk about it.”

Mary Schmitz was not a demonstrative mother. She was not hovering in the kitchen with a pan of brownies in the oven and a piñata to be finished on the table—not like her eldest daughter would grow up to be before her world would crash. Yet Mary Kay, like any young girl, coveted the attention of her mother. But few saw any.

“I never, ever, in all those years, saw her mother hug or kiss her or show her any type of affection in any way.
Ever.
I never heard her say I love you. Nothing,” Michelle said later.

To the outside world, the family was golden. John, the oldest, was the all-American, smart and good looking. Joe was overshadowed a bit by John, but he was also bright and political-brochure-ready. Jerry was intelligent, sensitive, and certainly the most caring and protective of Mary Kay. The girls—Mary Kay, Terri, and Liz—were cute, quiet, and relegated to the background.