Sex. Murder. Mystery. (49 page)

“A really young, active family,” is how Ellen described the Letourneau brood years later. “Very involved with the kids, busy with the church. They were always busy, always hectic, and always late—for school, meetings, parties, picnics, and life. Life was busy. They were overbooked, maybe not too organized.”

There were times when Mary Kay would drop off her children at neighborhood birthday parties, leave and go to the store to pick up a gift, wrap it in the car, and return to the party. Even though the invitation had been posted on the refrigerator for weeks.

When Ellen Douglas figured out the frazzled ways of the Letourneau household she made sure she was designated car-pool mom for Steven and Scott's Cub Scout meetings. That way they would not be stuck waiting for Mary Kay and Ellen would be able to get the two boys to where they needed to be on time.

Several years later, Ellen dismissed the lateness as inconsequential.

“Nobody was ever hurt by it,” she said.

When the quicksand of a scandal enveloped the blond-headed family with the four beautiful children, Ellen Douglas wanted the world to know one thing: At one time the home had appeared happy and Steve and Mary Kay Letourneau were devoted to their children. At least, she thought so.

As much as Steve and Mary Kay sought a brand-name, status-soaked lifestyle, it was no secret among friends in the neighborhood that they had money troubles. One time Ellen Douglas watched the Letourneau children when their parents went downtown to meet with the Internal Revenue Service over some back taxes that they owed in order to get approval on some refinancing.

Another time a neighbor listened as Mary Kay complained that St. Philomena wanted to send the kids packing for public school because she hadn't kept current on their tuition. It had reached the crisis point, and a letter had been sent home and overlooked.

“It was about three inches down in the pile on the kitchen counter,” the friend said with a sigh.

Ellen Douglas even hated to bring it up later, but she couldn't understand Steve and Mary Kay's choices. Both made okay money. Both worked steadily. Yet, they were struggling beyond belief. But they had the best clothes. Steven had the coolest new bike. They even had a landscape service.

“They had no money, but they paid for lawn care. But if you're broke, you mow it and just let it go brown and you don't care,” Ellen said later. “We knew all along they weren't good at handling whatever money they did make.”

To a few, it still seemed that Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau were a team. The focus appeared to be on their family. Steve worked nights so that he could be home when Mary Kay was teaching at school. When she returned to work after her babies were born, she'd pump her breast milk in the classroom and Steve would make milk runs throughout the day.

“Steve was her best friend,” Principal Patricia Watson said later.

At times, the principal worried about Mary Letourneau, the person. Mary the teacher always gave one hundred percent and more—but that was a problem.

“Even before I left Shorewood,” Patricia Watson said years later, “I had some concerns about her stability.”

She talked with Mary about focusing her priorities. She was staying up too late, and running herself ragged. The principal worried that the teacher's own children were not getting enough of their mother's time.

“Mary,” Patricia said more than once, “you need to get some things in control. You got to set your priorities because you can't do it all.”

Mary would promise to give it consideration, come up with a plan, a compromise that allowed her to be the best teacher and the best mother she could be. She'd come back to Patricia and they'd talk some more. She was sincere in her understanding that something wasn't working.

“She was just really a perfectionist,” Patricia recalled. “When you are a perfectionist you see every place that is not working for you. She could look at her children and figure out what wasn't right and beat herself up about it.”

In the fall of 1993, Mary Kay Letourneau moved into the annex, a cluster of Shorewood classrooms joined to the main part of the school by a narrow covered walkway, to teach sixth grade—at her request. She was pregnant with her fourth child, and after Christmas she delivered another beautiful daughter, Jacqueline. Mary Kay Letourneau was doing what she was born to do, being a mother and a teacher.

In time, toddler Jackie would join her mother and big sister as they sang the songs from the Bette Midler movie
Beaches,
and danced around the house. Like her father, Mary Kay would twist the lyrics and make them her own. She sang “Happy Sunshine” instead of “You Are My Sunshine.” Her children loved it.

Chapter 21

IN SAD REALITY, the Steve and Mary Kay Letourneau marriage was a gorgeous package with nothing inside. They seemed to want the world to see them for what they had a right to be—pretty, handsome, and with money to spare. Flight benefits from Steve's job at Alaska Airlines allowed for a big part of the charade by giving them next-to-nothing airfare to anywhere they desired. Nordstrom credit cards and creative bookkeeping did the rest. Steve would later say he didn't want to know that he was in so deep and that his wife was a spendthrift extraordinare. He didn't want anyone to know how bad it was.

It was true. One of Steve's relatives recalled a cousin's wedding and how Steve and Mary arrived late, though not as late as usual. They looked beautiful.
Better than the bride and groom.
Their children were equally well decked out.

“The kids were all dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, you know,
knickers.
They dressed like they thought they were the Kennedys or something,” the relative said later.

Steve and Mary were the gorgeous golden couple. She was the California girl with the stylish hair and the figure of a model. He was the square-jawed Dudley Do-Right; all blond and broad shouldered. Mary Kay even called him Dudley Do-Right and teasingly gave him a bathtub toy depicting the cartoon Canadian Mountie. Their children were perfect, too.
A balanced grouping for the family Christmas card.

But as Steve and other family members learned, it was not so lovely after all. The Letourneaus' money problems escalated after they moved to Normandy Park. Even with family help, things were speeding from bad to worse. They were behind in their payments for the van given to them by Steve's father in Alaska. Even the money given by a wealthy aunt and uncle for part of the down payment on the house in Normandy Park had not been enough to provide a cushion in their overwhelmed checking account. The mortgage payments had been too high and the house was headed for foreclosure. The month before Steve and Mary Kay celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary, they filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Student loans of more than $27,000, medical bills, and assorted credit cards had overwhelmed them. They still owed the IRS more than $10,000. The total unsecured debt was almost $50,000. For assets, they listed a 1985 VW Jetta and a 1969 Buick. Steve had $25 cash on hand.

The couple's difficulty with money brought the inevitable problems among the family lenders.

“Sharon and Mary Kay didn't get along at all,” said a relative. “They were always calling Sharon for money to pay the power bill, money for food.”

But they kept up the lovely front. Mary Kay flew off to California to visit Michelle or just to get her hair done. When they lived in Alaska when they first got married, Steve would come down to Seattle for his hair appointments. From the outside, it looked like they were glamorous and rich.

“They were trying to be somebody they weren't,” the relative said later. “They didn't care. They knew that someone would bail them out. They knew Steve's mom would give them money. She's not going to let her grand-kids go hungry.”

Steve knew it was true and it made him feel terrible.

“It was all a big façade. It always was,” he admitted years later to a family member.

In August of 1995, Stacey Letourneau was getting married in Alaska, and despite the fact that Mary Kay didn't care much for her sister-in-law, she was named matron of honor. She also insisted on helping with wedding decorations. She even spent a week working on a collage for Stacey—“something that she would keep for the rest of her life, it was that beautiful.” The bride's colors were a blue tone and an apricotlike color that was hard to describe. Nadine and her older daughter, Sandra, went shopping for balloons for the reception decorations but when they returned, Mary Kay said they had made a terrible mistake.

“Those are not the colors! Those are orange! Take them back. They won't work. They'll
never
work,” she said.

Bullied into it, the women, led by Grandma Nadine, returned to the balloon store, only to learn they had the closest thing to apricot that could be found in all of Alaska. Nadine thought the whole fuss was ridiculous.

“Who in God's name is going to match those balloons with the bows and ribbons, anyway? Who cares?” she asked.

They all knew:
Mary Kay.

That evening Mary Kay took the kids in the motor home Dick Letourneau had rented for extra sleeping quarters and drove twenty miles out to Eagle River to the reception hall. She worked all night making sure everything was just so. It was after three A.M. the next day when she returned.

Her way or no way.
That was understood by everyone who knew Mary Kay, but most saw it as a sign of perfectionism. Mary Kay had experience with the finer things—and those pep-rally-colored balloons were not going to work. But there was nothing she could do about it. No balloons of the right color could be had in all of Alaska.

Sharon's older sister, Sandra, was on hand to help. In order to keep a clear path for the caterer's comings and goings, Sandra put a plant on a table and placed it in front of one of the doorways to block people from using it.

Mary Kay moved the table and Nadine watched as Sandra told her off.

“I've had it with you, Mary Kay,” she recalled her daughter saying. “I've taken all the shit I'm going to take off of you. You are dealing with the wrong person.”

During one of the Letourneau family visits to Anchorage, Sharon Hume took her granddaughter Mary Claire shopping to pick out an outfit for her birthday. She found a little denim shirt and vest at Lamonts, a mid-priced retailer, and fell in love with it. The little girl couldn't wait for her mother and father to see her wearing it. Steve praised his daughter for her good taste and told her how lovely she looked.

“She was so proud of that outfit that she wore it for three days,” recalled Nadine, who was up in Anchorage visiting at the time.

When Mary Kay arrived from Seattle later, Mary Claire put on the outfit as a surprise. The next thing the adults knew, Mary Claire burst into the living room in tears. Steve and his grandmother asked her what was the matter. Mary Claire said her mother hated her new outfit. “ 'That just makes you look fat,' ” she quoted her mother as saying.

Sharon was very upset. So was Nadine. With Mary Kay, nothing was ever good enough.

Steve told his mom to let go of it and he'd clear it up with his wife later.

“Clear it up later?” Sharon repeated. “You know you are not ever going to bring the subject up! You're not ever going to ask her why! Is it because Grandma Sharon bought it for her? Or is it not good enough?”

“Mom,” Steve said, “just let it ride.”

Nadine jumped right into the fray.

“Who in the hell wears the pants in the family?” she asked her grandson. “You or Mary Kay? Yet I've never seen Mary Kay in a pair of pants.”

Steve didn't say anything back to his grandmother and the old woman just shook her head. Mary Kay was a piece of work.

You never win with her. She is that manipulative. And where did she learn it? she thought.

Steve's grandmother was a forthright woman who never let a chance go by to speak her mind. Her family loved her for it, though there were times when they probably wished Grandma would just shut up. One of those times took place in Alaska in Sharon Hume's kitchen when the family was enjoying a salmon dinner.

The “boys”—Steve, his childhood buddy Mike Mason, and his cousin, Mike Gardner—talked about heading up north to stay in Mason's father's cabin. It would be a couple of days of hanging out, just like they used to do before wives and children.

Everyone was up for it, but Steve was reluctant. He hemmed and hawed and just couldn't commit.

“Well,” he said, “I don't know. I'll have to check with Mary Kay—”

Nadine blew up. “God,” she said, “are you so damned pussy-whipped?”

Everyone laughed and Steve turned red. Later, his grandmother told him she was sorry.

“But I think you are. She's got the upper hand and she knows how to use it,” the old woman said.

Steve just shook his head.

Chapter 22

TURNING NORTH ON Thirty-fifth Avenue SW from Roxbury is a straight shot from White Center and the problems that come with that territory. With each block toward the central business district, “the Junction,” of West Seattle, come better homes, nicer yards, and that elusive pride of ownership. Thirty-fifth Avenue is lined with trees; rows of green-dipped paintbrushes in spring, yellow flames in fall. The houses are older, some approaching a century old. Little Northwest bungalows sit up high off the street in yards with lawns that drop perpendicular to the sidewalk. So steep are the yards that some homeowners hitch a rope to their mowers to drop them down and reel them up. No person could walk the edge.

The Hogden house was a pretty lemony shade of yellow that brought cheer in the winter and complemented the turning leaves that marched up the avenue in the fall. The home of Lee and Judy Hogden and their twelve-year-old daughter, Katie, sat like the others high up off the street. It was a house full of love with no shortage of pets.

The heart of their home was the kitchen, a wonderful room of clutter and computers. A kitchen island inset with a slab of marble dominated the center of the room; above the island was a canopy of pots and pans. A row of family photos mingled with eight-by-ten glossies of film and television stars—a gift from a movie director friend of Judy's. The prize of the gallery was the signed photo of Bette Davis; the River Phoenix image had never been taken from the envelope.