Sex. Murder. Mystery(101)

Mary Kay Letourneau's story seemed odd, maybe even suspect, though it matched Vili's. She became irritated. She told them they were being too extreme, taking it too far.

When the police told Mary Kay Letourneau that they were going to take Vili to the station, she became insistent. She flat-out didn't want to leave him alone. She was, she explained, responsible for him.

Just before the patrol cars went back up the hill away from Puget Sound and the marina, Shields huddled with another of the officers.

“We were kind of talking behind the patrol cars. The whole thing seemed fishy, we were convinced, but our hands were tied. He's in the back trying to put his clothes back on and she's wearing this little nightie thing. She didn't look as old as she is, but I knew she was older than eighteen,” the security cop later said.

Back at the Des Moines police station, the officers failed to reach Soona Fualaau at her home in White Center, some fifteen minutes to the north. Once more, they pressed Mary Kay and Vili for the name of the mother's place of work. Specifics were not forthcoming.

“She works for a pie-baking place in Kent,” Vili finally said. Neither he nor his teacher could come up with the name.

A phone call to the Valley Comm Center turned up the name of a commercial bakery called Plush Pippin. Another call turned up Soona Fualaau.

The sergeant told Vili's mother what had transpired that night. She was unconcerned and asked to speak with the pair. After both spoke to her, Soona Fualaau instructed the police officer to leave Mary Kay Letourneau in charge of her son.

“She had said that she feels completely comfortable with him being with her and she trusts Mary and that they could release the boy back to her custody,” Shields recalled.

What happened that night haunted him when all hell had broken loose and the world was introduced to Mary Kay and Vili.

“They had already had sex… or were about to have it,” the young marina officer said later. “We all knew it.”

A day later, the wife of a Des Moines police officer told the director of security for the Highline School District what had happened at the marina between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. An employee of the school district herself, the cop's wife said her husband had told her that the mother had approved the early morning excursion with the teacher. Though the officers on the scene had felt very uneasy, there wasn't enough evidence that a sex crime had been committed. With no crime—no charges—there would be no official action by the police. A report wouldn't be sent to the district.

Two weeks later, a lieutenant for the police department sent the report to the city attorney for Des Moines. He too was uncomfortable with what happened at the marina. It just didn't seem right.

Evidently, nothing happened once the report got there. The Highline School District didn't hear another word about the marina, the teacher, and the boy. Not for almost another year. Not until so much had happened that it could never be undone.





BOOK I

Daughter





To put it bluntly, to be free in right and natural law does not mean we are free to break the Ten Commandments… to lie, to covet, to steal, to dishonor father and mother, to commit adultery…

—John Schmitz, in his 1974 book, Stranger in the Arena

She was the most beautiful of the children and by far the most devoted to John. She was the one who sat beaming—like Nancy Reagan gazing at Ronnie—whenever her father spoke….

—Randy Smith, a Schmitz political aide in a 1998

Los Angeles Times interview

Let's look at this with reasonable and compassionate eyes.

—Mary Kay Letourneau to a friend in a 1999 prison visit





Chapter 1

IN REALITY IT was the tony homes of Lemon Heights perched on the scorched hills above Tustin that gave the city the nickname The Beverly Hills of Orange County. The majority of Tustin was Middle America with neighborhoods of mostly unpretentious tracts of stucco and tile-roofed houses filled with children freckled, tanned, or burned by the sun. The wealthy living on Lemon Heights looked down on Tustin, or rather past it, to the waters of the Pacific. When John and Mary Schmitz and their sons Johnny, Joey, and baby Jerry moved into a one-story house with a lone palm tree on Brittany Woods Drive in Tustin in the early 1960s, on the surface they were a good Catholic family with moderate means.

Yet if there was anything to distinguish the family from others in Tustin, it was the indisputable appeal of the parents. John was dark and dashing with the rigid posture of a military man. Mary, with her soft eyes and sweet smile, could play demure, but she was sure of herself in ways that few women allowed themselves at the time. John Schmitz and Mary Suehr had met at a college graduation party at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where both had earned degrees. She was a chemist who set aside a promising career to support the man she loved. But it was more than love. It was also the marriage of conservative and religious ideals that made them such a good fit. John and Mary were a team in life, the afterlife, and, in time, the purgatory that was California politics.