Sex. Murder. Mystery(105)

“That night when I got home my wife knew that my day had involved a tragedy with a child. She always knew,” Hurd Armstrong said many years later. “Whenever something happened with a child it lingered for days. I wasn't myself.”

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.