Sex. Murder. Mystery(115)

OF SEN. SCHMITZ

Mary Kay Schmitz was a twenty-year-old student at Orange Coast College just down the road from Corona del Mar when the scandal first broke. The seriousness of the allegations did not hit her right away. She didn't see it for what it was.

“It never crossed my mind,” she said later of her father having an affair with Carla Stuckle. Even when she first saw it on the news. “I thought, my father is such a good man. She's having some legal problems and he's helping her out. That's all it is.”

But it was more than that, of course. And no one in the family knew it had been going on for so long. Who could conceive of such subterfuge? Surprisingly, not Cake, who as “the girl most likely to… ” had become adept at preserving a perfect image. Not even Mary Schmitz, who went on TV as Queen of Family Values, and the champion of brightly burning home fires.

No one.





Chapter 8

IT WAS AT a John Birch Society meeting out in Orange County that Detective Hein cornered the politician with the paternity problem. The detective wanted to know if John Schmitz really was the father, and more importantly as far as the child abuse investigation was concerned, whether he knew anything about the injury. He identified himself and told the state senator what Carla Stuckle had said.

“She's in trouble,” the cop said. “The boy is in the hospital.”

For all his well-known charisma, John Schmitz was oddly flat in his response. “Yes, I know.”

“Well, is it your son?”

“Yes, he is, but I do not and will not support him financially. It is her responsibility to take care of them.”

John Schmitz said he didn't know anything about the hair on the baby's penis. And that was that. The detective didn't let on, but he couldn't believe his ears. Here was this man, the ultraconservative politician who told everyone to take responsibility for their families… and he had two children by some woman in a tract home in Tustin.

For Carla Stuckle, at least according to her eldest daughter, the fact that her children's father had been exposed brought relief. She thought that John Schmitz would be forced into a decision. He had to choose her or Mary. She, after all, was the one with the little babies.

“She was gleeful,” Carla Larson recalled. “She said, 'Well, now he won't be able to get out of it, will he?' ”

It irritated Carla Stuckle that John Schmitz hadn't been man enough to acknowledge his children. Even after they were born, he refused to tell his wife that he had been unfaithful.

The media crush was torturous. Cameras were everywhere; reporters hid in the bushes. Only once did Carla Larson speak to the press.

“I'm very upset at Senator Schmitz for not showing his face and standing by my mother. They are his children, too,” she said later.

Detective Hein drove up from the beach to Spyglass Hill. He had a few more things to ask John Schmitz about the potential child abuse against little John, but the man who loved the spotlight had made himself scarce. Mary Schmitz was home, however.

Mary was cool and polite. She reacted in a way that suggested the events had no impact on her. She said as much.

“I love him and I'm standing by him,” she said.

She said she knew he had a mistress, but that was no concern of hers. In fact, all of it was John's problem.

“She was rather indignant that she was brought into it at all. It was something her husband did and this other woman… it was their affair,” the detective recalled later.

He left Spyglass and drove down toward the ocean highway thinking that Mary and John Schmitz had some kind of bizarre understanding. It appeared to the detective that Mrs. Schmitz had known about the affair and didn't care.

If any in his inner circle knew that he had been carrying on with Carla Stuckle for all of those years, they never let on. Then or years later. Tom Rogers, close friend and onetime campaign finance manger, had no inkling that John Schmitz had played that kind of game. He'd been around politicians for twenty years and had seen dozens who played the field when their wives were back home taking care of the family. Politicians, by their nature, tend to be flirtatious and charming, feeding on the adulation of the people around them. John had an ego the size of California, but he wasn't any bed-hopper.

Though it was never an area they discussed, Tom Rogers tried to figure how it could have happened with John Schmitz.

“Maybe somebody who's egotistical has this kind of admiration, or adoration of a woman. She took night classes. She thought he was everything. John was susceptible to that because he thought really everyone ought to figure he's that good,” Rogers recalled.

Some wondered how he had time for two families. It was true he had twice as much energy as most and seemed tireless on the campaign trail or hammering out a deal in the legislature late into the night. But two families? How could he have kept it so secret?