Sex. Murder. Mystery(118)

Carla Stuckle did her best to hang on to all she had: her children. Despite working two jobs, she was nearly destitute; her beige stucco house was being foreclosed. Her gas service for her water heater had been shut off so she resorted to heating water on the stove for bathing. Her swimming pool had been drained because her pump was broken and she couldn't afford to repair it. She was gaunt, alone, and bitter. The children hadn't received as much as a card or a phone call from their father for months. Not even at Christmas or on their birthdays.

She told a reporter in early 1984 that “long after I'm gone, we'll know the reason these children were born. I didn't go through all of this for nothing.”

For the rest of her life, Carla Stuckle was a tragic figure. Though she was seen at the Tustin trailer park where John Schmitz lived while finishing up his remaining time for his pension, she eventually dropped off the face of the earth. Ailing with the diabetes that ravaged her in her forties, Carla Verne Stuckle had reclaimed her maiden name by the time she came to live in a Midwestern Catholic care community with her children, then twelve and ten, in 1993.

She was at the end of the line. Carla was found dead a year later in her apartment. She was only 56. No family other than her son and youngest daughter attended her funeral. And while one would have hoped John Schmitz would have taken in John and Genie, he did not. Oddly, it was Mary Schmitz's close friend Jeanne Dixon who assumed guardianship of the boy and girl. When the famed astrologer died in 1997, Carla's children were made wards of the state. They now live in an orphanage.

The contact with their half-siblings has been sporadic at best. Mary Kay, for one, never visited John or Genie.

“Some of the Schmitz children—the younger ones—have come out to see the kids, but Mary Schmitz has forbidden it. I don't think she knows about it,” said the spokesman. “Gifts have been sent.”

May Kay's childhood friend Michelle Jarvis often wondered what happened to John and Genie Bostrom. Not long after the affair between John Schmitz and Carla Stuckle hit the papers, it seemed that the mother and her babies simply disappeared. But John and Genie were half siblings to the Schmitz kids, after all, and in many families that was good enough to called brother and sister. When she asked Mary Kay about it, the answer came through loud and clear. Mary Schmitz had forbidden any relationship with those children. Mary Kay, in fact, had never laid eyes on the children, with the exception of seeing John in his mother's arms at church.

“Mary Kay told me that they had been back East for Christmas and her mother basically said that none of them could contact those children or have anything to do with them.”

Michelle thought Mary Kay's mother's edict was “sick” and told her friend so.

“If it was my family,” she said later, “I'd tell my mother to, you know, go you-know-what herself and I would go and help those children. They're in an orphanage and they've got family! That's sickening. What does John do? Nothing. His kids are in an orphanage… and he does nothing.”

Those who joined in making the “apple doesn't fall far from the tree” analysis of Mary Kay Letourneau's behavior weren't that far off the mark, according to friends of the teacher in trouble.

“Look at the parallels with her father,” college roommate Kate Stewart said in the living room of her Chicago home one afternoon in the fall of 1998. “I think that Mary Kay probably has her father's personality. The risk-taking. And his ideals. Here she is in prison and she's not going to be defeated and she still turns around and says to the people there, 'Screw it, I'm not doing that.' ”

It didn't matter to Mary Kay if her defiance only made things worse for her first in jail, and later in prison. She was the type who had to prove a point.

“Listen,” Kate once said, trying to get her college friend to make things easier on herself. “It's not going to get you anywhere there.”

* * *

Carla Larson, Carla Stuckle's daughter, had some hard times in her life—marriages that didn't work out, periods of poverty during which she and her son, Carl, lived with her father in Montana. There were times when she and her son lived on peanut butter sandwiches and kept their fingers crossed that times would get better. And they did. By 1994, Carla Larson had purchased a little house in Hamilton, Montana, just south of Victor where her relatives lived. The house was nothing special, except that it was hers. It had a view of the Hardees restaurant where her son worked until heading off for the Navy. Though things were better, it had been more than a decade since the younger woman had heard of anything of her mother—an estrangement that had been Carla Stuckle's choice. By 1998, when she first learned her mother was dead and her brother and sister were wards of a Midwestern state, she was a civilian officer for the sheriff and worked nights and weekends at a family restaurant, the 4Bs. Never more would she feel sorry for herself.