Sex. Murder. Mystery(151)

“It never seemed she was much interested in what I had to say back. I could be telling her something, but I knew her mind was going somewhere else.”





Chapter 32

MARY KAY LETOURNEAU was elated by the pregnancy; she reveled in it. She told her sixth-grade class that she was going to have her fifth baby—before she told any of her colleagues at Shorewood. She told them she was due in May, just before the end of the school year. The baby was so wanted and the teacher beamed whenever she brought up the subject. One afternoon seventh-graders Vili Fualaau and Katie Hogden met with their former sixth-grade teacher in the classroom when she brought out the sonogram images from among her drifting sheaves of papers and school brick-a-brac.

Mary traced the lines of the image, pointing out the baby's head and arms.

Katie had never seen her teacher so joyous. “She was glowing with happiness,” she said later.

But so was Vili Fualaau.

“Vili was just so happy too that she was going to have a baby that it was kind of awkward,” Katie recalled some time later when many of her memories had been tarnished by the story that had taken over the lives of her two friends.

“I knew them so well,” she said, “but I didn't pay attention to the most obvious thing. I missed the big thing. It didn't occur to me then that Vili had anything to do with it.”

Judy Hogden had a different reaction when she first heard about the impending birth. She thought it was peculiar that Mary had turned up pregnant in the first place. She knew from comments Katie had made that Mary and Steve Letourneau were struggling through a rough patch in their marriage.

“I guess it worked this time,” she said when she talked to her daughter about Mary's pregnancy. “Stranger things had happened.”

Later, when it was hinted that Mary's husband was not her baby's father, Judy couldn't make sense of the man sticking around in the same house in Normandy Park.

“If he knows that's not his child, then why would he stay with her?” she asked.

Nobody in the neighborhood knew what it was, but it was clear that something was going on with the Letourneaus. Some saw changes in the children, particularly Steven and Mary Claire. Steven Letourneau ditched GI Joe action figures for an attitude and the grungy, baggy look of a gang-banger. The change seemed sudden to Ellen Douglas. Steven even adopted the shuffle-walk and the dull, apathetic gaze of a kid who didn't care or who thought the world owed him something.

Ellen talked about it with her schoolteacher husband, Daniel.

“We'd look at him and we'd look at Scott, and say, 'Wow, he's really growing up, but not in a real positive way.' “

Yet Ellen noticed how once he came over to play with her son, Scott, he'd abandon the tough, cool-thug demeanor and be a little boy once more playing with Legos and running around the house.

After a while it dawned on Ellen that the boy's affect had been a complete pretense. Maybe something was wrong at home?

Ellen and her husband couldn't figure it out. All they could come up with was that the kids were not happy-go-lucky anymore and they didn't know why.

“It made us sad,” she said later. “Something was going on in their childhood. Life was not real happy at home.”

But what was it?

* * *

What on earth is going on here?

The Shorewood Elementary teacher stared at the driver of Mary Letourneau's Voyager. It wasn't Steve Letourneau behind the wheel as the vehicle still adorned with the Alaska plates pulled up the service driveway. It was the end of January 1997.

The teacher recognized the driver as Vili's brother, a boy who, as far as she knew, wasn't old enough for a driver's license.

What the—? she thought. He's underage!

She watched for a few minutes until Mary Kay came bounding out of the building and jumped into the passenger side. She had obviously given the boy her keys to move the van from God-knows-where to pick her up.

The flabbergasted woman followed them as they drove from school. She stayed back a bit, not really knowing why, but only that she was so shocked at the idea of a kid driving a teacher's car. She followed the blue van to a house off Twenty-first and the boy got out and Mary Kay slid behind the wheel and drove off.

The teacher who tailed Mary Kay Letourneau was ready to tell Principal Anne Johnson what she had seen, but she stopped herself. Just like she stopped herself when she nearly hit Jacqueline Letourneau when the little one darted out in front of her in the parking lot one day. Just as she stopped herself the times when the frazzled teacher was late for school—nearly every day—arriving at 9:15 or 9: 20.

“For years it was, 'Oh, that's just Mary. Mary can do this. Mary can do that.' I just thought, that's okay,” she said later.