The initial horror upon hearing the charges “rape of a child” is natural… But the continued creation of a little boy victim and sick perpetrator has to stop!
—Mary Kay Letourneau in a press release, November 1997
Chapter 35
THE MORNING OF the day after she made the call to the school district was Linda Gardner's thirty-third birthday. She was still jittery over the day before, but the worry and struggle over doing the right thing was behind her. Ahead that night was dinner at Harbor Lights in Tacoma with her husband and her father, up from Arizona. At 8:30 A.M. the phone rang. It was Patricia Maley, a detective from King County Police explaining that CPS had forwarded a report about her call. Linda's heart smacked against her rib cage.
“You're going to have to call me back. I'm getting my daughter ready for school,” she said.
The police!
Later when they spoke, Linda asked the sex crimes detective to promise to maintain her anonymity. She didn't want anyone to know that she'd been the one to blow the whistle on Mary Kay.
The detective listened as Linda recounted the conversations with her mother-in-law and Steve Letourneau's sister. The detective promised that she'd do her best to keep Linda out of it, but there was no guarantee. The allegations were very serious. Linda told her the boy's name was Billy.
Later that Wednesday morning, Dick Cvitanich, the Highline area administrator, called to see if Linda would come to the district office to discuss her story with their lawyers. Linda flatly refused.
“I've already talked to Pat Maley of the King County Police. I'm done.”
The casualness of the first conversation with the district had been gnawing at Secret Squirrel. It seemed suspicious.
“Dick,” Linda said before hanging up, “you guys already knew, didn't you? You already knew something before I called, didn't you?”
“As a matter of fact someone had called last week and tipped us off,” he said.
As the president of the Highline Education Association, the district's teacher's association, Susan Murphy had fielded more than one call of a purported sexual relationship between teacher and student. Most were untrue and remedied by a quick investigation. But the one coming at the end of February 1997 was different. Joe McGeehan, Highline School District Superintendent, phoned Susan at her Riverton Heights office with a heads up.
“I need to let you know that we've had a call that one of our teachers is pregnant by a seventh-grade student.”
It almost required repeating the words, they were so staggering.
Susan was told that the allegation was under review and had not been made public. She was alerted because, the superintendent said, “it will come out.”
A teacher in the district since 1969, in the middle of a three-year term as president of the HEA, Susan Murphy had never heard of a female teacher becoming pregnant by a student. She caught her breath as the superintendent told her what little he knew. It was a family member who made the phone call to the district, and at that moment district officials were doing all they could to either verify or disprove the charges.
The allegations didn't seem like they could be genuine. Conventional wisdom had it that such sexual liaisons only happened between male teachers and their female students, usually in the high school setting. Never had she heard of the reverse. And even more unbelievable to Susan Murphy was the tremendous age difference.
A seventh-grader and a teacher?
Susan hoped that the internal investigation and any police involvement would clear the teacher without embarrassment and without long-term career damage. Teachers had been targets for such crank calls from family members or students and parents with axes to grind.
The HEA president didn't know the woman in question, only that she was described in that first call as an elementary school teacher in her thirties. None of it computed, she later said.
“What could she possibly, possibly, have in common with a student of that age? That was the initial reaction. Even before the breach of trust, the anger, the embarrassment and all of that.”
It was not Billy. It was Vili. The night at the marina had not been forgotten by the district security director and the officers who had heard about it through the district-employee wife of a cop. When they thought of Mary Letourneau and a relationship with a student, they came up with only one name. Like a charades game, it sounded like Billy.
After calls to the school district, and the Des Moines Police, about that early morning at the marina the previous spring, Detective Maley drove to Cascade Middle School in White Center to see Vili Fualaau. It was shortly after 10 A.M. when she came face-to-face with the boy. He was slight framed, a little over five feet, with a shy, almost sweet demeanor.