And Mary Kay Letourneau put her future in their hands.
“I didn't really 'hire' him,” Mary Kay said later when people asked how she ended up with David Gehrke over a lawyer with more experience in sex cases. “He just came to me to offer help. I didn't even know for sure that I needed an attorney at that time. It just happened that I got David.”
Over the course of the spring, summer, and into the fall, Mary Kay Letourneau would be in and out of court, motions filed, pleas negotiated. Everything about the case would be complicated. She was pregnant. She would be nursing. She needed evaluations. Drug therapy wasn't possible because of her unborn baby. Delay after delay after delay. There was also the turmoil of her husband and their broken marriage. Strangely, Steve didn't move out after Mary was arrested in February. He stayed put.
Throughout it all, there would be David Gehrke and Robert Huff and the case of their careers. And, despite the sometimes surreal worldwide interest that would follow that more seasoned media players might find difficult, David and Bob would later insist that they did their best.
“This Mary thing had so many extreme emotions,” Bob Huff explained later. “It was like a whirlpool or a flushing toilet, depending on your visual preference. We were going crazy. I started calling it the Letourneau Triangle. The Letourneau Triangle is a place where normal laws of physics and human dealings do not apply.”
* * *
Among those who knew her, there was no shortage of concern for Mary Kay Letourneau when the news first broke. Though contending with the sudden loss of her beloved older brother, Ellen Douglas was one of those who tried to get in touch with her neighbor, friend, and fellow teacher. She left a message on the Letourneaus' answering machine.
“Whatever happens,” she said, “take care of yourself. Eat right. If you can't get out and get groceries, let us know. You can count on us.”
And across Seattle almost immediately everyone weighed in with an opinion. She was Anne Bancroft's boy-eater Mrs. Robinson of The Graduate and Jennifer O'Neill's lonely wife in The Summer of '42 all rolled into one. She was a schoolboy's dream; a parent's nightmare. She'd stolen a boy's youth. She'd made him a man.
Chapter 39
ONE WOULD HAVE thought that an explosion had taken place in Mrs. Letourneau's Shorewood classroom the morning after she had been led away by King County Police Detective Pat Maley. But of course it hadn't. The classroom merely looked the way it always did. The only thing missing was the pretty, but frazzled, presence of the schoolteacher.
A bulletin board presentation was peeling from its mounting, the words “The American Dream” curling from the wall and falling to the floor. The irony of the statement was not lost on the teachers who pitched in during the aftermath. One said later that she'd have killed to have a picture of the pathetic scene. All the kids in the class had signed a petition on the board confirming their beliefs in the freedoms of the United States.
“After all,” they concluded, “we are da bomb.”
A handful of shell-shocked teachers toiled for hours picking up the piles and digging through the debris that seemed a metaphor for the woman who had occupied the room the day before. Papers more than a year old were heaped next to her chair. Junk was everywhere; bulky class projects formed a miniature mountain range around the perimeter of the classroom. Several paper cutters of varying sizes were unearthed from blankets of construction paper. The finding of the cutters was of particular interest. The guillotine-like devices were not allowed in any classrooms since a boy had clipped off the tip of a finger.
“Guess whose class it happened in?” asked a teacher later with more than a touch of sarcasm.
In nearly every child's desk, it seemed to one who had been there, was an X-Acto knife. Again, a direct violation of school policy.
Said one later: “When I see the pictures they show of Miss Perfect's little room, I think… ” Her words trailed off into a sigh.
The father of one of the students filled in for a few days until a more permanent substitute could be hired. Visitors to the classroom during those subsequent days felt sorry for the man and the others who had helped out during that tumultuous time. Not only was the place a mess and the kids crying, but there was no indication of what had gone on as far as actual curriculum was concerned.
At first, word came down not to change the room one bit. Mary Letourneau was only accused of something. She was on administrative leave with pay while the legal system made a determination about her fate. Who was to say that she wouldn't be exonerated and allowed to return?
After a while, the personnel director instructed a teacher to “change everything. She didn't want a shred left of Mary Letourneau.”