Steve Letourneau wanted the whole thing to end. His wife had flung their dirty laundry all over the country and the sooner it was put to rest, the better. He told his lawyer that while he wanted closure, he didn't want Mary Kay to go to jail. Greg Grahn told Steve that he doubted such an outcome from the very beginning. He was sure as a first time offender she'd get a treatment program. Even so, he had doubts as the summer progressed that Mary Kay Letourneau was really a good candidate for any kind of special program. He told Steve that he doubted she was a threat to their children and that she was unlikely to be involved with any boy other than Vili.
Greg felt his client's wife had some kind of emotional problem that prevented her from remaining in control.
“It wasn't a love-at-first-sight type of thing. It was a drawn-out process where Mary Kay could have just drawn the line: 'You're a thirteen-year-old child and it's not going to happen.' ”
Greg Grahn was also alarmed by Mary Kay's insistence that she was still in love with Vili. She appeared to be using love as a defense.
“Honesty is a defense of slander so love should be a defense of child molestation. 'You can't put me in jail, because I really do love him.' That's just not the way the law works.”
Chapter 50
SHE DREADED THE day that she'd pick up the phone and it would be Steve Letourneau calling. Even though Secret Squirrel Linda Gardner had done what she felt was right, she knew that her actions led to the breakup of her husband's cousin's home, happy or not. Such as it was. Kyle Gardner had been in contact with Steve not long after the arrest and he had kept his wife up-to-date.
But it wasn't until April that the phone rang at ten P.M. and Steve's voice was on the line. Fear overwhelmed her and her heart sank. Before she could say anything—and she didn't know what it would be anyway—Steve took up the slack on his end of the line.
“Linda,” he said, “I just want to let you know that you got me out of this nightmare and I want to thank you for it.”
Linda didn't know what to say.
“Yeah. You want to talk to Kyle?” she asked, before setting down the receiver and looking for her husband.
Over the next few days the two would talk more. Linda listening at first, then offering advice. She thought it was ridiculous that Steve was still living there with his pregnant-by-a-sixth-grader wife. And why was he staying? The place was being foreclosed. It wasn't as though he was going to be living there after the law did whatever it was going to do with his wife.
She understood from talking with Steve and Kyle that things were getting violent in Normandy Park.
“You've got to get out of the house,” she said during one of their conversations that spring. “Come here and stay with us. If you don't you're going to get thrown in jail.”
Steve finally admitted that Secret Squirrel was right. It would be better than hanging around while Mary Kay had her baby.
And while her own mother-in-law would not forgive her, it seemed that once everything was out in the open among members of Steve Letourneau's family, Linda was not completely alone. Steve's mother and grandmother both made calls of support to thank her for taking care of the Mary Kay problem.
She knew Mary Kay and Steve hadn't kept the cleanest house. Linda Gardner recalled the time one of their children was missing at Carriage Row and it was discovered that the toddler had fallen asleep in a pile of debris on the sofa. Linda remembered tiptoeing through the clutter, but she didn't think that was as bad as what her husband Kyle described when he helped Steve Letourneau move from Normandy Park to their home in Bonney Lake just before Mary Kay had her baby. It wasn't just a case of packing boxes and moving them to storage. According to her husband, more than a half-dozen trips to the dump were necessary.
“They even threw away a couch,” Linda said later. “Steve had absolutely nothing when he left that house. It was all trash. Kyle couldn't believe how bad it was.”
And yet Steve and Mary Kay had always seemed so neat. Linda couldn't figure it out.
Something's not right. Not right with her. Not right with Steve. How can you be so filthy at home, but when you are around everybody you don't have a scrap of dirt on you… you're perfect?
She asked Steve about it not long after he moved in with the Gardners that spring.
“He told me that he would come home from work and he just gave up, because she would do nothing. She would not do any housework. They had a rat in the house. It was filthy. They lived in filth,” she said later.
Linda didn't want to rub salt into the wound so she kept her mouth shut, but still she wondered, “How was Mary Kay going to bring this baby home to that house? How could these kids live like that?”