Sex. Murder. Mystery(183)

He had played a part in what happened, and despite what his critics would say, Steve Letourneau knew it.

“You know,” he admitted to his lawyer, “I could have done things that could have stopped this.”

But Steve wasn't paying attention or he was burying his head in the sand during the months his wife carried on with Vili Fualaau. Maybe he was too wrapped up in what he was doing with his girlfriend to step in and save his wife and family from the inevitable min? Hindsight was a killer, and Steve knew it. According to his lawyer, Steve had seen “hundreds of things” that indicated what had really been going on with Mary Kay and Vili.

“He just refused to believe it back then,” Greg Grahn said. “He feels bad about it. He blames himself a little bit for that.”





Chapter 51

FOR SUSAN MURPHY, the president of the Highline Education Association, the day Mary Letourneau moved out of her classroom brought a combination of sadness and disbelief. It was a Saturday, not long after Audrey's birth, that brought Mary, her newborn, and her friend Beth Adair, along with Susan and a school district security official, to Mary's old classroom at Shorewood Elementary.

As for Mary, she had come full circle, returned to the scene of what some considered a crime, the place where she said she fell in love with a boy. For the others there to oversee and help the stroller-toting former teacher, it was the end of what had been considered a promising career.

Mary had been instructed after her baby arrived that she would need to remove all of her belongings from her old classroom. Other than a few books, very little of her personal effects had been sent to her after she was arrested. Susan Murphy was on hand to represent Mary, who was still on the district payroll—though most doubted it would last much longer.

Susan had been told that Mary had “a couple of boxes” to pick up. Mary arrived with her baby in the Audi Fox that her father had brought to her before Audrey's birth.

It was apparent that her vehicle would not hold all she had left behind in room 39.

“It wasn't a couple of boxes,” Susan Murphy recalled later. “It was closets full of stuff. Tons of projects, props from plays. Several closets within the classroom were overflowing with belongings that the district did not wish to store any longer.” The HEA president figured if she were the teacher leaving that classroom, say to go to another school, she would have marched three fourths of what they were hauling out over to the jaws of an awaiting Dumpster. Mary wanted everything. Every scrap, every project.

It bewildered Susan and she had to bite her tongue to avoid what she wanted to say.

What are you thinking? Where are you going to put all this stuff?

Mary, upbeat and excited, wanted it all.

“She was kind of childlike,” Susan later said of Mary's behavior in the classroom. “I didn't get a sense that she understood the severity of the situation. She'd wander from one thing to the next, she was sort of disorganized, kind of wandering around in circles… ”

While the group sifted through Mary's belongings and pressed on with the business at hand, Susan came across a pink detention slip with the name Vili Fualaau. She put it in one of the boxes without saying a word. Susan also got a clue about how the children in the classroom were feeling toward Mary and her successor. Inside a drawer she found notes disparaging Mary's replacement: “So and So Sucks! I hate So and So!”

Mary went from one item to the next, exclaiming interest and recalling memories that came to mind as she boxed up student projects. She had a kind word for everyone and everything associated with the remnants of all that had once mattered.

When the mountain grew larger, Susan called her husband to bring his car to provide more packing room. Half a day had passed before it was time to caravan over to Normandy Park, unload, and put that sorry episode behind them.

Late spring in the Puget Sound region brings a burst of growth and incessant rain, and in a week's time lawns can be overgrown—with no dry days in sight to mow. But that was not the case at 21824 Fourth Place S. The Letourneau home stood out from the others in the tidy neighborhood. Its lawn was overgrown and dandelions were rampant. Susan Murphy felt another pang of sorrow for Mary and her family. Though she could never dismiss the professional breach of trust and responsibility that Mary had blatantly and seemingly cavalierly forsaken, somehow Susan held some hope that Mary and Vili's story was truly one of a deep and undying love. Even though it was as wrong as could be—and there was no way to make it right in her mind—she allowed herself to hold out some hope for a somewhat happy ending. Susan didn't really buy into it, but even so she hoped for it anyway. Otherwise, she knew, all of this was for nothing.