Sex. Murder. Mystery(186)

“She's the biggest bitch I've met in my life,” Mary Kay said.

Amber felt sorry for Mary Kay. The way she had described some of the psychologists made them seem harsh and indifferent. Mary Kay needed understanding, not judgment.

“She said they were really cold and impersonal and she didn't like talking to them at all. So I felt bad that she had to go through that,” she said later.

Angie later remembered how Mary Kay railed against the whole process.

“They were trying to feed her the right things to say and she didn't want to say the relationship was wrong. She hated it. She really believed she was right and the evaluators were telling her that she was wrong and it made her mad. She was really stubborn and wouldn't agree with them,” the teenager recalled.

Mary Kay also hated the idea that Audrey couldn't come with her. Because of the nature of the child rape charges, she was ordered never to be alone with any of her children. No one expected her to molest her baby, but a rule was a rule. Mary Kay didn't care.

“I'll show them,” she said in what had become typical defiance. “I'm going to bring her anyway.”

One time she called the Fish twins from Federal Way and asked them to come to the evaluator's office. She had Audrey with her and the psychologist insisted that she be in someone else's care during their session. When the girls arrived and got Audrey, Mary Kay rolled her brown eyes.

“I'm trying to prove a point,” she said. “I should be able to bring my baby with me.”

The Fish twins understood Mary Kay's loyalty to her romance with Vili, but neither could understand why she wouldn't go along with the program in order to avoid incarceration.

Neither did the twins know how far her defiance of the program had gone.

“This little boy you've accused me of raping? Well, he's out in the car waiting for me and we're going to go off somewhere and do whatever we want to do,” Mary Kay had wanted to blurt out during one treatment session, as she later told a friend.

The treatment providers pissed off Mary Kay. She thought they were mean-spirited and didn't care about anything but categorizing her as a pervert. They had stripped her down to the core. They had probed in every area of her sexual background so deeply that Mary Kay told a friend she thought she had detailed every sexual experience she'd ever had. They wrote it all down, shook their heads, and told her she was a sick woman. According to what Mary Kay told friends, the whole process was built on humiliation.

“You're going to admit what a sick woman you are!”

“You are going to tell your children that you're a pedophile!”

“If you see—even a picture—of a child, you'll report it!”

One time a woman carrying her baby arrived in the waiting room while Mary Kay sat until she was called in for her appointment.

“They told the lady she had to leave the room because Mary Kay was a sex offender and might hurt her child. To a woman who was carrying her infant, for God's sake,” a friend recalled.

Mary Kay knew she was in trouble. The SSOSA program of treatment might keep her out of prison, but it was not a Cakewalk by any means. Some alternative. She was trying to do what they wanted her to do, but her feelings for Vili hadn't changed. They weren't going to.

“Everything that she did just incriminated herself further and further and it gave the prosecution more ammunition against her. They were just telling her to do things that were doing nothing but burying her deeper,” said Michelle Jarvis a year later.

But Mary Kay told them repeatedly that she would rather go to jail than sit through the evaluations.

That's really stupid, Angie thought.





Chapter 54

ANGIE AND AMBER thought healer Leslee Browning was a bit of a busybody, but she cut such a peculiar figure—all bells, spangles, and moonbeams—they couldn't hate her. All they could muster was a bit of eye-rolling and annoyance. Leslee, with her spiky, reddish “do,” reed-thin legs, oversize eyeglasses, and deep, smoky voice, was well-known by folks at Carriage Row.

“She's the daughter of that 'natural products' gal, Natalie. You know, the one with the pots of plants storm-trooping out her front door.”

Leslee Browning was in her mid-forties when she reconnected to Mary Kay Letourneau. The gossip line at Carriage Row had been rife with recollections and innuendo since it first became news that a former resident, a pretty, young mother of four, had lost her job as a schoolteacher by having an affair with one of her students.

Lines were drawn in a hurry. The Bendixes worked with Steve at Alaska Airlines and held down the side for the northern-exiled baggage handler; most of the women in the complex—including Leslee—were firmly in Mary's corner.