How can I explain this? To myself? To anyone?
For a long time she struggled with a poem about her feelings of love and friendship for Mary Letourneau. Each time she tried to complete the verse, she'd find herself scribbling over the text and crumpling the paper into a wad. Over and over.
I'll never get this right. I'll never be able to explain, she thought.
At thirteen, Katie was trying to do what adults could not. She was trying to analyze matters of the heart and to find a way to make sense of what had happened. Most importantly she wanted to keep her closeness with Mary undying and forever.
When people told her to “get over it. It wasn't a real friendship… the lady was old enough to be your mother,” Katie did her best to dismiss them. It was so easy for adults to miss the point. Katie used the same words Vili would use to defend his love for his teacher.
“Don't judge. You don't know me. You don't know how I feel,” she said.
Mary Kay Letourneau was uncertain about the effectiveness of lawyer David Gehrke, and she told the twins so on several occasions. She explained how she found him through some neighbors and that he had never handled a case like hers previously. His specialty was drug cases or DUIs.
As time went on, instead of growing more confident, Mary confessed more concern that her defense lawyer might be out of his element.
“She wondered a lot if he was doing the right thing,” Amber Fish said later.
Amber and her sister Angie asked Mary Kay more than once what was going to happen in court.
She told them not to worry. Mary Kay didn't think she'd have to serve a day in jail.
“My lawyers tell me that it won't go that far,” she said.
Even so, she took every opportunity to read up on her case and she made countless notes of issues to discuss with David Gehrke. In fact, for much of the summer it was all she talked about. For a while, she barely mentioned the relationship with the boy that had brought her to the place of ruin in the first place.
One time she called Amber to let her know that her lawyer was going to be calling her. There was some question about whether Mary Kay had been alone with Audrey—which was a violation of her bond.
“I don't want you to lie or anything,” she said, “and it really wouldn't be a lie because you have watched Audrey… but if he asked you if you've been watching Audrey and been with Audrey then tell… ”
Amber knew what Mary wanted. She was asking for an alibi.
“If he asks if you are living in the house, I'd say no,” Mary Kay told her.
Amber didn't have to worry about stretching the truth at all. David Gehrke never phoned. She even called his office, but she never heard back from anyone.
It was the strangest thing.
Mary Kay Letourneau was not a rude woman. Karen O'Leary had had her share of people slam doors in her face. While a KIRO cameraman waited in the car, the reporter and the woman about to go to jail for the rape of her student stood on the front steps of the Normandy Park home for more than a half hour, talking about the case, Mary Kay's future, and her love for her children. At one point, Karen asked to use the bathroom, and Mary Kay let her inside. The house was in total disarray and Mary Kay made no apologies for it. Why would she? She was about to go to jail. Before leaving, Mary Kay showed her pictures of her four oldest children.
“I felt sorry for her,” the television reporter said later. “She didn't know what was going to happen. She was actually, at that point, she said, glad to be going to jail to get away from the chaos outside.”
Mary Kay later recalled the day Karen asked to use her bathroom.
“I couldn't believe the nerve. She was lucky I had a guest bathroom. When she asked to use it, I thought, is this really an emergency or does she just want to get a little glimpse of the inside of my home?”
What Karen didn't know that day was that Mary Kay wasn't alone. Vili Fualaau was hiding in a back room listening to a Dionne Warwick CD.
“We laughed hysterically about it after she left,” Mary Kay said later. “She didn't know how close she came.”
The reporter and the teacher talked by telephone a few times later.
“I found her very warm, sweet and vulnerable. And a little delusional,” Karen said, looking back.
With the exception of Karen and the Seattle Times's Ron Fitten, most reporters had dropped the ball between the time Mary Kay Letourneau's name first appeared on charging papers until she made her most critical appearances in court.
“Karen was very smart. She spent time with Mary by going to her house. She saw potential for the story to really go big,” friend and school district policeman Nick Latham recalled. “She camped out at district headquarters. She claimed the story and kept at it.”