Sex. Murder. Mystery(196)

Mary Kay was livid when she learned of Bob Huff's letter.

“He did it on his own,” she told a friend. “He just did it to see if they could scare them into doing something, paying something.”

Feeling sorry for Mary Kay Letourneau was best left to those who saw her as a Joan of Arc for a forbidden love. She had recklessly and spectacularly ruined her life. But it was something she had done to herself. Although TV reporter Karen O'Leary had compassion for the teacher, it paled next to the sorrow she felt for the four Letourneau children. She could not fully imagine the devastation it had brought to their lives now, and ever after.

“[Imagine the pain of being] rejected by their mother because she's choosing a twelve-year-old over their father, but also over them ultimately,” she said later.

Lawsuit or not, she felt it added up to a mental illness. It had to be. Karen was convinced that Mary Letourneau was in fantasy land and needed treatment, not prison. The Letourneau children deserved a mother who was made well, not jailed. She believed it so much that in the middle of a San Francisco vacation the Monday after the lawsuit was filed, she agreed to appear on CNN's Burden of Proof to argue her position. It turned ugly and Karen learned firsthand how rotten the other side of the camera can be.

“They were just vultures,” the Seattle reporter recalled of the hosts and other panelists who wanted Mary Kay locked up forever. “They were terrible and I was defending Mary. They chewed me up. They all sided against me.”

Whenever some teacher-turned-rapist tidbit hit the papers or television or even the White Center grapevine, it ignited dissent and discussion. The Mattson house with its big-screen TV was always a center of such activity. Rumors began to circulate that Vili would not be waiting for his teacher-girlfriend and he was already playing the field. To be fair, most considered the boy somewhat shy, artistic, a tranquil presence in a sea of middle-school turmoil. At least that's what he could have been if the relationship with his teacher had remained private. But it didn't. And those who knew him knew that the girls were after what Mrs. Letourneau had.

Shorewood parent Nick Mattson had heard stories of the Samoan boy's conquests and refused to give him any slack, even when his wife, Tandy, reminded him that Vili was no longer in elementary school, he was growing up.

“So what? Is he going after college professors now?”

Tandy Mattson shook her head. “What I'm saying is that kids his age can understand.”

“Understand? He's their hero. He bagged a teacher.”

“You're just jealous that you weren't one of those kids back then.”

“Granted, what happened was wrong, but it takes two people to do this.”

“Aw, gee. Don't get started with me.”

“When Savannah is in sixth grade—”

“Oh, please,” Tandy said, stretching the word “please” into two syllables.

Nick ignored her. “—and her teacher's over there molesting her, you're gonna say, 'It's okay, it takes two to tango?' “

“Oh, mister, she ain't moving out of here till she's thirty!”

Nick shook his head. His wife didn't get it.

“It was rape,” he repeated.

Tandy wouldn't hear of it.

“There's a big difference between a male and a female.”

“No there isn't.”

“Yes there is… ”

And so it went, from household to household, from city to city. Everyone had an opinion.





Chapter 58

AS FAR AS many of the teachers in the staff room at Shorewood knew, there had been no personal relationship between Mary Letourneau and Beth Adair, the music teacher, until after Mary's arrest. And none of them knew how deeply Beth had become involved with Mary and how often she helped out with Audrey during the summer.

On the surface, it appeared an odd fit. Beth was older, not glamorous and certainly not the live wire that Mary had been. She was a mother and a recent divorcee. But Beth seemed to share at least one characteristic with her new best friend: Beth relished talking about herself and her painful divorce. One teacher who was going through a divorce about the same time handled her pain and legal matters privately. Not Beth.

“She would just be on the phone and very dramatic. Her divorce went on and on. 'Be nice to Beth. People kept saying Beth's crying.' “

From September 1997, the music teacher appeared obsessed with the Letourneau saga, making visits to the jail, running errands, talking to Soona and Vili on the phone from the staff lounge.

“She got way too into it,” said a veteran teacher who was at Shorewood at the time.

“Beth would be there crying or laughing the whole year long. She was so distraught sometimes she couldn't teach class, so she'd show movies.”