Sex. Murder. Mystery(202)
“Tony's such a great ally for me,” Mary Kay said with the same kind of breathless exuberance she once reserved for a new boyfriend. “He has such great connections. He's really going to help me. He's a warrior, a freedom fighter.”
Over the next few weeks, Michelle Jarvis conversed with Tony Hollick by phone and through e-mail. He was certain that Mary Kay Letourneau was the victim of a vast conspiracy involving federal, state, and local agencies. Part of it was to destroy her as payback for her disregard of the unconstitutional law. Some of it, he hinted, was even darker. As they chatted and emailed, Michelle found herself agreeing with things that would later seem beyond bizarre, but in her desperation to help her friend seemed so clear at the time. She saw the prosecution as overzealous and bought into Tony's conspiracy theory that eventually had all sides of the law in cahoots to railroad the schoolteacher who crossed the line. An official with the Republican Party, according to Tony Hollick, said that King County was going to “make an example out of Mary Kay.” That meant a demonstration prosecution. The strict liability statute was also a problem. It took none of the facts of the case into consideration and sent her to the slammer or into a treatment program for which she was not even qualified. Tony Hollick all the way in London could see it. Couldn't anyone else? he asked.
Much of what Tony had to say seemed to make sense to Michelle, especially since she wanted to find a way to get Mary Kay out of jail and back with her children. But there was that little item that always made Michelle cringe. Tony let it be known that he intended to marry Mary Kay Letourneau.
“If she would have me,” he said.
For weeks the calls from Tony Hollick to Kate Stewart were almost daily, too. At first, the mother of three didn't mind their frequency or inevitably lengthy duration, though she could not deny the calls from London did tend to eat up more time than she really had—time from her husband and children. Kate considered Tony highly intelligent, eccentric, “a freedom fighter who happens to be totally enamored with Mary Kay.” His feelings for Mary Kay, however, harmed the effectiveness of the eight amicus curiae legal briefs he “electronically filed” with the courts and other missives he used to attack the enemies of the American woman he'd never met.
Kate delicately advised Tony to “keep the love part and the enamored part out of it, because nobody is going to take you seriously.”
But Tony couldn't refrain from letting the world know of his true feelings. He recognized a great injustice and he could not deny that he loved Mary Kay Letourneau. He dispatched e-mails to the FBI, the White House, and the King County prosecutor outlining the ways in which Mary Kay's constitutional rights were violated. If it was obvious that he was in love with Mary Kay, so what? He'd press on.
No matter if he couldn't leave his heart out if it, Kate was glad for what Tony had done for Mary Kay.
“He's exposed people who might have done some underhanded things,” she said later. “He's put the limelight on some that have been against her.”
Michael Jarvis, like most of the husbands of the women who supported Mary Kay, kept out of it for the most part. But when the conversations with his wife, Michelle, and Tony Hollick went for hours at a time, the patience of the pilot-turned-multimedia-developer was stretched to the limit. When he could hear his wife divulge deeply personal information about herself, it made him wonder what the Brit's real intentions were. It seemed weird.
Who is this guy? What is he getting at? What in the world could that possibly have to do with helping Mary Kay? he thought.
When Michael asked his wife about it, Michelle dismissed his worries.
“He's probing into the character of people that were close to her,” she said. “He's trying to understand more about her, by understanding the people that were really close to her such as myself.”
Michelle didn't care what her husband thought at the time. She and Tony shared common ground. Both wanted to get Mary Kay out of jail and out of the SSOSA program before it took every shred of life from her soul.
“He's extremely intelligent,” she said later. “He's got these major emotional problems that put this weird slant into everything he does. Which basically invalidates his brilliance. Which is really too bad.”
But they talked and talked. If he was a little odd, he could be forgiven for it.
There's someone out there who cares. We aren't alone, Michelle thought.
At about the time Tony Hollick had come forward, Michelle learned the existence of Abby Campbell, the woman who had so irritated the Fish twins with her lead-the-charge attitude at the jail earlier that fall. Mary Kay praised Abby's support (“she's a wonderful girl and she's helping me out”), but she told her oldest friend that Abby was more a gofer than a key player like herself, Kate or even Tony.