“She's useful for what she's doing,” Mary Kay confided in her little girl's voice.
When Michelle suggested that it might be a good idea for her to contact Abby, Mary Kay dissuaded her from doing so.
“You really can't talk to her, Michelle,” she said.
Later, when the dust settled and Michelle learned what Abby Campbell had been doing behind the scenes, she figured that Mary Kay specifically hadn't wanted her to compare notes with Abby. Abby was privy to things that Mary Kay had kept from her oldest and dearest friend.
“Mary Kay is the queen of manipulation,” Michelle said later.
What was wrong with her? Mary Kay Letourneau's problem wasn't her relationship with Vili Fualaau, but the one with her lawyer, David Gehrke. At least her friends thought so. Few close to Mary Kay had any doubts that David had sympathy for his client and that his tears during interviews were real. It only made their concerns more difficult to reconcile. If David cared so much, why was Mary being labelled a sex offender?
What Would Jesus Do?. asked his bracelet
Jesus, some thought, would get a new lawyer.
Kate Stewart was one from the get-go pushing hard for Mary Kay to get rid of her neighborhood lawyer in favor of someone who could handle the intricacies of the case without selling her out.
“From the very beginning,” Kate recalled, “he had all kinds of problems. He wouldn't show up. He lives minutes from the jail. He was MIA two or three weeks at a time, not even calling. On the biggest case of his career. That was the writing on the wall right there. She saw it. And he'd go visit her and pacify her. Then he'd send Bob [Huff] in and make her feel better. She's smart. She sees through it. But again, she's needy now, she's there, she's removed from everybody. They kept convincing her. She knew in her heart, she had to get rid of them.”
“Get them out,” Kate kept advising. Mary Kay was not some nobody who couldn't get a decent lawyer. The attention to her case had brought offers of support and money. “Get rid of them, Mary Kay. You can get another lawyer. There is money all over your name.”
Mary Kay said she wanted to sever the ties with her lawyers, but she was afraid. She didn't have any money yet and didn't know how much she could get.
Kate urged her at the very least to hire another legal representative to keep an eye on David Gehrke and Robert Huff.
“Get someone to watch them,” she said.
Months later David Gehrke would become misty-eyed at the suggestion that he didn't do his best on Mary Kay's behalf. He wanted to keep her out of prison and the deviancy program was the answer. And though he believed Kate and Michelle hated him, their behind-the-scenes criticism and blame still hurt.
“[They say] I'm responsible for Mary Kay being in prison. I don't know why, but I'm responsible.”
Chapter 62
IF ANYTHING, JULIA Moore was a striking presence. The psychiatrist's movements were deliberate and forceful. Glasses were lowered when she spoke. Her gestures commanded attention. There was no doubt that Dr. Moore was a believer in her field, not one of the many psychiatrists embittered by the law and its relationship to the medicine they practice. She was a perfect fit for the Mary Kay Letourneau case. She had attended a Catholic convent boarding school in Pennsylvania, and Marquette University in Milwaukee—the same school where John Schmitz met Mary Suehr.
It was Abby Campbell, through a referral from University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who brought Dr. Moore and Mary Kay Letourneau together. As the new friend explained it, Mary Kay was miserable with her treatment as a deviant, especially the requirement to tell her children that she was a sexual predator. Abby Campbell wondered if something else was at work, something the other evaluators had missed.
Dr. Moore had followed the Shorewood Elementary teacher's case only marginally, but Mary Letourneau's calm demeanor had struck her whenever she saw her on television. “She was being practically stoned like the Magdalene—by the media and the public—but she came across as being serene in a naive sort of way. What is going on here?”
In early October 1997, Dr. Moore spent her first hour with Mary Kay Letourneau, the most famous prisoner at the King County Jail. For Dr. Moore, the first jail visit was an audition. Mary Kay wanted to make sure she could trust the evaluator—the evaluator that she would allow inside her mind and share the truths that she claimed were in there, deep. She would judge the psychiatrist by her demeanor, by the questions she asked, by the responses to her responses. Mary Kay wanted control, the power to pass on to Gehrke the name of the woman or man who could set her free without the label “rapist.”
When Julia Moore arrived that first time, the visit was between the glass panels that separate the jailed from the free in the visitors alcove. Mary Kay was an unraveling quilt of emotions. She had lost weight since her incarceration in the summer. Her red jumpsuit hung on her frame.