“An ordinary man would have had her killed. Even if he had an affair, and was a philanderer, an adulterer, what would give her the right to pick on a sixth-grader?” she asked later.
Michelle Jarvis saw her friend on the news that night, too. And when she had the opportunity, she asked about the wrenching plea for understanding and forgiveness.
“David told me to act sorry,” Mary Kay said over the phone. “So I did.”
Not long after Mary Kay talked with Michelle, David Gehrke and Bob Huff seized the moment borne of their client's notoriety and arranged a deal with The Larry King Show to appear alongside her on the popular CNN show. Mary Kay didn't want to do it, and unhesitatingly told them of her reluctance. It wasn't that she didn't want to be heard. Rather, she didn't want the image of her in jail broadcast. She did not want her children to see her looking like a common criminal.
“I was not going to do a face-to-face from jail,” she confided later. “David and Bob are practically jumping up and down telling me to do it, do it. They kept asking what it would take to make me comfortable. It was almost funny. They were focusing on such superficial things—my hair, and my makeup, what I would wear. They'd even get me a new blouse.”
A producer came to the jail to set things up, but Mary Kay refused to talk to her. She had already said she didn't want to do it. David Gehrke and Bob Huff were in the air flying back east for the broadcast.
“They weren't real happy with me,” she said.
The image of Mary Letourneau in tears begging for forgiveness was haunting and would never be erased from the memories of those who loved her. But a question still lingered. What had caused Mary Letourneau to throw everything away? In her office at a Highline elementary school, former Shorewood principal Patricia Watson gave the question serious and heart-wrenching thought, as she had from the first day she'd heard the news of the arrest. She saw Mary's relationship with Vili as the tragic result of a breakdown, “a metabolic imbalance that sent her off the edge.”
It wasn't the troubled marriage. It wasn't that her mother had not loved her enough. It wasn't that she had been in the pool when her brother died. Or the miscarriages. It was, Patricia believed, the sum of all of those things piling on top of each other.
“Every day was worse,” the elementary school principal said. “All the different things that happened to her, there was never any relief. She had a breaking point.”
Mary Kay's former principal also wondered what role the third and fourth child might have had in their mother's overloaded psyche. She didn't doubt that she wanted Nicky and Jackie, but perhaps they were more than she could really handle.
“Two kids she could manage, and school and home and keep it together. The third kid might just have been more than she could bear, and the fourth one just rocked it completely.”
Chapter 65
IT STARTED WELL before sentencing, but David Gehrke didn't address it. But as the winter holidays approached, it got to the point where he couldn't ignore it. The groupies surrounding Mary Kay Letourneau were working overtime telling her that the plea, the sentence, her lawyer's strategy, had been a complete and sinister travesty. David was the target of most of their wrath and he knew it.
Mary Kay had been getting the message that by listening to David's advice she had blown it big-time. It was love, not rape. It was unconstitutional and she should have challenged it.
“These were all people who didn't know what the law was. She broke it. They don't know what it meant,” David said later. In addition, those bolstering Mary Kay and her fantasy of life-long love with her former student didn't know what strings the lawyer had pulled to keep her out of prison.
“It was not until the day that she pled guilty that I was able to get the prosecutors to agree not to seek an exceptional sentence. They had her pressed that hard and there were several bases to seek an exceptional sentence upward. I felt like I had a good shot to get her a treatment program because of her clean record and who she was. I won. I got her a great deal.”
He could see that whatever he accomplished was in jeopardy and he drafted a letter with the lead-off sentence, “Mary K. Letourneau needs your help!!” and mailed it to Kate, Michelle, Tony, Maxwell McNab, and Abby Campbell. He also sent the letter to Mary Kay's father and her brother, Jerry, in Tempe. He wanted those who cared about her to rally around her in the appropriate way. That meant, he wrote, supporting her treatment when she was released. Bolstering her defiance was not helping her one iota.
Don't keep telling her that she got screwed and that it's love, he thought.
Certainly David understood some of the frustration with the statutory rape laws and how penalties varied from state to state and, as Tony Hollick had pointed out, country to country. He knew that what had happened between Mary Kay and Vili would not have been a crime at all in some states.