Sex. Murder. Mystery(216)

It was a second chance to make the megadeal that had seemed so certain when the story first broke in the summer. Mary Kay Letourneau's incarceration for an early morning tryst with Vili Fualaau was the fade-to-black ending they needed.

“Now you've got a finish. Now you've got the last chapter,” David Gehrke told producers who had passed on the project during the first wave of attention. “Now it's goddamn, she got what she deserved, or oh, man, this is really tragic,” he said later. “If you just present it in a neutral fashion everybody thinks, yeah, what a story, and you don't have to moralize. Now she's in prison… it's a horrible tragedy or justice.”

David and Susan Gehrke and Bob Huff and his girlfriend flew to New York to discuss the Letourneau story with media queens Walters, Chung, and Sawyer. When they returned to Seattle, Bob Huff sent Mary Kay a packet of information about an interview with ABC (“the only thing he's ever sent me here in prison”). Mary Kay already knew she preferred Barbara Walters and would not consider Connie Chung at all. But Susan Gehrke urged Mary Kay to talk with Diane Sawyer, too. But Mary Kay had already talked with Barbara and committed to her, so 20/20”s anchor would have the exclusive interview.

The prisoner in the spotlight wasn't in a hurry, however. She was sick, upset about being in prison, and didn't want anyone to see her in such a miserable state. When she said yes to the interview, she didn't know that she had to do it immediately. She thought she'd have a few weeks to get her head together.

But the next thing she heard was that Barbara Walters had cancelled the interview. “Then they [Bob Huff and David Gehrke] got all upset. 'You blew it with Barbara Walters, Mary! You've really messed up now! You made Barbara Walters wait! You made Larry King's producer wait for five hours for nothing!' “

Behind the scenes things were coming to a head insofar as David Gehrke and his representation of Mary Kay Letourneau was concerned.

The group of supporters cringed nearly every time he opened his mouth and the groundswell against him grew. When he told a national magazine that his client was “obsessed” with the boy, the outrage deepened.

It seemed that whenever a camera was around, David Gehrke was there. But whenever she needed him, Mary Kay complained to her friends that he couldn't be reached.

“You know after she got sentenced that he didn't go see her?” a friend asked. “How could he not go see her?”

Once two weeks went by without a visit to his client in prison.

“He was in New York having dinner and doing press and other things,” the friend said.

David Gehrke took exception to Mary Kay's friend's characterization of a starstruck lawyer, indifferent to his client's needs. It was true that he didn't see her every day and it was also true that he did let a couple of weeks lapse between face-to-face visits. But he was within reach.

“I've always allowed collect calls from jail or prison and I can almost always be reached by telephone, at home or at the office. But I don't charge enough to babysit clients and hold their hands two or three times a week. Not even the best retained—most expensive—lawyer can afford to do that.”

A week after Mary Kay was sent to prison, Soona Fualaau appeared in “disguise” on American Journal. Mary Kay had what she thought was a better venue: Oprah.

“I can say with all certainty that this young man is the love of my life. Otherwise I would not have put my children through this,” she said during a phone interview. She called back after her time on the prison phone was cut off. She seemed out of touch and the audience was out for blood. David Gehrke and Robert Huff sat onstage looking ridiculous and helpless. Following Oprah's lead that she didn't buy the bipolar excuse, the audience sneered, too.

“Bipolar, fourpolar, or nopolar,” said one from the gallery of mostly women.

The Oprah experience was proof that there was great risk no matter whose show you went on.

“The Oprah people were pretty good,” Kate Stewart said later. “But Oprah slammed her. I don't think it was personal. I think Oprah was stressed because of her own litigation in Texas.”

Kate Stewart didn't run from one talk show to another. She didn't appear in the pages of national magazines to fight for her friend. She stayed behind the scenes and pressed on with the campaign for support and understanding. It was a lonely gig. When it became better known among her Chicago circle of friends that she and Mary Kay Letourneau had been college roommates, she found herself in the awkward position of defending Mary Kay to those who had been poisoned by the negative media. Some were embarrassed and dismissive. It hurt.

“You know her,” she told a friend. “You met her at the wedding. You know she's a friend of mine. She's sitting in jail.”