Sex. Murder. Mystery(217)

Often she'd be asked if she would feel differently if her son had been involved with his teacher. Of course, she told people, she wouldn't want her son to become intimate with his teacher. No mother would. But on the other hand, if her son was a boy at complete risk as Kate believed Vili had been, and she could not do anything to save him, then maybe the love of his teacher wouldn't be so bad.

She reminded her friends, her husband, and others who didn't get it that it was about two people. Not just any boy and any woman. It had been about two people who found each other and fell in love.

“The mistake she made was breaking the law. She's helped that boy. She's given him the best of life. That boy would be one of the teenagers who commits suicide,” Kate explained.

Sometimes they softened and said they understood.

“She had consensual sex with a teenager. So what?” Kate would repeat sometimes, driving the point home that Vili was not the only teen having sex. “All the other teenagers are out there doing it anyway at thirteen and fourteen, which Vili was doing. They don't go to prison. It's taboo, but should she go to jail for seven years?”

One thing surprised Kate Stewart more than any aspect during the months of the second wave of the media war against her college friend: Why didn't her family and its prestige play a role in creating support for Mary Kay?

Kate expected headlines with more understanding.

“If I read a story in the newspaper and it told me Rockefeller's daughter… well educated, raised conservative Catholic, in a good home. I would think, 'Wait a minute, why would this girl do this?' I wouldn't automatically think she's a nut or pedophile,” she said later.

Kate just didn't get it. Why didn't Mary Kay's background give her credibility?

It wasn't Time magazine or even People. The big exclusive that so many had sought had been given to a rock magazine, Spin. Maxwell McNab also had an assignment to write an article for Mirabella, but it was expected to be a rehash of what had happened during the months he was hanging out with the Mary Club at the jail in Kent.

It was Seattle novelist and journalist Matthew Stadler, sympathetic to Mary Letourneau's plight, who took the Spin assignment and managed to actually speak with the subject of the article. Not long after it was known that he'd gathered access and taped interviews, the supermarket tabloid the Globe called offering to pay for his notes, photos, documents, and any interview tapes that he had accumulated. The writer didn't have to think twice. He turned down the Globe.

KIRO-TV's pursuit was a bit dicier. Since Matthew's brother worked at the Seattle station, several people there assumed they'd have the edge. Karen O'Leary was one.

“Do you have the tapes?” Karen asked.

The writer hedged. “I don't know where they are.”

That didn't seem to suit the TV reporter. Later he learned that Karen had told his brother that he in fact had the tapes and that he'd find them.

“Karen is waiting for the tapes,” the brother said.

Matthew Stadler was furious. “I told her I didn't know where they are and I'm not going to find them.”

Another staffer called next.

“[He] said they'd pay me money if I would find the tapes.”

Not in this lifetime. Stadler got rid of everything. Making quick money by betraying Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't his style. There had already been enough of that.

And deep down, he knew there would be a whole lot more.





Chapter 70

THE BOY WAS Samoan, and, in 1998, people began to focus on that aspect. Was it cultural? Was he some man-child from the island? Lima Skillion, executive director of the Seattle Samoan Center, a social services agency serving the four thousand Samoans and Pacific Islanders in the area, wanted to help, she said, not ridicule. The mother of two put the word out. She wanted to know who the family was. And did they need support?

No one came forward right away. But in time, word sifted throughout the community that the Samoan boy was from White Center and was the son of a single mother. Though KIRO-TV's interview in the park had showed his hands and ring, his face had been obscured. No one knew exactly which Samoan kid had the fling—or was raped—by his pretty, blond teacher.

Not long after Lima's outreach, a local social worker came to inquire about the resources available in the Samoan community.

“[Social Services] had a meeting finding out about how the Samoan community was looking toward this particular situation, case. Nobody knew then who these people were,” Lima Skillion recalled.

She advocated a slow approach, no “jumping into conclusions.”

“They were discussing taking the child—the boy's baby—from these people. What would Samoan people do with this baby?”

She understood through overtures made to the social service agents that the Samoan senior center offered to help take care of the baby. But they really didn't know what could be done. No one knew who the boy was. Or, if they did, they weren't talking.