Sex. Murder. Mystery(231)

The summer ran into the fall, and an upbeat Mary Kay told other prisoners that she would be getting out just after the baby came. She'd be given a pardon or a trial. Something would free her. She saw that something as the French memoir.

As the due date of her second baby with Vili grew closer, Mary Kay began to worry and maybe even accept that freedom wouldn't come as quickly as hoped. She was suspicious that her stubble-bearded lawyer Bob Huff was not forthcoming about the French book and its publication schedule. When the lawyer visited her a day or two before leaving Seattle for Paris in the fall of 1998, Mary Kay would later say he was evasive. He told her he was thinking about going to France to determine what was going on with the book. His remarks were so casual, so off-handed. What he didn't tell her was that the book was already finished, and he had a copy.

“I had no idea he was going the next day! He made it sound vague, like he was only considering going to clear up some business matters with Fixot. He didn't say he was going on a book tour with his teenage daughter, David Gehrke, and Vili. I didn't know the book was even printed. As far as I was concerned we hadn't even finished it yet.”

But it was. Un Seul Crime, L'Amour (Only One Crime, Love) was a hastily assembled volume of interviews of Vili, Soona and Mary Kay. Mary Kay told friends that chunks of text were simply not true. Disclosures of sex in cars and around every corner of the block were not the words of a soulful and loving young man like Vili. Having sex two or three hundred times was not the message that she had wanted out! Blanks were filled in in the rush to get the book out while the story was still hot.

“I know what happened,” she said, bitterness creeping into her normally sweet voice. “Bob Huff got impatient and instead of waiting for the writer he drove Vili around Seattle talking into a tape recorder. They filled in the blanks with David and Bob. You can hear David's voice in the book, too.”

She didn't blame Vili for what he had put into print. She saw Vili as a bit of a chameleon when it came to interacting with others.

“Put him in a car with a lawyer like Robert Huff and how do you think he's going to respond? He's going to act just like Bob because he wants to be liked, to fit in. Bob's like a surrogate father to him.”

Bob Huff later refuted Mary Kay's allegations. He had been working around the clock with the book and didn't know that he was headed to Paris until a few days before he left. There wasn't time to reach Mary Kay. He admitted that he helped to “adapt” the English manuscript to French. He was fluent in French and the publishing crunch was on to get it out while the interest in the story was still high. He did not fabricate any of the content.

“I couldn't make any of this up,” he explained. “It's too wild.”

But Vili Fualaau's lawyer suggested that perhaps, the teacher's young lover did have a tendency to stretch the truth. Bob recalled one time when he “and the boys”—writer Bob Graham and Vili—were hanging out at Bob Graham's rented place in the Belltown section of Seattle discussing the book's content. Vili's details of conquests with his teacher grew more and more outrageous.

“You know how it goes,” Bob Huff said later of the locker room banter. “But I did learn later that Vili did make up some stories. But we didn't need any bullshit. There was enough of a good story there.”

Even if inaccurate, the book made headlines, as did nearly everything associated with the former teacher. But if she had hoped the book would help her—there was a postcard in the back pre-addressed to Washington State Governor Gary Locke, with a plea for clemency—it only made matters worse. While she wrote of her undying and spiritual love for Vili, the teen wrote of waiting to have sex with her and betting a friend $20 bucks that he could nail his teacher, and living in her car while she was released from the King County jail. Mary Kay and Vili also wrote how they had disregarded the law and continued to see each other after her arrest at Shorewood Elementary. When she went into labor, it was Vili who drove her to the hospital—though, at 13, he didn't have a license and couldn't manage a stick shift. Mary took over and drove the rest of the way.

Other details were revealed, from the ridiculous (Mary Kay wore Mickey Mouse underwear at her sentencing) to the shocking (the sex). Vili wrote of a life in a violent home in the “hood,” of sex with other girls, of influencing pre-teen Steven Letourneau to abandon his “preppy” ways for a gangster style—while he was sleeping with the boy's mother. He had no respect for Steve Letourneau, as a man or a husband.

Before they consummated their relationship, Mary Kay had even told Vili that when two-year-old Jacqueline was of age, Vili should marry the girl. Mary Claire, she said, was too much like her father to be worthy of Vili's love. And while Vili struck a tough kid pose, Mary Kay's chapters, for the most part, were sweeter than a Hallmark card.