The book also described Mary Kay's month of freedom in January 1998 as one sexual escapade after another. She wrote how she even sneaked Vili into music teacher Beth Adair's Seattle house for nights of sex. When Mary was arrested the second time “in the car with the steamed up windows” Vili wrote how she had threatened suicide and how they had devised a “Romeo and Juliet” pact.
Mary later said there had never been any thought of suicide. She had read a biography of Virginia Woolf and learned how the author had loaded stones in her pockets before walking into a lake. She joked, she said, that she could do the same thing.
“The lake was right there… . It was not serious. 'Maybe I could put some rocks in my pockets and walk into Lake Washington'. It was not a threat. It was a joke.”
Soona Fualaau lambasted the Highline School District when spokesman Nick Latham told a TV reporter that her son had lied about going on a promotional trip to France to market a book. According to Nick Latham, the boy had said he said he was going to Europe “to study art.”
“She told us that we had no right to say anything about her son. Nothing whatsoever,” the district spokesman said later.
Chapter 80
VILI FUALAAU WAS in Paris with his lawyers while Mary Kay went into labor and was rushed from the prison in an ambulance driven by Gig Harbor Fire Department paramedics on October 16, 1998. She was taken to St. Joseph's Medical Center in downtown Tacoma while the troop of media, groupies, and friends began to assemble to keep the vigil. A rumor circulated that the Globe had offered up to $50,000 for the first photograph of mother and baby. Nurses were put on notice to keep a wary eye for the media. At 36, Mary Kay became a mother for the sixth time when she gave birth to Alexis Georgia Fualaau. But this was not the blissful birth of a baby born to a woman who would take her home and placed her in the family's bassinet lined with the beautiful fabric from Duchamps. It was about a prisoner who handed her baby over to the infant girl's grandmother before being carted back to her cell.
The babies' names remained a point of contention between Soona and Mary Kay. Mary Kay had wanted to name her first baby with Vili “Audrey-Anna”, but Soona nixed it as being too similar to the name of another family member. When the second baby was born, Soona refused to call the infant Georgia. In time, Mary Kay and her friends were the only ones who did.
“I'm getting used to these little fussy battles,” Mary Kay said later, choosing her words carefully. “Soona and I don't always agree.”
The big question after his second baby was born was not how Vili Fualaau felt about being a father for the second time, but whether his “soulmate” would be charged with a second count of rape. Prosecutors had said they considered filing a third-degree rape charge against her, but had decided enough was enough. No more charges would be filed.
“There's no legal barrier to prosecution of Mary Kay Letourneau,” King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng said. “It is instead a question of justice… seven and a half years is a substantial punishment for the conduct involved.”
And poof… if was over. Or some had thought—and hoped—it would be. Few worked the media like the teacher and student.
Vili appeared on TV for money and Mary Kay called in to give her side of the story. She was hurt when Vili went off to France with Bob Huffs teenaged daughter and pictures of the pair appeared in the Globe. The tabloid even reported that Vili had several flings with neighborhood girls, though his heart still belonged to Mary Kay.
“I'm still in love with Mary and I still wear her ring. I'm not going to sit around and wait and cry my eyes out. I'm going to keep busy,” he told Inside Edition.
Things were tough for the “toast of Paris” [as David Gehrke called Vili] when he returned to Seattle after the book tour. Vili was booted out of school for openly smoking pot on school grounds. Bob Huff showed up with his client to argue the boy's case before the school district. “It was the first time I've ever heard of a suspended kid bringing a lawyer to defend him on a routine suspension. Her son could have taken drug abuse counseling and enrolled back into class. Instead, they fought it,” said a district employee.
TV reporter Karen O'Leary and others who followed the case knew that the whole sad Letourneau affair would never really be over. It would rear up once more and remind the world that the teacher and the student were still around. On the afternoon of November 9, the cracking voice on a police scanner indicated a shooting, a self-inflicted gunshot at a home in White Center. The address seemed familiar and Karen confirmed it for the news crew headed out with a camera: It was the home of Soona Fualaau.