Sex. Murder. Mystery(233)
“I was hoping that it wasn't Vili, that it wasn't some suicide. I thought of the love story he and Mary had tried to promote, and I wondered if the final chapter for the teenager had been written,” Karen O'Leary said.
In the middle of the afternoon, Vili's brother, Perry, had been shot in the abdomen while reportedly fooling around with a gun with a cousin. The seventeen-year-old's injuries were severe and he was hospitalized for several weeks, reportedly with the loss of a kidney, damage to his spleen and other serious injuries. Vili, his children, and Soona were not home at the time. Family members said they were living in a hotel paid for by Inside Edition.
When KIRO News crews got there, David Gehrke told them the family had no comment.
Later, Karen O'Leary wondered why David would have been there at all. Mary Kay had fired him after she hired the Boston lawyer Susan Howards and filed her appeal in the spring. And, as far as she knew, he never directly handled anything for the Fualaaus.
“He just doesn't want to be left out, that's all,” Karen suggested.
Mary Kay went ballistic at the news of the shooting. Her daughters were living in an unsafe environment. She told a friend that she even phoned in a complaint to the authorities to have her kids removed from Soona's care, but nothing happened.
She also worried about Vili.
“I'm hurting for Vili, the lack of support he is getting. I don't expect Soona and the others to support Vili and me. Why would they do that? But they should support who he is and what he should be doing with his life. Vili deserves the recognition for his talent, his genius. I'm struggling with my loyalty to them, when they show none to me,” she told a friend.
Though it wasn't fast enough for her lawyer and the Fualaaus, Mary Kay spent most nights during the first part of 1999 working on the English language translation of the Fixot book. She told friends she was distressed by the gross inaccuracies she found in the manuscript. At night, she pulled out a little aqua trunk as a table and slid a reading lamp close to her bed and worked into the early morning, revising, commenting, and even laughing. A few times she read the passages out loud to her cellmate and the two would nearly roll on the floor in hysterics. It was ludicrous. The last line was the topper. Bob Graham had written a scene that smacked of an old Susan Hayward movie. She was calling out through the bars for understanding. “I beg of you… this is love… I beg of you…”
From her prison phone—her lifeline to the world—Mary Kay told a friend perhaps the most shocking aspect of her story. Her children were being kept from her, she claimed, because she hadn't finished the revisions for the English version of Only One Crime, Love.
Bob Huff bristled at the idea that anyone was keeping the children away from Mary Kay. He remembered seeing paperwork associated with arranging prison visitation with Mary and her babies. It was proof, he believed, of Soona's desire to allow Mary Kay to see Audrey and Georgia Alexis.
“I don't think Soona is that diabolical to pull off this big scam of creating the letters and acting like she's trying if it wasn't really true.”
Mary Kay also feared that they'd release the book without her input. “I will say it's not me… if they step over the line like that. I'll call every news media person I know and they'll put me on the air. I will go down the line on this and Bob and David know it.”
Ghostwriter Bob Graham used his interviews with Mary Kay Letourneau one more time in the winter of 1999 when he wrote a pair of pieces for the London Sunday Times Magazine and a London tabloid. The article quoted Bob Huff as saying that Mary Kay had threatened to say Vili had raped her, if he didn't do the right thing and marry her. “That's Mary for you,” Bob Huff reportedly said, “She wants her way, no matter what happens.”
Mary Kay said she wanted to call Bob Huff to ask why he would say such a thing.
“But I can't. He doesn't have a phone that works… at least one that I know of. Can you imagine having a lawyer who doesn't have a phone number?” she asked.
In January 1999, Mary Kay spoke on a Seattle radio show hosted by a DJ known as the “T-man.” A few days after she told the world how much she loved Vili, a letter was dispatched to the station. The prison considered the radio interview third-party contact with the victim, a violation of Mary Kay's sentence. Vili hadn't been on the show at the same time—not even on the same day—but the prison saw it as Mary using the media to get her message of love and hope for marriage out to the teenage father of two.
According to Mary, Bob Huff was livid. “Any time you speak to any sector of the media, the less value your name has,” she recalled him telling her in a fit after the radio broadcast.