Sex. Murder. Mystery. (55 page)

One night around seven P.M. when the linoleum hallway of the Shorewood annex was quiet, the Shorewood custodian came across Mary Letourneau coming out of the girls' bathroom just to the west of her classroom. The man was on his way in to clean the toilets. The lights were off. Mary Kay seemed a little nervous, and quickly indicated that her former student Vili Fualaau was upset about something and had sequestered himself in a stall. Mary said she tried to calm him down.

“He's having one of his attitudes. You know teenagers,” she said, offering a smile and shrug.

The janitor had teenagers of his own and said he understood. He liked Mary Letourneau and knew that the boy in the bathroom was a regular visitor to room 39. He was a good kid.

He didn't think much of the encounter and didn't report it. Neither did he report the time he saw Vili driving his teacher's van in the school parking lot.

Chapter 33

IT WAS NO surprise that Steve and Mary Kay Letourneau were late. They had never made it on time for anything. Steve's cousin Kyle Gardner and his wife, Linda, not only expected perpetual tardiness, but often placed a bet with each other about
how late
they'd show up. An hour? Two? The smart money was always a little later than that. Linda bet for money; her husband bet for sexual favors. Linda usually won.

But in January 1997, Steve and Mary Kay didn't show up at all to an engagement party at the Tacoma Country Club for one of Steve's cousins. Chronically late was one thing, not appearing at a family function was very peculiar.

Kyle Gardner's mother and Steve's father, Dick Letourneau, were siblings and their respective sons were practically raised together, until Dick and Sharon moved to Anchorage.

Standing in the buffet line, Linda asked another Letourneau cousin where Steve and Mary Kay were.

The young woman looked at her with a serious, but puzzled look.

“Don't you know?” the cousin asked.

As Linda indicated she didn't know anything, an aunt nudged the cousin, her daughter, out of the way and abruptly ended the conversation.

Linda stood there with her plate wondering what was going on.

Something's funny here for her to be whisked away like that
.

Linda Gardner was a fireplug of a woman. She was outspoken in a family where it seemed they preferred agreement or compliance. Linda was not a troublemaker, but a woman who knew that by age thirty-two, she was old enough to speak her mind. She and her husband, Kyle, were raising a son and a daughter and they were doing it on their own—without family handouts. Linda was planning a dream house that she was going to build herself. If she broke a nail, who in the hell cared?

She was also a lover of information-gathering and digging deep into a subject to bring out what no one had known before. This was not to say she was nosy or pushy, though some family members might have thought so. When Linda ferreted out the truth behind a family relationship, Kyle nicknamed his wife Secret Squirrel, after the crime-fighting rodent cartoon show of their childhood.

It was the encounter at the buffet line at the engagement party that put her into Secret Squirrel overdrive. Everyone had been so quiet about Steve and Mary Kay. No one would say a word, though one did let slip that the two were having marital problems. That was news to Linda.

“I thought they were the perfect little Catholic family,” she said later.

Of course, Linda had no idea what was really going on. She had no idea what was going on with Mary Kay and she never would have guessed it in a million years. And she certainly didn't know that Steve was already involved with another woman, a beautiful Alaska Airlines flight attendant from Newport Beach named Kelly Whalen. The two had purportedly met in Mexico when Steve took a little holiday to get away from his troubles.

Chapter 34

IT ATE AT Secret Squirrel like splashed acid. Linda Gardner couldn't stand the secrecy and the silence surrounding Steve and Mary Kay's faltering marriage.
What was the frickin' deal?
No one even mentioned them anymore. It was like they had taken a swan dive off the face of the earth. The Gardners had sent their daughter on a trip to visit grandparents in Arizona for midwinter break. The couple decided to stop by the new house of another of Kyle's cousins near SeaTac Airport before the plane bringing their daughter rolled down the tarmac.

By then Kyle seemed just as interested in the silence as his wife had been. When the new homeowners were showing them around their yard, Kyle asked about it.

“What's going on with Steve and Mary Kay? Everyone is so quiet.”

Before the cousin or his wife could answer, Linda spoke up.

“Well, I know something's wrong. I know it's Mary Kay. I think she's having an affair and it's not with a man. Either she's a lesbian or something worse.”

The cousin's wife's mouth went agape.

“You guys really don't know, do you?” she said.

“No,” Linda said, “we don't know. What?”

The cousin answered for his wife, saying that they couldn't tell.

“I have sworn that I won't tell anybody what I know,” he said.

Secret Squirrel's mind raced as it went into high gear.

Oh, my God. She's a lesbian, she thought
.

On their way home, they drove past the house in Normandy Park, just to see. Linda slumped in the passenger seat, as if being detected would matter or as if she were on some kind of a spy mission. She had never been to the house before, and after what she had heard, she thought the place looked like a dump—not the showplace Mary Kay had let others believe. She saw Steven walking down the street, but no other sign of the distraught family with the lesbian mother.

When they arrived at their home in Bonney Lake, Linda urged Kyle to phone his mother in Kentucky to find out what was going on. He called from the kitchen and Linda got on a bedroom extension. Kyle told his mother that they didn't like being in the dark. Everyone in the family knew something was up. Everyone but them.

“You two have to swear that you will not tell anybody or do anything,” she said. “You have to swear to me.”

Linda crossed her fingers. “I swear,” she said, echoing Kyle's promise.

“Mary Kay was having an affair,” Kyle's mother said.

“Yeah.”

“She's pregnant.”

“Oh, really?” That was news to Linda. She hadn't heard a word of any pregnancy. Then Kyle's mother dropped the bomb of all bombs.

“It's with a twelve-year-old,” she said.

Linda didn't say a word, but a phrase bounced through her head as though she had been screaming from a mountaintop.

Oh, my God!

It shocked Linda that no one had turned Mary Kay in to the police.

The mother said the Letourneaus were hoping that the boy, who had been one of Mary Kay's students, would come forward and break the story. Steve's family had kept silent because of the children involved. Once more, Kyle's mother made them promise not to breathe a word.

“Her attitude was very firm. 'Do not tell anybody. Do not do anything about it.' She didn't say it was right,” Linda said later. “She didn't say it was wrong. 'Do keep your mouths shut.' “

Putting together the pieces wasn't easy, not even for Secret Squirrel. Linda Gardner had always considered Mary Kay Letourneau a bit of a phony—at least she was so overly nice it seemed that no person could be genuinely that sweet. Linda remembered the last time she saw Mary was at the Western Washington State Fair in Puyallup, south of Seattle. She and her two children bumped into Mary and her four kids quite by accident. It was mid-September 1996.

Since the children were shirttail cousins, Linda thought it was nice that all could be together at the same time, even though the meeting was merely accidental. But Mary was in a hurry; she was preoccupied. She didn't seem to want to pal around like she might have done in the past.

“She was real fast. At that time she wasn't her bubbly self. She wanted to get away from me pretty fast,” Linda said later.

Of course, at that time, the Letourneaus' world was beginning to unravel. Mary Kay was pregnant and no one knew it.

That night, Linda Gardner poured herself a big glass of wine and told her husband that they had to confirm his mother's story. What she had said was so unbelievable, so off-the-wall, and so ugly, that Linda didn't think it could really be true.

“Are we imagining this?” she asked.

It was so disturbing.

A thirty-five-year-old teacher having sex with a sixth-grader! How dare a teacher we put in the classroom with our children do this?

She was also bitter at her husband's family for their conspiracy of deceit. They knew that fall. They knew at Thanksgiving. They knew at Christmas. At the engagement party in January.

“Kyle's mother came out for the holidays and she knew and she didn't tell us a thing. When I look back at this it angers me. From a parent's point of view, here she was still teaching. She was still in the classroom,” she said later.

Linda was consumed with worry. She wondered if this boy wasn't the only one. She feared for Mary Kay's two sons or others in the classroom.

“You don't all of a sudden go from being an outstanding teacher and having sex with a twelve-year-old boy. You just don't,” she told her husband.

At his wife's urging, Kyle phoned Steve's younger sister, Stacey, in Alaska to discern what she knew. Stacey recounted the same story, adding that everyone in the family had known about it for months. It started in September when Steve discovered love letters and journal entries written by Mary Kay. He confronted the boy at his house and told him to back off his wife. Dick Letourneau had wanted to turn Mary Kay in to the police, but decided not to because of the impact it would have on his four grandchildren.

“He knew what would happen,” Linda said later. “They all knew.”

Stacey explained that her brother had seen an attorney.

“They got a lawyer. They were trying to get him a quick divorce, but it cost too much for Steve to do it, so he backed out.”

She also disclosed that the boy was Hispanic or Asian—family members had met him when Mary Kay brought him to Alaska that summer.

Linda could barely take it. She spoke up and told Stacey that Mary Kay had to be stopped.

“Stacey, I'm going to give your dad one week to do it. If he doesn't do it, I'm going to turn her in.”

Stacey understood. She had been tortured over the whole thing, too. Mary Kay was a sick woman. Stacey hated what she did, but her hands were tied.

Kyle and Linda got into their hot tub and talked about what had happened. The shock of it all. What could be done? Several hours and glasses of wine passed. Linda didn't think she could wait for Dick Letourneau to do the right thing. He had known about it for months and hadn't taken care of it. Why would he do it now?

“Kyle, I have to turn her in,” she said finally.

Her husband understood, but he was reticent about getting too involved. Not because he approved of what Mary Kay had done, but because his family had made it so clear that loyalty demanded silence.

“If you do it” he said finally, “just don't tell me.”

Linda Gardner couldn't keep it inside. After a sleepless night she phoned her brother and told him what they had learned about Mary Kay.

“Linda,” her brother said, “if you don't tell, I'm going to. She has to be turned in.”

“I waited,” she said later. “I stayed awake all night sick to my stomach. I knew what I had to do.”

Linda Gardner kept her promise to her husband. She didn't tell Kyle Gardner the morning of February 25, 1997, that she was going to report Mary Kay to the authorities after their grade-school-aged daughter was out the door. She was scared. She felt sorry for Steve and the Letourneau children. She knew Mary Kay would lose her job and that prison was a possibility. She had separated Mary Kay the wife and mother from Mary Kay the woman who was having sex with a boy.

She's going to keep doing it, she reminded herself in an effort to bolster her resolve. She's got to be stopped
.

She checked on her toddler son before working up the nerve to pick up the phone. The image of her sweet little boy was all the courage she needed. Linda Gardner never wanted anyone to harm a child. She was a mother, too. She couldn't understand how anyone could take a child's innocence, as she believed Mary Kay had.

She dialed the number for Child Protective Services, gave her name and phone number, and told her story.

“You're going to have to call the school district,” the woman said. “You have to talk to them because she's a teacher.”

Linda was flabbergasted and she hung up.

Hello?
she thought.
I just told you that a teacher is having sex with one of her students and you want me to call the school district?

She didn't think she could do it again, but knew she had no choice.

She called Highline School District offices in Burien. A secretary answered.

“I need to talk to somebody,” Linda said. “The superintendent. I need to talk to somebody high up. This is not a minor thing.”

When the secretary pressed her for the urgency of the call, Linda told her.

“This is regarding a teacher that has been having sex with one of her students.”

“I'll take your name and phone number,” the secretary said. “Someone will call you back.”

A little while later, Dick Cvitanich, area administrator for the district, phoned Linda and calmly listened as she nervously spat out her story. She wasn't certain of all of the facts and said so. She wasn't even sure of the kid's identity, or even the name of the school where Mary Kay taught. But the man didn't ask many questions. He was strangely brief considering the subject.

“I'll check it out,” he said.

And that was it.

This is weird
, Secret Squirrel thought.

BOOK III

Rapist

Having fun with me was risky. One time you got hurt. Sometimes you were just yelled at or questioned. Then Steve found out and you gave up on us.

—Mary Kay Letourneau, in a note to Vili Fualaau, fall 1996