A Matter Of Hearts

By John Cloud/Seattle

Mary K. Letourneau sat on the steps in front of her home, staring west across a glorious sunset over Puget Sound. Inside with a friend was baby Audrey Lokelani, Mary's fifth child and her first with Vili Fualaau, the teenager she has become so infamous for loving. It was a breezy summer's eve, and she could smell the fresh-cut grass on her lawn. She squinted into a blazing horizon. "I had a dream last night," she said, speaking to a neighbor. "I dreamed I was sitting here watching the sunset. And I sat there and sat there, but the sun just wouldn't set."

That was last summer, before her life spun completely out of control, before it was again and again on Oprah and Dateline and Geraldo, before it was retold (and often mistold) in papers from the New York Times to the tabloids. Letourneau's relationship with Vili, who turns 15 in June, as well as her conviction and imprisonment, have drawn international attention. The BBC has come to Seattle to film a documentary. Her image has been an alluring paradox: at once darling suburban teacher and predatory monster; so blond, so pretty, so...dangerous to children? She is more complicated, of course, and soon several magazines will render her in brushstrokes instead of spray paint. But even here there is haste: Mirabella and Spin rushed out advance copies of their articles last week to preview salacious disclosures. Letourneau, in jail but hardly incommunicado, expected less trumpeting and more deliberation, since she had cooperated closely with both writers. For their part, the Fualaaus have sold the story and pictures of Vili to a tabloid, the Globe, for more than $20,000. Their decision was understandable--the family has struggled financially, and a radio host had already identified Vili early in the week--but even as it ran his picture, the paper labeled him the "boy she raped." When Mary sees it, she will think it a bit tacky.

She considers herself the victim of a collision of law and love. But if Mary Letourneau is a complex character in a complicated situation, is she any less guilty? Her new lawyer--a hotshot New Englander with an accent and a Ph.D.--is concocting an appeal in secret. More disclosures are sure to come, and several books are in the works. But could a mountain of paper make what she did O.K.? Is there any way to defend Mary? The key may lie in the meanderings of her heart.

There was a moment last year when Letourneau had some time to start a journal for Audrey so that when the little girl is older, she can understand this mess. At that time, last summer, the future didn't look so bleak to Letourneau. She was still talking to her other four children, her "angels," even though they were moving to Alaska with their dad Steven. True, her lawyer, David Gehrke, was telling her she had to plead guilty to "rape of a child." Such a ridiculous charge, she thought. Why couldn't everyone realize that Vili had come on to her for months? But Dave and his wife Susan were friends from the neighborhood, good people who assured her that Dave had obtained a good deal--a few months in jail, then a treatment program for "sex offenders." Another annoying term, Mary thought. She was still imagining a life with all five of her kids together as a family. She and Steve would divorce, but perhaps she and Vili--a sensitive, dreamy soul who had, to her surprise, become the love of her life--could wed. To this day, Mary likes to see the bright side.

Within weeks of these musings, brutal reality set in. In August, Letourneau was taken into custody; in November, she was sentenced to seven years and five months in prison for having sex with Vili. And though Judge Linda Lau initially suspended the sentence, her leniency imposed an impossible condition: Letourneau must not have contact with Vili. In February, Lau learned that police had caught Mary and Vili together. Livid, she reimposed the sentence and sent Letourneau to prison.

The February episode looked much worse than it was, say those who really know Mary and Vili. The two were caught in her car in the dead of night with wads of cash and Mary's passport. Outsiders thought they planned to race off to a country that would allow them to marry, but the boring truth was that they had gone to see Wag the Dog and get some food and beer. As romantic and manic as Mary can be, she never planned to flee with Vili. To where? And take him from his mother, the one person who has been sane and humane throughout all this? No.

Though Mary and Vili kissed and touched, they mainly talked that night. He needed to vent. He was a normal kid with school pressures, three older siblings, a hard-working mom and a dad in prison, and now--he still couldn't believe it sometimes--a baby. Vili has had trouble at school, and he was arrested on a minor robbery charge last year. Few people listened. Letourneau, his soul mate, was one.

Before they were caught in the car, they had violated Lau's condition several times. They met to go to the movies, to try to make sense of their predicament, and, yes, to have sex. Titanic made their spirits take flight and their libidos surge--forbidden love, a terrible tragedy, a soaring sound track. According to the Globe, Vili even sketched Mary in the nude, a la Jack and Rose.

But if truth is stranger than fiction, it is, in this instance, also harsher. Mary, 37, is pregnant again, and her and Vili's second child, when it is born, will be Exhibit A in the likely case that the local prosecutor will bring fresh charges of rape against her. Though she has persuaded her prison keepers that she is ill enough to stay in the infirmary--which is equipped with a phone that she uses constantly--prison is still a terrible place to be pregnant. The appeal of her original case will take weeks just to plan, weeks more to be heard, weeks more to be decided. Susan Howards, her Boston-based appellate lawyer, has been to Seattle only once, for a few hours. Months, years could pass. Mary is due to give birth to another angel in the fall, and within 48 hours, a state law enforcer will take the child from her.

Vili Fualaau is a rather big teen but not a muscular hulk. He has recently experimented with a mustache, and it's a little wispy. His voice has deepened, and he's now about 5 ft. 8 in. His appeal is more Leonardo DiCaprio than Ben Affleck, but mostly he's an average kid--which is to say, he's extraordinary in his own way. Born in Hawaii to parents who emigrated from Western Samoa, he loves art and music, and when strangers come by to meet him--and many, many strangers want to meet him these days--he and Mom Soona usually begin by showing them his artwork. He draws allegorical cartoons, zany characters with deeper meanings. Later this month Spin will run a sample depicting Mary's courtroom as a circus where Fear is the central, spear-wielding character.

Some friends call him Buddha, and Soona has often called Vili "an old soul trapped in a young body." He has always seemed mature. In sixth grade, a couple of years ago, while classmates were writing poems that described themselves as lovers of "girls, baseball, ice cream...and MTV," Vili wrote that he was a "Lover of giving, faith, trust... Who likes to wear masks over his soul." He was just 12.

That is the Vili that Mary fell in love with. She had met him years before, in her second-grade class, and quickly noticed his talents. He had noticed her too, and he flirted with her throughout sixth grade. Kids get crushes on teachers all the time--and, of course, most are rebuffed--but Letourneau had entered a fragile period. In October 1995, her father, retired G.O.P. Congressman John Schmitz, had disclosed his terminal cancer. As Mary later told a psychiatrist, she felt he had died already. "She felt she died too," says Dr. Julie Tybor Moore. Her father has always been a rock, even during his own public whipping. In 1982, an extramarital affair was revealed when his mistress (a former college student of his) brought one of their two children to a hospital after the child was injured in an accident. The hospital requested the father's name, and Schmitz--a church-and-family conservative--then watched his political career wilt.

Family was always important to Mary; now hers seemed to be disintegrating. She had been a superteacher, hauling her own kids to her classroom after dinner so she could chat and play as she finished special projects. But after learning about her father's illness, she withdrew, declining to take on a student teacher and saying no to some Girl Scout duties.

Meanwhile, she and Steve were growing distant. They had always been a bit oddly paired: she the literary romantic, he the frat boy at Arizona State, where they met in the early '80s. She got pregnant not long after meeting him, and she married like the good Catholic she has always tried to be. But by the early '90s, it was clear to friends that even their four children weren't going to hold Steve and Mary Letourneau together. Expenses outpaced salaries--Steve loads cargo for Alaska Airlines--and creditors were phoning. They filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in May 1994.

An inner circle of Mary's friends, a troika who have requested anonymity even as they talk among themselves of a "campaign" to burnish Mary's public image, insist that Steve was having affairs and abusing Mary, mostly verbally but with an occasional shove. (Steve Letourneau and his lawyer turned down several interview requests.) It got to the point that they were barely civil. Therapist Moore says Mary remembered that when she told Steve about her father's cancer, he growled, "What do you want me to do?"

Moore believes that Mary has bipolar disorder--most people know it as manic depression--an illness with a raft of possible symptoms, from irritability to hypersexuality. Moore theorizes that "psychosocial stressors" in Mary's life--the most crucial being the news of her father's cancer--tipped a disorder that had been mild and all but unnoticed into depression followed by a nervous breakdown. "I think she was very interested in this boy, and she had often extended relationships with students after school," Moore says. "But by [June 1996], she was overly elated, highly revved up and nearly delusional." Moore notes, "The father had always been the man in her life--and even the husband was for a time--but then she really began to see this boy as the man in her life."

Mary has never fully accepted Moore's diagnosis, and her friends disagree over its accuracy and importance. For their part, prosecutors think she's more evil than ill. Whatever her true state, in June 1996, she and Vili became more than close friends. He had stayed at her house many times before. Soona was working nights making pastries, and she thought the sleepovers at Mrs. Letourneau's were healthy for Vili. But he had begun writing Mary romantic poems, and at some point openly asked her to have sex. She declined at first.

Then, just after midnight on June 19, Steve and Mary were at home arguing, tossing threats and denunciations around as usual. Vili was there, but he left amid the fighting. Mary eventually followed him in the van, picked him up and drove to the marina in a suburb called Des Moines. Her van crept around the parking lot as they looked for a place to stop, and a security guard watched it run over a curb. Suspecting a drunk driver, he called the cops.

When they arrived, Officers Rich Niebusch and Bob Tschida couldn't quite figure out what they were dealing with. They shone a spotlight into the back window, and a startled Mary jumped from under the covers she and Vili were sharing and into the driver's seat. She at first lied and said her companion was 18, and Vili pretended to be asleep. But the officers questioned him and learned his age. He had just turned 13. Even as Mary tried to explain herself--there was a fight with my husband; we were just sleeping; I often watch Vili--they were concerned enough to call in a sergeant. After all, Mary was clad in a coat and T shirt but "was bare-legged below the T shirt," Tschida wrote in a report. The sergeant who arrived later reported that she was wearing a beige skirt. Regardless of this, it didn't look good, and Vili told the Globe that he and Mary had, in fact, been "close" to having sex that night.

Somehow, no one beyond the police discovered just how bad it looked. The cops called Soona, but Fualaau family lawyer Robert Huff says they spoke with her "for half a minute" before allowing Mary to tell Soona a G-rated version of the incident. "Mary's a great talker," Huff says, "and Soona calmed down." Soona then told the police it was O.K. for Vili to go home with Mary; for reasons that aren't clear, the police didn't press the issue. They never informed Mary's school, and they decided there wasn't enough evidence to file charges.

"I think our people went out of their way and followed good protocol on this," says Des Moines police commander Kevin Tucker. "You know, when they were talking to the mom and she was saying it was O.K., then basically there were no signs of criminal activity." In hindsight, of course, there was every sign: a Washington State statute clearly defines sex with a minor between the ages of 12 and 16 as rape.

Over the summer, Mary and Vili were able to live out their love. Steve always worked a lot--he and Mary were still paying into a court-approved bankruptcy plan and had a hard time meeting mortgage payments. He was used to seeing Vili around anyway. The teenager told the Globe that he and Mary had sex in nearly every room of the house.

In the fall, Mary realized she was pregnant. She and Steve hadn't had much sex in the previous few months, and the baby was definitely Vili's. Steve was by then very suspicious of the amount of time his wife and her student were spending together. When he learned that Mary was pregnant and that Vili was the father, Steve was enraged. Gehrke and Huff, who works as both the Fualaaus' lawyer and as Mary's media representative, say Steve ranted about "that n_____ baby" in front of their children. He even confronted his 13-year-old rival, demanding to know if he was having sex with Mary. Vili said yes.

The Letourneaus were in hell. Steve wasn't sure what to do. Take his children from their mother? In the end, a relative of his called Mary's school district anonymously. School officials immediately phoned the cops, who questioned Vili the next morning. He told the truth, and later that day, in February 1997, the school principal called Mary out of a faculty meeting. A detective was waiting to arrest her.

In the long months that she waited to plead guilty (last summer) and be sentenced (in November), Mary and Steve barely spoke. According to Spin, she had to sleep in the car outside their home because she was under court orders not to live in the same house as children, even her own. In a series of interviews with the TV tabloid show American Journal, Steve said he cried often during this period and his children were confused and devastated.

According to police reports, on May 9, Mary told police that Steve hit her in the stomach and said, "We want to see the law bury you, and it can't happen too soon." The officer found a large red mark on her stomach. Steve was gone, and Mary didn't want to press charges, so the cops left. But Mary told police that Steve returned that night drunk. As they were talking, he pulled away in the car quickly, allegedly knocking her hard to the ground. She was eight months pregnant with Audrey. A neighbor took her to the hospital.

Her debacle got little attention at first, but after Mary did some interviews with a local paper last summer, her attractive face and quixotic mien changed that. Soon many images of Mary--some of her own creation, most drawn by others--were emerging. There was the weepy, repentant Mary at her original sentencing. "Help us. Help us all," she begged the judge. Moore believes this was "the real Mary," brought back to reality by Depakote, a mood stabilizer. Others suggest it was a ruse (successful) to win leniency.

But soon enough, Gehrke's hard-won deal didn't look so good. The "Special Sex Offender Sentencing Alternative" required Mary to tell her kids that Mommy was a rapist. How could she do that? From behind the scenes, the image of a truculent, unrepentant Mary then emerged. She stopped taking the Depakote--her doctor approved, wrongly thinking she would quickly change to lithium, another medication used to treat bipolar disorder--and started telling friends that she and Vili were truly in love. "Since when do people who love each other have to defend it?" she would ask. She quarreled with her court-approved treatment counselor, Terry Copeland, who in 15 years had never seen a sex offender in his care return to prison for committing another sex offense. He has counseled more than 400.

Reporters were creating images of her too, some that Mary disputes. In his forthcoming piece in Mirabella, Jim Fielder includes an account by a court-appointed counselor of an incestuous relationship involving Mary and one of her three brothers. Mary has told friends that the counselor who wrote this evaluation wildly exaggerated the truth, which was that in an innocent childhood exploration, she had once touched a brother's penis. She has told friends she hopes to sue the counselor. Friends say Letourneau is also angry with Fielder, claiming he not only interviewed her under false pretenses (she believed he was writing a screenplay) but also took copies of her psychiatric evaluations from Julie Terry, a close friend with power of attorney for Mary. Mirabella editor in chief Roberta Myers denied all the allegations Friday, saying Terry, in fact, gave Fielder the documents.

What's next for Letourneau? New lawyer Howards has to devise an appeals strategy, which won't be easy. Washington State has led the nation in aggressively prosecuting sex criminals, and Howards starts out knowing little about Washington law. She made her name in Boston by helping win the release of a group of women who had murdered their abusive husbands. But Mary has told friends that she doesn't think the abuse she has accused Steve of should be part of the public debate. She is disappointed that Gehrke pinned her defense on her bipolar condition, and she doesn't want it emphasized. She will almost certainly claim in an appeal that Gehrke did a poor job.

Letourneau believes that Gehrke could have sought a deal for her under a molestation rather than rape statute, one carrying a maximum penalty of 15 months rather than 89 months. She has begun reminding people that Vili was the "aggressor" in their relationship and that without violence there can be no rape. But David Allen, a Seattle criminal-defense attorney, says, "Molestation is a different crime, involving touching or fondling. Rape of a child in Washington is defined as any penetration, however slight. It's age-driven, and who the aggressor is or whether it's consensual doesn't matter."

Another long shot for Mary could be a claim that Vili raped her, since she was vulnerable and didn't have the will to resist his come-ons. So far, however, Mary has avoided putting any legal burdens on her young lover. Meanwhile, her friends and lawyers are bickering about how to proceed. The infighting has worsened in the past few weeks. Howards has tried, unsuccessfully, to get them all to shut up, and she is the only one who isn't talking.

Unless Howards works a miracle, Mary K. Letourneau will leave prison in 2005. Vili will be 21. Though the judge ordered Mary never to see him again for the rest of her life, it's hard to imagine her complying. On the other hand, seven years is an eternity for a teenager to wait for a girl. Even so, Vili says he will. "No matter how long I have to wait," he told the Globe, "I'll be there because our love is so special that nothing can stand in its way." So far, almost everything has stood in its way.

--With reporting by Victoria Rainert and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Victoria Rainert and Andrea Sachs/ New York