by Nonny » Fri Dec 02, 2005 2:57 am
I found an old article in People on Mary Kay Letourneau. It gives the names and ages of her 4 children -- from her first marriage. <br><br>Title: Out of control. (cover story) <br>Source: People; 03/30/98, Vol. 49 Issue 12, p44 <br><br>As a teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau was praised as someone who could see things through the eyes of a child. Now one wonders whether she can see things any other way. Letourneau, 36, the Normandy Park, Wash., mother who caused a scandal last year when she had a baby by a 13-year-old former student, is pregnant again, presumably by the same boy. It is not, in her view, an occasion of shame--or even embarrassment--though she was returned to prison five weeks ago to serve the remainder of a 7 1/2-year sentence for child rape. "She told me this baby she is carrying is the one thing that will keep her going," says her close friend Michelle Jarvis, "that if she didn't have this life inside of her she would have cracked up."<br><br>Many would say she already has. Letourneau has refused to identify the father this time, but her lawyer David Gehrke has said he assumes it is the teenager, now 14 and an eighth-grader in Seattle. (His name has not been published because of his age.) Letourneau, who is six weeks pregnant, conceived while out on parole, around the time she and the teenager were found by police at 2:40 a.m. in her parked car. Police say they had $6,200 in cash, her passport and a load of baby clothes, suggesting they were about to flee the country.<br><br>Letourneau had been forbidden to see the boy as a condition of her release, so she was sent back to prison last month. The startling news of her second pregnancy has left almost everyone involved in the case in a state of disbelief. "I'm kind of speechless," says her husband, Steve, 35, a cargo-loading specialist for Alaska Airlines who has custody of the couple's four children and is in the process of divorcing his wife. "It's like taking a picture of our family from the wall and throwing it on the ground."<br><br>A close look at the family in which Letourneau grew up may provide some clues as to how she went wrong. Her father, John Schmitz, was a philosophy instructor at Santa Ana College in California who was elected to one term in Congress. Dapper and handsome, he was renowned for his considerable personal charm. But he was even more widely known for his fierce attacks on threats to public decency wherever he found them--and he found them everywhere. His fervid conservatism won him the presidential nomination of the American Independent Party in 1972, but eventually his views grew so extreme that he was asked to leave the John Birch Society.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>At home, Schmitz was an unusually stern father to his six children, and by some accounts was particularly obsessed with the dangers of sex education. Despite her political differences with Schmitz, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred became friendly with him and his wife, Mary, though she winced at what she considered their heavy-handed treatment of their kids. "John and Mary were just so ideologically strict, so repressive," says Allred, who hasn't spoken to the family in years. "I'm sure [Mary Kay] never felt comfortable talking to them about things she might have been feeling."</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Yet old friend Michelle Jarvis says Mary Kay hardly seemed oppressed, though her parents traveled often and she was cared for by her three older brothers. The family lived in Corona del Mar, says Jarvis, in "a gorgeous house that backed up against the hills. I used to swim in the pool at night and see coyotes running across the yard. On sleepovers, Mary and I would raid the refrigerator in the middle of the night." At a parochial high school that both girls attended in Anaheim, Jarvis says, Mary Kay blossomed: "Her father used to call her Cake, and that was her nickname. Mary was very popular in high school. She had lots of girlfriends and guy friends. She had lots of personality and smarts. She was very funny."</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>As it turned out, her father had a secret that wasn't. In 1982 his political career ended in disgrace when it was disclosed that he had been living a double life, keeping a mistress who had once been his student and fathering two children by her. Allred suspects the scandal left the family deeply shaken, and she speculates that the aftershocks are still being felt. "I can't imagine how that must have influenced the children--the contradiction, the irony," she says. "I'm not excusing what Mary Kay did, and I'm not a psychiatrist, but I can understand how she could have crossed the line the same way her father did."<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Yet Mary Kay remained unshakably loyal to her father and, at least outwardly, seemed to put the episode behind her. While at Arizona State University, she met fellow student Steve Letourneau, and when she became pregnant they married. Many who knew her agree that, at least until recently, Letourneau was devoted to her four children--Steven, 13; Mary Claire, 10; Nicholas, 6; and Jacqueline, 4. Settling with her family in Normandy Park, a middle-class suburb of Seattle, she earned a reputation at Shorewood Elementary School as an exceptionally gifted teacher.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>One pupil with whom she formed an especially close relationship was a Samoan-American second-grader, one of four children, who showed remarkable artistic ability that Letourneau delighted in cultivating. More than that, she began to think of him as a kindred spirit. "There was a respect, an insight, a spirit, an understanding between us that grew over time," she told The Seattle Times last year. "It was the kind of feeling you have with a brother or sister--a feeling that they're part of your life forever." At that point, she maintained, there was nothing sexual about her feelings. "I didn't know what it meant," she said. "I felt that one day he might marry my daughter."<br><br>Over the next several years, Letourneau kept in close touch with the child. She bought him art supplies, took him to museums and encouraged him to develop his talent for poetry. "She showed me pictures he drew and let me read his poetry," says one of Letourneau's neighbors. "He was very artistic, very insightful. The poetry he wrote wasn't anything you'd expect from a 12-year-old."<br><br>Then, starting in the fall of 1995, when Letourneau had the boy in her sixth-grade class, she suffered a series of emotional jolts. In October she learned that her father had terminal cancer. "She was devastated, she was paralyzed," Julie Moore, a defense psychiatrist who evaluated her, later testified. "She felt like she lost the man of her life." By that time her marriage was in trouble, and to make matters worse, in January 1996, Letourneau suffered a miscarriage that left her on the brink of a breakdown.<br><br>snip--<br><br>________________________<br>Something else from <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.spitfirelist.com/f469.html" target="top">www.spitfirelist.com/f469.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br>‘Can’t you understand that this is not a story about me,’ an unrepentant LeTourneau told George magazine. ‘It’s a story of two remarkable men.’ Those would be her thirteen-year-old student and her domineering father, both of whom LeTourneau loved beyond reason.<br> <p></p><i></i>