13-year-old pupil was the `man of her dreams'

It is a disturbing criminal case, or a passionate romance, depending on your perspective, that has divided both the city of Seattle and the US. Some call Mary Kay LeTourneau a child rapist. Others say she is mentally ill.

At the Shoreline Elementary School, they say she was once one of the best teachers ever to grace the premises. Now she is simply a woman in jail, pregnant for the second time, bearing the child of a child, a woman abandoned by almost everyone except her 13-year-old lover.

The sad story of Mary Kay LeTourneau first hit the headlines last spring. A popular 34-year-old teacher, LeTourneau was married to Steve LeTourneau and the mother of four children, ranging in age from four to 13. The family lived in a Seattle suburb called Normandy Park that is about as manicured middle-class American as it gets.

She had good friends, although few knew much about her family background. Parents loved her. "She was an exceptional teacher, a leader among her fellow teachers as well," said school spokesman Nick Latham.

What people didn't know was that LeTourneau had fallen in love with a boy she'd first met when he was a second-grader at Shoreline Elementary. He was half-Samoan, and by all accounts an unusual child. He was artistically gifted. He wrote poetry. One teacher said the boy "was like an old soul trapped in a child's body. He stood out." Even the boy's mother told friends he'd never been a typical child.

At first LeTourneau was just a dedicated teacher and mentor. She introduced the boy to the piano and took him to art classes. By the time he was 12, he was back in the sixth-grade class she was teaching. The nature of their bond would change.

In an interview with the Seattle Times last July, LeTourneau explained her initial feelings for the boy.

"There was a respect, an insight, a spirit, an understanding between us. There was a bonding that was pretty instantaneous.

"It was the kind of feeling you have with a brother or sister, a feeling that they're part of your life forever. But I didn't know what it meant. I felt that one day he might marry my daughter," LeTourneau said.

But late in 1995 LeTourneau's marriage began to deteriorate. In January 1996 she suffered a miscarriage. Then she discovered her father was dying of cancer.

Few people in Seattle knew who Mary Kay LeTourneau's father was; she rarely used her maiden name, Mary Kay Schmitz. But people in California would remember. One of six children, LeTourneau had been raised in a strict conservative ultra-Catholic family in Orange county.

Her father, John Schmitz, had been one of the most right-wing politicians ever elected in the US, first winning office in 1964. He later served in the US Congress. John Schmitz had been the first member to hold office of the John Birch Society, an organisation comparable to the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1968 he'd said that Ronald Reagan was not conservative enough to be president; in 1972 he was so opposed to President Richard Nixon's trip to China he said he opposed him coming back.

But by 1983 John Schmitz's political life ended abruptly in scandal. It turned out that family man Schmitz was involved with a young girl who had been his student when he taught a class at a local college. Voters, along with Schmitz's wife and family, learned that Schmitz had been concealing a mistress and two illegitimate childen for years.

Gloria Allred, a lawyer who was a friend of the family at the time, says that the impact on Mary Kay must have been devastating. "I'm not excusing what Mary Kay has done and I'm not a doctor, but I can understand how she could have crossed the line the same way her father did."

No one can say what really happened. It could have been a daughter reenacting the sins of the father, or just a lonely woman in the throes of marital despair. But whatever it was, Mary Kay LeTourneau took the next step, one that would destroy her life and unleash a media pogrom that continues.

The boy told authorities that he gave LeTourneau a silver ring and announced his love for her. She at first resisted. By the summer of 1996 they were having sex, either at her house or in her car. The relationship was more than physical. They visited museums and bookstores. LeTourneau lawyer's David Gehrke, puts it this way:

"She found the man of her dreams, but he was 13."

In the meantime, LeTourneau's husband, a supervisor for Alaska Airlines, was having an affair of his own. But he exploded when he found love letters between his wife and her young lover. A relative notified police. LeTourneau was arrested.

It soon came to light that she was pregnant and planned to have the baby, intentionally conceived with the boy as a "bond' of their love. Last May she gave birth to a girl named Audrey and three months later pleaded guilty to two counts of child rape. At her sentencing she begged for leniency from the court, apologised and promised not to see the boy again. Even the boy's mother, now caring for the infant, testified on LeTourneau's behalf.

Judge Linda Lau sentenced LeTourneau to 7 1/2 years in prison, but suspended the sentence to all but six months on condition that she never see the boy again, and begin a sex offender treatment programme.

On January 2nd, Mary Kay LeTourneau was released from jail. Her husband had moved to Alaska with her four children. She'd lost her job. Her house had been sold. She began to try and rebuild her life by moving into a rented cottage in an area of South Seattle called Seward Park. Her house was on a street just blocks from the edge of placid Lake Washington, a beautiful neighbourhood with green lawns and pink cherry blossom trees.

At 2.20 a.m. on February 2nd, a police patrol car noticed a car parked in front of LeTourneau's home with its parking lights on and its windows steamed. As Time magazine would note, the hours after midnight are largely shared by lovers and criminals, and police soon realised they had stumbled upon both.

LeTourneau and the boy were in the car, clothed and holding hands. They had just come from seeing the movie Wag the Dog, a political satire that revolves around a bedevilled US President who has sex with a teenager. This time LeTourneau was hauled back to jail and ordered to serve the rest of her seven years behind bars. But another shocker awaited: Letoureau is now pregnant with the couple's second child, due to give birth in November.

Rober Huff, an attorney representing the boy, says that "whatever people think, these two people feel love for each other. People are now getting just how complex it is. Before, they just thought it was torrid."

Indeed, LeTourneau's life may read like a novel, but it not a fiction styled for popular taste in the US.