On a warm August afternoon in 1973, the summer before Mary Katherine Schmitz started sixth grade, her little brother Phillip drowned in the pool behind the family's home in Corona del Mar's exclusive Spyglass Hill.
The swimming pool, lined with turquoise tiles and architecturally sited to take full advantage of the backyard's panoramic ocean view, had just been filled. Former congressman John G. Schmitz was away on business, and his wife, Mary, busy with church work and her own campaign to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, was counting on her eldest daughter once more to look after the child everyone in the family still called "the baby."
The baby was a fearless 3-year-old, and when he took off his life jacket and stepped into the deep end of the pool, not even the diligent Mary Katherine--playing in the shallow end with her older brother Jerry--noticed the tiny splash. Only after their mother began looking for Phillip was he found, lifeless on the bottom of the pool.
Twenty-five years later, Mary Kay Schmitz Letourneau, married with four young children, went to a Washington state prison for the rape of a 13-year-old boy. Unrepentant, Letourneau insists she fell in love with the boy when he was a student in her sixth-grade class. They have a baby girl together--her fifth child--and now Letourneau is pregnant with their second child.
For the Schmitz family and other Mary Kay supporters, the best explanation for her stunning behavior may begin with what happened that warm summer day on the scenic hill in Corona del Mar.
"There is no question that her brother's death, combined with other traumas Mary Kay suffered later, contributed to the tragedy of her life today," says Dr. Julia Moore, the psychiatrist who evaluated the once-beloved Seattle teacher and diagnosed manic depression before she was jailed as a sex offender last November.
The story of the petite blond woman known at the Washington State Corrections Center for Women as prisoner 769014 is as sad as it is outrageous. And it mirrors, many say, the downfall of her father--the brilliant and flamboyant ultra-conservative Orange County politician who lost his career and, for a time, his family, when it was revealed that Southern California's most outspoken advocate of family values himself had a mistress, also a former student, and two illegitimate children.
The Outspoken Congressman
