Mary Kay Letourneau, the schoolteacher who married a former student she was convicted of raping, has died from cancer. She was 58.
Letourneau was a 6th grade teacher at an elementary school in Burien, a suburb of Seattle, when she began an inappropriate sexual relationship with then-12-year-old Vili Fualaau in 1996.
A friend of Letourneau’s then-husband alerted the authorities about the relationship. Police caught Letourneau with the boy in a parked minivan at a marina in Des Moines, WA. at 1:20 a.m. on June 19, 1996.
Letourneau, a mother of four, initially told police the boy was 18. Both were fully clothed at the time, but police suspected something of a sexual nature had occurred.
Back at the police station, Letourneau, then 34, said she was babysitting Fualaau and took him home after she and her husband had a fight.
Letourneau and Fualaau’s first daughter was conceived about two months later.
Letourneau pleaded guilty to two counts of child rape and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years of sex offender treatment.
The jail sentence was suspended on the condition that she agreed not to contact her adolescent baby daddy.
By then, Letourneau’s husband had filed for divorce and moved out of state with their four minor children.
The couple’s second daughter was conceived in 1998, before Letourneau was sentenced to serve more than 7 years in prison for child rape.
After Letourneau’s early release from prison in 2004, Fualaau, then 20, applied to the court for permission to see her. The couple was married in 2005.
In 2017, Fualaau, then 33, filed for a legal separation from Letourneau, 55.
Fualaau told the NY Post he still loved his wife and they were happy together. He said the separation was for business purposes “in order to sell cannabis.”
He said the separation would make it easier for him to obtain a license to sell “cigaweed” – marijuana cigarettes.
“It’s not necessarily what you think. When you want to get licensed, they do background checks on both parties,” he told the New York Post. “If I decide to be a part of it, I have to be licensed, and I have to be vetted, and so does a spouse. She has a past. She has a history.”
Fualaau worked as a DJ in the Washington area but he wanted to start his own business.
The couple’s story was the subject of books and a movie on USA Network, titled “All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story.”
