A love like no other

Mary Fualaau: I was really thinking there would be a fine, like pay a fine option.  Because what I had been to traffic court situations.

Josh Mankiewicz, Dateline correspondent: Yeah, but you can’t tell me that you thought this was on the order of a traffic violation.

Mary Fualaau: Well, what I really believed is that the law would look into it. 

Mary says the thought it would make a difference that Vili was a more than willing partner. She says she was stunned to learn that under statutory rape laws, it is illegal to have sex with a 13 year old even if he is willing.

Perhaps even more surprising: her explanation for that night between her incarcerations, when she and Vili were found in a car together at 3 a.m. with cash and her passport.

Mankiewicz:  Were you planning on leaving the country then?

Mary Fualaau: No.  (chuckles) No. No.

She says the money was to pay her lawyer and the passport was just I.D. And get this: She claims she didn’t mind being caught and sent back behind bars. She says it was her only chance to see her kids.

Under the conditions of her release, Mary was prohibited from contact not just with Vili, but with her five children—a ban she found intolerable.

Mary Fualaau: You put me in the community, in a treatment program without any contact with my children. There’s nothing worse.

Mary says she decided she’d prefer to be in prison, with at least occasional visits from her kids. She claims she was already making arrangements to pull out of her treatment program and go to prison, so seeing Vili was no risk at all. But at the hearing where her seven year sentence was reinstated, she surely didn’t look happy about it.

Mary Fualaau: We were away from each other, our families were shattered.

All contact with her young lover was still forbidden. No visits. No phone calls. No letters. But Mary and Vili admit now they did find a way to communicate.

After the birth of their second baby, Georgia, Mary was allowed to pump her breast milk and have it sent to the home where their two babies lived with Vili’s mom and with Vili. Mary enclosed secret messages in the packaging.

Mary Fualaau: We had a pretty sophisticated number code from- - years before that—we understood.

Mankiewicz: Gimme just a couple of ‘em.

Mary Fualaau: "104" was “I love you.”  And if I wasn’t feeling good, or if something was going wrong—there was another one. And then I would write names of songs down. Because the lyrics express how I feel.

Songs like “Oh Happy Day,” and “Let’s Get it On.” Vili says he would play the songs Mary suggested and he kept a printed card for decoding her ultra private messages.

Mankiewicz: What was it like to get the shipments of Mary’s breast milk out of the prison and realize in there was a little secret message for you?

Vili Fualaau: It just made me feel really good, really happy about it.

Vili spent months daydreaming about her getting out. But as time passed, he admits he dated other girls—girls his own age. By 2002, with Mary locked away for five years, Vili very publicly proclaimed in that civil trial, that his love affair with Mary Letourneau was over.  

Mankiewicz: You sat in a courtroom, under oath, and said that you had lost your feelings for her.  And that that relationship wrecked your life.

Vili Fualaau: That under oath thing in courtroom, I don’t really believe in all that stuff. I have a really strong belief in a God that really sees a lot of good in people’s hearts.

He says his mom and her lawyers convinced him that disavowing his love for Mary would pay off.

Vili Fualaau: They gave me the pressure that if I didn’t do it, how was I gonna have the funds to raise my kids?

Mary heard about it all in prison from news accounts.

Mankiewicz: Was it painful to hear him say that he didn’t love you anymore?

Mary Fualaau: I knew that no once could ever say anything to him to take away what we had. I thought they really convinced him you know to get that money to say whatever he had to say.

Two years later, when Mary was released and this star-crossed couple finally reunited— legally this time— they both say their love was as strong as the night they parted.

Vili Fualaau: I got to hold her.  You know, I got to put my cheek against hers and got to hold her hand, and just hold her.  (Chuckle) And look at her, and just to even smell her breath, you know, is  really good feeling. 

Mankiewicz: Seven years apart.  How did he change?

Mary Fualaau: Not very much.  I liked—well, what I really liked is that we could go out to dinner, and he could order a glass of wine. 

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