Schoolteacher in Sex Case Is Schmitz Daughter

A Washington schoolteacher who pleaded guilty last month to having sex with a 13-year-old student, whose child she bore in May, said she had hoped to hide her family identity throughout the ordeal because her father, former Orange County Rep. John Schmitz, is dying of cancer.

“It’s a tragedy that this came out about me before his death,” Mary Kay LeTourneau, one of Schmitz’s eight children, told the Seattle Times in an emotional interview from jail in Kent, Wash. “He has cancer. He’s expected to die in a couple of months. He had a right to die with dignity.”

LeTourneau, 35, first met the student when he was a second-grader. Last year, he became a student in her sixth-grade class, and she began having sex with him in June of that year. She told the Seattle Times that she felt bonded to him but “I felt that one day he might marry my daughter.” A relative of LeTourneau’s husband reported her to authorities; she was arrested in March.

She told the Seattle Times from jail this weekend that she feels responsible for reviving a scandal that disgraced her family and forced her father from politics.

That uproar occurred in 1982 when it was made public that Schmitz, who had touted church and family values during his political career, had fathered two children out of wedlock during a nine-year affair. The woman involved had been a student in a class he taught at Santa Ana College.

Schmitz now lives in Washington, D.C., where he works part time at Political Americana, a memorabilia store in Union Station. Neither Schmitz nor his wife, Mary, could be reached for comment.

LeTourneau’s baby girl is being raised by the mother of the student, now 14. LeTourneau’s husband filed for divorce and moved to Alaska with the couple’s children. She will be sentenced Aug. 29 and could spend 7 1/2 years in prison.

For nearly 20 years, Schmitz exemplified firebrand conservatism after he was elected in 1964 to the state Senate. Active in the John Birch Society, Schmitz eventually was asked to leave the group because of his outspokenness.