A LOVE THAT LASTED

THEIRS was a love story that held a macabre fascination for decades.

When it all began, she was a 34-year-old schoolteacher, married with four children. He was her 12-year-old pupil, infatuated with a woman more than two decades his senior – and the feelings were mutual.

What followed were two children, a conviction for child rape, two jail sentences, a wedding mired in controversy, then later a bitter divorce. Yet over the years Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau remained a unified force, a couple committed to each other despite all the controversy and condemnation.

Now the love story that began in the late 1990s has come to