It hadn’t even been two years since she’d graduated from high school when a handwritten note arrived to Mary Beth Runnoe’s college dorm.
Opening the mail, she found a hand-drawn heart with the words ‘thinking of you’. It was a love letter from the crush she used to daydream about as a teenager.
‘I truly can’t wait to see what God has in store for you, me, and us,’ he wrote from across the country. ‘You have shown me how to treat a woman. Your heart and its contents mean the world to me as it has already poured into me and made me glad!
‘We have talked about obstacles or roadblocks that might be in the way of us being anything more than “just friends”… I am putting it in God’s hands.’
The sinister problem was that Runnoe’s crush was her teacher – a man over a decade her senior who she had first met when she was 10 and he was married.
When she got the letter, she was 19 and he was 34 – seeking a full-on adult romance.
It would be years before she would begin therapy in her 20s and first hear the word ‘grooming’.
Now 29, Runnoe is an educator herself – a career she bittersweetly acknowledges he inspired her to pursue. She talks about the relationship and its fallout in her new book titled Thinking of You.
Married author, teacher and mother-of-two Mary Beth Runnoe, 29, has written a memoir about being groomed in high school by a teacher who’d known her since she was 10 years old
Pictured in fifth grade, when she first met the man she calls ‘Mr William Davis’ in her book, Mary Beth Runnoe became closer with him over four years of high school – when he shared intimate details of his life she now recognizes as grooming
As a child and young adult, she adored and idolized Mr William Davis (the fictional name she uses for her former teacher in the book) – now, she views him as a predator.
Runnoe is horrified by the relationship he cultivated with her, and she wants readers to know his particular style of grooming, and why it ‘is far more widespread than we think’.
‘Since I’ve opened up, I have connected with several other women who have been victims of something similar,’ Runnoe told the Daily Mail.
‘Some of those women, those relationships did turn physical – and they have said to me that the emotional piece, that grooming part, was more traumatic to them.’
Runnoe explains that such an attachment – especially when formed under an uneven power dynamic – cannot easily be undone.
And many of the women who contacted her after she began sharing her story admit they stayed in touch with their groomers for longer than necessary, adding they felt ‘some kind of obligation’ and even sometimes a ‘need to protect them’.
Runnoe said her experience with Davis knocked her confidence and left her questioning everything from her memories to her skills and talents.
She feared that, as an educator, she might ‘unknowingly do’ what he did, that she ‘might not be capable of rebuilding the boundaries [he] destroyed.’
She found writing the book to be both cathartic and difficult, but nonetheless necessary to embolden other victims to speak out.
Runnoe was crowned homecoming queen during her senior year. Within two years of her graduation, her former teacher was exploring an adult romance with her through calls, emails and letters, she writes in the new memoir
While in school, Davis, a young and popular teacher, complimented Runnoe often and encouraged her both in class and extracurriculars. He would single her out and even let her sub for him, teaching her peers in his absence. She later found out there were rumors about them flying through the school.
The object of many students’ affection, Davis also made comments to Runnoe that were, in retrospect, very telling.
She wrote about a time when she left her rain jacket in his room. He ran after her with it, shouting, ‘Sorry, I just don’t like to have female students’ things left in my room. You know how it is.’
He would also make fun of her upperclassman boyfriend, calling him a ‘creeper’ and ‘cradle robber’.
As she got older, they got closer. Davis shared details of his personal life, making the student his ‘confidante’.
Davis told Runnoe – before others – that he was divorcing his wife, who also worked at the school.
On one occasion, while talking to her about his marriage, he stopped and told Runnoe to then leave the room, adding, ‘We shouldn’t be alone, anyway’.
‘He shouldn’t have told me that he was getting a divorce and asked me not to tell my peers,’ Runnoe told the Mail. ‘Those were all crossing of boundaries that allowed me to develop closeness to him.’
In one handwritten letter (pictured) he sent during her sophomore year of college – not even two years after he’d been her teacher – he wrote: ‘You have shown me how to treat a woman’
And once she left high school, Davis’s true intentions became clear.
Right after graduation, he turned up at a wine tasting Runnoe’s parents were hosting at their home.
In her book, she wrote that he told her, ‘You are a beautiful young woman,’ before addressing her mother: ‘Listen, if I wasn’t her teacher… Well, I guess I’m not anymore, huh? Anyway, if I never had been, would it be weird to you? If I was hitting on your daughter?’
Runnoe’s mother ‘laughed awkwardly’ and the conversation ended when another attendee asked for a refill.
A besotted teenager, Runnoe was elated and texted back and forth rather innocuously with the teacher during her collegiate freshman year. Then they met up in person when she returned home over the holidays – he took a new out-of-state job after his divorce and was also no longer local.
They joined other former students for a mini-reunion at a restaurant, where a server mistook Runnoe and Davis for a couple.
Runnoe remembered him saying, ‘People with age gaps date all the time’ and that he knew ‘a lot of happy couples’ in that position.
Later that night, one of her former classmates sent her a string of photos titled ‘love birds’, showing her and Davis sitting close together.
‘I kept those photos for a long time, holding them as evidence that I hadn’t imagined them at all,’ Runnoe wrote.
Runnoe ended correspondence with her former teacher during her sophomore year of college after meeting her future husband (pictured)
The next year, Davis suggested they meet at a coffee shop, later requesting that she call him by his first name.
From there, correspondence grew exponentially.
He said he wanted to ‘get to know her’ and sent her ‘paragraphs about the lack of intimacy’ he had felt with his wife. He would call her late at night for hours-long conversations as she struggled to stay awake in her dorm.
He sent her ‘pages of notes, devotionals and what can best be described as Christian essays’ along with attachments to songs he had written and recorded.
Runnoe said of looking back at their emails 10 years later, ‘nothing could have prepared me for what I would feel reading [the] messages again as a grown woman… I found that I had majorly downplayed [his] manipulation and blatant abuse of power.’
In one phone call during her sophomore year, she remembered Davis telling her he could ‘imagine myself kissing you… would you kiss me back?’
They discussed the obstacles they would have to face: disapproval and questioning.
Runnoe was a devout Christian, and Davis said he had joined a new church, recommitting his life to Jesus.
‘We had very real conversations about it,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘And honestly, that made me think that he was more serious about me because he was considering, “what are we going to tell people”, and “what’s our relationship going to look like?”
‘I thought he was taking such care.’
Runnoe, now an educator herself, published her memoir on August 1
But in the spring of her sophomore year, Runnoe met her now husband.
And when she called Davis to tell him she had connected with someone her own age, he went cold, wishing her luck before hanging up.
That was the last time they spoke – though he has repeatedly tried to add her as a friend on Facebook from multiple new accounts.
As Runnoe came to terms with her grooming experience, her memoir grew out of a therapeutic exercise to ‘tell the story from my eyes’.
‘Looking back, I feel violated in all of those times, because I feel very unsafe in my childhood and in my memories,’ she told the Mail.
One day, she hopes educators may use her book as an instructional tool, ‘to spot these types of relationships forming between students and their colleagues, to look out for each other’.
