Framed, Part 6: Convicted and disgraced — with still farther to fall

CHAPTER SIX: RUIN

A tall, lanky man sat alone on a bench outside Courtroom 62. He was absorbed in the yellow legal pad balanced on his lap, silently mouthing what he had written there.

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He was recognizable to many of the attorneys who passed through this third-floor wing of the Central Justice Center in Santa Ana. By now he was accustomed to the stares of curiosity and contempt. The white-shoe rainmakers in the $1,000 suits, the personal-injury guys hustling a living on slip-and-falls, the overworked public defenders — they knew his mug shot from the news.

Until recently Kent Easter had been one of them, a member of the tribe in good standing, a sworn Officer of the Court. He sat atop the roiling, competitive heap of Orange County’s 17,000 practicing lawyers — a $400,000-a-year civil litigator, an equity partner in one of the county’s biggest firms.

His career had been a trajectory of prestige schools and status gigs, from Stanford to UCLA Law to a big Silicon Valley firm, and finally to a 14th-floor office in a Newport Beach tower overlooking the Pacific.

This was before the arrests and the trials and the cameras, before his pedigree became a cudgel with which to flog him, before strangers were writing him letters urging him to kill himself. Now he sat alone in the din of the courthouse hallway wearing ill-fitting pants and a homely purple sweater.

It was February 2016. His lips moved as he studied his legal pad. He was rehearsing a plea for mercy — his closing argument to jurors weighing his financial fate. Absent was the top-dollar legal talent that had flanked him through two criminal trials. Finally, representing himself, he would face his fellow Orange County citizens alone. He would paint a picture of his almost total ruin and beg them not to make it complete.

***

To Rob Marcereau, the attorney representing the plaintiff and her family, Kent Easter brought back memories of the William Macy character in “Fargo” — a man flailing to extricate himself from the web of his own doomed criminal scheme, losing more with each entangling lie. Here, as compensation for emotional distress, Kelli Peters wanted millions from him.

Some of Marcereau’s lawyer buddies had told him the case was a long-shot. Peters had suffered no physical injury and had kept her role as a school volunteer. But the more Easter tried to duck what he had done, Marcereau thought, the more the jurors would hate him.

Easter sat alone at the defense table, without his co-defendant and ex-wife, Jill. When Marcereau chatted with him during court breaks, he found him oddly affable — low-key, disarmingly polite, with a sense of humor — and had to remind himself he was the enemy.

“Kent Easter and his wife, Jill Easter, plotted and planned and schemed to destroy the life of Kelli Peters for a full year,” Marcereau told jurors in his opening remarks. He detailed their futile campaign to oust her from her volunteer job at Plaza Vista elementary, and their ill-fated plot to disgrace her by planting drugs in her car.

When his turn came, Easter told jurors that Peters’ tale of suffering was full of “exaggerations and embellishments.” He said he took responsibility for what happened to her, though he did so only in the vaguest terms. And he added: “The fact that something very bad was done to a person does not give them a winning Powerball number.”

Marcereau put Easter on the stand. Had he conspired with his wife to plant drugs in Peters’ car?

“Very stupidly and very unfortunately, yes,” Easter replied.

Marcereau pressed for specifics.

“Which one of you, you or your wife, actually planted the drugs in Mrs. Peters’ car? Or was it both?”

“It was my wife.”

That was in keeping with his failed defense during his criminal trials, in which he had cast her as the culprit.

She had not testified at those trials, and no one knew what she might say. When Easter put on his case now and called her to the stand — with a sign-language interpreter on hand for her claimed hearing loss — he did not seem angry at the woman he claimed had ruined him.

Instead, his tone seemed almost wistful, his gaze tender. She was now calling herself Ava Everheart, and so he began, “Good afternoon, Ms. Everheart.”

“Good afternoon.”

He began by acknowledging the damage he’d done to her name.

“I probably could have treated you a little better, couldn’t I have?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Despite all of that you have still been kind to me and haven’t sought revenge, right?”

“No.”

“I have known you since you were young. I don’t know if you remember those days.”

“Yes.”

She was living with her parents in Newport Beach. Her father was an astrophysicist and inventor, but she did not mention this. She insisted she was not a child of privilege. She had worked three jobs to put herself through school.

She surveyed the courtroom and said, “I think I am the person that went to the best law school in this room, to be honest with you, and I am proud of that. Doesn’t mean I am spoiled, or a bad person.”

But now her reputation was ruined, she complained. She had done nearly two months in jail. She was disbarred, her law degree from Berkeley’s Boalt Hall useless. “I lost everything. I mean everything,” she said. “I am not a school terrorizer, as I have read about myself.”

She wanted to dispel a misconception about her self-published crime thriller, “Holding House,” which Marcereau had invoked to illustrate her preoccupation with “the perfect crime.”

“The point of the book is these people think they have the perfect crime, and then it gets really messed up,” she said. “So the point is there is no perfect crime. You can’t think of one in your head because you will always be fooled, and that is the point of the book.”

Marcereau did not see much value in a lengthy cross-examination. He thought she had already buried herself.

“Ma’am, on Feb. 16, 2011, you planted illegal drugs in Kelli Peters’ car, true?”

“I pled guilty to that.”

“Did you do it?”

“No.”

“That is what I thought. No more questions.”

It was time for Kent Easter to call his most important witness, and so he uttered one of the most melancholy sentences jurors would hear: “At this time I would just be calling myself.”

He took the stand, wearing one of the unassuming sweaters that had seemed his sole wardrobe through the trial.

He turned to the jury box and explained that he was, at 41, a broken man. A UCLA Law grad who was sharing an apartment with his parents. His savings eviscerated by a quarter-million dollars in legal fees. Barred even from driving for Uber or Lyft because of his felony conviction. Relying on acquaintances to throw him a little work. And still the sole breadwinner for his three kids, aged 8, 10 and 12.

“All this education that I had is now completely useless to me, by and large,” he said. “I have no expectation that I will be a lawyer ever again.”

Marcereau was convinced Easter was hiding money, somewhere. Soon after his arrest, he pointed out, Easter had transferred ownership of his Irvine house to his father-in-law.

He told jurors not to be deceived. “You know, I think he has a good act. He comes in here wearing the same sweater three days in a row,” Marcereau said. “He probably has a dozen tailored suits at home, and yet he is in here wearing the same sweater trying to tell you that he is poor. Don’t believe it.”

For Kelli Peters, the run-in with the Easters amounted to “the worst experience of her life,” Marcereau said. Her daughter Sydnie, who was 10 when the Easters tried to frame her mother, had refused to sleep alone for fear “the Easter monster” would abduct her, Marcereau said. She had grown isolated from her friends and had finally asked to change schools.

Even now, Kent Easter was still waffling on what he did, while his ex-wife showed “not an ounce of remorse,” Marcereau said. He turned again to the crime novel. He reminded jurors that a promotional spot had appeared on YouTube, right around the time drugs were planted. It had featured a dramatic voice-over by Kent Easter: “If you knew how to commit a perfect crime, would you do it?”

“Kelli Peters is cowering in her house, crying with her daughter and her husband, scared out of her mind, worried she is going to be thrown in jail for God knows how long, and Kent and Jill Easter are toasting to the perfect crime,” Marcereau said. “‘We did it, honey.’ Clink. The perfect crime.”

Kent Easter sat in the hallway during the lunch break, clutching the legal pad on which he had scratched out his closing argument.

“I should never have hurt Kelli Peters,” he told jurors when they returned. Still, he said, everybody had stood by her. The school had supported her. A policeman had detained her but had not arrested her, handcuffed her, pulled a gun on her, locked her in his squad car or taken her to jail. The “polite and professional” cop had not even raised his voice.

Now came the abject plea for mercy. “I’m simply a parent of a young family that is broke,” Easter said. “So I really come here already having lost everything I have except for my family, and I submit there is no further point to additional punishment.”

His words were plaintive, but his tone nearly robotic. It was if he were talking about someone else, a character named Kent Easter that he did not particularly love.

Nor did jurors, who returned with a verdict of $5.7 million. He sat alone, looking stunned.

***

To celebrate the verdict, Kelli Peters’ friends threw her a party. They had bought a heart-shaped pinata and decorated it with blown-up copies of the Easters’ mug shots.

Someone gave Peters a stick. She held it tentatively, embarrassed, and administered some half-hearted thwacks. Her daughter, now 15, took the stick. The girl whose childhood had been blighted by the ordeal told her mother to step back. Some of the people in the room were laughing, and some of the same people were already beginning to cry.

She swung the stick full-force. Paydays and 100 Grand bars tumbled through the gash.

***

Four months after the verdict Easter was back in court, this time in a handsome dark suit, telling the trial judge, Michael Brenner, that the damages were excessive, that Peters’ attorney had failed to show he had means to pay. “The case law is clear on this,” he argued, rattling off legal citations.

Brenner thought the damages were just about right, the jury’s reasoning sound. It was easy to imagine how they figured it, he said. They saw two “top of the heap” lawyers — “a couple of real legal smarties, sophisticated people” — who had used their legal acumen in an attempt to destroy a woman who lived in a little apartment, and who had quit her job to volunteer at her daughter’s school.

The judge noted that Kent Easter could reapply for his law license after a five-year suspension.

Musing on his half-century in the law, the judge called this “the most incomprehensible case I’ve ever seen,” and said: “I can’t figure out why you and your ex-wife did what you did.”

The judge worked a rubber band with his fingers, gazing quizzically down at Kent Easter. He was struck by Easter’s “flat affect” during trial, and reminded him that he’d never taken unambiguous responsibility for planting the drugs.

“Your position on this is always very vague,” the judge said. “The jury could easily think, ‘You know, Mr. Easter has a plan and what he’s gonna do is keep it just as vague as he can.’”

He came right out and asked what everyone wanted to know: “Who dreamed up this idea?”

The judge let the question hang there, while Kent Easter, sitting nearly motionless, said nothing.

“It’s just nuts,” the judge continued, twisting the rubber band. “They’re not exactly master criminals out of Boalt Hall and UCLA.”

***

More than five years after the drug-planting, the upheavals ripple outward still. Kent Easter has filed for bankruptcy and appealed the civil verdict, so finding a way to get Kelli Peters her money has spawned another legal battle.

In that effort, Peters’ lawyers recently sued Jill Easter’s father, 74-year-old Paul Bjorkholm, a retired scientist for EG&G Astrophysics who owns a $2-million Newport Beach home.

Summoned to answer their questions, Bjorkholm sat uneasily across from the lawyers amid the clamor of the busy third-floor cafeteria at the Santa Ana courthouse.

The lawyers grilled him about what happened in the summer of 2012, when — weeks after the Easters were arrested — they gave him their Irvine home.

The house was sold, and the $171,000 proceeds were split between Jill and Kent Easter, in trusts Bjorkholm had agreed to oversee.

That money rightfully belongs to Peters, the lawyers maintain. They are also asking for punitive damages against Bjorkholm, contending that because he participated in the home’s fraudulent transfer, they may lay claim to his own assets.

During the questioning, Bjorkholm said he had been reluctant when Kent Easter asked him to become trustee so soon after the arrests. Nevertheless, he’d agreed to do it.

“At the time you were asked to do this, you were concerned that it might appear to be a fraud?” Marcereau asked.

“No, other people might think so,” Bjorkholm said. “You’re badgering me pretty hard, and I’m not happy with that.”

Marcereau pressed for an answer. “Why did it seem odd to you?”

Kent Easter was sitting beside his former father-in-law, and now he did as a lawyer would. He interjected: “Objection, asked and answered.”

Marcereau said, “You’re not his attorney. You’re not a lawyer.”

Easter said, “I’m a party here. You’re taking a record.”

Marcereau’s co-counsel, Roger Friedman, told Easter he could stay if he kept quiet, but threatened to get a court order if he interfered.

As if Easter needed reminding, he added, “You’re not an attorney.”

***

Ask Kent Easter about it today, and he answers in urbane, unfailingly polite tones that his criminal defense was a pack of lies and distortions, that he demonized his wife, that he pressured her into pleading guilty in the hope he might go free. Nor was he her dupe. “She was made out to be a cartoonish villainess,” he says. “This master-planner ice queen from ‘Gone Girl’ — it makes this great archetype. She writes these crime novels and planned this whole thing. But it’s just absolutely not true.”

For his trials, he says, he “embellished” one of the defense exhibits without his attorney’s knowledge — the hectoring email in which his wife demanded that he “get serious” about destroying Peters. He says the all-caps last line, with its 68 exclamation points, was his work, not hers. “To beef things up,” he says.

It’s hard to keep track of his shifting stories. In criminal court, he denied conspiring to plant the drugs and said his wife had done it alone. In civil court, he said he conspired with her but that she had done the actual planting. Today, he says, “She was not out there that night,” but will not supply details. He worries about perjury charges for changing his story. He points to the county jail and says, “I don’t want to go back over there.” He acknowledges that the crime “was really not thought out very well,” and adds: “I didn’t expect that half the Irvine Police Department would be working on this.”

He speaks of his ex-wife as if he still loves her. When he met her at their Silicon Valley firm in the mid-1990s, she was not like other women he met, laser-focused on a legal career. She was a hiker, a student of history, the owner of a pet bunny. She turned out to be a great mother who used flashcards with their kids and got them reading by age 5.

“All the best moments in my life have been with her,” he says. “All the worst moments have been with her too.”

He is scratching out a living, he says, doing odd law-related jobs and freelance writing.

Some time ago, he says, he met a woman and developed a romantic interest in her. He asked her out. They made plans. Then came the cancellation he half-expected, expressed in four words:

“I just Googled you.”

***

One day this spring, Kelli Peters drove to Hollywood to tape a segment of the “Dr. Phil” show. She hoped to promote a book she was co-writing called “I’ll Get You! Drugs, Lies, and the Terrorizing of a PTA Mom.”

She brought a mock-up of the cover, featuring herself in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope beneath Jill Easter’s glaring mug-shot eyes.

Dr. Phil obliged by holding it aloft, which she hoped would bump up the advance sales. She needed the money. Her husband had leukemia and was out of work, and the Easters had not paid a penny of the civil judgment.

Entering the publicity circuit exacted a price, however. The producers had taped an interview with Jill Easter and filmed Peters as she watched, fighting nausea.

Easter was unrepentant. She accused Peters of having mistreated her son, leaving him “crying” and “dirty.” Easter portrayed the presence of her genetic material on the planted drugs as innocent, mere “transfer DNA” — an explanation that elicited little more than ridicule.

It was not clear why Easter agreed to the interview; she came off so badly that the host asked, at one point, “What’s wrong with this woman?”

***

For Peters, it is a relief, now that the Easters have left the neighborhood, even if — last she heard — they are just one city over, in Newport Beach.

She walks her dogs along Irvine’s trim streets and watches geese on the banks of the big, artificial lakes. She smiles at the same people she has been passing for years. She asks about their families, and pets.

It is friendly but dull. She misses beach cities. Maybe when her daughter graduates from high school, she says, she’ll find a more exciting place.

Now and then, she runs into a member of the Police Department, the agency that saw through the lies and put 20 detectives on the case and saved her. They greet her like a friend, but act a little surprised to see her. Why hasn’t she left town, considering all the bad memories?

“I feel safe here,” she says.