IRVINE, Calif. _ The lawyers lived in a big house with a three-car garage and a Mediterranean clay-tile roof, on a block of flawless lawns and facades of repeating peach. The couple had three young children, a cat named Emerald and a closetful of board games. On their nightstand were photos of their wedding in Sonoma wine country.
Kent and Jill Easter were in their 30s, and wore their elite educations on their license plates: Stanford and UCLA Law School for him, Berkeley Law for her. Experts in corporate and securities law, they had met at a Palo Alto law firm.
She had quit her practice to become a stay-at-home mom in Irvine, and by appearance her daily routine was unexceptional: play dates at the community pool, sushi with girlfriends, hair salons, Starbucks, yoga. He was logging 60-hour workweeks as a partner in one of Orange County's biggest law firms, with a 14th-floor office overlooking Newport Beach.
The story Kelli Peters told police about them, in February 2011, was a strange one. She was scared, and her voice kept cracking. A year earlier, the Easters had campaigned unsuccessfully to oust her from the school where she ran the after-school program. The ordeal had shaken her, but she thought it was over.
Now, after a phone tip led police to a stash of drugs in her car, she thought of the Easters. She thought, "They got me."
It had started over something so small.
Feb. 17, 2010, had been a Wednesday, which meant it was one of the busiest afternoons of the week at Plaza Vista elementary in Irvine.
A tennis class had just ended on the playground behind the main administrative building, and Peters _ volunteer director of the Afterschool Classroom Enrichment program, called ACE _ had the task of rounding up the kids.
She would lead them into the building through the back door and hand them off to parents waiting on the sidewalk in front of the school.
The Easters' 6-year-old son had been left outside briefly, waiting at the locked back door for someone to let him in. The man who ran the tennis class had found him and walked him to the front desk.
Jill Easter thought her son seemed upset and demanded to know what had happened.
Peters explained that the boy had been slow to line up, that he tended to take his time, so this wasn't unusual. She said she hadn't noticed he was missing when she scooped up the others.
"I apologized over and over," Peters wrote in her account to school officials. "I gave him a hug and I thought she looked like she was OK with everything."
Easter was not OK. She seemed fixated on the tennis coach, by Peters' account, and wondered whether he had touched her son. Wasn't it strange that the coach had brought him to the front? "I kept saying no, it's not strange, a lot of my instructors bring the kids up," Peters wrote.
The conversation made Peters uncomfortable, and she wanted to end it. "She made a comment as I walked away that she wondered how I could sleep at night with the way I treat people. I went inside and started crying I was so upset," Peters wrote. "But the weird thing was she never changed her facial expression. It was always the same weird smile."
