IRVINE, Calif. _ It was my wife, Kent Easter told jurors.
She had become obsessed with destroying the PTA mom, he said. She had planted the pot and painkillers in Kelli Peters' car. She had lured him into her criminal scheme. She was the reason he sat here today, his life a shambles, on trial for a felony.
Easter had taken the witness stand in his own defense, casting himself as a figure instantly familiar to aficionados of 1940s crime dramas: the hapless cuckold and sap, undone by a femme fatale and her noirish machinations.
It was a pitiable tale, but he was a hard man to warm up to. He had an air of bloodless detachment that came across as arrogance.
He had been a busy man, he explained, logging 200 billable hours a month for his big Newport Beach law firm, trying to appease a hectoring spouse who was never satisfied.
He knew that his wife, Jill, had been unfaithful to him, off and on, for years. "I felt that my job was to be a husband, to stay married," Easter testified. "Nobody in our family had ever gotten divorced."
As a glimpse into the toxic power dynamic of the marriage _ as a window into his wife's obsessiveness _ Easter's team presented Defense Exhibit L. It was an email she sent him in March 2010, he said, interrupting his workday.
The subject line: "Need to get serious." The theme: how to crush the lowly school volunteer who, she insisted, had deliberately locked their 6-year-old son out of his elementary school a month before.
The email was a litany of demands. She wanted Kelli Peters' background checked. She wanted her arrested. She wanted her slapped with a restraining order. She wanted to sue Peters, the school, the school district, the school board, the public schools foundation. She wanted action by tomorrow.
The email ended in bold capitals: "WHY ARE WE LETTING THIS NO ONE ABUSE OUR SON AND THEN TRASH OUR FAMILY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!WHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
There were 68 exclamation points, for anyone who cared to count.
"She thought I had let her down, that I had failed," Easter said. "I hadn't pushed hard enough on this."
As her obsession with Peters intensified, he tried to be the reasonable one, the moderating force. He had not known of her scheme to frame Peters, he insisted.
In telling this story, Kent Easter had to explain away a big problem: It was his BlackBerry that had been pinging near Peters' PT Cruiser in the predawn hours when the drugs were planted in a pouch behind the driver's seat. His wife's iPhone had been pinging at their Irvine home, a mile away.
Kent Easter was ready with an explanation: We swapped phones.
He had been at home, sleeping fitfully, sore from recent surgery. She had left her iPhone in their bedroom to charge and had taken his BlackBerry. He thought she was downstairs, tending to their sick daughter. Unbeknownst to him, she had slipped out to plant the drugs.
He was at work later that day, he said, when she called him to say she'd seen Peters popping pills and driving like a "madwoman" at Plaza Vista elementary in Irvine. She insisted that he call police, and he reluctantly agreed, afraid she would again belittle him as a failure.
To disguise himself, he gave police the first name that popped into his head, which happened to be "VJ Chandrasckhr," based on an Indian neighbor. He had then tried his untrained best to mimic the man's accent.
"It's incredibly uncomfortable to sit here and listen to something so ridiculous," Easter said after the call was played in court. "I feel stupid for having believed her and put my entire career and children in jeopardy."
To flesh out its portrayal of Jill Easter as an overbearing shrew with a talent for weaponizing guilt, the defense played a tape of her haranguing her former lover, a married Los Angeles city firefighter who had been wired up by police. She accused him of abandoning her as police zeroed in on her and her husband as suspects.
"Don't just put your head in the sand! This is the moment, this is when I needed someone and you turned your back on me!" she had cried. "And I will not survive this!"
It was a tone Kent Easter said he had heard before.
"That's the voice that I hear when I saw the 'need to get serious' email," he said. "That's the voice that plays in my mind. I mean, that's when she is upset about something and wants something."
