FRAMED, Ch. 5

Headline photo credit: Kent Easter, at a hearing in Orange County Superior Court, faced professional ruin after he was charged with planting drugs in a school volunteer’s car. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Chapter 5 | Read it from the beginning

By Christopher Goffard

 

 

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.”

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