Framed, Chapter 3: Secret lovers, legal maneuvering and a fictional blueprint for ‘the perfect crime’

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Jill Easter wasn’t talking. She bounced a basketball in the driveway with her 3-year-old daughter as Irvine police moved methodically through her house, snapping photos and jotting notes.

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Inside, detectives found what seemed the well-appointed home of ordinary suburban parents. A garage cluttered with exercise equipment. Rooms with kids’ sports trophies, an airplane mobile, a canopy bed decorated with Disney princesses.

In the master bedroom they found a copy of Easter’s self-published novel, “Holding House,” written under the pen name Ava Bjork. It had just come out. She smiled glamorously from the back cover, with styled blond hair and arresting blue eyes. Like its author, the female protagonist was a Berkeley-educated lawyer who had found work at a Bay Area firm.

She was “a patient woman with a formidable intelligence,” the novel explained, alluring to men but unlucky in love. To cope with life’s stresses, she mixed wine with Xanax. When wronged, the heroine burned for revenge and applied her patient, formidable intelligence to the task of exacting it.

***

While Jill Easter waited unhappily for police to complete their search, a second team of Irvine cops had converged on a target a few miles away. This was her husband’s 14th-floor law office, in a building overlooking Fashion Island in Newport Beach.

It was March 4, 2011. Detectives were looking for evidence that the Easters had planted marijuana and painkillers in a neighbor’s car about two weeks earlier, the bizarre endgame of a year-old grudge that began at an Irvine elementary school.

Police couldn’t just go into Kent Easter’s office and rifle through his files; they were full of confidential information about his clients.

For the search, they relied on Paul Jensen, a personal injury lawyer who also served as an unpaid special master for the courts. He would take what looked relevant and leave the rest.

That morning, when Jensen showed up at the Irvine Police Department for the operational briefing, he counted a throng of cops — maybe 15 or 20 — and thought it seemed like overkill. They were ready for Pablo Escobar. “Kent Easter is a lawyer,” he thought. “He’s not a Mafioso.”

But now, as he went through Easter’s papers, Jensen was happy the police were there in force, standing guard at the door. Some of the law firm’s employees were raising a clamor, confronting the cops. Why are you here? What gives you the right? This is Newport Beach, not Irvine! Only after a cop threatened someone with arrest did things quiet down.

Neither of the Easters was arrested that day. The evidence seized included the couple’s smartphones. Detectives believed their contents might clinch the case.

But the phones were soon locked up inside the chambers of an Orange County judge, where they would languish as legal arguments raged.

Easter’s firm wanted his BlackBerry back because it held sensitive client information. The Easters’ criminal defense attorneys wanted evidence on both phones kept from police, citing attorney-client and spousal privileges. It was complicated enough to bring a case against two attorneys, even more so when they were married to each other.

***

At times the case approached the threshold of farce — a mashup of Benny Hill, David Lynch and “Desperate Housewives.”

Into the story, on the very morning the search warrants were served, stumbled a strapping off-duty firefighter — Jill Easter’s married paramour.

Detectives were sitting in an unmarked car, waiting to approach the Easter house, when the firefighter came strolling up the block and spotted them. He took off, holding a phone to his ear.

Jill Easter emerged from her house in a negligee, by detectives’ account, then noticed the cops herself, and hurried back inside.

Police stopped the firefighter as he pulled away in his pickup. His name was Glen Gomez. He drove an engine for a Los Angeles Fire Department station house, 50 miles north. He said he was in town to visit “a beautiful Swedish girl, her name is Jill.”

Their affair had been going on for 2 1/2 years. They arranged trysts, swapped explicit photos and traded exuberantly pornographic texts, court records would show. She called him her “sex ninja,” “Papi” and “Mr. Delicious.” He called her his “sex goddess,” “baby girl” and “Mrs. Delicious.”

Gomez’s phone records showed he hadn’t been near the scene of the drug-planting, but detectives hoped to enlist his help.

They were tight-lipped with details, but told him that he was in the middle of something very serious, something that could hurt both his family and his career.

They kept saying, “She’ll ruin you.” He kept saying, “I love her.”

Would he wear a wire? police asked.

On March 23, nearly three weeks after the warrants were served, he agreed. He wanted to show he had nothing to hide, and seemed to have a second motive: curiosity.

He met her in a park down the block from her house. She brought her two youngest children. She told them her male friend was the park ranger. She told them to go play. There was a playground with a sandbox, swings, slide and seesaw.

As investigators listened in, Gomez, who had been given a loose script, told her cops had been asking him questions. He wanted to know what it was all about.

She was in some kind of trouble, she said, but wouldn’t give him details.

“I really can’t afford to have this type of investigation because my husband could lose his job,” she said.

“I’m going to tell them the truth. I mean, it’s not a crime to have a beautiful girlfriend,” Gomez said. He said he thought they should keep their distance, for a while. “As much as I care for you and love you, it’s probably not a smart thing for us to be, like, talking right now, because of what’s going on and stuff.”

He pressed her. “I just hope that you are who I think you are,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure you are. I’m 99.999% positive. But when I have a detective calling me it makes you wonder a little bit, that’s all.”

Easter accused him of abandoning her. “I thought that if I ever had some trouble in my life or sadness that I would have someone to stand beside me, and I don’t,” she said. “It’s a hard lesson to learn.”

She continued to scold him. “I don’t even know what I need,” she said. “I need someone like you see in the movies to come in and help.”

He persisted. Why were cops asking him questions?

“Do you think I know?” she replied. “I’m waiting for someone to help me. I’m losing everything here. I don’t know.”

“Well, if you haven’t done anything wrong, then you should be fine.”

Her tone was growing angrier and angrier. “I’m not going to be fine, do you understand me? 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! And I will not survive this!”

Soon after the conversation in the park, the firefighter told police, they broke up and she went “crazy.” She showed up at his Long Beach home and told his wife about the affair, brandishing emails and photos.

She detailed the affair in a letter to the dance studio where his wife worked, Gomez told police. It was “cleverly written in the third person,” according to a police report, “as if it was a close friend of Jill’s who was writing it.”

***

Irvine Police Det. Mark Andreozzi called Kelli Peters in late March 2011, more than a month after the drugs were discovered in her car outside Plaza Vista elementary, the school where she’d volunteered for years.

He couldn’t tell her much, but he wanted to reassure her: The department now had strong evidence that the drugs had been planted, as she’d insisted all along.

He didn’t reveal what the crime lab had just reported: Jill Easter’s DNA was on the pot pipe and the Vicodin pills, though not on the Percocet. And Kent Easter’s DNA was on all three.

Police insisted that Peters keep quiet even about the little she did know. Anything she said could derail the investigation. If word got back to the Easters, they might find some way to stop it cold. Now and then police told her, “You have no idea how much we want to get them.”

Months went by, and they were nowhere close to making arrests. Jill Easter had hired Paul Meyer, an Orange County defense lawyer so formidable that judges turned to him when they were in trouble. Kent Easter had enlisted Thomas Bienert Jr., a former federal prosecutor with expertise in white-collar crime.

Detectives knew that just around the time of the drug-planting, Kent Easter’s BlackBerry had been pinging off a tower near the crime scene, and that it had exchanged 15 texts with his wife’s iPhone during those predawn hours.

So far, however, defense arguments had thwarted police from examining whatever incriminating messages the phones might contain.

Sitting in a windowless office, Jensen, the volunteer special master, combed through 20,000 emails on the BlackBerry, weeding out the thousands that seemed to fall under attorney-client and attorney work-product privilege.

What he was not qualified to do, he told the judge, was to screen the phones for spousal privilege, and with this chore still undone in late October 2011 — more than eight months after the crime — he insisted he was done with the case. He had a practice to run. “I never in a million years thought it would be like this,” Jensen said later. “I put in a Herculean amount of work.”

The district attorney’s office did further screening, and in November detectives got a stash of “non-privileged” Easter texts. To their chagrin, the most anticipated ones — the 15 predawn texts — had been erased before the phones were seized.

At the Irvine Police Department, the frustration was climbing. The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lynda Fernandez, seemed stuck in a holding pattern as the court weighed whether to release more evidence.

A year passed. The police investigation, including the embarrassing search of his office, had not harmed Kent Easter’s career. His firm named him an equity partner, cutting him into a share of the profits.

***

For Kelli Peters, it was a time of self-consciousness and dread. In the mornings, she searched her car carefully for drugs. At Plaza Vista elementary, where she still had a desk in the front office, people were always bringing her cakes and telling her she was in their prayers. Now and then she saw Jill Easter arrive, looking rushed, to pick up her son. Peters felt a chill and looked away.

Her daughter, Sydnie, who turned 11 that year, refused to sleep alone, fearing she would be abducted. At recess, Peters would find her sitting alone or wandering the yard, talking to herself. At the school’s insistence, Peters sent her to the school therapist and came to regret it, because it meant Sydnie was being pulled out of class and made to feel even more like a spectacle.

Peters bought her a sketchbook to carry at school, and her daughter hid behind it, drawing superheroes and ponies. Peters asked other moms to please encourage their kids to play with her, but this made her daughter feel pitied, and eventually she was begging to leave the school.

Anxiety pervaded every hour. When Peters came home, she hurried to her door, afraid someone might be hiding in the hallway. Her husband would return from work to find her crying.

Peters slept fitfully, haunted by dreams in which Jill Easter was slashing her throat. In her waking hours she found her hands pulling her scarf protectively around her neck. She discovered a bald spot on her scalp. She got off Facebook. She snapped when people forgot to lock the doors.

At the big artificial lake where she took her dogs, and where she had watched generations of Canada geese grow up, she now feared to walk alone. She made sure friends were with her, one on each side.

Her famously safe, master-planned city now seemed alive with hidden menace. As she walked among Irvine’s tidy houses, she became fixated on how vulnerable they all seemed, with windows to climb through and sliding-glass doors to break into. It made her grateful to live in an apartment, with one door in and out.

Often, her family would catch Kelli Peters talking to herself. She would be in the kitchen reliving her encounter with police at the school, pleading, explaining.

Please put the drugs away, she would mutter. I don’t want people to see them...

I have an enemy... Her name is Jill Easter...

I have an enemy...

***

Some of the detectives were reading Jill Easter’s self-published novel, searching for psychological clues.

She was adept at fashioning characters consumed by a primal need for payback.

The plot of “Holding House” followed a Berkeley-educated heroine, Libby, and her Berkeley-educated friends, as they launch a “foolproof” crime: Kidnap a well-heeled target and hide out in Panama to await a wired ransom.

All goes awry, and Libby is spurned by her narcissistic lover and criminal confederate, the “chiseled and effortlessly handsome” Joe. She finds herself “churning over her one new mission in life — to make Joe pay for abandoning her.”

She drains his bank account. She sets him up for a visa violation. She makes an anonymous call to cops. As they close in, he leaps to his death. Guilt consumes her.

It was possible to read Easter’s novel as a cautionary tale about the self-immolating temptations of vengeance, the wisdom of avoiding beautiful narcissists, or the inevitable doom of “foolproof” criminal plots.

These were not the themes emphasized in marketing the book, as police learned when they discovered her online promotional page, which instead touted the seductions of lawbreaking:

“Ever dream about the perfect crime? It’s in this book! As you read, you’ll be wondering why no one has thought of it before. It’s shockingly simple, twisted and 100% possible. Once you read about it, you’ll be tempted to pull it off!”

Read Part 4: THE PROSECUTOR >>

christopher.goffard@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATchrisgoffard