On New Year's Eve, five Orange County high school students-most of them brilliant boys from wealthy Asian-American families-allegedly murdered another student. The victim was also wealthy, brilliant and Asian-American.

Based on statements from four of the boys, police say the murder was premeditated and brutal. With baseball bats and a sledgehammer, the suspects say, they destroyed their victim. If so, they may have destroyed their own lives as well. All five have been charged with first-degree murder and face the death penalty if convicted in a trial that could start as early as March. The have pleaded innocent and are being held without bond.

Exactly what they may have done to their lives has been slow to sink in. Lt. Timm Browne, a spokesman for the Orange Police Department, says he watched the boys as they sat in the police station Jan. 4, waiting to be booked on suspicion of murder. He says he tried to read their faces, looking for some sign of emotion. "There wasn't any," he says. No remorse, no anguish, not even any fear. One of the boys sat, manacled to his chair, doing his calculus homework.

Could boys so smart-one, tied for valedictorian of his class, was headed for Princeton, another scored 1350 out of a possible 1600 on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, another was an honor student-do something so stupid? Could such good boys-one was a volunteer at a YMCA child-care program, another an officer of his school's service club-do something so evil?

Stuart Tay was a 17-year-old Chinese-American honor student at Foothill High School in Santa Ana, an hour's drive southeast of Los Angeles. At about 4 p.m. on Dec. 31, he told his sister Candice that he was going out to run an errand and that he'd be home soon.

What he didn't tell her was that, according to a police report, the errand was buying a gun. Police say that Tay, who drove a bright red 1990 Nissan 300ZX and lived with his parents and sister in a custom-built, 11-room house with a swimming pool and a tennis court, was planning a burglary. They say that he and the boys charged with his murder were going to steal computer parts.

Tay had been a Boy Scout, but "he was no angel," Browne says.

When Tay didn't return, his mother, Linda, began paging him. He didn't answer the pages. She called his friends. They didn't know where he was. At 9 p.m., after he had been gone five hours, she called the police. She told them Stuart had never stayed away that long without calling her. She said that he wasn't the kind of kid who liked to party and that he didn't go to hangouts.

A crime of passion?

According to police reports, Tay went to a local Denny's restaurant to meet Robert Chien-Nan Chan, 18, and Kirn Young Kim, 16. From there they went to the home of Abraham Acosta, 16, where Tay was supposed to pick up the gun. Two other students, Mun Bong Kang, 17, and Charles Bae Choe, 17, were already there, waiting for Tay. And so was a shallow grave. A neighbor later told the police that he had seen Acosta and two Asian boys digging in the yard the day before Tay disappeared.

Why would these boys have wanted to kill Stuart Tay?

Lee Roberts, a private investigator hired by the Tays to find their son immediately after his disappearance, theorized that this was a crime of teenage passion. Tay was dating a girl, Jennifer Lin, who had briefly dated Chan.

But the police don't buy this story. Browne says it wasn't until after Tay was dead and Chan was allegedly going through his wallet that he found Lin's picture and realized the connection.

Police say Tay and the suspects didn't know each other well. Tay went to school in Santa Ana while the suspects all attended Sunny Hills High School in nearby Fullerton. According to police, they just came together to commit a crime.

The Orange County Register, which has been calling this "The Honor Roll Murder," reported that the link was Jennifer Lin. She reportedly mentioned Chan's name to Tay as someone who might have ties to Wah Ching, a kind of national Chinese Mafia.

Fullerton police say they had heard in October that Chan might have ties to Wah Ching. Lt. Jeff Roop says Chan and six other Asian-American boys went to the home of another Sunny Hills student who they believed had made disparaging remarks about Wah Ching and told the boy to come out. When he refused, they told him they would shoot up his house. He came out and they began to pummel him, Roop says. When they saw the boy's sister, they jumped into their cars and drove away. The victim refused to press charges.

"It was the first I'd heard of Wah Ching having members in Orange County," Roop says. "We never found out if the boys really were members or if it was just high school talk."

The gang element

Wah Ching may have been a little far-fetched, but teenage Asian gangs are not unheard of in Orange County, a conservative, Republican community. Roop says the Asian gangs are different from other gangs in that the members dress conservatively, do well in school and often hold jobs. They don't wear tattoos or spray-paint graffiti all over their neighborhoods.

"Most gangs are turf-related," Roop says. "Not the Asian gangs. They're criminal enterprises. The boys come together to commit robberies and burglaries."

According to Browne, Lin gave Chan's number to Tay, and Tay called him. He told Chan that his name was Martin Gore, which is the name of the keyboard player for Tay's favorite group, Depeche Mode. The police say that when Chan learned that Tay was using a phony name, he got angry because he thought Tay might be double-crossing him. Tay knew Chan's name and the names of the other boys, but he appeared to be trying to protect himself. Chan got so angry, the police say, he planned Tay's murder.

It was a brutal affair. According to statements made by the suspects-with the exception of Chan, who has refused to talk-when Tay got to Acosta's house, he went into the garage. Kang handed him a heavy metal box that supposedly contained a gun, but didn't. While Tay examined the box, Chan and Acosta hit Tay with baseball bats and a sledgehammer, for about 20 minutes. He begged for his life, but they ignored him.

In his statement, Choe said he heard Tay ask Chan, "What did I do to you?" Acosta said Tay was taking "too long to die," so Chan poured rubbing alcohol down his throat, then taped his mouth shut with duct tape. The official cause of death was "aspiration due to blunt force trauma." The boys wrapped him in a sheet and buried him in a shallow grave in Acosta's back yard. Acosta hosed down the garage, but enough blood was left for the police to use as evidence.

Clumsy cover-up

When the killing was over, the cover-up began. In his statement, Kim said he drove Tay's car to the nearby city of Compton and left it there, with the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked. Chan, Choe and Kang followed him.