Things ended poorly for the trio, Mr. Fitzpatrick said: “One day, I was in the cafeteria, and Nick walked up to me and said ‘You have to decide: Are you my friend or Pamela’s?’ I said ‘Well, Pamela never asked me anything like that, so I guess her.’ But I never understood how he could just cut me out of his life in an instant like I didn’t matter.”

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Vassar College, once known as the alma mater of Jacqueline Onassis and Meryl Streep, was, by the time Mr. Meyer arrived in 1995, a haven for worldly artistic kids who were too urban for Kenyon and Oberlin but didn’t have the grades or scores for Brown or Yale.

What students at Vassar lacked in drive, they made up for in black eyeliner. On campus, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Mr. DeMeyer drove a black BMW, carried his books in a black Louis Vuitton knapsack and kept a stuffed animal in his dorm room named Aloysius, after the one in “Brideshead Revisited.” He also started dating guys.

He dropped the k from Nickolas and changed his last name to Von Meyer. Eventually, he settled on DeMeyer.

“I can’t say I was friends with Nick, but you couldn’t help but notice him on campus,” said Carl Cade, who graduated in 2000. “I even bought the German nobility act, despite that I looked him up in the Vassar directory and wondered how the hell a German noble was from Findlay, Ohio. It didn’t really stand out because there were so many of us who were scholarship kids pretending to be posh and there were so many of us who were rich kids pretending to be street. Vassar was a grifter’s dream. I remember he once announced that he was getting rid of a Gucci camel coat and whoever came over first would get it free.”