RARELY has a town been conceived and constructed in the glare of publicity and aura of hope that greeted Disney’s master-planned, picture-perfect village of Celebration in central Florida. Expectations were so high that, in November 1995, 4,000 people entered into a lottery for the chance to win the right to pay 25 percent over the market price to move into one of the first 500 or so homes.

Many of those pioneers expected Celebration to recreate the ideal of Disney World just a few miles away, not for a weeklong holiday, but for 52 weeks of the year. They thought their children would get straight A’s at the model school and that there would never be a weed in their lawns. For the solidly middle-class, overwhelmingly white population, this was the adventure of a lifetime, the chance to start over in a town paved with great expectations.

Reality seemed to catch up with the utopian village, which Disney gave up control of a few years ago, when residents awoke on Monday morning to find that one of their neighbors, a 58-year-old retired schoolteacher, had been murdered. The yellow crime-scene tape surrounding his condo contrasted with the nearby town square, which was decorated for Christmas and awash in holiday music from speakers hidden in the foliage. Then, on Thursday, another resident fatally shot himself after a standoff with sheriff’s deputies. The apparently unrelated deaths showed the world what people in Celebration already knew: life behind the town’s white picket fences wasn’t perfect after all.