The week after Stancl's arrest, The New York Times ran a story about the case, headlined sex predator accusations shake a wisconsin town. In it an Eisenhower mother was quoted as saying, "It was beyond what the kids could imagine, you know? They see a lot of things, they go to the theater and everything else, but this is so shocking." Like most people in town, she sees Eisenhower as a bastion of innocents, blindsided by a monster among them. Certainly, that's the most comforting way to look at it.

at 12:40 p.m. on Wednesday, November 12, 2008, two frightened Eisenhower students told a teacher, who told the principal, that they had seen the phrase bomb 11/14/08 written on the wall above a urinal in a downstairs boys' bathroom. The principal, Michael Fesenmaier, had dealt with bomb threats before, but not during his four years at Ike.

By the following afternoon, authorities had found no sign of a bomb and no solid clues as to the source of the threat. In his office, Fesenmaier had corralled a few known troublemakers in an attempt to get them to confess to vandalizing the bathroom wall. Midway through one interrogation, Fesenmaier was interrupted, and when he turned around he was surprised to see Tony Stancl.

A stooped boy of five feet eleven, Tony was a familiar figure in the school's front office. The previous year, he worked there part-time, and people thought he was pleasant enough, if kind of lazy. He was prone to officiousness, but even for him this drop-by was pushing it.

"Mr. Fesenmaier," he said sternly, "what are you doing to protect us?"

Fesenmaier assured him, "I've got it under control," and turned back around.

Rebuffed, Tony shuffled into the hall and pulled out his BlackBerry. It was against school rules to use your cell phone in the building, but Tony had been surreptitiously Twittering about the bomb threat ever since school started that morning:

7:28 a.m. School is like prison now. No one is allowed in the halls unless they are supervised.… Cops are in the hallways too.

9:04 a.m. Update: school is officially on lock down. I hate being suppressed.

1:28 p.m. Maybe we will have off tomorrow since the "bomb" is suppose to go off tomorrow…

That afternoon he walked out of the building and got in his crappy green Civic. There were times when he wished he still had his old car—a blue Audi A4 he'd kept wad and spotless. He'd sold it the previous spring and planned to use the proceeds to do something constructive: He wanted to go to Peru that summer to build houses for the poor. He might have imagined the trip as a kind of homecoming—Tony and his sister, Stephanie, were adopted as babies from an orphanage in Lima—but his parents told him the trip was too dangerous. Instead, he bought a forty-two-inch plasma TV that he hung in his bedroom in the Stancls' effusively gabled home in Country Estates, one of New Berlin's grandest developments. Tony could be arrogant about his family's wealth. He signed e-mails "Tony $" or "To$y," and on his MySpace profile he wrote, "Some people consider me rich, but i don't like that saying, i prefer 'financially fortunate' lol."

Physically, Tony was less fortunate. Whereas his sister was a jock—she played on Ike's basketball and softball teams—Tony's most striking feature was his disproportionately large head. His efforts to connect with girls were awkward at best. "He would try to flirt with you and it would be, like, creepy," says a girl who graduated in the class ahead of Tony's. "He would say things that would bring the conversation to a total stop, and you'd look at him and wonder, What was that about?" The closest he got to sports was Academic Decathlon, where he was the team's history whiz. He was also treasurer of the Eisenhower chapter of SADD, which stands for Students Against Destructive Decisions. As part of SADD, Tony did seat-belt checks on the long row of cars driving out of Ike's parking lot after school. He stood with a New Berlin cop, stopping each vehicle to offer a friendly reminder to buckle up.