Cole, who left his Harvard job in the spring, moved to Spain at the end of the summer. He did not agree to be interviewed for this article.

Ten phone calls were made to his Belmont home during the summer, and male and female voices answering the line indicated that he would return messages soon. Cole never did.

That silence was unusual for someone who, friends say, loves to to talk. But little about William Devil Cole is as it seems. Like the Fishhead Coup, Cole's life seems to rest on an assumption--that the good cards one shows will distract others from the less flattering truths one holds closer to the heart.

His Early Years: Growing Up at Dalton

William Cole was born and raised in New York City, but he grew up at the Dalton School. According to school records, he was a student there from the pre-school through high school.

Located on 89th St. in Manhattan's Upper East Side, co-ed Dalton is one of New York's most prestigious private schools. It is a training ground for the children of the city's wealthy elite. This year, tuition ranges from $14,000 for elementary school to $15,600 for the high school grades.

Dalton prides itself on producing community-oriented students who aren't afraid to speak their minds, and the campus has a nerdy sort of earnestness about it. On a recent weekday, a visitor could watch the student government debate the senior class's annual joke resolution with the tenscity of the U.S. Senate discussing health care reform. (Among other things, the proposal called for Dalton's first-year student to "refer to any area where a group of seniors has gathered as Mt. Olympus").

In some ways, William Cole, a curious boy from a well-educated family, fit right in.

"I remember him in the library....I remember a positive spirit, kind of an off-best look," says Marilyn H. Moss, Dalton's librarian.

"He put his face to the side," Moss recalls as she glances at his picture in the 1980 yearbook. "I remember a lot of hair and a lot of smiles."

He wasn't always that way. Cole was born into what appears to have been a happy family with enough money to send young "Billy," as he was called, to Dalton.

But after he turned six, his life changed. His father Richard, according to Cole's uncle and records on file at the Dalton School, died in a car crash. Cole, who was in the car, hurt his ankles but escaped permanent injury, says the uncle, New York City prints dealers Sylvan Cole.

A year later, in 1970, his mother, Deborah M. Cole, remarried. Her new husband was Jack Greenberg, a renowned lawyer who spent 23 years as director and counsel of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Greenberg, a former dean of Columbia College who serves on the Columbia law faculty, also spent a year as a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

Cole's mother was a lawyer who taught at Columbia for some time, according to Sylvan Cole. The well-off couple lived in the city, and they currently reside in a Riverside Drive apartment overlooking the Hudson, worth between $680,000 and $750,000.

Together, the couple raised what friends and teachers say was a very difficult, if unusually intelligent, child.

Dalton's reservations about Cole are reflected in the letter of recommendation the school sent to colleges where he applied.