Douglas and his family lived in a two-story ranch house, white with black shutters, at the corner of Fawn Hill Drive and Hidden Glen Lane in Monsey, a New York City suburb full of recent transplants from Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

Douglas's father, Larry Milteer, drove a bread truck painted with an ad for Levy's rye. When he finished his morning rounds, he parked the truck in front of the house and drove his Dodge Charger to a second job, reconditioning cars at Spring Valley Dodge. His wife, Barbara, was the most exotic woman in the neighborhood, half Italian and half Filipino. She had long, black hair and big, brown eyes, and she greeted everyone with enormous hugs. The two were 18 years old when they married in 1959. Clinton was born in 1961, Scott in 1962, Douglas in 1964.

Homes in our neighborhood were built on three-quarter-acre lots, without fences. Games of war or hide-and-seek often spilled across seven or eight yards, through ankle-deep streams and groves of trees, under an old wooden bridge, and along seldom-used railroad tracks.

Some children roamed more freely than others. The Milteer boys were among the freest. They rode bicycles, then graduated to minibikes, then to motorcycles. Clinton and Scott were big and strong and athletic. They liked to fight.

"We were from the Bronx," Clinton recalls. "We were supposed to be the tough guys, and we had to prove ourselves."

The Worst Jobs

Barbara Milteer remembers Douglas as the sweetest and most affectionate of her boys, the one who most needed to be hugged. When treehouses or bicycle ramps were built, Douglas got the worst jobs -- carrying tools or cleaning up nails. When he didn't do what his brothers told him, he got punched. "Doug took a pounding," Clinton says.

Douglas occasionally took refuge in the home of Sharon Pollock, a girl who lived down the block. The two built houses of cards while the other boys played football and fired BB guns at rocks and trees. Now married and raising a baby girl in New City, N.Y., Sharon Brigando says she remembers Douglas as gentle, "a good person."

Douglas and I lived three doors apart. In our second-grade class photo, we stand at opposite ends of the same row. Douglas is frowning. Once, when we were about seven years old, we were playing in the street in front of my house. I don't recall what, if anything, provoked his anger. I do remember the flurry of punches that persisted long after I had crumpled. By the fourth grade, when Douglas organized classmates to attack me on the playground day after day, I felt like there was no escaping him.

And I didn't know why he chose me. I made good grades. Others made better. I was short. Others were shorter. I had a smart mouth, could hold my own when teased and occasionally even made fun of a kid -- there were only a few -- who ranked below me in the school's social hierarchy. But I never gave Douglas any lip. I tried to avoid him.

"Douglas picked on you more than anyone else," Scott says now. "I don't know why. We would egg him on, too."

The Milteer boys also fought among themselves. Clinton and Scott were only a year apart in age, and Scott was almost as big as his older brother. Doug allied himself with whoever appeared to be the greater power of the moment. He took a beating either way. It was rough stuff, but it seemed to the Milteer boys like nothing out of the ordinary. "We were just always physical," Clinton says.

Every evening at about 6, Mrs. Milteer rang a cowbell on her back porch to summon her boys to dinner. Before the bell echoed even once, the children were racing for home. "Burn rubber!" one would shout as he jumped on his bike.

Scott and Clinton say they lived in fear of being hit by their mother. The slightest transgression, they say, would set her off -- particularly when she was taking diet pills -- resulting in a quick slap or a longer thrashing with a belt. The brothers and their father say Douglas absorbed a disproportionate share of punishment, though they don't know why. "She'd haul off and smack him in the face really hard," Larry Milteer says. "But he wouldn't cry."

Mrs. Milteer insists that she never hurt her children. As a child, she says, she was spanked by her mother, usually with a strap or a hairbrush. She was beat up at school, too, she says, by students who thought she was Japanese. With her own children, she applied roughly the same level of discipline that her parents had. "I did hit my children," she says. "But I don't think I was overly abusive. Two strikes with Larry's belt or three strikes with my hand. Usually that was it."

The Milteers' marriage was full of shouting. Many in the neighborhood had heard of the time Larry Milteer bought a new Cadillac without telling his wife. The next day, while he was at work, Mrs. Milteer traded it for a racy green Karmann Ghia.

In 1975, after Douglas finished the fifth grade, Barbara and Larry Milteer decided to split up. They gave their boys a choice of staying with their mother in Monsey or moving to Valencia, Calif., with their father. They unanimously chose their father.

Mrs. Milteer stayed in New York. She needed time to sell the house and to "sow her oats," she says. "I was in my early 30s," she recalls. "I went from my daddy's house to my husband's house and then we had three sons." She says she never missed her children while they were in California. "I always felt they were on a vacation."

But Douglas missed his mother. He wrote letters and sent photos of his new school. The Milteer men moved often during their first years in California, as Larry settled in with one girlfriend after another. Each move brought a new set of "stepbrothers" and "stepsisters." Clinton and Scott seemed pleased with the new arrangement. They had only one parent to contend with, which they viewed as a chance to experiment with drugs and alcohol.

The Milteer boys felt they had to re-establish their bully credentials in California. Their classmates seemed bigger and stronger than the ones back in Monsey. They weren't terrorized as easily.

"Our first day of school in California, I punched this kid right in front of the teacher," Scott says. "This kid was taunting me about being a tough New Yorker. I went, Wham! Knocked him out of his chair."

As a sixth-grader at Rosedell Elementary and a seventh-grader at Arroyo Seco Junior High, Douglas fought more than ever. "He started getting horrible," Scott recalls. In a seventh-grade shop class, Douglas pulled a smaller student out of his chair and pounded him in front of the teacher and the class. He said the boy annoyed him. Later, he and his brothers chuckled about it.

"He was marking his turf," says Mark Hansen, one of Douglas's closest friends.

Even friends were vulnerable. In the refrigerator at Mark's home, Douglas noticed tiny packets of ketchup and mustard that had been hoarded from fast-food restaurants. He swiped a few. The next day at school, Mr. Hansen says, Douglas offered the packets as proof to classmates that the Hansens were too poor to buy their own condiments.

In 1976, the Milteer boys' grandmother, Daisy Washkalis, moved from New York to Valencia to help care for them. Ms. Washkalis says Douglas was extraordinarily well-behaved at home. He kept his room tidier than an auto-dealer showroom. He applied wax and water to the leaves of artificial plants to make them shine. And he raked the carpet in his bedroom so that the shag pile fell in the same direction.

Douglas ran newspaper routes, stocked soda machines and helped his father with demolition work. He used the income to tinker with his image, trying to appear not only tough but stylish and affluent, too. He insisted on brand-name clothing and ridiculed classmates who wore anything else.

In the summer of 1977, Barbara Milteer resettled in California. Douglas, now 13, continued living with his father. By the time he reached high school, he was almost fully grown, with a thick chest, strong shoulders and a bit of a paunch. He wore his hair in a blow-dried poof. His pals liked him for his cocky attitude and his Ford pickup, which he called Big Red.

He graduated from high school in 1982 and joined his brothers in the construction business, working for a company that built luxury homes in Beverly Hills. Now his tidy habits and attention to aesthetic detail were valuable. Before long, Douglas was coordinating construction projects. One client, a wealthy podiatrist, liked the young man's work so much that he hired him to manage the operation of his sprawling home, which was often used as a movie set.

While his brothers drank and chased women, Douglas pursued wealth. At the peak of his career, he was earning about $100,000 a year, according to friends and relatives. He wore expensive suits, smoked imported cigars and treated dates to weekends at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, a beach community south of Los Angeles. He often entered a bar and announced that he was buying drinks for everyone. He purchased a used Mercedes convertible and ordered personalized license plates that read "MILTEER." His role model, he told friends, was Donald Trump.

Flowery Paintings

With two friends, he bought a condominium on a golf course in Laguna Niguel. He also owned a condominium in Valencia. He furnished his places with flowery paintings in gold frames and pedestals holding ornate vases. Atop his bed in Laguna Niguel sat a stuffed toy cat he called Fluff.

Friends recall that Douglas never had more than one chair in his living room -- as if he wanted visitors to be impressed but not to stay, they say. His brothers grew resentful. Scott and Clinton say Douglas bullied them to impress the podiatrist for whom he worked. When he hired his brothers for construction work, Scott says, he negotiated ruthlessly, squeezing them until they agreed to some of the lowest wages in town.

"I mellowed out after the seventh grade," says Scott. "But Douglas was a bully his whole life. He'd step on you, stab you, grind you. I'd say, 'Doug, you can't keep doing that.' I think he had to play the tough guy for being the youngest."

Women loved Douglas. He was handsome, witty, hard-working and a good earner. In 1983, he met Cristi Nelson, a college student who was working at a 7-Eleven in Valencia when Douglas walked in and started to flirt. They began a relationship. She remembers him as shy, gentle and obsessed with order. His shirts had to hang half an inch apart in the closet.

And he had a temper. "He never hit me, but he got madder than anybody got with me in my whole life," she says.

After 3½ years with Douglas, Ms. Nelson moved out. She says Douglas seemed more interested in money and material possessions than in their relationship. Soon after, he met his next girlfriend. He dated her for five years and married her in 1993 in a posh Beverly Hills wedding with 150 guests. He was earning a sizable wage, dressing and driving well, and now was respectably married.

The union lasted barely a month. His wife moved out and filed for divorce after Douglas told her one night that he was sleeping with another woman and would continue doing so, she says. She says she was young and naive and enamored of the idea of marriage. "I wanted to check off that box -- married."

Three months after the wedding, when the couple met with their divorce attorneys, Douglas appeared frail and thin. Shingles covered his face and arms. He said he had leukemia, but his wife, who didn't want her name used in this article, suspected otherwise.

In the years leading up to their marriage, Douglas often was ill. Colds sometimes developed into more serious maladies. Once he said he had scurvy. Another time, hepatitis.

Long after the divorce, she learned he had AIDS. She says she is certain Douglas knew he had AIDS when they were sleeping together. "It's awful," she says. "It's evil. He never said a word."

Both she and Ms. Nelson say they have tested negative for the AIDS virus.

After the divorce, Douglas's life collapsed. He lost his job, his car was repossessed, and he fell behind on payments on his condominium. He began borrowing money from friends and family. Instead of using the money to pay his mounting medical bills, he bought designer clothes to fit his ever-shrinking frame. In 1994, owing more than $100,000 to hospitals, health clinics and the Internal Revenue Service, he filed for personal bankruptcy.

Now homeless, Douglas moved in with one family member after another. After months of lying about his illness, he finally started telling his family that he had AIDS. He bragged that he had been with too many women to know how he had been infected.

He needed help getting out of bed to go to the bathroom and lined his bed with towels when no one was around. He often grumbled about the quality of the care his relatives gave him. Once, he called the police to complain that Scott had tried to kill him by denying him water.

Clinton wrote letters to Douglas asking why the brothers seemed to have grown apart and telling Douglas the family still cared about him. Douglas never answered. "He was dealt a bad hand and he was holding everybody accountable," Clinton says.

In the summer of 1997, Douglas moved into his mother's apartment in Santa Clarita, Calif. He slept on the sofa and watched TV and tried to keep down protein shakes.

He told one friend that he wanted to stay there in part so he could confront his mother on having been an abusive parent. "He wanted to hear her say it," says Lisa Maillet, one of Scott's former girlfriends and the mother of one of his sons. "But he also wanted his mom to be his mom. He wanted her to take care of him. But at the end, there was no one there for him. That was the only time you could see the hurt boy in him."

Mrs. Milteer says she doesn't remember having such a conversation with her son.

By early autumn, Douglas moved into a nearby motel. Days later, his father found him in his room, collapsed and filthy. He called an ambulance. Douglas died, alone, on Dec. 29, 1997, at an AIDS hospice in West Hollywood.

Mrs. Milteer wanted to throw her son's ashes to the wind. Clinton wanted him buried with a marker so he could visit the grave, but no one wanted to pay for one. They settled on cremation and decided to delay buying a marker. The ashes were buried on a shady hill in a cemetery in Santa Clarita.

The day was cold, gray and wet. Scott delivered the eulogy to about 30 people seated on folding chairs under a tent. Douglas had always fought for the things he wanted, Scott said. He fought to keep up with his brothers. He fought to get attention at home and in school. He fought the shame and devastation of AIDS. Douglas didn't win all his fights, Scott told the mourners, but neither did he back down.

Barbara Milteer, who never remarried, says she was surprised to realize how little she knew about her youngest son. "There is so much of Doug's life he kept private," she said. "I'd like to know more. It was so hard for me to hear you say he was a bully. He was my baby."

Scott Milteer has six children from three different women. He resolved after Douglas's death to be a better father and to see each of his children every day. He says he doesn't want them growing angry because of his mistakes.

"I feel like I have to live with the things I've done," Scott says. "But after Doug died, I wanted to feel good about myself. ... I tell my kids, always be fair. Play hard but be fair. ... Doug played hard but he wasn't always fair."

He recalled one of his last visits to the AIDS hospice.

"Doug held my hand and said, 'I'm sorry for the things I've done and I hope you'll forgive me.' " Scott says. "I think he regretted his actions, but he didn't have time to see everyone he did wrong to."

Write to Jonathan Eig at jonathan.eig@wsj.com ¹