Teen's Rift With His Mother Leads To Sting and Murder-for-Hire Trial

His attorney, John Getz, has suggested that Ryder might have heard the "two bullets" line on television and that he repeated it without meaning it. In court, Getz has accused Troiano and her husband of giving up as parents. "It's apparent that the victims in this case expect the Department of Juvenile Services to solve all their problems," he said at the September hearing.

Ryder, whose case was transferred recently from adult to juvenile court, is being held at the Cheltenham Youth Facility in Prince George's County. Getz declined to make him available for an interview.

Ryder, his two stepsisters and his parents lived a seemingly typical exurban life in semirural southern St. Mary's. His mother works as a budget and financial manager at nearby Patuxent River Naval Air Station. His stepfather is an information technology specialist. At night, a blanket of stars covers their 5,800-square-foot house.

Troiano married young. When her son was 13 months old, she left his father, a man with whom she had what she called an abusive relationship. By the time the boy was in sixth grade, she had married Joey Troiano, and officials at Spring Ridge Middle School in Lexington Park began calling. He had walked out of class and was roaming the halls. Could someone come get him?

Over the next few years, as he received poor grades, the Troianos tried stricter and stricter discipline. At one point, Shannan Troiano's best friend, Jessica Pamepinto, suggested backing off.

"I used to run around," Pamepinto remembers telling Troiano. "I turned out good."

When Ryder was 14, according to court records, he smashed the glass front of a fire extinguisher case at school and broke into the county fairgrounds, spraying fire extinguishers and smashing lights. A judge sentenced him to supervised probation.

A progress report on Jan. 27, 2006, was dismal: six F's and an E. "I think he is very capable of doing the work," one of his teachers wrote in an e-mail later to the Troianos, "he just refuses."

For a time, the Troianos tried using the probation as leverage. Of 36 meetings with authorities, Shannan Troiano said, she and her husband went to 34 together, and each went to one of the other two.

This spring, Troiano requested that her son be placed in a structured residential program in Western Maryland if he failed to improve at school, she said.

But Ryder had fulfilled his court-ordered obligations outside of school -- he had paid restitution and performed community service -- and on March 21 he was released from probation, leaving his parents feeling they were the only bad guys.

Things got worse. Ryder quit school. According to his parents, he broke into their room and took $45 from his sister's piggy bank, leading first to a physical fight between him and his mother and then to her kicking him out of the house. "Get out!" she remembers telling him.