On a late March morning in the early 1990s, less than 2 1/2 months after he was forced to resign his tumultuous superintendency in a small Midwestern school district, Ed Evans took a shotgun into the woods and, using a spatula to push down the trigger, took his own life. His body was found by his teen-age son three days later. He had devoted nearly half of his 45 years to the same school district, where the pressures of the top job finally drove him to his death. Six years later, Paul Reylene rode triumphantly through another community with similar characteristics in the same state atop a bright red fire engine, sirens blaring. Inside the high school, more than 300 staff and community members hailed his selection as state superintendent of the year. At 43, just three years after his arrival in the community, he was recognized as one of his state's top superintendents. Two superintendents, two vastly different outcomes. But an examination of the career paths of the two men reveals they had many of the same forces bearing down on them. Both found themselves in hauntingly similar communities. Each, to one degree or another, had to deal with the divisive issues, gnawing family pressures and personal loneliness that had come hand-in-hand with the top job in a school district. One man responded by falling into a downward spiral that led to his death. The other found his way through the morass to reach a pinnacle of his profession. The two cases are on the extreme ends of the spectrum of the contemporary superintendency, but many of the forces that led to the "killing" of one leader and the "crowning" of the other are routinely felt by school district leaders across the country.