I wish we could still see their SM accounts. I looked at both of them before they were taken down. I didn't have time to cross reference all their friends, but I saw A LOT of crossover in interests - flashy cars, especially. They both had friends: employed, unemployed, old, young, "****gish"-looking, professional-looking... Lots of people attended community colleges like DW and JW. JW waged numerous self-promotional web/SM campaigns where he was creating the image he wanted people to see. DW didn't.
Until 2005, when he was 25, DW didn't have a criminal record (that we can access). His first violent charge was in June 2006, other than the peace order taken out by his dad. Until then his charges were all traffic-related and petit-theft. In fact, most of his charges to that point were the kind that might go away if your dad was a police officer.
I'm not implying that JW has a ton of un-prosecuted crimes in his past. I'm just trying to make the point that an absence of charges/prosecutions is not the same thing as someone not committing crimes. How often do we see a perpetrator commit some horrible crime, without warning, no criminal history, etc.? How often do we see a 20-year employee embezzling from his company? The best way to predict what someone will do is his/her previous behavior, but that's not fool-proof. We don't know what JW was up to for most of his life, because other than the carefully curated websites and SM accounts, he is a virtual ghost. We don't know what DW was doing before he came to the country at 20.
If you take away the hype, you have two under-employed men without educations or obvious means to support the life-styles to which they aspire. One has "the gift of gab" to get what he wants. The other uses violence.