I’ll agree only so far as to say there’s always more to the story, especially twisted stories like this one, and we may never know the entire truth.
However, Freejooky assumption drives home the point – if we sensible (?) adults are assuming that these kids were really gay, just imagine what all their idiot high school friends would have thought. 
Is everyone assuming that the initial picture he solicited from the victims simply a nude shot? Because I think I’d rather have such a photo be shown to the world than agree to his terms. So perhaps he convinced them to take a photo of themselves jerking off, which would of course be far more embarrassing, and those are the photos that he used for blackmail.
Yeah, I think the media is taming down the nature of the original pics.
As for the “Well why didn’t they fight back?” bullshit. The kids probably thought they were the only ones this was happening to and if the accused preyed on the kids that were already a little fragile and easy to bully, I could see it happening. Bad kid logic of desperation: “Okay, if I do this one thing, he’ll give me back my photos! He promised!”
Like Nurse Ratchet “What would your mother think?” leading to a total meltdown.
I knew a guy in the 9th grade that would start crying if a teacher gave him a stern talking to. He must’ve been 14 the last time I saw him bawling because he was seen throwing a snowball on campus (not allowed) and was getting in shit from a teacher. If he’d been targeted by someone like the accused and manipulated like that, either the perv would’ve had him wrapped around his finger or the kid would’ve committed suicide so his parents would never find out.
When I was 14, if some guy threatened to put a photo of me on the net wanking, he would have gotten his teeth knocked out of his skull (if I couldn’t do it myself I’d have found a bigger guy to beat the snot out of him for me). But that other kid I knew, no fucking way he would’ve been able to stand up to that kind of blackmail. He just didn’t have the stones to take care of it himself, and probably not even the stones to ask a buddy for help. (For that matter, he probably didn’t have many buddies at all.)
I suppose part of the skill of being a predator like that is knowing who will beat him up when he makes his blackmail attempt and not trying it on them. Perhaps you observe the prospective victims for a while and test their suggestibility?
I think it’s an instinct, particularly sensitive in predator types. I read some exerpts from a book on the modern day mafia, and it noted that most were poorly educated, and in many ways actually dumb (poor reasoning capacity), but that most had a kind of cunning, a nose for human weakness, that was akin to a shark’s sensitivity to blood in water.
Just seeing who would comply with the first request for nude photos was a good way to see which boys he was more likely to be able to manipulate. Stancl was probably turned down by a number of boys who were suspicious of the “girl” asking for compromising photos, it was only the ones he could get to agree that he later tried to pressure into performing sexual acts.