The little boy in that photograph, born on February 29, 1960, in El Paso, Texas, appeared to have an ordinary childhood on the surface — the youngest of five children in a hardworking Mexican immigrant family. His father labored for the railways, his mother raised the children in the Catholic faith, and their home seemed, from the outside, like any other in the American Southwest.

Behind closed doors, though, life was anything but normal. His father’s violent temper turned their home into a place of constant fear. The boy endured severe beatings and multiple head injuries before the age of six, leading to temporal lobe epilepsy later in life — damage that would have lasting consequences.

His father’s cruelty bordered on the unthinkable. As punishment, he would tie the boy to a crucifix in a cemetery, leaving him terrified and alone through the night. These experiences carved deep emotional and psychological scars into a child who was already desperate for affection and stability.

By just ten years old, the boy had turned to alcohol and marijuana to numb his pain — the beginning of a lifelong spiral into violence and depravity. He would grow up to become Richard Ramirez, the notorious “Night Stalker,” whose reign of terror in California during the 1980s left a nation horrified and changed forever.