"When I was 11, I had an episode in my life. I saw my cousin shoot his wife. It wasn't traumatic... but the shock value. I went back into the apartment to collect some things with my dad, because my cousin was in jail. The couch was all bloody. It was there where she had landed after the bullet. She got a .38 to the face. At the same time it was very... uh. The stillness of the room, the eerieness, you know. We had to open the windows to ventilate the room and it was something. It was... (long pause) ...it was death! I had known the woman. I had known her very well. I went into the living room and saw her purse. I looked through her purse, saw her ID cards and her things. It was a strange feeling. That was the first time I ever ran across death. Ever since, I was intrigued." Ram�rez may have been influenced into becoming a murderer by his cousin Mike, a Special Forces Vietnam War veteran who boasted of killing and torturing his Vietnamese enemies and showed him Polaroid pictures of his victims. Ram�rez was present the night Mike shot and killed his wife, and her blood splattered on Ramirez's face. Whatever the reason, he became one of the most feared and infamous serial killers in American history.