When Ramirez was thirteen, he witnessed Miguel shoot and kill his wife and was affected by it for the rest of his life.
He would show Ramirez photos of Vietnamese women he had raped, tortured, and killed, and also taught him how to keep hidden and kill with stealth. When he was twelve years old, his cousin Miguel returned from his second tour in Vietnam and they began spending time together. At the age of ten, he began spending nights at cemeteries and also began smoking marijuana. When he was in seventh grade, his grades began slipping and he started sniffing glue. It resulted in him being removed from his position as a quarterback on the school's football team. When he was in fifth grade, it was discovered that he had epilepsy, though doctors said he would grow out of it. At the age of two, he almost died when a dresser fell on him, and he suffered a concussion. Mercedes's pregnancy with Ramirez was very difficult because the chemical fumes she inhaled at her job at a boot factory caused her body to try and reject the fetus. They had a total of five: Ruben, Joseph, Robert, Ruth, and, finally, Richard Ramirez. His father Julián, a Mexican national and former Ciudad Juárez policeman who later became a laborer on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, was prone to fits of anger that often resulted in physical abuse.
Ramirez was born Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960.