are some people just truly fucked from the very beginning, or at least from very near the very

beginning? For example, could someone suffer so much abuse and or neglect in their first six months

of life that they just can't ever fully recover and live a normal life, even if they don't have

obvious physical disabilities or mental illnesses? While it's sweet to think that we all have a fighting

chance in life, that some amount of therapy, love, and security could turn even the most abused

and unwell person into a healthy, happy, functioning member of society, is that really true?

I've teetered back and forth about this over the years, but generally I think I've leaned

towards believing that while the overwhelming majority of us have a lot of say over what kind of person

we get to choose to be in this life, there are rare exceptions. Gerald Eugene Stano may have been

one of those exceptions. Born Paul Zineger on September 12, 1951 in Schenectady, New York, Gerald Stano was his mother's fifth child.

She's unnamed in sources, and the third that would be taken from her by social services.

She neglected him to such an extent that when baby Paul was finally taken, doctors declared him unfit for adoption, saying he was functioning, quote,

at an animalistic level and habitually ate his own feces as some sort of survival mechanism.

He was lucky to still be alive by the time he was taken from his mother's home.

A couple named Eugene and Norma Stano eventually adopted Zyneger and legally changed his name to Gerald Eugene

Stano. But they seemingly couldn't overcome his bad beginnings. Progressing from lying to stealing

to coercing a mentally disabled girl to have sex with them and impregnating her, Gerald Stano

graduated to murder by the time he was in his early 20s. In Daytona Beach, where he would make his home as an adult, he killed a woman on an average of every three months, but sometimes he separated his victims by only weeks or even days.

From 1973 to 1980, at least 23 women died at the hands of this moody, violent man who prowled the streets, wearing his distinctive

disco-inspired wide lapel shirts and polyester pants and bump and Donna Summer and the like.

Twenty-three women confirmed, but Stano would ultimately confess to 41 murders, and the primary

detective, who worked with Stano to find closure on unsolved murder cases became convinced the true

...