Ralf Jager was the second son of a butcher and an abusive mother. He worked in his father’s shop as soon as he could reach the counter. Hans Jager was a quiet butcher, an angry husband, an absent father and a tyrant of a boss. He demanded nothing less than perfection from his sons. If their days work was not satisfactory, they would be punished and Mrs. Jager was the tyrant of their home.

Ralf’s mother wanted girls and treated both her sons like dirty dogs running crazily through the house. When the doctors told her she could no longer bare children her disappointment became disdain and she took it all out on the boys. She made punishing them her form of self-masochism.

Her punishments for them soon grew abhorrent. The two boys were spanked regularly, withheld meals and forced to sleep in the closets when they misbehaved. She smacked them for incorrect grammar, kick them to wake them up and would wash their mouths with a bar of soap for cursing. Her drinking and smoking increased after she found out about their father’s affair. The smell of tobacco and alcohol became the stench that brought on punishment while he was “out”.

When Ralf was 9, she molested him in the punishment closet.

It changed him. His fragile need for love was shattered. He was forever convinced of her betrayal to motherhood. Whatever she was, it was not someone that cared for him. And he had come from careless. In his mind, a spawn of the dark abyss.