Cayetano Santos Godino was born in Buenos Aires on October 31, 1896, to Italian immigrants. His father was an alcoholic with syphilis, the family lived in a conventillo tenement in extreme poverty, and Cayetano was small, with unusually large ears, which gave him the nickname the Argentine press used: El Petiso Orejudo, the big-eared runt.
He began at nine. In 1906 he beat a two-year-old boy, and in 1908 a girl of eighteen months whom he buried alive and who was found in time. In 1912 he killed thirteen-year-old Arturo Laurora, three-year-old Reyna Bonita Vainicoff, whom he set on fire in her bed, and two-year-old Jesualdo Giordano, whom he strangled and drove a nail into the skull of. He also set at least seven fires, including one at a warehouse, and blinded and burned a large number of animals and birds.
He was picked up several times over those six years and released to his parents or to a reformatory, because he was a child and because Argentina had no framework for what to do with him. Neighbours knew what he was. His own father asked the police to take him.
He was finally detained in December 1912, at sixteen, after the Giordano killing. He was studied at length by Argentine criminologists of the positivist school, who were interested in him as a specimen of hereditary degeneracy, a framework that has not aged well.
He was held in Buenos Aires and then, from 1923, at the prison at Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, at the far end of the country. He was beaten repeatedly by other prisoners. He died there on November 15, 1944, aged forty-eight.