He grew up with his 15-year-old mom who was later tragically killed in a case that puzzled police for decades.
It could have broken him – but instead, this star has made an impressive career in Hollywood and even being named as one of TV’s ”Ten Sexiest Men.”
A key witness to his mom’s murder
October 26, 1961, Waterbury, Connecticut. A future Hollywood heartthrob enters the world. His parents are Catholic teens: Diane, an Italian-American just 15, and Richard, an 17-year-old Irish-American. The boy’s name is Mark.
Sadly, his parents split before Mark even turned two. By the age of five, he had already lost his mother. Diane was shot in the head in February 1967, and though our star didn’t actually see the shooting, he was a key witness. At the time, Mark had been kicked out of the house by his mother’s boyfriend, a known gangster and heroin addict — just moments before the gun went off.
Police and paramedics rushed to the scene, and Diane was carried out on a stretcher with a fatal gunshot to her heavily bandaged head. For decades, her death was officially ruled an accidental shooting, but that story would change in recent years, revealing shocking new details.
”I’m not happy that all this happened to me, but I learned from it,” he once said.
After their mother’s murder, the future Hollywood star and his sister went to live with their maternal grandmother, Avis, in Waterbury, Connecticut. Waterbury was a tough, working-class neighborhood, and he recalls that his family was one of the few white families in the area.
