Raymond was born to a lower-middle class family in Cincinnati, Ohio, who believed slightly too heavily in the hands-off approach to parenting. Therefore, Raymond was not particularly... friendly, even at a young age. He wasn't an out-and-out sociopath - that is to say, he never killed and dismantled any pets he was given, nor did he seem to reject interaction with his fellows entirely - but to a lot of people, he gave off the impression of being the kind of person who would eventually snap and shoot up his school at the time, and he didn't particularly mind letting people think that way about him. As it happened, he'd acquired a lot of his parent's better genes, something quite a few of his siblings did not, and so found his way into and through university in the late 80's and early 90's, and then enlisted into the armed forces.

This went well enough for a couple of years - he was motivated enough to do well on the ground, and possessed about the right mindset to avoid PTSD - but soon, he set his sights higher than a mere soldier. He wanted, surprisingly much, to become a sniper. Circumstances transpired that he found a place in the recently-founded United States Army Sniper School, and continued on to graduate as a full-blown sniper, soon enough requesting an additional skill identifier as a counter-sniper which he passed with flying colours, then spent the next few years serving the military in this capacity with gusto. Of course, he who snipes snipers risks being sniped himself: in June of 1996, what should have been a simple engagement for him ended when he caught an enemy sniper's bullet and barely survived, leading to his eventual honourable discharge, complete with Purple Heart medal. Even knowing the circumstances, he oddly found himself extremely resentful of the military and himself over the next several weeks. A Purple Heart? An honourable discharge? To him, that was as good as saying "you have failed", even though he'd done everything right. The cognitive dissonance became too much for him, and in a fit of impotent anger at the country he felt had abandoned him, he triggered.

He did not, at first, realise he'd triggered. It took another gun and a scope, in an effort to relive old times whilst recovering, for him to realise that, and the rest of his recovery period to figure out its exact strengths and weaknesses. Once the realisation took him, though, the thought struck hard: sure, he could use this power to help assist the country that abandoned him, maybe become a superhero even, but why the hell should he? He'd heard about the "unwritten code" the Capes held to, and there was no way in his mind that this power of his could be anything but lethal. They'd rip him apart, given the chance. So instead, why not work for himself? After all, there were plenty of targets out there who needed eliminating... and plenty of money to be made as a mercenary. A headhunter, if you will.

At first, he was fairly small-time. When he wasn't on the job, he continued to train his physique when it was needed, and taught himself how to dismantle and rebuild scopes, and then how to build them, integrate more and more comparatively advanced technology into them, and so on. Yet the hits he took, the hits he could acquire, were low-profile, comparatively low-pay (though enough to let him maintain the weapons and other equipment he possessed at the time, including a camera to record his kills as evidence), and though his power guaranteed a hit if a hit could be acquired, taking out a target to the desired specifications was sometimes impossible, and if he didn't do it right, his pay was often cut, or even entirely docked, by whoever hired him. However, he struck into the big leagues when he was asked to eliminate a fairly dangerous cape- an immigrant from Hyderabad after Leviathan's attack whose name roughly translated as "The Universe Warrior"- somewhere in Lyon, France. Specifically, the third of September 2003, the date of Behemoth's attack upon the city.

Though Raymond escaped the city alive and fortunately unharmed, mostly by running away from Behemoth as soon as he could and under no circumstances drawing its attention, his employer at the time threatened to take away his pay almost entirely, citing that the attached camera didn't prove he'd killed the right person, and the hero probably died to the Endbringer instead; this was turned around when Raymond presented one of the newest features of the scope he'd attached to the weapon, an integrated digital filming setup, with a maximum capacity of around a minute's worth of footage. Small, but enough to prove his worth when combined with the incumbent zoom capacity of the scope itself. With incontrovertible proof of his kill, and at the friendly encouragement of a couple of the man's bodyguards (and not-so-friendly encouragement of Raymond himself), Headhunter in fact acquired twice as much for the job as the already-hefty sum he'd been promised, money he used to begin upgrading his weapons to eventually reach his current setup.

After that, it was but a matter of time before word got out in certain circles about "the mercenary who took out the Universe Warrior", and by Autumn of 2004 he became the guy you went to when you wanted a parahuman dead. The man who avoided notice by killing targets before they ever knew they were threatened, and skipping town before the Thinkers could so much as triangulate his position; the man whose gun found itself capable of eliminating a shockingly large number of capes for its sheer raw power, being designed to destroy tanks rather than people; the man who seemingly existed as a ghost, if anything. The Headhunter. Ultimately, this led to current events: though it is in his mind somewhat beneath him, he has been offered a very substantial sum of money to join a new gang in Denver, with the promise of more to come as the gang grows larger and more powerful. Considering the barrier to entry presented by the Community, he believes that might take a while.