In his jail mugshot, Christopher Castillo of San Jose looks calmly at the camera, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with his short, dark hair neatly arranged like so.

It’s a far cry from a few hours earlier, when police say he dressed up in a white dress, high heels, stockings and a wig and tried to beat his mother to death with a baseball bat.

Castillo, 38, is now facing attempted murder and kidnapping charges in New Mexico after the “severe beating” of his 58-year-old mother, police said. His mother is in the hospital with a broken arm but is expected to survive, partly because she fought off her cross-dressed son with a chair, and also because a neighbor interrupted the attack.

Castillo traveled to his mother’s house in Las Cruces, N.M., near the Mexican border, on Monday to visit his mom for the first time in six years, police said Tuesday. A day earlier, Castillo’s sister had relayed a message to their mother that the San Jose man was going to try and kill her.

Around 5 p.m., a neighbor saw Castillo, wearing a woman’s outfit, enter the mother’s house. Soon after, the neighbor heard screams coming from the home, so she went over and saw Castillo standing over his mother with an aluminum baseball bat.

The neighbor yelled, called 911 and helped the mother up while Castillo ran off. Police later found the bat in a nearby alley, and then spotted Castillo — now dressed in a white shirt, khaki pants and tennis shoes — and arrested him.

The case has some loose parallels to the famous 1960 movie “Psycho,” in which the mentally disturbed character Norman Bates kills someone while dressed up like his mother. The motive in Castillo’s case is not clear.

“We’ve seen all sorts of weird things, and this is just one of them,” said Dan Trujillo, a spokesman for the Las Cruces Police Department. “It’s very disheartening, especially when it’s a family member doing it to another family member.”

Police also booked Castillo on suspicion of tampering with evidence and are holding him in jail in lieu of $155,000 bail. Trujillo did not know if he had hired an attorney, or how he got to New Mexico.

Contact Mike Rosenberg at 408-920-5705.