Talking with evil: My interviews with a serial killer, rapist and child molester

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/talking-with-evil-my-interviews-with-a-serial-killer-rapist-and-child-molester/2013/02/22/41d1f0bc-79e1-11e2-a044-676856536b40_story.html

Talking with evil: My interviews with a serial killer, rapist and child molester
By Josh White, Published: February 22, 2013

He shuffled into the room and stopped, plexiglass and cinderblocks framing his slight figure. He looked much as I remembered him from nearly a decade earlier: big eyes in a boyish face, a thin build, long fingers, waist chains. But his eyes, once cold and flat, had mellowed into something resembling thoughtfulness.

For a moment, my reflection in the glass superimposed on his orange jumpsuit, and I paused, looking at him and at me. Lee Boyd Malvo smiled. The D.C. sniper, in the visitation room of one of the nation’s most restrictive prisons, smiled at me.

I have covered war, feeling the zip of bullets overhead, the giant-footstep boom of a mortar landing, the heat of an explosion. I’ve been inside drug dens and on police stakeouts. I have watched two men die in Virginia’s electric chair, seeing the death grip on oak, the smoke rising.

Yet nothing compares to personal encounters with people who have done something so horrible, so evil, that it defies understanding. People who can look you in the eye and describe what it was like to use a high-powered rifle to shoot a stranger in the head, how desperation can lead to animalistic rape, how pedophilic obsession can infect, fester, destroy.