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

By Josh White, WashPost, Published: February 22

Josh White is The Washington Post’s education editor. He covered the D.C. sniper shootings in 2002 and was a local investigative reporter from 2008 to 2012.

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.

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