This post is headed by a mugshot of Axel Rudakubana, the young man who stabbed three little girls to death, and injured many more, in Southport last year at a summer holiday Taylor Swift-themed dance club.
It is an extraordinary portrait. Rudakubana’s eyes somehow manage to convey sorrow, hatred, wickedness and fear all at the same time – with a viscerality that is almost physical. There are some people (there are two or three I can think of who I have encountered in my own lifetime) whose malice seems to emanate from them in a cold miasma – whose very presence in a room refrigerates it. That is the sensation that one gets when looking at this photograph. But at the same time one can see suffering and pain in the face it depicts, too; it does not excuse Rudakubana’s actions for one second to observe that his own evil has traumatised him. He is said to have told police in the aftermath of his stabbing spree that he was happy he had done it and that the girls were dead, but he doesn’t look at all happy; in fact he looks as though he is already in a personal hell.
