The story

Sniper Lee Boyd Malvo said in a letter to CNN that he is still "grappling with shame, guilt, remorse and my own healing if that will ever be possible." And a social worker who has worked extensively with him said he draws self-portraits that often show him with a tear running down his cheek.

Malvo, 22, spends 23 hours a day inside his cell at Virginia's toughest prison, a maximum-security compound called Red Onion, not far from the Kentucky border. He's serving a life sentence.

According to social worker Carmeta Albarus-Lindo, Malvo is a changed person since he and John Allen Muhammad terrorized the Washington area five years ago this month in attacks that left 10 dead over a 23-day period.

"The most I can do is to continue to be there, because that is his greatest fear -- that, you know, another parental figure would abandon him because that was what he'd been exposed to all his life," said Albarus-Lindo, who has spent hundreds of hours with Malvo since his arrest and conviction. Read the letter

She said one of those "parental" figures was Muhammad, who met Malvo in the Caribbean nearly two years before the deadly shooting spree began in 2002. Read full article »

'The Minds of the D.C. Snipers'
Five years after the Washington-area sniper murders, CNN's Soledad O'Brien reports on how two men, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, began their reign of terror.
At 8 p.m. ET Wednesday

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