Humanizing Terrible Characters

I was (re)reading Under the Dome by Stephen King recently, and I came across a certain scene. The scene is from the point of view of one of the antagonists, Junior Rennie (if you've read the book or seen the terrible, terrible TV adaptation, he's the kid who has migraines and kills people to get rid of them).

Junior in the TV Series, as portrayed by Alexander Koch. Image from the Under the Dome Wiki.

There's a scene in the book--I don't know if it's in the show, I stopped only a few episodes in, but hey it's on Amazon Prime, I might check it out again--where Junior and one of his friends the fellow new "cops" find a couple of abandoned kids. These kids haven't eaten in days. It's a nine year old girl and a five year old boy, and both of these characters, both of whom have, in the case of Junior, literally murdered and, in the case of Frank, literally sexually assaulted/physically assaulted others, they show their human side. And as a reader, even as a reader who has read this story before and also didn't just skip the first three hundred pages to get to this scene, had to stop and "awww" at the scene.

At the end of this scene, Junior picks up the little girl and, "Her arms [tighten] around his neck. It [is] one of the best things Junior [...] ever felt in his life." (King, 310). Being needed, being able to rescue these kids is one of the best things this monster of a man has ever felt--let's get this clear, at this point in the book, Junior Rennie is a necrophiliac rapist serial murderer. He's got a body count to match the number of pages. But the book is humanizing him. 

If I'm remembering correctly, the TV show tries its best to humanize Junior, to the point where he's not really the same character anymore, but this is different. For King, whose villains are usually Capital V Villains (especially the human ones; see: Henry Bowers), this is a big step. The only other Stephen King minor antagonist I can think of who got even a fraction of this treatment is Lloyd Henreid from The Stand. This is a big scene, for Junior as a character and for the story as a whole, and I think it's one of the best scenes in the book. 

There's a movie called Zero Day. It came out in 2003, and it follows two teenagers, Andre and Cal, as they plan and eventually execute a shooting at their school. It is heavily Columbine based, down to Cal (the Klebold) being the one out of the two of them to go to prom and a scene with Andre (the Harris) closing up at a pizza place. The movie is fantastically done, and one of the things it does is it humanizes the two of them--particularly Cal--and then tears it all away with the last couple of minutes while it shows them gunning down their classmates and making jokes about it. 

It's that same type of horrified "awwww" you give at Junior helping these children as you do when you see Cal hanging out with a friend at the cemetery (the scene is cuter than it sounds). Both scenes are necessary and good because, as much as we'd like to ignore it, people who do terrible things are still people, and they still have their soft spots. They still have moments where they aren't monsters, and showing those moments makes the moments that they are monsters that much more devastating.