The 'rapists, theives and murderers' thing was really Lestat's trademark. Louis lacked the ability to read minds, so he wouldn't really know someone was a Rapist without actually catching them in the act. Lestat on the other hand, he was able to tell right away, and fed gleefully on evil-doers. It was Lestat' grand solution to the moral quandry that he was merely the wolf culling the herds of evil, and by being thouroughly wicked himself, but only to evil-doers, he somehow came out as balanced in the grand scheme of things. The Savage Garden, he referred to it, where even Vampires can have a place in all their glory and predatory instinct, without being immoral. Louis was mainly just a rat-killer, and since he didn't know that Lestat had selected only the evil as his victims, Louis assumed from Lestat's evident enjoyment of his lifetaking that Lestat was an evil monster. And Lestat, being who he was, was too proud to explain himself.
But this makes me wonder why the writers have avoided actually having Angel take human life onscreen. We hear that he used to dine on thieves and murderers and such, but we never really see this, other than from a historical perspective. Did the writers shy away from the moral ambiguity of it? We often see Angel killing an evil man, but we never seem to see him 'drink him dry'. Is it that he fears the human blood will become addictive, or is it that the writers don't feel the audience will make a distinction?
