I sat across from New York’s most notorious child killer. He still refuses to admit the truth

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My head throbbed, my skin was clammy, my stomach roiled. The man sitting across from me was literally making me sick.

But I’d spent days persuading Joel Steinberg, one of New York’s most notorious child killers, to have dinner with me. I could hardly get up and leave.

When The Post approached me not long ago about making a short documentary about the most memorable story I’d ever covered, I had plenty to choose from.

But the first thought that came to mind was my interview with Joel Steinberg.

My second thought: Must I?

In 2017, I reached out to Steinberg for an interview marking the 30th anniversary of one of New York’s most horrifying crimes: the fatal beating he inflicted on his 6-year-old adopted daughter, Lisa, in their West Village apartment.

I wasn’t optimistic. What could Steinberg possibly stand to gain by talking to me?

A lot, as it turned out. After serving 17 years for manslaughter and retreating into a kind of self-imposed exile in Harlem, the disbarred lawyer seemed to envision some grand comeback, with me enlisted to help engineer it.

He insisted on Sparks Steak House, where he ordered soup to nuts: steak, lobster, shrimp, scallops, crabmeat, mozzarella, ice cream, the works. He washed it down with scotch and wine.

And money was no object. The Post was picking up the tab, which came to nearly $1,700. In 2017 dollars. 

He talked endlessly about his brilliance as a lawyer, the injustices he’d suffered, the greatness the world had failed to appreciate.

I’d inevitably start to tune him out, and he always seemed to know, stopping abruptly to stare me down with those unnerving, prying eyes.

“Are you following me? Do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m saying?”

I’d try to steer the conversation to Lisa. He kept dragging it back to Joel, monologuing for hours, none of it usable material. I felt less like a reporter than a detainee at a CIA black site, where they’d break me by forcing me to listen to Joel Steinberg talk about himself.

It’s hard to convey just how profoundly unpleasant this man was. His toxicity felt contagious, as though the longer I sat across from him, absorbing his endless stream of self-justification, the more of it was getting inside me.

It occurred to me more than once that I was getting a tiny glimpse of the psychological hell endured by Hedda Nussbaum, his battered former companion.

Forget, if you can, the physical violence. What must it have been like to endure this man’s relentless insistence on himself, day after day, year after year? The endless monologues, the hectoring, the need to dominate every exchange until the person across from him simply surrendered?

Seven hours of it was making me physically ill. Hedda had endured 12 years. 

We left Sparks well after midnight. I figured the interview was a bust, but out on the sidewalk, Steinberg, fortified by booze, was finally ready to talk about Lisa.

“The psychological part of it is I never accepted her death,” he said. “I thought she was still alive.”

I never accepted. I thought. Everything was I, I, I. And when he finally managed a she, it was only to blame her death on the doctors.

“She died of pulling the plug.”

News editors talk about getting the gold. Steinberg’s refusal, even after 30 years, to acknowledge that he’d killed his own daughter was pure gold.

So why did I feel like I’d lost something?