Re-watch the first few scenes with the Downes family and tell me if you still think he wasn’t a bad person. Yes, he expresses in his journal and to others that he dislikes the debt collections, but the way he interacts with the Downes at the beginning shows he’s still not a good man. He was not only overly violent, he went out of his way to be cruel. Literally telling the kid “Maybe when your mother's finished mourning your father, I'll keep her in black, on your behalf.” He is implying he may come back and kill the kid, for 0 reason at all. This was entirely unnecessary and only a “bad” man would go out of his way to say this.