An Ivy League graduate is charged over Brian Thompson’s murder

It took fiveID3DCCTV days, but after a feverish manhunt spurred by , the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in Manhattan, on December 9th police arrested Luigi Mangione and charged him with murder. The 26-year-old was discovered in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a city of 44,000 people about a five-hour drive from New York. According to Joseph Kenny, the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, he was found carrying a silencer, a gun and several fake cards. Among those was one from New Jersey that had been presented earlier at a New York hostel by a man identified by police as a suspect in Mr Thompson’s killing.The arrest came suddenly, seemingly by chance. Mr Mangione was found eating at a branch of McDonald’s, where an employee spotted him. New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, credited a “combination of old-school detective work and new age technology” for the discovery and thanked members of the public for sending in tips. Alongside murder, the suspect was charged with four other weapons offences in New York. New York police and prosecutors went to Altoona to join the investigation.Before Mr Mangione’s arrest, police seemed to have few leads. The killer had apparently arrived in New York and left again by bus; covered his face for much of his time in the city; may have used a “burner” phone; and paid for things exclusively in cash. Searches in Central Park had turned up a backpack that the killer had apparently discarded, but it contained only a jacket and—in a detail seemingly designed to spark feverish speculation—a bundle of Monopoly money.Since the murder, the internet has been rife with speculation that the killer was motivated by anger over profit-making in the health-care-insurance industry, where Mr Thompson had risen to become the boss of one of America’s largest firms. As well as the gun (apparently a “ghost gun”, possibly one printed on a printer, according to Mr Kenny), Mr Mangione was also carrying a handwritten “manifesto”, police said. The contents of this have not been published yet but the police said that it criticised health-insurance companies and that “it does seem he has some ill-will towards corporate America”. The bullet casings found by the police after the shooting had words written on them—“Defend”, “Deny” and “Depose”—seemingly intended to echo words used by insurance companies on forms rejecting claims.Mr Mangione grew up in Maryland, where he attended a private school in Baltimore, and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, where he studied computer science and mathematics and obtained a master’s degree in engineering. He appears to have lived in Hawaii and in California in the past few years. He worked as a counsellor at Stanford University, and at a company based in Santa Monica.Several online profiles belonging to a Luigi Mangione point at somebody with an esoteric collection of political views. On Goodreads, he apparently posted a review of the “Industrial Society and Its Future”, better known as the writing of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, which he described as “prescient”. On X, he shared few of his own thoughts directly but instead retweeted tech gurus and people like Jonathan Haidt, a prominent psychologist and author. Insofar as an ideology can be discerned, the online Mr Mangione looks more like that of a revolutionary “rationalist” than that of a red terrorist or a far-right provocateur.What will that mean for the fanbase that the mysterious killer developed before a person of interest was identified? For many people, judging by their fervent postings on social-media sites, the cold-blooded murder of a father of two constituted a heroic blow against an unjust system. The killing has certainly renewed a long-running discussion of the shortcomings of the health-insurance industry.Already entrepreneurs are selling T-shirts online with “Defend, Deny, Depose” written on them. In Chicago, on the morning of December 9th, somebody hung a large poster with those words from a pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Drive, one of the city’s expressways. On TikTok, people posted pictures of fresh tattoos depicting the words and, in one case, a rendering of the photo of the suspect’s face taken by at the hostel.There have been a few copycat threats. In Minnesota, UCare, a non-profit insurer, closed its offices and ordered staff to work remotely after the firm received an apparently credible threat by phone on December 6th. Other large insurers have scrubbed employee names and photographs from their websites. At least one firm that helps manage health-care claims has suspended in-person visits. The discovery of Mr Mangione in Altoona may ease some anxieties, but the impact of Mr Thompson’s assassination will endure.