After a manhunt lasting nearly a week, authorities have arrested and charged a suspect in the killing of UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson. WSJ’s Joshua Chaffin unpacks what we know about the alleged killer, his possible motivations, and the public rage that has bubbled up as the search continued. Further Reading: - Suspect in UnitedHealth Killing Was Ivy Leaguer With Anticapitalist Leanings - Manhunt for UnitedHealthcare CEO Killer Meets Unexpected Obstacle: Sympathy for the Gunman - Murder at Dawn: A Top Executive’s Final Moments in Manhattan Further Listening: - The Story Behind the Stabbing of a San Francisco Tech Exec - Why So Many Emergency Rooms Are Failing Kids in America Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to the CEO of UnitedHealthcare?
Last week, the CEO of United Healthcare, a major insurance company, was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan. And the story, in subsequent search for his killer, has captivated the nation.
Meantime, developing now, a manhunt is underway in the deadly shooting of United Healthcare's CEO. He was shot and killed this morning outside of a New York City hotel.
It has the kind of makings of like a thriller. You know, this top executive is in the middle of midtown Manhattan in the middle of holiday season, and he is gunned down by an assassin in the sort of pre-dawn darkness.
That's our colleague Joshua Chaffin, who's been covering the story.
Somebody with a pistol, with a silencer, who seemed to know what they were doing. And it's utterly mysterious as to what has happened, why this has happened.
And then, yesterday... We begin with that breaking news out of Pennsylvania. After a six-day manhunt, a man is in custody in connection with the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
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Chapter 2: Who is the suspect arrested in the case?
Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate, was arrested hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime, at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He's been charged with murder. But the story is far from over.
There's yet another layer to the story, which is the response from the public and the deep, deep anger at the healthcare system, at the health insurers in particular. And so we've actually seen a case where you have a murdered executive who's a father of two, and yet you have all sorts of sympathy online for the killer, which is unusual.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, December 10th. Coming up on the show, the murder of a health insurance CEO and what we know about the alleged killer. The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was a man named Brian Thompson. He was 50 years old, had two kids, and he'd been in the role for about three years.
Last week, he was in New York for a big investor conference. Around 6.45 a.m. on Wednesday, he was walking outside the Hilton Midtown Hotel when a man in a dark jacket and a hood shot him in the back multiple times. So after Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was murdered, What clues did the police have to go off?
I think that their clues were largely surveillance. And this is, you know, Midtown is one of the most surveilled places on the planet, apparently. And so there were all sorts of camera feeds, either from the NYPD itself or from... private landlords and businesses and neighboring buildings all around that area.
And so it was remarkable that people could see, and really gruesome, people could actually watch this murder quite soon on video, which distributed all over the internet. People were able to see that, and yet at the same time, the killer seemed to have been careful enough that police could not After the shooting, the suspect rode a bike to Central Park, where he disappeared for a while.
Then he took a taxi to a bus station at the northern edge of the city and left town.
And at the scene, police found these three bullet casings with the words deny, defend, and depose written on them. What's the significance of that phrase?
Those were the first kind of clues to his motivation. And those are kind of buzzwords for people who are opponents or protesters of the health insurers and who complain that this is the common playbook of the for-profit health insurance industry, that they delay claims, they deny them, and that basically their playbook is to do whatever they can to not pay. And that's how they...
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Chapter 3: What clues did police find at the crime scene?
But to be clear, nobody actually knew what the killer's motivations were.
No, we didn't. And of course, there was all sorts of speculation. Was it some sort of personal matter, et cetera? But we didn't know. We knew that this was a gentleman who had been targeted specifically, that the killer had sort of been lying in wait, that all sorts of people had passed him by on the sidewalk.
But he clearly was focused and waiting for Brian Thompson, who is a health care chief executive. And then I think when those The words written on those shell casings became apparent that I think began to tip suspicion in that direction.
And what were New York police doing to try to catch him?
According to Jessica Tisch, the new police commissioner, she pointed to all of these kind of neat gadgets and assets that they deployed, drones, scuba teams, aerial surveillance, aviation, canine units.
But it sounds like a huge part of it was sifting through and looking at thousands of hours of footage, of surveillance video footage, and trying to find the kind of proverbial needle in the haystack.
What were they able to piece together about the alleged killer's movements after the shooting?
They found a very kind of telling picture of him at the front desk of a hostel on the Upper West Side, where the clerk apparently asked him to remove his mask and smile for an instant when he was checking in. In that moment, he has a very distinctive smile. That was captured on video, and then the police were able to circulate that to the media and online.
And while the police were searching for the killer, there's this other thing happening, which is this outpouring of anger from the public at the health insurance industry.
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Chapter 4: What was the public's reaction to the murder?
The police responded. I think they said it was 9.14 a.m. And they approached Luigi Mangione. And it sounds like he was reasonably civil. And he gave them a fake New Jersey driver's license. And then one of the officers apparently asked him if he had been in New York recently. And apparently at that moment, he went quiet and started shaking. So I think at that point, police...
had a pretty good indication who it was. And he was taken into custody soon thereafter.
Here's New York City Mayor Eric Adams at a press conference yesterday.
He matches the description of the identification we've been looking for. He's also in possession of several items that we believe will connect him to this incident.
So in addition to the fake ID, they found a ghost gun that had been produced on a 3D printer. They also found a silencer that had been produced on a 3D printer. And they found a three-page handwritten document.
Coming up, what we know about the suspect. All right, so tell us everything we've learned so far about the man who was arrested yesterday, the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione.
You know, this figure had been cloaked in a hood and a medical mask as we knew him during the manhunt. And all of a sudden, after he's captured, we have images and we have a name very quickly, Luigi Mangione. Luigi attended a very prestigious school, the Gilman School, an all-boys school where tuition runs up to $40,000 a year. He was the valedictorian, graduated in 2016.
Here's Mangione addressing his class as valedictorian.
Throughout his time here at Gilman, the class of 2016 has been coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it.
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Chapter 5: Did the public sentiment influence the manhunt?
One of the members is a local representative.
In a statement, Mangione's family said, quote, "...our family is shocked and devastated," and that they, quote, "...offer prayers to the family of Brian Thompson." What else did you learn about his personality? What makes you think he was idealistic?
He had written some blog posts in high school talking about, you know, he became very interested in computer programming. You know, we can follow books that he read and so forth, you know, through college and after college. He posted on the Goodreads site, and he's clearly wrestling with a lot of questions about society and ethics and so forth.
Mangione appeared to review lots of books on the Goodreads website, and in January, there was a notable entry.
Chapter 6: How did Brian Thompson's family respond to the public's reaction?
He posted a review of the Unabomber's manifesto that was quite sympathetic. And he sort of endorsed the idea that if you come to a point where your political activism isn't working, then maybe violence is justified. So in light of what we now know, that's really pretty chilling. He also posted various books about back pain and
We believe that he had back surgery, that he had chronic back pain, that he had what looks like spinal fusion surgery. And so there is obviously a lot of suspicion about his interaction with the health care system and what that experience did to him.
According to friends, Mangione had back surgery, and then at some point this year, he lost contact with some of his friends and family.
Yeah, this is still very much kind of a gray period in the investigation, and I imagine we'll learn a lot more about it in the coming days. But there are messages on his social media from friends saying, you know, hey, are you okay? What's happened to you? Your family's looking for you. Can you get in touch? Should I be worried? There's another one from a friend saying, yeah.
You committed to the wedding, to my wedding. Like, are you coming? What's happened? Is all okay? So clearly, at some point in the last however many months, something seems to have gone wrong, and he seems to have sort of drifted away.
This afternoon, while being escorted into a courthouse in Pennsylvania, Mangione shouted at reporters.
It's completely out of touch. It's an insult to the intelligence of the American people. It's an experience.
It's not exactly clear what he was referring to, but he appeared to say, Mangione is currently being held without bail in Pennsylvania and is contesting extradition back to New York, where he faces a murder charge, among other criminal charges. Now, a judge set a schedule for legal proceedings in Pennsylvania that could take weeks to resolve.
So at this point, it seems like his frustration with the health insurance industry might actually be a factor that motivated him. So what does that mean for the health insurance industry?
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