The Journal. - The Suspect in the UnitedHealth Killing

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

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

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 United Health Care CEO. 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. 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. This episode is brought to you by SIBO Global Markets. SIBO is a global exchange operator committed to building trusted markets worldwide. SIBO delivers cutting-edge trading, clearing, and investment solutions and products in multiple asset classes, including equities, derivatives, and investment solutions, and products in multiple asset classes, including equities, derivatives, and effects. Learn more about the exchange for the world stage at cibo.com. 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 AM 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 the police could not quite track him down.

It took some time to actually get an image of his face, and he seems to have done a pretty effective job at eluding them, at least in the early days. 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 pad their bottom line. So that was the first sign that this might be tied to some grudge or gripe about health care.

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, you know, 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. Yeah, so the first thing that we, that I at least began seeing was all sorts of snarky comments online, which is, you know, not something that's atypical for social media. You know, things like, my deductible, you know, doesn't cover my sympathy, or clearly a lot of disdain for UnitedHealthcare. Y'all saying murderer, I'm saying freedom fighter, because y'all always want to act like y'all don't see what's going on until somebody does something a little bit radical. This was like a unifying moment for the American people.

And I'm noticing that people are feeling a sense of justice being served by this modern-day Robin Hood. It was easy to kind of chuck that up to, you know, this is people online saying kind of crass things. But very quickly, my email box began to fill up with really heartfelt letters or notes from doctors, dentists, healthcare practitioners, laying out the depths of their frustrations

with the insurance industry and how kind of soul crushing it was to fight every day to try to get treatments and procedures approved for patients and what a misery it was to endure this constantly. And they did not defend in any way the murder, but they certainly attested to how unpopular the health insurance industry is. Did any of this broader sentiment have an impact on the manhunt? So, in the immediate aftermath,

there were all sorts of people who have this new practice of people crowdsourcing an investigation, kind of amateurs getting together online and helping the police through open source data, make connections that were very effective in identifying some of the January 6th interactionists. A lot of those people said, you know, I don't condone murder, but I'm not going to help in this case. I'm sitting this one out. I don't believe in the healthcare system. Did Brian Thompson's family or the company say anything about this reaction from the public? I think they've been grieving very privately. His funeral was

private. I imagine it must kind of deepen their pain to know that there are a lot of people celebrating his murder, or if not celebrating, justifying. Ultimately, it was a member of the public who noticed the suspect and turned him in. So, the scene of the arrest is a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which is kind of central western Pennsylvania.

It is kind of a walk away from the Greyhound bus station, a really nondescript neighborhood. And apparently he was sitting toward the back of the restaurant with a laptop, and somebody recognized him from wanted poster, and an employee called the local police. And then what happened next? The police responded, I think they said it was 914 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. A courtside legend is born. The Raptor Chicken Nacho Poutine from McDonald's. Our world-famous fries topped with seasoned chicken, gravy, stringy cheese curds, tortilla strips, and drizzled with nacho cheese sauce. Get your claws on it. For a limited time only,

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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 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. And then he goes on to University of Pennsylvania where he's an honor student and gets a master's in computer science. He's a very bright, talented young man and seemingly pretty idealistic and thoughtful. And it turns out that Luigi Mangione is from a very affluent, prominent family in Maryland. The family owns or developed a golf course and resort. It's a large Italian-American family. 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,

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, he became very interested in computer programming. We can follow books that he read and so forth, 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. He posted a review of the Unabomber's manifesto that was quite sympathetic. And he, you know, 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 healthcare 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, you know, your family's looking for you. Can you get in touch? You know, should I be worried? There's another one from a friend saying,

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 a good experience. It's not exactly clear what he was referring to,

but he appeared to say, it's completely unjust and it's an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience. 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?

It's a fascinating question. I mean, I don't think health insurance companies have ever been terribly popular, but it must be bracing and shocking for insurance executives to follow the story and discover just how angry people are at them. And a sentiment in a lot of the emails that I've received is, is it really surprising that this has happened? Isn't it really surprising that this has happened? Isn't it more surprising that this hadn't happened sooner? So I think you have United Healthcare, Brian Thompson's company,

I think it made about $25 billion in profits last year, that has a profound reputational problem. And I think it's not something that sort of easily moved past. Has the health insurance industry responded? So far, I think the industry is, my sense, just looking from the outside is that they themselves are sort of in a state of shock as to what happened and still kind of digesting this whole saga and what it's telling them, how people feel about them.

UnitedHealth said last week that its priorities were supporting Thompson's family and ensuring the safety of its employees. The company said it will, quote, continue to be there for those who depend upon us for their health care. What questions do you still have about Mangione in this incident? We have a lot of questions. You know, there's a lot of sort of gumshoe, police work, basic stuff. You know, when did he get to New York City?

How did he get here? What was he doing day in, day out while he was preparing? How was he able to intercept Brian Thompson that Wednesday morning outside the Hilton? And I think that we have sort of a rough, broad-brushed picture of a very promising young man kind of in some ways turning, but we haven't really fleshed that out yet. And I think that's important to do, to understand all that he went through that took him to this point.

What do you think is the reaction and the moment of all this frustration and rage that we've seen from people online toward the health insurance industry and the healthcare industry say about America right now? Um, it does feel like we're in a kind of time of anger and earthquakes and eruptions and, you know, every institution suddenly seems kind of vulnerable or at risk from this kind of public rage and discontent.

Social media, of course, is also great at harnessing that. If you move past the shock and the sort of tabloid elements of the story, it seems to tap into something about this broader public mood in the nation at the moment, that there is so much anger at institutions and health insurers among them. And so the fact that we've had this strange reaction, the fact that it has seems to have almost

created kind of a reckoning, I guess, for the health insurance industry is, I think, pretty significant. That's all for today. Tuesday, December 10th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Scott Calvert, Jim Carlton, Alyssa Luckpat, Anna

Wildy Matthews, and Ginger Adams-Odysse. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.