Sunday, December 08, 2024

Finding People


One of the basic tasks investigative journalists have to excel at is finding someone who doesn’t want to be found. So when somebody becomes the object of a large-scale manhunt by authorities and yet eludes capture, that’s bound to trigger our interest.

We may, on occasion, begin our own searches and the results may change the course of our careers.

Patty Hearst, the Unabomber, Osama bin-Laden were among those who attracted our interest in the past, and the search for the man who shot the United Health Care CEO is obviously the current one.

Law-enforcement agencies could do worse things than form an advisory board of experienced investigative reporters to help in these matters but for multiple reasons they’ll never do that.

So just for kicks, here’s what struck me about the elusive fugitive in the Manhattan killing. First, he made sure those shell casings would be found at the scene. The video of the shooting shows him tapping the gun at several points and one explanation is the gun was jamming. That may be true and it’s also possible that he was tapping it to make sure that the casings fell out near the body.

As we know, the casings were labeled with words associated with controversial health insurance practices, which may indicate a motive for the killing. Or they may have been an attempt to confuse investigators about his actual motive but I lean toward the first interpretation — they probably reflect his motive, which is anger at United Healthcare.

Also on the video, I noticed the the shooter had a distinctive way of walking while holding the gun. He was clearly a trained shooter and his stance and the way he moved may be a characteristic of how and where he was trained.

As fas as the shooter’s escape plans and the decisions he made along the way during his escape, it’s possible that some of the other purported “clues,” i.e., the water bottle and a burner phone, were left to throw investigators off his trail.

As for the mistakes he made — there are always mistakes — lowering his mask to flirt with a clerk at the hostel where he was staying was among the more endearing. He’s just a guy after all, and probably not a professional paid assassin. 

He had to dump his backpack to help avoid easy identification after the crime but there was reportedly only a jacket in it when it was found. The whereabouts of other evidence is unknown. Most importantly, since the gun wasn’t in the backpack when it was discovered, that remains a mystery. If it’s not in the waters of Central Park it could be in a trash receptacle uptown.

Then again, O.J. Simpson’s murder weapon was never found.

I don’t think the New York shooter had an accomplice. This crime and getaway have the markings of a lone operator, even though he appeared to be talking on a phone minutes before the shooting — a contra-indicator if you will. But he may have had people willing to protect him, which was the case with the SLA fugitives, making him much more difficult for authorities to apprehend.

Also, a surprisingly large segment of the population supports the gunman taking action against the deeply unpopular health insurance industry and therefore, like in the Patty Hearst case, some may be willing to help him avoid the police.

Because authorities are circulating the photos of his face, he will no doubt be recognized by some who know him, including family members. This could well lead to his capture, as it did the Unabomber, although family members may also try to protect him. If he’s smart, he will avoid contacting family.

The latest phots show him masked in a taxi he took from 86th up to the bus terminal. But wearing a mask might have made him stand out when he was in transit away from New York, so he may not have remained masked. If so, he would have tended to cover the lower part of his face with his hands, or tried to shield it from view when moving about in public.

When somebody acts that way, people can sense it.

Finally, if you believe the Mayor of New York, the NYPD already knows his identity. Why the Mayor revealed this is beyond me but if true, it’s only a matter of time before he is captured..

I hope you’ll excuse these musings of an old investigator. After all, to this day, when certain people around these parts hear my name, they sometimes say “Aren’t you the guy who found Patty Hearst?”

That’s not exactly accurate, but I’ll take the complement. It will be 50 years next September since Howard Kohn and I published “The Inside Story” of Patty Hearst and the SLA in Rolling Stone. 

For what it’s worth, old investigators sometimes notice details that others miss. One other thing — the fugitive will likely repeat similar mistakes to those he’s already made. People have patterns.


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