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On December 5, 2024, a leading publication ran the front-page story “Insurance CEO Shot Dead In Manhattan”. The report went on to state that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away”. The daytime killing was indeed both cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance or struggled with medical bills, the news felt like a release. Online platforms erupted. One post read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company created to increase earnings on your health.”

Less than a week after, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a master’s in computer science, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He faces court proceedings on criminal counts of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So what is his background? And what might have motivated the accused offense? These are the questions John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

Understanding the Person

A writer for a major publication, Richardson spent years researching the communities that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, writing stories about people “cursed with realistic fears about an end-times scenario”. To reveal “the making” of his subject, Richardson first reviews Mangione’s extensive reading. We learn that “[when] he was taken into custody, Luigi had a list of 295 books on Goodreads”. Their subject matter covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own personal growth, both physical and mental”. Additionally, Richardson sifts through his communications with influencers and authors as well as his many updates on social media. These primary sources, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead render him an amorphous figure. Richardson tries to justify this by proposing that “Luigi’s elusiveness, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old deceiver’s charm”. Here, as elsewhere, Richardson attempts to cast his subject in archetypal terms.

Mangione is deeply anxious about the world around him, one where ‘change is rapid whether we like it or not’

Interpreting the Incident

As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson uses as a clue three words – “delay”, “refuse” and “remove”, engraved on the ammunition left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms occasionally employed by health insurance companies to deny coverage. He examines the evidence Mangione suffered from a chronic back condition, which might have provided motive for an attack, but finds no proof; instead, what meaning there is seems to rest in Mangione’s philosophical dread about the world around him, one where “everything is accelerating whether we like it or not, moving rapidly to the edge”; a world where the general belief seems to be that AI is going to eventually either dominate, or eliminate humanity, or both.

Missing Pieces

Notably missing from the book are conversations with the key individuals. Richardson made requests, but did not anticipate time with Mangione himself. And his relatives stated explicitly that they had chosen not to talk to the press in advance of the trial. Another glaring gap is any detailed data about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from the early 2020s, company earnings increased by 33%.

Ambiguous Findings

By the conclusion, the reader has no clear understanding of Mangione’s personality or what might have motivated his alleged crimes. More troubling, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him gives the reader the uncomfortable impression of having been exposed to a veiled endorsement of an targeted killing. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson delivers his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the insane ruler, the monster in the maze and the emperor without clothes.” In that tale “Robin Hoods come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the people are suffering and everything is confusing anymore.”

One thing is certain: as Mangione’s legal representatives continues in its attempts have charges that could lead to the death penalty thrown out, any reference of myths, Robin Hoods, champions or villains will not be admissible as evidence in defence of this attractive individual with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” soon to be on trial for murder.