Why Finding the Suspected Killer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is Harder Than You Think

CNN
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He killed a high-ranking CEO on a sidewalk in America’s largest city, where thousands of surveillance cameras monitor millions of people every day.

But the man who killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson outside the busy hotel continues to elude capture. Now authorities say he could have been slipped out of New York – that is, the elusive shooter can be anywhere.

It could take weeks to find and clean the massive trove of footage from all the places the shooter might have traveled.

Police believe the suspect arrived in New York 10 days before the murder, on November 24, a law enforcement official told CNN. During the entire stay, the suspect repeatedly appeared on camera, but always kept a hood on his head and wore a mask in public places.

“He knows what he’s on camera is New York,” said John Miller, CNN’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.

Police are searching and reviewing countless hours of video footage in hopes of finding more clues, such as whether the suspect was seeing anyone in town.

“It will take them weeks. … They will videotape every step of his journey,” Miller said. “They will film his every move.”

While the gunman had carefully planned many parts of his crime and escape, he may be surprised by “how far the NYPD is going to go in collecting video,” said former NYPD Chief Kenneth Corey.

“And they’re not going to just take him from the crime scene to his escape route,” Corey said. “They’re actually going to rewind and they’re going to try to count all 10 days that he spent in New York. And I don’t think he foresees that.”

Minutes after Thompson was shot and killed Wednesday, surveillance video captured the suspect riding an electric bicycle into the sprawling Central Park at 6:48 a.m.

Coverage 843 hectaresCentral Park is bigger than the country of Monaco. “It’s a big park and it’s a difficult area,” Miller said.

The suspect apparently left the park within minutes. After reviewing surveillance footage, police believe he may have left the park via the West 77th Street exit, but without “characteristic gray backpack” was spotted on the suspect during the shooting.

At seven in the morning, a man similar to the suspect was spotted riding a bicycle on West 85th StreetThis is evidenced by the recordings of private surveillance cameras. Law enforcement officials told CNN they have reviewed the video and believe it likely shows the shooter.

We now have a photo showing the face of the suspect without the mask. How did no one recognize him and contact the police?

Some portray the killer as a man who exacts justice against the health care system they say they value profits over patients’ liveswhich may discourage some people from reporting possible sightings of it.

Evidence suggests the gunman saw himself as “a Batman-type figure who sought justice on behalf of the people he believed he represented,” said Brianna Fox, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida.

Law enforcement sources told CNN the words “detain” and “drop” were written on the ammunition and shell casing associated with the shooter. Police are investigating whether those words point to a motive. The words are similar to a popular phrase about the insurance industry: “delay, denial, defense.”

Tens of thousands of social media users mocked the death of the CEO of the insurance company and did not express sympathy after the murder. A publication of parent company UnitedHealthcare mourning Thompson’s death received more than 82,000 reactions as of Friday; 76,000 of them are laughing emojis.

The image of the suspect with his mask down was taken during a moment of flirtation with a dorm employee is the best photo that helped identify the suspect, authorities said.

But contrary to popular belief, facial recognition software doesn’t always connect a suspect’s face to an individual, said Donnie Scott, CEO of IDEMIA Group, which specializes in facial recognition technology.

“Most Americans might think that law enforcement has a picture of everyone in the United States. This is very untrue,” he said.

“If he’s not a New Yorker and hasn’t been arrested before, chances are he’s not going to be in their criminal database or their photo repository,” Scott said.

“What’s likely happening in all law enforcement agencies is they’re looking for that image in their local systems to see if that criminal exists in their galleries.”

Some believe that police can simply cross-check a suspect’s face with driver’s license photos from the Department of Motor Vehicles. But the reality is not so simple.

“This is a legal process of obtaining a permit. By law, New York State does not have access to the DMV database for law enforcement purposes,” Scott said. “It requires cooperation and sharing of information, and the basis and willingness of the relevant agencies to allow it to be shared under the law.”

Scott said facial recognition technology should not be used in isolation to identify a suspect.

“Our job is to really facilitate the work of law enforcement agencies. If you think about the real basis and use of facial recognition technology, it’s sifting through millions and millions of images to get a small subset that an expert can use to make an identification,” he said.

“A face is not a fingerprint. It’s not DNA. It is not used for positive matching. It’s used to get to a small enough number that an expert can say, “Yes, I believe we have an investigative investigation.” What other evidence could we possibly have that could match this person to the crime?”

The police are investigating a the phone was found in the alley suspected mileage. But getting data from a phone can be extremely difficult, depending on the phone model and operating system.

“This is something that law enforcement agencies at all levels have been struggling with for the last 10 years … and it has to do with the ubiquity of end-to-end encryption and these incredibly secure blocking programs that are on most phones,” said former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe .

During his time with the FBI, he recalled, “When we took an iPhone into an important case, whether we could get into it depended not only on the model of the phone, but also on the specific iOS. version that it was launched.”

For example, “you can access an iPhone 7 running any iOS, but you can’t get into it if it’s running another iOS,” McCabe said. “It’s a very complex matrix of hardware and software, and that’s what determines whether law enforcement can get past the blocking mechanism.”

Even if the authorities can “uncover the phone,” he said, the technical problems may not end.

“When you go into a phone, you’re dealing with the problem of encrypted content,” McCabe said. “Some users are not that disciplined and they save things like text messages and such on their phones so you can read it from the device. But others are better when messages expire and are automatically deleted.”

Detectives recovered possible DNA evidence from an abandoned cell phone and from a water bottle they believe the suspect may have been drinking from. The potential DNA evidence has been sent to a lab for testing, a senior law enforcement official told Miller.

But having DNA data may not be enough to identify a suspect.

If a suspect has committed a crime before and their DNA has been entered into a law enforcement database, they may be easier to identify. But if the suspect was previously clean, it becomes more difficult to identify him with DNA.

“If they can pull the DNA … but there’s no match with those DNA (samples), it’s going to be very difficult,” said Callahan Walsh, co-host of “America’s Most Wanted.”

There is a possibility of isolating the suspect with help genetic genealogyif one of his relatives entered his DNA data into a public database.

“They can bring in family DNA, but it takes a little longer to process,” Walsh said. “There must also be a match for one of his family members somewhere in the database.”

Even despite the suspect may have left New YorkNYPD will continue to search for evidence, Commissioner Jessica Tisch said

“We are currently processing a tremendous amount of evidence in this case,” Tisch said Friday.

“We already have a lot of forensic evidence, fingerprints, DNA evidence,” as well as “big camera footage” of the suspected shooter moving around the city, she said.

But despite the abundance of evidence, finding a suspect is a difficult task, McCabe said.

“It’s a lot more complicated than it looks.”

Mark Morales, Shimon Prokupec, Tami Looby, Claire Duffy, Elise Hammond, Erin Burnett, Brynn Gingras and Courtney Fennell contributed to this report.