This article originally ran on Tuesday, December 10, 2024 in New York magazine.
Former FBI agent Jerry Clark served six years on the Cincinnati division’s violent-crime fugitive task force and was later the lead investigator on the notorious “Pizza Bomber” murder case. Today, he’s a professor of criminology at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the co-author of four books, including On the Lam: A History of Hunting Fugitives in America. We talked to him about the manhunt for Luigi Mangione, who allegedly fled from Manhattan after gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4.
How does law enforcement go about apprehending a fugitive?
You start out with, “What do we know happened?” Then you start to piece together how he got to the scene and where he went after he left, and you start searching for imagery. We call it canvassing. In the digital age, every business has a camera, every person has a camera in their pocket. So you’ll canvass and follow the trail of where the last known sighting was.
It takes hours and hours of painstaking police work to get those videos. They don’t just appear. You’ve got to go find them. I used to even look at people riding on the bus. If there’s a bus route near where the suspect was last seen, you find the bus driver who was working that shift and ask if they have any regular customers, then put out a note asking anybody that was riding this bus at this time to give you a call. It’s all just hard gruntwork.
And then you go through hours of footage. Once you have a clear image, you put it out over the media as quickly as possible to get the help of the public. You’re creating digital billboards so that everybody gets to see this face. Now you’ve got millions of investigators.
You start to get tips, and that’s what you rely on. That’s eventually what solved this thing. A conscientious person in the McDonald’s in Altoona saw him and contacted the authorities. The public should be really proud of themselves, because someone saw something and they said something.
The shooter had developed a Robin Hood image. Some people were swooning over him. I wonder if that enthusiasm could have contributed to his undoing by feeding the coverage.
I think you’re right. That fascination, good or bad, provides the interest, and then we utilize that to help us figure out where he could have gone.
He probably thought he was home free in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where nobody might have any concept of him being there. But the pictures were out.
From the perspective of somebody who wants to get away, what did Mangione do right, and what did he do wrong?
One thing he did right was to try to hide his footprint before the event. He went to a hostel using a fake ID from New Jersey and planted a bike that he used to get away. I wouldn’t quite call him organized, but he did take some steps.
He made some mistakes, too. It’s so hard not to. He pulled his mask down in the hostel, and later in a cab, and they were able to get pretty good photos of him.
With cameras everywhere, it must be incredibly hard not to be detected. You slip up for an instant, and a camera’s gotten you.
Exactly. You’re picked up. And that one image is all we need. It’s hard to commit the perfect crime these days, it really is.
I was thinking that if they didn’t get him in the first couple of weeks, he’d be gone. He’ll be in another country.
The longer it takes, the more difficult it becomes for investigators. As long as you keep getting sightings so you know where he was most recently, the trail stays fresh. But once it gets a little colder, the job gets more challenging.
I imagine that from the fugitive’s perspective, there’s a tension between wanting to get as far as you can and the recognition that the more time you spend on the road, the more chances there are for someone to spot you. Ideally, you’d like to be hunkered down in a cabin or something.
Just live as modest and simple as you can. And that includes no digital footprint at all. Every turn they make, they have to think that somebody is looking for them. They just never rest. It puts a lot of wear and tear on a person, physically and mentally.
The psychology is so interesting because they’re under so much pressure, yet at the same time, they really like the attention to feed their narcissism. It’s a dichotomy for them. What fun is a crime if you do it and nobody knows? And that’s why people usually get caught.
Why would you assume that all fugitives would be narcissists?
Most of the time, criminality involves some touch of narcissism. “Look what I did.” It’s all about me. A flare of attention-seeking behavior is always present.
The fandom for Mangione may have fed public awareness to his capture, but I wonder if it could have helped him as well. If people want you to get away, they won’t report you.
I’m telling you, I’m shocked that no one called and said, “Hey, I recognize the guy in the photo.” A cousin. A brother. A student. A classmate. Maybe someone did call in, but the fact that during the press conference they said that they didn’t know his name until that day — wow. That was really shocking to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.