The dark fandom behind healthcare CEO murder suspect

They came in hoodies, they came in masks, shuffling their feet and laughing nervously while waiting for a winner to be announced.
Just a few days after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered on a New York City sidewalk, these young men had lined up in Washington Square Park to compete in a lookalike contest for the man wanted for his murder.
It was sparsely attended and seen as a joke by those who did turn up, said Talia Jane, a journalist who was there.
But it underlined an obsession with a murder suspect that has gripped social media since the killing on 4 December, fuelled by latent anger directed at America’s private health insurers.
“There was a lot of tinder already there, a lot of discontent, a lot of frustration already there, and [this] sort of threw a match on it,” Ms Jane said.
And it has only grown since the suspect was named as Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League-educated member of a prominent Baltimore family.
In TikTok videos, memes and group chats, a young man accused of shooting a father-of-two in the back on a New York City sidewalk has been fawned over and praised as a kind of folk hero.
This fetishisation was remarkably widespread, not limited to radical corners of the internet or any political affiliation, troubling many observers.
“We do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” said Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, where Mr Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s.