Wellllll, if I was on the jury, I would be able to be convinced by evidence that he did it. Still wouldn’t go along with conviction, but that’s a different thing.

That being said, assuming all information publicly available is true, then he probably did it, or did it alongside someone with the plan of him taking the blame.

But that is the assumption that would have to be made, and I don’t assume that. I assume that the prosecution has to make a jury believe it. I’m damn near absolutist about not making a final judgement on my end until the person has had their day in court. Since it’s a fact that police can, will, and have manipulated evidence, have gained false convictions because of it, and sometimes prosecutors will go along with that, there has to be something a lot more definitive than what’s been shown in this case for me to state that he did it.

Since this was a high profile murder, the stakes are high enough that it is entirely possible for there to have been collusion between law enforcement agencies to rush a suspect into custody and fake a case around them. That’s as the extreme end of possibility to the extent that I seriously doubt it, but it’s possible.

So, the real answer is that I don’t believe much of anything about the case. If I believe something about it, that’s a matter of faith, not fact, and I simply don’t have enough facts that are proven to my satisfaction. I can still admit that he’s probably the guy, but that’s beside the point.

Thing is, in full transparency, the only thing the killer (be it Mr Mangione or someone else) did wrong was taking out just one target, or the wrong target, depending on how you look at it. A CEO is just a sock puppet for a board of directors and majority shareholders most of the time. Killing a CEO is like killing the sergeant of a unit; it’ll disrupt things, but it isn’t crippling. There’s still generals giving the same orders, and then have a new flunky in place in no time. A CEO is just the easier target because there’s only one of them.

You want to disrupt a major company like United, you have to go after more than one piece of the apparatus.