The ongoing social media commentary about the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is not, given the state of contemporary society, entirely surprising. Nor is it without precedent.
Thompson was gunned down on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk on Dec. 4. Since then, there’s been fawning social media attention on Thompson’s alleged killer, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, now in police custody following a highly publicized manhunt.
Social media users and others have adulated Mangione for allegedly shooting Thompson, with the veneration turning him into a kind of modern vigilante folk hero.
Mangione’s purported agenda and motives tapped into the very real rage felt by many Americans toward the health insurance industry and have in certain circles galvanized public support for his alleged actions.
An interesting element of this saga is just how conspicuously it aligns with previous American manhunts, trials and criminal spectacles. Social media might create new avenues for cause célèbres, but public obsession with high-profile alleged or convicted killers is hardly a new phenomenon.
This development also serves to further obscure the line between what constitutes serious journalism and tabloid trivialism as news outlets increasingly serve as force multipliers for inane online commentary that otherwise doesn’t merit amplifying.
Some major outlets have opened their reporting, for instance, with proclamations about what the internet thinks about Mangione’s theorized motives and his photogenic nature.
But much of what we are witnessing now has been seen before, albeit in different ways.
Three examples of public enemies as celebrities
The following are some high-profile examples over the last 100 years:
John Dillinger: A Great Depression bandit synonymous with what’s known as the public enemy era, Dillinger was also a media darling. In the tradition of ancient Egypt and Rome, a death mask was even crafted to immortalize him after he was killed by FBI agents in Chicago in July 1934.
He was lionized in newspapers at the time as something of an American Robin Hood, given that bank robbery was seen as something of a noble pursuit during the period. Dillinger had legions of fans and sympathizers, as depicted in the 2009 Michael Mann biopic, Public Enemies.
Pretty Boy Floyd: Upon the death of Dillinger in July 1934, Charles Melvin Floyd became the No. 1 “public enemy” in the U.S. and was shot and killed by federal law enforcement agents in rural Ohio just a few months later.
The “Pretty Boy” sobriquet assigned to Floyd by the media fully took hold following the Kansas City Massacre in June 1933, until that time one of the largest single losses of life of law enforcement officers in the United States.
While the origin of the moniker isn’t entirely clear, collective acrimony towards major banks during the Great Depression coupled with Floyd’s conventionally handsome, sharp-dressed appearance ensured the nickname stuck and that his crimes were widely seen as righteous.
There have been countless tributes since his death, including a protest song by folk icon Woody Guthrie eulogizing him as a martyr for the poor.
O.J. Simpson: Among one of the most enduring surrealist images in American crime history is the infamous O.J. Simpson car chase along a California highway in June 1994.
Wanted in the stabbing murders of his ex-wife and her male friend, Simpson lead police on a nearly two-hour procession broadcast live on television.
Some viewers even flocked to the chase route in order to cheer Simpson on in-person and to display homemade signs of support and encouragement for him to get away.
The fanfare paved the way for what later became billed as the Trial of the Century, an eight-month televised courtroom saga that deeply divided the U.S. Simpson fans even sold merchandise outside the courthouse and eventually celebrated his acquittal with additional signage and swag.
Erotic attachments
In some other cases, however, there’s also a more complex and licentious dimension to the fandom. Many high-profile cases have seen a degree of public eroticization over those accused or convicted of a crime. American addiction medicine specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky noted in a recent interview that much of the adulation of Mangione appears to be less ideological and driven more by an “impulse” known as hybristophilia.
Hybristophilia is one of several paraphilias. It’s when people develop an attraction to a person who has committed a violent crime, up to and including murder.
A number paraphilias conflate sex with extreme violence, or require non-consenting partners in order to fulfil the fantasy and are therefore rightfully illegal (pedophilia, necrophilia, etc.) The growing list of paraphilias runs the gamut from the goofy to dangerous and have been a subject of clinical and forensic research since at least the Renaissance.
A twisted form of intimacy
Not every paraphilic interest necessarily develops into a paraphilic disorder, which happens when the erotic fascination and fantasy begins to interfere with proper social and occupational functioning and can involve high-risk and often illegal activities. But hybristophilia — classified as a person disproportionately drawn to and fascinated by people (typically males) who murder — usually ends up causing problems for those afflicted.
Like all paraphilias, hybristophilia exists along a massive spectrum. On one extreme end of the spectrum are women like Karla Homolka, Myra Hindley and Terri-Lynne McClintic, who gravitate to dangerous, often homicidal men and help them commit crimes.
They do so as a form of intimacy, risking their lives and often taking the lives of others in the process.
On the other end of the spectrum is a group I’m often asked about at public readings, lectures or in media interviews: the seemingly balanced women — and, in rarer cases, men — in apparently healthy intimate relationships who inexplicably abandon their families, their jobs and upend their
lives as a show of faith to their newfound obsession, whether they’re prison pen pals or malevolent, violent people met through other channels.
They become infatuated with these people, including killers they either meet personally or obsess over from afar, to the extent that their ability to maintain real relationships becomes impaired, if not irreparably damaged.
The examples of celebrity offenders highlighted above, in part, reflect the romanticization of people who take on what the public perceives as morally corrupt systems.
In the public enemy era, it was the ignominious big banks of the 1930s that were foreclosing on farms and homes while people were down on their luck. For Black Americans, the O.J. Simpson case became synonymous with systemic racism in the criminal justice system, in particular the then scandal-plagued Los Angeles Police Department. In Mangione’s case, the focus is a health-insurance system widely seen as cynical and heartless.
Michael Arntfield, Full Professor of Criminology & English Literature, Western University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.