ERIC S RAYMOND:
I don’t know anything other than public information about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
However, a primer follows about patterns in past political assassinations. I will sketch what scenarios an intelligence analyst would come up with looking at this one.
The first and most important rule in this kind of investigation is: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.
In political assassinations, as an ordinary murders, the correct suspect is usually the most obvious suspect. Airport-thriller-style convoluted plots and false-flag ops pulled off by unlikely people or organizations are rare in the real world.
Accordingly, when you’re trying to solve a political assassination, the right question to ask is “Who said they wanted him dead?”
Then, you infiltrate those organizations, or arrest a bunch of members, and do contact tracing. Usually you do in fact find your killer that way. It’s not very different from ordinary police work except for the stakes.
There are broadly speaking three different kinds of assassin: the nutter, the zealot, and the pro. They are not difficult to distinguish once you got your hands on them.