Boeing is a company, and companies don’t make decisions. People do. So who at Boeing is motivated enough to take on the personal liability of a first degree murder conviction?
Say an exec at Boeing paid someone to pay someone to 'handle' the situation. "Will no one rid me of these meddlesome whistleblowers - oops I dropped my huge luggage case of unmarked bills" kind of thing... I'm not saying they did, to be very clear, just answering this hypthetical.
Where would you put the odds of that person ever facing "a first degree murder conviction"? If it's anywhere over 1%, I think you might be naive, and would benefit from looking at actual conviction rates for serious crimes (~2%) [0].
Even if they were incredibly sloppy about it, the motivation to admit in front of the world that Boeing did this to multiple whistleblowers is strongly in the wrong direction.
And as others have pointed out, repeatedly, Boeing is in the business of killing people. Billions of easy dollars are at stake.
So, who at Boeing might be motivated enough to take the <1% chance to keep raking in billions of dollars, protect America's 'reputation' (such as it is), and personally keep cashing in 6 or 7 figures a year? Any of them. Damn near all of them. Easily over 80%. It's not a job for people of conscience.
0 - https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major...
Murders have much better clearance rates than other "serious crimes" (whatever that means), so the chances of getting caught is probably far higher than 2%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
If you click the link in the article to the author's paper [0], "serious crimes" are defined in detail...
And you were correct to call that out. Thanks! Happy to be wrong on this one.
True conviction rates for specifically reported murder/manslaughter are generally around 50%. Theft and Burglary indeed skew the numbers a lot, with an extremely low clearance rate and vastly more reports. (All theft/burglary losses combined are only a fraction of wage theft [1], for perspective.)
All that said - if these were murders, they were committed by people with a vastly different set of resources compared to the average 'crime of passion'. I doubt that conviction statistics re professional murder are easy to come by, but I'd bet everything I own that they're significantly lower than 50%.
0 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3566383
1 - https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...