I think there’s a healthy dose of remembering all the times it’s been reported how police have railroaded innocent people for the sake of a conviction and closing the case, mixed with seeing this person as a modern-day Robin Hood and not wanting him to be identified. The dude could have been wearing a Beetlejuice suit with a face like Sloth from the Goonies and people would still say “that’s not him” because he put on a tiny pink cowboy hat.
This man will be an American folk hero in time. And if that thought seems disgusting, I’ll invite you to read up on American history.
Funny thing is, anyone willing to do an extremely targeted killing like this, and get away for so long, must be at least moderately intelligent. If they spent the time being able to figure out when and where he would be most vulnerable, who’s to say they didn’t spend a similar amount of time learning makeup techniques to cover their true skin tone, or stuffing gauze into their cheeks to change their facial structure, or small tubes in their nose to widen it out, or glue-on eyelashes and color contacts, or putting a rock in their shoe to change their gate (especially good in this case for establishing a false motive and sending the cops in the wrong direction), or learning how to sew and making that jacket out of a trench coat that successfully converts back to a trench at the pull of a string, or making a realistic silicone mask with embedded ultra-bright infrared LEDs that blind cameras (especially night vision) from being able to get an accurate picture… With a little work, you can find step-by-step instructionals, or entire communities, for all of that.
For all we know, the real killer might be a one-legged dwarf from Zimbabwe with incredible stagecraft skills.