Dateline NBC - Terror at the Mall

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

In this Dateline classic, a killer targets mothers in their SUV's who are out for a day of shopping at the mall in southern Florida. Dennis Murphy reports. Originally aired on NBC on August 7, 2009.Additional footage: WTVJ-TV, MIAMI, FL

On a steamy August afternoon in South Florida, the mall, like malls anywhere, can be a place to escape. An everyday Christmas of possibilities in the upscale shop windows. For some people, it's an air-conditioned main street where they can let their brains slip out of gear for a while. A lot of mothers go there with their kids to walk around, get them out of the house. Caller Jane, as in Jane Doe, is speaking in disguise because of the terrible things that happened to her one day after she and her young son had a nothing special wander through the big mall near Boca Raton, north of Miami.

While she was shopping, spraying on a sample of perfume, buying a fashion baseball cap, someone was out in the parking lot, waiting, watching, on the hunt for vulnerable women. He must have locked on Jane as she and her son exited the mall at Nordstrom about 1 o'clock that day. She was doing the usual mother's juggling act as she popped the hatch of her black SUV. I put my son in first. I strapped him in his car seat. He's in back. Yeah, in the back. Then I go to the back of the truck, and I put the stroller in,

shut the gate, and start walking to the front. And that's when I hear my son, and he's like, mama, mama. And I could tell he's worried or scared. That's when I look in to see if he's okay, and there's a guy sitting there. A guy in a floppy hat, wrap around shades, sitting in her SUV right next to her two-year-old. That moment, how terrifying is that? I was in shock at that moment. And I just stood there, and the guy said, get in the car. And I was frozen. And when he said, get in the car, for the second time, that's when I noticed the gun. The gun is pointed at her son.

The man in the hat orders her to drive away from the mall and find a drive-through ATM machine. She follows his directions. He tells me to withdraw $200, so I withdraw $200, and I gave it to him. And then I withdrew another $200, and draw $200 and I gave it to him and then I would do another 200 and another 200 and then when I go for the 800 it denies me because I reached my maximum. And yet you must be thinking we're both dead here. Yeah but the guy had said just do what I say and I'll take you back to the mall. But he doesn't. He tells her to pull into the slow-moving sludge of midday traffic. Her son, sitting next to the gunman, is lulled asleep by the moving vehicle.

Jane at the wheel, glancing at the car to her left. The other driver can't see inside the dark smoke glass windows of her big SUV. Never sees her start terror. I thought of crashing my truck. But then I thought, you know, if I did that, then he might get mad and hurt my son. The gunman orders Jane to pull into the rear parking lot of a Hilton hotel. He tells her to get out. And I was begging him not to kill me, and he said, I'm not going to.

I don't need any more problems than I already have or any more trouble than I'm already in. More trouble? What's this guy talking about? It's all a surreal jumble. One minute you're buying a baseball cap, and the next moment you and your young child are looking at eternity. I remember thinking, nobody knows that I'm going to die today. The gunman wants her to swap seats with him, him driving, her in the back seat with a kid. Then bad gets a lot worse. I see him pull out a pair of handcuffs. He handcuffs my wrists behind my back and he pulls out a bag of zip ties and he zip ties my ankles together and then zip ties my neck to the headrest. And he takes out a pair of darkened sunglasses with duct tape, I'm guessing, and puts them on my eyes.

So now I'm blindfolded. Speak to me of terror. I started losing it and I started choking, choking myself because the zip tie was so tight. Couldn't breathe and gagging and crying. And I was just hysterical. Whatever she's doing seems to work. Her abductor eases up on the zip tie around her neck. So he loosened it, and he's like, is that better? And I'm like, yes. He pulls into traffic and then abruptly stops again. He has a plastic bag with him.

He reaches in and pulls out a knife. I didn't know what he was going to do with the knife, so I was crying, please don't kill me, please don't hurt me. He's like, I'm not, just stay still, don't move. He cut the zip tie off my neck. And that was it, and started driving again. But now Jane thinks whoever this guy is, he doesn't seem to know the local roads.

He's managed to get himself onto the toll road, the Florida Turnpike, and he's steamed at his own error. He makes a U-turn and I guess my son's bottle fell and he started crying and I saw that it went like under the driver's seat so he grabbed it and gave him his bottle and you know he stopped crying. After two hours of this, him driving the big SUV erratically, Jane in back, bound by the ankles and hands, blackout sunglasses over her eyes. He stops the vehicle, and lo and behold, they're back at the town center mall where it all started. And tells me that he's going to put the zip tie back on my neck, and he's going to let me call somebody and tell them

that my truck is broken down and that they need to come get me. The guy dials her cell phone. I tell him who to call, my son's father. I told him, you know, my truck's broken down, come get me. Do you get the feeling he was trying to come across as a nice guy to you in some weird way? Like he changed to kind of a nicer guy in a way. It sounds kind of weird, but like a different person almost. But Mr. Nice and Accommodating was still in control. He had a final order for his victim. Now, when the police come, I want you to tell them that I'm short, fat, and black. He then

takes the sunglasses that he had on me off, and he put a pair of swimming goggles on me that were blacked out. In the back seat, still bound, strapped to the rear seat headrest, and now the world gone totally dark. He said to me, if I see anything on the news with my face or my picture or my description, I will come after you. The gunman slammed the door and was gone. But he'd be back. The mall was perfect for his kind of hunting.

The mall gunman had slipped away, but Jane Doe was still bound inside her idling SUV. Blacked-out swim goggles prevented her from seeing. Her two-year-old son was in his car seat beside her. How are you restrained now? You've been tied here at the neck. Right, and I was handcuffed behind my back. The father of her boy had been alerted and was on his way to the mall, but she had no intention of waiting to be found out in the many football fields of

mall parking. How do you get out of that? Well, I had my hands behind me, and I pulled them under my butt and threw my feet like this. And how'd you get out from a restraint on your neck? I had pulled the goggles up, and there was a button right here, and I pushed the headdress up. Like, I didn't know where he was. I was scared like he would see me and then at that point I was like I just have to go. Jane knew the mall and sped to the valet parking stand. I pulled up to the valet and I said can you please call the police. I was just kidnapped and he was looked at me like are you kidding and I was like no and I showed him all my restraints and he called the police. So after an ordeal like Jane's you kidding? And I was like, no. And I showed him all my restraints and he called the

police. So after an ordeal like Jane's, you'd think maybe you were finally in the clear when the police showed up. But it hadn't been Jane's day from the very start. And now the cops weren't making it any easier. She got the distinct impression that the arriving city of Boca Raton police officers did not believe her story. Not the gunman. Not the terrifying ride around. None of it. I don't know. It just didn't seem like that they believed what I was telling them.

Even with the scrapes that you had on your neck and your arms? Mm-hmm. The cops checked out the cheap handcuffs still on her wrists, the zip ties in the back seat, and simply did not believe that anyone could get themselves out of that kind of bondage, unless it was all a setup of some kind. She'd have to be a Houdini. Police didn't believe you could get out of that bind you were in, did they? No. And when she recounted her terrifying odyssey, the business about the Florida turnpike, they doubted her story even more. The SunPass electronic device on her windshield hadn't recorded her entering the toll road.

There was no debit on her account. The Boca Raton police captain at the time, Matthew Duggan, said the town's officers weren't blowing off the woman's story. They treated it, he says, in that Reagan-on-Gorbachev kind of way. Trust but verify. I wouldn't classify it as doubting the victim. I would clarify it as substantiating what they said, because ultimately when we catch this guy, and it will be evidence against them. They asked you to take a lie detector test, didn't they?

Yes. You've been a crime victim. What did that say to you? If they needed me to, for whatever reason, I was going to do it. I wasn't hiding anything. If there was a request for a lie detector test from the woman abducted, did that say something about initial hesitation in believing her? We have to be objective in what we look at. And, you know, if a lie detector was used, it would be another tool that would just substantiate stories. The Boca police did send some crime scene texts out that evening to process the car and gather some prints and DNA. But the authorities' initial skepticism about Jane Doe, whether she was trying to run some kind of a crazy game on them, meant that as a news story, it never got much play.

The account of the woman abducted from Town Center Mall came with this kind of asterisk attached. It was termed an alleged abduction. The tens of thousands of shoppers who use the mall every day never heard boo about it. It was as though Jane Doe had never encountered the gunman in the fishing hat and wraparound sunglasses. It was only a few days later, an eon in the lifespan of police blotter news, that the detectives were finally able to confirm Jane's story about getting on the turnpike. We actually pulled video records from the toll plazas. We could actually see the car, her car going through the toll plaza.

Apparently her SunPass device had simply malfunctioned when it indicated she hadn't entered the turnpike. Months went by and Jane never heard from the police again. She was just another urban crime victim with a hair-raising story to tell her friends and family. I just thought that they weren't going to catch him, and I didn't think anything was going to come out of it, unfortunately.

And then, three months after her abduction, she got a call from a sheriff's detective in the same county. They were working a case that had started at the same mall, an old case, an abduction, and the victim had been shot to death. Yes, she'd be happy to talk to them. I see his face every day.

Every day. I still do. The face of the carjacker. The guy who put a gun to her child and left her shackled in the back seat after forcing her to withdraw $600 from an ATM machine. A bad day at the mall for the young mother we're calling Jane Doe. You thought you were dead several times. Yeah.

At first, the local police didn't entirely believe her story of abduction and terror when it happened in early August. But now, in November, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, another investigative agency, asked for her help

in an ongoing investigation. They wanted to talk to me about the murder of Randy Gorenberg in March. Like Jane Doe, Randy Gorenberg had been at the same Boca Raton, Florida mall before she was shot to death during an apparent abduction. Randy was a 52-year-old mother of two married to a successful chiropractor, her mother, I.D. Elias. She was very down-to-earth, very basic, loving daughter, wonderful mother. That was Randy. On March 23, 2007, Randy Gorenberg stopped off at the town center mall a little before noon.

Wearing Puma sneakers and carrying an expensive purse, she was captured on an exterior mall security camera, pausing for a moment to check voicemail on her cell phone. It was 1.15 p.m. when she headed for her black Mercedes SUV with smoked out windows. What happened once she reached the parking lot, we do not know, because the mall owners had not placed security cameras there. 39 minutes after Gorenberg was photographed outside the mall, 911 got a call. Someone got shot. It's a female. The caller was saying he'd seen someone tumble from the passenger side of a black Mercedes SUV near a county park five miles north of the mall.

Oh, my God. Is she moving? No, she's dead. She's dead. She got two shots in the head. My gosh. Is she moving? No, she's dead. She's dead. She got two shots in the head. My gosh. Arriving deputies found that the victim wasn't wearing shoes, and yet her expensive jewelry, a Cartier watch, diamond ring, and necklace were untouched. There was no ID on the person. The SUV was gone.

It would later be videoed by a security camera at a nearby Home Depot. The abandoned Mercedes was found behind the store. The vehicle was registered to a Randy Gorenberg. The murdered woman now had a name. Then Palm Beach County Homicide Captain Jack Stringes. When we looked in the vehicle, we found that her belongings were gone. And her shoes were missing. Yes, her shoes were missing along with her purse.

The sheriff's detectives rolled to Randy Gorenberg's $2 million home. And there, in front of the house, they saw a young man who struck them as acting strangely. Back and forth, talking on the cell phone, smoking a cigarette. The young man in the family driveway turned out to be Randy's 25-year-old son, Daniel, who had not yet been notified of his mother's murder. The murder investigation was only hours old, but the detectives were displeased that the victim's son gave them an alibi that didn't check out and had handed over, as requested, the clothes he said he'd been wearing that day.

Only it turned out later they were the wrong clothes. Police officers don't like to be lied to. Correct. Well particularly when we're trying to narrow down the exact timeline. The timeline is critical to this type of investigation. Randy Gorenberg's husband Dr. Stuart Gorenberg also left detectives scratching their heads when they informed the chiropractor that his wife was dead. It was just not the typical response that you would see from family members when their spouses or kids have been killed and murdered. Within days of the murder, Dr. Gorenberg hired a lawyer. He and his son stopped talking directly to the police.

The cops were focusing their initial investigation on the usual suspects in this kind of out-of-the-blue, no-known-enemies kind of killing, family members. And the husband wasn't making himself any less suspicious in the cops' eyes by the way he was acting. Please help us find this murderer, this monster. Randy's mother and daughter, Sari, called a news conference to ask for the public's help. And even though they were in the same building that day, neither Dr. Gorenberg nor his son, Daniel, participated in the appeal. Were you angry at your son-in-law for not talking to the police?

I was angry, yes. But people handle things differently. Every communication I had with him for the first couple months, he was devastated. Attorney Guy Fronston represented Dr. Gorenberg and his son. He said they had absolutely nothing to do with Randy's murder. I understand the sheriffs are doing their job. They were trying to run down a murderer, and that's what we all want. They just were looking at the wrong people.

Detectives examined the chiropractor's finances and home life under a microscope. They looked at the son's emotional history. But months passed, and the cops were no closer to catching Randy's killer. So into the spring and even the summer, the murder of Randy Gorenberg is a mystery. Yes. Then that same summer came the Jane Doe carjacking at the mall. The Boca Raton police had given area agencies a heads up about the gunman's M.O. and asked detectives to go back through their old files for a possible match.

Maybe the Randy Gorenberg killing had its roots at the mall in an abduction like Jane Doe's. The similarities were obvious. The town center mall, two stylish women, both with big black SUVs. Personally, I don't believe in a coincidence. I think there's some significant connections there with the SUVs, the location and stuff like that. So it wasn't until November, eight months after the Randy Gorenberg killing, that police finally sat down with Jane Doe to hear her story from the top. She was looking like the lucky one who got

away, and her account would be investigative gold. Jane worked with a police sketch artist and produced a sketch of her abductor, the floppy hat, the wraparound shades, the bland regular features. Jane felt, though, that the composite hadn't really captured the guy who'd kidnapped her and her son. Still, the detectives were pleased. They had something to work with. I think she was very brave. She was a very good witness to what occurred. She's been able to provide us with significant information.

Two victims, but if it was the same perpetrator in both, why was one victim released and the other cruelly shot to death? And other differences, too. Jane Doe had been bound with handcuffs and plastic ties, blinded with blackout goggles. The murder victim had not been restrained in that same way. And with Jane Doe, the goal was apparently to steal her money from an ATM. But in the Randy Gorenberg case, that would have been impossible. Randy did not have an ATM card.

So hypothetically, if her abductor is intent on taking her to an ATM machine to withdraw some cash, Yes. and she's saying, I don't have an ATM card, Yes. he's probably not believing it. Right. But how could that have gotten him so jacked up that he ended up killing her? The cops get psychological and theorize it's because Mr. Control had abducted

an uncontrollable victim. She resisted, obviously, because she tried to get out of the vehicle just prior to getting shot. Jane Doe, on the other hand, obeyed all his commands and made a concentrated effort to talk to him. With my son in the car, there was no chance, no chance for me to fight back, so I couldn't risk his life. Despite Jane Doe's valuable addition to the Randy Gorenberg case file, weeks went by and they were no closer to finding her killer. By then, the Christmas decorations had been up at the mall for weeks. And in early December, out there, he was back. The hyena returned to the waterhole.

It was the most wonderful time of the year, and the retailers at the Town Center Mall in Boca Raton, Florida, couldn't agree more. December 2007. The parking lot was jammed with shoppers, few of them aware that one and probably two women had been abducted from that very place as they got in their SUVs. One had been murdered. Jane Doe was the other who lived to tell the harrowing tale. It comes the holidays, you've got to do some Christmas shopping, I imagine. Do you think about going back to the mall? No, I don't go to that mall. I pretty much stayed out of the malls. A good call on her part because on December 12th,

a town center security camera took a photo at about 1 p.m. of a mother and daughter entering the mall. Single mom Nancy Boquicchio and seven-year-old Joey were shopping for Christmas cards. The little girl was regarded by her family as a kind of miracle daughter. Nancy's sister Joanne Bruno remembered her sister thinking that once she turned 40, children weren't going to happen for her. The doctor said she wasn't going to be able to have any. So when she was having Joey, she was thrilled because it was really a miracle. Her original due date was Christmas Day. Well, she was our Christmas angel.

And what a bundle Joey turned out to be. A center of attention, dancing, karaoke-singing cutie, budding golfer. But on that December day, as they walked past the Sony store security camera on the way to the food court, they had only hours left to live. At 3 p.m., Nancy and Joey left the mall through the same exit that Randy Gorenberg had used on the day she was killed. We don't see Nancy and Joey reach their car, a big black SUV, because the owners of the mall had still not installed security cameras out there. They must have been grabbed upon reaching the SUV. Within minutes of them being on video exiting the mall, Palm Beach County

Sheriff's Office gets a 911 phone call from Nancy's cell phone. There's no dialogue and the phone immediately hangs up. Minutes later, Nancy Bocchicchio's black SUV is spotted at a drive-thru ATM, the same one Jane Doe had been directed to. She withdraws $500. Hours passed without any word about the mother and daughter. Then, just before midnight, a security guard at the mall noticed a black SUV with its engine idling. Inside the vehicle, it was as bad as you'd expect. Both of them. There was a female and apparently her daughter were dead in the back of a dark suv the festive christmas ribbons at the mall were joined by strong yellow crime scene tape as matt duggan took charge you're a veteran investigator you've seen a lot of rough stuff how cold how bad

is this mother daughter i mean how does anyone describe a mother and a daughter being shot at basically point blank range family members believe without hesitation that nancy died trying to defend joey i know my sister and i know to protect joey i know she was fighting and evidence of her resistance the cheap novelty store handcuffs used to restrain Nancy were broken, an indication that she'd struggled to get free. The timeline of the crime was a blank. No one had seen and no cameras recorded the SUV returning to the lot. But the unknown person at the wheel had almost certainly been there before

in almost identical circumstances. Nancy had handcuffs on her hands. Her feet were tied with tie wraps. She had goggles over her eyes that were also blacked out. And her head had been affixed to the headrest. This is all the signatures of your August robber abductor? To a T. There's no question in your mind that you're looking for the same guy in those two cases?

In my mind, there's no question at all. The cops knew what they had, and they were going to have to bring Jane Doe back into the picture ASAP. I got a phone call in the morning telling me that a mother and her child were found murdered at the mall. I don't even know the words to describe it. Like, my heart sank. I just, I knew it was him. Maybe he was going to murder me. And some chance, just he didn't.

I don't know why. And then I had to deal with him murdering, you know, a mother and her child. Looking back, Joanne, the sister, remembered that she and Nancy had even talked about the first incident. Randy Gorenberg of Delray Beach was murdered. But as they casually followed the news, it didn't seem to have had any connection to the Boca Mall. And few but her friends knew anything about the second incident, Jane Doe's carjacking ordeal. Some Boca Raton residents became outraged to learn that a kidnapper and killer had savaged women and children apparently at will, and the cops hadn't found him. This may be one in a string of similar violent crimes committed by a man or group of men preying on female shoppers. Now Boca Raton was a town deeply distressed.

With the specter of a possible serial killer hanging over one of South Florida's most affluent communities, councilmen were up in arms, shoppers thinking twice about going to the mall. I'm afraid to go to the mall. I'm afraid to take my kids anywhere. The Jane Doe story was certainly horrifying news to Nancy's sister. It must have been chilling for you to read and hear the account of that survivor of the abduction, the details about being restrained, threatened. And you have to wonder, are these the last kinds of words that my sister heard? It had to be.

I mean, they were tied up also, and Joey, poor little thing, she looked so frightened. It was a look I'll never forget. Seven years old. Yeah, seven. And on her eighth birthday, I bought her a coffin. And of course, the horror in an echo chamber was reverberating most of all for the woman who got away, a mother with her own young child.

I feel horrible, horrible for what they're going through. Jane Doe was back in the police interview room. Go over it again. Give us a detail. Who is this guy? Exactly. Who and where? After the mother-daughter murders in December,

police had no doubt that Jane was telling the truth about her abduction from the same Boca Raton mall in August 2007. The swimming goggles, the handcuffs, the plastic ties around her neck, everything he'd done to Jane, the killer had also done to Nancy Bocchicchio and her seven-year-old daughter, Joey. You know, it haunts me every day. My son and I might not be here today. Once skeptical police had given Jane a lie detector test. Now she was their star witness. They re-interviewed her. I went through it all again, you know, numerous times. The description that accompanied the composite sketch Jane Doe had come up with

was of a man she thought to be in his late 20s or early 30s, no body hair, someone who could have been at the bar next to you. He didn't have an accent, but he could have been Hispanic or maybe Pacific Island. About six feet tall, not much taller. Yeah, about six feet. Regular build. I saw he had a ponytail. Ponytail long. Yeah, he had a little ponytail about this long from the base of his back of his neck.

And it was curly. Jane had also told investigators that tucked inside a plastic bag from a shoe store called Traffic was a kidnap kit, a well-thought-out set of tools he used to control his victims. But still, something wasn't adding up. The work that went in to committing this crime, the planning, the preparation, does not equate to the ultimate reward. The killer, after all, got just a few hundred dollars from his victims, and now it was a matter of catch him before he strikes again. A reward of $350,000 was offered. The Boca Raton Police and the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office formed a task force of nine detectives assigned to the case.

Behind the unmarked door of the task force office, a visual reminder for investigators about what's at stake. We put up a couple of pictures of the victims, which are simple words underneath saying that this is why we're here. The task force determined after reviewing hundreds of hours of security camera tapes... I was just looking at the different people that were passing by in front of the store here. ...that the man in the floppy hat was not seen anywhere inside the mall following his victims. We got at least three

clear shots of Nancy and Joey, and we're confident that they weren't actually targeted or at least stalked while in the mall. That meant the killer laid in wait for his victims in the parking lot, pouncing only after they'd left the mall, in broad daylight with thousands of people around. During the Christmas season, there's approximately 70,000 people a day going in and out of that mall. Thousands of people, but just which one had blood on his hands? Police tried to get inside the killer's head. They reasoned that the mall was a place where he operated comfortably.

Did that mean maybe he was a current or former mall employee? Someone who perhaps knew that there were no security cameras in the parking lot? Detectives ran down hundreds of leads. Within days of the mother-daughter murder, one of the most promising leads was a report that Nancy's credit cards and cell phone had been found by two homeless men in a vacant lot in an African-American neighborhood in Miami, 60 miles to the south. It could have been a tactic he used to send us on a wild goose chase down to Miami. It could also be on his way home. It could be a place that he frequents but doesn't live.

It wasn't the first time the killer had tried to get police to think an African-American might be involved in the crimes. Remember, before he left Jane, the carjacker told her to lie to police about his description. I want you to tell them that I'm short, fat, and black. But she hadn't done that. She worked with a police artist at refining the sketch. She combed through magazines and went online studying men's pictures, looking for facial characteristics that resembled her carjacker. In February, by then six months since her terrifying abduction, Jane sat down once again with a new forensic artist, John McMahon of the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

When I was doing that composite, I just felt that I was dealing with a very brave and strong person. Unlike the first sketch attempts, where the floppy hat and sunglasses predominated, this time there was more nuance to the character, like the small ponytail. Detective McMahon had a hard time replicating the skin tone Jane had described, a golden brown, so he used bronzing lotion, which worked perfectly. It's very good. You know, as close as you can get from a sketch. Soon the sketch was out there in South Florida on moving billboards and wanted posters.

And some went up at the town center mall where the killer had targeted his victims beginning almost a year before. And there's one more incident that's come to light since the murders. But it goes back to August at the time of the Jane Doe abduction. A few days later, at another Boca Raton upscale shopping area, Meisner Park,

a gunman approached a woman in a parking garage and demanded that she take him to an ATM machine. Now, if he was the same carjacker as the one who'd abducted Jane Doe and who'd murdered the woman and child, then on this day, his target would escape altogether because she wasn't getting in the car with him. She refuses and actually threw her purse on the seat well of the car, gives him $200 cash and basically says go away. Initially, the woman refused to file a report. But months later, after the double murders, she came forward and gave police a description of the suspect. It matched that of Jane's carjacker to a T. This is why this case is so interesting and so frustrating,

because the actions of the perpetrator on this date totally are inconsistent with his actions on other dates. And then, of course, after there's the second event, there's a firestorm of criticism of Boca Raton PD that if we'd only known about August, if they'd only put up signs, if they told us, mother and daughter would never have gone to the mall that day. Is that a fair criticism? I believe that our response to the August case

was swift and it was thorough. We put it out to the mall and we put it out to the media. So, no, I really don't think it's a valid criticism. However, hindsight being 20-20, if we could have done anything to alleviate, you know, what happened to Nancy and Joey, you've got to believe we would have done it. The Mall Killer Task Force has sent its investigative work onto the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, the so-called profilers for a psychological portrait of what makes this perpetrator tick. It does give us a fresh set of eyes to look at the case.

We had our own veteran of that same FBI unit set eyes on the case, too. He wanted to talk to Jane Doe and check out the crime scene. When my son saw the sketch on TV, he says, bad man. So he knows what happened. What kind of man kidnaps women, terrorizes children, sometimes kills, and sometimes doesn't? What goes on in the brain of the man in the fishing hat and the wraparounds?

We asked former FBI agent Clint Van Zandt what he made of the ongoing investigation. Van Zandt was with the behavioral sciences unit, the Profilers, when it first started. Clint, this is the entrance and exit where the security camera sees two of the victims coming out. Yeah. We drove to the upscale town center mall in Boca Raton. On any given day here, there were an estimated 35,000 shoppers for the killer to choose from when selecting his prey. Clint, your idea of a hunting ground, a mall, put me in the head of a perpetrator. This is the place to come and find it all.

Van Zandt also spent two hours debriefing Jane, the only woman carjacked by the killer who lived to talk about it. I just tried to talk to him like he was just a regular person, maybe try to relate to him in some way. I think that's what really saved you in this situation. The elaborate paraphernalia he brought with him, dime store handcuffs, swimming goggles prepped as blackout masks, suggested that we were in psychopath country in trying to understand him. It seems to me after the ATM you go from a scary incident to absolutely horrifying when he gets out his bag of Trex. There is something unique about those cuffs for him. It seems to me after the ATM, you go from a scary incident to absolutely horrifying when he gets out his bag of tricks. There is something unique about those cuffs for him, whether there is a ritualistic aspect about it, whether that means something psychologically to

him. But a signature aspect, just like Picasso signing a painting, the signature says this is unique to me. But remember, that unique bag of tricks was absent in the Randy Gorenberg case. She was the only victim who wasn't blindfolded or handcuffed. And that critical difference, what Van Zandt calls the killer's signature, caused investigators to rethink their theory of the case. Maybe the Gorenberg murder is not related to the Jane Doe or Bocchicchio cases after all. At this point in the investigation, we have not been able to forensically link the Gorenberg case to the other incidents that occurred at the mall. No forensic link, even though Gorenberg, like the other two women,

was last seen at the mall before she was carjacked. And then in December 2008, police released a new theory about the Gorenberg case, a lead that could put Randy's husband, Stuart Gorenberg, in the picture, perhaps as the true intended victim that day. Police said they'd learned he was seeing prostitutes before his wife's murder, cruising the family's black Mercedes GL through some of the seedier streets of nearby Broward County. Investigators theorize that maybe some toughs also living in that neighborhood spotted his fancy suv coming and going and decided to tail him home one day with the idea of a future ripoff in mind

it may be possible that he was a target that somebody may have followed him knew where he lived and that maybe he was the intended victim that day but randy happened to be driving the mercedes-benz a theory that suggests robbery but if that was the motive victim that day, but Randy happened to be driving the Mercedes-Benz. A theory that suggests robbery. But if that was the motive, why did the killer take only Randy's purse, leaving behind a valuable Cartier watch and a diamond pendant? It's only a working theory, and investigators acknowledge problems with it. A woman mistaken for a man. Maybe it was something botched and hurried.

Well, if he was the intended target, and again, this is just an investigative theory, it was just a crime of opportunity at that point. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Randy Gorenberg's mother heard the police say that the killer or killers may have actually been after her son-in-law rather than her daughter, it was another hammer blow to the family. You have no idea how difficult that was to hear. The fact that someone else may have been the target and not my daughter, that's like a double murder to me. Stuart Gorenberg's attorney responded that the allegation of his client seeing prostitutes was baseless.

And while the police may have been floating this theory to generate leads, the tactic hadn't worked. As a result of local media coverage of the prostitute's angle, the lawyer says that Dr. Gorenberg, a chiropractor, had to close his practice. In 2009, almost a year after Randy's murder, police interviewed the Gorenberg's son, Daniel, again. Police say he was uncooperative in the early stages of the investigation, but in this go-round, he answered all of the detectives' questions and has been officially ruled out as a suspect.

So now two police agencies in two different counties are pursuing two different theories of the crimes. As a result, the Boca Mall Murder Task Force is no more. Technically, this task force would be termed, I guess, disbanded. At this point, by the time the forensics came in, we felt comfortable in saying that the cases are not linked. Plus, both investigations appeared to be heading in different directions. Boca Raton PD has only one full-time detective working a case getting colder and colder. It hurts. Makes me feel that, you know, they're giving up. Well, at least before Palm Beach County and Boca Raton were working together, I felt it was

more manpower. At Nancy Boquillo's house, time was for a while frozen back to that day in December 2007. Joanne Bruno preserved her sister's house just as it was when Nancy and her seven-year-old daughter left to go Christmas shopping at the mall. She would go over to the house a few times a week to think about Nancy and Joey and grieve. After four years of the house being abandoned, she gave it to her daughter and her children. I promised my sister before she was buried that I wouldn't give up and I won't. I just pray to God every day that before I leave this earth, they do catch him. That's the one thing I need, that he's caught.

Jane Doe and the families of Randy Gorenberg and Nancy Bocchicchio sued the owners of the town center mall, alleging the mall did not have adequate security in place. The owners denied those allegations, saying the mall was and is a safe place and that now there are surveillance cameras in the parking lots. All of the cases have been resolved without the mall owners admitting guilt. The files are sealed.

As for Jane Doe, she's gone on with her life, but not without looking over her shoulder sometimes. I like to see him get caught. I like to be able to just look in his eyes, you know, to see who this person was that did this to me and that did this to Nancy and Joey. For now, he's still only a sketch and a lifetime of horrifying memories.