Serial Execution-Style Killings at Boca Raton Shopping Mall

BRIAN SKOLOFF writes:

[In December, 2007,] The 911 call lasted a split second. Not even a breath was heard.

It was Nancy Bochicchio's last desperate plea for help.

The single mom and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey, would soon be dead, each bound and shot in the head in the back seat of their black Chrysler Aspen.

March 23, 2007

Randi Gorenberg, 52, heads to the mall to do some shopping. It's a typical day for the bubbly, outgoing doctor's wife and mother of two.

Surveillance video shows her leaving the mall at about 1:16 p.m. She walks into the parking lot to her black Mercedes SUV.

Just over a half-hour later, at 1:54 p.m., witnesses spot her car driving through a park in nearby Delray Beach.

Then a gunshot.

Gorenberg's body falls limply from the passenger door, shot in the head.

Her Mercedes is found a few minutes later abandoned behind a Home Depot. Her purse and cell phone are missing. So are her black and white Puma shoes.

No one sees the killer. To this day, he's a ghost.

"It's been a very hard and sad year for me," said Gorenberg's mother, Idey Elias. "And whoever he is, he's still out there doing these evil things."

___

August 7, 2007

A 30-year-old woman and her 2-year-old son leave the Town Center mall on a balmy afternoon and head for their black Lincoln Navigator in Nordstrom's parking garage.

The woman puts her son in his car seat and loads her purchases in the back.

She gets behind the wheel and is startled to see a man sitting beside her child with a gun to his head. The gunman is dark-skinned, about 5'11", 180 pounds, wearing sunglasses and a full-brimmed floppy hat, possibly with a ponytail.

"Take whatever you want, just don't hurt us," she tells him.

The man orders the woman to drive to an ATM where she withdraws $600.

He then orders her into the back seat, where he binds her feet with plastic ties, secures her hands with cheap novelty handcuffs and fixes her neck to the headrest with another tie.

He's calm but threatens to kill her. She doesn't resist. They drive back to the mall where he puts a pair of blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes.

He asks if she's OK, even gets her a drink of water and her inhaler for asthma. Then he disappears.

The woman eventually frees herself.

"He took my license and told me if his picture was on the news that he would come after me ... and my son," she would later say. "I'm terrified."

She has concealed her identity from the public out of fear for her own and child's safety, appearing before reporters on the condition that her name and face not be shown.

Three days after she was attacked, the same man is believed to have robbed a woman at gunpoint in a parking garage at another nearby shopping area.

___

Dec. 13, 2007

It's just after midnight at the mall. A security guard making his rounds notices a black SUV idling in the parking lot and calls police.

The Bochicchios are dead inside.

Just 10 hours earlier, Nancy Bochicchio picked up Joey from her second grade class for a doctor's appointment. The inseparable pair then hit the mall.

They enter between Neiman Marcus and Sears and come out the same way less than an hour later, spotted on surveillance video, their long shadows trailing them in the afternoon light.

Video from a nearby bank then shows their car at a drive-through ATM.

Bochicchio withdraws $500. No one knows what happens next but the killer.

Both are bound in the exact manner as the August victim. Their eyes, too, are covered with blacked-out goggles.