Crime Immemorial

Randi Gorenberg was a wife, mother of two and longtime South Florida resident. She had grown up in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and married her husband, Stewart Gorenberg, in 1979. The couple eventually moved to Florida, where Stewart worked as a chiropractor. Their son, Daniel, was living at home in 2007, while their daughter, Sarie, was attending the University of Florida.

There was nothing in Randi’s known plans on March 23rd to suggest she was heading toward danger. She had been at home before driving to the Town Center at Boca Raton. Investigators later established that she purchased a John Legend CD and clothing—described in various reports as a top, blouse or pair of shorts. Mall surveillance footage captured her leaving at approximately quarter past one.

Investigators believe Randi was most likely confronted in or near the mall parking area and forced into her own SUV, although no witness has ever been identified who actually saw her abduction. Years later, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office Detective William Springer acknowledged how badly that absence has hampered the investigation: detectives know when she left the mall and they know approximately when she was killed, but they do not know where the Mercedes went in between.

The theory that eventually emerged was that Randi may have been the victim of a robbery or carjacking in which the perpetrator intended to force her to withdraw money from an ATM. But there was a problem: Randi did not carry a debit card.

Springer has suggested that this could have unexpectedly complicated the attack. From the offender’s perspective, Randi may have looked like an obvious robbery target: she was driving an expensive Mercedes SUV, was well dressed and carried an upscale handbag. An attacker expecting to force her to an ATM might not have believed her when she said she could not withdraw cash.

Exactly what happened next remains unknown. Investigators have found no evidence that Randi was tied or otherwise restrained. Springer has said he believes she may have tried to escape from the vehicle. If so, her resistance could explain why an abduction apparently intended to last longer ended so quickly and violently.

At one fifty-four p.m., the mystery suddenly becomes visible again. A witness at the South County Civic Center, adjacent to Governor Lawton Chiles Memorial Park in the Delray Beach area, reported hearing gunshots and seeing a woman being pushed from the passenger side of a black Mercedes SUV.

Randi had suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head. An autopsy conducted the following day confirmed the cause of death. The killer—or killers—did not remain at the scene.

Only five minutes after the 911 call, surveillance cameras recorded Gorenberg’s black 2007 Mercedes-Benz GL450 entering the parking lot of a Home Depot at Atlantic Avenue and Jog Road, less than two miles from the Civic Center. The SUV was driven around to the rear of the store and abandoned. Whoever stepped out of it managed to disappear without being clearly captured on surveillance footage.

The Mercedes immediately became one of the most important pieces of physical evidence in the investigation. Early reports described blood inside the vehicle, and investigators subsequently said they recovered physical and DNA evidence from it. Years later, detectives emphasized that evidence from the SUV could potentially link a suspect to Randi’s murder if the right person were ever identified.

Several items belonging to Randi were missing, including her Kooba handbag, her cellphone, and her black-and-white or white Puma sneakers. The disappearance of the purse in particular supported robbery as a possible motive, though whether robbery alone explains her murder is another question.

The SUV also generated another tantalizing clue. Investigators later said a Chrysler 300 may have been seen in connection with the Mercedes around the time it was abandoned. That vehicle would become important when detectives publicly named a person of interest several years later.

More than a year after the murder, the investigation produced one of its strangest developments. On August 12th, 2008, cards associated with Randi Gorenberg were used hundreds of miles from Florida.

According to investigators, purchases were made that afternoon in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Two portable PlayStation systems were purchased at a Sears in the Holyoke Mall in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Roughly twenty minutes later, another purchase was made in West Springfield. About an hour after the first transaction, a PlayStation 3 was purchased from a Toys “R” Us in Newington, Connecticut. Surveillance images showed two men associated with the transactions.

It appeared, at first glance, to be an extraordinary lead. If Randi’s stolen credit cards had remained in the murderer’s possession for more than a year, the men might provide a direct route to her killer.

But investigators warned against making that leap. They could not determine whether the men had any connection whatsoever to the murder. They might merely have obtained stolen card information somewhere down the line, or the cards themselves might have been cloned. No publicly disclosed breakthrough resulted from the transactions. It became another intriguing thread that ultimately seemed to disappear into the larger mystery.

In June 2011, four years after Randi Gorenberg’s slaying, investigators publicly announced what appeared to be a significant development. They wanted to speak with fugitive Michel Barrera.

Barrera was already wanted in Miami-Dade County on unrelated warrants involving armed bank robbery, attempted murder of a law-enforcement officer, fleeing police and firing at police during a high-speed chase. He had remained a fugitive for years.

The possible connection to Randi Gorenberg came from a confidential informant who had been incarcerated at the time of the murder. According to information released by investigators, the informant claimed to have heard members of MS-13 discussing Randi’s killing and said gang members had been involved. The informant further suggested that a hit man believed to be Barrera had participated.

There was also the Chrysler. Detectives said relatives of Barrera in Miami had access around the time of the homicide to a Chrysler 300 similar to a vehicle investigators believed had been seen following Randi’s Mercedes near the Home Depot shortly before it was abandoned.

America’s Most Wanted publicized the effort to find him. Authorities explicitly stated that they did not have probable cause to arrest Barrera for Randi Gorenberg’s murder. They wanted to locate and interview him to determine whether he had any involvement. He has never been charged with Randi’s murder, and the allegation connecting him to the crime originated with an informant rather than publicly disclosed forensic evidence.

What transformed the killing from an isolated mystery into something potentially larger were two extraordinary crimes that occurred later that same year.

On August 7th, 2007, a woman now generally referred to as Jane Doe visited the Town Center at Boca Raton with her two-year-old son. After putting the boy into her vehicle and loading purchases into the trunk, she walked around toward the driver’s seat.

Someone had slipped into the vehicle while the doors were unlocked. The man produced a gun and ordered her to drive. Over approximately the next forty-five minutes, he forced the woman to visit ATMs and withdraw money. He eventually directed her to a hotel parking lot, restrained and blindfolded her, then took over as driver. Eventually he returned the vehicle to the mall and left the mother and child behind alive.

The survivor provided investigators with something they had never received in the Randi Gorenberg case: an account of how an attacker could ambush a woman after she returned to her vehicle.

Four months later, something even worse happened. On December 12th, forty-seven-year-old Nancy Bochicchio and her seven-year-old daughter, Joey Bochicchio-Hauser, went to the same mall. Investigators believe they too were abducted and forced to make an ATM withdrawal.

Late that night, a mall security officer discovered Nancy’s SUV still running in the parking lot. Nancy and Joey were inside. Both had been restrained using an elaborate combination of duct tape, plastic ties, handcuffs and darkened goggles. Both had been shot to death.

The possibility that the cases were connected was impossible to ignore, but no publicly announced forensic evidence has definitively established that Randi Gorenberg was murdered by the same person responsible for the August abduction or the Bochicchio murders.

There are also differences. Most notably, Randi does not appear to have been restrained, whereas restraint and blindfolding were central features of the later crimes.

But to Detective Springer, those differences do not necessarily eliminate a connection. In a 2024 WPTV investigation, Springer said one of the theories he repeatedly returns to is that the same offender committed all three attacks and had effectively chosen the Town Center as a place to hunt for victims. He has suggested that the Randi Gorenberg attack might even represent an earlier, less-controlled version of the offender’s method: Randi, alone and apparently unrestrained, may have resisted, leading the attacker to refine his approach later by selecting women accompanied by young children and using restraints.

Retired FBI Special Agent John MacVeigh, who worked on the cases, has publicly stated that he believes the three incidents are connected. In his view, the similarities are too substantial to dismiss as coincidence.

There is another curious similarity: none of the publicly described attacks appears to have had a sexual component. That has led some investigators to question whether robbery was truly the central motivation. MacVeigh has argued that the money may have been secondary—that what interested the offender was control. Springer has voiced a similar suspicion, noting that an extraordinary amount of planning and risk seemed to be involved for relatively modest financial gain. Still, that remains a theory rather than an established fact.

As happens in virtually every unsolved homicide, investigators initially had to consider the people closest to the victim. Randi Gorenberg’s husband cooperated with investigators from the beginning. By 2014, Detective Springer publicly stated that her family members, including her husband, had been ruled out as suspects.

There is nothing publicly known to indicate that Randi recognized the person who entered or took control of her SUV. There is likewise no publicly established evidence that she was specifically followed to the mall because of her identity. If the later Town Center cases are connected, the mall itself rather than Randi may have been what attracted her killer.

The case has inevitably attracted theories outside law enforcement. One of the most publicized appeared in the 2024 Swedish documentary series Under the Radar: Secrets of a Swedish Serial Killer. Filmmakers investigated whether convicted Swedish serial killer Peter Mangs, who had spent time in Florida, might have been responsible for crimes in South Florida, including the Town Center cases.

The filmmakers pointed to circumstantial details they believed were significant, including Mangs’ presence in Florida and possible associations with a Chrysler 300.

Law enforcement subsequently reviewed the information. The result was notably less sensational: Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office officials said Mangs was not considered a suspect in the Randi Gorenberg murder, while Boca Raton police said that after fully vetting the information he was not considered a suspect in the other Town Center cases either.

In 2025, Springer said investigators continued to explore newer DNA-testing methods in hopes that advances in forensic science could eventually bring the case to a successful conclusion.

On March 23rd, 2026, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office again appealed to the public, but there has still been no arrest, and the murder of Randi Gorenberg is still unresolved.