The Murders of Nancy and Joey Bochicchio

On Wednesday, December 12th, 2007, 47-year-old Nancy and her 7-year-old Joey Bochicchio left the Boca Raton Town Center Mall after doing some Christmas shopping. Surveillance video showed the two girls leaving the mall, with everything appearing to be normal. However, several hours later, Nancy’s SUV was spotted in a back parking lot of the mall, still running, after the mall had closed. Inside, police found Nancy and Joey, bound and executed. The investigation that followed revealed that these two murders may not have been random at all, that they could’ve been another attack committed by a still-unknown serial killer.

Who were Nancy and Joey?

Nancy Jo Ann Bochicchio was born on August 21st, 1960 in the Bronx, New York. Known to friends and family as Titsi, Nancy was described as tough on the outside, but with a kind heart. Her sister, Jo-Ann, said that growing up in the city made her sister street-smart. She even told a story about a purse-snatcher trying to grab Nancy’s bag off her shoulder. Instead of letting her purse go, she bit the attacker’s hand! She spent much of her free time doing charity work as a child advocate. Friends described her as “a good spirit, who would help anyone and always saw the best in a person.” She loved gardening and was part of a very tight-knit Italian family. Nancy was a stock analyst who was running her own business and was a very hard worker. In the 1990’s, Nancy followed some of her co-workers as they relocated down south to Florida. She and her boyfriend, Philip Hauser moved to Boca Raton, Florida.

In 1999, Nancy turned 39-years-old and found out that she was pregnant. She gave birth to her daughter, Joey Noel Bochicchio-Hauser. Not long after, Nancy married her boyfriend and Joey’s father, Philip. Despite the two making an attempt at starting a family, Nancy and Philip separated three years later. Regardless, Nancy and her daughter Joey were best friends and inseparable. Joey was described as outgoing, generous, bubbly, well-spoken, and very mature for her age. She was nice to everybody, whether she knew them or not. She took lessons in ballet and golf and loved practicing cheers and singing karaoke. Unlike most of her peers, Joey would try almost any food. She even enjoyed eating clams, oysters, and mussels! Her favorite colors were pink and purple and she was growing her brown hair long so she could donate it to “Locks of Love”.

Nancy worked hard so she could afford the tuition to send Joey to the private school, St. Jude Catholic School, in Boca Raton. After separating from Joey’s father, Nancy didn’t really date anyone. She was worried about having a man in the house around Joey, and her number one priority was her daughter. In the local newspaper, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, an article written after Joey and Nancy’s death, perfectly summed up their mother-daughter relationship perfectly:

“Perhaps it was because Nancy Bochicchio had her only child late in life. Or maybe it was because she was a single mom that she built her life around Joey…She clung to her daughter, brought her everywhere she went, spent so much time with her that their two personalities virtually blended into one. Joey, 7, was mild-mannered yet outgoing. She was mature beyond her years…

’Joey was Nancy. That was her mold,’ said Timmy McCurdy, a family friend. ‘They weren’t even like mother and daughter. They were sisters.’”

The Day of the Murders

On Wednesday, December 12th, 2007, 47-year-old Nancy picked up 7-year-old Joey early from school. Joey had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon and they had plans to meet with a schoolmate of Joey’s and her family later that night so the kids could go over their lines for a Christmas play. Joey was cast as a reindeer. After Joey’s doctor’s appointment, the girls went to the nearby mall, the Town Center Mall in Boca, to do some Christmas shopping. Surveillance video showed that they entered the mall through an entrance between Sears and Neiman Marcus at approximately 2PM that afternoon. The pair is seen leaving through the same entrance just after 3PM. At 3:14PM, 911 dispatchers received a call from Nancy’s cell phone, however it immediately hung up. The dispatcher called her cell phone back within a minute, but there was no answer.

Later that evening, the mall closed down as usual at 10PM. Just before midnight, a mall security officer noticed a black 2007 Chrysler Aspen SUV parked near the south side of the parking lot by Sears. The vehicle was still running. Finding it suspicious, the security officer called the Boca Raton Police Department’s non-emergency line to request an officer come check the vehicle out. When the officer arrived, he found a horrific scene.

Nancy and Joey had both been bound with duct tape and plastic zip ties, and appeared to have been shot in the head at point blank range. Nancy had athletic goggles that were blacked out, covering her eyes. There was a zip tie around Nancy’s neck, binding her to the headrest. The mother and daughter were dead in the back of the vehicle, described by some on scene as looking like they’d been executed.

The community was absolutely stunned. Who would kill an innocent woman? Who would kill her seven-year-old daughter?? Friends and family of Nancy and Joey couldn’t understand what happened that afternoon. How had the mother and daughter been brutally murdered in broad daylight with no one noticing for almost eight hours?

The Investigation

Investigations into the movements of Nancy and Joey on the day of their murders gave police security footage of them walking into the mall and out of the mall. They saw no evidence to suggest that anyone was following the pair and nobody was seen approaching them as they left the mall. (I don’t believe there’s surveillance video of the parking lot…I imagine if there was, we’d know a lot more!)

Some of Nancy’s belongings were missing from her vehicle, including her credit cards and cell phone. Police tracked Nancy’s credit card activity and found that she’d made a large withdrawal from an ATM near the mall on the day of the murders. Surveillance video at the drive-thru ATM showed Nancy’s SUV pulling through. She withdrew $500 and pulled away. Those who saw the video said that there appeared to be people in the backseat of the SUV. Police were able to determine that right after Nancy withdrew the money at the ATM, her SUV was parked back in the mall lot, with the engine running. Everything else that happened is still unknown. Police located Nancy’s cell phone and credit cards in Miami shortly after the murders. It was less than an hour away from Boca Raton. Two homeless men had reportedly found Nancy’s purse and used one of her credit cards. Police questioned both men, but quickly cleared them of any involvement. Investigators also determined that the duct tape and zip ties used for binding Nancy and Joey were likely bought from a chain store in Miami. They did not elaborate as to how they determined this. The murders were a huge news story, not just in Florida, but around the country. The community was completely stunned that something like this could’ve happened in such an upscale area in the middle of the day. It wasn’t very long after the murders that investigators began connecting them to not just one, but TWO recent incidents at the mall.

Randi Gorenberg

Randi Gorenberg was born in 1955 in Brooklyn, New York. She was married in 1979 to a chiropractor named Stewart Gorenberg. Shortly after marrying, Stewart decided to move his practice south to Boca Raton, Florida. In the following years, Randi gave birth to a son, Daniel, and a daughter, Sarie. The family lived in an upscale community in Boca. Randi was known as someone who would do anything for her children. She often volunteered in the community and at her kids’ schools. Randi’s best friend was her mother, Idey. After Idey’s husband passed away, she moved to Florida to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren. She described her daughter as down to earth and very loving.

On March 23rd, 2007, almost 9 months before the Bochicchio murders, 52-year-old Randi went shopping at the Town Center Mall in Boca Raton around noon. She bought some new shorts at Old Navy and a copy of John Legend’s CD. Surveillance video showed Randi leaving the mall through the same entrance that Nancy and Joey would walk out of in December.

Less than an hour later, just before 2PM, people sitting in Gov. Lawton Chiles Memorial Park, about five miles away from Boca Raton, heard gunshots. They looked up to see a dark, Mercedes SUV. A woman was pushed out of the SUV and the vehicle sped off. Just 39 minutes after the surveillance video captured Randi leaving the mall, a 911 call was made. The caller told 911 that a female got shot and that he’d seen her fall out of the passenger’s seat of a black Mercedes SUV near the park. The dispatcher asked if the victim was moving. The caller said that she was dead and that she had two shots in her head.The woman was Randi Gorenberg and she was dead from a gunshot wound.

A few minutes later, surveillance video at a nearby Home Depot showed Randi’s SUV entering the parking lot, followed closely by a white Chrysler sedan. The SUV was later found abandoned in the back of the Home Depot parking lot. Nobody had seen anyone in or around the SUV in the parking lot. There was a bullet casing found in the vehicle, but Randi’s shoes, purse, and cell phone were all missing. Strangely enough, her Cartier watch, diamond ring, and expensive necklace were still on her.

Initial investigations focused on Randi’s husband and son, however there was no evidence connecting either of them to the murder, just the investigators’ gut feelings. When the sheriff’s deputies initially went to Randi’s home to inform them of what had happened, they were struck by Randi’s son’s behavior. They said that Daniel gave them an alibi that didn’t check out. Police said that Daniel also gave them the wrong clothing, when they requested the clothes that he’d been wearing that day. When detectives informed Mr. Gorenberg about his wife’s murder, they felt his reaction didn’t make sense to what they expected from a murder victim’s husband. Shortly after, Mr. Gorenberg hired a lawyer for him and his son. Randi’s mother and her daughter, Sarie, held a news conference, pleading for any information about Randi’s murder. Ultimately, police were unable to find anything that connected Randi’s husband or son to her murder.

Police received a tip from a jailhouse informant. He said that he overheard gang members talking and taking credit for Randi’s murder. The informant said that the gunman was named Michael Barrera, a fugitive who moved between South Florida and Mexico. One of his relatives reportedly owned a white Chrysler that closely matched the vehicle that looked to be following Randi’s SUV into the Home Depot parking lot on the day of her murder. Investigators have been unable to connect Barrera to Randi’s murder.

Jane Doe

On August 7, 2007, about five months after Randi Gorenberg’s murder, the Town Center Mall in Boca Raton became the sight of yet another abduction. A young woman, known only as Jane Doe due to her fear of being targeted by this attacker again, and her two-year-old son left the mall around 1PM, exiting through the Nordstrom’s exit. She put her son in his car seat in the back seat of her black SUV, then shut the door and walked to the trunk. She popped the trunk, folded up her stroller, placed it inside, then shut the hatch. As she walked towards the driver’s seat, she heard her son say “mama, mama” in a voice that she described as scared or worried. She looked into the backseat and saw that there was a man sitting in the backseat beside her son. She stood there, in complete shock, as the man told her to get in the car. She didn’t move, so the man repeated his command. The woman then noticed that the man was holding a gun and pointing it at her son.

Jane got into the driver’s seat and the man instructed her to leave the mall parking lot and find a drive-thru ATM. When Jane reached the nearby ATM, her abductor told her to withdraw $200, then another $200, then another, until she reached $800, and the ATM denied her, likely because she’d reached her withdrawal limit. The man told Jane, “just do what I say and I’ll take you back to the mall.” He instructed her to pull back into traffic. Her son was asleep in his car seat, unaware of the danger he and his mother were in. Jane said she considered crashing her car or doing something to get someone’s attention, but everything came back to her son. If she did something the man didn’t like, he could hurt her son.

The man instructed Jane to pull into the back parking lot of a Hilton hotel, park the vehicle, and get out. Jane said she begged the man not to kill her as she got out of the vehicle. She said that the man 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.” He made her swap places with him, Jane in the backseat with her son and the man driving. Before he took his place behind the wheel, the man handcuffed Jane’s wrists behind her back, zip tied her ankles together, then zip tied her neck to the headrest. The man pulled out a pair of sunglasses with duct tape over the lenses and put them over Jane’s eyes, so she was essentially blindfolded. Jane was panicking, and the zip tie around her neck and the headrest was making things even worse. She felt like she was choking, as she gagged and cried. The man loosened the zip tie and asked her if that was better. Jane said yes, then the man drove out of the parking lot.

As they drove, Jane watched as the man pulled out a knife. She cried again begging him not to kill her. He told her that he wasn’t, but that she needed to hold still. He reached back and cut the zip tie off from around her neck, then continued driving. Jane didn’t think the man seemed to know where he was going. He ended up on the Florida Turnpike, which was a toll road. Obviously, the man did not want to go through a toll, as he was abducting someone. The man made a U-turn, which Jane said, caused her son’s bottle to fall onto the floor and roll underneath the driver’s seat. The two-year-old began crying, until the man reached underneath his seat, grabbed the bottle, and handed it to him.

Jane said that the man continued to drive around, for about two hours, while she was still bound and had her eyes covered. When he finally stopped, he took the sunglasses off of Jane and she realized that they were back at the Town Center Mall. Jane said that the man told her that he was going to put the zip tie back around her neck and that he was going to let her call someone. He instructed her to tell the person she was going to call that her vehicle was broken down and they needed to come get her. She requested that he use her cell phone to call her son’s father. The man dialed the phone and Jane told him that her vehicle was broken down.

When asked later by an interviewer, Jane said that the man seemed to become nicer at this point. Like, he was kind of a different person. The man hung the phone up and told her what to tell the police when they came. He wanted Jane to tell them that he was “short, fat, and black.” He added that if he saw anything on the news with his face or description, he’d come after her. The man took the sunglasses off Jane and replaced them with blacked-out goggles. With that, the man was gone.

Jane immediately began working on freeing herself from the restraints. Her hands were still handcuffed behind her back, so she was eventually able to pull her hands down, past her butt, and slip her hands over her feet, so her hands were still cuffed, but now in front of her. She pulled the goggles from her eyes and pushed a button on the headrest to remove it from the seat. She jumped into the driver’s seat and drove to the mall’s valet stand. She told the valet that she’d been kidnapped and asked him to call the police.

The Boca Raton Police arrived on scene and Jane told them what had happened. Jane described the man as having been wearing a floppy fishing hat and wraparound sunglasses. She believed him to be Caucasian and approximately 20-years-old and about 6 feet tall. She said that she was given the impression that the police didn’t believe her story. Jane said that the officers looked at the bindings still on her and didn’t believe that she could’ve escaped the way she said that she did. Additionally, Jane’s Sun Pass (an electronic device that tracks when a vehicle passes through a toll road) had not recorded her vehicle entering the toll road, as she said they did during the drive. Police asked Jane to take a lie detector test about the event. Crime scene techs came out to process Jane’s vehicle.

The Boca Raton Police Captain, Matthew Duggar, said that the department wanted to make sure that they were confirming all of Jane’s information so that it could be used as evidence against him. He said that a request for a lie detector test would just be another tool in building a case against the abductor. After reviewing video records from the toll area, police later determined that Jane’s vehicle DID go through the turnpike. Her Sun Pass likely malfunctioned. Unfortunately, even with Jane’s description of her abductor, authorities were unable to identify him. The only news coverage that her abduction received was a small paragraph in the newspaper. It was referenced as an alleged armed robbery.

Connections?

Police did not initially believe that Randi Gorenberg’s murder was related to Jane Doe’s abduction or Nancy and Joey’s murders. Prior to Nancy and Joey’s murders, police were trying to determine whether Randi’s murder was at all connected to Jane’s abduction. They had similarities that were difficult to ignore: abducted from the same location in the middle of the day, both good-looking women driving dark SUVs, and both were clearly coerced with a gun. However, why was Randi killed, while Jane Doe and her son were brought back to the mall parking lot, virtually unharmed? There was no evidence that Randi had been restrained or had her eyes covered like Jane Doe had. It appeared that the motive for Jane Doe’s abduction was robbery, but with Randi, getting cash from an ATM would have been out of the question. According to her mother, Randi didn’t carry an ATM card. Was Randi murdered simply because she couldn’t withdrawal cash for her abductor? Some investigators believed that Randi was shot because she was trying to exit the vehicle as they drove by the park, which is why she was pushed out of the vehicle.

Captain Matthew Duggan of the Boca Raton Police Department said that there was no doubt in his mind that the same man who’d abducted Jane Doe and her son had killed Nancy and Joey. With the discovery of Nancy and Joey, investigators really only had one witness who could help them: Jane Doe. They re-interviewed her, where she gave them the same description she’d given them initially of her abductor. She said that the man didn’t have an accent and didn’t really have any distinctive features. He was someone who you wouldn’t give a second thought to in a crowd. She said that the man was carrying a plastic bag from a shoe store by the name of Traffic. Jane said that inside of the bag was what was described as a “kidnap kit”. It included everything he needed to keep his victims under control.

Jane helped police refine the sketch of the suspect. She was able to describe a small ponytail that the man had, as well as a more detailed description of the coloring of his skin: a golden brown. Unlike the first sketch she’d help create just after her abduction, Jane felt the sketch captured what the man really looked like.

After the murders of Nancy and Joey, police learned about yet ANOTHER incident that happened that could’ve been related to the other abductions. In August, just a few days after Jane and her son were abducted, a woman was approached in a parking garage of another upscale shopping area, less than 15 minutes from the Town Center Mall. A man with a gun told her to take him to a nearby ATM. This woman refused to get in the vehicle with the man. She threw her purse into the floor of the passenger’s seat and gave him $200 in cash. Police said that she essentially told the man to “go away”. The woman refused to file a report, but came forward after hearing about Nancy and Joey’s murders. She provided police with a description of the man, which was a very close match to the description of Jane Doe’s abductor.

A former FBI profiler, Mark Safarik theorized that the reason there was such a significant difference in the outcomes of Nancy, Joey and Randi, versus Jane Doe and her son, was because of the amount of control he had or didn’t have. Safarik believed that the abductor may have realized that targeting someone with a small child would make them easier to control. This makes particular sense, since it seemed that Randi was unable to be restrained and attempted to jump out of the vehicle. When Jane Doe and her son were taken, she reported that she was able to remain mostly calm, which may explain why she was left alive. When Nancy was found, police said that her wrist restraints were broken and that it looked as though she’d attempted to remove her eye covering. The amount of control this man was able to maintain in each situation could have been the major influence as to whether each person lived or died.

Theories

In May of 2008, a man was arrested at a Miami mall after a store clerk called police. The clerk said that the man resembled the sketch from the Town Center Mall abductions and murders. When mall security arrived, they called local police to speak to the man. Police said that the man became belligerent and refused to answer questions. According to police, the man was carrying a hat and sunglasses similar to those described by Jane Doe. The man was ultimately arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The man was placed in a photo lineup, where Jane Doe did not identify him as her abductor. Police felt confident in Jane’s negative ID. They knew that she had the man’s face permanently cemented in her brain. Investigators were unable to find anything connecting the man to the Town Center Mall cases, other than a reported similarity in his looks to the abductor. He was released.

Most believe that the man responsible for the attempted abductions, abductions, and murders is a serial killer who has yet to be caught. Some even attribute them to having been committed by serial killer, Israel Keyes, however this just seems to be the go-to theory on Reddit when people don’t know who to blame LOL.

There has been no forensic evidence to connect the incidents, but the families of all of the victims strongly believe that increased mall security could have prevented these incidents. Jane Doe also believes that more significant police concern and news coverage could have possibly prevented Nancy and Joey’s murders. Joann, Nancy’s sister, agrees with Jane. She believes that if her sister had been aware of the recent incident with a woman and her child being abducted, she wouldn’t have taken Joey there. Investigators said that there is no way to know if publicizing Jane Does’ abduction more would’ve prevented the murders.

The most recent update of the murders and abductions reported that there was an unknown person’s DNA found in Randi’s SUV. The DNA has not matched anyone in their database. Police also said that her husband, Stewart, has not been totally eliminated as a suspect. There have not been any updates or released progress made in any of the cases.