A Swedish serial killer named Peter Mangs lived in Boca Raton on and off and frequented the Town Center mall in Boca Raton around the same time as a series of infamous murders took place there, according to a new documentary, which claims that Mangs could be the killer police have been looking for over the last 16 years.
A three-part series called “Under the Radar: Secrets of a Swedish Serial Killer” follows a Swedish documentarian named John Mork and a former investigator, now TV personality, Jim Rathmann as they seek to unravel clues left by Mangs, a musician-turned-killer, about murders that he may have committed in Florida and for which they say he was never charged.
The documentary, named for one of Mangs’ unsettling songs, was released Tuesday on the ViaPlay streaming service, which “specializes in the best in Nordic and European crime dramas, thrillers, dramedies, and documentaries.”
Mangs is often described as a “lone wolf terrorist” who typically targeted immigrants in racially motivated shootings across the Swedish city of Malmo. Researchers believe he began his radicalization in South Florida. He is now in prison in Sweden, where at least 15 killings are linked to him.
His father, Rudolf Mangs, who researchers believe may have contributed to his radicalization with his own anti-immigrant sentiment while the two were in Florida, still lives in Boca Raton, according to the documentary team.
Mork and Rathmann use pictures, song lyrics and letters from Mangs about his time in Florida to conclude that seven unsolved murders in places from The Keys to Plantation could be linked to him. But out of all the cases they bring up, they believe the Boca Raton mall killings have the clearest connection to Mangs, who spent time in the mall, according to a friend’s diaries, often stayed with his father, who lives minutes away, and shares a resemblance, some say, to a sketch artist rendering of the possible killer.
Mork became obsessed with Mangs and kept up correspondence with him through letters, ultimately planning to confront him in prison and get him to confess to the crimes, but that never happened.
Eventually, Mork and Rathmann took their findings to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and Boca Raton Police, the lead agencies on the Town Center mall murders. In the documentary, detectives appear open to the theory. However, they later determined that there was no connection between Mangs and the murders, spokespeople for the Sheriff’s Office and Boca Raton Police told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“We don’t have evidence to support he is our suspect,” said Teri Barbera, a spokesperson for PBSO. “(Detectives) are not willing to give me anything specific, but we have no evidence to support that he’s our suspect ultimately, so he’s been ruled out.”
Mork and Rathmann argued that police shut them out and may have never fully investigated their leads, which include an abandoned house near the Spanish River drawbridge that Mangs led them to through clues and where they claim there could be human remains.
“Boca Raton PD’s gonna need to speak to what it is that they have or have not done,” Rathmann said. “I know we provided them some information they didn’t know before.”
Mork’s interest in Florida is spurred by a confession that he says Mangs once made to a psychiatrist who got to know him over the course of his time in prison. He told her that he had killed two people in Florida.
The psychiatrist never got the chance to speak to him about this again before she died, but she told Mork about the confession. Thus began his expedition from Sweden to South Florida.
Researching possible investigators to join the series, he found Rathmann, who had grown up in Boca Raton before moving to Louisiana, later working as a Secret Service agent. He has made several television appearances, including the role of lead investigator on “Joe Exotic: Tigers, Lies and Cover-up.”
Rudolf Mangs and radicalization in South Florida
Peter Mangs first came to South Florida in 1996 to jump start his music career, according to a paper by Swedish historian Mattias Gardell, who researched Mangs and other “lone wolf” white supremacists. He stayed with his father, who, along with local Florida “militia” groups, ended up assisting in his radicalization.
When Gardell visited Rudolf Mangs’ home in Boca Raton, he found that Rudolf Mangs had decorated Peter’s old room with knives with swastikas, iron crosses, and the German eagle, according to the paper, “Urban Terror: The Case of Lone Wolf Peter Mangs.” Gardell was also interviewed in the documentary.
Rudolf Mangs was a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and owned several guns. He took his son to local gun shows and introduced him to “the flourishing militia scene of South Florida,” Gardell writes.
“Peter was really interested in this movement,” Rudolf Mangs told Gardell at one point, according to the article, “which deals with conspiracy theories, the militias, and patriots.”
Peter Mangs stayed in South Florida for three years, trying to launch a music career to no avail.
“His American years were not all in vain, he says,” the article states, referencing an interview with Mangs. “His encounter with the militia milieu, white power literature, and the ‘sovereign citizen’ concept made a lasting impression.”
Mork visited Rudolf Mangs, years later, in the Boca Raton home several times over the course of the documentary, once with a criminal psychologist. He hopes that the father will give him some insights into whether his son committed murders while staying in his home, perhaps even admit that he knew about them. But Rudolf Mangs adamantly denies having any such knowledge.
“I took for granted that this was some fantasy of his,” he said.
Rudolf Mangs acknowledged that he and his son shared views on immigrants — that they must live their lives in such a way as to not be a “burden for society” — but said they “never discussed starting to kill immigrants.”
He did not return a voicemail from the Sun Sentinel.
The Boca Raton mall murders
The Town Center mall, a luxury shopping destination in the heart of one of South Florida’s wealthiest cities, was thought to be safe before it turned into a hunting grounds. Three murders and an attempted kidnapping, all connected to the mall, took place within the course of one year, in 2007. The perpetrator was never caught, and those who lived in South Florida at the time of the murders have not seen the mall the same way since.
“It’s probably the biggest crime in Boca Raton’s history,” Rathmann said.
The first victim was Randi Gorenberg. She was last seen leaving the mall after shopping for a John Legend CD on a Friday afternoon in March when someone kidnapped her, shot her, and threw her body out of a car in the South County Civic Center in West Delray Beach, 5 miles away.
Then came Jane Doe. She and her 2-year-old son were getting into the car in the mall parking lot in August when, suddenly, a man with a gun appeared in the back seat next to her son. He bound her with zip ties and made her wear blacked-out goggles. Then he had her drive around, at one point taking a couple hundred dollars out of an ATM, before letting her go.
To this day, Jane Doe’s identity has been kept a secret because the killer remains at large. But what she saw led to a sketch and description of the suspect: a man about 6 feet tall, with a long brown ponytail, who wore driving gloves, a floppy hat and glasses.
Finally, on a December day approaching Christmas, Nancy Bochicchio and her daughter, Joey, went to the mall.
Bochicchio had picked up Joey from school early that day to take her to a doctor’s appointment, her family said. Later that night, they had planned to meet with another family so Joey and her friend could go over lines for an upcoming Christmas play, where she would play a reindeer.
After the doctor’s visit, they headed to Town Center mall, exiting about an hour later through the Sears entrance. A few minutes later, there was a call from Nancy Bochicchio’s phone to 911, but it immediately hung up.
Just after midnight, a security guard at the mall noticed a black SUV with the engine running in the parking lot near Sears. He called Boca Raton Police to check it out. When they looked inside, they found Nancy Bochicchio and Joey, bound, with single gunshot wounds to their heads. They were also wearing zip ties and blacked-out goggles.
“It was apparent to us that they had been, what amounted to, executed in the rear of the vehicle,” Boca Raton Police Capt. Matthew Duggan told the Sun Sentinel in 2017.
Surveillance video showed that Bochicchio had also taken money from an ATM while people appeared to be in the back of her car. Boca Raton Police and PBSO officials believe that the latter two cases are connected, but their relationship to Gorenberg’s case remains uncertain.
What was Mangs up to?
By the time 2007 had rolled around, Mangs had already begun to kill. He fatally shot two men in Sweden in 2003, both chosen at random, because of their Arabic sounding last names, according to Gardell. But he was far from done.
Two years after the Boca Raton mall murders, in 2009, Mangs began a yearlong shooting spree in Sweden. He shot at immigrants, Muslims and Jews, with the idea that the crimes would start a race war. His only known white victim was a 20-year-old woman, who he shot three times late at night while she was sitting in a car with a man of foreign descent. Mangs later said that his goal was to punish a white woman for betraying her race.
Mork and Rathmann believe Mangs had the means and motive to commit the Town Center mall killings, which could have been racially motivated despite the victims being white. They say that passport information provided by Swedish authorities puts Mangs in Florida at the time of the murders, while diary entries and photos show that he had spent time at the mall, among other locations linked to unsolved deaths. Similar to the killings in Boca Raton, Mangs had taken one of his victims’ cards and pin codes, according to the documentary.
Multiple people interviewed in the documentary said that the sketch created with the help of Jane Doe looks eerily similar to Mangs. Though he was bald in many of his pictures, he did have a ponytail around the time of the murders, Mork said.
“Some of his motivation was robbery, too,” Rathmann said. “You know, ‘give me your credit card numbers, what’s the pin,’ things like that … so that fits when you take what he did in Sweden to what he does in the United States. There’s a lot of similarities that can link him to both.”
But the mall killings also appear to diverge from Mangs’ modus operandi. In Sweden, Mangs often shot from hiding places or far away, and did not kidnap his victims. Even though he lived near the Town Center mall, the zip ties used on the victims were purchased in Miami. And nearly all of Mangs’ known victims had darker skin.
Mork thinks if his goal was to start a race war, Mangs could have committed the mall attacks to instill fear in the community.
“The thing with lone wolf strategy is to make the public fear, you know, create chaos,” he said. “Nobody should be able to feel safe, and the victim doesn’t always have to be a certain ethnicity.”
Throughout the documentary, Mork and Rathmann meet with notable figures in local law enforcement and present them with their evidence, including Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg and lead detectives on the Boca Raton mall case.
They also hired Michael Gauger, a former chief deputy at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office who was acquainted with the investigation at the time, as a consultant to help them dig up information. Gauger introduced Mork and Rathmann to PBSO Detective Bill Springer, the lead investigator in the Gorenberg case.
Mork and Rathmann also met with Boca Raton Police later, though they described the meeting as tense: The detectives barely spoke a word or made a facial expression when they presented the evidence, Rathmann said.
“They just looked at us like they’re burning a hole right through us,” he said. “So I don’t know if they just don’t want the fact that there’s outsiders that came in and helped out with the case, and I’m not trying to speak negatively to it, it just was very odd in actions.”
Ultimately, detectives in both agencies decided Mangs was not the guy, according to spokespeople.
“I didn’t hear exact reasons why, but nobody thought there was involvement in it,” Gauger told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Barbera also declined to get into specifics, citing the active investigation, though she said that detectives had evidence to indicate that Mangs was not the suspect. She also seemed to think that he was not in the area at the time of the murders.
“Whatever evidence they got from the scene, this individual is not their suspect,” Barbera said.
‘Empty Telephone’
Mangs’ presence in Florida still raises questions about other crimes he might have attempted or committed. The documentary looks at seven local unsolved murders as potential connections, including the shooting of a Jewish man who lived near the Swap Shop in Fort Lauderdale, where Mangs’ recording studio was located, and a woman whose body was found wrapped in plastic in the Keys, near the iconic bridge where he had taken a picture.
None were as promising, according to Mork and Rathmann, and they didn’t investigate as thoroughly or present their findings to police.
The last discovery in the documentary isn’t a case at all. Mork receives a new letter from Mangs with a new song called “Empty Telephone” and specific directions to a location in Boca Raton, some of which Mork reads aloud:
I’m talking to the empty telephone
The girl on the other side is lying all alone
By a beach house in Boca Raton
You don’t get no better with an AK-47
Next to her little hand there is blood on the sand
Mangs instructs Mork to cross the Spanish River drawbridge, then head 200 to 300 meters north to a group of old, overgrown houses with views of the ocean. Mork follows the instructions, diving into a wooded area and passing a “No Trespassing” sign before he stumbles upon an abandoned house, overgrown just as Mangs described.
He and Rathmann hire a group of K-9 search and rescue dogs trained in sniffing out human remains. The dogs alert to something in the ground.
“The dogs that we use are true canine cadaver dogs, they will not hit on animals, deceased animals or anything other than true human remains,” Rathmann said.
But before they can begin to dig, Rathmann decides to call off the search so they don’t tamper with evidence.
Footage from the documentary then shows the group meeting with Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputies about the abandoned house. It “caught them completely off guard,” Rathmann recalled. A supervisor told them to cut all cameras and to wait while his team did its own assessment.
Mork and Rathmann say they still don’t know what happened at the location that day or if deputies ever performed a dig.
“We never got to actually find out, like, did they actually truly go and do a search or did they just say they did a search?” Rathmann said. “What is it? You know, they can come back and tell us, ‘hey, we didn’t get anything.’ But I find that kind of hard to believe.”
Barbera said in an email that “the location in question was explored, and currently, there is no evidence of any human remains buried there. If any credible new information comes to light, we will thoroughly follow up and investigate.”
Mork and Rathmann haven’t given up on the idea that Mangs has victims in South Florida. They are now working on season two, following up on their investigations in the area and focusing on another relative of Mangs who also lived nearby but who they declined to identify for now.
They hope that, at the very least, the documentary might jog someone’s memory.
“Maybe there’s something they saw, maybe they recognized Peter,” Rathmann said. “Maybe somebody had a strange interaction with Peter back in that time that would help connect. You never know where you’re going to get that one little piece of information that puts it all together.”
This article has been updated to reflect the full name of the documentary.
