Terror at the mall

Jane Doe: I see his face every day, every day. I still do.

The face of the carjacker. The guy who'd put a gun to her child and left her shackled in the back seat after forcing her to withdraw $600 from an ATM machine.

It was a bad day at the mall for the young mother we're calling Jane Doe.

Dennis Murphy: You thought you were dead several times?

Jane Doe: 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 her for help in an ongoing investigation.

Jane Doe: They wanted to talk to me about the murder of Randi Gorenberg in March.

Like Jane Doe, Randi Gorenberg had been at the same Boca Raton, Fla., mall before she was shot to death during an apparent abduction.

Randi was a 52-year-old mother of two married to a successful chiropractor.

Dateline interviewed her mother, Idey Elias.

Idey Elias, victim's mother: She was very down-to-earth, very basic, loving daughter. Wonderful mother. That was Randi.

On March 23, 2007, Randi Gorenberg stopped off at the Town Center Mall a little before noon.

That was her that day, in Puma sneakers and carrying an expensive purse. An exterior mall security camera captured her pausing for a moment to check voice mail 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.

911 got a call 39 minutes after Gorenberg was photographed outside the mall.

(911 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.

Male voice: Oh my God.

Dispatcher: Is she -- is she moving?

Male voice: No, she's dead. She -- she's dead. She got two shots in her 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 videotaped by a security camera at a nearby home depot. The abandoned Mercedes was found behind the store. The vehicle was registered to a Randi Gorenberg. The murdered woman now had a name.

Palm Beach County homicide Captain Jack Strenges.

Capt. Jack Strenges, Palm Beach County homicide: When we looked in the vehicle, we found that her belongings were gone.

Dennis Murphy: And her shoes were missing.

Strenges: Yes, her shoes were missing along with her purse.

The sheriff's detectives rolled to Randi Gorenberg's $2 million home, and there in front of the house they saw a young man who struck them as acting strangely.

Strenges: Back and forth talking on the cell phone, smoking a cigarette.

The young man in the family driveway turned out to be Randi’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.

Dennis Murphy: Police officers don't like to be lied to.

Capt. Strenges: Correct. Particularly when we're trying to narrow down the exact timeline. The timeline is critical to this type of investigation.

Randi Gorenberg’s husband, Dr. Stewart Gorenberg, also left detectives scratching their heads when they informed the chiropractor that his wife was dead.

Strenges: 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 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.

Idey Elias: Mother... please help us (crying) find this murderer, this monster.

Randi's mother and daughter, Sarie, called a news conference to ask for the public's help.

Even though they were in the same building that day, neither Dr. Gorenberg nor his son Daniel participated in the appeal.

Dennis Murphy: Were you angry at your son-in-law for not talking to the police?

Idey Elias: I was angry. Yes. But people handle things differently.

Guy Fronstin: Every communication I had with him for the first couple months, he was devastated.

Attorney Guy Fronstin represents Dr. Gorenberg and his son. He says they had absolutely nothing to do with Randi’s murder.

Guy Fronstin: 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 Randi’s killer.

Dennis Murphy: So into the spring and even in summer, the murder of Randi Gorenberg is a mystery?

Strenges: 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 Randi 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?

Capt. Jack Strenges: Personally I don't believe in 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 Randi 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 could be investigative gold.

Jane worked with a police sketch artist and produced this 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.

Jack Strenges: 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 there are 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 Randi Gorenberg case, that would have been impossible.

Idey Elias: Randi did not have an ATM card.

Dennis Murphy: So, hypothetically, if her abductor is intent on taking her to an ATM machine to withdraw some cash and she's saying, "I don't have an ATM card," he's probably not believing it.

Idey Elias: 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.

Capt. Jack Strenges: 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.

Jane Doe: With my son in the car, there was no chance for me to fight back. So I couldn't risk his life.

Despite Jane Doe's valuable addition to the Randi 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 water hole.

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