A Swedish serial shooter named Peter Mangs lived in Boca Raton on and off and frequented the Town Center mall in Boca Raton around the same time as the infamous murders took place there, according …
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Documentary links Swedish killer to infamous unsolved Boca Raton mall murders. Police say he’s not the guy
A Swedish serial shooter named Peter Mangs lived in Boca Raton on and off and frequented the Town Center mall around the same time as the infamous Boca Mall murders took place, 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” 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.
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.
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.”
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