I’ve spent years cracking serial killer’s secret code hidden in sinister song… does it reveal unsolved US murder spree?
“FIRST kill – big deal; second kill – no big deal” .
These were the chilling words Sweden’s worst serial killer wrote to the man who was trying to make sense of his horrific crimes.
Peter Mangs was convicted of two murders and eight attempted murders in the city of Malmo.
But a piece of sheet music written by the killer in prison filled with clues and codes led investigators to believe he could also be responsible for a string of unsolved crimes in Florida, including the brutal double murder of a mother and her seven-year-old daughter.
Now, a new documentary, Under the Radar, follows journalist John Mork and Barack Obama’s former bodyguard Jim Rathmann as they attempt to crack the code in Mangs’ music and potentially link him to crimes in the States.
Jim says: “Peter Mangs is no ordinary criminal. He’s a terrorist. And his motive in Malmo was to create chaos. I believe that was his motive here too. In the most extreme and evil way possible.”
Between 2003 and 2010 multiple murders and sniper attacks terrorised the city of Malmo.
A gunman carrying out what appeared to be a series of random attacks was striking fear in the community – with 15 shootings between October 2009 and October 2010.
The same weapon had been used in many of the shootings and almost all the victims were immigrants.
In 2010, the killing spree ended with an unlikely arrest.
Undetected kills
The seemingly quiet and unassuming Peter Mangs, 38, had no previous criminal record, but evidence in his apartment made it clear he was no amateur assassin and linked him to several shootings and murders going back a decade.
The failed musician had gone out at night in disguise, killing undetected, constantly evading the police by making sure he didn’t kill anyone with who he had any prior links so the police could not pin down the killer by investigating the victim.
He was a lone wolf activist, a racist killer who sympathised with white supremacist groups.
Driven by xenophobic views shared with his father and far-right authors, he believed what he was doing would destabilise society, strike fear into the immigrant community and fuel the fire of a race war.
He saw himself as an Aryan god.
Mangs was jailed for life in 2013 for two murders and eight attempted murders but, despite this, he considered himself to be an intellectual, far superior to anyone else.
For many people close to the case, this sparked fears that the crimes he was convicted of were just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2018, documentary maker John Mork started looking into the Mangs case and met with the killer’s prison therapist, Kicki Lindberg.
She told him that Peter had confessed to committing a double murder in Florida and she was convinced he was telling the truth.
But Kicki also had another chilling piece of evidence. Mangs had written a song – Under the Radar- filled with clues and codes. And if you could crack those, you could figure out who he had killed.
Dying from cancer, Kicki passed the handwritten sheet of music to John Mork and made him promise he would do everything he could to uncover Mangs’ American crimes.
John started corresponding with Mangs by letter and spent hours poring over the song, trying to crack the clues.
He also called in some experts – musicians and graphologists to try to crack the codes in the song’s notes and lyrics.
As well as the song, they also gained access to Peter’s computer, which contained hundreds of photos which helped them to track his movements in different parts of Florida during the time of his seven-year killing spree.
A diary from that time placed him in Florida, visiting his father Rudolf who lived there.
The team believed that Peter’s arrogance meant he never expected anyone to be able to piece the jigsaw together.
But John travelled to Florida and enlisted the help of former secret service agent and Barack Obama’s bodyguard turned homicide detective Jim Rathmann to help him find out if the Swedish serial killer had murdered in Florida and, if so – who were his victims.
“I thought it was an interesting and unique case,” says Jim. “It is not every day that somebody calls you with letters and all the communications and adding a song with lyrics with clues for a homicide. It was very exciting. This is the first one that involved music.
“He would leave clues about what he was driving, he was talking about a Cadillac, the places he was going to, he was trying to draw hints for you to put things together.
“Quite honestly it was clever the way he went about it, because people are listening and not having a clue about what the real meaning about it is, let alone that he is talking about the homicide where the victims were real and their families are suffering.
“It was really interesting to listen to those lyrics and try to find out what he is talking about and get to the bottom of it.”
Jim, from Florida himself, used his local knowledge to pinpoint exact locations featured in Mangs’ song lyrics, diary and photo library and managed to link places he captured on camera with unsolved murders.
Together, John, Jim and their team examined around 20 unsolved Florida murders, but three cases stood out.
Murder connections
In March 2007, Randi Gorenberg, a 52-year-old mother-of-two, was shot and killed at point-blank range in Boca Raton near a cash machine.
CCTV footage showed Randi’s car being followed by a white Chrysler 300 – the exact make of vehicle owned by one of Peter’s family in Florida.
And a diary entry made by Peter’s friend has him test-driving the car.
Just months later, mother and daughter Nancy and Joey Bochicchio were found murdered in their SUV in the car park of a Boca Raton shopping mall.
For that composite sketch to be so similar and the features and structures that you can’t change, like the chin or the nose, that was very interesting. To me, it is Peter
Jim Rathmann
It was the biggest police investigation the area had ever seen – the mother and her seven-year-old daughter had been ambushed as they went back to their car, bound and shot at point-blank range.
And the diaries obtained by John Mork showed Peter Mangs had visited that same mall.
Two months previously, a woman in the same area said she had been car-jacked and kidnapped. She went to strap her two-year-old child in the back seat and turned to see a man with a gun pointed at her child.
Wearing blacked-out sunglasses, the attacker handcuffed her and zip-tied her to the car’s headrest. She managed to escape – but police believed the same man was responsible for both attacks.
And the woman’s artist’s impression of her attacker looked uncannily like Peter Mangs.
“It looks a lot like Peter,” says Jim Rathmann. “In the composite sketch, the suspect has a ponytail, and Peter at one time had a ponytail. But Peter was also a master of disguise.
“In Sweden, when he committed the murders, when law enforcement went to collect evidence, he had numerous disguises – wigs, clothing items, earrings, even eyebrows. He would change his entire look.
“So for that composite sketch to be so similar and the features and structures that you can’t change, like the chin or the nose, that was very interesting. To me, it is Peter.”
In all three cases, the motive was robbery. And in Peter’s first murder in Sweden, he stole his victim’s credit card so he could empty his bank account.
But despite handing their findings to police, Jim still has no idea if the authorities have shown the surviving woman Peter Mang’s picture.
He says: “I would hope that they would, because if Jane Doe does recognise Peter as being the suspect then that opens the flood gates for a lot more investigations into those angles because you have an actual eye witness.
“If they have done that or not, I don’t know. They are very tight-lipped.”
Who are the UK's worst serial killers?
THE UK's most prolific serial killer was actually a doctor.
Here’s a rundown of the worst offenders in the UK.
- British GP Harold Shipman is one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded history. He was found guilty of murdering 15 patients in 2000, but the Shipman Inquiry examined his crimes and identified 218 victims, 80 per cent of whom were elderly women.
- After his death Jonathan Balls was accused of poisoning at least 22 people between 1824 and 1845.
- Mary Ann Cotton is suspected of murdering up to 21 people, including husbands, lovers and children. She is Britain’s most prolific female serial killer. Her crimes were committed between 1852 and 1872, and she was hanged in March 1873.
- Amelia Sach and Annie Walters became known as the Finchley Baby Farmers after killing at least 20 babies between 1900 and 1902. The pair became the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison on February 3, 1903.
- William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people and sold their bodies.
- Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was found guilty in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven others between 1975 and 1980.
- Dennis Nilsen was caged for life in 1983 after murdering up to 15 men when he picked them up from the streets. He was found guilty of six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder and was sentenced to life in jail.
- Fred West was found guilty of killing 12 but it’s believed he was responsible for many more deaths.
Mystery over ‘human remains’ find
All the while John and Jim were trying to piece together Peter Mangs’ movements in Florida, Peter continued to write to John, not knowing the journalist was trying to link him to more crimes.
One set of song lyrics he sent directed them to a very specific location of a demolished house and cadaver dogs they brought in alerted to potential human remains on the site.
But after brief enquiries, the local sheriff’s office did not continue the investigation.
Peter wants notoriety. He wants to be famous for these serial killings
Jim Rathmann
“These dogs are trained only in human remains,” explains Jim. “When the K9 dogs alerted in that area it caught me by surprise. I was not expecting that.
“When cadaver dogs actually hit, they are not hitting on a deceased animal, they are hitting on human remains. So to have the sheriff’s office treat us in that manner, not take it seriously, it was quite disappointing.
“It is the first time it has ever happened to me with a law enforcement agency.”
But despite John Mork and Jim Rathmann’s investigation and findings, the Florida Police Department has no ongoing investigation into Peter Mangs.
And Jim hopes the documentary will push the authorities to reexamine the cases.
“These cases took place 17 years ago,” he says. “There has been a lot of advancements in technology. If they have collected DNA, which I know there was in the Randi Gorenberg case, but they have never been able to link a suspect with DNA.
“So you have to ask yourself, why is that? If you only have DNA running in a database in the USA and you have someone who lives in Sweden, maybe that is the reason you have never had those connected dots.
“You have to expand that search, get Interpol involved and see if you can make those DNA matches.”
Jim hopes Peter will give them further clues to take to the police and potentially get justice for the victims and their families.
He says: “Peter wants notoriety. He wants to be famous for these serial killings. And I wish I had the chance to sit down and talk to him.
“But every time we got to a week before meeting him something would happen, he would get in trouble in prison, or the prison would change their mind and we never got to do the interview.
“If he would come forward and say exactly what it is that he did, I will make sure he is on every publication in the world. These families need closure and I would hope he would come forward with that information.
“People need to know what happened to their loved ones. Peter wants to be known as the most famous serial killer of all time, he wanted that attention, that is what he was doing in Sweden, he wanted that race war.
“To him, that was exciting.”
Credit: Under the Radar: Secrets of a Swedish Serial Killer is streaming now on Viaplay via Amazon Prime Video