FORT LEE, N.J. — A young man wearing a baseball cap sat alone in his convertible at the drive-through lane of a Dunkin’ Donuts here, the top down on a warm October afternoon, waiting to order Munchkins and coffee. He did not notice, from behind, the approach of a man carrying a baseball bat.

The stranger smashed the bat into the back of the driver’s head and ran away. The driver, dazed and bleeding, lurched his car out of the line and crashed into another vehicle on Bergen Boulevard.

The attack was as brief as it was brutal, but it was long in the making. A couple of years, at least, perhaps longer. The yearnings of the heart don’t come with time stamps, and long-game acts of deceit and betrayal don’t lend themselves to simple when-and-where entries on police reports. The chain of events that led to and followed that attack would not be a straight one, but a twisting series of seemingly random and bizarre actions and reactions no one could have seen coming.

The path to that drive-through begins in familiar territory: a lonely older man with some money in the bank and a younger woman who would come to separate the two. The old man was Jerry Needleman, a retired builder and a widower, who was 84 when he walked out of his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Aug. 5, 2013, and was approached by a distraught woman he did not know.