At first glance, it was almost as though nothing had changed.

It was late March, more than three months after his mother and her husband were killed in their Hallandale Beach condo, and Jamie Wise was in Florida for Passover.

The investigators had finished collecting evidence. They told him he could visit the scene.

Inside the pale yellow townhome where Rochelle Wise and Donny Pichosky spent their winters, there were breakfast dishes in the sink. A newspaper on the table was dated Jan. 9, the day before a neighbour discovered the bodies of the well-loved Toronto couple, dead in what police quickly deemed a double homicide.

“It was surreal because the house wasn’t ransacked. It was perfect,” Wise, 38, said. “It was difficult trying to visualize what happened in there.”

Nearly eight months since the investigation began, the murders remain unsolved — and so many of Wise’s questions unanswered. On Wednesday, in his first extended interview, he said he wanted to bring attention to the baffling case, and the lives snuffed out by a seemingly random crime.

“Someone has to be held accountable. Justice has to be served for my mom,” he said. “I can’t change what happened. But she doesn’t have her life, so whoever did this shouldn’t have their freedom.”

No details have emerged about the case since the spring, when police revealed that Pichosky, 71, and Wise, 66, died by asphyxiation, in an apparent robbery that involved at least two perpetrators, who most likely did not know the retirees. (Wise’s $16,000 wedding ring was the only item taken from the property.)

Despite a $51,000 reward issued by CrimeStoppers in March, it has been more than a month since investigators received a new lead, according to Hallandale Beach Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy.

After analyzing more than 100 pieces of evidence from the scene, police have reached out to other U.S. agencies for help with the forensic analysis, an attempt to “re-energize” the investigation, Flournoy said.

“Right now we’re kind of rehashing our old leads and testing out our theories again,” he said.

What police do know is that on the evening of Jan, 8, the devout couple, who was married in Toronto in 2009, attended a local Jewish temple and stopped at Walmart before returning to their home in Hallandale Beach, about 20 minutes south of Fort Lauderdale. They spoke with a family member the morning of Jan. 9 using Apple’s FaceTime, their last known contact with anyone.

The following evening, Wise was at a meeting in Toronto when he got a call from Pichosky’s son-in-law, who told him to go home. Something horrible had happened.

“He said the neighbours had called him frantically and then hung up. He hadn’t heard from them in hours,” Wise said. “He thought they were dead. He basically implied that.”

While Wise placed countless unanswered calls to his mom’s cellphone, her best friend in Florida drove over to the townhome. She told Wise the house was surrounded by police cars and news trucks.

Sitting at his kitchen table, he typed “NBC Miami” into the Internet search bar on his computer.

“Sure enough, right on the website, it said, ‘Two people found dead,’ and (listed) their address,” he said. “That’s how I found out.”

Wise arrived in Florida the next morning, hoping to get some clarity from police.

“You expect that they’re going to tell you what happened, but of course they don’t because it’s a crime scene,” he said.

Police were adamant that it was a double homicide, words that triggered countless questions.

“(You think), ‘How is it possible? Why them? What are you talking about?’” he said.

“Then you just sort of shut that off. There are things that have to be done. I’m the man in the family, so I had to do all those things. Falling apart is certainly not an option.”

Of all the tasks he had to perform — arranging for the bodies to be returned to Toronto, planning a memorial service — finding a way to tell his two young daughters about what had happened to their “Bubba” was probably the most difficult.

He channeled his mom, a longtime educator with a knack for relating to children, and told them it was time for her “to go to heaven,” he said.

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“When you tell a 3-year-old over and over again that it was just their time, they believe you,” he said. “That’s a reason that makes sense.”

But there is much about the case that simply doesn’t.

Wise said he has often wondered how no one in the quiet subdivision saw anything suspicious on the day his mom and Pichosky were killed, which Flournoy said “is the same question we’re asking.”

In Florida, where, according to FBI data released to Scripps Howard News Service, more than a third of homicides go unsolved, tight-lipped neighbours can sometimes be a roadblock for investigators.

But Flournoy describes the Venetian Park community, part of the semi-gated Three Islands Safe Neighbourhood District, as “forthcoming.”

Still, police have been unable to identify a mystery woman whose image was captured on a surveillance video the day before the couple’s bodies were found. The footage, released in February, shows a heavy-set blond walking behind the couple’s home with an unidentified object in her hands.

“If the community wasn’t talking, we could say she may be from the community. But this community kind of knows everybody, so there’s no reason to shield the identity,” Flournoy said.

On his way home from work each day, Flournoy passes a CrimeStoppers billboard on Hallandale Beach Blvd. emblazoned with the couple’s faces — “a constant reminder” of the still-unsolved case, he said.

He doesn’t blame Wise and his family for growing impatient.

“I would be frustrated. They want to know who is responsible for killing their parents,” he said. “It’s frustrating to us that we’re not able to tell them who is responsible, but our frustration can’t get in the way of us doing our due diligence.”

Wise, who is in regular contact with investigators in Hallandale, said he “will not stop” until the perpetrators are caught.

He hopes he can motivate the public “to demand answers as well from their community officials, from law enforcement.”

“Our country should want to know what happened to two of their citizens who were murdered abroad,” he said.

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he said the next few days would be especially tough.

“Holidays are family time,” Wise said. “Our family is broken this holiday.”