The 6-week-old baby was found lying in her bassinet. Her 2-year-old-sister was found curled into a ball behind a nearby couch.
Their grandmother was just feet away, face down on the kitchen floor. And their mother was lying in a pool of blood in the dining room.
All four had been shot and brutally beaten to death inside their home in Miramar on April 30, 1997, in one of South Florida’s most shocking mass murders. The crime scene was made more terrifying by a cryptic message the killer scrawled across a wall near the victims that demanded drug money.
Twenty-eight years later, the case remains unsolved as members of the victims’ family call on Miramar police officials to finally make a move on a suspect.
The Altidor massacre is featured in a new six-episode season of the podcast Felonious Florida, produced by the South Florida Sun Sentinel in partnership with Wondery and Amazon.
Using exclusive access to the full case file, the podcast retraces the steps of detectives from the Miramar Police Department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as they hunt for the person who murdered Theresia Laverne, 69, her daughter, Marie Altidor, 30, and Marie’s daughters, 2-year-old Samantha and 6-week-old Sabrina.
From almost the start, investigators considered George Altidor — husband, father, and son-in-law of the victims — to be a person of interest. And they still consider him to be a suspect today.
But the podcast reveals gaps in the early days of the investigation that could have uncovered critical evidence. Members of the victims’ family say in the series that those gaps have helped allow the killer to elude justice.
“The bottom line is, Miramar Police Department has not moved on this case,” Myrlaine Salter, a cousin of Marie Altidor, says in the series. “They have a plethora of circumstantial evidence — and I’ve seen cases tried and won with less — they haven’t done it.”
George Altidor told detectives that when he left for work that Wednesday morning, his family was alive and well. But when he tried checking on them by phone in the early afternoon from his job at a marine air conditioning plant in Hialeah, nobody answered.
Altidor then called his sister’s husband, Rochener Seraphin, who lived a mile away in Pembroke Pines, and asked him to drive to the Altidor house on South Crescent Drive.
About 5 p.m., Seraphin and his 12-year-old son found the front door to the Altidor home unlocked and discovered the bodies inside. Marie Altidor and her mother had been shot and beaten to death with a weapon later determined to be a hammer. The two Altidor girls had been beaten on their heads repeatedly.
Investigators, led by Miramar Detective Ron Peluso, found inconsistencies in Altidor’s story and they struggled to assemble a complete timeline of the murders.
The podcast reveals that Altidor was deceptive in several answers about the murders during a polygraph test and Peluso says that Altidor had outright lied to them during hourslong questioning after the discovery of his family’s massacre.
“A lot of people would tell me ‘he’s a hard-working man, he works for the family, he loves his family, he wouldn’t do anything wrong,’” Peluso says. “Well, believe me, you don’t know what happens behind closed doors. And that was this particular case. This guy was a Jekyll and Hyde. Behind closed doors, he was a completely different person.”
The podcast uses never-before-released audio recordings of police interviews from the investigation. In one recording, Altidor’s first wife, Jose Yanick Fede, tells detectives that Altidor was jealous, controlling and manipulative to her.
Altidor secretly recorded Fede’s phone conversations and threatened her repeatedly with a gun that he often kept under a pillow on their bed, Fede says in the recordings.
Detectives concluded that Altidor was equally controlling of his second wife, Marie, who had become withdrawn and paranoid, according to her family and FBI documents revealed in the podcast.
The most significant piece of evidence in the murders was the message that was written on the wall of the Altidors’ family room above the bodies of Samantha and Sabrina. The message, written with a black marker, said “I want my 100,000 / They stole my drugs.”
A warrant required George Altidor to provide samples of his handwriting for comparison to the writing on the wall, but analysts from state and county crime labs could not determine if they matched. An analysis by a Boca Raton-based handwriting expert brought in by the podcast was also inconclusive.
“There’s no doubt there’s some minor similarities, but not enough to say I’m conclusively giving you my opinion that it’s the same writer,” the analyst, E’lyn Bryan, says in the series. “There are similarities. We need more than just a handful of little similarities.”
Still, investigators for years zeroed in on Altidor, compiling a significant amount of circumstantial evidence against him. But they lacked enough physical evidence to bring charges and were stymied by a highly debated alibi that Altidor’s lawyers said proved he was not the killer.
Phone records revealed that a call had been placed from inside the Altidor home at 7:09 a.m. on the day of the murders to a distant relative of Marie Altidor. The caller claimed to be Marie, delivering news of Sabrina’s recent birth. The call was critical to the timeline because Altidor said he was already on his 30-minute commute to work, where he arrived at 7:30, proving his family was murdered after he left.
But the podcast reveals that the relative who took the call, Helene Mondestin, of Silver Springs, Maryland, was not totally certain the caller was, in fact, Marie Altidor. And Altidor’s family said it would have been highly unusual for Marie to have called at such an early hour — if at all.
Technology at the time could not be used to prove one way or another who really made that phone call. And investigators were not able to disprove George Altidor’s claim that he was commuting at the time of the call.
“That killed that case, that phone call right there,” Peluso, the lead investigator, says in the podcast. “How do you get around that phone call?”
The case was declared cold in December 2000, but opened again seven years later by a new Miramar Police detective who spent years reexamining the evidence.
“This is one of those cases that always kind of stuck with me,” cold-case Detective Danny Smith says in the podcast. “You had four innocent people that were brutally, savagely murdered and there were no answers. So I think this is one of those things that just kind of is always gnawing at the back of an investigator’s mind — and especially with two kids involved, two young children.”
Smith’s investigation revealed that five years after the murders, George Altidor had remarried. His new wife, Florence Daudin, was a woman Altidor had visited the night before his family was murdered. In 1997, he told investigators he had gone there to work on her air conditioner.
Shortly after they married, George and Florence Altidor moved to Broken Arrow, Okla., a quiet suburb of Tulsa, where they continue to live today. Altidor has not cooperated with the investigation since October 1997.
Despite years of reinvestigating the Altidor murders, Smith was unable to uncover new evidence that could move the case forward. He retired from the Miramar Police Department in late 2024.
“Of all the cases that I’ve worked and been assigned and investigated there are a small handful that have… that are unsolved, that remain unsolved. This is the one case that I’ve never put away,” Smith says in the series.
Members of the Laverne family, all of whom immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, say they believe there’s more that the Miramar Police could do to bring justice for the victims.
“If I’m putting one and one together, I think there is a piece missing in the puzzle. And that piece is Florence Daudin, which is George’s wife today,” Marie Altidor’s sister, Alberthe Mardy, says in the podcast. “Why haven’t you interviewed Florence?”
The podcast reveals that Daudin was never interviewed by detectives in 1997, despite obvious connections — she was likely the last one to have seen Altidor before his family was murdered.
Salter, Marie Altidor’s cousin, says the family believes there is enough evidence to move forward on the case and is frustrated with what they see as inaction.
“I don’t want to attend another memorial. I don’t want to attend another prayer circle. I don’t want to attend anything. Because there’s nothing new to bring to the table. Everything that needs to be brought to the table, it’s on the table,” Salter said. “Now, what are you gonna do with it?”
Marie Florent-Carre, another cousin of Marie Altidor, said the family believes the case should be handed over to the state attorney for a formal review, or to a grand jury to consider possible charges. Every year that goes by, she says, only deepens their pain.
“It’s like you take a wound that never healed and then you poke it with a needle constantly,” Florent-Carre says in the podcast. “We are appealing to the Miramar police to pass this on and let the justice system do its job.”
The disagreement over the status of the case has driven a painful wedge between the Laverne family and the investigators with whom they have worked so closely for decades.
But, Smith says in the series, that the department’s hands are tied.
“It’s frustrating. I know it’s frustrating for them, and it’s frustrating for us as investigators. But for me to take someone’s freedom and liberty away without probable cause is not the way our justice system works. We do not have probable cause to arrest,” Smith says.
Despite considering George Altidor a suspect for 28 years, his alibi has been unbreakable.
“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence out there, but the bottom line is that there was a phone call placed from the residence the morning that the crime scene was discovered. And at that time George was already at work when that phone call was placed — or he was nearby work,” Smith says.
View images and video from Altidor murder files, including crime scene photos, at FeloniousFlorida.com.
Miramar Police Chief Delrish Moss says that a lead detective has not been assigned to replace Smith on the case but his department will follow up on every lead that comes in. He appealed for anyone with information to come forward, no matter how unimportant they may believe their information to be.
“If you’re holding on to this information for whatever reason, I think you have an obligation not only to this family, but to your conscience,” Moss says. “And so if you have information, please, we not only ask and implore, we beg you to give us that information so that we can provide closure to this family. As long as this case remains open, unsolved, this will be a case that the Miramar Police Department will continue to look into and put resources to.”
Members of the Laverne family, in the podcast, say that although they hope somebody with information comes forward, a passive approach to the investigation isn’t going to break the case.
“Four people were murdered and nothing has ever been done,” Salter says. “You have a six-week-old little angel that never even had a chance. You have a two-year-old that’s as innocent as they come. If you’re not doing it for the adults, do it for the two innocent children that had absolutely no business being killed by anyone.”
“I want justice for my mom, my sister, and my two little nieces,” Mardy says. “Mostly the children, Samantha and Sabrina. We just want justice for them. And I feel like the killer is still on the loose. That’s my hope. One day, the investigators will come up with something and say okay, we got him.”
Miramar Police ask anyone with information on the Altidor murder case to contact Broward County Crime Stoppers at 954-493-TIPS. You can also send tips to the Felonious Florida podcast at feedback@feloniousflorida.com.