The six-week-old baby was found lying in her bassinet. Her two-year-old sister was found curled up in a ball behind a nearby couch.
Their grandmother was just at her feet, heading towards the kitchen floor. And their mothers were lying in the blood pool in the dining room.
On April 30, 1997, in one of South Florida’s most shocking mass murders, all four were brutally beaten to death at their home in Miramar. The crime scene was made even more frightening by the inexplicable message that murderers scribbled down a wall near a victim demanding drug money.
The case remains unsolved 28 years later, as members of the victim’s family are calling on Miramar police officers to ultimately move the suspect.
The Altidor Massacre was featured in the new six-episode season of Podcast Felonious Florida, produced by South Florida Sun Sentinel in partnership with The Wondery and Amazon.
Using exclusive access to full-case files, the podcast follows detective steps from the Miramar Police Department and the Florida Law Enforcement Department, looking for the murders of Theresi Araban, 69, daughter Marie Altidore, 30, Marie’s daughter, two-year-old Samantha and six-week Sabrina.
Investigators thought George Altidore (the husband, father and son-in-law of the victim) was the person of interest almost from the start. And they still consider him the suspect today.
However, the podcast reveals gaps from early years of research that could reveal critical evidence. Members of the victim’s family say in the series these gaps helped the killer escape justice.
“The bottom line is that the Miramar Police Department hasn’t made this case go,” Marie Altidore’s cousin, Milllane Salter, in the series. “They have a lot of circumstantial evidence, and I won the case, but they haven’t done it.”
George Altidor told detectives that Wednesday morning when he went to work, his family was alive and well. But when he tried to check on the phone early in the afternoon from his job at a marine air conditioning factory in Hialea, no one answered.
Altidore then called her sister’s husband, Roshenar Seraphine, and asked Pembroke Pines to drive to Altidore House on South Crescent Drive, as she lived a mile away.
Around 5pm, Seraphine and his 12-year-old son discovered that the front door of the Altidore Home unlocked and the body inside had been found. Marie Altidore and her mother were shot and beaten and died with a weapon they later decided to be a hammer. The two Altidor girls were repeatedly beaten to their heads.
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Investigators led by Miramar detective Ron Peruso have found contradictions in the Altidor story and struggle to frame the full timeline of the murder.
The podcast reveals that Altidore is deceptive in several answers about murder during polygraph tests, and Perso says that Altidore lied to them completely during questions hours after the discovery of the family genocide.
“Many people would say, “He’s a hardworking guy, he works for his family, he loves his family, he won’t be doing anything wrong,” Perso says. “Well, trust me, you don’t know what’s going to happen in a closed room. That was this particular case. This guy was Jekyll and Hyde. Behind the closed room, he was a completely different person.”
The podcast uses audio recordings that have never been released before of police interviews from the investigation. In one recording, Altidore’s first wife, Jose Yannick Fede, tells the detective that Altidore jealousy, dominates and manipulates her.
Altidor secretly recorded Fede’s phone conversations and repeatedly threatened him with a gun.
Detectives concluded that Altidor equally controls his second wife, Marie, according to her family and FBI documents revealed on the podcast.
The most important evidence of the murder was a message written on the wall of the Altidos family room, above the bodies of Samantha and Sabrina. The message written with a black marker said, “I want 100,000/they stole my medicine.”
The warrant required George Altidore to provide handwritten samples to be compared to write on the wall, but analysts at the state and county crime labs could not determine if they matched. The analysis by Boca Raton-based handwriting experts brought to us by the podcast was also inconclusive.
“There are no doubt some small similarities, but it’s not enough to say that it ultimately gives my opinion that it’s the same writer,” analyst Elyn Bryan said in the series. “There are similarities. We need more than just a few similarities.”
Still, for years, investigators focused on Altidore and compiled a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence against him. However, they lacked sufficient physical evidence to bring about the accusation, and were hampered by a highly debated alibi, in which Altidore’s lawyers stated that he had proved he was not a murderer.
Phone records revealed that at 7:09am on the day of the murder, Marie Altidore’s distant relative was called from inside the Altidore’s house. She claimed that the caller was Marie and reported news of Sabrina’s recent birth. This call was important to the timeline as Altidor said he was already on a 30-minute commute.
However, the podcast reveals that he is not entirely certain that the call-up relative Helen Mondestin in Silver Springs, Maryland, is actually Marie Altidore. And Altidore’s family said it was very unusual for Marie to call that early.
Technology at the time could not be used to prove how they actually made the call. And investigators were unable to disprove the allegations that George Altidore was commuting to work when he called.
“It killed the incident, the call was called right there,” Chief Investigator Perso says on the podcast. “How do you avoid that call?”
The case was declared cold in December 2000, but was reopened seven years later by a new Miramar police detective who spent years reconsidering the evidence.
“This is one of those cases where I’m stuck constantly with me,” Cold Case detective Danny Smith says on a podcast. “There were four innocent people who were cruelly murdered and had no answers, so I think this is one of those constantly gnawing the back of the investigators’ hearts.
Smith’s investigation revealed that George Altider remarried five years after the murder. His new wife, Florence Dodin, was the woman that Altidor visited the night before his family was murdered. In 1997 he told investigators he went there to work on her air conditioner.
Shortly after they got married, George and Florence Altidor moved to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Altidor has not cooperated with the investigation since October 1997.
Despite re-investigating the Altidor murder case, Smith has been unable to reveal any new evidence that could drive the case forward. He left the Miramar Police Station in late 2024.
“Of all the cases I’m working, assigned and investigated, there’s a small handful that remains unresolved and unresolved. This is one case I’ve never cleaned up,” Smith says in the series.
Members of the Laverne family, who moved from Haiti to the US, say they believe Miramar police can do what they can to bring justice to the victims.
“If you put one and one together, I think there’s something missing from the puzzle, and that’s Florence Doddin, George’s wife today,” says Alber Mardi, sister of Marie Altidore, on the podcast. “Why didn’t you interview Florence?”
The podcast reveals that Daudin has never been interviewed by a detective in 1997 despite his obvious connections. She was the last one to see Altidor before her family was murdered.
Marie Altidore’s cousin, Salter, says the family believes there is enough evidence to move the case forward, and is dissatisfied with what they consider to be inaction.
“I don’t want to attend another monument, I don’t want to attend another prayer circle. I don’t want to attend anything. There’s nothing new to bring to the table, so everything you need to bring to the table is at the table,” Salter said. “Now, what are you going to do with that?”
Marie Florent Carle, another cousin of Marie Altidore, said the family believes the case should be handed over to the state attorney for a formal review. Every year, it only deepens their pain.
“It’s like you suffer a wound that never healed and constantly thrust it with a needle,” Florent Carl says on the podcast. “We are telling this to the Miramar police and urging the judicial system to let the job go.”
Disagreements about the circumstances of the case have driven a painful wedge between the Laverne family and the investigators they have worked closely with for decades.
However, Smith says in the series that the hands of the department are tied.
“It’s frustrating. I know it’s frustrating for them, and it’s frustrating for us as investigators. But for me, taking away someone’s freedom and freedom is not the way the judicial system works.
Despite having considered George Altidor as a suspect for 28 years, his alibi remains unbreakable.
“There is a lot of circumstantial evidence there, but the end result was that the call came from the residence the morning when the crime scene was found, and George was already working when the call was heard at the time.
View images and videos from Altidor murder files containing crime scene photos at Feloniousflorida.com.
Miramar Police Chief Dellish Moss says the chief detective has not been assigned to replace Smith in the case, but his department will follow up on all leads coming in.
“If we keep this information for any reason, I think it’s a duty not only to this family but to our conscience,” Moss says. “So, if you have the information, we don’t just ask and beg, but we ask that you provide that information so that we can provide this family with the closure.
On the podcast, members of the Laverne family say they want people with information to move forward, but a passive approach to investigation is not going to break the case.
“Four people have been murdered and nothing has been done,” says Salter. “There’s a tiny angel at six weeks old who didn’t even have a chance. There’s a two-year-old kid who’s innocent enough to come. If you haven’t done it for adults, do it for two innocent kids who haven’t been killed by anyone.”
“I want justice for my mother, my sister and my two little nies,” says Mardy. “Mainly the kids, Samantha and Sabrina. We want justice for them. And I feel like the murderer is still in a relaxed state. That’s my hope. One day, investigators will come up with something and say it’s okay,
Miramar Police will ask anyone with information about the Altidore murder to contact Broward County Crime Stoppers at 954-493-TIPS. You can also submit tips to the Feelonious Florida podcast at Feedback@feloniousflorida.com.
