Felonious Florida

Felonious Florida is a true-crime series from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, produced in association with Wondery. The newsroom roots show. Its Altidor Massacre season, reported and written by David Schutz, stays with a single case: the 1997 killing of Marie, her baby daughters Samantha and Sabrina, and George's mother-in-law Teresia inside their home on Crescent Drive, in a middle-class Miramar neighborhood called the Knolls. The older girl was two; her sister was a newborn. The storytelling is built on timelines. Dates, addresses and small anchoring details carry the narration: a Wednesday at the end of April, a radio broadcast of the Miami Heat against the Orlando Magic, and George's account of fixing an air conditioner at Florence's house and getting home at halftime. Tape does much of the work. In one recording, Detective Ron Paluzzo asks a witness, Anne Johnston, to state her full name and asks about April 30, 1997. Elsewhere Paluzzo remembers the scene itself, with grown officers crying and a young patrol officer telling him he was the only one holding it together. Deep down, he admits, he was not. A woman once married to George describes a gun he kept under his pillow and threats he made against her life. The evidence room gets airtime as well. A slab of drywall, roughly six feet by four, sits behind plexiglass in the Miramar Police Department's evidence building, with a message about stolen drugs and drug money written across it in black marker. The season makes room for Marie as a person, not only a victim. Relatives describe her as shy and quiet, a soprano in the church choir and a studious girl who attended a private high school in Port-au-Prince, where her father Ferdinand was an administrator, and who spoke French, Spanish, Creole and English. The show is frank about the investigation's gaps, too. There was a lead about some puppies that went unchecked until cold case detectives took up the file more than a decade later, and by then nobody could remember anything about them. By one account, the many experts who sifted the evidence turned up little that police and the family had not already considered. Detective Smith then asks a basic question, where George is now, and finds a 2001 marriage to Florence, a name already in the case file. Listener notes flag graphic violence and state that all subjects are innocent until proven guilty in court. Beyond the Miramar case, the feed carries other Florida stories, among them The Disappearance of Lisa Spence, Part 2, in which police dogs named Riot and Jewel search a field beside a canal in 2009.