The Case Files: Joanne Zephir
On Mother's Day 2022, a woman forced her two daughters to drink bleach, then strangled one to death as the other fled. Was Zephir cursed or seeking vengeance?
Joanne Zephir had messed up to the point of no return and she knew it. When she arrived to pick up her two daughters from their aunt’s home on May 8, 2022, she was aware of the arrest warrant Orange County police had issued for her.
During this conversation, Joanne admitted that she had stabbed her husband in Orange County, prompting the arrest warrant. He survived the ordeal, but now Joanne had to face the consequences of her actions. And she would, or so she claimed, but she told her sister-in-law she wanted to spend some time with her girls before turning herself in.
What came next is completely unfathomable.
“Several hours later, she called a family member and told her that she had killed her 3-year-old and the 8-year-old was also going to die and then she would kill herself,” said Osceola Sheriff Marcos Lopez in a news conference on Tuesday, May 11, 2022.
Joanne had called her sister-in-law with the mortifying update. Court documents explain that the sister-in-law asked to speak to her surviving niece. She told the young girl to run, quoted in the affidavit as telling her to “look for people near the road and get help.”
The young girl did just that. While the sister-in-law called police as soon as she got off the phone, the surviving daughter fled as far as the church entrance before falling unconscious.
By then, her younger sister was dead, and her mother remained unconscious in the front seat after her suicide attempt.
Police tracked Joanne using her cell phone’s GPS and arrived at the church to the heartbreaking scene.
When police were able to talk to the surviving daughter, she told them of the harrowing ordeal her mother had forced upon her and her little sister.
After driving to the Pentecostal Church of God in Poinciana, Florida that Mother’s Day Sunday, 38-year-old Joanne parked so she and the girls could have a nap in the parking lot.
“After their nap, her mother made her and her sister drink a ‘special milk’ that she told them would clean their ‘bellies,’” the affidavit states. “The 8-year-old explained her mother first made her 3-year-old sister drink the milk, but her sister told [Zephir] that the milk was ‘yucky.’ [Zephir] told her the milk was good for her and she had to drink it and then proceeded to make the 3-year-old drink about half the bottle of milk.”
Zephir then made the eight-year-old drink some of the “milk.” The girl told investigators that she took three big sips before vomiting. The affidavit says she described the smell as “bad, like pickles,” and that it burned her tongue. But Zephir insisted that it was good for them and they had to drink it.
“The 8-year-old female stated her mother put her sister back in the car and she was no longer breathing and she had died,” the affidavit stated.
Joanne had strangled the youngest child before ingesting bleach for herself.
“Joanne was found sitting in the driver’s seat of the vehicle and deputies noticed she appeared lethargic and was drooling from the mouth,” court documents noted, according to the Daily Express. “Deputies reported they could smell a strong odor of bleach emitting from the interior of the vehicle.”
EMS did their best to save the 3-year-old, but it was too late for her by the time help arrived.
“Joanne stated after she killed her ‘babies’ she decided to try to kill herself,” the affidavit continued. “Joanne advised she drank a considerable amount of bleach in an attempt to commit suicide.”
“The reason for doing this to her children was because the victim in Orange County must have put a voodoo spell on her, making her harm her children,” Lopez said during the press conference.
On top of the attempted murder charge from stabbing her husband, Joanne not only survived her suicide attempt, but also faced a first-degree murder charge for the death of her youngest daughter and left her older daughter with the horrific memories of that day — one that is meant to celebrate motherhood and for children to appreciate their mothers, not be nearly murdered by her after watching her do the same to a helpless sibling.
Body cam footage released over two years later showed Joanne in the aftermath of the crime. She is in a blue medical gown, her head lopsided to her shoulder, appearing worse for wear as she is escorted from the hospital in a wheelchair to go to prison. The State Attorney’s Office released the photo in December 2024.
Law & Crime reported that Zephir had confessed after being read her Miranda rights that she tried to stab her husband as well before going to the home of her sister-in-law. He survived the ordeal and was released from hospital after receiving treatment.
In December 2023, upon undergoing a psychological evaluation, Joanne was deemed competent to stand trial, according to MEAWW.
In April 2024, the prosecution announced it would seek the death penalty against Joanne after a grand jury handed down an indictment in February of the same year. All in all, she was indicted for first-degree murder with a weapon, which is eligible for the death penalty in Florida; attempted first-degree murder with a weapon; and attempted felony murder with a weapon, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
The State Attorney’s Office explained that specific factors made them decide to seek the death penalty: that Joanne had custody of the victim; the victim was under 12-years old; and the capital felony being committed while the defendant engaged in the act or attempt to commit aggravated child abuse.
The trial was scheduled for May 7, 2025.
However, a court document from February 17, 2025 shows that Joanne changed her original “not guilty” plea to “guilty.” As part of the deal she made with prosecutors, Law & Crime reports, she pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree murder with a weapon and one count of attempted first-degree murder with a weapon. In return, the prosecution dropped their pursuit of the death penalty and the third charge of attempted felony murder.
A baffling and heartbreaking case, and we are left with few answers
Investigators and prosecutors stayed pretty tight-lipped when it came to details of this case. I found little when came to details of Joanne’s past, mental history, marriage, or what led to the events of May 8, 2022. I did find the court document of her change in plea (it’s available publicly, link below in sources) which gives us a few pieces.
The document shows that Joanne didn’t finish high school, her highest grade completed being listed as tenth grade. It also says she speaks both English and Creole. This tells us little more than she has some sort of English or Spanish descent from Europe or African descent from the West Indies, as per Britannica.
She also noted in the document that she suffered from depression and was, at the time, medicated. However, she noted that the medication did not affect her ability to concentrate or comprehend the legal proceedings, nor did she suffer from any other physical or mental issues that would affect her understanding of the legal process.
She signed this plea agreement on February 11, 2025.
Since there was no trial, and investigators and prosecutors released so little information due to privacy concerns for the surviving victims (understandably so), we may never know the full story. Joanne’s Facebook profile is locked down save for a professional photo of her and the girls. She has no LinkedIn or Instagram profiles I could find.
And what of her claim that a voodoo spell cast on her by her husband led her to commit the horrific crime? Was this a strange afterthought she had, perhaps a quick jump to a defense upon awakening from her suicide attempt? It’s doubtful it was a premeditated defense, even if the crime itself was, since she didn’t plan on staying alive after she believed she killed her kids.
So, did she truly believe a curse had been placed upon her by her husband? Is it why she stabbed him, presumably after numerous other marital issues?
Did Vodou play a part in Joanne’s actions?
Vodou, or Voodoo, or whichever variant it may go by, is a religion which mixes pieces of Roman Catholicism and native African religion, specifically from the Dahomey region of West Africa, which is the current nation of Benin. The Learning Religion website states that Vodou is typically practiced in Haiti, New Orleans, or places in the Caribbean.
This religion found itself in America when African slaves were brought over against their will, bringing their beliefs with them despite it being forbidden on U.S. soil.
It has a reputation as dark magic thanks to pop culture, but it actually dates back over 6000 years in West Africa, according to the Cultures of West Africa website. The beliefs are founded in “a strong connection to the spiritual realm and the natural world.”
The spirits of this religion are called “Iwa” who serve as mediators between the divine and humans. Voodoo rituals represent a communication between humans and Iwa. During ceremonies, partakers often use drumming, chanting, and dancing to transcend between the two realms. These rituals, accompanied by spiritual possession (that of Iwa temporarily possessing practitioners to guide them or send messages through them, not the typical demonic possession we might think of), and ancestor worship.
When the people of West Africa were forcefully uprooted to become slaves in the United States, their beliefs came with them and merged with Western beliefs. However, it wasn’t necessarily by free will. Catholicism, like slavery, was forced upon these people, who were helpless in a new environment, now enslaved, and treated like less then humans.
This led to the people of West Africa to learn how to equate Catholic saints with those of their own beliefs. This allowed practitioners of Voodoo to continue to practice their religion while disguising it as Catholicism. This blending of religions is called syncretism, which the current day Catholic Church condemns despite how popular it is in New Orleans and Haiti.
Since Voodoo is very much a religion where followers can adapt it to their own uses and beliefs, I’ll link to more information below, but there’s so much more to it than typical stereotypes would lead you to believe.
And since we don’t know exactly what role Joanne believed it played in her actions, we cannot pinpoint exactly why it may have led her to trying to commit filicide and suicide.
It wouldn’t have held up in court, though, that’s for sure. Whether this was a half-hearted attempt at a defense, or whether it came from a place of her own beliefs, we just don’t know. Without a trial, we won’t get the full story — at least not at this time.
And to speculate on what she may or may not have believed without full knowledge of such feels disrespectful to the followers of this religion, and her victims. It feeds into the “black magic” stereotype which simply isn’t entirely accurate. I imagine some people may use it for such purposes, but it wouldn’t be fair to paint every practitioner in that light. Just like any witchcraft or alternative spiritual beliefs, one cannot apply the same label or stereotype to anyone who practices it.
So, aside from the brief history lesson here, we aren’t going to indulge in sensationalist speculation. I just wanted to provide a beginning glimpse into what Voodoo really is, and point out that the belief that someone set a curse on you is simply not a viable defense for murdering, or trying to murder, your children and husband. A little girl lost her life due to this mother’s actions, and another is likely to be traumatized for life. After all, when you lose trust in your own mother, how do you trust anyone else?
Joanne was found competent to stand trial and there has been nothing else noted as to her mental health or potential issues other than depression. This floods into some blurry areas as far as Philip Resnick’s five classifications of filicide motives go. Was this a result of her depression? Was she a family annihilator and ready to end her own life, too? Or did her marriage break down to the point where, when she didn’t succeed in killing her husband, she chose to murder the children out of a sense of vengeance, and still found a way to blame him for it by claiming he cursed her?
Furthermore, let’s discuss premeditation. She had to have mixed the bleach into the milk for the kids before she got to her sister-in-law’s home or in the car where the kids couldn’t see her doing it, or comprehend what she was doing. She had a plan. It went wrong. And she still blamed the husband she had tried to kill mere hours before force feeding her children the poisonous concoction.
She told her sister-in-law she just wanted to spend time with her girls before turning herself into police; a sympathetic story any family member would relate to. Whether Joanne exhibited problems with her care of the children before, we don’t know, which makes it pointless to speculate on that, too. We can only work with what we really know.
I personally lean towards spousal revenge as a motive. The horrific method of murder, the premeditation, the story she came up with upon surviving, the blaming of the father, all point towards spousal revenge. Julissa Thaler, Yui Inoue, and Kimberly Singler are prime examples. Except, that is, the suicide attempt. That’s usually more in line with altruistic filicide. But the lines can blur, as we saw in the Elaine Campione case. She was also depressed and suicidal when she murdered her two little girls as an act of revenge against their father, accusing him of abuse amidst a bitter divorce. She also claimed to try and kill herself the same night she murdered her kids.
Joanne Zephir’s marriage had clearly crumbled, and she knew she was going to prison. Was this another one of those “if I can’t have them, no one can” cases?
Filicide, and murder in general, are not always black and white. And sometimes, even when a case concludes in court, we still don’t get all the answers to something so mortifying and heartbreaking.
Sometimes, we are left with only the carrying out of justice. And sometimes, that has to be enough.
For more on filicide, visit my “Fatal Maternity” series:
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Sources
Osceola County Sheriff’s Office
Law & Crime