Divorce Papers on an Empty Bed: The Dan Markel Case

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A law professor pulls into his own garage on a Friday morning in Tallahassee, and he

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never makes it inside the house.

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It takes 12 years, five convictions, a wire tap, and a woman getting arrested on a jet

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bridge with a one-way ticket to Vietnam to explain why.

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It all starts with a custody schedule.

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Dan Markel's favorite toys as a toddler were a mop and a pale and a step ladder.

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That information comes from his mom, Ruth, who has told that story a lot over the last

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12 years.

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He would climb the kitchen counters in their house in Montreal and then climb right

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back down.

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Not looking for cookies, just because he wanted to see if he could do it.

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The family moved to Toronto when he started kindergarten.

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His dad was running a distribution company.

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His mom, a management consulting firm.

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And Dan was unable to sit still for four seconds.

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He was a mess of a student until about eight or nine when the school gave him an aptitude

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test and he came back with the highest score that they had ever recorded in the history

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of that test, which must have been a pretty weird and fun phone call for his parents.

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Around 10 or 11, something clicked and he just locked in.

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He went to Harvard for undergraduates and graduated magna cum laude in politics and philosophy.

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Then did graduate work in Jerusalem, picked up a master's at Cambridge and then went back

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to Harvard for law school and finished in 2001.

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He clerked for federal judge and by 2005, he was teaching law at Florida State with tenure

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by 2010.

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He wrote about punishment theory, wrote for the New York Times in the Atlantic.

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And oh yeah, he also skied and played baseball on the side.

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And Markel was a certified busybody.

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He met Wendy Adelson on J date, which if you don't know what that is, it's like Tinder,

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but Jewish.

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And because this is the mid 2000s, everybody at the time was still telling their friends

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that we met at a bookstore.

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We saw each other in line at Starbucks.

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They'd make up something.

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They didn't want to tell people they met on some dating app.

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Wendy grew up in Coral Springs, Validictorian and her family was in the dentistry business

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down there.

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Harvey and her brother Charlie were dentists at the family practice and her mom Donna was

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the patient care coordinator, which is a job title I want you to remember.

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Dan and Wendy got married in Boca Raton in February of 2006.

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They both ended up teaching at FSU's law school and their son's Benjamin and Lincoln came

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in 2009 and 2010.

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The marriage fell apart after the boys and she has talked publicly about a loneliness

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that settled in on her.

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Dan married to somebody that she felt did not see her as an equal.

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In September of 2012, Dan came back from a trip to a house that had been completely emptied

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out.

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Wife gone, kids gone, most of the furniture gone, and the divorce paperwork was sitting there

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on the bed waiting for him.

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The divorce went through July 31, 2013.

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They landed on 50/50 custody and people who knew them say the first stretch was reasonably

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civil.

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Donna is the engine of this whole thing, according to prosecutors and about a decade of testimony.

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The prosecutor in the case described her in court as extremely controlling, with very

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strong opinions about every decision in her daughter's life, down to which house she should

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buy.

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What Donna wanted after the divorce was Wendy and those two little boys 500 miles south

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in Miami near the rest of the Adelson's.

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A Florida court had already told her no, and Dan was never agreeing to it because 50/50

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custody means nothing when your kids are 500 miles away.

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In 2014, he filed a motion to keep Donna from unsupervised visits with his sons over things

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that she said to the kids and they would later come back and tell him about.

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Court records and testimony also show the family discussed offering him $1 million to let

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the boys move.

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On the morning of Friday, July 18, 2014, Dan ran some errands.

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He went to the gym and then he pulled into the garage at his house in bed and hills in

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Tallahassee.

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He was shot twice in the head while he was still sitting in his car and he died the next

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day at age 41.

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Nothing was taken, nobody forced their way in, and that sent investigators straight to his

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personal life.

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The thing that cracked this open was a silver Toyota Prius rented out of the Miami area,

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tracked on surveillance footage and toll records following Dan around Tallahassee for two days

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before the shooting.

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A camera on a city bus caught a passenger in that car changing into a white dress shirt

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within minutes of the murder.

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This investigation crawled along, detective spent almost two years building a case out

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of cell tower pings, sun pass toll records and bank statements and footage off buildings

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and city buses.

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The first arrest came in May of 2016.

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It was a man named Sikfrido Garcia.

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In all that paper, they noticed a woman named Catherine Magbenua had money coming in from

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the Adelson world, including payroll checks from Harvey Adelson's dental practice and

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a cash deposit right after the murder.

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And then the FBI ran a play so crazy that it sounds made up.

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In 2016, an agent posing as an associate of a Miami gang leader walked up to Donna Adelson

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outside of a condo building and demanded $5,000.

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The point of it was to rattle her enough that she would talk on lines, phone lines that

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they already had tapped.

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Within 20 minutes, Donna was calling Charlie.

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The two of them met behind her building and walked in slow circles, whispering.

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An FBI agent testified later that this quiet, careful Charlie was completely out of character

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for a guy who was normally the loudest person in any room.

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The recordings, after that turned into some of the worst evidence against him, starting

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with Charlie telling his mother to not talk about anything in the apartment or any place

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at all.

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The family ran code words calling the murder "TV."

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The hitman's money, his salary, and floating a story about a birthday gift of a private

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paella chef that prosecutors argued was coded talk about the killing.

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These are people with graduate degrees and dental licenses and the code word they landed

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on was paella chef.

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I don't know, this whole thing sounds crazy.

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But the real break came in October 4th, 2016, when Louise Rivera pleaded guilty to second

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degree murder in exchange for 19 years and a promise to testify.

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Rivera was a leader in the North Miami Latin Kings.

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So cooperating with police was against everything he lived by since he was a teenager.

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He told him he had supplied the gun and drove the car, and he walked them through the chain.

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Charlie Adelson brought in his ex-girlfriend Catherine Mangba, who was also on and off with

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Garcia and had two kids with him.

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And she hired Garcia, who brought in his childhood friend Rivera.

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The price was $100,000, paid and $100 bills stapled together in $1,000 stacks.

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And investigators found that Charlie kept his own money stapled that exact same way.

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When Rivera asked why they were doing any of this, Garcia told them that the lady wanted

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her two kids back, that she wanted full custody of the kids.

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Garcia was convicted in 2019 and got life plus 30 years.

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Mangba's first trial was hung and a retrial in 2022 convicted her on everything.

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Life plus two consecutive 30 year terms.

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She later admitted that Charlie gave her the money for the hit and the information used to

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find Dan.

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Charlie went on trial in the fall of 2023, and his girlfriend at the time, June, described

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what he was like at home.

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She talked about the stacks of $100 bills stapled together in his safe.

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How jumpy and secretive he got after the FBI approached his mother.

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The change of clothes and the gun that he kept right next to the bed, like a man waiting

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on a knock on the door.

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He also said that he showed no sympathy at all about Dan being dead.

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He was convicted in November of 2023 and got life plus 30 years on each of the conspiracy

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and solicitation counts.

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Donna was arrested that same month at Miami International Airport, taken on the jet bridge

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holding a one-way ticket to Vietnam, which has no extradition treaty with the US, by the

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way.

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He convicted on all counts in September of 2025 and sentenced to life that October.

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Dan's parents lost those boys twice.

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Wendy cut them off from their grandsons and changed the kid's last name to Adelson, and

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Florida's grandparent visitation laws gave Ruth and Phil no standing to fight it.

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Ruth spent a decade lobbying over that, and in June of 2022, the governor signed HB 1119,

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the Marquel Act, after it cleared the Florida Senate 37-0-0.

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It creates a legal presumption in favor of the grandparent visitation when one parent

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is found criminally or civilly liable for killing the other.

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Wendy restored limited contact with them in 2023.

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Wendy has never been charged, though she was named as an unindicted, co-conspirator along

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with her father Harvey, and she says she had nothing to do with it.

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Meanwhile, the appeals kept grinding.

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Florida's first district court of appeals upheld Charlie's conviction on July 1, 2026, ruling

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his change of venue arguments were never properly preserved.

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He's serving life in a South Dakota prison after a transfer over security concerns.

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Donna, his mother, now 76 years old, is at Homestead Correctional Institution, where her

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lawyers, by the way, ask for more time this month after a medical emergency behind bars.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, binge-able true crime stories.

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I'm Joe, low, I'm the host, and here's an email, "Subject, I have a theory about you."

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Joe, I've been listening since about Episode 30-something, and I've built this whole profile

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of you in my head that I need to know how much of it is right.

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Here's my list, you have a background in something technical or media adjacent.

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You've had a dog, you're not from wherever you live right now, you get up early, you're

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the oldest sibling.

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Tell me how many I got.

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I'm not a stalker, I'm just a project manager, and I do this to everyone.

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My husband finds it annoying and exhausting.

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Cheers, Robin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Robin, thank you for your email, thank you for listening.

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Background in something technical or media adjacent.

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True, you've had a dog, also true.

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You're not from wherever you live right now.

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That was kind of true, I grew up as my dad being in the army, we moved all over the place

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when I was a kid, and where I live right now I lived here for a pretty good amount of time,

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a pretty long time, but this isn't where I would say I grew up, I didn't grow up here.

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You get up early, that one is annoyingly true.

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Even on the weekends I don't set in an alarm, but I just get up and I can't stop myself

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from doing it, I'd like to sleep in, but I don't think I'm capable anymore.

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You're the oldest sibling.

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That one is not true, I'm the middle child.

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The only boy I've got an older sister and a younger sister, so I'm the annoying older/younger

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brother.

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So there you go.

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Hey, if you're a new listener to this podcast, do me this huge favor right now and hit

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subscribe wherever you're listening.

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And if you're already a subscriber, you've been an OG listener from the start, kind of like

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Robin has been, I love you.

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Be sharing this show with your friends and your family, telling them all about it, telling

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them about 10-minute murder, encouraging people to go to 10minuteMurder.com to learn more about

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the podcast, get links to where you can follow the show on social media, and to contact me

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if you've got cases that you want me to cover.

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That's 10minuteMurder.com.

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And that's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10-minute murder.