Divorce Papers on an Empty Bed: The Dan Markel Case

0:00 A law professor pulls into his own garage on a Friday morning in Tallahassee, and he never makes it inside the house. It takes 12 years, five convictions, a wire tap, and a woman getting arrested on a jet bridge with a one-way ticket to Vietnam to explain why. It all starts with a custody schedule.

0:48 Dan Markel's favorite toys as a toddler were a mop and a pale and a step ladder. That information comes from his mom, Ruth, who has told that story a lot over the last 12 years. He would climb the kitchen counters in their house in Montreal and then climb right back down. Not looking for cookies, just because he wanted to see if he could do it. The family moved to Toronto when he started kindergarten. His dad was running a distribution company. His mom, a management consulting firm. And Dan was unable to sit still for four seconds. He was a mess of a student until about eight or nine when the school gave him an aptitude test and he came back with the highest score that they had ever recorded in the history of that test, which must have been a pretty weird and fun phone call for his parents.

1:41 Around 10 or 11, something clicked and he just locked in. He went to Harvard for undergraduates and graduated magna cum laude in politics and philosophy. Then did graduate work in Jerusalem, picked up a master's at Cambridge and then went back to Harvard for law school and finished in 2001. He clerked for federal judge and by 2005, he was teaching law at Florida State with tenure by 2010. He wrote about punishment theory, wrote for the New York Times in the Atlantic. And oh yeah, he also skied and played baseball on the side. And Markel was a certified busybody. He met Wendy Adelson on J date, which if you don't know what that is, it's like Tinder, but Jewish.

2:23 And because this is the mid 2000s, everybody at the time was still telling their friends that we met at a bookstore. We saw each other in line at Starbucks. They'd make up something. They didn't want to tell people they met on some dating app. Wendy grew up in Coral Springs, Validictorian and her family was in the dentistry business down there. Harvey and her brother Charlie were dentists at the family practice and her mom Donna was the patient care coordinator, which is a job title I want you to remember. Dan and Wendy got married in Boca Raton in February of 2006. They both ended up teaching at FSU's law school and their son's Benjamin and Lincoln came in 2009 and 2010. The marriage fell apart after the boys and she has talked publicly about a loneliness that settled in on her.

3:08 Dan married to somebody that she felt did not see her as an equal. In September of 2012, Dan came back from a trip to a house that had been completely emptied out. Wife gone, kids gone, most of the furniture gone, and the divorce paperwork was sitting there on the bed waiting for him. The divorce went through July 31, 2013. They landed on 50/50 custody and people who knew them say the first stretch was reasonably civil. Donna is the engine of this whole thing, according to prosecutors and about a decade of testimony. The prosecutor in the case described her in court as extremely controlling, with very strong opinions about every decision in her daughter's life, down to which house she should buy.

3:55 What Donna wanted after the divorce was Wendy and those two little boys 500 miles south in Miami near the rest of the Adelson's. A Florida court had already told her no, and Dan was never agreeing to it because 50/50 custody means nothing when your kids are 500 miles away. In 2014, he filed a motion to keep Donna from unsupervised visits with his sons over things that she said to the kids and they would later come back and tell him about. Court records and testimony also show the family discussed offering him $1 million to let the boys move. On the morning of Friday, July 18, 2014, Dan ran some errands.

4:35 He went to the gym and then he pulled into the garage at his house in bed and hills in Tallahassee. He was shot twice in the head while he was still sitting in his car and he died the next day at age 41. Nothing was taken, nobody forced their way in, and that sent investigators straight to his personal life. The thing that cracked this open was a silver Toyota Prius rented out of the Miami area, tracked on surveillance footage and toll records following Dan around Tallahassee for two days before the shooting. A camera on a city bus caught a passenger in that car changing into a white dress shirt within minutes of the murder. This investigation crawled along, detective spent almost two years building a case out of cell tower pings, sun pass toll records and bank statements and footage off buildings and city buses.

5:27 The first arrest came in May of 2016. It was a man named Sikfrido Garcia. In all that paper, they noticed a woman named Catherine Magbenua had money coming in from the Adelson world, including payroll checks from Harvey Adelson's dental practice and a cash deposit right after the murder. And then the FBI ran a play so crazy that it sounds made up. In 2016, an agent posing as an associate of a Miami gang leader walked up to Donna Adelson outside of a condo building and demanded $5,000. The point of it was to rattle her enough that she would talk on lines, phone lines that they already had tapped. Within 20 minutes, Donna was calling Charlie.

6:08 The two of them met behind her building and walked in slow circles, whispering. An FBI agent testified later that this quiet, careful Charlie was completely out of character for a guy who was normally the loudest person in any room. The recordings, after that turned into some of the worst evidence against him, starting with Charlie telling his mother to not talk about anything in the apartment or any place at all. The family ran code words calling the murder "TV." The hitman's money, his salary, and floating a story about a birthday gift of a private paella chef that prosecutors argued was coded talk about the killing. These are people with graduate degrees and dental licenses and the code word they landed on was paella chef.

6:51 I don't know, this whole thing sounds crazy. But the real break came in October 4th, 2016, when Louise Rivera pleaded guilty to second degree murder in exchange for 19 years and a promise to testify. Rivera was a leader in the North Miami Latin Kings. So cooperating with police was against everything he lived by since he was a teenager. He told him he had supplied the gun and drove the car, and he walked them through the chain. Charlie Adelson brought in his ex-girlfriend Catherine Mangba, who was also on and off with Garcia and had two kids with him. And she hired Garcia, who brought in his childhood friend Rivera. The price was $100,000, paid and $100 bills stapled together in $1,000 stacks.

7:37 And investigators found that Charlie kept his own money stapled that exact same way. When Rivera asked why they were doing any of this, Garcia told them that the lady wanted her two kids back, that she wanted full custody of the kids. Garcia was convicted in 2019 and got life plus 30 years. Mangba's first trial was hung and a retrial in 2022 convicted her on everything. Life plus two consecutive 30 year terms. She later admitted that Charlie gave her the money for the hit and the information used to find Dan. Charlie went on trial in the fall of 2023, and his girlfriend at the time, June, described what he was like at home.

8:17 She talked about the stacks of $100 bills stapled together in his safe. How jumpy and secretive he got after the FBI approached his mother. The change of clothes and the gun that he kept right next to the bed, like a man waiting on a knock on the door. He also said that he showed no sympathy at all about Dan being dead. He was convicted in November of 2023 and got life plus 30 years on each of the conspiracy and solicitation counts. Donna was arrested that same month at Miami International Airport, taken on the jet bridge holding a one-way ticket to Vietnam, which has no extradition treaty with the US, by the way. He convicted on all counts in September of 2025 and sentenced to life that October.

9:03 Dan's parents lost those boys twice. Wendy cut them off from their grandsons and changed the kid's last name to Adelson, and Florida's grandparent visitation laws gave Ruth and Phil no standing to fight it. Ruth spent a decade lobbying over that, and in June of 2022, the governor signed HB 1119, the Marquel Act, after it cleared the Florida Senate 37-0-0. It creates a legal presumption in favor of the grandparent visitation when one parent is found criminally or civilly liable for killing the other. Wendy restored limited contact with them in 2023. Wendy has never been charged, though she was named as an unindicted, co-conspirator along with her father Harvey, and she says she had nothing to do with it.

9:48 Meanwhile, the appeals kept grinding. Florida's first district court of appeals upheld Charlie's conviction on July 1, 2026, ruling his change of venue arguments were never properly preserved. He's serving life in a South Dakota prison after a transfer over security concerns. Donna, his mother, now 76 years old, is at Homestead Correctional Institution, where her lawyers, by the way, ask for more time this month after a medical emergency behind bars. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, binge-able true crime stories. I'm Joe, low, I'm the host, and here's an email, "Subject, I have a theory about you."

10:34 Joe, I've been listening since about Episode 30-something, and I've built this whole profile of you in my head that I need to know how much of it is right. Here's my list, you have a background in something technical or media adjacent. You've had a dog, you're not from wherever you live right now, you get up early, you're the oldest sibling. Tell me how many I got. I'm not a stalker, I'm just a project manager, and I do this to everyone. My husband finds it annoying and exhausting. Cheers, Robin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Robin, thank you for your email, thank you for listening. Background in something technical or media adjacent. True, you've had a dog, also true.

11:14 You're not from wherever you live right now. That was kind of true, I grew up as my dad being in the army, we moved all over the place when I was a kid, and where I live right now I lived here for a pretty good amount of time, a pretty long time, but this isn't where I would say I grew up, I didn't grow up here. You get up early, that one is annoyingly true. Even on the weekends I don't set in an alarm, but I just get up and I can't stop myself from doing it, I'd like to sleep in, but I don't think I'm capable anymore. You're the oldest sibling. That one is not true, I'm the middle child. The only boy I've got an older sister and a younger sister, so I'm the annoying older/younger brother.

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