Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the morning of July 18, 2014, Dan Markel dropped his two little boys at preschool in Tallahassee, Florida, and drove to the gym.
He was 41, a Harvard-trained law professor at Florida State University. He was also a divorced dad in a bitter fight over where his sons would grow up.
He left the gym at 10:33. He was on the phone with a man named Schlazer as he pulled into the garage of his house on Trescott Drive.
On the other end of the line, Schlazer heard a loud sound.
“I heard him breathing like this,” he said later. “He never spoke another word to me.”
A neighbor, James Geiger, heard it too. “We heard a loud noise, a bang,” he said. “It startled us.” He went to his window and saw a Prius backing out of Markel’s driveway and speeding away.
He walked over. Markel’s car was still running in the garage. On his second trip he went inside, found Markel bleeding in the driver’s seat, and called 911. It was 11:02.
“His driver’s side window is shattered,” he told the operator.
Dan Markel had been shot twice in the head. He died the next day.
Police called him the “intended victim.” They had no idea who had wanted him dead.
The boys
Markel had married Wendi Adelson in 2006. She came from a wealthy South Florida family. Her father, Harvey, and her brother, Charlie, were dentists at the family practice, the Adelson Institute. Her mother was Donna.
“She was extremely controlling,” a prosecutor would later say.
The couple moved to Tallahassee, where both worked at the FSU law school, and they had two sons. They divorced in 2013.
The fight that followed was about the boys. Wendi wanted to move them to South Florida, near her family, about 500 miles away. Markel insisted they stay in Tallahassee, and he won an order barring the move. Donna Adelson campaigned for that move anyway.
In 2014 Markel filed a motion to block Donna’s unsupervised visits with the children. It was the last motion he ever filed.
Wendi Adelson has always denied any involvement in what happened to him. She has never been charged.
The Prius
Exactly one year after the murder, police asked the public for help finding a Toyota Prius.
The gym’s security camera had filmed Markel’s car pulling in at 9:12 that morning, with the Prius right behind it. At 10:33 the Prius followed him out again. City bus cameras caught it behind him on Thomasville Road at 10:51. At 10:55, another bus caught it heading away.
The car had a black side mirror and a SunPass toll tag. The trail led to a rented Prius, and to two men from the Miami area, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera. They had driven up to Tallahassee and stayed in motels for two nights.
The first person Garcia called after the killing was Katherine Magbanua, the mother of his children.
Magbanua was also Charlie Adelson’s ex-girlfriend.
So investigators had a killer and a go-between. What they did not have was proof of who was behind them. They had wiretaps on the family’s phones, but they needed someone to start talking.
In April 2016, the FBI decided to shake the tree.
They called it a bump. A stranger would walk up to Donna Adelson on the street, say a few words, hand her something and walk away. “What you want to do is approach somebody and see if they will start talking,” the agent later told a jury.
He found her outside her condo in Miami. He handed her a newspaper story about the murder with “$5,000” written on it, and a phone number.
“I just want to let you know that your family has been taking care of Katie and her friend Tuto,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said softly.
He never once mentioned Charlie.
She did not call the police.
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