“Probably both of us”
Donna Adelson picked up her phone and called her son.
“I’m going to need to talk to you,” she told him.
“Does it involve Wendi or anything?” Charlie asked.
“No no no no.”
“Does it involve me or other people?”
“Well, probably both of us.”
FBI agent Pat Sanford played that call for a jury nine years later. He was asked if she had sounded calm. Yes, he said. Asked if she had shown fear, he said no.
About twenty minutes later they spoke again. Charlie said that if there was a threat, she should go to the police.
“The TV was probably about five,” Donna said.
“They asked you for $5,000?” Charlie said.
Prosecutors said “the TV” was code for the murder. They pointed to a joke Charlie had made: that buying a TV for his sister as a divorce present was cheaper than hiring a hit man.
Then Charlie called Katie Magbanua.
Dolce Vita
The next day, Charlie and Magbanua met at a Miami restaurant called Dolce Vita. The FBI recorded them.
They tried to work out who the stranger was, a blackmailer or a cop.
“How do you get people to talk?” Charlie asked. “You throw a smoke grenade, and then you get all the cockroaches to run out.”
He had the right idea. It was already too late.
“If they had any evidence,” he said, “we would have already gone to the airport.”
Within weeks, the arrests began. Garcia was taken in May 2016. Rivera took a deal and got 19 years, and he named Magbanua as “the woman in the middle doing everything.” Asked about the motive, he said, “She wants full custody of the kids.”
Investigators followed the money too. After the killing, Magbanua had received large sums from the Adelsons. Prosecutors said Charlie had agreed to pay $100,000 for the murder.
Garcia was convicted in October 2019. Magbanua’s first jury deadlocked, but a second convicted her in May 2022. Both got life.
Charlie Adelson was arrested on April 21, 2022. He took the stand in his own defense. On November 6, 2023, a jury found him guilty of murder, conspiracy and solicitation.
One-way to Vietnam
One week later, on November 13, 2023, Donna Adelson was at Miami International Airport with her husband. She had a one-way ticket to Vietnam, a country with no extradition agreement with the United States.
Investigators had learned of the plan. Officers stopped her in the jetway.
Body camera video shows a woman in a gray hoodie with a blue bag on her arm. As police explained what was happening, her husband took off her jewelry.
“My husband’s almost 80 years old,” she said. “Please… Oh, don’t do this. Please.”
“An innocent woman”
She went on trial in Tallahassee in August 2025, 11 years after the murder. Jurors heard her voice on the wiretaps and saw the video of the bump. Her defense said the state had no real evidence, and cast suspicion on two of her adult children.
On September 4, 2025, they convicted her of first-degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation.
At her sentencing on October 13, she stood up and spoke.
“Never in a million years would I have wanted Danny to be harmed or killed,” she said.
“What happened to Danny is unforgivable. But I am an innocent woman convicted of this terrible crime without evidence.”
She said she had never even had a parking ticket.
Judge Stephen Everett interrupted her several times. He spoke of her “utter lack of remorse.”
“The court finds the evidence in this case is clear,” he told her.
He gave her life in prison without parole, plus more time on the other two counts. She was 75, and the fifth person sentenced in the plot. She has appealed. In July 2026, a Florida appeals court upheld Charlie’s conviction.
The two boys have grown up without their father.
“Danny was a great father,” his mother, Ruth, said.
