The brazen 2014 midday shooting of a prominent Florida State University law professor in front of his Tallahassee house has now seen five people put behind bars for the crime. In addition to two hit men and their intermediary, Dan Markel’s convicted killers now include his ex-wife’s wealthy brother and 75-year-old mother — who was arrested while trying to board a one-way flight from Miami to Vietnam one week after her son’s 2023 conviction.
Now, speculation is rampant that Wendi Adelson, whose acrimonious 2013 divorce from Markel was marked by their bitter custody battle, could be the sixth person to be charged in the case. According to court documents, prosecutors have identified her as an unindicted co-conspirator, but she has repeatedly denied having any involvement or prior knowledge of the scheme.
“I think there is a strong possibility that she will get charged,” former prosecutor Melba Pearson, a legal analyst and faculty member at Florida International University, told BuzzFeed in a phone interview.
In fact, Pearson said she believes “prosecutors have been angling towards [her] from the beginning because, truthfully, she’s the person that benefited the most out of all of this.”
When questioned during her mother’s trial, Wendi Adelson insisted, “I was not involved in any plot to kill Danny.”
The conspiracy unraveled in 2016 when one of the hit men, Luis Rivera, who had faced a life sentence on murder charges, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for his testimony against the shooter and the go-between. Earlier this month, Donna Adelson was found guilty on the same charges as her son, Charlie Adelson, who was finally sentenced to life in prison in 2023 for first-degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation to commit first-degree murder. (A hearing date on her sentencing has not yet been scheduled, but she too faces a life sentence.)
The execution-style murder of Dan Markel was unfathomable to the Tallahassee community and people who knew him. He was a well-liked teacher and respected legal scholar regarded as a devoted father to his sons. The motive presented by prosecutors was even more jaw-dropping: They asserted that Donna Adelson orchestrated the killing with her son so that Wendi could have full custody of her children with Markel and relocate with them 500 miles away to live near her family in South Florida.
In addition, Wendi Adelson said she had received a lucrative and more stable job offer in South Florida. Markel adamantly opposed her request to relocate with their sons, and, in 2013, a court sided with him and ordered her to keep the boys in Tallahassee.
Wendi Adelson was compelled by the state to testify in four trials in connection to the case, including her brother and mother. She received limited immunity, meaning that the statements she made in court cannot be used against her if she is charged in connection to Markel’s killing.
But many questions asked by Chief Assistant State Attorney Georgia Cappleman — who prosecuted all of the Markel murder trials — directly concerned Wendi’s own actions before and after her ex-husband’s death. Wendi’s name and photo were included in an exhibit shown several times in court diagramming the connections between the Adelsons and the people Donna and Charlie Adelson paid to kill Markel.
Although Wendi Adelson had previously testified that she was happy in Tallahassee and enjoyed her job, prosecutors presented her with court documents and communications with friends contradicting that narrative.
In the months after Adelson filed for divorce in 2012, she said she felt “stuck” in Tallahassee, whose “smallness” and “slowness” made her feel “claustrophobic.” Her mother described her as a “prisoner” who was being “held hostage” by her ex-husband.
Wendi emailed a friend saying that living in Tallahassee couldn’t compare to the life she could enjoy in South Florida, where her parents owned a luxury condo and her brother, a successful periodontist, had a house with a boat, pool and hot tub.
Charlie Adelson worked with his father, Harvey Adelson, 81, who owned the Adelson Institute for Implants and Aesthetic Surgery, a thriving cosmetic dentistry practice near Fort Lauderdale. His father retired in 2021 and sold the practice. (Harvey Adelson attended his wife’s trial but never testified, and prosecutors have not accused him of being involved in the murder plot.) A forensic accountant testified in Charlie Adelson’s trial that in July 2014, the collective balances of Charlie, Wendi and their parents’ investment and bank accounts totaled over $8 million.
Just days after Markel’s murder, Adelson reportedly moved with her children to Miami.
Wendi Adelson had an alibi for the time of the shooting — one carefully crafted by her mother and brother, prosecutors alleged. She was at her home waiting for her broken television to be serviced, before running errands and meeting friends for lunch.
In an interview with police hours after Markel was shot, Wendi Adelson said that her brother had given her a new television as a divorce present, joking that the gift was cheaper than hiring a hit man. She testified that he made the joke numerous times.
But her ex-boyfriend Jeff Lacasse, who dated Wendi Adelson in 2013 and 2014, later testified that she knew her brother had actually looked into hiring someone to kill Markel.
During his testimony, Lacasse claimed that just days before the murder, Wendi confided that Charlie Adelson had “looked into all options possible to take care of the Danny Markel ‘problem,’ including hiring a hit man, and it would cost about $15,000.”
Lacasse also claimed that her statement, which he described as “chilling,” had nothing to do with the joke Adelson told police that her brother had made. “She was dead serious when she said this,” he alleged.
When Wendi Adelson testified in her mother’s trial, Cappleman zeroed in on her attempt to drive by her ex-husband’s house shortly after the shooting.
Wendi Adelson confirmed a police officer’s testimony that she had tried to turn into Markel’s street, but like other drivers was forced to turn away because it was blocked off by a squad car and police tape. She explained the timing as a coincidence and said that she had merely been trying to take a habitual shortcut that would pass by the house she once shared with Markel. Despite the police activity, she did not attempt to call Markel or her children’s preschool, she testified, because she just assumed a tree had fallen.
In fact, it was a crime scene. About an hour earlier, Markel had pulled up into his Tallahassee garage after working out at the gym when two men in a Prius drove up behind him. Rivera testified that he was behind the wheel when his accomplice, Sigfredo Garcia, got out of the car and shot Markel twice in the head. Markel’s next-door neighbor heard the gunshots and called police. Markel died hours later in the hospital.
Prosecutors showed that one of Charlie Adelson’s girlfriends, Katherine “Katie” Magbanua, connected him to the two hit men. She shared two children with Garcia, who had an extensive criminal history and was close friends with Rivera, a Latin Kings gang leader. Magbanua testified that she acted as their intermediary, claiming that Charlie and Donna Adelson paid her $100,000 the night of Markel’s murder. She split the cash with Garcia and Rivera, but also received additional payments from the Adelsons: Although she never worked for the family’s dental practice, she regularly received paychecks in its name that were handwritten and signed by Donna Adelson.
Rivera took a plea deal in 2016 and testified against Garcia and Magbanua when they were tried together in 2019. Garcia was convicted, but jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict against Magbanua. She was tried again in 2022 and convicted. Garcia, who also testified in Charlie and Donna Adelson’s trials, was sentenced to 19 years in prison for his role in the crime. Garcia and Magbanua are serving life sentences.
Markel’s neighbor told police that he saw a green Prius, which investigators eventually identified as a rental car used by the hit men, drive away from the scene. Rivera later identified Garcia as the shooter and testified that the two had rented the car in Miami, drove to Tallahassee and stalked Markel. He said they followed him when he dropped off his sons at preschool and went to the gym — confirmed by security footage played in court — and then drove home, where Garcia fatally shot him with a .38-caliber revolver.
An FBI sting operation spooked the Adelsons into believing they were being blackmailed by Magbanua and/or her associates, which further incriminated them via wiretapped phone calls, text messages and an audio-enhanced video recorded of Magbanua and Charlie Adelson meeting at a public restaurant in Miami.
Donna Adelson kept meticulous notes in her day planners spanning a number of years. Prosecutors obtained and presented her 2014 day planner in court, the year Markel was killed, in which she noted the model and license plate number of Markel’s car. It was the same car the hit men had followed to Markel’s house.
A week after Charlie Adelson was found guilty in November 2023, Donna Adelson was arrested on a jet bridge at Miami International Airport as she and her husband were about to board a plane to Vietnam using one-way tickets. Prosecutors showed that she had obtained a “fast track emergency visa for Vietnam,” after saying on a phone call recorded by investigators that she had been researching countries — like Vietnam — that do not have extradition treaties with the U.S.
Wendi Adelson, however, has remained free — which her mother noted in text messages between them shortly after Charlie Adelson’s conviction and before her arrest.
“Your brother protected you for years,” Donna Adelson wrote to Wendi in the texts, which were presented in her trial. “Now you are not guilty. Your lawyer took very good care of you.”
In a subsequent text, which Donna Adelson read aloud to her son in a recording of a jail call obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat, she expresses her anger that her daughter hadn’t called and again refers to the “protection” the Adelsons provided her.
“Everyone looks to protect you,” Donna Adelson texted her daughter. “I bet you’ve got a lot to think about.”
Jeff Lacasse’s testimony, however, has done nothing to “protect” his ex-girlfriend Wendi. In addition to the “chilling” conversation he said they had about a hit man, he also testified that he believed the Adelsons might have been trying to frame him for Markel’s murder. Wendi Adelson quizzed him about his travel plans in a conversation that he found “creepy,” he claimed, and Cappleman noted that a route he intended to take that day would have been the same used by the killers.
In fact, the FBI was notified about Lacasse — from Wendi Adelson’s estranged brother, Robert Adelson, an ear, nose and throat physician who testified for the first time at Donna Adelson’s trial. Before explaining that he had cut ties with his family because of his mother’s callousness and disturbing comments surrounding Markel’s murder, he described an “unusual” text exchange he had with his sister at the end of June 2014, in which she told him she was dating Lacasse and shared pictures of him with her and her sons.
It was “unique,” he said, because she had never previously shared details with him about her romantic relationships. It was even more unusual, he testified, because she asked him not to tell her parents about it.
After Markel’s murder, he reached out to the FBI to tell them about Lacasse. Police later confirmed Lacasse was in Tennessee when Markel was killed.
Wendi Adelson’s limited immunity complicates matters. But if the state can prove she lied during her testimony, immunity is likely “out the window,” Pearson, the former prosecutor, suggested.
Even with the immunity agreement intact, however, “that doesn’t mean [prosecutors] didn’t hear what she said,” Pearson noted. “They could still use the knowledge that they gleaned from it to pursue different angles of investigation, to pursue new lines of inquiry.”
And there might already be enough evidence to charge Wendi Adelson with murder, Pearson said, under Florida’s principal statute.
Prosecutors could argue that Adelson “is not necessarily the mastermind of this, but she cooperated and aided in some way for this homicide to happen, and she stood to benefit from the homicide occurring,” she said.
Not only that, but Pearson said that prosecutors could have more evidence against Adelson that wasn’t shared during the previous trials.
“I highly doubt we’ve seen it all,” she said. “There may be pieces of evidence that were really strong in terms of establishing Wendi’s guilt, but maybe didn’t speak as clearly to the guilt of Charlie or Donna or anybody else” who was on trial.
If prosecutors could persuade someone to “flip” — like Rivera, who got a lighter sentence by testifying against his co-conspirators — they could “bolster and strengthen” the state’s case against Wendi Adelson, Pearson said.
In cases of first-degree murder, prosecutors are required under Florida law to bring the case to a grand jury to obtain an indictment, Pearson noted. And she doesn’t expect that to take long.
“This is going to probably come to trial in, like, a year,” Pearson predicted, emphasizing the case’s high profile and previous litigation.
After the guilty verdict against Donna Adelson was announced, Cappleman was asked by reporters whether anyone else will be charged in the case. She said she didn’t know but confirmed that the investigation was ongoing.
“Stay tuned,” she added with a coy smile.