Wendi Adelson and Dan Markel - Part 1 of 3

0:00 On paper, they looked like the perfect couple, a Harvard-educated law professor and a passionate immigration attorney, both brilliant, both driven, both devoted to their two little boys. But behind closed doors, their differences were slowly driving them apart. Throw in a mother-in-law who needed to control everything, and a protective older brother with a tough-guy image, and it was a recipe for things to get very ugly. This is the story of Dan Markell and Wendy Adelson, and it starts long before anyone ever heard a gunshot. I'm Tina. And I'm Rich. Welcome to Love, Marry, Kill.

0:40 Hey, Tina. Hey, Rich. How are you today? I'm fair today. How are you? I'm pretty good. I'm just recovering. I had a very busy day yesterday, as you know. I went to the Tigers game. I came home. I had to watch a football game. Then I had to watch the highlights of the Tigers game that I went to because I recorded it. So it was a lot. Did you see yourself on camera? No. No, I didn't. I didn't watch the whole game. I'm pretty sure I wasn't on camera. I told you I was going to watch for you and I didn't. You didn't. Well, the only reason I went is because Justin Verlander, who is one of the all-time great pitchers, was retiring and it was his last game as a Tiger.

1:29 It was actually very emotional. There were not a dry eye in the house. I bet there was some dry eyes. I don't think there was. I did see the highlight of his little girl going out on the mound and getting him and that was very sweet. You teared up? No. I did. You've been watching the replay. It was funny because before you left, I said, don't forget the tissue. And you did. You did cry. One of our listeners recently asked why sports mean so much to you. That's a good question. You know, I guess it's just because I grew up on sports. Like I grew up playing baseball, watching baseball, thinking about baseball. So it's just there's sort of a nostalgia there, I guess, is part of it. But I also just like the fact that It's competitive. I like seeing people who are good at things.

2:17 And it's cool because you don't know the outcome, you know? Yeah. Not like watching a movie where you know it's going to have a happy ending or that type of thing. You just don't know. Yeah. It just makes life a little more interesting to have something to look forward to doing, right? It's a good question, though. I never really thought about that. And for the podcast, I feel like it's partly your podcast. And I don't know. I feel like it's something you like to talk about. So that's why we kind of talk about it so much on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is a big part of our lives. I think last time we promised not to talk too much about it going forward. Well, it was the football season and our Bears-Lions bet. But yeah, we'll revisit that later on in the season. Yeah, we will. Before we get to our snack, I wanted to talk for just a minute about advertising, specifically about the volume of ads that show up in our podcast.

3:05 We've gotten a few comments lately that the ad volume is very jarring at times. A lot of people are nodding off to sleep when they're listening to us. Yeah. And I feel really bad about that. Yeah. But I also I don't know that everyone knows we can't we don't have a lot of control over the ads. So we basically host our podcast with a podcast host. Spreaker. Called Spreaker. And they insert ads at the point we tell them to. So we say, hey, we want an ad at this part of the podcast. they'll insert an ad. We don't know what ad it is. And it could be a different ad if you're listening in Minnesota or Florida or whatever. And there are a lot of categories of ads that we try to avoid. Yes. And a lot of the complaints have been about gambling ads, which we had said we don't want in the podcast. Anyway, I sent a note to Spreaker the other day and I complained pretty loudly about this because it's been an ongoing issue. They said they're going to take out gambling ads so you shouldn't hear them again.

4:00 but there's not a lot that we can do about the ad volume. We hope that it's getting better. Well, a shameless plug for our Patreon, but if you listen on Patreon, you don't get any ads at all, and you can sleep soundly through the whole episode. I have a very exciting snack for you today because I was fortunate enough to stop by our P.O. Box, and there was a nice package in there from Grace, who sent us a really amazing snack. She went on a recent trip to Taiwan, and she sent us a whole bunch of stuff that she bought in Taiwan. That's so sweet. The only problem is that all of the writing on the packaging is all in Taiwanese. And my severe peanut allergy, that could be a bad thing.

4:43 Just kidding. I do not have a peanut allergy. That would be bad, but no. So yeah, she sent a whole bunch of stuff. So we're just going to try a sampling and then we'll comment on it. Okay. Music What did you think about our assortment of Taiwanese snacks? Well, first of all, I'm overwhelmed that someone took the trouble to do that for us and this cute little keychain. Everything was really good. We didn't open everything because there was a lot of cute little things in there, but just I really enjoyed most of them except for one. Yeah, there was one you didn't love. I thought they were all really good. There was one that looked like little octopus tentacles and there was a picture of an octopus on the bag. It was really good. It was more like a Cheeto type of snack, but yeah.

5:29 This pineapple cake is delicious, but what a fun, fun snack. Thank you so much, Grace. Yeah, thank you so much, Grace. And if you'd like to send us a snack, you can send it to LMKpod, P.O. Box 111, Dexter, Michigan, 48130. Today, we're going to dive into the story of Wendy Adelson and Dan Markell. When I started researching this case, you warned me that it was going to be very involved and very complex, and you weren't wrong. To do justice to the story, I think we're going to need three parts. The story, it's gotten a lot of attention recently. As I was partway through with my research, Hulu released a four-part documentary series about it. The documentary was very well done. I do recommend watching it so you can see and hear the people involved. But, of course, we're going to go deeper.

6:17 On the morning of Friday, July 18, 2014, Dan Markell dropped his two young sons off at preschool. told them he loved them, and promised he'd be back that afternoon to take them swimming. He never made it back. Less than two hours later, after stopping at the gym for a workout, he pulled into his garage. Before he even had a chance to open his car door, someone stepped into the garage and fired two shots, point-blank, through the driver's side window. Both bullets struck Dan in the head. A neighbor heard the gunshots and called 911. Dan was rushed to the hospital and kept alive through the afternoon and into the evening, but just after midnight, he was pronounced dead. He was 41 years old. Dan Markell was a brilliant, nationally recognized law professor at Florida State University, a Harvard-educated legal scholar whose work on punishment and justice was cited across the country. He was also a devoted father of two boys, just three and four years old.

7:17 While he had numerous professional accomplishments and accolades, he told anyone who would listen that becoming a parent was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Two years earlier, his marriage to Wendy Adelson had come apart in dramatic fashion. She left without warning, took their sons, and filed for divorce the same day. What followed was one of the ugliest divorces Tallahassee had ever seen, packed with courtroom filings, allegations of misconduct, an attempted relocation that never happened, and a level of bitterness that never subsided, even after the ink on the settlement had dried. So when a bullet ended Dan's life in his own garage, investigators didn't have to look far to find people who may have had a motive, but figuring out who actually pulled the trigger and who, if anyone, had put them up to it would take years. This is the story of Dan Markell and Wendy Adelson. Dan Markell's parents, Phil Markell and Ruth Isaacson, both grew up in Montreal, the children of European immigrants.

8:19 They met at a summer camp in 1963 while both were home from college on break and married in 1966. Their first child, Shelley, was born in September 1969. Three years later, in October 1972, they had a son. They named him Daniel. From the very beginning, Dan seemed more alert, more high-energy than most kids. As a baby, he didn't sleep at all during the day. He would wake up at 6 a.m. and stay up until 7 p.m., almost like someone with a job to do. He was driven. As his mother would later put it, The Markells raised their children Jewish, though not strictly. They attended Saturday morning services only occasionally, but they were fairly strict when it came to observing Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

9:10 Every summer, without fail, the family packed up and spent several weeks in Israel. For Dan, it would become the place he loved more than any other in the world. In 1978, when Dan was five and Shelley was eight, the family moved from Montreal to Toronto. Ruth worked as a management consultant and Phil worked as an importer. In addition to being rambunctious and curious, Dan was also a voracious reader from an early age. He started with comic books and worked his way up to more serious literature, spending many Saturdays at the local library with his sister while their parents worked and a babysitter watched over them. I thought that was an interesting idea. It never occurred to me to have a babysitter just take your kids to the library and say, you're spending the day there and just have a babysitter watch over them at the library.

9:58 Not a bad idea. Haven't fun isn't hard when you've got a library card. Very well said, yes. But reading was just one interest among many. Dan played tennis, baseball, ice hockey, and he skied. He loved dancing and was good at it. He landed lead roles in youth theater productions and had no hesitations about performing in front of a crowd. Whatever he tried, he approached with a kind of fearlessness. And once he landed on a goal, he was tenacious about pursuing it. That tenacity showed up in strange, specific ways. Dan loved board games, and his favorite was Trivial Pursuit. At one point, he memorized every question and answer on the cards, all 2,400 of them, so that he could beat anyone who challenged him.

10:44 Hmm, that seems a little unfair. A little bit. In Hebrew school, he found himself drawn deeper into his religion. He loved the sense of belonging he felt during services, and for a time, he even considered becoming a rabbi. At the same time, he developed a curiosity about financial markets and began investing in American stocks as a teenager. He also started reading about Ivy League universities, and at 13, he told his parents that he wanted to go to America after high school. ideally Harvard. When Dan was 14, the family moved again, this time closer to downtown Toronto, where Ruth's work increasingly demanded her time.

11:25 She had recently published a book called Room at the Top, A Woman's Guide to Moving Up in Business, and had become an in-demand speaker and consultant. One of Ruth's friends, a guidance counselor, helped Dan chart his path to an Ivy League school. Grades were never going to be the problem. He had an uncanny ability to absorb and recall dense material, along with a talent for writing. What he needed, the counselor told him, was to become a leader, not just a good student. So Dan joined the debate team and excelled. He started a school club for environmental conservation. He resurrected his school's long-defunct newspaper and became both its editor and business manager, writing and editing most of the content himself, while also going out and signing up local businesses as advertisers to fund it. At 16, he spent an entire summer in Israel, deepening his love for the country and reconnecting with cousins, and forming relationships and friendships that would last the rest of his life. At 17, Dan got word that Marnie, a girl he had been enamored with since second grade, and he had dated her on and off through his teenage years, had been killed on a beach in Tel Aviv. She had laid her towel down in the exact spot where a Hamas operative had planted a pipe bomb. It was a devastating, senseless death, and it affected Dan deeply.

12:48 Dan was accepted to Harvard, arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts in September 1991. It didn't take long for him to fall in love with Harvard. He threw himself into student life, building diverse social circles, and joining a range of student organizations. Politically, he leaned liberal, but he genuinely enjoyed debating with classmates who disagreed with him. He liked to argue, he was good at it, and he clearly relished it. But he was also a good listener. Even in the middle of a debate, he had no intention of losing. In class, he was the student sitting near the front with his hand up, always ready with a question, a counterpoint, or a direct challenge to the professor. Some classmates rolled their eyes and called him a gunner. Dan didn't mind. If anything, he wore it as a badge of honor. As a former University of Michigan graduate student, do you want to tell everyone what a gunner is?

13:41 I mean, it was, I think you kind of described it, you know, it was the person who was always sitting in the front, always asking questions, who kind of almost felt like they had to be the center of attention. And a lot of us were sort of like, you know, look down on the gunners. But The Gunners were really serious about their studies, too, and they wanted to get the most they could out of it. Two steps ahead of everyone else. Kind of, yeah. They were planning for their future more than the average college student probably. Dan joined the debate team and wrote for the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, a job he loved. By his junior year, he was writing his own weekly column. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in government. From there, Dan won a fellowship to study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and he spent the next two years in Israel, immersed in political philosophy. He traveled extensively and landed a job as a legislative aide to the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, something unheard of for a 23-year-old Canadian. In Israel, he had a close brush with violence. Riding a bus one day, he was two buses behind another that was detonated by a suicide bomber.

14:46 He escaped physically unharmed, but he witnessed the aftermath firsthand, and it shook him to his core. In the fall of 1996, Dan moved on to the University of Cambridge in England, enrolling in the master's program in philosophy, supported by three separate scholarships. He excelled again, graduating with high honors in political thought and intellectual history. Reading the biographies of both Dan and Wendy, who we'll talk about in a minute, It makes me feel really unaccomplished. I mean, these people are so driven and fit so much in and just were at the top of everything that they did. Yeah, definitely an impressive resume. In September 1997, Dan was back at Harvard, this time as a first-year law student, a 1L. To him, law school felt like a natural continuation of everything he'd studied so far, but he still wasn't sure whether he was working towards a career as a lawyer, a philosopher, an academic, or something in business.

15:45 He feared immersing himself fully in legal studies would eventually point him toward the right answer. Between his 1L and 2L years, he went home to Toronto and worked as a research assistant for a University of Toronto law professor specializing in international law. contributing to a project on amnesty in post-apartheid South Africa. The work turned into a 57-page scholarly article, which was later published in the University of Toronto Law Journal. Somewhere in the course of writing it, Dan started seriously considering a career as a law professor. By the time he graduated from Harvard Law in May 2001 with honors, He already had three separate articles accepted for publication, which was nearly unheard of for someone still in law school. Aspiring law professors typically clerk for a judge after graduation, and Dan followed that path to the U.S.

16:38 Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which hears appeals out of federal trial courts across the western United States. He clerked in Phoenix under Judge Michael Daley Hawkins, a Bill Clinton appointee. Dan treated the clerkship the way he treated every classroom before it. He didn't hold back when he thought the judge had gotten something wrong, and he'd argue his case just as readily with Hawkins as he had with his Harvard professors. More than once, Hawkins had to say to him gently, Dan, please remember, I'm the judge. Landing a tenured track law professorship is a brutal numbers game. There are only around 200 accredited law schools in the country, and between them, they hire roughly 150 entry-level, tenure-track professors in a typical year. In any given year, there may be more than 600 candidates vying for those spots. Nearly three-quarters of the jobs go to graduates of Harvard, Yale, and a few other top 10 schools. By the summer of 2003, though, Dan had built a resume that stood out even in that highly competitive environment, including a record of academic publishing, a federal clerkship, and a stint editing the Harvard Law Review. After his clerkship wrapped up, Dan moved to Washington, D.C. to work as an associate at Kellogg Huber, a respected litigation firm. By that September, his phone was ringing off the hook. Law schools were eager to interview him, and he lined up nearly two dozen interviews.

18:09 The one disappointment was that Harvard did not offer an interview. But heading into the process, Dan was overconfident, and he didn't land a single offer. On paper, faculty search committees loved him. In person, he came across as arrogant and intimidating, and that cost him. Undeterred, he decided to regroup, trying again the following year, and kept working at Kellogg Huber in the meantime. Hopefully you're getting an idea. The picture of Dan here is that he's a brilliant guy. But often, and this will be a continuing pattern, he's overconfident. He doesn't understand why people can't sort of accept the fact that he's brilliant. And he rubs people the wrong way, I think. And in his mind, it's like he knows the material. He knows the law. He knows all this stuff. And so I think he's frustrated that people don't always recognize that or don't look past his personal foibles.

19:07 Well, socialization and your personality is just as important as your education. I think a lot of times people forget that when they're so immersed and you're getting their Harvard degree and going to Cambridge and things like that. It's just as important to focus on your interpersonal skills. During Dan's time at law school, his sister Shelly had a baby, then a second child while Dan was working at Kellogg Huber. Becoming an uncle stirred something in Dan. He realized that he wanted to be a father someday. He'd had a few serious relationships over the years, some lasting well over a year, but at 31, he was still a bachelor. So he created a profile on JDate, a dating site for Jewish singles. A handful of dates followed. none of them panning out, until July 2004 when he was matched with an impressive woman named Wendy Adelson. We'll be back after a break.

20:07 Harvey Adelson and Donna Jacobs got married in 1971 when he was 27 and she had just turned 21. Both were native New Yorkers from working-class Jewish families. Harvey had just wrapped up a dental residency in Brooklyn and Donna had just earned her bachelor's degree in education from Queens College. After their honeymoon, he went to work as a licensed dentist and she took a job as a The following year, the couple decided New York wasn't where they wanted to raise a family, so they relocated to North Miami Beach, Florida. Less than a year after that, they moved again, this time to Coral Springs, drawn by its strong public school system.

20:48 Donna was pregnant by then with their first child, a boy they named Rob. Harvey spent those early years building up his dental practice, which he called the Adelson Institute, and the family's fortunes grew along with it. They eventually bought a five bedroom, 4,000 square foot home on a half acre lot in an upscale neighborhood, complete with a swimming pool and a clay tennis court Harvey had installed right next to it. Three years after Rob was born, Donna gave birth to another boy, Charlie. Three years after that, in April 1979, the family was complete with the birth of Wendy. From the start, Wendy was the family comedian, the one who could crack a joke to cut through tension, who seemed happiest when she had the room laughing. She was especially close with Rob despite a six-year age gap between them. Rob was an excellent student, and Wendy looked up to him and tried to emulate him in school.

21:44 When she was 12, Rob left for Tulane University in New Orleans, and she was devastated for weeks afterward. After his undergrad, Rob went on to medical school, eventually becoming an ear, nose, and throat doctor in New York. Academically, Wendy excelled, pulling straight A's. But more than just book smarts, she also developed an awareness of her own privilege and a drive to give back. In eighth grade, she started a non-profit called Starting Blocks. Using $ 200 she had saved from her piggy bank, she bought stationery and stamps and wrote letters to local toy companies and bookstores asking for donations. With her mother's help, she built out a board of directors that included... state legislators, and other local movers and shakers.

22:31 The pitch worked. She started collecting toys, books, art supplies, and instructional videos, then personally bagging them up and delivering them to underfunded daycare centers. She backed that up by volunteering at daycares in lower-income neighborhoods for at least seven hours a week throughout all four years of high school. On top of all that, Wendy modeled professionally and became an accomplished pianist. She graduated valedictorian of Coral Springs High School's class of 1997 and was voted most likely to succeed. But as Wendy later said, what her mother Donna seemed most proud of wasn't any of her academic achievements or her success with her non-profit. It was that Wendy made it through high school without losing her virginity.

23:18 Her non-profit organization when she was in eighth grade, that sounds like a pretty amazing thing. It really is, isn't it? For an eighth grader to undertake that and be successful at it, it sounds like. If I were her mom, I think I would be very proud of that. I would think so, too. In August 1997, Wendy moved into her dorm at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, a small liberal arts school with a heavily Jewish student population. Going in, she planned to follow her brother Rob's path toward medical school. Academically, she continued to excel while keeping up her commitment to community service through the local Big Brother Big Sister program. By sophomore year, she had become fluent enough in Spanish to land a summer fellowship in Argentina, where she worked alongside families still searching for loved ones who had disappeared during the country's dirty war in the 1970s.

24:13 It was there that she met Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Argentinian human rights advocate who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, the year after Mother Teresa. He became a mentor to her, and his influence ran deep. Wendy came away from that summer convinced that she wanted to fight for social change the way that he had. She also came away with a new perspective on how best to do it. She would need a deep understanding of the law. Medical school was out, and law school was in. In her junior year, she was awarded a Truman Scholarship, an award nearly as prestigious as a Rhodes Scholarship. She spent that summer immersed in public service, interning with the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., and volunteering as a conflict resolution teacher at a girls' juvenile detention center on the side. Back at Brandeis for her senior year, she was chosen as the university's sole nominee for a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Fellowship, and was one of only 10 students selected nationwide out of hundreds of applicant universities.

25:21 She finished her undergrad in May 2001, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, then headed back to Washington to start her fellowship, focusing on immigration issues. While there, she picked up yet another prestigious award, a scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which covered the full cost of a master's program in philosophy and at Cambridge in England. Once her year with the Carnegie Endowment wrapped up, she flew to England to start her graduate work, this time centered on international relations. The experience left a real mark on her, deepening her sense of purpose around helping immigrants navigate their way through the American system. Outside of all her academic achievements, Wendy and her mom were both die-hard fans of TV game shows. Donna, in fact, had once been a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. One of the puzzles she solved that day was the phrase mischief maker.

26:18 People who knew Donna and her family well would later find that more than a little ironic. Wendy followed in Donna's footsteps. After her fellowship ended, she applied to compete on The Weakest Link. She got the callback and flew out to Los Angeles to tape an episode, which aired in December 2002. She got a big laugh when she told the host. When I was little, I wanted to be a giraffe. She ended up winning her episode. Did you see video of her being on the game shows? All I've been able to find is the little clip of her saying, when I was little, I wanted to be a giraffe. I wasn't able to find the whole episode or more from it. We used to love The Weakest Link. Oh yeah, it was a great show. Understanding the Adelson family dynamics are important for this story, so let's talk a bit about the other Adelson children, Charlie and Robb.

27:07 Growing up, Charlie Adelson was very different from his siblings. As a teenager, he was scrawny. Classmates nicknamed him Screech, after the character from Saved by the Bell, and he never matched Rob or Wendy academically. He did show a natural talent for tennis, though. He headed off to the University of Central Florida in Orlando, majoring in micro and molecular biology. It was there that Charlie remade himself physically. He started lifting weights for hours each day and packed on 50 pounds of muscle by the time he graduated. Along with the new physique came a new persona. Charlie cultivated a tough guy image, and part of that included an enthusiasm for guns. He built up an impressive personal collection, keeping one under the driver's seat of his car and another within reach of his bed at all times. Professionally, Charlie set his sights on following his father into dentistry.

28:02 enrolling at Nova Southeastern University's dental school in Fort Lauderdale. He earned his license in July 2003 and went straight to work alongside his dad. After a three-year surgical residency, he specialized in periodontics, extractions, implants, and bone grafts, a move that helped the father-son practice expand significantly and start bringing in serious money. But for Charlie, that kind of money only created an appetite for more. He built out a referral network spanning dozens of dentists across South Florida. He put in 16-hour days, driving all over the region to perform procedures. By his mid-30s, he was investing his earnings into apartment complexes and even a New York-style Jewish deli. Somehow, in the middle of that grueling schedule, he still found hours for the gym, and along the way, he started taking anabolic steroids. Personally, Charlie was an avowed bachelor, moving through a steady rotation of girlfriends with no interest in monogamy, fidelity, or ever settling down.

29:09 Rob Adelson was the opposite of his younger brother, focused, disciplined, and honest to a degree that occasionally baffled the rest of his family. As a teenager, while attending a tennis tournament with his parents, Rob realized a vendor had given him too much change after buying a snack. He told them that he was going to walk back and return it. His parents didn't get it and mocked him for it, but to Rob it really wasn't a choice, it was the right thing to do. From then on, the family had a nickname for him, Honest Abe. though they didn't mean it as a compliment. Rob went on to graduate in the top 10% of his class at the University of South Florida's medical school, then moved to Dallas for a residency in ear, nose, and throat medicine. It was there that he fell for a woman named Haritha Chalapalli, who was a resident in emergency medicine. When he told his parents he was dating an Indian woman, they made no secret for their disapproval. They expected him to settle down with a nice, Jewish woman. Rob was in love with Haritha, but about nine months into their relationship, he told her that his parents were forcing him to choose between her and them. He chose his parents, breaking things off with Haritha. However, he regretted it almost immediately, and Haritha took him back. Harvey and Donna responded by turning up the pressure even further, warning him that he'd be disowned for good if he didn't end it permanently. The cycle repeated itself several times over, breakup, reconciliation, breakup again.

30:41 Eventually worn down, Rob ended it with Haritha for what he believed to be the last time. Not long after, he started dating a Jewish woman from Dallas named Debbie. His parents were thrilled when he announced their engagement. But shortly after the wedding, Rob realized the truth that he'd been avoiding. He was never going to love anyone the way he loved Haritha. He had the marriage annulled within months. He and Haritha found their way back to each other, and this time, Rob told his parents that it was final. They'd accept it or not. He and Haritha married just 10 months after his marriage to Debbie was ended. The couple went on to settle in Albany, New York. where they raised two children and, by all accounts, have lived a genuinely happy life together. He still spoke with Donna, Harvey, and his siblings after that and visited occasionally, but things were never quite the same.

31:32 You get the sense that Rob is kind of the black sheep of the family here. In a good way. Yeah, exactly. For the wrong reasons, really. Like, okay, he's honest to a fault, and so he fell in love with someone outside of his faith. Like, all these things, you know, he's... end up looking at the Adelson family, which we'll talk about a lot during the story. Rob really stands out as being, you know, kind of the one good one, if you will. After six years away, Wendy came home to South Florida to attend law school at University of Miami, where she'd landed a full scholarship. She threw herself into the work, interning at the school's Center for Ethics and Public Service and later landing a coveted internship with a federal trial judge in Miami. Donna urged Wendy, now 25, to create a J-date profile, telling her it was time to find Mr. Right.

32:24 One evening that July, with Donna literally looking over her shoulder, Wendy scrolled through profile after profile, nobody clearing the bar either of them had set. She was ready to give up for the night when Donna spotted Dan's profile, a 31-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer. She said, Wendy, I think we've found Mr. Right. On his end, Dan noted three things right away when Wendy's initial message came in. He found her to be very attractive. She was young, barely 25, more than six years younger than him. And she lived in Miami, well over a thousand miles from D.C. But none of that mattered much once he saw her smile. They started talking online and quickly realized how much overlap there was in their lives. In addition to their shared faith, they'd gone to colleges 10 miles apart in Boston. They'd both graduated magna cum laude, they both had done graduate work at Cambridge before heading to law school, and they were both highly accomplished. They finally met in person that September when Wendy was in Washington interviewing for a summer clerkship, and from there, a long-distance relationship took shape. For Dan, the physical attraction was real, but what really pulled him in was Wendy's mind, her wit, her offbeat sense of humor, and her commitment to helping people who had less than she did. Wendy, for her part, was drawn to Dan's playful, goofy side, along with a worldliness and intellectual intensity she hadn't encountered in anyone else that she dated. Both of

33:55 them started to picture the other as someone they could build a family with. For a while, they split their time between Miami and D.C., though gradually, Wendy found herself spending more and more time in Dan's city. Dan was more serious about his religion than Wendy was. She adjusted to keeping a kosher home with him, something new for her, but she didn't seem to mind. When Dan made his first trip down to Coral Springs to meet her parents, he won them over completely. He was, in Donna's eyes, exactly what she'd been hoping for. Wendy made just as strong an impression on Dan's family in Toronto, and watching him interact with his niece and nephew gave her a glimpse of the father she thought he could become. The following year, Dan went back on the law school job market, and again, the invitations for on-campus interviews poured in. His top target was UC Berkeley, then ranked 10th nationally. He and Wendy began talking seriously about her finishing her own legal training wherever he ended up teaching so they could stay together. To Dan's frustration, Berkeley didn't make an offer.

35:04 The most serious interest instead came from Florida State University, whose law school was ranked number 67 in the country. It was a school that Dan barely registered as an afterthought. He and Wendy flew down for a site visit. Neither of them knew Tallahassee, and what they found gave them pause. It felt small and provincial compared to the cities like Boston and D.C. where they'd spent a lot of time. The Jewish community numbered only about 4,000 people in a city of 150,000. The cultural scene was lacking. the public schools underwhelming, and some of the neighborhoods surrounding campus didn't feel safe after dark. But Dan saw FSU as a stepping stone, confident that he could eventually get back to Harvard or at least to a major city like D.C.

35:52 or New York. He talked Wendy into seeing things the same way, and she agreed, reluctantly, to make the move with him. In May 2005, right after Wendy wrapped up her second year of law school, the two of them traveled to Israel together, On their fourth day there, Dan brought her to the Golan Heights and, with the Sea of Galilee spread out below them, he proposed. She said yes without hesitation. Dan couldn't stop telling friends afterward that he had won the lottery of life. But the euphoria didn't last long. Not long after they got home, Wendy watched Dan treat one of her law school friends with a rudeness that left the woman humiliated. Wendy was furious.

36:34 She told Dan that she needed space and told friends that she was seriously weighing whether to call off the wedding entirely. Dan spent the following days working hard to repair the damage and eventually, Wendy forgave him. But looking back, it was a preview of a pattern that would define their marriage. Dan genuinely loved a good argument. He always had. It was the same instinct that made him a gunner in his Harvard classrooms and a relentless debater with judges and colleagues alike. He could be sharp, blunt, even cutting when he was making a point, and he didn't always notice when the person on the other end of the argument wasn't enjoying it or was quietly wounded by it. To Dan, disagreement was just how two smart people worked something out. It rarely occurred to him that it might land differently for someone else. Wendy was built the opposite way.

37:24 She hated confrontation, and rather than push back in the moment, she tended to absorb it, go quiet, and let the resentment build underneath the surface. Where Dan wanted to hash things out until they reached some kind of resolution, Wendy's instinct was to retreat and to let her frustration come out later in indirect ways. It was a mismatch that would only grow more pronounced in the years ahead. I think understanding this dynamic of, you know, Dan and Wendy and their personalities, like they had very similar sort of career paths and accomplishments. But they were so different in terms of just how they were as people and how they interacted with people. I think we've all known people like Dan who just they just don't kind of understand necessarily that people might get hurt by something you say if you're in an argument to them. It's just, no, I'm just having an argument about facts. And so they don't always get it when the other person is feeling, you know, kind of embattled.

38:19 Well, it sounds like Dan, he could have an argument and then move on with the rest of his day, where a lot of us, if we have an argument or harsh words with someone, it's really hard to let it go and move on. Yeah, exactly. We'll be back after a break. By August 2005, Dan was standing in front of a lecture hall half full of first-year law students at FSU... Even though he was still new, Dan had already started putting out feelers to see if a more prestigious school might come calling. Meanwhile, Wendy was working through her 2L and 3L years of law school.

38:59 I'm sorry, I meant to ask this earlier, but why didn't Dan get offers from more prestigious law schools? From the best that I could tell, it was really because his personality kind of rubbed people the wrong way when he went in for interviews. Okay. So it wasn't his youth because I thought maybe the average age of a law professor would be, you know, in their 40s or 50s. No, I don't think so. I think it was more at least the first year that he went around. It seemed like that in the interviews, he just didn't do that well. Like people just didn't like his personality. Back in Coral Springs, Wendy and Donna were deep into wedding planning. Dan had really only asked for one thing, that the entire event be kosher, in keeping with what he considered a non-negotiable Jewish custom. But Donna pushed back. Nobody in their extended family actually kept kosher day to day. and to them, Dan's request felt less like tradition and more like an imposition. The disagreement dragged on for weeks before Donna finally, grudgingly relented. The wedding took place on February 26, 2006.

40:04 At Dan's request, the ceremony was officiated by Rabbi Robinson, a close friend of his from his Cambridge days. That afternoon, when the rabbi went to check in with the kosher supervisor in the synagogue's kitchen, there wasn't one to be found. The catering staff explained that the bride's family had requested a last-minute menu change and that what was actually being served wasn't kosher at all. Rabbi Robinson was stunned. He decided to hold off telling Dan until after the ceremony, not wanting to spoil the moment. But just before the ceremony started, caterers wheeled out a display that included chopped liver sitting alongside cheese, a combination that Dan instantly recognized wasn't kosher. Rabbi Robinson tried to smooth things over, chalking it up to a mistake. Dan made it through the ceremony, but afterward, the rabbi pulled him aside and told him what had really happened. As the reception began, Dan went from table to table, warning any guest who kept kosher not to touch the food, apologizing over and over. He was quietly seething. He felt like Donna had deceived him and humiliated him over something that she knew was very important to him. To many people who knew the Adelsons, the whole episode seemed like a message from Donna. She was the boss, and things were going to happen on her terms. Fresh off their honeymoon in the Bahamas, Dan got an offer that seemed almost too good to be true.

41:34 A position teaching criminal law at Washington University in St. Louis, a school ranked in the nation's top 20. The school flew Dan and Wendy out for a visit in March 2006 and treated them like royalty. Both of them were thrilled at the idea of getting out of Tallahassee. When the school asked Dan to lay out what it would take to bring him on board, he took their enthusiasm as a green light to aim as high as possible. He asked for a salary in line with what he might command at Harvard or Yale, generous travel and research funds, and, since he and Wendy were, in his words, a package deal, a job for her as well, ideally in immigration law.

42:17 The list didn't land the way he had hoped. It irritated the dean and much of the faculty, and the offer was rescinded before Dan even had a chance to negotiate. He tried walking some of it back, but by then it was too late. Oh, boy. Yeah, so again, you kind of see this pattern over and over where he's very confident and feels like, oh, they really want me. I'm going to ask for the moon. And, you know, I could always back off a little bit, but they took it as, look, who is this guy, you know? Not long after that setback, though, the University of Miami's law school extended a different kind of offer, a visiting position for the fall 2006 semester, essentially a trial run to see if a permanent hire made sense.

43:01 Along with it came a package deal for Wendy, bringing her on as a staff attorney and instructor at the Center for Ethics and Public Service, the same program where she had interned as a student. For Donna and Harvey, it was a dream come true. Their daughter was coming home. Once he arrived, Dan quickly built relationships with several senior faculty members who were impressed by his intellect, but not everyone was won over. A handful of the school's female professors, several of them scholars in critical race theory and gender studies, took issue with some of his views on criminal justice. Separately, a group of clinical faculty, professors who supervised students representing real clients, also had a say in whether Dan would be hired, and they weren't enthusiastic. Their reservations weren't really about Dan at all. They centered on Wendy, whose work as a lawyer they didn't rate highly, and whose mistakes they had had to correct more than once. They understood that voting against Dan meant that Wendy would leave too, and some of them seemed to think that that was for the best. The hiring debate turned contentious. One female colleague accused Dan of misogyny, pointing to a moment in an informal meeting where he had kept his eyes on a male colleague rather than looking at her while he spoke.

44:23 The accusation caused some of Dan's supporters to change their votes, and in the end, the permanent offer never came. Dan was stunned. He had been confident that it was a done deal. He went back to FSU where the dean, relieved to have him back, gave him a raise in hopes of heading off any future wandering eye. Knowing how disappointed Wendy's family would be, Dan encouraged her to stay in Miami and finish out her academic year appointment, which she did, putting the two of them back into a long-distance marriage just months after the wedding. It was now clear that they would be staying in Tallahassee for the long haul, so Dan and Wendy bought a home on Trescott Drive in Benton Hills, one of the city's oldest and most established neighborhoods. By the time Wendy turned 30, she was six months pregnant with the couple's first child.

45:14 Their first son, Benjamin Amakai Markell, was born in July 2009. The middle name, Amakai, meant My People's Lives. It was meant as a tribute to Dan's grandmother, celebrating her unwavering commitment to the Jewish people and Jewish tradition. Donna flew in to stay for six weeks after Benjamin's birth to help the new parents settle into a routine. When Benjamin was just six months old, Wendy discovered she was pregnant again. Their second son, Lincoln Jonah Markell, arrived in October 2010, four days after Dan's 38th birthday, and once again Donna came for an extended stay to help them out. The boys quickly became the center of Dan's world. He threw himself into fatherhood with the same intensity he brought to everything else, giving them baths, pushing their stroller around the neighborhood, reading to them, singing to them. getting down on the floor to play. Friends who knew him during this period describe a dad who was silly, deeply affectionate, and endlessly proud, the kind of father who couldn't stop bringing his sons up in conversation.

46:21 As their marriage is progressing and they're having children, how was the relationship between Dan and Donna and Harvey? I didn't find a lot about how and when that relationship went downhill. We know that it did go downhill. And by the time Wendy and Dan started having serious problems, Dan also had serious problems with Donna, especially, just because she exerted herself. Harvey sort of seemed like he kind of sat on the sidelines. A little bit. He supported Donna, whatever she did. But Donna seemed to be the real issue when it came to the in-laws. Most first-year law professors spend their early years focused on the path to tenure. The formula is well-known. Publish a handful of articles. Prepare solid lectures. sit on a faculty committee or two, and contribute some service to the broader profession.

47:10 But Dan had no interest in just doing the bare minimum. By the time he arrived at FSU, he had already published four law review articles, with a fifth on the way, an output that most junior professors couldn't reach in years, let alone before their first semester. In April 2005, he and a friend, Ethan Lieb, launched ProfsBlog, a blog about Legal academia and scholarship, back when blogging itself was still relatively new, Prof's blog grew into something much bigger than either of them expected, a real community of young, like-minded law professors eventually pulling in more than 250,000 page views a month. In-person Prof's meetups became a fixture at major academic conferences, and Dan was often the one organizing the dinners and happy hours that ran late into the night.

48:02 That same appetite for feedback and collaboration led Dan to create ProfsFest, a twice-yearly, two-day workshop hosted at different law schools around the country, where roughly a dozen professors would spend an hour picking apart each participant's draft article. Dan jokingly called these gatherings his cocaine. He also co-organized a separate annual event just for criminal law scholars, the Crime Prof Shadow Conference, a three-day summer conference that became a fixture on the calendar for people in his field. So Dan really, he loved connecting people, not just professionally, but personally also. He introduced people. I think some people he introduced got married, and he was really proud of the fact that he had played matchmaker. But that really came to the fore in his career. work with the law community. Like, he really loved to get people together and share ideas.

48:54 It sounds like a fabulous time. Yes. Most of Dan's own research centered on retributive justice, the question of how and why society should punish people convicted of crimes. By 2010, just five years into his academic career, he had published 18 law review articles, many of them in top-tier journals at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Berkeley. To the legal academic community, Dan? had become something close to a rock star. In the classroom, he was a polarizing figure. He pushed his students hard using an intense, aggressive version of the Socratic method, and he had little patience for students who showed up late. Some students thrived under that pressure and came away grateful for it, Others found him condescending and demeaning, and he developed a reputation among students and some colleagues alike as someone who could be difficult to be around. Over time, though, his teaching style softened. He started building real relationships with students outside the classroom, giving career advice, recommending restaurants and things to do wherever their summer internships took them, and writing letters of recommendation. and outside the law school entirely, he became a prominent, well-liked fixture in Tallahassee's Jewish community, deeply involved in local Jewish life. FSU's law school rose right along with him. By 2009, buoyed in part by Dan's growing reputation as a legal scholar, the school had climbed to

50:24 number 52 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. That same year, the University of Houston came calling with an offer that included a 50% raise. Dan and Wendy flew out to take a look, but by then, Tallahassee had genuinely grown on Dan. He had built a close circle of friends and a real sense of belonging in the community. He turned Houston down, using the offer instead as leverage to negotiate a better deal at FSU. By 2014, FSU had climbed even further, to number 45 in the national rankings. Friends said that Dan never spoke about all of his successes or his standing in the legal field.

51:05 One friend said, Dan may not have been humble about sharing his opinions as he taught in class or wrote online, but he was humble about himself. While Dan's career was taking off in academia, Wendy was also excelling on her own path. As a public interest attorney and adjunct professor with Florida State University's Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, she represented immigrant women and children fleeing domestic abuse, asylum seekers escaping persecution, and survivors of human trafficking. For Wendy, the work went well beyond the technical duties of a lawyer. She would personally drive clients to doctor's appointments and therapy sessions, translate them, them in Spanish and help them navigate a complex legal system.

51:52 She also kept up a scholarly writing practice alongside Dan's, though her work appeared in less prestigious journals than his. Dan would help her refine her articles, offering feedback on her drafts. Somewhere along the way, Wendy felt pulled toward a different kind of storytelling, one that could reach ordinary readers, not just legal academics. The result was a 276-page fiction novel called This Is Our Story, which she ultimately self-published on Amazon after failing to find a traditional publisher. The book alternated chapters between the first-person perspective of Lily Walker Stone, a corporate lawyer turned public interest attorney, and her clients, Rosa Hernandez and Mila Gulaj, two women who migrated to Miami from Argentina and Slovakia, respectively. In the afterward, Wendy described Rosa and Mila as composite characters drawn from the many stories she'd absorbed over the years practicing immigration law.

52:52 The book may have contained some clues about Wendy's growing discontent in her marriage to Dan. While the main character Lily was fictional, she seemed closely based on Wendy's own life. In the book, Lily's husband is a professor and Lily feels trapped in a fictional Florida panhandle town that sounds a lot like Tallahassee. By the end of the book, Lily leaves her husband, taking her child with her. It's kind of a weird choice, writing a book when you're married, and the main characters are fairly, you know, thinly veiled versions of you and your husband. And in the book, it ends up in divorce. Like, that just seems like something that's going to prompt some very uncomfortable discussions between a couple.

53:33 Maybe she and Dan had already had discussions of divorce. That could be. Once the book was released, Wendy hit the road to promote it, giving talks and appearances wherever she could. In February 2011, she also launched her own legal blog, the Human Trafficking Law blog. It never came close to matching the traffic Dan's blog pulled in, but Wendy took real pride in it and was happy with the attention it brought to a cause she was passionate about. Not long after, funding cuts eliminated her position at the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. Dan stepped in and lobbied the school's dean, pushing to create a new role for her. The dean knew that there would be pushback from senior faculty, but he also wanted to keep his star law professor happy.

54:17 So in August 2011, Wendy came on as a visiting clinical professor tasked with launching a brand new medical-legal partnership with the school's public interest law center. Each semester, she supervised a group of 10 second- and third-year law students who represented homeless, low-income, and undocumented patients at a free community health clinic, helping them file disability claims and represent themselves in immigration proceedings. On top of that, she taught six hours of classes each week. By December 2012, the visiting label was gone from her title and a salary bump followed soon after. She'd earned a strong following among students and colleagues alike, and her work was seen as excellent.

55:00 In the spring of 2014, her novel was selected as required summer reading for all 7,000 incoming FSU students, part of the school's One Book, One Campus program, and Wendy was supposed to deliver the keynote address at that year's new student convocation. It should have been the high point of her professional life. But by the time the new student convocation took place in late August, Dan Markell was dead and Wendy Adelson had skipped town. Do you know anything else about the One Book, One Campus program? It seems kind of crazy that every incoming freshman is supposed to read Wendy's fictional book. Yeah, I don't know much more about the program. I think it's just, yeah, they select books every year that people have to read incoming. And I think some people were upset about Wendy's book being chosen because it kind of felt like, yeah, they're just trying to keep Wendy and Dan happy. Dan is sort of the rock star and, you know, they want him to be happy and not start looking for other jobs.

56:01 As both Dan's and Wendy's stars were rising, something else was happening in the background. Wendy's love and respect for him were eroding year by year. She felt like he was dismissive of her work and her ambitions. She told people that he'd never even read her novel, either the finished version or any of her drafts. However, Dan's friends would later dispute this, saying that he had read it, and despite the negative portrayal of the fictional version of himself, he was very proud of her work and promoted it heavily in his circles. In general, she felt that Dan was not proud of her accomplishments, but again, Dan's friends and family dispute this, They say that he talked about Wendy's work with pride, publicly gushing over her and her accomplishments.

56:45 I can envision in Wendy's place that maybe you felt like you're being overshadowed because Dan, they were both very accomplished, but I think Dan was almost like more like rock star status in the legal community. And I think his job, like, you know, she kind of got the job at Florida State because of him, because they wanted to make Dan happy. So I can understand from her point of view that maybe she felt and maybe her work wasn't seen as being as important or as prominent as Dan's work. In early 2011, when Lincoln was still an infant, Wendy told Dan for the first time that she was considering divorce. His response was blunt. She was free to go, that he'd be keeping the house and the kids, and that she'd be leaving with nothing. They tried counseling after that, but the sessions petered out before long. So that would be a really scary position to be in when you know you've got this you know, husband who is a great legal mind and he is probably going to be able to use that to his advantage. Wendy started confiding in friends that she felt like she'd married the wrong man, that she didn't like who he was anymore, and that he didn't treat her as an equal. The two of them also fought in fundamentally different ways. Dan thrived on conflict.

57:57 He genuinely enjoyed a good argument. Wendy did everything she could to avoid one, retreating into silence whenever tension flared. which only frustrated Dan further. Religion became another fault line. For Dan, being Jewish was at the core of his identity. For Wendy, it was more like cultural heritage. It was there, but not something she needed to organize her life around. She resented being pushed toward keeping kosher and attending synagogue, and the resentment deepened when Dan made clear that he expected their sons to be raised strictly within the faith, too. In small acts of rebellion, she would take the boys out for non-kosher food behind his back. Wendy was also frequently embarrassed by Dan's social bluntness, his habit of saying the wrong thing and ruffling feathers without noticing. Eventually, she started telling him so directly, and to his credit, he didn't get defensive about it. He actually started leaning on her to send him a subtle signal when he needed to rein it in. But over time, even that arrangement wore her down. she hadn't signed up to be his social minder. Dan earned tenure in the spring of 2010 while Wendy was pregnant with Lincoln, and he immediately requested a full year of leave from T. for 2011. Again, wanting to keep his star professor happy, his dean granted it without hesitation. So once he finished grading exams that December, when Lincoln was barely two months old, Dan found himself with 13 months of open calendar. Most people in that position might have used the time to rest and recharge.

59:29 but Dan used it to accelerate and work harder. He took on a role as scholar-in-residence at NYU's law school, spending close to a week there most months, on top of a steady stream of conferences and speaking engagements elsewhere. The effect at home was that Wendy ended up shouldering more of the day-to-day parenting than she'd bargained for, right at the moment that she was also trying to establish herself in a demanding new role as a clinical law professor. When you said that Dan was taking time off, I thought he was taking time off for paternity leave, but no. No, it was more just a sabbatical, and yeah, I think he worked really hard and traveled a lot during that time. By August 2012, the strain had become something Wendy was talking about out loud, not to Dan, but to friends that she trusted. On a beach trip to St. George Island with close friends, she pulled the other women aside and told them, in confidence that she was planning to leave Dan the next time he went out of town.

1:00:26 Around the same time, Dan sensed that things were getting better. Wendy seemed more pleasant, and overall the marriage seemed better. What he didn't know was that Wendy's demeanor was due to the peace she felt having made up her mind. We'll be back after a break. On Monday, September 10, 2012, Dan was in Greenwich Village at an NYU law school conference when his phone rang. It was Wendy. For three days he had been in New York, she hadn't answered a single call, voicemail, or text, and he had no idea why. He knew something must be wrong, but he didn't know what. He stepped out of the conference to take the call, and Wendy bluntly told him she was leaving, taking the boys with her, and filing for divorce. Dan begged her to reconsider, told her he would fly home immediately so they could talk.

1:01:22 Maybe he should have seen it coming, but he hadn't. Back at the house on Trescott Drive, Wendy wasn't alone. Her parents had been there all weekend since Dan had left town, helping her carry out a plan the three of them had put together months earlier, over the summer. While friends helped her pack up the last of her and the boys' belongings, clothes, toys, whatever remained, professional movers loaded furniture onto a truck. Ben and Lincoln, barely three and not quite two, had no idea what was happening around them. Wendy had already moved into a new house, 15 minutes away, on Aqua Ridge Way, two days earlier, on Friday. After Dan's plane landed in Tallahassee as he pulled into his own garage, he saw the first sign of what had actually happened. Entire shelves were stripped bare. Inside, it only got worse. Half the living room furniture was gone, along with dishes and other household items. Upstairs, the boys' bedrooms had been emptied out completely. When he finally reached the primary bedroom, his first reaction was relief. At least he'd have a bed to sleep in that night. Then he saw it, a divorce petition laid out neatly on the comforter. It had been filed at 4 p.m. that day, just minutes after Wendy's call to him in New York.

1:02:41 The petition stated that the marriage was irretrievably broken. Wendy was asking for the majority of the boy's time, along with child support, alimony, and an equitable split of their property. Looking closer, Dan noticed something else. She had signed it on September 5th, days before he had even left for New York. Wendy hadn't left a forwarding address. Dan had no way to reach her. His calls went straight to voicemail, and she didn't call him back. Was her intent not to let him see the children? Her intent was to get everything out of the house, get completely settled into a new life before he had a chance to react to it. Mm-hmm. I'm sure she didn't think he was never going to see the children, but at first she didn't tell him where they were at all. Dan finally reached Wendy on September 11th by leaving her a message threatening to file kidnapping charges unless she let him see the boys immediately. She agreed to meet him for ice cream just to prove the kids were still in town and doing fine, although she made sure to bring their mutual friends, Alan and Lynn Grossman, along with her. The more Dan learned in the days that followed, the clearer it became just how much planning had gone into Wendy's exit. She had taken the boys' passports, effectively blocking any trip to visit his family in Toronto.

1:04:01 Their safe deposit box at the bank had been cleaned out, mostly jewelry, including a two-carat diamond engagement ring that had belonged to his great-aunt Rachel, a gift from his great-uncle Lazar. She had also withdrawn half the money from their investment account, roughly $ 300, 000, plus another $ 50, 000 from a separate account. And under Florida law, a parent can't finalize a divorce without first completing a state-sanctioned parenting course. Wendy had already taken and finished hers back in July, two full months before any of this happened. What angered Dan most was that Wendy wouldn't tell him where she and the boys were actually living. The only place he could see the boys was their preschool, so he started showing up there almost daily, for breakfast, for circle time, for lunch, whatever he could get.

1:04:52 By late September, he had had enough. He walked into her office at the law school and demanded angrily that she give him an address and phone number for wherever she was staying, threatening to pursue charges if she refused. She finally gave in. Underneath the anger, though, Dan really wanted Wendy back, He wrote her long, raw emails, laying out everything he was willing to change to save the marriage. He sent flowers to her office. At one point he got down on one knee and begged her to give it another shot. Her responses, when they came at all, were curt and often took days to arrive. Then came a small opening. Wendy agreed to bring the boys to a Halloween party thrown by mutual friends. Dan was hopeful, telling himself that if they could just spend some ordinary time together as a family, something might shift. But Wendy and the boys never showed, because earlier that day, she had heard through a friend that Dan had been telling people, including colleagues at the law school, that she was mentally ill and had taken large sums of money from him.

1:05:57 For Dan, the no-show at the Halloween party was the final blow. Whatever hope he had been holding onto... It was clear now that Wendy had no intention of even trying. The reality of the situation finally settling in, Dan hired a local divorce attorney who was highly recommended by one of his colleagues. He had briefly considered representing himself, but he knew enough to know that family law wasn't his area of expertise. Dan also had a pretty good sense of what was coming. He knew it was only a matter of time before Wendy pushed to move the boys to South Florida. and he had noticed Donna spending more and more time in Tallahassee helping her daughter. He understood what that meant. This wasn't going to be a fight against Wendy alone. It was going to be Wendy, backed by the full resources of the Adelson family, including Charlie, who had money and was clearly willing to spend it.

1:06:52 Dan started studying Florida's relocation laws on his own, preparing for a battle that he knew was coming. About five weeks in, Wendy switched attorneys, hiring Kristen Adamson, one of North Florida's most experienced and sought-after divorce lawyers. Dan heard through the grapevine that Donna was behind the switch. Wendy's original attorney apparently had discouraged her from pursuing relocation, and that was not acceptable to Donna. Their strategy soon became clear. Wendy landed a job offer from a well-regarded personal injury firm in South Florida and and in January 2013, she filed her petition to relocate, attaching an email confirming the job offer. According to the filing, she planned to move into her parents' home starting May 1st, when the new job would begin. Her argument centered on the boys' quality of life. They would have more access to extended family, and she added that her position at FSU felt precarious because Dan had made her workplace there hostile. Dan spent the next five weeks crafting his response with the same intensity he brought to his scholarship, 23 pages, dense with footnotes and citations, as though he were submitting to a law review rather than a family court. He picked apart Wendy's economic reasoning, pointing out that she had never worked at a private firm before, and she had just been promoted at the law school. He argued the boys were deeply rooted in Tallahassee already, citing their preschool director's assessment

1:08:24 that they were thriving. And he went further, accusing Wendy of unethical conduct during the proceedings, a claim that infuriated the Adelsons. Donna, in particular, was livid that Dan would attack her daughter that way. In response, she sent Wendy a lengthy five-page email laying out what she thought the case should focus on, Dan's temper, alleged verbal abuse, and his narcissism. She also made clear her feelings on relocation, saying, The most important part of your divorce is relocation. I sincerely hope that your attorney understands. to support her. For more than three hours, Dan's attorney worked through a long list of questions while Dan sat nearby, scribbling notes and passing them along in real time. The relocation hearing itself took place on June 18, 2013. After Wendy spent roughly three hours on the stand laying out her case, the judge dismissed her and called the attorneys aside for a sidebar.

1:09:38 She told them plainly that she found Wendy's argument unpersuasive, there was no real basis, in her view, for uprooting the children, and a desire to be near extended family didn't outweigh the rights of two capable, loving parents. She said they were welcome to continue the hearing, but it would likely be a waste of everyone's time. Wendy's attorney reluctantly agreed to stop. The petition was denied, and the judge ordered both sides into mediation ahead of a three-day divorce hearing scheduled for July 31st. For Wendy and her family, this was a major defeat. How far apart is Tallahassee from the Miami area?

1:10:19 It's about a seven-hour drive. They're pretty much on opposite ends of Florida. Donna was livid and unwilling to accept the decision. She pushed Wendy to keep fighting and telling her flatly to make Dan, whom Donna now referred to as this fucker, absolutely miserable. Knowing how important the Jewish faith was to Dan, Donna came up with a plan designed to convince Dan... that Wendy intended to raise the boys as Catholic. Where did that come from? I think she was just trying to find ways to get at Dan. Step one of the plan, take a photo with the boys in front of a Catholic church and make it her Facebook profile picture. Step two, hire a private tutor to come teach the boys about Jesus at Wendy's house.

1:11:02 Step three, tell Dan the children were going to be baptized. Donna had already found out a baptism could be arranged within two weeks, and suggested they send Dan and his family invitations. Step four, enroll the boys in Christian summer camps. Step five, sign them up for toddler classes at church. At one point, Donna even suggested dressing the boys in Hitler youth costumes as a way to get under Dan's skin. Oh boy. That's crazy. This is all a huge mess. Yes, it is. Oh my goodness. I mean, what about the kids' well-being and what's good for them? Yeah. Take control from him, Donna wrote to Wendy in all caps. Get to him psychologically.

1:11:45 He's going to want you to stop this. The point was to provoke Dan into losing control. To her credit, Wendy turned the plan down. She told her mother that doing anything to alter the boy's religious upbringing would make her look bad in front of the judge and could easily backfire. Donna, frustrated, redirected her anger at Wendy's attorney, complaining that she and Harvey had been paying $ 600 an hour for 10 months with nothing to show for it. Donna came up with a new idea, offering Dan a straight financial bribe to get him to agree to relocation. The plan was to put together a million dollars, a third from Donna and Harvey, a third from Charlie, and a third from Wendy herself. But Wendy rejected that too.

1:12:32 She knew that Dan would never go for it. The mediation process meant to arrive at an agreeable divorce settlement for both parties didn't start well. Neither side was willing to budge. Dan wanted a 50-50 split of time with the boys. Wendy was holding firm at 65-35 in her favor. The case looked headed for trial, until at the last possible moment, the two sides found a compromise. Dan agreed to let Wendy serve as primary custodian during the school year for the next three years. with his time limited to six nights out of every 14. Summers would be split evenly, and starting in 2016, school years would be two.

1:13:12 Dan had originally pushed to keep the boys for every Jewish holiday, but ultimately agreed to alternate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Passover with Wendy every other year. On the financial side, Dan agreed to pay $ 841 a month in child support, cover 65% of the boys' preschool, extracurriculars and summer camps and pay $ 10, 000 toward Wendy's attorney fees. Wendy gave up any claim to alimony. The house on Trescott Drive went to Dan, with Wendy bought out for $ 120, 000. The judge signed off and the marriage was officially over. But the bitterness didn't end with the signatures on the divorce paperwork. Not even close.

1:13:55 I was researching this case and I got to this point in it. I was like naively thinking, well, they came to a settlement. They agreed on everything. They all signed off. Why should there be any issues? But as we should know, like in divorces, just because the ink is dried on the settlement doesn't mean the problems are going to go away. Well, and the resentment doesn't go away. It lingers. In the midst of the contentious mediation and divorce proceedings, Dan managed to find new love. In December 2013, at a legal conference, Dan told close friends about a new relationship. one that had clearly turned serious. The woman was Amy Adler, a law professor at NYU. She was around 50, in the midst of her own divorce, with a teenage son.

1:14:40 Dan and Amy likely crossed paths years earlier through the same academic law circles that had brought Dan to New York regularly, but it wasn't until December 2013 that Dan started introducing her as his girlfriend. By the following summer, the relationship had settled into a rhythm. On the weeks he didn't have the boys, Dan would fly to New York to be with her. In late June 2014, Amy flew down to Tallahassee to meet Dan's sons for the first time. Wendy crossed paths with her briefly on the morning of June 30th while picking up the boys from Dan's house. Wendy would later describe Amy as beautiful, polished, and accomplished. Seems like things are on the upswing here for Dan.

1:15:22 They're through the divorce. He's got a new girlfriend that he is in love with. And I think that's where we're going to end part one. I know that was pretty long, but I did think it was important to go into a fair amount of detail about their backgrounds, their relationships, all their accomplishments, the dynamic between them. That's always my favorite part is setting up the scene of what's about to happen and knowing as much as we can about their backgrounds and how they're going to respond to everything else in the future. And in this case, maybe even more so than most of them that we cover, those dynamics and those relationships are really, really key to understanding what actually happened. A couple of things just to talk about before we wrap up, though.

1:16:06 We've heard different accounts of the marriage, like who was the difficult one in the marriage, right? Dan tended to be blunt and argumentative, and he maybe had trouble reading the room, whereas Wendy was maybe a little passive-aggressive in some ways. She avoided conflict, and she would kind of build up resentment over time. When you think about that account of the marriage, who do you find more sympathetic at this point? I don't know. It's really hard to answer that question. I feel like they both have their good qualities and their faults. I don't feel like I need to pick a team. I feel like because I know what's to come, I feel like the Adelsons being in their marriage was probably a huge factor in it, right? Like Donna, especially.

1:16:54 Yeah, the in-laws. Yeah, I think Donna especially was more involved in their relationship than she should have been. Yeah, and I think both I think both Dan and Wendy had their flaws. They both had their good points. So I don't think either of them is necessarily more to blame for the marriage falling apart than the other. I feel like it was just a matter of time because they both were very different in sort of the way they approached things that it just was inevitable that it was going to fall apart at some point. I think having two very career-minded people in a relationship, it's really hard to find time to spend time together, nurturing your relationship and with your children. And so, yeah, I know that's a huge challenge.

1:17:36 I want to talk a little bit about the Adelson family dynamic, because I do think it's one of the aspects of the story that fascinates people the most, starting with Rob. So we talked about how they nicknamed him Honest Abe as an insult, really. What do you think it says about a family then, you know, when somebody is really honest and they get treated as the family's kind of black sheep? I feel like some of the members of the family might be morally compromised. And to have Rob being this bastion of honesty and good character maybe made them feel a certain way. Yeah. I can imagine it was really hard for Rob because it's almost like you're under peer pressure from your family to be a certain way, even though you know morally this is the right way to be. I should be honest and upright. And getting.

1:18:28 But some people would rather put their own interests first, right? If you find $ 20 on the ground, well, that's, you know, my lucky day and whoever dropped it. Yeah. I just think Rob must have been very strong to be able to kind of, you know, maintain his approach to life and the choices he made, like with Haritha and everything like that. Yeah. very admirable to me that he was able to sort of, you know, maintain that. And he wasn't as close to his family, right? Well, after he married Haritha, yeah, they weren't as close. They still talked, and we'll talk more about Rob's role in the family as we go forward. But yeah, they definitely weren't as close as Charlie, Wendy, Donna, and Harvey.

1:19:11 The other thing I wanted to talk about is Donna. She seemed to want to be very involved in her children's lives, like deciding who it was okay for Rob to marry. In a lot of accounts, Donna is portrayed as the one that basically decided for Wendy that it was time to get married and that she was the one who kind of picked Dan out on J-Date. Does it feel like Donna genuinely believed that she knew what was best for her kids, or was it more about control, like for her own sake? Well, it certainly sounds like she liked to control every situation, and she probably thought that she knew what was best, right? I feel like people who come from money, and neither of us do, their family has a lot more to say about who they match up with, right? Like, oh, I've never heard of that family before, or, you know.

1:20:00 I get the sense that Donna was used to getting her way with everything and really didn't understand when she couldn't get her way, like why it didn't work out for her. She just seemed like to, and we'll see this more as we get into part two and three, but she just seemed like, yeah, like I always get my way. And so why wouldn't you just go along with what I say? It sounds like so far we've talked about Donna and we haven't really hardly even mentioned Harvey. Is that because he was just working all the time? Yeah, we just don't really have a whole lot of information. Like he didn't insert himself nearly as much into, you know, Wendy and Dan's marriage. I think he he just played more of a background role. I think he was there supporting Donna. But, you know, he wasn't talked about a lot in the book I read or in a lot of the shows that I watched for this. Well, be sure to come back next time for part two. If you'd like to hear both parts two and three right now, you can join us on Patreon at patreon.com slash lovemerrykill.

1:20:57 For $ 5 a month, you get early ad-free access and a monthly bonus episode. One of the interesting things about this case is you've got two lawyers who are getting a divorce, which is, I can't imagine how each of them is hiring their own lawyer as well. It's just their agreement. I was like, yikes, that was a lot to iron out. I know, it's so much detail. And I can imagine like being Dan's lawyer would be a nightmare because Dan is a legal scholar. And so even though he wasn't a family lawyer, he's going to go through everything with a fine tooth comb and research everything. But when he has so many connections too.

1:21:39 Yeah, exactly. But it got me thinking about lawyers and like kind of crazy legal cases. I found a few of the maybe the craziest legal cases that are out there that I didn't know about before. In 2005, a Washington, D.C. judge named Roy Pearson dropped off a pair of suit pants at his neighborhood dry cleaner. The cleaner accidentally sent them to the wrong location, and the pants came back a few days late. And Pearson actually insisted that the pants they eventually gave him weren't even his. He demanded that the dry cleaner... pay him $ 1, 000 as compensation. He said that's what the pants were worth. But the Chung family, who owned the dry cleaners, refused to pay. And so he sued them for $ 67 million. He later reduced it to a mere $ 54 million. He represented himself. He's a judge.

1:22:35 He represented himself. He planned to call 63 witnesses at the trial. Holy cow. And at one point, he broke down in tears on the stand describing how much he suffered from the lack of getting his pants back. Were his pants really worth $ 1, 000? I mean, that's possible. Sometimes, you know, a pair of suit pants could be worth $ 1, 000. But yeah, I'm not sure where he got the $ 54 million amount for. Do you think he won the case? No. No, he lost completely. And not only that, but he got issued a 90-day suspension from practicing law. Oh, wow. Because they said he engaged in frivolous litigation and therefore interfered with the administration of justice.

1:23:21 What happens if you don't pick up a shirt from your dry cleaner? Because it was a long time ago. I remember leaving some clothes in a dry cleaner and I never picked them up. And it's been over 20 years. They're probably still sitting on the rack. You think so? I bet they're not. I don't know. It's a good question. This other one I thought was very interesting. So in 2011, a wildlife photographer named David Slater set up his camera in an Indonesian jungle and a crested macaque monkey named Naruto grabbed the camera, and snapped a series of selfies. The photos went viral, and when Slater tried to get one taken down from Wikipedia for copyright reasons, people pointed out, technically, didn't the monkey take the picture? PETA ran with that logic and sued Slater in federal court on the monkey's behalf, arguing that Naruto the monkey was the true copyright owner.

1:24:18 The case actually made it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that animals cannot hold copyrights under U.S. law. Slater and PETA actually reached a settlement where he agreed to donate 25% of future profits from the photos to the macaque conservation charity in Indonesia. Okay, that's fair enough. It's a happy ending. It's really funny, though. The monkey was the one... who took the picture. I would think in a court of law, though, whoever bought the film would be the owner, you know, the film and the camera. Yeah, I would think so, too. The last one I wanted to bring up is maybe one of the most famous lawsuits in American history, and that is the suit of the woman who sued McDonald's for spilling her coffee.

1:25:00 That's funny, because when you were saying, you know, the most famous, I was like, that was the first one that popped into my head. Yeah, so you remember that. I think everybody remembers that, but it was A 79-year-old woman, this is in 1992, she bought coffee. She put it like between her knees and took the lid off and it spilled and she got really bad burns. Like she was burned over 16% of her body and the burns like penetrated through like the muscle and fatty tissue. They were really like bad burns. She spent eight days in the hospital. She needed skin grafts. It took her two years to recover. Wow. And the part that most people don't know is she initially asked McDonald's for just $ 20, 000 to cover her medical bills.

1:25:43 McDonald's came back and said, we'll give you $ 800. And it came out at trial that McDonald's had been serving its coffee at 180 to 190 degrees, which is way hotter than any other restaurant would serve their coffee. And they had received more than 700 complaints of scalding injuries in the preceding decade. and they never addressed it, never changed the temperature of the water. The jury ended up awarding the woman $ 200, 000 in compensatory damages and $ 2. 7 million in punitive damages, but the judge later reduced it substantially, and it ultimately settled for an undisclosed amount, but most people said it was probably under $ 600, 000. Wow. So it wasn't quite as big. I think most people picture that was this multi-million dollar lawsuit.

1:26:31 Yeah, I would have thought that too. But there would have been so many other people that would have sued after that. What temperature does McDonald's serve its hot beverages at now? Surprisingly, they They have dropped their temperature a little, but not that much. So now apparently they serve between 170 and 180 degrees. Wow, that isn't much. No, but I guess it's a little bit better. I'm thinking about Donna and Wendy and how they were sitting in front of the computer and Donna was helping Wendy pick her potential. Mr. Right. Right. Do you think that had my mom seen you in your profile, she would have said, oh, that's the one. Mm-hmm. Not so sure.

1:27:12 I don't think she would have. No. Do you think your mom would have said, yeah, click right on her? Oh, absolutely. You think so? I don't know. My mom was always pretty hands-off in my dating decisions. I don't think she inserted herself or wanted to insert herself in those decisions. But I know she loved you from the very beginning. I'm not so sure about that. Oh, she did. Yeah, she definitely liked you from. The first time she met you. No, I know she liked me, but I don't know if she, yeah. I remember when the first time I met her, it was within minutes she sent you out to get a pizza. Oh, yeah. She was like, well, Tina can stay here with me. And I was like, oh, no, please don't. That was pretty funny. Loveliest lady. Don't get me wrong. I just, yeah.

1:27:53 Well, your dad did kind of a similar thing to me when we first met him. He's like, Rich, let's go to the hardware store. And he took me in his truck. Oh, boy. You and my dad are not, you're not the same. Yeah. I do remember that, though, when my mom did that. Like, why don't you go out and do this and Tina and I can talk. Yeah. She was a great lady, though. We, yeah, loved her so much. Yeah. I miss her a lot. We love you guys. Thank you so much for listening. Please rate, review, follow, and subscribe. Find us on social media or send us an email at lovemarykill at gmail.com. Or visit our website, lovemarykill.com. Until next time. Don't kill your wife. And don't kill your husband.

1:28:57 Thank you.