Wendi Adelson and Dan Markel - Part 2 of 3

0:00 Wendy Adelson and Dan Markell had finally reached a settlement in their ugly divorce, but that didn't put an end to the hostilities. The battle raged on, with Wendy's mom Donna becoming increasingly involved and increasingly furious. In Part 2, we'll head to Tallahassee on the morning of July 18, 2014 and follow law enforcement as they begin untangling the web that led to Dan Markell's murder. I'm Tina. And I'm Rich. Welcome to Love, Marry, Kill.

0:45 Hey, Tina. Hey, Rich. How are you today? I am good. How are you? I am doing pretty good. Before we get back to the case, we wanted to mention Love, Marry, Kill, Just the Facts. We know not everyone likes their true crime with a side of banter or snacks. That's why we created an alternate version of Love, Marry, Kill called Just the Facts. It's the same deep, well-researched story, but without the banter up front and the end. And without the snack. Find it wherever you listen. Just search for Love, Marry, Kill. Just the Facts. We got a comment on Spotify just a little bit ago from somebody who said we should drop the snacks because it's going to give us heart attacks. Oh! I think they were serious. They were like, you guys need to drop the snacks because it's not good for you.

1:29 Well, that's nice that people care about us, but in general, we eat pretty healthy. Yeah, and we don't really eat a lot of the snacks. We've been talking about that. We waste a lot of snacks. We need a snack enthusiast to come live with us. We really do. Snack and bass. I don't know. What would they call that role? A snack assistant? I don't know. Yeah. Well, we are recording this. It's officially October, and it feels like October. It's spooky season, finally. I love spooky season. I know you do. Have you seen that creepy doll hanging around at all? She's not creepy. She's beautiful. And she's my daughter. How dare you? I think she is just a little creepy. Well, I decorated for fall, like September 15th or so.

2:11 So she came out a little early, but she normally doesn't get hidden until October 1st, but you've been hiding her all over the place. Trying to scare me. I really enjoy our creepy doll tradition. We should probably explain what it is a little bit. Well, it's called Doll in the Hall. It's a lot like Elf on the Shelf, but not really at all like Elf on the Shelf. But I think I have posted pictures on Instagram of places that I've found her. What's her name? I always forget her name. Arabella. Arabella. And she is a pretty scary looking doll. And we will hide her in places where the other one of us will Yeah. Be surprised to find out. Today I was doing laundry and she found her way into the dryer. Sometimes probably the, and I don't like to hang her, put a noose around her neck because I feel like that's mean. But you do that a lot.

2:58 Like you put her in the pantry or I think you put it like in the garage, like when you open the door. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't do any of that. Sometimes maybe she does that to surprise you. One thing that I always forget about this time of year is the amount of bugs that come out. Not like mosquitoes, but they're like stink bugs or box elder bugs. And even the bees are all over the place. I don't think that's just a Michigan thing, but. Yeah, they're all over the screen windows. Yeah, I don't really care for the bugs. Today it's really warm. I think it's our last warm day for a while. It's almost 80 degrees and it's a little sticky. We have the windows open and yeah, they come inside and they're pretty harmless, but... I don't really like them.

3:39 Yeah, I don't care for them either. Well, with that transition, do you want to have a little snack? Sure. You already know what they are because you walked out into the kitchen last night as I was making them, but these are. You act like me walking into the kitchen is against the rules or something. I know, you really shouldn't. Yes, I left the room that you normally lock me in, and yeah. You did, but this snack was actually a suggestion from Kim. She sent it a long time ago. She said. She probably gave up on us. A lot of people give up on us because they suggest things and we're not able to get to them. Well, these are Snoop Dogg's Rolls Royce peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. Can I just compliment you on the beautiful presentation? Of course.

4:20 I will always take compliments. I think you learned this trick from me, but when you take your chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, if they're kind of sparse looking on the top, you just put a few. Chocolate chips on top. Fresh chocolate chips, yeah. And you kind of press them into the, yeah. And you put exactly six chocolate chips on every cookie. And they're arranged in a nice little circle with one. In the middle. They're very, very symmetrical. Well, let's give them a try. I'm curious to hear what you think about these. What did you think about Snoop Dogg's recipe? I think they're excellent. I really like them. Yeah, I think they're really good, too. Did they really come from Snoop Dogg?

5:01 Apparently, I don't know. He made them in his– or do you think his friend Martha Stewart helped him out? That could be, but I've seen them all over the internet, and they always attribute it to Snoop Dogg, so who knows, but they're good. They're really good. Yeah, I mean, they're basically chocolate chip cookies, but they've got some peanut butter in there. Not an overwhelming amount of peanut butter, but yeah, I think they're definitely worth a try, and as always, we'll put the recipe in our show notes. Would you like to give us a recap of part one? Absolutely. Absolutely. Dan Markell was a brilliant, driven, Harvard-educated law professor at Florida State University. He had built one of the most successful careers in legal academia by his mid-30s. Wendy Adelson was his equally accomplished wife, a public interest lawyer, a novelist, and the daughter of Donna and Harvey Adelson, a wealthy South Florida family with its own complicated dynamics, including a controlling matriarch in Donna and a wildcard brother in Charlie. Dan and Wendy met on J-Date in 2004, fell for each other fast, and got engaged within a year.

6:06 Though even before the wedding, cracks were showing. Dan loved a good argument and didn't always notice when he'd hurt someone. Wendy hated confrontation and let her resentment build quietly instead. They settled in Tallahassee, where they both worked at Florida State. They had two sons, Ben and Lincoln, and built what looked like from the outside a picture-perfect life. But by 2012, the marriage was over. In a meticulously planned escape, Wendy moved out while Dan was traveling and filed for divorce the same day. What followed was one of the ugliest custody battles Tallahassee had ever seen. With heavy involvement from her mom, Wendy pushed hard for relocation to South Florida, and Dan pushed equally hard to ensure that the kids stayed close to him in Tallahassee. By the end of Part 1, Wendy and Dan had finally come to a divorce settlement. and Dan had found new love with an NYU law professor named Amy Adler. Wendy was moving on with her life as well, but the wounds were still very much open.

7:07 This divorce battle was really ugly, and a big part of it was the relocation issue. Wendy never liked it in Tallahassee. Dan didn't like it at first either, but he got used to it, and it kind of grew on him, and he became kind of part of the community. But Wendy and her family really wanted her to relocate back to South Florida. I think I meant to say this in episode one and I forgot, but justice for Tallahassee, because Wendy really hated it there and described it as just a horrible place to live. Under the divorce settlement, Dan owed Wendy $ 120, 000 for the house and $ 10, 000 toward her attorney's fees. Instead, he paid only $ 54, 725. 38. When Wendy asked where the rest was, he wouldn't say... only telling her he had compelling reasons not to pay it. Wendy had her lawyer file a motion to force compliance or hold Dan in contempt, and a hearing was set for February 17, 2014. Three days earlier, Dan had filed a motion of his own, accusing Wendy of false financial disclosures, even fraud and perjury, for allegedly failing to report more than $ 240, 000 in assets on her financial affidavit, and for refusing to return his great-aunt's diamond ring.

8:25 His position was that her misconduct excused him from paying what he still owed. At the hearing, the judge scolded Dan for failing to pay, warning him he was risking contempt, but also agreed that he had grounds to depose Wendy again over his allegations. It was a split decision, and Donna, watching from the sidelines, was furious all over again. The filings kept coming from both sides. Dan accused Wendy of repeatedly denying him scheduled time with the boys. He also claimed that on three separate occasions, the boys told him, Grandma says you're stupid, and Grandma says she hates you. The boys are three and four?

9:06 Yeah, I think that's about right. He had also heard that Donna was giving the kids non-kosher foods like bacon and shrimp, which seemed like an intentional effort to instigate a conflict. He asked the judge to bar Donna from spending unsupervised time with the kids, which made her even more furious. Donna in turn lashed out at Wendy's lawyer. It was maddening to her that, despite all the money she and Harvey had poured into the fight, it seemed like Dan kept coming out ahead in the courtroom. The constant litigation was wearing Wendy down. She had started seeing a therapist to help manage the stress. which was coming at her from two directions, Dan on one side, her own family's anger on the other. She just wanted it to be over. She told a friend, quote, Dan escalated things again with another filing in May 2014, arguing about the financial settlement once more and asking for sole decision-making authority over the boys. To support this, he pointed at Wendy's refusal to discuss where their sons would go to kindergarten.

10:16 Through all of it, Dan had what seemed like a great relationship with Amy waiting for him, but he couldn't let go of the divorce fight. One good friend finally gave Dan a dose of tough love saying, You've got to stop fighting about all this crap. It's driving you crazy. Is a fucking ring really that important? Is the world going to explode if you don't speak with your kids for a day? Look at all the good stuff going on in your life. You need to let go of all this negativity. Your work is suffering. You're going to ruin your life if you keep fighting about a stupid piece of jewelry and all this other garbage. It's time to get yourself out of the muck. It was blunt, but Dan told his friend he was right and thanked him for saying it. But a few days later, Dan was dragged back into the muck. On July 16th, he received a voicemail from a local non-denominational charter school informing him that Ben's application for kindergarten had been accepted and It was the first he had heard of the school or any application. Wendy had decided on the school and submitted it without telling him. He was beside himself.

11:21 This divorce reminds me of Dan and Betty Broderick. Remember, Dan Broderick was an attorney also, and he just made the divorce ridiculous and drawn out and gave as little money to Betty as he could. It sounds like Dan Markell was... kind of doing the same thing. Well, in this case, they're both lawyers, too, so even worse. But things like, you know, Wendy applying for kindergarten without telling Dan, I can totally see how that could be really enraging. Yeah. Friday, July 18, 2014, started like any other morning for Dan. He had the boys, so he got them up, fed them breakfast, and helped them get ready for the day. By 8.30, he had Ben and Lincoln buckled into their car seats in his black Honda Accord. And 20 minutes later, he dropped them off at preschool. He hugged them both, reminded them that he'd be back early to take them swimming.

12:12 He told them that he loved them and said goodbye for what would be the final time. On his way to his gym, Premier Health and Fitness, he tried calling Wendy. He wanted to talk about the charter school. After getting the voicemail about Ben's application being accepted, he'd actually gone and toured the place himself and came away impressed. Despite how she'd gone about applying without telling him, he was ready to tell her he'd consider it. But the call went to voicemail. He left a message saying his exercise class would wrap up between 10.15 and 10.30 and they could talk after that. When class ended, Dan sat in his car for a few minutes scrolling through messages before pulling out of the parking lot at 10.38 a.m. He then called his mom, Ruth, who was as happy to call her and chat as he drove home. They had a normal talk, covering the boys, weekend plans, a bit of this and that. Unlike most days, though, when they would talk until Dan pulled into his driveway, he told Ruth he had to cut things short, as he was supposed to call a teacher from the charter school so he could learn more about it. He then called Stuart Schlaeser, a teacher from the School of Arts and Sciences. As they talked, Stuart could hear the road noise on Dan's end gradually fade. It sounded like he was pulling into his driveway. Then, mid-conversation, Dan said, Hold on a second, there's a person in my driveway that's unfamiliar to me.

13:36 A moment later, Stuart heard a loud noise, then muffled sounds, maybe voices, that he couldn't quite make out. Mr. Markell! Mr. Markell! Nothing came back except deep, ragged breathing as if Dan's mouth were pressed right against the phone, gasping for air. Stuart's first thought was that maybe Dan had a heart attack. Are you alright? Is everything okay? Can I help you? There was no response. Stewart hung up and immediately called back, but it went straight to voicemail. He texted, are you okay? No reply came, so he called 911. That must have been such a horrifying experience for this guy. Incredibly horrifying, and it would have been even more horrifying for Dan's mom. She wrote a book later, and she talked about how she normally would have talked to him all the way until he got home. And she was really actually thankful that he cut the conversation short because she was like, I don't know if I could have, you know, lived with that.

14:31 Yeah, that would have been very traumatic. Meanwhile, Dan's next-door neighbor, Jim Geiger, had taken the day off work because two of his granddaughters were staying with him and his wife, Sharon. Sharon had a doctor's appointment that morning, but after that, the four of them were planning to go out for pizza and then catch an afternoon movie. Before Sharon left, the two of them were sitting together when they heard a loud popping noise outside. Startled, Jim got up and went to the window. Out of the corner of his eye towards Dan's property, he caught sight of a small, light-colored car speeding out of Dan's driveway toward Benton Road. Something about it didn't seem right to Jim. It looked like someone fleeing. Had there been a break-in? He told Sharon he was going to check on the house next door.

15:17 Crossing his front yard, Jim could see that Dan's two-car garage door was raised. Inside sat the rear of a black car, engine running. He was relieved thinking Dan was home, just about to leave, so he turned and went back home. He waited by the window for a few moments, but Dan's car didn't leave, so Jim decided to go back and check again. Everything looked the same as before. Garage open, the car just sitting there, engine running. This time, Jim walked into the garage toward the driver's side door. A few feet away, he felt glass crunching under his shoes. He saw that the driver's side window was shattered. just a spider web of glass still clinging to the frame.

15:59 He looked inside and saw Dan slumped behind the wheel, the left side of his head soaked in blood. Geiger reached for his phone, then realized he'd left it at home, so he sprinted back, grabbed it, and was dialing 911 before he'd even made it back into his own front door. It was 11.01am. He told the dispatcher, you need to send an ambulance in a hurry, he is still alive, he is moving. Geiger waited by the car, staying on the phone with 911 and growing more frustrated as time went by. Ultimately, it took 19 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. Later, the Tallahassee media would bring attention to the long wait, reporting that the 911 dispatcher had misclassified the call as less critical than it actually was. Eventually, Dan's family would successfully sue the dispatch company, placing the money in a trust for Dan's children. To the 911 dispatcher, Jim said the car he saw fleeing was light-colored, maybe gold or silver. He wanted to say it was a Prius, but he couldn't be certain. May have been something else roughly that size. The police and EMTs finally arrived to find Dan slumped in the driver's seat, breathing in rapid, labored gasps. His face and shirt soaked in blood. They loaded him into the ambulance and pulled away at 11.28 a.m.

17:17 While Dan was en route to the hospital, officers used his keys to search the house. They found no sign of forced entry and nothing out of place. They cordoned off the crime scene, stretching yellow tape roughly five houses in either direction, along Trescott Drive and around the property's perimeter. At the hospital, a forensic specialist documented Dan's injuries, two distinct gunshot wounds to the face, one just above the inner corner of his left eye near the bridge of his nose, and the other on his left cheek below the outer corner of the same eye. A narrow band of gunpowder residue marked his left forearm, indicating that Dan may have raised his arm to the gun, which was fired at close range. Dan was rushed into the ICU.

18:04 He was still alive, but the situation was hopeless. He was kept alive for the next 14 hours, but finally succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead early the next morning. So the paramedics were delayed by 20 minutes or so. Do you think that time could have made a difference or were his injuries too tragic? Yeah, I mean, who could say for sure? But I think, you know, both bullets were, both gunshots were to the head and, you know, into his brain. So I don't think it would have probably made any difference in the end. But, you know, we'll never know, unfortunately. The Friday morning that Dan was shot, five miles northeast of Dan's house, Wendy Adelson's doorbell rang on Aqua Ridge Way, at 8.20 a.m. It was Dan's week with the boys under their custody arrangement, so Wendy had the house to herself, working on an article she hoped to finish before the fall semester started. The person at the door was a Best Buy repairman, there to look at her TV, which one of the boys had cracked with the thrown toy.

19:04 The repairman determined it couldn't be fixed and wasn't covered under warranty. He left by 9.15, and after that, Wendy's plans for the day were some more work on her article, then lunch at 1pm with two girlfriends, followed by an engagement party that evening for another set of friends. Around 12.30, she left the house in her burgundy Honda Odyssey. Before lunch, she wanted to pick up a bottle of bourbon for the party later. The liquor store she chose to go to was ABC Fine Wine and Spirits in Benton Hills, not far from Dan's house. To get there, she turned onto Trescott Drive and was startled to see a police car and crime scene tape blocking the road just a few houses before a dance. She turned around thinking that maybe a power line was down, which had happened before when she'd lived there. She found a different route to the liquor store. The incident later raised eyebrows for a couple of reasons. First, the restaurant she was headed to for lunch was three miles directly west of her house, a 10-minute drive at most. There were multiple liquor stores right near the restaurant. But instead of going to one of those, Wendy chose to drive six miles southwest to the ABC Liquor Store, then three and a half miles back north to the restaurant, a trip that could have taken at least 20 minutes in total. Not only that, but the route from her house to the ABC Liquor Store wouldn't normally take one down Trescott Drive. It's not much farther, just adding a minute to the trip, according to Google Maps. but it seems like quite the coincidence

20:35 that Wendy chose this route on the day her ex-husband was shot and killed. Wendy later explained the trip, saying that cutting through on Trescott Drive was a familiar shortcut to her. It's unclear why she chose that particular liquor store, but it's possible that she was familiar with it from when she lived in Benton Hills. Although I was listening to the interrogation of Wendy on the day that Dan was shot, And she said she wasn't at all familiar with liquor at all. So I don't think she was probably familiar with the liquor store either. Like she didn't really know anything about bourbon or anything like that. She had to ask the clerk about it. So it is fairly odd that she took this route and she took this shortcut. Well, she called it a shortcut, but it wasn't really a shortcut on Trescott Drive, which is Vance Street.

21:23 Can you explain where Trescott Drive is? Is it in a residential neighborhood? Yeah, it is a residential area. And it's sort of like, you know, she cut through there like from one main road to another where, I don't know, maybe the traffic on the main roads was a little busier or something. And so she cut through there or that it just felt comfortable to her or it brought back memories or whatever. Or could she have been checking up on Dan? Yeah. Well, yeah, it could be that as well. I don't mean because she knew he was being shot. She was just like, oh, is he home? What's he up to? That is possible. She did admit later that she kind of looked at Dan's current girlfriend's Facebook profile. So she was obviously curious about his life. So that could be.

22:04 We'll be back after a break. After Wendy bought the bottle of bourbon, she arrived 10 minutes late to lunch at Mosaic, where her friends were already seated. The three of them ate, paid, and were getting ready to leave around 2.30 when a man approached the table and asked if Wendy Adelson was there. It was Detective Craig Isom from the Tallahassee Police Department. He asked her to come with him to the station to discuss something that had happened that morning. How did they know she'd be there? That's a great question. I don't actually know, and I've been watching Wendy's interrogation and she asked the same thing and I don't think she ever got an answer to it.

22:49 I think they just called around and, you know, they have their ways. Wow. After they arrived at the police station, Isom told her directly Dan had been shot. He had been taken to the hospital and wasn't expected to survive. Wendy's reaction was immediate. She screamed and began sobbing. Oh my God, I have a message from him this morning. What happened? Before giving her any more details, Isom asked her to walk him through her morning, where she had been, when she'd left the house. She told him that she had left shortly after noon and had tried to cut through Trescott Drive before finding it blocked off. He asked if she knew anyone with a grudge against Dan. She said that Dan meant well, but he had a way of rubbing people the wrong way sometimes. Still, she couldn't imagine who would actually do something like this. She then volunteered, unprompted, that she didn't think he had done it to himself.

23:41 He had a girlfriend now, a law professor named Amy Adler who taught at NYU. Wendy floated a theory. Maybe Amy's ex-husband wasn't thrilled about the new relationship. Isom moved on to family. Wendy described her family, parents in Coral Springs, two brothers, one in Fort Lauderdale, Charlie, who she said she was especially close to. Isom asked to take her phone and make a copy of its contents, and she agreed without hesitation. Then, unprompted again, Wendy raised another theory. She said she had plenty of friends who knew that, quote, Danny didn't treat me very well. Her fear, she told Isom, was that someone might have done this not out of hatred for Dan, but out of some twisted idea that it would help her. Isom's interest sharpened. Who did she have in mind? She said she couldn't imagine anyone specific.

24:34 He asked, would you ever ask someone to do something like this? She said, not in a million years. Could someone have done it for her benefit without her knowledge? At first, she said no, despite having just raised this very possibility herself. But after a brief pause, here's what she said. My brother, the one, his name is Charlie, the one I'm really close to, he said, makes a lot of jokes in that taste. And it was a joke he made. He bought the TV for me this morning that got broken. And I was talking to him about whether it made sense to fix it or whether I should get a new one. And it was always his joke that like, he knew Danny treated me badly. And it was always this joke. He said, I looked into hiring a hit man and it was cheaper to get you this TV.

25:22 So instead I got you this TV. I mean, he would never. He's my big brother, and he's been taking care of me since I was little, but he would never. And I said, I told that to the repair guy this morning. Right. That's okay. He said he asked me how much it cost, and I said I didn't know because it was a gift, because the brother said it was cheaper than a hitman. It was my divorce present. Okay. Such a horrible thing to say. I'm so sorry. That's okay. You imagine how much the detective's ears perked up at hearing that her brother was making jokes about hiring a hitman.

26:05 The joke is a bad joke, first of all. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's cheaper to buy you a TV than to hire a hitman. It's a very strange joke. And it's very strange that Wendy would bring this up to the Best Buy repairman at her house as well. She told him. So was that corroborated by the repairman? I don't know if it was, I'm sure it probably was, but I don't think Wendy would bring this up to the police if she didn't actually say that. It's just kind of a bizarre thing to say, I think. Yeah, and she was, I mean, she was crying laughing at the same time. Yeah, pretty inappropriate. Wendy described Charlie as a bit of a character, a periodontist who worked long hours across multiple offices in South Florida. She admitted her last interaction with Dan hadn't been pleasant. She had wanted to pick the boys up early that afternoon. Dan had pushed back, wanting to take them swimming first. Charlie, she said, had talked her down, telling her it wasn't worth fighting over. There was also the matter of Ben's kindergarten, a decision the two of them needed to finalize by Monday, which was supposed to happen over the phone once Dan finished his workout class that morning. He had left her a voicemail, but when she didn't hear back from him, she had called and left her own message. Detective Isom asked whether infidelity had played any role in the divorce. Wendy said no.

27:25 Had Dan ever been belligerent toward her? He had never hit her, she said, but she considered him emotionally abusive. It simply hadn't been a healthy marriage, she said, and she didn't want her sons growing up thinking that was how a man was supposed to treat a woman. Beyond that, she was clear. No physical violence toward her or the kids, no drug problems, no gambling, and no cheating on either side. She told Isom that she had wanted to move to South Florida and had filed a petition for relocation, which the court denied. She acknowledged that people, including Dan's family, might think that she killed Dan. She told Isom, I understand why I'm a suspect. I guess I'm not a suspect.

28:06 I just understand why you would think that I would do this. She kept coming back to this over and over through the interview. She would just, out of nowhere, she would say, I understand why I'm a suspect. And Isom would say, you're not a suspect. I'm not saying you're a suspect. but she kind of kept saying that over and over. Eventually, Isom steered the conversation toward her own love life. Wendy said her most recent relationship had been with Jeff LaCasse, a professor of social work at Florida State. They had been together roughly 10 months since late October, though earlier that week when she returned from visiting her family in South Florida, the two of them had fought and Wendy asked for some time to think things through. She and Jeff had ended up at the same yoga class that Monday evening. After class, he asked to see her the next day. Rather than say no outright, she emailed him once she got home, saying, She ended the message, What had turned the tide in the relationship with Jeff, she explained, was that, just before her trip to South Florida, he accused her of cheating on him, He had gone through her phone and saw that she had called another man who she had dated briefly the previous fall. She denied having an affair, but the fight left her questioning the relationship. Isom asked what kind of car Jeff drove. She told him it was an old, run-down silver two-door she thought maybe a Nissan, though she wasn't certain. He lived alone in a basement apartment off

29:38 Park Street. After her five-hour interview with the police was over, Wendy called her parents to tell them what had happened and asked them to come to Tallahassee to be with her. By that time, police had reached Dan's parents in Toronto to tell them that their son had been shot and was not going to make it. When Ruth shared the awful news with her 96-year-old uncle Lazar, a man who had acted as a father to her when her biological father died while she was young, he stared for a minute, taking in the news. He then pounded the table with his fist, with the force of a much younger man, and repeated the Yiddish word, loosely translated, that means, the in-laws, the in-laws. By the way, you can find a video of Wendy's entire five-hour interview online, which we'll link in the show notes. I watched it, so you don't have to.

30:31 I don't recommend it. A lot of it was honestly just them arranging who was going to pick up the children and who they were going to call and things like that. But it was actually interesting to watch. And just a few recurring themes that I noted in watching the interview. One is that she would intermittently break out into sobs and be kind of like, I can't believe this is happening. It would just kind of come out of nowhere. I mentioned before, but she would bring up, I can see why I would be a suspect kind of over and over again. She talked a lot about her fear that she and the kids might be in danger. She was like, well, if someone came after Dan, maybe they're going to come after me and the boys. She was also very concerned over how to tell the boys how to break the news to them. And then it was kind of bizarre, but she would occasionally break in with a random comment or like a joke or something like very, lighthearted. For example, she was talking to the victim advocate at one point and all of a sudden she's like, don't we kind of look alike? Like you could be my sister. It was just kind of a odd thing. And she would do that at a few different points in the interview.

31:35 She was probably just very uncomfortable in this situation. Yeah. I'm not making any judgment on her behavior in it, just kind of my observations from it. But yeah, she was, I mean, she was clearly very upset about the whole thing and really, you know, struggling to process the shock of it. Did she go to the hospital? No, she didn't. She actually asked whether she should go or whether she should bring the boys in to see their father. And the detective really recommended that she didn't because, you know, Dan was shot in the face and his, you know, it was not in good shape. And he wasn't conscious or anything like that either. Dan's memorial service was held at his synagogue, Shomrei Torah, on Sunday morning, July 20th, just over 24 hours after he was declared dead. Donna and Harvey Adelson were there, lingering quietly at the back of the room. At one point after the service, Dan's mom, Ruth, approached Donna to talk about setting up time to see her grandsons. Donna ignored her. Also at the service, Harvey and Donna spoke briefly with Craig Isom, the lead investigator on the case, and agreed to sit down for an interview before heading back to South Florida. It was a promise they would not keep. Elsewhere at the service, Wendy approached a group of Dan's friends, people who had taken his side during the divorce. She told them, I'm a single mom to these boys now. They don't have a father figure in their lives anymore, so they really need the love and support of you all. She asked them to put aside whatever had happened between her and Dan for Ben and

33:07 Lincoln's sake. But the very next day, Monday, Harvey and Donna left Tallahassee for South Florida, taking Wendy and the boys with them. Aside from brief occasional visits, Wendy never came back to Tallahassee. And from that point on, neither she nor anyone in the family would say another word to law enforcement. So Dan is killed on a Friday, and Monday, Wendy packs up, goes to South Florida with her parents, and never comes back. That is very quick. Yeah. You keep saying South Florida here, but you mean like the Miami area? Yeah, they lived in Coral Springs, which is north of Miami, but yeah, they were all down there. near that area.

33:47 While Wendy and her family were on the road to Coral Springs, Professor Jeff LaCasse sat down with police for an interview. LaCasse seemed wired. His speech was jittery, his gestures hyperactive, like he had downed a couple of Red Bulls. Physically, he had a strong resemblance to Dan, thin with glasses and a light beard. At 42, he was a year older than Dan had been. LaCasse told them, I'm surprised you guys didn't call me earlier, because I probably said a hundred times in public that I'd like to kick his ass because he kept really making Wendy suffer. Things like that. But no, I would never. I'm a professor. I'm a pussy. I'm not going to do anything like that.

34:31 Lacasse told investigators that he had met Wendy after moving to Tallahassee from Arizona to join the FSU faculty in the fall of 2013. They started dating that September, casually at first. After the Christmas break, things got more serious, and by March 1st, they were officially a couple. Then in May and June, the relationship started fraying. He said the main source of tension was another FSU professor named Daniel Sack. Wendy had dated Sack soon after her divorce, but told Lacasse she'd stop seeing him romantically that fall. However, they kept up a platonic friendship, meeting occasionally for coffee or to go for a walk. LaCasse never fully believed that, and his jealousy got the better of him. Jeff described Wendy's appeal, saying, Once you date this girl, you'll do anything for her. I'm not the only man that's been under her thumb that way. I mean, she's really, she has this charisma and sexuality, and so, you know, you'd throw yourself in front of a bus for this girl.

35:33 Asked when he'd first met Dan, LaCasse gave a precise answer, January 12, 2014. He and Wendy had been heading out to a comedy show, and Dan was running late for a custody handoff, so the two men ended up crossing paths. The exchange was awkward, he said. Dan managed to insult him multiple times in the span of a 10-minute conversation. LaCasse also claimed that Wendy was so afraid of Dan that she'd nearly have panic attacks in his presence. When police asked about his own whereabouts at the time of the shooting, Lacasse said he'd been traveling to Tennessee to visit a close friend. He'd stayed at a Days Inn 20 miles south of Atlanta on Thursday night and continued on to Tennessee Friday afternoon with credit card charges along the way to back up his alibi. He volunteered his own theory of the murder, that someone in Wendy's family was responsible, driven by a desperate desire to get her back to South Florida. Asked specifically about Charlie, Lacasse didn't hold back. He described Charlie as an unusual guy, not much empathy. He kind of hangs out with people from both sides of the track. Drawing on his own background in juvenile justice and forensic psychiatry, he said Charlie, quote, set off my radar a little bit. He's a weird guy, a strange guy. He's a conduct disorder kid and he hates Danny. He went further saying, Wendy had reported to me that Charlie considered all the possible options to take

37:04 care of this problem. Put it that way. I think Charlie kind of looked into some options, like literally saw how you would do this. LaCasse thought that Charlie may have antisocial personality disorder. LaCasse said he could easily picture Charlie orchestrating a murder without ever telling Wendy he'd done it. In fact, the moment he'd heard Dan had been killed, Charlie was the first name that came to his mind. A millionaire with resources to spare? Someone who juggled three girlfriends at once without a hint of guilt? someone who was arrogant, narcissistic, and aggressive. He described the entire Adelson family dynamic as unhealthy, even unsettling, saying, quote, the family is so unhealthily enmeshed, so completely enmeshed, that Wendy is not really an adult. Her parents, he claimed, still treated her like a child. A great example of this, whenever Wendy wanted to make the six and a half hour drive to Coral Springs to see her family, they would first drive to Tallahassee then turn around and drive her to Coral Springs, rather than trusting her to make the drive on her own.

38:08 I can sort of understand that instinct to want to protect your children, but that's 13 hours of driving just so that she didn't have to drive herself. In both ways, they would take her home too then? Yeah. That is pretty crazy. How old was Wendy? She was 35 at the time Dan died. I remember being on a road trip with a friend one time, and I think we got off the highway to get a snack or gas or something, and She was well into her 40s, and her dad called her, and he said, Hey, I think you took a wrong turn there, honey. Oh, no. I was like, oh, boy. Wow. LaCasse didn't have much good to say about Dan. He mentioned the job opportunity Dan had at the University of Miami, but in LaCasse's words, he was an asshole, so he lost it. So the couple stayed in Tallahassee, where Dan went on to thrive, but Wendy hated it. Lacasse claimed that virtually every friend Wendy had had warned her against marrying Dan in the first place, calling him the biggest jerk they'd ever met. But she'd gotten swept up in the prestige of Harvard Law and married him anyway. He said it was a bad marriage from the start, and it only got worse once the kids arrived. He described Dan as an absentee father who came home at 9 p.m.

39:22 and grew bored with his children within minutes, leaving Wendy to handle everything. More broadly, LaCasse said that Dan simply wasn't well around town, an unapologetic snob who talked down to people. Jeff Lacasse painted a picture of Dan's conduct during the divorce as unhinged, filing so aggressive that Dan had even tried to get Wendy disbarred and often used the legal system as a tool to keep her under constant stress. I should jump in and say here that all of this information that Lacasse is giving to the police is based on things Wendy has told him. Like, he's only met Dan once or maybe twice, so it's all based on things that Wendy said to him. A few days later, Lacasse came back to the police station and spoke briefly with investigators. He'd been thinking about the fact that Wendy had asked him about his schedule for the Friday Dan was killed. This was when they were leaving yoga class together, right before she asked him for a week of no contact. He said that she asked him directly, Are you going to be here Friday?

40:22 It struck him as odd. She seemed to be breaking up with him, and now she was asking if he was going to be around on Friday. He told her yes, he was going to be around in the morning, but then he was planning to leave for Tennessee to see some friends on Friday afternoon. But then he changed his mind and decided to leave on Thursday evening instead. It had dawned on him that if he had left in the afternoon as planned, he would have had no alibi for the time of Dan's murder, and he happened to drive a car that resembled the color and size of the vehicle seen by Dan's neighbor. The question came up in his mind, was Wendy trying to frame me? So he talked about Dan pretty harshly there.

41:02 Yeah, he did. And I'm kind of surprised that the police didn't look at him, I guess because he had an alibi, he was not considered a valid suspect. I think when he originally came in, he was definitely viewed as a suspect. When his name came up during Wendy's interview, it sort of was, it raised their eyebrows like, oh, here was a guy that Wendy just broke up with who may have a grudge. And he seemed like when he came in for this interview, he seemed very amped up and, you know, on edge. So I think they initially thought he was maybe a good suspect, but he did have a solid alibi. Was this the end of his and Wendy's relationship? Yeah, they did not get back together after she broke up with him like the week before Dan died.

41:43 We'll be back after a break. At first, detectives had little to go on beyond Jim Geiger's memory of a light-colored car that might have been a Prius speeding away from the scene. The initial breakthrough came from surveillance footage at Dan's gym, Premier Health and Fitness. The footage showed him arriving and parking at 9.12 a.m. Moments later, a greenish-silver Prius pulled into the same lot and began circling. Over the next 81 minutes, while Dan worked out inside, the Prius shifted between two different parking spots, but no one ever got out. Its windows were dark-tinted, making it impossible to see inside, and the footage was too grainy to pull a license plate. When Dan pulled out of the lot at 10.38, the Prius pulled out right behind him. Detectives gathered more footage from businesses along Thomasville Road, the route between the gym and Dan's house, and the same Prius turned up twice more, but still didn't reveal anything useful. They also found footage from a bank camera showing Dan's car traveling westbound on Benton Road just after 8.30 that morning, with the Prius trailing directly behind him. That was when he had left home to drop the boys at preschool. Whoever was in that car had apparently been tailing him for two and a half hours before the shooting. They still had little to go on, and the investigation stalled. Then one investigator, Greg Wilder, had

43:16 a brilliant idea. City buses. Tallahassee's buses were outfitted with cameras inside and out, so detectives pulled footage from two buses that had been running along Thomasville Road between 10.30 and 11 o'clock that morning. At 10.44, a camera mounted on the front of one bus caught both Dan's Accord and the Prius trailing. Three minutes later, the bus pulled up directly behind the Prius at a red light, close enough to show that the car had a Florida plate, though still not clear enough to read the actual characters. A second bus caught the Prius again just after the shooting, weaving abruptly from the right lane to the left. When it had to stop for another red light, the Prius pulled up right alongside the bus. Even through the tinted glass, the camera picked up visible movement from the passenger seat, someone in a white shirt shifting around. Race, gender, and age were still impossible to determine, but it was enough to confirm one critical fact. There were at least two people in that car. From the accumulated footage, investigators built out a detailed profile of the vehicle. It was a Toyota Prius, most likely between 2006 and 2009, painted in a shade called Silver Pine Mica, not a very common color.

44:37 Another important clue, mounted on the inside of the windshield, they could see a small white SunPass transponder, the kind used to pay tolls electronically on Florida's highways. A separate lead emerged from canvassing the neighborhood. A resident of an apartment complex not far from Dan's house told police that on the morning of Thursday, July 17th, the day before the murder, she had seen a bluish-silver, Prius-like car park in the corner of the complex's lot. Two men got out and walked down a path running alongside a large drainage ditch. On the far side of that ditch sat the chain-link fence marking the back edge of Dan's property.

45:19 She described the driver as tall, with a runner's build, fair-skinned, wearing a light-colored baseball cap, The passenger was shorter, stockier, with a darker complexion, possibly Hispanic or Italian, and with short, dark hair. The two men disappeared from view and reappeared about 10 minutes later. The next step for investigators involved the SunPass transponder. They subpoenaed the Florida Department of Transportation for toll transponder records for any Toyota Prius that had traveled the Florida tollways in the days surrounding the murder. While the search for the Prius continued, investigators moved quickly to clear some of the potential suspects. Jeff LaCasse was the first to be ruled out. His credit card records showed a purchase at a Kmart in Sweetwater, Tennessee at 1.14 p.m.

46:10 on July 18th, roughly two hours after the shooting. The store surveillance footage confirmed that he was the one making the purchase. Investigators also looked at Dan's professional life. they pulled license plate records for every student who had taken his spring semester class, and not one of them turned out to own a 2006 to 2009 Prius. A review of more than 15,000 emails from Dan's work account turned up nothing suggesting any student or faculty member harbored a serious grudge against him. One lead briefly stood out, a blogger who went by Atheist Atlanta Lawyer, whose posts and comments about Dan and others left little doubt that he held extreme anti-Semitic views. Investigators identified him as Cyrus Malakabadi, a 40-year-old Georgia man, but he had a solid alibi and was crossed off the list. While Dan may have rubbed some people the wrong way, it seemed like there was no one who had a motive to kill him, except, of course, the Adelsons. Lead investigator Craig Isom knew that he needed to dig into Wendy and Dan's divorce and Wendy's family dynamics. Friends of Dan and Wendy's described to police just how bitter the divorce had become. Isom pulled every document filed in the divorce case. The paper trail told the story, the Adelson's bitter disappointment after the relocation petition was denied, and Dan's later filings accusing Wendy and her parents of serious misconduct and asking the court to

47:43 sanction Wendy and bar Donna from unsupervised time with her grandsons. On Wendy's laptop, which she had voluntarily turned over the night of the shooting, Isom found emails from Donna that made her fury toward Dan unmistakable. Isom also learned that Dan had been preparing to file a new motion in the divorce case, one focused on what he considered Wendy's perjury in her financial disclosures, allegations serious enough to potentially get her disbarred. Friends of Dan's also told police that something felt off about Harvey and Donna's behavior after Dan's death. They seemed to be acting cold and defensive. Harvey, in particular, was unable to look people in the eye and did his best to avoid speaking to anyone. Isom also reached out to Wendy's oldest brother Rob in Albany. Rob told him that he wasn't particularly close with either of his siblings, but he didn't hesitate to note that Charlie despised Dan and that Charlie certainly had the financial means to hire someone to kill him. Rob kept cooperating with investigators over the course of the investigation, offering a detailed picture of just how controlling Donna could be, including, he said, toward his own wife, Haritha. I don't know if you remember from part one, Donna basically threatened to disown him if he married this woman.

49:03 Which he did. You mentioned earlier in this section that Wendy had a potential perjury violation in her financial disclosures. Do you know more about that? Well, just when she did her deposition, she was under oath, and he felt like she had left out a number of assets that she didn't include. That was why he came back and said, I'm only going to give you this much money because, you know, you left out all this stuff. So technically she was under oath and that would be perjury. Gotcha. Months went by. From the outside, there seemed to be little progress in the investigations. During these months, Jeff LaCasse kept thinking about Wendy, her family, and things she had told him before Dan's murder. With time to clear his mind and frustrated by the apparent lack of progress in the investigation, LaCasse came back to the police in March 2015, nearly eight months after the murder.

49:56 This time he was prepared with detailed notes of things that he wanted to share. His main message was that he had realized that Wendy was deeply troubled, manipulative, and and childlike when facing conflict or responsibility. He was starting to believe that she had narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies. On the surface, she was a gifted actress, but underneath, she was someone with no real sense of guilt or empathy, hypersensitive to any criticism, and a pathological liar. He recalled something she had told him once, unprompted, quote, I have a really hard time telling the truth when it's inconvenient or unpleasant. I lie all the time. And just a reminder here too, Jeff is a professor of social work and his specialty is mental health. So he's not a complete novice when it comes to looking at people's disorders.

50:50 Lacasse was also questioning the negative portrait that Wendy had painted of Dan. Increasingly, he found himself believing what other people had told him instead, that Dan may have been an arrogant academic, but that underneath it, he had been a decent man and a genuinely good father. Finally, LaCasse told police about something Wendy had said to him at some point during their relationship, something that, in hindsight, felt ominous. She said the only way she would ever be able to move back to South Florida was if something happened to Dan. Can we trust this guy's account of anything, though? Does he have an axe to grind because he was upset that Wendy broke up with him? Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm sure police took Everything he said with a grain of salt because he might have had ulterior motives.

51:37 It's just odd that he came back 10 months later. Seems like a bit of a flip-flopper. One of the more powerful tools available to modern investigators is what's known as a tower dump, a record of every phone number that is connected to a specific cell tower during a defined window of time. But it's still like finding a needle in a haystack. Investigators obtained warrants for all four phone carriers operating towers in Tallahassee, and came back with thousands of pages of data. They combed through every number that had pinged off the towers near Dan's house, the boys' preschool, and his gym on the morning of July 18th. After hours of painstaking effort, they came up empty. Not a single number had connected to towers at all three locations that morning. So they tried a different angle, with search warrants already in hand for the phone records of Wendy, Donna, Harvey, and Charlie, Investigators cross-referenced calls sent and received from the Adelson's phones against the numbers captured in the tower dumps.

52:39 They got one match, 786-372-5986. Seventeen days before the murder on July 1st, that number had been in contact with Harvey's cell phone, and on the morning of July 18th, it had pinged a T-Mobile tower near Dan's gym twice at 936 and 958. The number belonged to a man named Sigfredo Garcia, who lived in Miami Beach. Investigators pulled Garcia's T-Mobile records and checked his most frequently called contacts against the tower dump data. Again, they found just one match, a number that had pinged an AT & T tower near Dan's gym while he was inside working out, and had also pinged a tower near his neighborhood the day before.

53:24 That number belonged to Luis Manuel Rivera, another Miami Beach resident. When investigators pulled DMV photos for both men, they lined up with the descriptions given by the witness at the apartment complex near Dan's house. We just went through a lot of cell phone data to try to simplify it a little bit. They looked at all of the numbers that pinged off of towers near Dan's house on the day of his death. Sounds like they were trying to triangulate. Exactly. And they found one number that had called Harvey Adelson like a couple of weeks before the murder. So that was how they narrowed it down and found out Sigfredo Garcia, and then they found out that Sigfredo Garcia had often called and talked to Luis Rivera, and so that's how they made that connection as well.

54:08 Around the same time, the Sun Pass transponder records came back. They found one Toyota Prius in that unusual silver pine mica color that had driven on the tollways between South Florida and Tallahassee between July 16th and 18th. They then traced the SunPass transponder to a small rental company in North Miami. The owner pulled up the paperwork. The Prius had been rented on July 15th by none other than Luis Rivera, with Sigfredo Garcia listed as a secondary contact. The owner told investigators that every car in his fleet carried an embedded GPS locator for theft protection, which logged location data every 25 hours. These records placed the Prius in Tallahassee at the Roadway Inn, a motel less than three miles from Dan's house, at 12.26 a.m. on July 18, hours before the shooting. The tower dump backed this up, showing both Rivera and Garcia's phones pinging towers near the Roadway Inn that evening and into the early morning. Investigators then subpoenaed bank records for both men. Rivera had withdrawn $ 40 from an ATM in South Florida. at 646 on July 18th as the two men were making their way back south. Footage from the ATM showed a clean, direct view of Rivera's face, staring into the camera as he withdrew the cash. The footage also captured a reasonably clear look at the passenger, a match for Secreto Garcia, wearing

55:38 a long-sleeved white shirt. By the time investigators had pieced all this together, it was late 2015, well over a year since Dan's murder. There was still plenty of work ahead, but Isom felt the investigation finally had real momentum. He was confident it was only a matter of time before they could draw a direct line connecting Garcia and Rivera to the Adelson family. One name that turned up several times in Rivera and Garcia's call records for the days they were in Tallahassee was a man named Shadrick Nobles. When police tracked Shadrick down, he was sleeping in his car, going through a rough stretch. They told him he wasn't in trouble. They just wanted information. Before they'd even explained why they were there, Nobles asked, is this about those two dudes from Miami? Asked why he'd brought them up, he said he'd just had a bad feeling about them.

56:31 He had run into the two men outside of their motel room back in July 2014, and they asked if he could find them some cocaine. Nobles did help them get cocaine and partied with them in their room. He picked up both Garcia and Rivera out of a photo lineup without hesitation. To understand Luis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia, it helps to understand the Latin Kings, one of the largest Hispanic criminal organizations in the country, with a strong presence in Chicago, New York, and especially Miami. The Kings' core business is drug distribution, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, but violence has always been part of the enterprise too. Members often mark their allegiance permanently, branding crown tattoos into their skin, sometimes alongside a lion. Some earn their way in, others inherit a membership as legacy members through family already in the organization. Luis Rivera fell into the second category. Born in Puerto Rico in 1983, he became a legacy Latin king through two uncles already in the organization. His king name, Taro, came from a childhood nickname given to him by his godmother.

57:42 His family relocated to Miami when he was still a toddler, and he was already an active king by age 10, the same age he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. His first arrest came at 13. From there, his life cycled between reform schools, public schools, and a string of arrests. He never advanced past a third grade reading level, and he was using marijuana and cocaine by middle school. Within the Kings, though, he rose fast. By 15, he was leading the organization's North Miami chapter, roughly 100 members strong. Well, that is a rough start in life. For sure. Starting at age 17, Rivera held down a legitimate job as a laborer, a job he stuck with for the next 15 years, while still engaging in criminal activities with the Kings. His first real criminal charge came at 18.

58:33 for aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and drug trafficking. He managed to stay off the radar for years after that until 2008, when his girlfriend reported him for domestic violence, followed later by a separate arrest on drug and weapons charges. Rivera's closest friend going all the way back to elementary school was Sigfrido Garcia, known as Tuto. The two, Tato and Tuto, were so close they considered themselves brothers. Garcia's parents had emigrated from Cuba before their oldest child was born, with Tuto being the youngest of five. His father cycled in and out of prison, chased women, and used cocaine heavily. Tuto had his first snort of it, stolen from his dad's stash, before he turned 10. His father taught him how to break into cars and smoke marijuana with him.

59:22 By the time Tuto was 11, his father was gone for good, having fled to Mexico to dodge drug charges. Tudor's own criminal history started very young. His first arrest came at age six? Six. What was he arrested at age six for? I don't know. At 12, he set a building on fire. By seventh grade, he'd already done a stint in rehab. As a teenager, he threw himself into weightlifting and built a muscular physique. At 23, he was shot multiple times after confronting a man he suspected of being a pedophile. He wasn't expected to survive, but he did. Around that time, he fell for a woman named Katie McBanwa, and the two had a child together. Garcia took a job in construction to help support the family, and in 2009, he went to work as a laborer at the same company where Rivera worked, until he was fired for drinking on the job while operating heavy machinery. Chronic problems with his sciatic nerve sidelined him from long stretches after that, and he increasingly turned to alcohol and cocaine to cope. In 2012, he and Katie had a second child together. Later that year, he was arrested for assaulting and robbing an elderly man. By 32, he'd been arrested no fewer than 25 times, dating back to his juvenile years. By the time of Dan's murder, Garcia and Katie had been together for years, though the relationship was on again, off again. In late 2013, Katie kicked Garcia out, though the two remained in contact. We'll

1:00:54 be back after a break. Katie Magbanwa, the mother of Sigfredo Garcia's two children, would turn out to be the link that detectives were searching for. She worked the front desk at SoFi Dental Care and Orthodontics in South Beach, and it was there in late 2013 that she met a handsome, muscular, well-off, traveling periodontist. His name? Charlie Adelson. As investigators dug into the phone records, they found that Katie not only spoke and texted with Sigfredo frequently, she also spoke with Charlie more than 900 times between early May and mid-July 2014. Cell tower data also placed her and Charlie's phones together in Key West for several days in late June. It seemed clear to investigators that Katie and Charlie were involved with each other.

1:01:51 The phone records from the day of the shooting painted an interesting picture. Just after midnight that morning, there were calls between Katie and Garcia, Katie and Charlie, and between Charlie and his mom Donna. Later that morning, Donna called Wendy. Soon after that, Charlie called Wendy. Then he called Donna immediately after that 18-minute call ended. In the hour leading up to the shooting, Charlie spoke with Katie three more times. Right around 10 a.m., the time that Dan was leaving the gym, Garcia and Rivera's phones went dark, likely powered off. After the shooting, Charlie called Donna, then he called Katie right after that. About an hour after the shooting, Garcia called Katie. That evening, when Garcia and Rivera were headed back to Miami, Garcia and Katie spoke seven more times, and Katie spoke to Charlie three more times. Without getting into more detail, It was clear that Katie was in frequent contact with both Garcia and Charlie, while Charlie was in frequent contact with his mom. The records also revealed that Garcia and Rivera had actually driven to Tallahassee once before, just over a month before the murder, on June 4th and 5th, in a different rental car. During that trip, their location showed up at Winthrop Park, just a short walk from Dan's house. And during that trip, Katie and Garcia were again in regular contact. Was this a rehearsal or perhaps an aborted attempt to kill Dan over a

1:03:23 month before he was actually murdered? In between the two trips, there were several calls and texts between Katie and Charlie and between Katie and Garcia. Interestingly, there was one call from Garcia to Harvey Adelson's cell phone on July 1st. The call went to voicemail. It was the only call investigators could find directly between the Hitman and the Adelson family without Katie as the intermediary. And that was the call that originally helped detectives make the connection from the cell tower dump. Most people involved in a murder-for-hire try not to start spending conspicuous amounts of cash right afterward. Sigfredo Garcia, Luis Rivera, and Katie Magbanua weren't among them.

1:04:06 Just eight days after the shooting, Garcia bought a 1984 Chevy Monte Carlo. In August, he added a Honda motorcycle. In October, a 2000 Nissan Maxima. Rivera made his own round of purchases, a Suzuki motorcycle and a Toyota Camry. By December, the two men were relaxed enough about it to post a photo on Facebook, sitting together on their new bikes. Meanwhile, over the final six months of 2014, Katie deposited roughly $ 34, 000 into her bank account in irregular chunks ranging from $ 300 to $ 2, 000 at a time. Investigators found something else that stood out even more. Starting in September 2014, Katie was placed on the payroll of the Adelson Institute, Harvey's dental practice, drawing a bi-weekly paycheck of $ 450 before taxes. Over time, she collected 44 of these checks, totaling nearly $ 18, 000. But her cell phone had never once pinged a tower anywhere near the Adelson Institute's location. She wasn't showing up to work there, or anywhere close to it.

1:05:15 And the checks themselves raised further questions. Rather than being deposited automatically like a typical payroll check, they were handwritten and personally signed by none other than Donna Adelson. Fifteen of them, despite being dated two weeks apart from one another, carried consecutive check numbers as if they had all been written in a single sitting rather than issued over the better part of a year. There were other signs of money flowing Katie's way. In the fall of 2015, she started driving a black 2001 Lexus LS430. By then, she seemed to have reunited with Garcia and her relationship with Charlie had ended, but the Lexus had belonged to Charlie.

1:05:57 In January 2016, Harvey, whose name was on the title, officially signed the car over to Katie. There was no record of any payment changing hands. It appeared to have been a gift. Around the same time, in early 2015, Katie also got breast implants, which would have cost about $ 4, 000. By this point, investigators had a strong case against Garcia and Rivera, and they had a lot of circumstantial evidence linking the hitman to Katie, who in turn had links to Charlie. But the evidence still wasn't strong enough to arrest the Adelsons, so law enforcement decided to try an operation that became known as The Bump to tickle the wire.

1:06:40 Tickling the wire is the law enforcement term for a deliberate provocation designed to spook a suspect into saying or doing something incriminating. On April 19, 2016, that's exactly what the FBI set out to do. At 1.45, Donna Adelson was walking out her front door for her daily routine, picking up her grandsons from elementary school, when a heavyset, middle-aged man approached her. Excuse me, Mrs. Adelson? How you doing? I just want to give you this. He held out a piece of paper. Who are you? You're scaring me. No, don't be scared. Listen, just want to let you know that we know that your family has been taking care of Katie and her friend Tudor for quite some time after your problem up north has resolved. And I want to let you know that my brother, he's incarcerated.

1:07:28 He helped your family with this problem you guys had up north. And we want to make sure that he's going to make sure that you take care of what he's going through the way you're taking care of Katie and Tudor. I don't know what you're talking about. Well, this will explain it. He pressed the paper into her hand, thanked her, and walked away. Donna stuffed it into her purse and continued on toward the school. The man was an undercover FBI agent, Oscar Jimenez, and the exchange was captured on his body cam. The FBI had spent weeks planning it. Less than two weeks earlier, investigators had secured court authorization to wiretap both Charlie's and Katie's cell phones. so whatever happened next, they'd be listening. The paper Jimenez handed Donna was a printout of a news article from the one-year anniversary of Dan's murder, with a phone number and the figure $ 5, 000 written on it.

1:08:23 The goal was to make Donna believe someone connected to Luis Rivera, a fellow Latin king perhaps, was trying to shake her down. They knew Rivera himself couldn't interfere with the operation because he was sitting in federal prison on an unrelated racketeering conviction. The moment Donna got back into her 26th floor condo, she called Charlie. I got some paperwork hand-delivered to me. You're being sued? No, that's what I thought it was, but I'm going to need to talk to you. Does Dad know about this? No, Dad's at work today, fortunately. Does Wendy know that? Does it involve Wendy? No. No, no, no, no, no, no. Let me just talk to you later.

1:09:03 Does it involve me or other people? Well, probably both of us, so you probably have a general idea of what I'm talking about. So let's find some time to talk to each other and take the boys for a ride, okay? Okay. Charlie pushed for more, but Donna wouldn't discuss it further over the phone. Twenty minutes later, he called back. They agreed to meet for dinner. Make sure you bring cash with you. So I need to bring cash? That's probably a good idea, right? Is someone blackmailing you? Well, that's always a possibility. You think someone's trying to blackmail you? Um, maybe. Could be. No, that's crazy. Do you know who sent it? I have a pretty good idea. Yeah, it's amazing. Somebody knew exactly who I was. Called me by my name.

1:09:50 Before hanging up, Charlie told her, Don't say anything to Dad until I take a look at it, because Dad flies off the handle. Donna agreed, saying that was exactly why she'd planned to deal with it while Harvey was at work. Minutes later, Charlie called Katie and filled her in. She seemed genuinely startled. She said, She should have called the cops or something. Charlie agreed. The next day, Charlie met Donna for lunch near her condo. FBI surveillance was there, but they weren't able to pick up any usable audio. Afterward, Charlie drove an hour to Sunny Isles Beach to meet Katie, who had just started a new job in real estate. They talked in his car and walked to a small Italian place named Dolce Vita, again trailed by agents who recorded the meeting, but again, the recording was very rough.

1:10:40 They were able to make out some bits of the audio, and it was helpful. Charlie seemed to be asking Katie to follow up with the blackmailer, saying, You call him on the phone. All I want you to say is, I got a call from some friends who said that you reached out to them and that you mentioned my name. He told her to frame any payment as charity to help the less fortunate, reasoning that paying someone off is not an admission of guilt. Charlie seemed to sense the possibility that the blackmailer was sent by the police, saying, If it's the police, they can't take the money and won't even come to meet you. Then his tone shifted. If it's this guy, you better kill him because he's going to be a big problem. If you can't do it, I'll have someone else do it.

1:11:23 It's not clear who Charlie meant by this guy. He made clear his mother couldn't be involved in the whole situation. After the meeting at Dolce Vita, Charlie called Donna to reassure her. Everything's good, so I hung out with my friend who was going to sleep on some stuff. Nothing to worry about, he told her. No question in the world. Investigators were also listening on calls between Katie and Garcia. The day after her meeting with Charlie, Katie pushed Garcia to call the blackmailer and find out his identity, even though she told Charlie she would make the call herself. Garcia resisted at first, but she wore him down, and he said he would do it. So to summarize all of that, this FBI blackmailer approached Donna, who then went to Charlie and asked him to handle it.

1:12:10 Charlie then went to Katie and asked her to handle it. Katie went to Garcia, who said he would handle it, but he actually never called the blackmailer either. So it was like a hot potato. No one wanted to call the blackmailer back. Gotcha. On April 25th, the FBI escalated again, sending a letter straight to Donna in Harvey's condo. It read, in all caps, My phone is not ringing so you don't care about Taro and what he did for you. He knows he is fucked and soon so will you. The confusion compounded from there. Katie told Charlie that she'd lost the blackmailer's number, prompting him to track down the original note from his mother. Katie then told Charlie she had tried the number but there had been no answer. But that was a lie. No one had attempted to call the number at this point. Then on the morning of April 28th, FBI agent Jimenez called the Adelson Institute directly, asking for Donna, saying his name was Sammy. Donna didn't take the call, but minutes later, in apparent distress, she called Charlie, who tried to calm her down. Eventually, Charlie decided to call the number himself. Okay, just so everyone knows, I am playing Jimenez and you are playing Charlie. Hola, Diga? Hello, Diga?

1:13:26 Who's this? Who's this? Someone's been calling my family. I'm trying to figure out who this is. In reference to what, man? Someone by the name of Sammy called. Yeah, that's me, man. Alright, what's going on? Well, what's going on is my brother, Toto, okay? My brother Toto has not been taken care of. His family has not been taken care of. I talked to the dentist. Why are you calling me? Who are you? I don't know Toto. You don't know Toto? I'm sure you know Katie and Tuto. They've been taken care of since the family problem been taken care of up north. I don't know who these people are. It's not going away, my friend. I was in Broward with Tato, and he told me the whole story. Nobody was taking care of him. The family was taking care of Katie and Tuto, and nothing's been taken care of with Tato. We know what's going on, and Tato needs to be taken care of. Do the right thing. The lady already has the paperwork. She knows what I'm talking about.

1:14:21 Let me look into things. No more fucking around, man. This ain't going away. You guys need to do the right thing for Toto. That's my brother, man. He needs to be taken care of, just like Katie and Tuto have been taken care of. I've never met these people, but let me call you back, okay? That's bullshit, man. You know exactly what I'm talking about. I'll call you back. After hanging up, Charlie immediately called Katie, and the two of them tried to piece together who the blackmailer could be, again speculating that it may have been a cop fishing for information. Charlie, growing impatient, floated a new theory to Katie. What if his own brother, Rob, was somehow behind the whole thing? Charlie said, If it was my brother who was behind this, I'm going to fucking find out. If it was my brother, I'll turn him in and get the reward money. My brother's a piece of shit. After two solid weeks of frantic phone traffic among Donna, Charlie, Katie, and Garcia, investigators had a lot of suspicious activity, but still didn't have the smoking gun that they were after.

1:15:19 So they turned the pressure up one last time. At 2.09 a.m. on May 4th, Jimenez texted Donna directly, all caps again, So you don't take me serious? You think I'm playing? You have some puta calling me to see if I'm for real? If you think what Katie's baby daddy did for you can't come back, you're fucking crazy. I want the money now or I'm going after the 100K. 100K was the reward money for information leading to the arrest of Dan's killers. The next day, surveillance teams watched Charlie visit his mother's building. This time, Harvey joined the conversation. The three of them huddled in a secluded spot near the condo's outdoor pool. Undercover agents watched from a distance but didn't pick up audio.

1:16:02 On May 6th, Donna called the blackmailer herself and told him flatly that she wouldn't be paying a cent. She denied any involvement in her son-in-law's death and informed him that if he had real information, there was a $ 100, 000 reward out for Dan's killer, he was welcome to take it to the police. Not long after, Charlie told the others to start communicating over WhatsApp instead. It was the end of the bump and time to start making arrests. And that is where we're going to end part two. In part three, we'll talk about who actually gets arrested. So at this point, just based on what we've already gone through, which of the Adelsons do you think were involved in the plot to kill Dan?

1:16:44 Charlie, Harvey, and Donna. What about Wendy? I'm not really sure. That was a lot of information that you gave us in this episode. I'm a little glazed over, if I'm being honest. It is hard to believe that anyone would make that decision without checking with Wendy, but I could see Donna making that decision on her behalf. Yeah, I think that's the most interesting thing, one of the most interesting things about this case, and we'll talk about it I suspect a lot when we're in part three. But yeah, I think it's very clear that Charlie was involved. I think it's pretty clear that Donna was involved. I think Harvey was most likely involved. He was in some of these conversations. Wendy is another question. She was not involved in any of these phone conversations that they tapped into.

1:17:30 I know how this case ends, so it's a little difficult for me to weigh in on it too heavily without giving anything away. So in researching this case, I found myself really impressed by the police work because literally all they had to go on initially was the neighbor saying, I saw a car, it might have been a Prius. That's really all they had to go on. So to basically put all these pieces together and go through all the phone tower records and the video surveillance, looking at the city bus video footage, it was really pretty impressive. Do you think If the neighbors hadn't seen the Prius, if they had gotten away without anyone seeing them, do you think that the police would have been able to crack this case?

1:18:11 Yes, I do. I think eventually, like either Garcia or Rivera or Katie, probably not Katie, but Garcia and Rivera, who were career criminals, I think that they would have said, when they were arrested for something else, maybe, you know, I have some information, trying to get off on a different crime. Yeah, that could be. Or the other thing I think is that They probably would have looked at the footage from Dan's, the parking lot of the gym that Dan pulled into and the preschool, and they might have seen that, oh, a Prius followed him into the gym and no one got out and then followed him back out. So they might have still been able to solve it, but really, it was pretty impressive.

1:18:51 But this case is over 12 years ago and the amount of video surveillance and triangulation by cell phone towers is pretty incredible. Yeah, it really is. During Wendy's five-hour interview with the police, she admitted to driving down Dan's street the day he was killed. And she also brought up, unprompted, the idea that maybe someone killed Dan thinking they were doing her a favor. And she even brought up that her brother Charlie would joke about hiring a hitman to kill Dan. Do her comments make you more or less likely to think that she was involved? Wendy just strikes me as kind of an odd duck and hard to read. So I don't really know. It seems like the conversation that she had with the police was just what was on her mind at the time.

1:19:39 It does sound like she was traumatized to a certain extent by Dan's death. I don't think she was expecting it. She seemed to be pretty jarred by it, upset by it, right? Or am I reading it wrong? No, I mean, it seemed like that to me when I watched the interrogation. Like she really did, you know, Several times she broke down sobbing. It didn't feel fake to me, but it's really hard to tell. And like Jeff LaCasse said, he thought she was a really good actress and, you know, could kind of bring those things up. So it's really hard to say, I think. Something I think about in a lot of these cases is you can want someone dead, but you can also be devastated when they are killed.

1:20:19 Yeah, that's very true. So Jeff LaCasse, he talked about the Adelson family being so deeply enmeshed and that Wendy, that they didn't treat her like an adult. Do you think that lends support to the theory that they maybe killed Dan without her knowledge? Like basically they were like just wanting to take care of her and not have her bothered by anything? Or that maybe Wendy manipulated them into doing this? A question I have for you I keep thinking of, did Wendy still have feelings for Dan? You know what? It's a good question. I don't know for sure. I know she did. I think I mentioned this earlier. You know, she did look up his current girlfriend on Facebook, which says, OK, maybe she's at least curious about his life. But I don't know. She seemed to really dislike Dan. I don't know if hate may be too strong of a word, but just in everything she said to the police, she really painted a very negative picture of him.

1:21:10 You know, indifference is having no feelings for someone. Hate is... you know, closely linked with love. It's a thin line between love and hate, they say. Yeah. So the bump operation didn't really yield a smoking gun, but do you think that the evidence that they did find was incriminating? It does seem like it was kind of a failure, doesn't it? But the way that all the cloak and dagger stuff and what we need to meet and the talk by the pool seemed like it really did make everyone nervous. Yeah. I thought it was kind of funny that no one wanted to make the call. Right. Like they wanted to finger someone else in that crime. I think that was the biggest thing. It made everyone very nervous. Like it was such a flurry of activity after this and all these phone calls going back and forth and all these meetings. But yeah, when I first went through it, I thought, yeah, really. I mean, in some ways they were like, we should call the police and maybe it's the police doing this. So it didn't seem quite as effective as I think maybe that they had hoped. But there was also some audio that didn't come out very clearly that we'll talk about in part three that they did some work on and cleaned up, and I think it helped the case quite a bit.

1:22:19 We talk about murder every week, but I am constantly astonished that people's solution to their problem is to kill someone, to just take Dan out of the equation. That's what's best for us, so that's what we're going to do. His children be damned. I know Dan was... I don't really know how to describe Dan because, of course, we always want to talk about our victims with empathy. But he was a prickly guy. Yeah, he could be a very difficult guy. He was not always the most lovable person in the room. But he was brilliant. And his legal mind, just to throw that out the window because it's what works best for us. Yeah, he had a lot to offer. And like you pointed out, You're killing the father of your nephew, your grandchildren.

1:23:05 Is that really good for them? Are you really looking out for your grandchildren? Yeah. It makes no sense. Well, be sure to come back for part three. So most people will be listening to this episode just a little bit before Halloween, maybe a week or so. I was thinking about ghost stories, and I was thinking about a story that that someone told me way back when I was in my early 20s. And it's the only really credible ghost story I've ever heard, like firsthand from someone. So are you lying and you're just making up a story or is this actually.

1:23:45 This is. But it's hearsay. Well, it's hearsay, but the person who told me, it seemed so believable to her and she was adamant that this was a true story. Mm-hmm. So I'm going to share it. So yes, now it is hearsay because it's coming secondhand from me. But the person who told the story, she actually experienced this. If someone can really deliver a good ghost story, it's more plausible. Even if the story isn't plausible, just their delivery of it is what's most important, I think. Yeah, could be. The fact that this came firsthand, let me just tell the story and then you can decide whether it sounds plausible. So this girl, she was in her 20s. She had moved into a house in downtown Detroit. It was the first time she had lived on her own.

1:24:26 It was like this little house that she rented and she would go to sleep at night and she would often wake up in the middle of the night and she would look over and she would see a figure of a man sitting in a chair next to the bed. And it always looked like he was putting his boots on. And then he would come over and lean over her in the bed like he was giving her a kiss and And she would flip out and wake up and turn on the lights and it would all be gone. This happened to her multiple times. And so she did some research and she looked up the history of the house and who had owned the house before. And it was in Detroit, used to be salt mining was a big thing. And there was a guy who lived there who was a salt miner who had died in a mining accident. So what she came up with was that this guy, he put on his boots every morning at the same time. And would kiss his wife goodbye before going to the salt mines. And then he died.

1:25:21 So he's cheating on his wife? Cheating on his wife. Oh, because he's. He's kissing your friend. I hadn't really considered that angle before. He has always thought like a ghost stays where they died. Like his ghost would be in the mine. That's what you would think too. Yeah. Yeah. But she told the story believably. It was the first time I ever came away from hearing a ghost story convinced that, oh. Maybe there is something to this whole thing. Did she do a lot of drugs? I don't know the answer to that. It's a good question, though. We probably talk about this every year, but I have a horrible memory. Have you had any experiences, supernatural experiences that are unexplainable? The thing that I think about a lot of times is you've had people that are very close to you that love you very much pass away.

1:26:09 Right. And so I feel like those people, like your mom and your dad, like, they would come back to you. If that was a possibility, they would come back to you. They would comfort you if you were feeling down or they would offer you some love and reassurance in your life. And because that hasn't happened, and it hasn't happened to me either, I'm just less likely to believe ghost stories in general. Well, same. And yeah, nothing like that has happened to me. I've had a lot of dreams about people who have passed away that were close to me that were kind of seemed very like real. Like I had one dream about my dad who had passed away when I was eight years old. And the dream was like, he would come back and see me like over the years, like over the course of my childhood to adulthood and check in with me. And the dream like spanned like 15, 20 years or something like that. And it was really so vivid. And so, you know, just stuck with me forever, but it wasn't really a ghost, you know, type of thing.

1:27:10 Okay, this isn't a very Halloween-y thing to say, but I think about it all the time. Your parents would be so proud of you. Well, that's very nice of you to say. Well, it's true. Another thing I think about all the time is if you're a murder victim, you should be able to come back and you should be able to say, you know, this guy. So-and-so did it. Yeah, don't you think? That would be ideal if that was the case. It would make things a lot easier. For the police. Yeah. I feel like whoever is in charge after you pass away, that they should make that a thing. They should. It reminds me of the story The Telltale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. It's one of my favorite short stories, but it's basically a murderer is haunted by the person that he kills. And yeah, it seems only fair. Yeah. I feel like if I killed someone, I would be very haunted.

1:27:52 Yeah, I think so too. But I don't really want to kill anyone. Good to hear. If you would like to listen to the conclusion of this episode, go to patreon.com slash lovemerrykill for $ 5 a month. You get early. ad-free access, and a monthly bonus episode. And when we do multi-part cases like this, we release them all at once. Thank you all so much for listening and hanging out with us. Find us on social media or visit our website at lovemerrykill.com. Until next time, don't kill your husband and don't kill your wife. Thank you.

1:28:42 Thank you.