Donna Adelson has been convicted of orchestrating the 2014 murder of her son-in-law, Dan Markel. Photo / Court video, YouTube
For more than a decade, the killing of a well-known Florida law professor, Dan Markel, has consumed a team of state prosecutors in Tallahassee, who secured four convictions as they peeled back a complicated murder-for-hire plot involving the family of the professor’s ex-wife.
Today, a jury found a fifth person guilty in the 2014 plot: Donna Adelson, Markel’s mother-in-law and the grandmother of his two sons.
She was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and solicitation of murder.
Adelson, 75, sobbed and repeatedly cried out, “Oh, my God”, after the verdict was read at the Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee, prompting Judge Stephen Everett to remove the jury from the courtroom as he warned Adelson against further outbursts.
He offered her a few minutes to get tissues and collect herself. She faces a likely sentence of life in prison.
Markel, 41, a prominent legal scholar at Florida State University, was shot on July 18, 2014, in the driveway of his home in an upmarket Tallahassee neighbourhood. He died 14 hours later at a hospital.
His murder has been the subject of news articles, television shows and a podcast.
In 2023, a different jury convicted Adelson’s son Charles Adelson, a Fort Lauderdale periodontist, of the same charges as his mother after prosecutors showed that he arranged and paid for Markel’s murder. Charles Adelson is serving a sentence of life in prison.
The three other people convicted in the case are Katherine Magbanua, Adelson’s former girlfriend; Sigfredo Garcia, the father of Magbanua’s children; and Luis Rivera, a former leader of the North Miami Latin Kings gang.
“For 11 years, we have been forced to a life filled with unimaginable pain and heartbreak,” Ruth Markel told the judge in a victim impact statement after the verdict. “We have lost a treasure.”
According to prosecutors, Donna Adelson orchestrated the plot so that her daughter, Wendi Adelson, who was embroiled in an ugly custody dispute with Dan Markel, could move with the couple’s two young sons to South Florida. A judge had denied her relocation petition after the divorce.
Prosecutors said that Donna Adelson, through her son, had arranged for Garcia and Rivera to drive to Tallahassee from Miami to kill Markel. The conduit was Magbanua, who had two children with Garcia.
Magbanua’s initial trial resulted in a hung jury, but in a second trial she was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation of murder in 2022.
She was sentenced to life in prison, with two additional 30-year sentences to run consecutively with her life term. She testified against Charles Adelson and his mother.
A jury convicted Garcia of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 2019. He, too, was sentenced to life in prison.
Rivera pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2016. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison and testified against Garcia, Magbanua, Charles Adelson, and Donna Adelson.
Prosecutors consider Wendi Adelson and Harvey Adelson — Donna Adelson’s husband and the father of Charles and Wendi Adelson — unindicted co-conspirators.
Neither has been charged, and both have denied any involvement. Wendi Adelson has testified with limited immunity in all four trials held in the case and did so against her mother last week.
Donna Adelson was arrested in November 2023, more than nine years after the killing, at Miami International Airport.
Her son had been convicted just days earlier; she and her husband had one-way tickets for a flight to Vietnam, which does not have extradition to the US.
During her trial, prosecutors showed that she had researched countries without extradition treaties on Wikipedia.
Jackie Fulford, one of Donna Adelson’s defence lawyers, said during her closing argument that Adelson had not been fleeing the country but rather looking to take an extended break after being left so distraught by her son’s conviction that she had considered suicide.
Fulford portrayed Adelson as a woman who became too involved in her daughter’s divorce and could not resist calling Dan Markel an array of insults, as prosecutors’ records of emails from Donna Adelson to Wendi and Charles Adelson showed. But none of that made her a murderer, the defence argued.
“They have a lot of theories, and they like to spin evidence a certain way to make her look bad because she said ugly things,” Fulford said of prosecutors. “That is not proof of somebody having somebody killed.”
Donna Adelson did not testify during the trial.
Prosecutors showed the 12-member jury emails, text messages, and recordings from an undercover FBI operation that was part of the murder investigation.
Magbanua, the conduit between the Adelson family and the killers, testified that she began receiving cheques from the Adelsons’ dental practice about three months after Markel’s murder. All were signed by Donna Adelson, Magbanua said.
Two women who served time in jail with Donna Adelson as she awaited trial also testified. They said that she had promised them gifts such as a trailer, a grand piano and veneers to lie to investigators about her case.
And jurors heard from the oldest of Donna Adelson’s three children, Dr Robert Adelson, an ear, nose and throat doctor who had never testified in any of the previous trials.
He described his mother as “controlling” and said she “hated” Markel at the time of the divorce.
He became estranged from his mother after a chilling conversation days after Garcia and Rivera had been arrested in which she refused to engage in discussing the murder, he said.
Georgia Cappleman, the lead prosecutor, told jurors during her closing argument that Donna Adelson could not accept that her daughter and grandsons would remain far from her in Tallahassee.
“The evidence has shown that Donna Adelson was all about psychological warfare, and when all else failed she was willing to do whatever it took to accomplish her non-negotiable to get her win,” Cappleman said.
After 12 days of trial, the jury took about three hours to find her guilty.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Patricia Mazzei
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