How twisted ‘obsession’ saw mother-in-law order execution of lawyer amid family feud – & FBI sting that snared her

WHEN Wendi Adelson learnt that there had been a fatal shooting involving her ex-husband Dan Markel she was devastated.

A prominent legal scholar, Dan, 41, was fatally shot two times in the garage of his Tallahassee, Florida, home on July 18, 2014.

For a decade, the crime remained a mystery – despite the initial £18,000 Crime Stoppers reward offer and later, an independently-funded £73,000 award offer.

The devastating case – which saw Dan’s two sons, Benjamin and Lincoln, left without a father – hit the headlines and drew attention on social media as sleuths desperately tried to uncover who the father’s killer was.

But nobody could have predicted the shocking twist behind the brutal murder that tormented Dan’s family for more than 10 years.

His death had been orchestrated by his in-laws who had worked together in a twisted plot.

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But while on the outside Dan and Wendi, now 47, seemed like the perfect couple, the fairytale relationship slowly started to crumble as Dan got a job teaching in New York.

Speaking on the documentary Dan’s friend Oryl Lobel explains: “There was a perception that Wendi was the trailing spouse.”

She added: “There was maybe some bickering about Dan travelling too much.”

By 2012 the marriage had soured and Wendi left the family home taking their two kids with her and leaving divorce papers on the dining table.

The mum-of-two then applied for a relocation order to move the boys to South Florida so they’d be closer with her parents but Dan blocked it.

In June 2013 judges denied Wendi’s petition to relocate the boys and the divorced was finalised the following month.

“That left Wendi stuck in Tallahassee and her family didn’t like him for that reason,” Oryl said in the four-part series.

And it seems that the hard feelings were not limited to Wendi.

In March the following year, reports show that Dan filed a motion prohibiting his mother-in-law Donna Adelson from having unsupervised visits with his children claiming she was making ‘disparaging’ marks about him.

Just four months later, the body of Dan was discovered in the car of his garage, he had been fatally shot.

Right after the memorial service the next day after the shooting, Wendi and her two sons drove to South Florida and different theories began to emerge – from suicide to “a disgruntled student who got a bad grade”.

During an interview with the investigations team, Wendi said: “I think maybe somebody did this on my behalf.

“Some crazy, deranged person thought that this was a good way to support me.”

Despite the theories there was just one lead – a light-coloured Prius that had followed the dad to his home before it was seen dashing away from the driveway.

It soon became clear that Dan’s murder was a hit job – but the police needed to figure out who had orchestrated it.

The focus immediately shifted towards Wendi’s “wealthy” family – patriarch Harvey, who ran a dental practice where his wife Donna worked, successful periodontist son Charles who was “very protective” of his sister Wendi, as well as the eldest sibling Robert, who had become estranged from the family.

Investigations showed that once Dan had blocked the relocation papers, his mother-in-law did everything to keep his kids away from him – even as much as offering $1million (£740,000) to entice him to agree to the move.

“They hate Danny,” said Jeffrey Lacasse, who dated Wendi after her divorce.

“I’ve never seen this kind of obsession, their hobby is hating Danny.

“And she [Wendi] talked about the fact that the only way she could ever relocate is if something happened to Danny.”

Even more shockingly, Jeffrey later claimed, Wendi had allegedly said that at one point her brother Charles “did look into having him [Dan] killed” – a hitman job that would cost $15,000 (£11,000).

After some digging and tracing phone calls made the morning of Dan’s death, investigators tracked down a short call to Wendi’s family by a man named Sigfredo Garcia.

Although there wasn’t much information on Garcia – also known as Tuto – the forces discovered he had made frequent calls to Luis Rivera, who had ties to the Latin Kings gang, on the same day of the homicide.

The two were “100%” tied to the brutal case after video footage revealed that Rivera and Garcia were both in the same Toyota Prius car seen by a witness.

Phone records also showed that Garcia also contacted another person numerous times – Katherine Magbanua who was getting paid by the Adelson institute, Harvey’s dental practice.

Piece by piece, the puzzle was slowly coming together – a moment made possible thanks to the discovery that Magbanua, who had children with Garcia, made frequent phone calls to Wendi’s brother, Charles.

It was later uncovered that at one point Magbanua – who wasn’t actually working at the dental practice – had also been romantically involved with Charles.

It further transpired that following the hitman murder in 2014, Magbanua was showered in lavish gifts – from a breast enhancement to a new car.

After wiretapping delivered little useful evidence linking the Adelson family to the murder, the investigations team came up with a plan.

In a sting operation an officer dressed undercover as a gang member approached Donna on the street and handed her a note asking for $5,000 (£3,700) to help Rivera – at the time already behind the bars for a different crime.

Donna pretended she had no idea what it was about – but contacted Charles not long after and told him the matter involved both of them. Charles became increasingly suspicious that the forces were following their movements and listening to their calls – and subsequently moved all communication to WhatsApp, which they weren’t able to tap due to the end-to-end encryption.

It wasn’t until they spoke to Rivera that the team finally got the breakthrough they so desperately needed.

Speaking to the officers, Rivera revealed that at first he thought that Garcia and he had been hired to come to Tallahassee to “rob somebody”.

“When I got in the car, that’s when Garcia told me what we’re coming up here for. ‘We’re coming here to kill somebody’,” he revealed in a recording of his police interview.

“I asked him, ‘Who’s f***ing hiring?’. He’s like, ‘Katie told me the lady wants her two kids back, she wants full custody of them kids’.”

After being arrested in the summer of 2016, Garcia pleaded not guilty and was convicted of first-degree murder after a trial three years later. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Magbanua was arrested in October 2016 and charged with murder, conspiracy and solicitation in Dan’s killing.

She denied the allegations and testified at a trial three years later that she’d done legitimate work for the Adelson family and paid for her surgery with cash tips from a job promoting liquor brands.

A mistrial was declared after the jury deadlocked, but during a retrial three years later, the single mum was convicted of all charges and sentenced to life in prison.

Charles had been recorded at a Miami restaurant appearing to implicate himself in the crime, according to prosecutors, and was arrested in 2022 on charges of first-degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation of murder.

During his trial in 2023 – the day of his birthday – Charles vehemently denied that he played a role in Dan’s brutal murder and claimed that he was the victim of a deadly extortion scheme. After Dan’s killing, he said, Magbanua told him if he didn’t pay one-third of a million dollars in 48 hours, he would be dead.

Magbanua took the stand and provided a testimony that was different from her earlier statements. She explained she’d lied in her trials to save herself and pointed to Charles as the one responsible for coming up with the murder plot. Magbanua also acknowledged recruiting Garcia to carry out the killing.

Almost a decade after the murder, on November 6, 2023, after three hours of deliberations, a jury convicted Charles of all charges. He was sentenced to life in prison.

In a bizarre twist, a weel after her son’s conviction, Donna – the matriarch of the family – was arrested in dramatic fashion.

She and her husband Harvey were taken into custody at Miami International Airport with one-way tickets to Vietnam that they’d booked on November 7 and after she’d been recorded on a prison phone call saying they were “looking for places where there’s no extradition”. (Vietnam has no official extradition treaty with the United States.)

In October 2025, 11 years after Dan’s life was taken away, Donna was found guilty of first-degree murder, conspiracy for first-degree murder and solicitation for first-degree murder, and later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 30 consecutive years.

In a victim impact statement delivered immediately afterward, Dan’s father Phil said: “The pain that they have caused my family is obvious. But they have also caused a lifelong harm to their own immediate family and so many families and children around.

“Luis Rivera – his children have no father. Katherine Magbanua and Sigfredo Garcia – their children have no parents. Charlie Adelson – his son has no father.

“Their heinous actions have left me, Ruth and [sister] Shelly without Danny, and my grandchildren – without their father.

“And my only short question to Donna – was it worth it?”