TRUE- LIFE
Did trouble with the in-laws end with a man being killed?
When Daniel Markel and Wendi Adelson’s marriage broke up, things got nasty.
Wendi acrimoniously filed for divorce in September 2012.
After that, the former couple bickered over the financial settlement.
Dan accused Wendi of hiding money and assets.
Mostly, the couple argued over their two young sons.
Though they shared custody, Wendi was determined to take the boys from Tallahassee and move 400 miles away to Miami.
Her parents, Harvey and Donna Adelson, lived there, running the family’s successful dental practice.
Wendi’s brother Charlie Adelson was in Miami, too, and was also a dentist.
But Dan blocked her request to relocate.
The two battled it out in court, where Dan, a brilliant lawyer and talented professor at Florida State University, was winning.
The judge wasn’t on board with letting Wendi move the boys away from their loving father.
So he sided with Dan. It wasn’t a popular decision amongst the Adelson clan.
The dispute rumbled on. Until Dan was shot and killed in his driveway.
On the morning of 18 July 2014, after dropping his kids, then 5 and 4, at preschool, he’d run errands and gone to the gym.
Shot in the head
But as he arrived home and pulled into the garage, a stranger followed.
Two shots blasted out, before a silver Toyota Prius sped away.
Neighbours found Dan, 41, sitting in the driver’s seat, groaning.
There were shards of glass everywhere, and a bullet hole in his head.
Blood poured from the wound and he was raced to hospital.
Sadly, Dan died later that evening.
But who would slaughter a loving father in broad daylight?
Following the former couple’s ugly custody battle, the police were suspicious of the Adelsons.
But they had no proof.
Then, in May 2016, detectives found CCTV of the mystery Prius tailing Dan to the shops, the gym.
Police traced it to a rental agreement with a man named Luis Rivera.
Rivera quickly confessed that he’d been paid to drive from Miami to Tallahassee to murder Dan.
And a critical link was unearthed. Rivera, a member of the Latin Kings gang in Miami, was lifelong friends with a man called Sigfredo Garcia.
And at the time of Dan’s brutal murder, Garcia’s long-term on/off girlfriend, Katherine Magbanua, was also dating another man… Charlie Adelson.
A murderfor-hire plot unravelled.
Rivera pleaded guilty to seconddegree murder that year, and was jailed for 19 years.
Magbanua and Garcia were later convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation. They were jailed for life. But what about t
