Law Professor’s Killer Stalked Him ‘Like a Shark’ Before Murder-for-Hire Ambush Linked to Ex-Mother-in-Law

Dan Markel left the gym expecting a routine day. Instead, the person who would kill him was already waiting.

As the prominent Florida State University law professor pulled into his driveway, he was speaking by phone with music teacher Stewart Schlazer about educational options for his children. Then the call took a frightening turn.

“Can you please hold on a second? There’s an unfamiliar person in my driveway,” Markel said.

Moments later, Schlazer heard what he described as “a loud boom.”

“There are really eerie parts of those final hours,” producer Lily Fletcher told News Media. “When you watch the CCTV footage, it looks like a completely ordinary day. Dan takes the kids to school, goes to the gym—and then there’s a Prius circling the gym parking lot. It never stops. It’s clearly waiting for him.”

“It has always reminded me of a shark circling,” Fletcher said. “There was something deeply sinister about watching that happen during such a mundane part of his day—simply going to the gym. That image stayed with me. It’s chilling.”

Markel was shot in the head while seated in his car inside the garage of his Tallahassee, Florida, home on July 18, 2014. He was 41 years old when he died the following day.

The killing is examined in a new ABC News Studios true-crime docuseries, “Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel,” which is now streaming on Hulu.

The series includes exclusive interviews with FBI agent Pat Sanford and a recorded conversation with Rob Adelson, the eldest Adelson son, who testified against his mother, Donna Adelson, at her trial. It primarily tracks the prosecution’s investigation and courtroom evidence, incorporating testimony and recordings presented during the proceedings.

Markel married Wendi Adelson in 2006 after the two met online. The docuseries presents prosecutors’ theory that Wendi’s mother, Donna, was a controlling and forceful presence who held strong views about her daughter’s decisions.

Wendi later said the marriage deteriorated after the couple had two sons, Benjamin and Lincoln. Their bitter 2013 divorce revolved around where the children would live. Wendi wanted to relocate them to South Florida, closer to her family, while Markel argued they should remain in Tallahassee, where the parents shared custody.

The docuseries says Donna was enraged when the request to move the children was rejected.

Prosecutors said the custody battle ultimately fueled a murder-for-hire plot that took years to unravel. At trial, they argued that Donna helped arrange Markel’s killing because he blocked her daughter and two young grandsons from moving to South Florida.

They also revealed that her son Charlie Adelson arranged for Markel’s killing through his then-girlfriend, Katherine Magbanua, who connected him to Sigfredo Garcia, the father of her children, and Garcia’s friend Luis Rivera.

Prosecutors said Garcia shot Markel while Rivera drove the getaway car. Over the next decade, investigators used cellphone records, surveillance video, financial records and secretly recorded conversations to build the case.

“Investigators suspected members of the family were involved, but weren’t able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt for a really long time,” Fletcher said.

“And I think what really surprised me about the investigation was how incredibly thorough and how many needles in how many haystacks they went through to find the evidence, whether it was tracking silver-colored Priuses across Florida, or going through thousands of phone data to find any links to the family and near the crime scene.”

At trial, prosecutors painted Donna as the calculated matriarch of an affluent South Florida family with the means and motive to orchestrate the killing of the ex-son-in-law she “hated.” Defense attorneys, however, insisted the state didn’t have sufficient evidence to link her to the murder plot.

In 2023, Charlie, a dentist, was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder in his former brother-in-law’s killing. Prosecutors told jurors that Charlie paid to have Markel killed and used Magbanua to hire Garcia. They said Garcia enlisted the help of Rivera, his childhood friend.

Charlie testified that he had nothing to do with the killing and was stunned when Magbanua came to his home and said her friends were the killers. According to reports, he also said he needed to pay more than $300,000 in 48 hours or he would be killed. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Magbanua and Garcia were convicted of first-degree murder, and Rivera was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and cooperating with prosecutors.

In 2025, Donna was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and an additional 30 years for the conspiracy and solicitation convictions.

While Fletcher said the surveillance video is one of the documentary’s most haunting moments, she believes the hundreds of FBI wiretap recordings provide the clearest window into the Adelson family.

“There are hundreds of wiretapped phone calls of the Adelson family,” Fletcher said. “As a team, we listened to all of them. I think just the brazen way with which the family was continuing their lives during the investigation, really believing that they’d got away from it, was very disturbing. They really thought that they were above the law.”

“Fletcher said listening to the wiretaps left her with the impression that some family members believed they would avoid accountability.

“They weren’t used to not getting their way,” Fletcher continued. “And I think that is really alarming to me, that there are people like that who believe that they can operate outside of the constraints of the law.”

Two years after Markel’s murder, Donna and Charlie spent hours discussing Wendi’s boyfriend at the time and whether she should stay in the relationship. Fletcher said the conversations showed her how deeply Donna and Charlie involved themselves in Wendi’s personal life.

“It’s hours and hours of conversations,” Fletcher said. “It’s Donna encouraging Charlie, and Charlie is suggesting to his mother as well that he will go and speak to Wendi. Just the meddling and the way they’re speaking about Wendi and making decisions for her life, I felt that to be obviously really damning for them about their involvement in the case in terms of what the dynamics are like in their family.”

Wendi has repeatedly denied any involvement in her ex-husband’s killing and has not been charged.

“I don’t know why people online have such strong levels of certainty,” Fletcher said. “In listening to the wiretap conversations of Wendi’s mother and brother, and the way they are so accustomed to meddling in her life and deciding what is best for her, I could imagine a scenario in which she wasn’t involved in it at all. I think that the vitriol around Wendi, especially online, is sad in a way. I imagine a scenario in which Wendi’s family did this without her knowledge.”

News Media reached out to Wendi’s attorney for comment.

“This is the story of a breakdown of a marriage, a custody dispute, and problems that escalated and seemed so irreconcilable,” Fletcher said. “But this was an instance where things got so out of hand, and no one comes out with what they want.”