Dan Markel and the stranger in the driveway

The call

Shortly before eleven on the morning of Friday, July 18, 2014, Dan Markel pulled into the garage of his house in Betton Hills, a quiet neighborhood in Tallahassee. He was on the phone. He mentioned that there was a man he did not recognize standing in his driveway.

The person on the other end heard a muffled sound, and then nothing.

A neighbor heard the shots and looked out in time to see a car reverse out of the driveway and accelerate away. He found Markel still behind the wheel of his own car, the engine running, his glasses and phone on the ground beside it. Markel had been shot twice in the head. He lived through the night and died the next morning. He was 41, a professor at Florida State University’s law school who wrote about punishment and sentencing, and the father of two young boys.

Police said almost immediately that he had been the intended victim. What they could not say, for two years, was who had wanted him dead.

The only war he knew he was in

Markel’s marriage to Wendi Adelson had ended in 2013 after a divorce that turned on where their sons would live. Her family was in South Florida; she wanted to move the boys there. A judge said no, and the ruling held: the children stayed in Tallahassee.

In 2014 Markel was back in court again, this time seeking to limit his former mother-in-law’s unsupervised time with the children. The hearing on that motion was postponed in May. It was never rescheduled.

The chain

The two men who drove up from South Florida were Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera. They had made the trip once before, in June, and gone home without finding Markel alone. On the second attempt they followed him through his whole morning: the daycare drop-off, more than an hour parked outside his gym, then the drive back to his street.

Detectives spent two years assembling the route from cell records, rental and toll paperwork, and footage from city buses, intersections and nearby buildings. In May 2016, Garcia was arrested. The affidavit that followed described a chain: Charlie Adelson, Wendi’s brother, to Katherine Magbanua, who had dated Charlie and had children with Garcia, to Garcia and Rivera.

Rivera pleaded guilty that October and agreed to testify. Prosecutors put the price at $100,000, paid in hundred-dollar bills stapled into thousand-dollar bundles, and told juries that Charlie Adelson habitually stapled his cash exactly that way. After the murder, Magbanua began receiving paychecks from the Adelson family’s dental practice, signed by Charlie’s mother, Donna.

The bump

By 2016 investigators believed they understood the structure but could not prove it. So they frightened it. An undercover FBI agent approached Donna Adelson near her home, referred to Markel’s murder and asked for $5,000, as though he were a blackmailer connected to the men who had done the job.

The money was never the point. Within hours Donna had called Charlie, Charlie had reached Magbanua, and Magbanua had reached Garcia, with investigators listening on wiretaps. Recordings from that period became central evidence at Magbanua’s retrial and at Charlie Adelson’s trial.

Five convictions, and what is still open

Garcia was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to life. Magbanua’s first jury hung; her retrial in May 2022 convicted her on all counts. Charlie Adelson was convicted in November 2023. Days later Donna Adelson was arrested at Miami International Airport, at the gate for a one-way flight to Vietnam. She was convicted in September 2025 and sentenced to life that October. She maintains her innocence, and her appeal is pending. Charlie Adelson’s convictions were affirmed on appeal in July 2026.

Prosecutors named Wendi Adelson and her father, Harvey Adelson, as unindicted co-conspirators. Neither has been charged, and Wendi Adelson has consistently denied knowing about the plot.

After the arrests, Markel’s parents spent years in court simply for the right to see their grandsons, whose surname had been changed from Markel to Adelson. Florida later amended its grandparent-visitation statute. The amendment is known as the Markel Act.