Original subtitles

[lens whirring]

[beeping]

[tense music]

♪ ♪

AUTOMATED VOICE: You have one unheard message.

[siren wailing]

First unheard message.

CRAIG: What'd you hear?

- Um...

CRAIG: Yeah, there was a shooting at your home,

or your ex-husband's home.

Your ex-husband, he's not going to survive.

- [sobs]

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

REPORTER: The death of a Florida State University

law professor--

REPORTER: Mystifying murder--

REPORTER: Daniel Markel was found--

REPORTER: A mystery that has baffled police--

REPORTER: - shot in the head.

MYA: They just seemed like the perfect couple.

But appearances are not what they always seem.

PAT: It was a bitter divorce.

And her family were very well-to-do,

wealthy people out of South Florida.

MYA: They hated Danny.

They hated him.

REPORTER: Shot the father of two trapped in his car,

bleeding.

REPORTER: Who would do this?

PAT: There were so many players in this investigation.

CRAIG: Wendi had a current love interest.

MICHAEL: Charlie was cocky and braggadocious.

He was always protective of Wendi.

REPORTER: Were you involved in a plot

to kill your brother-in-law, Dan Markel?

TARA: What Katie wanted

was to provide a good life for her kids.

PROSECUTOR: Did you have anything to do

with the murder of Dan Markel?

- No, ma'am.

PAT: I worked this case,

you know, close to half my career.

And when you hear the story, people would say,

ah, you're crazy, that's not real.

CAROLYN: Well, there's nothing normal about

any of the relationships in this family.

ROB: She called me and said,

I just want to let you know, if the police come around,

don't talk to them.

- I know I'm late, but I'm obsessed.

- This entire thing is a disaster.

- Lock the whole family up!

♪ ♪

MYA: People ask us all the time,

was Wendi involved?

♪ ♪

STEWART: My name is Stewart Schlazer.

My job is a music teacher at a high school.

I teach band and marching band and jazz band.

And in 2014, I was working at

the School of Arts and Sciences in Tallahassee

when this incident happened.

[light music]

Tallahassee is kind of a self-contained city.

It's the capital of Florida.

It's in the Bible Belt, we call it,

but it also has a lot of diversity,

a lot of variety of people.

There's three universities there.

They have a huge football program.

But also it's a good family city.

REPORTER: Saturday over at Child,

as the annual father-son baseball camp--

STEWART: And so the events the morning of July 18th

didn't seem like the Tallahassee that I knew.

A friend of mine asked me if I could talk to his friend,

Dan Markel, about the school that I was teaching at,

and if it would be a good fit for him

and his kids and his family.

And I said, sure, of course.

So I texted him.

♪ ♪

At 10:36, I received a message

saying he would reach out soon.

And at 10:48, Dan called me.

It sounded like he was driving in his car.

We started having our conversation about his family

and what was going on in his life.

It sounded like he needed to share this information,

maybe for him more than for me.

And then I realized he must have stopped at his house.

And, um, he said...

Can you hold on a second?

There's an unfamiliar person in my driveway.

[suspenseful music]

And then I heard a really loud sound, like a loud boom.

[boom]

[line ringing]

STEWART: The operator said an ambulance is on the way,

and I said great.

And then I went about my day.

And that was my interaction with Dan Markel.

REPORTER: Police respond to the sound of gunfire

in a quiet Tallahassee neighborhood.

REPORTER: Markel had a gunshot wound to the head.

REPORTER: Unable to talk as his neighbor dialed 911.

- Outside of the home that police had taped off

early this morning.

MAN: There was an ambulance at the residence,

and did see someone being brought out.

♪ ♪

CRAIG: I was eating lunch with my wife

when I got the call that there had been a shooting.

When I got to the scene, I realized that

everything about this was just totally out of the norm.

It's 11:00 a.m. on a Friday in a good neighborhood.

The victim was Daniel Markel,

an FSU professor in his early 40s.

He was divorced with two young boys.

We checked the house, but there was no indications of a robbery

and his wallet was still present.

♪ ♪

SHERRIE: This wasn't like every other murder.

This was a prominent law professor.

So everyone from all divisions of criminal investigations

was out canvassing,

knocking on neighbors' doors, trying to get witnesses.

We had witnesses that called in,

heard the shooting, what they saw, call it.

But the only lead we got came from one of his neighbors.

He called because he heard the gunshots.

CRAIG: So we had a witness,

but we didn't really have a good starting point

as far as motive.

Nothing.

Professor Markel is from Canada.

There was no close next of kin in town.

- When conducting homicide investigations,

the first person you go to is the spouse or the person

most directly connected to that person.

CRAIG: And that was his ex-wife, Wendi Adelson.

♪ ♪

SHERRIE: Wendi was at lunch with some friends,

and she was brought into the police department

for an interview.

WENDI: [sobbing] Oh, God.

[sniffling]

SHERRIE: During that initial investigation,

you don't know what happened.

You don't know where this is going to lead.

CRAIG: We're going to help you with that.

SHERRIE: But usually, the spouse has either

got some leads or they were involved.

[distant sirens chirp]

CRAIG: Daniel's been shot, okay?

And we have to find out why and who did this.

Can you help with that?

CRAIG: Okay.

CRAIG: Well, before we get into everything,

I have to establish where you were

and who you were with, and so forth.

CRAIG: Okay?

And then once we've established all that,

I can give you more details.

CRAIG: Who was at your house this morning?

Yeah, I figured-- [sniffling]

CRAIG: A guy from Best Buy was at your house

to work on your TV?

CRAIG: Can you tell me what time

you left your house this morning?

CRAIG: Okay.

CRAIG: I'm a little confused what's your purpose

of driving down Trescott.

CRAIG: And you just drive by your old house?

[applause]

MAN: Our second speaker is Dan Markel.

ORLY: The tragic irony is that before he was shot,

Dan was becoming one of the most prominent

criminal legal scholars in the country

and, I would say, around the world.

- Uh, greetings, everybody.

Uh, it's an honor to be here and share some thoughts--

ORLY: He was a very bright thinker,

a very strong, powerful public speaker

with a lot of ambition.

And then he becomes the subject of a heinous crime.

I didn't quite believe it

because it sounds so improbable.

Like, why would a law professor,

a beloved teacher be shot in his head?

[somber music]

PHIL: Danny was a very, very determined individual.

His goal was to go to Harvard.

He worked hard to get what he wanted,

so he made it into Harvard and he graduated.

RUTH: And that was a turning point for him.

Then he became interested in justice, retribution,

and punishment, and so forth.

ORLY: We met at Harvard.

Dan cared so much about being a great teacher and a mentor.

And quite naturally, he wanted to become a law professor.

But also, Dan was a risk taker.

When he founded PrawfsBlawg,

it wasn't at a time where everybody was blogging

and everybody had social media presence.

He could rub people the wrong way, but at the same time,

he had a very playful, fun side.

He knew everybody, and everybody knew him.

And I still remember when Dan

called me to tell me that he met somebody.

[light music]

MICHAEL: I've known the Adelson family since

I was about five and a half, six years old.

I grew up on the same street

as Robert, Charlie, and Wendi Adelson.

Wendi was wonderful. She was smiling and happy.

And I would hear stories from my mom

and from other neighborhood kids in how she was excelling

and how talented and smart she was,

and always the apple of her parents' eye.

♪ ♪

For us, growing up in the city of Coral Springs,

we were all extraordinarily fortunate.

Wendi was a typical young Jewish princess.

She was adored by her parents, by her family and her friends.

And when I was introduced to Dan

and saw the two of them together,

they seemed to truly be in love

and enjoy each other's company.

- Dan met Wendi on Jdate, a dating platform

mainly for people in the Jewish faith.

She had been valedictorian

and she was becoming an attorney.

- They were very happy times.

He was a prize.

He really was a prize.

ORLY: He was just really giddy and proud of meeting

his future life partner, so he announced it on PrawfsBlawg.

They had an announcement in The New York Times about it.

LINDA: Gene and I were at the wedding.

Seemed to be a very happy time for everybody.

They were in love.

You know, that's what weddings are about.

ORLY: When Dan got the position at Florida State

in Tallahassee, he felt a little alone

because he was Canadian.

He wasn't from Florida.

His family was far away in Canada.

But Dan and Wendi talked about how this was

a really lovely town that was safe,

somewhere they could know their neighbors

and have good schools for their kids.

RUTH: As proud as I am of his academic achievements,

his world achievements,

I was the proudest of him as a father.

PHIL: He was exceptional.

He'd be on the floor playing with them.

He'd be swimming with them.

He was always very, very interactive with the kids

in everything that they did.

- They coined their family the Bears.

And so Wendi was Mama Bear, he was Daddy Bear,

and then the cubs were their two kids.

I remember when they invited us to dinner.

ALEX: We were going probably through what most marriages do

with young kids, and you're working through

all these little things and frustrations.

And we get there, and they're, like, on top of the world.

- We left very insecure.

Literally, we got in the car and looked at each other

and was like, what is wrong with us?

But appearances are not what they always seem.

ORLY: I think there may have been

a sense that there was something of a gap

in their academic path.

Wendi had been a law student at University of Miami.

There was a perception that Wendi was the trailing spouse,

that she had received her clinical position

thanks to the recruitment of Dan.

♪ ♪

MYA: They had their kids very close together.

I mean, less than a year and a half apart.

And I think Wendi struggled after that,

with two small children at home.

ORLY: There was maybe some bickering

about Dan traveling too much to New York,

uh, because he had taken a gig to do some teaching there.

MYA: She did want to move to Miami

to be closer with her parents.

He was happy.

He loved Wendi.

He loved the boys.

But I don't think he knew how unhappy she really was.

♪ ♪

ALEX: I was at synagogue one Saturday,

talking with Danny after services,

and he told me what had happened.

What did he call it, his Pearl Harbor?

Yeah.

He was out of town at a conference,

and she called him and said,

I don't want to be married anymore.

He immediately got on a plane and came back home,

and Wendi had left.

- Wendi had taken his kids,

herself, most of the things,

and he did not know where they were.

MYA: They had bought a dining room table and chairs,

and she took half the chairs.

But also, she left the divorce papers on the bed.

♪ ♪

I think he was just very hurt.

ALEX: I don't think he was prepared for that.

- He said to me that he was in a state of shock

and also in a state of a lot of fear because

he did not know where his kids were.

♪ ♪

And then Dan learned that it was really her family

that were helping her disappear.

And so I think that was the moment that he understood

that it's, like,

her and her family in the battle against him,

and that it's not going to be a fair game.

- I think that was when he realized

it was time for him to get a lawyer.

Wendi applied for a relocation order

to move the boys to South Florida

to be closer with her parents,

and Danny blocked it.

So basically, that made Wendi stuck in Tallahassee.

- And her family didn't like him for--for that reason,

but I think he was fine with that.

♪ ♪

MYA: When we heard Danny had been shot,

I thought somehow that Wendi's family

had to be involved with this.

I--I just could not wrap my brain around

anybody else that would want to kill Danny.

[tense music]

REPORTER: Friends and family gathered

at Congregation Shomrei Torah today

to remember FSU law professor Dan Markel.

Many that knew Markel say he will live on through

the people and community members that he's touched.

CRAIG: Dan Markel passed away early Saturday morning

from his traumatic head injuries from the shooting.

And conforming with the Jewish religion,

his memorial service was the next day.

I attended somewhat for protection,

in case there was a threat to Wendi or the children,

But also to observe other members of the family,

hers and Dan's.

MYA: There was a lot of people there.

There was also television crews present.

So when Wendi walked in with her parents,

I was shocked that they came, to be honest.

They lived in South Florida, and they hated Danny.

Not just dislike, but they hated him

because of how contentious their divorce was.

ALEX: At the memorial, though,

that's when I had that kind of thought that,

wow, maybe, you know?

- Like, someone connected to Wendi.

- But then you go, surely not. That's insane.

CRAIG: At the end of the service,

Wendi's mother, Donna Adelson, introduced herself.

She wanted to talk about any developments in the case.

She tried to get her husband to come over, Harvey.

It appeared like he was not real anxious to come meet me.

And I said, well, I'd like to go ahead

and interview you all.

And she goes, okay, I got your card.

I'll let you know.

But I didn't hear from them at all.

♪ ♪

[line ringing]

The next day, I called Wendi's phone.

It sounded like she was driving.

I asked her something, and she goes, you're breaking up.

I can't--I can't--I can't understand what you're saying.

I felt like it was a ruse

because I could hear her just fine.

I said, Ms. Adelson, can you hear me okay?

And she goes, no, and she hung up.

[line clicks and beeps]

Within just a couple minutes,

I get a phone call from her attorney.

And he goes, well, if you want to try to contact Wendi,

you need to go through me.

They're on the way to South Florida

with her parents right now.

And I thought to myself, well, she didn't waste any time.

This was a victim that was well-respected.

He was known nationally.

And his ex-wife and the children were gone.

So that's when we got the FBI involved.

[dramatic music]

PAT: I was in the FBI for almost 27 years.

And during my career,

I've worked a wide variety of cases,

everything from gangs to drug smuggling,

cyber criminals to human trafficking.

But this case presented a bigger challenge.

I worked this case, you know, close to half of my career.

This is the first time I've talked about it.

When I first got involved,

we had to fan out and cover a lot of ground.

INTERVIEWER: I'm Investigator Cherry.

Thanks for being here. - Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: This is Investigator Isom.

He's the lead investigator. - Hi.

- Alex Greenberg. INTERVIEWER: Alex.

CRAIG: The interviews provided

a lot of background information,

and it became very apparent that there was a lot

of different possibilities for motive.

- I have heard from other people that

he is kind of a hard-ass professor.

- He was kind of one of the pioneers on social media,

and was kind of out there blogging.

- That case that he had going on in New York,

he was excited about working on that.

REPORTER: This was someone who was specifically targeted.

And that's a really important clue.

REPORTER: And that's why they start to focus on

everyone who might have known the professor.

ORLY: There were a lot of rumors floating around

that were each scary in its own way.

STEWART: The internet has all these theories.

I think people like a puzzle. People want answers.

REPORTER: Could it have been someone associated with

or commenting on his blog?

- On this blog, we found some threats

made to Professor Markel.

ORLY: I remember being quite worried that maybe

somebody is just targeting law professors on the blog.

Maybe this is a disgruntled

former student who got a bad grade.

JENNIFER: There could be other people who had

an ax to grind with him.

He did some work for some Jewish rabbis in New York.

REPORTER: Three local rabbis accused of plotting to kidnap

and torture a man because

he wouldn't allow his wife to get a divorce.

PAT: The rabbi case, they called it the Prod Father,

because I guess he used a cattle prod

to coerce his subjects

to get them to give the divorce, basically.

Dan Markel apparently represented

one of the individuals in this case,

and maybe those people didn't want

Professor Markel to be involved.

CRAIG: You've got to chase everything down.

And you work just as hard

whether you're going to eliminate someone

or find probable cause to get them arrested.

♪ ♪

During the interview with Wendi,

another name that came up was Jeff Lacasse,

Wendi's current love interest.

It had gotten pretty serious, but she had asked for time off

from the relationship recently.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, it's on the record.

INTERVIEWER: No, it's possible.

INTERVIEWER: Sure.

INTERVIEWER: Wait, what was that?

[ominous music]

CREW: Carolyn interview, take 1 common marker.

- Welcome back to Moms for Justice.

I am Carolyn, and thank you for joining me today.

This case fascinated the whole world.

It really has. It's captivated people.

- This case is one of the craziest cases

I think we've ever covered.

- My head is spinning around.

- I hope you're paying attention

to this scintillating case.

- My obsession with this case began

when I heard Wendi Adelson's interview with the police.

CRAIG: Right.

CAROLYN: There's been a lot of theories.

My viewers on my podcast, we've got tons of theories.

INTERVIEWER: All right, Mr. Lacasse,

I appreciate you coming in and talking with me here.

We're still in the preliminary stages of this investigation.

- Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Your name did come up--

- Of course.

INTERVIEWER:--because you were associated

at some point with Wendi-- - Of course.

INTERVIEWER: - which is his ex-wife.

CAROLYN: Oh, gosh, I could go on forever about Jeff Lacasse.

Usually, the ex-boyfriend is the first person

that you look at, so I don't blame them

for maybe being a little suspicious at first.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

CRAIG: It is kind of odd that

he did somewhat remind me of a photograph

that I'd seen of Dan Markel.

INTERVIEWER: You know that her ex-husband has been murdered?

INTERVIEWER: And you've never had

any kind of physical contact with Danny?

INTERVIEWER: Who do you think is involved in this?

You know some of the background, I'm sure, by now.

CRAIG: I think Jeff was very nervous.

He was definitely uneasy the whole time.

So we didn't rule out anybody to begin with.

INTERVIEWER: Here's the thing, Jeff.

I mean, we're outsiders looking in.

- Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: So any kind of insider perspective

that you would have, I--I--I welcome to hear.

- Yeah, um...

PAT: Wendi had already relocated to South Florida

that first week after the homicide,

and she was a person of interest, of course.

I had mixed feelings about her interview.

Some of it she seemed to be somewhat genuine,

and some of it she seemed to be overacting.

CRAIG: I know it's cold in here.

- Okay, I know it's part of it--

SHERRIE: During that interview,

we had what we call a monitor room,

so we were able to kind of sit and watch her reactions

and see kind of what's going on.

CRAIG: No, they haven't been notified yet.

SHERRIE: She appeared very upset,

I think maybe in shock some too.

It felt like it was overdramatic sometimes.

- [sobbing]

CRAIG: To me, Wendi's tears, her expressions,

her demeanor, everything seemed genuine.

CRAIG: Now, just don't jump to conclusions on that.

CAROLYN: I think that she is doing her very best

to put on the grieving ex-wife,

acting as if she is genuinely upset.

- Would you ever ask someone to do something like this?

[dramatic music]

CRAIG: She may have put on an Academy Award performance,

but I didn't consider her a suspect.

She didn't know who.

She didn't know why this incident happened.

But she did make comments

that obviously have stuck with a lot of people.

[tense music]

PAT: To understand what happened

on that Friday of the shooting,

we knew we had to go back and try to build a timeline

of before and after the homicide had occurred.

CRAIG: We went back through the interviews

to retrace Dan's movements on Friday, the 18th of July.

♪ ♪

CRAIG: We know that he dropped off the children

to the preschool at 8:50.

Then he checked in at the Premier Gym

at 9:13.

Here's Dan pulling into the parking lot.

Then we see him on video inside the gym.

PAT: Right after the shooting, a neighbor of Dan Markel's

described what he believed to be

a green or silver-looking Prius

backing out of the driveway very rapidly.

[ominous music]

CRAIG: Lo and behold,

here's this light green to silver Prius

in the parking lot.

PAT: The vehicle was there in the parking lot

for an hour and a half, and drove around

the parking lot a few different places.

What was really odd was that nobody ever exited the vehicle.

CRAIG: At one point, it almost got backed into

by a car leaving.

And then when Dan leaves in his car,

the Prius follows.

PAT: To then think about

these were his last moments that morning.

He had no idea what was coming.

Tracking down that vehicle, in my mind,

is going to lead us to the killer.

♪ ♪

But the surveillance video at the gym was so distorted,

there's no way possible to pull out the tag.

- That's when a brilliant investigator

came up with the idea,

check the city bus camera system.

PAT: Everywhere we knew Professor Markel was

and this green Prius was, we pulled out footage

from the buses that were scheduled

to be on those routes at those particular times.

And from the bus video, we can see Mr. Markel

makes it past the interstate,

but the Prius gets stopped at a red light.

And then the bus pulls right up behind it.

And we thought that was going to be it.

- There's the car, the tag.

We got it.

Unfortunately, the camera system that the buses use

does not give good clarity.

PAT: We sent it off, had FBI experts

analyze it, enhance it.

- But everything that was tried, failed.

PAT: The only thing we could really say for sure

is that it appeared to be a Florida tag.

CRAIG: It was very frustrating.

We have all this video and can't do a thing with it.

PAT: But then right after the murder,

the Prius is leaving the crime scene.

It pulls up next to a city bus.

And we could see these two people in the vehicle.

And then on the front windshield,

there was a white square at the top.

It appeared to be a Florida SunPass.

- A device that allows you to go through toll stations.

They're very common in South Florida,

very rare in North Florida.

So the first question in my mind is,

why would these two drive 500 miles up here

from South Florida to execute a law professor?

PAT: It was obvious to us that

this wasn't just a crime of passion.

This was something that was planned.

The weapon used in this crime was a revolver,

which is pretty smart because they're not leaving behind

a shell casing.

And the fact that it happened in his driveway,

where they didn't even have to go inside the house

and leave DNA evidence or leave fingerprints,

showed that they had thought this through

and planned it out.

CRAIG: They didn't see Dan turn

to get into his neighborhood

because they got caught at the light.

So they knew where they were going

because they knew where he lived.

♪ ♪

PAT: In the neighborhood that Mr. Markel lived in,

most people wouldn't think twice about a Prius.

I thought it was pretty brilliant, actually.

It blended in the neighborhood too well.

So putting the evidence together,

it appears to us that this could

be a potential professional hit,

professional assassination.

And if this was a hit, we need to find out

who was on the other side of things.

Who ordered a hit on Professor Markel?

♪ ♪

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- You know, shortly after the murder--

I don't remember exactly how much time--

the Adelsons sold their house and left the neighborhood

without mentioning it to anybody.

- We never even saw a moving truck.

[chuckles] They were just gone.

♪ ♪

I think that Harvey and Donna did that

because they just didn't want to talk about what happened.

Having to relive that over and over again,

it's just too hard for them.

GENE: They sold their house at least

25%, 30% below market value in a hurry.

I suppose I thought that perhaps

there was something else going on that nobody knew about.

♪ ♪

PAT: When you're dealing with a murder for hire,

one way to prove the case is to follow the money.

Find out who had the financial means

to do something like this, to pay somebody

to come do something like this.

So we looked initially at the Adelson family pretty hard.

They have a lot of accounts. They have a lot of properties.

They have a lot of money flow.

And they had a lot of issues with Dan Markel.

CAROLYN: This looks like the American dream.

Smiling, all happy.

They look like they all get along

and they're just a great family.

That's what-- it just looks picture perfect.

This is what success looks like.

But something's not right there.

[dramatic music]

- Wendi's parents are Harvey and Donna Adelson.

MICHAEL: Harvey was the patriarch of the family.

He was very successful. He was a dentist locally.

And he owned the dental practice

that Donna and Charlie worked for.

CAROLYN: So this is Donna Adelson

when she was working at the Adelson Institute.

At the time, she was acting as a manager in the office

and pretty much knew all the employees

and everybody who came and went, the patients.

- The middle son, Charlie, was a traveling periodontist

and was associated with his dad's dental practice

in South Florida.

MICHAEL: Wendi and Charlie were always very close.

They went to middle school and high school together,

and Charlie was always protective of Wendi.

It's very obvious who the favorite kids

in the Adelson household were.

It was always Charlie or Wendi.

Robert, despite being the eldest,

was never the favorite child in that house.

And it was evident to anybody who came into the house.

PAT: What we'd heard was Rob Adelson,

the third sibling out of the family,

was somewhat estranged from the family.

He had his own personal issues with his mom

that had gone through things, and they were not close.

I sent agents in Albany, New York,

to go and interview him and find out his background,

find out where he had been all around the time of the murders.

He was very cooperative and told the agents what he knew.

He didn't have that close of a relationship

with the family at the time, but he didn't think

there was any way that they would have

done something like this.

A couple weeks later, he told us he had spoke to his mom.

His mom had basically told him, hey,

if the police come and talk to you, don't talk to them.

He's like, I already talked to the FBI.

They already came out here and talked.

And she said, well, don't worry about it,

you don't know anything anyway.

And he thought that was really kind of strange.

PAT: You know, I told you back then,

I was like, I hope you can help me

prove that they didn't do it, that somebody else did this.

That would be great, if, you know,

I was able to, you know, take that off of your plate.

♪ ♪

PAT: Rob provided us with valuable information

about his family, a lot of inside information

on how the family operated

and updates on what family members were doing.

So right after the murder,

Donna and Harvey moved to South Beach in Miami.

We knew they lived in this high-rise,

multi-million-dollar condominium

right on the water.

A lot of people with money live in this condominium,

so it's got high security on it.

They definitely had the means to pay for a hit,

and they definitely had the motive.

Wendi was trying to move to South Florida

at the time of the divorce.

And that's exactly what happened after the murder.

Wendi was living in the same condominium complex

as her parents.

So we ended up getting some financial records to find out,

hey, was there any large sums of money

that were taken out to pay for a hit.

But there was nothing that stood out.

There's nothing that we could latch on to

to show they were involved in this

up until the point we started really heavily

looking at cell phones that were in the area

of Professor Markel the same day of the homicide.

There was one phone in particular that had popped up.

It was a burner phone, but it had a South Florida number.

It was the same place where the Prius is from.

And there was one short, short phone call

to the Adelsons.

[dramatic music]

That was the big break in the case that we were looking for.

But I had no idea that it would take 11 years

just to get to the people who caused this.

- If you told me this story, I would not believe it.

CALLER: She's wearing a red top, blond hair.

- I thought, this can't be right.

MICHAEL: How could you get to this point?

It just doesn't make any sense.

CAROLYN: You don't even see this stuff in movies.

♪ ♪

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