Original subtitles

[soft dramatic music]

[boat horn blares]

[sirens wailing]

CREW: June interview, take one, six, mark.

JUNE: Say I want to put lip gloss on?

PRODUCER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Then that's fine?

PRODUCER: Yeah, yeah. - Do I need--

- [laughing] Sorry. OK, I know.

I'm addicted to lip gloss.

All right, sorry, let's go.

My name's June and I was born in Miami,

lived in Fort Lauderdale.

And in October 2015,

that's when I first started dating Charlie Adelson.

♪ ♪

Charlie and I just connected, like, right away.

He was the Prince Charming coming to get me,

and I was the princess.

It just kind of felt like-- like a fairy tale,

I guess, with him.

Like, not real.

♪ ♪

The other day, I was at the mall.

Someone stopped me, and she's like, are you June?

And I was like, yes.

And she tells me, wow, like, I'm so obsessed with this case.

How are you doing?

It was the first time someone, like,

not on the internet or not a true crime fanatic

just, like, randomly stopped me.

It kind of took me by surprise.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

REPORTER: Death of a Florida State University

law professor. REPORTER: A mystifying murder.

REPORTER: Daniel Markel was found shot in the head.

♪ ♪

MYA: They just seemed like the perfect couple.

PAT: It was a bitter divorce,

and her family were very well-to-do,

wealthy people out of South Florida.

MYA: They hated Danny.

♪ ♪

REPORTER: Who would do this?

PAT: There were so many players in this investigation.

CRAIG: Wendi had a current love interest.

PAT: Charlie lived a bachelor lifestyle.

He had a lot of different girlfriends.

REPORTER: Were you involved in a plot

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

PROSECUTOR: Katie, did you have anything to do

with the murder of Dan Markel?

- No, ma'am.

ROB: She called me and said, you know,

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

don't talk to 'em.

- This entire thing is a disaster.

- Lock the whole family up!

♪ ♪

REPORTER: And a popular law professor

murdered in a bizarre mystery.

One year ago, Florida State law professor Dan Markel...

- Shot in the head twice.

REPORTER: Such a puzzling case.

- Something you would expect to see in a dramatic thriller,

or read about in a fictional murder mystery.

REPORTER: This car is really all that they've been able

to put out for information.

Certainly been very vexing to law enforcement.

[dramatic music]

PAT: Around the year anniversary

of Mr. Markel's death,

we'd been tracking down Priuses

almost on a daily basis

and had come up basically empty.

CRAIG: We knew from the bus video

we were looking for two suspects,

a driver in dark clothing and a passenger in white.

But we didn't have anything else

as far as identifying the two possible hitmen.

PAT: Until we started looking at cell phones

that were in the area that morning of the homicide.

Unfortunately, the interstate cuts through Tallahassee.

Thousands of people drive on it every day,

pinging on cell towers.

There's a lot of phone numbers that get captured.

But after going through all that cell phone data,

we had a set of burner phones

that were in the area around Premier Gym

at the same time as both the Prius

and Professor Markel.

CRAIG: And when we looked at the phone records,

we see this phone call that was made

to the Adelsons.

♪ ♪

PAT: That cell phone did not have

any subscriber information belonging to it.

So we ran it through social media,

and it popped up on a Facebook page called Tuto Dade.

It had a front photo of a Hispanic male,

said he lived in Miami, but no other identifying information.

It was a dead end.

So that's when we started looking deeper

into the family business.

♪ ♪

HARVEY: What I enjoy most about our practice

is restoring a person's smile.

MICHAEL: This is the commercial

that was on the Adelson website

15 years ago.

To me, it looks like they just had

a guy with a camcorder putting stuff together.

It wasn't, like, a professionally-done

type of video.

- I never knew that Harvey was into that stuff.

- I think it was more Charlie than anything else.

- Charlie. It was Charlie.

CHARLIE: My name is Dr. Charlie Adelson,

and I am a periodontist, owner, and co-partner

with my father, Dr. Harvey Adelson,

who is a cosmetic dentist.

MICHAEL: Watching Charlie in this commercial,

he looks very stiff, very uncomfortable.

It's not the Charlie that I knew

or ever experienced as kids growing up in the neighborhood.

He was always loud.

He was always boisterous, very excited.

But money was extremely important to Charlie.

It's the reason he chose the career path he did.

It's the reason he had the cars he had,

the property he had, and the way he lived his life.

CHARLIE: Be able to restore people's smiles

and change the way they chew, change the way they live.

GENE: What Charlie says is true.

This is what you want for your patients.

You want to help them.

You want to make them smile better, eat better, et cetera.

But I don't believe that that was in Charlie's heart.

He was just interested in how much cash

he could put into his pocket.

[ominous music]

MICHAEL: We were all extraordinarily fortunate

in the neighborhood that we grew up.

Me and the Adelson kids, we played outside,

you know, afternoon, all day,

until it was time to come home.

Wendi and Charlie were a little bit younger.

But Robert, the eldest, was the same age as me,

and we had similar interests, so it was natural

that we became friends.

♪ ♪

He was easily one of the most intelligent kids

I have ever been around,

but he was never appreciated for his talents.

It was always what Charlie did or always what Wendi did.

Rob and Charlie were very, very different.

Charlie always wanted to be the spotlight of attention

while Rob was never looking for that sort of stuff.

[tense music]

PAT: At this point during the investigation,

it was pretty clear to me that Rob

was not close with his family.

He was definitely not close to Charlie.

He did not get along with his brother at all.

♪ ♪

PAT: I began talking to Rob quite frequently

and discussing what he questioned about his family,

as time went on.

Especially Charlie and what kind of person he was.

♪ ♪

JUNE: When I met Charlie in 2015,

he didn't seem like he was a dentist.

He gave off, like, a goofy vibe.

He's very silly.

He would tell me, like, what we're doing,

and, you know, I'd have to dress up.

It would be a big event or a dinner or something fun.

♪ ♪

- Charlie loved the prestige of being a periodontist.

He loved to drive around in a Ferrari.

He loved to go out at night and meet women.

- Charlie would take me out, just him and I,

in the limo to Miami for dinner.

PAT: We'd find out that he would go to a restaurant

driving his Ferrari, and instead of tipping

the valet guy, he'd tip him with the promise

of lobster or something.

You know, it would be really extravagant.

JUNE: I was working paycheck to paycheck,

so Charlie was kind of an escape for me from reality.

It was, like, just his world.

I first found out about this whole case

when I asked about his family.

When his sister came up and her life and her husband,

he just said, no, she doesn't have one

because he was murdered.

I was shocked.

And I was like, I'm really sorry.

That sounds awful. Like, why and who?

But he was just very blunt.

He said, they don't know who did it.

So I kind of dropped it because it seemed like

he didn't want to talk about it.

And then one day, I was approached

outside of Charlie's house by the Daily Mail.

[camera shutter clicking]

I was like, who are you guys?

What are you doing here?

You know, what is going on?

He told me that Charlie might have been involved in this,

and that's how I found out, not through Charlie.

I was blindsided, basically.

[phone ringing]

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

CRAIG: The following year, after the homicide,

Wendi's ex-boyfriend, Jeff Lacasse,

requested to come back for a follow-up.

I was surprised.

Yeah, you start at the very beginning,

however you want to do it.

CRAIG: No, absolutely not.

- We found out he'd been doing some hard thinking

about what had happened

during his relationship with Wendi Adelson.

CRAIG: You know, my first impression is,

he's a successful social work professor,

so I didn't see a whole lot of motivation on his part

to be somehow involved.

And he provided a solid alibi as to his whereabouts.

I think Jeff was smitten.

This is a very attractive woman,

and she wants to spend time with him.

PAT: During Wendi's interview, she was fully cooperative.

She agreed to let them copy her phone, her computers.

CRAIG: What I want to do right now,

but I need your permission, is, I want to take your cell phone

and download all the information out of it.

Do you have a problem with that?

CRAIG: OK.

PAT: Once we found out the details of the divorce

and the child custody situation,

we realized there was some motive for the family.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- Dan told me that Wendi would backtrack on promises,

like a court order of her allowing him

to Skype with the kids on days that he didn't have them.

Time and again, she would break

whatever they agreed upon

in a way that he felt was not just

disrespectful and hurtful to him,

but really damaging to the kids.

- On the 13th of January in 2013,

Wendi files this petition for relocation.

She wanted to go to Miami because Donna, her mother,

would be there to help with the childcare

while she went to work.

Her friends were there.

Charlie, her brother, was there.

But you can't just take two children away from their dad.

- Dan wanted to be an active participant

in his children's life and wasn't going to let them

grow up without him being involved.

♪ ♪

- When Donna Adelson found out

that the relocation petition was denied,

she lost her mind.

She started emailing all these crazy, ludicrous ideas

for Wendi to find ways to beat Dan.

"You have five weeks before your court date.

"The rest of your life, and consequently Dad's, mine,

"and yes, even Charlie's, will be affected

"by how well you can perform before July 31st.

"You can be a good actress when you want to.

"I've seen you in action.

You need to put on the performance of your life."

- She did not want her grandchildren growing up

in redneck Tallahassee.

CAROLYN: The Adelson family come up with this idea

to offer $1 million to Dan Markel

so he would let her relocate.

Harvey and Donna would pay a third,

Charlie would pay a third, and Wendi would pay a third.

CRAIG: Wendi tells her mom, he's not gonna fall for that.

Dan doesn't care about money that much.

So they were running out of options.

CAROLYN: Donna writes, "Take control from him.

"Get to him psychologically.

He's going to want you to stop this."

MYA: Jewish identity was very important to Danny,

because he wanted his boys to be Jewish.

- Danny had told us that when the boys were

with the in-laws, sometimes they would

put the boys, on purpose, on Skype,

eating shrimp or eating something that was not kosher.

- To upset him even more, she suggested dressing up

the kids in Hitler Youth costumes.

- She was trying to show Dan that he's not in control

of the situation, that he needs to let them

move to South Florida.

Yeah, it was pretty disturbing.

CRAIG: Now, did she actually say that?

[tense music]

CRAIG: Right after the shooting,

Wendi was interviewed.

She was very upset, and she also emphasized

she didn't have anything to do with the murder.

She didn't know anything about it.

Just a few days later, her parents were driving

her and the children to South Florida

to set up their home in Miami.

♪ ♪

WENDI: My children are thriving and happy.

We live with my parents, who are incredibly devoted

to our well-being.

- Wendi did this creative writing class podcast.

It's all over YouTube. You can listen to it.

She wrote a piece about being unhappy in her marriage.

When she's reading from it, she sounds kind of cold

and disconnected from the fact

that her ex-husband was murdered.

WENDI: We married when I was in my mid-20s,

when I thought I could cheat the system

and marry a man I lacked passionate love for

because, hey, didn't that die anyway during marriage?

- And then she makes this really weird comment.

WENDI: In casual conversations,

I don't know whether to call him my ex-late spouse,

or my late ex-spouse, except that late ex-spouse

sounds like latex spouse.

CAROLYN: How could you say something like that?

Your ex-husband is dead.

PAT: We found out that Wendi changed

the kids' names to Adelson from Markel.

Her explanation was to protect the kids

from any harm becoming of them.

We all, as investigators, had mixed emotions about that.

MYA: I could not believe that Wendi changed

the boys' names, that she would take

the Markel name away from them.

I thought that was awful.

CRAIG: The Markels were very upset.

They felt that it was, I'm changing

the children's name to erase any memory

of your son being their father.

PHIL: Family is such an important part of our--

our history and our being, both of us.

We can't talk to them. We can't Skype them.

We send them gifts, we get two-word emails saying,

thank you, they've received the gifts.

We don't know anything.

[somber music]

People are very...

- Jeff suspected that the Adelson family

could have been involved in the murder

because they hated Danny.

CRAIG: He said, if there's one guy you don't want to miss,

it's Charlie Adelson, Wendi's brother.

CRAIG: Jeff Lacasse made statements

that Charlie was not a nice individual

and said a lot of vulgar things.

MICHAEL: I started to hear stories about him.

Once he became accomplished and successful in his career,

he liked to live on Main Street but he was always on Skid Row,

hanging around with, you know, people that were in bad scenes.

JUNE: When I found out Charlie was a ladies' man,

obviously, it's not something I was happy to hear.

He was the closest I've ever come to me

being married to somebody.

He was interested in a lot of women

and was known to kind of date a lot of people.

He loved having options and having fun

and, I guess, not being bored.

So it was hurtful.

♪ ♪

CRAIG: Jeff was very forthcoming.

He was very helpful.

And he relayed to me something very shocking

that Wendi told him about Charlie, Charlie Adelson.

- And what if Charlie--

- Yeah, yeah.

[sirens wailing]

[soft dramatic music]

♪ ♪

SHERRIE: When Dan Markel was murdered,

Wendi was brought in for an interview.

And in the office, we had what we call a monitor room,

so we were able to kind of sit and watch

and see her reactions.

CRAIG: Do you think someone would do this for your benefit

without asking you?

- But then she mentions a "joke."

That's when the monitor room erupted.

CRAIG: Right.

It's OK.

CRAIG: OK.

CRAIG: That's OK.

- [sobs]

CRAIG: Wendi was pretty adamant it was just a joke.

He wouldn't actually do something like that,

but that was a pretty big statement to make.

And when Jeff told me a very similar variation

of what Wendi had said,

I wasn't gonna discount it.

- Both of these interviews kind of matched

some of the evidence that we had here--

it was a professional hit.

[camera shutter clicks]

But we were kind of at a standstill

with the phone call that Tuto Dade made

to the Adelsons.

You know, it was a lead that we had,

but running just background on the name Tuto Dade,

you know, came up with nothing.

Looking at the cell phone records,

we found one other number that Tuto Dade

talked to very frequently.

That same phone number was in Tallahassee

the day of the homicide, and it belonged

to an individual named Luis Rivera.

[camera shutter clicks]

Luis Rivera was in a gang.

He was part of the Latin Kings.

REPORTER: The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office

has been investigating what they describe

as a dangerous operation run by the Latin Kings gang.

And on Tuesday, they announced...

PAT: The Latin Kings is a pretty prolific

organized criminal gang.

[camera shutter clicks]

REPORTER: Dozens of arrests

after more than a decade of investigation.

REPORTER: Huge amounts of heroin, meth, cocaine,

and deadly fentanyl, to the tune

of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

PAT: If you're looking for a candidate to hire a hitman,

these guys definitely fit the bill

for being able to get the job done.

Luis Rivera was currently incarcerated

on some other federal charges, some RICO charges,

from several months after the murder of Dan Markel.

I started pulling financial information,

and when I looked at Luis Rivera's debit card,

it wasn't heavily used.

But one place he did use it at was an ATM withdrawal,

July 18, 2014, the day of the homicide.

[tense music]

So talked to the banks and ended up

finding archived footage from that ATM and saw...

[ominous music]

The green Prius.

That exact moment when I opened that file

was incredible,

to be able to see that green Prius.

And then he pulls up and rolls the window down.

And there he is, clear as a bell, Luis Rivera

sitting behind the driver's seat,

wearing a black shirt.

Next thing you know, you see somebody in the passenger seat

lean forward and look over.

♪ ♪

Could this be Tuto Dade?

It was a pretty incredible moment.

We were ecstatic when we saw this video,

because this was the first video footage

to tie them 100% to that green Prius

that was stalking Mr. Markel.

♪ ♪

These two individuals followed him around

and pulled in that driveway and shot him.

[glass shatters]

♪ ♪

We noticed on their trip to Tallahassee,

they're talking to this 850 number several times,

and it belonged to a local guy named Shoddrick Nobles.

When we tracked him down,

he was actually sleeping in his car.

He looked like he had run across hard times.

We get him out of the car and just talk to him

and tell him he's not in trouble.

We're just trying to get some information.

- Sorry, bro. [coughs]

- And he goes, is this about them two dudes from Miami?

And me and Craig look at each other and we're like--

So when we first came up to you today,

you mentioned them specifically.

You said, them Miami boys.

Why--what did you think about them?

PAT: Bad feeling about them?

- Nobles remembered it like it was yesterday.

The night before the murder, he met them at a motel

and supplied them with cocaine.

PAT: Said, that short dude was scary, man.

He had a gun and stuff.

We're like, really? Tell us more about it.

- You'll be asked to view a series

of photos of individuals.

- We still hadn't told him what the case was about.

Asked him if he could pick 'em out of a photo lineup

and showed him multiple pictures

of different individuals.

CRAIG: That's which guy?

- And he ended up picking both of them out.

He also told us there could be somebody else

who's actually involved in this.

- We just thought to ourselves, who could that be?

[intriguing music]

[phones ringing]

And if you go back to Tuto Dade's phone records,

there was one other number that Tuto Dade

talked to very frequently,

an individual named Katie Magbanua.

She was, at the time, actually working

at the Adelson Institute.

Looking at her background, she had two kids,

and the father of Katie Magbanua's children,

his name was Sigfredo Garcia.

We pulled up a photo and realized,

that's Tuto Dade.

♪ ♪

But the big thing to me was, one of the most

frequently-called numbers from Katherine Magbanua

is Charlie Adelson.

[tense music]

PAT: So at this point during the investigation,

it appears to us that Katie Magbanua

could be a connection

between the two hitmen and the Adelsons.

♪ ♪

So we start looking into her background pretty hard.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- OK, I'm gonna keep my hands still.

Oh, gosh. [laughter]

CREW: A mark.

DRINA: So I'm from Florida and I grew up here.

Katie, or Katherine, Magbanua was my friend,

but we called her Kay.

Kay was very kind and funny.

Everyone kind of liked her.

She was a very sociable person.

Not only just sociable, but also she was beautiful.

I remember my mom, she would always be like,

ooh, who's that pretty girl?

But she--she's beautiful.

I mean, she's very attractive, and yes,

she knew she was attractive.

She was well aware of that.

But Kay, to me, always had on a front,

like she had to look like she was OK.

You know, she never wanted anyone to know

something was wrong with her.

Kay never said there were problems with Sigfredo,

but I felt that there were.

I felt that there was a deeper--

something was going on there, for sure.

TARA: There is a soft side to Sigfredo.

That's the side that Katie fell in love with.

He was like her high school sweetheart.

And, you know, she was with him throughout her 20s,

her young years.

And that's really all she ever knew, was him.

He has a criminal history from when he was a juvenile.

He hung out with the wrong people.

Luis Rivera, he was friends with him for a very long time.

I think his drug usage and alcohol would cause him

not to come home all the time

and caused him not to keep a steady job.

She had so much on her shoulders.

She was working many jobs,

different clubs, different bars.

She was hustling.

I think the life that Katie wanted

was to provide a good life for her kids,

but it is difficult when it's not a stable income

of two parents.

In May of 2013, before the homicide took place,

Katie had been fed up with Sigfredo.

They had broken up.

She was working the front desk in a place called Sofi Dental,

and here comes this guy who is single, no kids,

has his stuff together.

I mean, he's a dentist.

That is how she met Charles Adelson.

I think at that point,

Katie wasn't looking for a relationship.

She was working so hard, focused on the kids.

My understanding is, is he asked her for her number.

She didn't give it to him, but he got her number.

From Charlie's history, he seems to have a type,

and Katie fit that type.

JUNE: The first time I heard the name Katie

was the day that the reporters were

outside of Charlie's house.

[camera shutter clicking]

They asked me if I was Katie.

I had no idea who that was at the time,

so I said, no, who's Katie?

Charlie didn't talk much at all about his relationship

with Katie.

♪ ♪

PAT: We couldn't believe that Charlie had

been dating Katie Magbanua.

- So that's where everything started to come together.

♪ ♪

DRINA: When I knew her, it seemed like

she had a lot of money.

You know, things that most people,

you know, average people couldn't afford.

She never explained where the money came from,

maybe because I didn't ask, or maybe because

she didn't want me to know.

♪ ♪

One day, Kay showed us her boobs.

She got breast implants and she was proud of it.

PAT: We were able to see that Katie had breast enhancement

through some of her revealing photos on her Facebook page,

which would have cost around $6,000 or $7,000.

You know, she's working currently as a receptionist

and raising two kids, paying rent.

Where's she getting this kind of cash from?

[tense music]

We start doing surveillance on Katie,

pulling financial information about her.

Turns out Katie's getting these paychecks

from the Adelsons, to be an employee.

CRAIG: The paychecks were signed by Donna Adelson.

PAT: But we're doing surveillance on Katie,

and not once does she ever go to the Adelson Institute.

CRAIG: In addition to that, we see that

she's making large cash deposits,

usually for $2,000 or $3,000.

PAT: I had some agents do drive-bys of Charlie's house

on Whale Harbor, and we noticed

this black Lexus sitting in Charlie's driveway.

A little over a year later, after the homicide,

lo and behold, Katherine Magbanua has

this car sitting in her driveway.

Holy shit, Charlie gave her a car

as part of the payment

for the assassination of Dan Markel.

That's exactly what we thought.

♪ ♪

[intriguing music]

PAT: We know Luis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia

came up to Tallahassee in the green Prius

and did the hit.

We know Sigfredo Garcia is the father

of Katherine Magbanua's children.

Katherine Magbanua was dating Charlie Adelson

prior to the murder and is now getting paid by Donna Adelson,

Charlie's mother, even though she's not working

for the Adelson Institute.

But we only had enough evidence

to arrest Sigfredo at this point.

We have to get more evidence on the family.

How can we do this?

How?

We need to gather evidence in a covert way.

What if we do a wiretap?

[phone rings]

CRAIG: Obtaining a wiretap is a big deal.

You have to justify why you want it.

You need probable cause, and then some, for a judge

to approve a wiretap, and you're on a time limit

until they're null and void.

- We wanted to do a wiretap on Charlie's phone

and Katie's phone.

At this point, Charlie was not

romantically involved with Katie anymore,

but they sure were buddy-buddy.

[line ringing]

JUNE: When I saw the phone calls between him

and his ex, Katie, I thought it was a bit strange,

because I was dating him at the time.

And I'm thinking, like, you know,

we don't talk that much on the phone.

- I asked him, like, why are you guys talking this much?

We don't talk that much.

- Charlie seemed to be really trying to keep

Katie happy at all costs.

PAT: He was very generous to Katie.

He knew he owed her

and he's trying to keep her quiet.

PAT: There were some revealing things on the wiretap,

but nothing about the actual homicide.

But listening to Charlie's phone,

we can hear him make other calls with the Adelson family.

[line rings]

JUNE: Charlie and his mother were close.

They would speak on the phone daily.

I guess you could say he was a mama's boy, in a way.

[chuckles]

- Charlie spoke to his mom, Donna, often.

He spoke to her multiple times a day throughout the day,

about different things that was going on

within their dental practice

or just drama within the family.

PAT: Wendi doesn't know what's best for her.

Wendi needs to do this. She needs to date this guy.

She needs to stay with this guy.

Donna was very controlling, constantly manipulating Wendi

to do what she thought she needed to do.

And Charlie was the fix-it man.

[dial tone]

[tense music]

PAT: From the conversations that we monitored,

it's pretty revealing to us

that Donna's running things here

and had Charlie doing her bidding.

♪ ♪

We had some revealing information about them,

but I can't arrest people based on police officers' beliefs.

I have to have actual evidence.

- We needed people to start talking

about what had happened,

but we're running out of time.

We didn't want the wiretap to expire.

PAT: So we decided we had to do something.

Let's go ahead and conduct

an undercover operation on Donna,

the matriarch of the family.

OFFICER: Stand by.

- The Adelsons are this close to getting away with it.

We get one shot to do this, or we're done.

CRAIG: This is the day of reckoning.

Your past is catching up to you, Donna.

PAT: I had no idea of the craziness

we were gonna experience.