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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in True crime history and the authors that have written about him Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening.
A devoted father, one of the most accomplished criminal law scholars in the country. Someone wanted him dead, but why. On the morning of July eighteenth, twenty fourteen, forty one year old Florida State law professor Dan Markel dropped his boys off at preschool at the gym and headed home to his quiet tree canopied neighborhood. Within seconds of pulling into his garage, two thirty eight caliber bullets fired from point blank range were lodged in his brain. His brutal
slaying defied explanation. The case went stone cold for nearly two years before dogget pursued by the Tallahassee Police and the FBI resulted in the arrest of two lifelong criminals who had driven ten hours from Miami with one singular purpose to murder the esteem professor were his ex wife, Wendy Adelson and her South Florida family. The masterminds behind
this horrific crime. Extreme Punishment is the riveting story of a divorce between two law professors that spiraled out of control, wealthy in laws, hell bent on revenge, and an unlikely love triangle, and the relentless quest to bring Dan's killers, all of them to justice.
The book that we're.
Featuring this evening is Extreme Punishment, The chillings true story of acclaimed law professor Dan Markel's murder, with my special guest, journalist and author Steven b Epstein. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Steven b Epstein, thanks so much for having me Dan. One slight correction, not a journalist, I'm an attorney. Thank you so much
for that correction. Let's start as you do right in the very beginning, and you take us to July eighteenth, twenty fourteen, and too right next door to two thousand and two one one six Trescott Drive, Benton Hill's a suburb of Tallahassee, and the neighbors Jim and Sharon Geiger what do they see?
In twenty fourteen.
It was actually a little before eleven am. They were sitting in their living room fiddling on an iPad when Jim Geiger, who was a seventy two year old grandfather former school teacher, heard something that sounded like a firecracker go off toward his front yard. He sprang up from the left seat they were sitting on and started looking around trying to figure out what had happened, and eventually cluded on the fact that the noise had come from
Dan Markel's property just next door. So he goes over to the driveway, walks up toward the garage, but he notices that Dan's car is there and it's on, so he figures everything's fine. He goes back home, and he figures Dan's going to leave the driveway and go somewhere,
but that doesn't happen. So he goes back a second time, and when he gets right up beside the car next to the driver's seat, front window is shattered, the driver's side window is shattered, and he's stepping on glass, and he looks inside and Dan Markel is all bloody, slumped over behind the steering wheel of his car.
At the same time, his wife, Wendy is where is she and what is she doing?
By that time, Wendy was his ex wife. They had gotten divorced the prior summer, so they've now been divorced a little bit more than one year. She is living about fifteen minutes away, and she's going through her morning in her home. It's a summer, so neither of them have teaching responsibilities at Florida State Law School where they both taught. And she's going about her day now.
She's doing some errands and she's running around. She goes to a liquor store, and she went to lunch with a couple of friends. At about two point thirty though, she's approached by someone correct tell us about that who approaches her at that time.
The person who approaches her is a police investigator with the Tallahassee Police Department named Craig Isom, and Craig Isom says to the three women, is there a Wendy Agelson here and Wendy She officially says, well, yes, that's me, and he tells her that there's been an incident and he needs her to come downtown to the police station to talk about it.
Now, he wants to speak with her when he gives her the details, and what are those details, what is her reaction?
Well, she understand that she was at the police station from two forty five PM until about seven forty five or even close to eight o'clock PM, So she was there for a very long time, and her reactions ranged the gamut. So she became fairly hysterical upon finding out that Dan had been shot and that he wasn't going to survive, And lots of stuff happened during those five
plus hours. In fact, so much so that two entire chapters chapter two and three of my book are pretty much just that interview of Wendy Adelson at the police station.
Talk about Wendy Adelson in that five hour interview, and Investigator Isom felt that it was quite important to talk to her and talk about the divorce and the divorce proceedings. So, as you say, much of that is spoken about in the book. Tell us what she informs him about the status of their marriage and the reasons for the divorce and the status of the hearing that was upcoming.
Well, she says a lot of things, and again it's quite a broad range, but she said that Dan Markel had been emotionally abusive to her during the marriage, that they had lots of disagreements. They disagreed about Judaism. They were both Jewish, but they disagreed about how Jewish they should be and how Jewish they should raise their two boys. They disagreed about things about the children, and so on
and so on. But one of the things that you pick up on fairly quickly from the interview is that her family members, most significantly her mother Donna, her father Harvey, and her brother Charlie, really don't like Dan Markel, and we're angry with him for the way they perceived he was treating her both during the marriage and especially after they separated, And she brings them up constantly, and at one point even says that as a joke, Charlie had said he had gotten her a large screen TV as
a divorce present because it was cheaper than hiring a hit man. So there's all kinds of stuff that she says that pretty much points the finger at her family members as being mad enough to not necessarily do this, but to do something.
One of the major things that had happened was that she had lost again along with her family, the real location motion to be able to relocate near her family. Can you explain what she how she explained that to im.
I don't remember the specifics of how she explained it to IM because it blurs in my mind with what was actually happening in the relocation battle. And in fact, there is a chapter in the book, chapter ten, entitled Relocation. But the long and short of it is Wendy and Dan wound up in Tallahassee, Florida when Dan got a assistant professor position on the law faculty in two thousand
and five. Wendy was still in law school at the University of Miami at the time, and ironically she was living in Miami, he was living in Washington, d C. They weren't even engaged at that point, and they decide, you know what, if this whole thing between us works out, we'll wind up going wherever I land a teaching job.
They eventually get engaged, and that summer they moved to Tallahassee, Florida to start a life together with Their wedding tended to take place in February of two thousand and six, and so they wind up in this place neither has ever lived. Wendy's family, as you said, is from South Florida. She's seven hours away, and she doesn't really want to be there. Dan didn't really want to be there either.
He wanted to be in a higher profile faculty position on a faculty at He actually had a job interview at Berkeley, and he wanted to be at a place more like that than Florida State. But circumstances being what they were, they wind up in Tallahassee and they have two kids, and the kids are both in preschool, and at the time of the separation, Wendy said, I don't need to stay here anymore. I'm not married to him anymore.
I want to go back home, and she filed emotion in the family court to permit her to relocate to South Florida with the two children, which would require Dan basically to become a long distance dad. And not surprisingly, Dan said, no, I'm not agreeing to that, and he fought very hard to prevent it from happening, and he won. That was in the summer of twenty thirteen, about a year before he was killed.
Now back to Tallahassee investigators, how do they proceed with the limited evidence that they do have, like the eyewitness testimony of the next door neighbors, how do they proceed?
Well, it was interesting because Jim Geiger had seen the car leaving the driveway. I'm sorry I left that part out earlier. I apologize, but when that's why he had a suspicion that something nefarious had gone on. Was not only about the firecracker, but he saw a car at the edge of Dan's driveway that was speeding away, and that's why he initially went over to see if everything was okay and was convinced it was when he saw
Dan's car running. But he described that car to the nine to one to one dispatcher as a light colored Prius and that was the first clue that investigators had as to who might have done this to Dan Markel.
Very quickly, they were able to retrace dan steps from that morning and learn that he had been to his gym, Premier Fitness, and got security camera footage of the parking lot, and lo and behold, they saw Dan's Honda Accord, his black Honed Accord, come into the parking lot about nine to fifteen that more, and right behind it was a light colored prius, and they were actually able to see Dan leave the parking lot after his workout and the
prius was following him. They couldn't get the license plate. The clarity of the video wasn't good enough to get the license plate. But then they got more security camera footage from city buses and they literally watched this prius following Dan almost all the way to his home before the buses lost sight of that car. And then after the murder was committed, another bus had this vehicle, this Prius in its security footage and it showed not only
a driver, but somebody sitting in the passenger seat. The windows were tinted so you couldn't really make anything out as to who these people were. And again they still didn't have a good image where they could make out the drivers the license plate, but they were well on their way, and lo and behold, this vehicle had a SunPass transponder for the tollways down there, and eventually they were able through the sun Pass transponder and DOT records to find the exact vehicle that was pictured in all
of the security camera footage. And the home run for them was when they got information regarding one of the men who had actually rented the car. His name is
Louis Rivera. They got bank records from him that showed he had made a withdrawal of fifty dollars or forty dollars from his bank down in South Florida that same evening after the murder had been committed, and the security camera footage from the ATM gave crystal clear images of both men, who were Leuis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia, in a light colored Toyota Prias, and they had solved it
at that point. Now, everything that I just described took a year and a half basically for investigators to piece together.
Now, what did they do when they have these two people that they believe are the hitmen? What do they do to further expand on their investigation?
They did an undercover sting operation, and so they The theory of Craig Eisen literally from the moment was sitting across from him talking about her divorce and how nasty
it was talked about her parents and her brother. His theory from day one was that that's the motive he wouldn't cooperate in the relocation Dan Markel and lo and behold two days after he's killed, Wendy literally was relocated with her children to South Florida because there was no more Dan Markel, no more divorce court to stand in the way. So that was the theory from day one.
And they didn't know initially what the connection was between these two Hispanic hit men who had long rap sheets and the Adelson's, but they were determined to find out.
One of the ways they started finding out was street telephone records, which established that not only did Sigfredo Garcia father two children with a woman named Katie Magbenowa, that same woman, Katie Macbaniwa, was in a relationship, a romantic relationship with Charlie Adelson, Wendy's brother at the time of the hit on Dan Markel, essentially a love triangle where Katie was in the middle and the go between between Charlie Adelson and the Wilson family and the two men
who put two bullets in Dan Markel's head. So they decided to do this sting operation, and they began it by what's called a bump where an undercover agent literally bumps into Donna Adelson who is at her condo in South Beach and walking across the street to pick up Wendy's children and Dan's children, Ben and Lincoln at their school, and hands her a piece of paper and tells her that my brother, he's incarcerated, and he wasn't taken care of the same way that Tuto, who is sik Credo
Garcia's nickname, and Katie have been taken care of. You need to do the right thing and take care of
my brother. And on that sheet of paper that he handed to Donna Adelson was an article about the one year anniversary of Dan Markel's slang and a figure five thousand dollars and a telephone number, essentially a blackmail demand to pay this guy who's posing as a gangster five thousand dollars or they're going to rat out the Adelson family because essentially what they're saying is we know exactly what happened, and we're going to turn y'all in if
you don't pay us five thousand dollars. And that sets off a series of events and phone calls, many of which were wiretapped, that eventually leads to tons of information about what the Adolson family knew about the hit on Dan Markell and who was involved and so forth.
This bump was meant designed to battle the cages of people involved, and one of those people that they believed Isisen believed was involved heavily was Donna Adelson herself, and.
One of the reasons he believed that goes back to
the divorce. Some of the material that they recovered from Wendy Adelson's computer, which they got in their possession the same day she was interviewed the night of the murder were emails that Donna had written to Wendy both before and after the relocation battle, where she was adamant that they were going to get Wendy and the kids relocated come hell or high water, and told Wendy that she needed to do some pretty horrible things to convince Dan to make the move to let the kids move to
South Florida, the most significant of which were converting the kids to Catholicism. They were Jewish and Dan was very observant in his religion, and that would have killed them if the kids were converted to Catholicism. And that's the type of gamesmanship that Donna Adelson displayed in her emails to Wendy, who, by the way, didn't go along. She didn't convert the kids to Catholicism, or do any of the other things that Donna was urging her to do.
This became Donna Adelson's battle, it was clear from those emails, perhaps even more so than Wendy's battle to get the kids relocated to where the Adelsons lived in South Floria.
To put everything in context too, though Donna hated the family, hated Dan Markel, but in the proceedings with his ex wife Wendy, he had quite the aggressive behavior re litigiously as well.
Can you explain no question about it. Dan was very skilled with the use of language. He was a prolific criminal law and criminal theory scholar. He had written twenty plus Lauriview articles a book, was speaking all over the country, all over the world on on topics regarding punishment and criminal punishment theory. And though he didn't represent himself in the divorce proceedings, he wrote all of the pleadings that were filed in Port and there was a lot of
vitriolic language that he used. And you know, Wendy's parents were paying for her legal bills, and they were reading every word and it was just riling them up. And it was clear from the back and forth, Dan would file something and then the next day Donna would be emailing Wendy about it, and it was riling everybody up. And you know, nobody would have thought at the time that they would get so angry with him they would
put two bullets in his head. But that's exactly what investigators believe happened.
Now with Donna and this bump, and she's approached, and investigators believe that this will rattle her cage. But does it rattle Donna's cage? And but does But how does she react? And who does she speak to?
The very first person she calls is Charlie Adelson, and she uses some cryptic language. But he asked her who does it involve, and she says, under her breath home the two of us. He says who, because he didn't hear her, and she says, the two of us. I think you know what I'm talking about, which is obviously highly incriminating. She doesn't say, I have no idea what this is about, Like why on earth would somebody be talking about this and handing me a thing about Danny's murder?
Should we go to the police? And none of that happened. It was right away. This involves the two of us. I think you know what I'm talking about, and they arrange to get together the next day. In fact, Donna really wanted to talk with him that afternoon, but it wasn'tconvenient, and Wendy was going to come pick up the kids, and then there was Harvey and where was he going to fit in? So they arranged to meet the next day around lunchtime, which they did just outside of the
South Beach condo that Donna lived in. It's actually a picture in the book of the two of them sitting in plotting strategy. And right after that meeting with Donna and Charlie goes to meet with Katie macbanoa. Now I should say that right after he gets off the phone with Donna, Charlie calls Katie mcbanawa and tells her what had happened with the bump and of significance, Katie mcbana, what hasn't been his girlfriend? This is April of twenty sixteen.
This is happening. She hasn't been his girlfriend since the fall of twenty fourteen. And the reason why he says he's calling her is because Donna told him that that the undercover agent, who she at the time thought was a gangster, had mentioned one of Charlie's ex girlfriends, and that's the pretense under which Charlie says he's calling her, and they say. She says to him, well, you have like a thousand ex girlfriends, Why are you calling me? He says, yeah, that's right, I do. Maybe it's one
of the other ones. But he never calls anybody else because he knows this is about this bump, is about what happened to Dan Markel, and this bump therefore had to do with who was involved in the plot. And the first person he calls after Donna tells him about the bump is Katie mcbana. Why her, well, because she was the middle person between the Atolsins and the hitman.
Now investigators believe that they may be able to pressure her into giving up this entire scheme and who were involved.
How does it work though, when she's.
Questioned, well, you're talking about Katie mcmanawa, Yes, she isn't questioned. So they tried to talk to her. They got to the point where they had gotten all the useful information they were going to get out of the undercover operation, which essentially ended when both Charlie and Donna called the undercover agent and professed to knowing nothing. And so they were getting about ready to arrest Sigfredo Garcia. That was going to be the first arrest, and they showed up.
The FBI shows up at his workplace, and at the same time, Craig Isom is banging on the front door to the town home that the two of them are living in. They're back together again. They got back together, you know, less than a year after the murder, and as I said, Charlie Adelson was no longer her boyfriend, and they're living together in this town home. And so now you have Sigfredo Garcia at his workplace having to answer questions from the FBI, and he tries to be
cooperative or says he's trying to be cooperative. At the same time, Craig Isom and another FBI agent are knocking on the front door to their town home and Katie mcbanoh is inside panicking, calling her. She calls Garcia her husband. They were never legally married, but she calls her. She calls him her husband. She's calling him, no answer, and there's no answer because he's now talking with the FBI, and she gets a coworker of his and like, there's
people knocking on my door. I don't know what to do. Are they the cops? Can you help me? And it's very clear she's panicked. The long and short of is she never actually opens that door. They never do question her, and not that day, but a couple of days later they arrest Sigfredo Garcia, and now she's living out, you know, without him. He's on the inside, she's on the outside, and she's trying to live her life. She doesn't get arrested until October first of twenty sixteen.
He got arrested.
I think it was May twenty fifth of two thousand, so there's a four plus month gap, and they don't question her in that time, and she doesn't volunteer to come in and talk to the police. It's kind of a cat and mouse game until she's finally arrested. And that's the point at which they thought she would squeal, because it's either that or spending a bunch of time,
if not the rest of her life in prison. And amazingly enough, from October first, twenty sixteen to this very day, she's never spilled the beans on anybody.
What do police learn from Rivera and where is he?
So Rivera was arrested I want to say, two weeks approximately after Garcia, and it was a lot easier to bring him into custody than it was Garcia because he was already in custody. He was in a federal prison for being involved in gang activity. He was a member and actually a leader of the Latin Kings gang in North Miami and was rounded up as part of a huge Rico case a year before. So he had been in jail and then prison after he was convicted and
senced for quite some time. At the time they arrested him on the charges of murder for the murder of Dan Markel. And he initially when he talked with Isom and the FBI lead agent Pat Sanford, the first time, he tried to play dumb, as if he didn't know who Garcia was, as if he had never been to Tallahassee. They showed him the ATM photograph of him and Garcia in the prius and he said, Okay, maybe we were in Tallahassee, but we were just going to visit Florida State.
And eventually it became clear that he was going to have to talk or he was potentially facing the death penalty, and so his court appointed lawyer worked out a deal with the government where he was going to turn state's evidence and would offer a profit statement and then testify any resulting trials. In exchange for his current sentence, which was twelve and a half years, to be increased only
by six and a half years. He would have a nineteen year sentence on the murder charges he would plead to second degree murder, he'd be sentenced to nineteen years, but those nineteen years would run concurrently with his existing twelve and a half year federal sentence, so basically only an additional six and a half years in prison because he was the first one to get to the government and turn state's evidence, and he did, and.
He had a really good deal, and he also said that he was not the shooter, correct.
Did I don't know how much that had to do with how good a deal he got, because at the end of the day, it didn't really matter that you had two men in that priests that pulled up right behind Dan Markel's vehicle and somebody had to go do the shooting, and they both knew it was going to be done, and Rivera was in the driver's seat bringing Garcia to kill Dan Markel, So the culpability was about equal on both sides, even though Garcia, according to Rivera,
is the one who actually squeezed the trigger.
So you talk about Garcia being arrested and in the ensuing time they do not be able to question meg Bawana mag Banowa.
It's a lot of people say Magnanua. She herself says mag Banawa, her attorneys say mag Banawa. Therefore, I think the correct way of saying it is mag Banawa. But her name's been pronounced a lot of different ways by a lot of different people covering this case.
Catherine meg Banoa plus enough, thank you. So this ensuing gap of time, when they're not they're not able to question her, how do they proceed with Garcia? And what information do they get from him that they won't already have?
Whatsoever?
They get nothing from him? Unlike Rivera's attorney. First of all, he, unlike Rivera, has a privately retained attorney named som Zangana, who has a very interesting backstory that I develop in great detail and book. But Zangana never enters into plean negotiations with the government. There's a pretty good reason why not, and that's because sick Fredo Garcia can Just as much as Katie mcbanowa considered Sigfredo Garcia her husband, Sigfredo Garcia
considered Katie McDonald his wife and squealing. If you look at this the way that the evidence has been developed and the way it's been proven in court, squealing would have involved squealing on her. And remember, initially she wasn't even arrested, so you have this period of four to five months where she's not even arrested, then she is, and that, in my view, is what prevented him from coming forward and making a deal. The way that Rivera made a deal, Rivera was ratting out his best friend
in the world, Sigfredo Garcia, and Sigfredo Garcia's wife. But he knew that it was that or facing the death penalty, and so has between those two, ratting out his best friend since childhood made more sense. Sigfredo Garcia was not going to rat out his wife, and so she wasn't
convicted until May of twenty twenty two. So it wasn't until that point where she was actually convicted of this murder where he finally was freed of the notion you know, if I say something that's going to get her convicted, She's now been convicted. So it's only been a few months where perhaps the calculus is now somewhat different for him about whether he will tell what he knows, But the big difference is he's already been convicted in the sentence to life in prison.
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all these characters involved in Dan Markel's murder. Take us up to that trial and the prosecutor involved, the judge involved, and the defense attorneys that were assigned.
Okay, so there were lots and lots and lots of delays and procedural wrangling. Finally the case gets to trial in September of twenty nineteen, and if you'll remember the players that we've talked about, Sigfredo Garcia was facing the death penalty, his wife, Katie Macbanawa was not facing the death penalty but was facing life in prison. And Louis Rivera had turned state's evidence, so he's already been sentenced to nineteen years in prison. And so at this trial
you have, the lead prosecutor is Georgia Kapelman. She's essentially second in command in the State Attorney's office in Tallahassee. For Sigfredo Garcia, I've already mentioned, his attorney was a gentleman named Sam Zangana who's an attorney, a defense attorney out of Miami. And for Katie Megdanawash, she has two attorneys. Her attorneys are Tara Kawas, who is also an attorney from Miami, and Chris Dukost, who is also an attorney
for Miami. So all of the defense attorneys literally had a schlep seven hours from Miami and live in hotel rooms for essentially a month. And I describe all that in the book. While Georgia Kappelman has a huge home court advantage, literally her home court was that courthouse, and her office was literally steps away in the same building, and she had an army of other prosecutors and paralegals at her Beckham call to assist her, so she had
a very distinct advantage. The judge was James Hankinson, who has tried many high profile cases in Tallahassee criminal history. A very good, very stern judge, a stickler for the rules and a stickler for lawyers being punctual and respectful, although that wasn't true for a lot of the case. The lawyers snapped at each other quite a bit. The
lawyer's backstory is very interesting. Georgia Kapelman grew up in Tallahassee because her father was a football player at Florida State University and played in the NFL and then returned to Tallahassee when he wanted to start a family, and that's where Georgia grew up. Krista Coast grew up in the Boston area and then became a prosecutor in Miami
before he became a defense attorney. Sam Zanganay his family was actually from Iran and he wound up in this country as a youngster because he was born here and had American citizenship. He wound up in Miami as a prosecutor as well, and then became a defense attorney. And who have I missed, I've gotten to Coast, I've gotten Cowas, I've missed Cowas. Tara Kuwas has the most interesting backstory
of all of them. She grew up in Jamaica and only came to the United States when she was eighteen years old to go to college at Florida International University. And she herself had been arrested and thrown in the Broward County jail when she was a freshman in college and it was that experience that led her to wanting to become a defense lawyer. So she was a defense lawyer from the moment she graduated from from law school.
And those are the lawyers. That's the judge who populated the courtroom as this trial gets underway where the government is seeking to have a jury find the defendants sekred of Garcia and Katie mcdonalah guilty of first degree murder.
Now this Terra kuaas you mentioned that she really does believe Katie's story, doesn't she.
Well, I think at the time Katie came to that Christacoast and Tara Kawas came to see her in jail the day that she was arrested. She was arrested and taken to that same Broward County jail that Taro Coas herself had been in when she was a college student. I think Katie was so insistent that she had nothing to do with any of this and knew nothing about it,
that Christoicost and Tara Kawas bought in right away. Obviously they received mountains of evidence from the government, but they had explanations for every piece of evidence that they were able to spin in the opposite direction. And that was what they did throughout the trial. Everything that the government used to try to show that Katie had been involved, they spun it to show No, a guilty person wouldn't deposit tens of thousands of dollars in hush money. No
guilty person would do that. Obviously that money had nothing to do with trying to hush her up, because if it did, she wouldn't have been depositing it. So things like that, that's how Dacost and Coass tried to explain away the most damning and incremitting evidence against Katie. Remember, Katie wasn't at the scene of the crime. There's no surveillance footage showing her at the scene of the crime.
That's not the allegation against her. The allegation against her is that she basically solicited her husband Garcia to do this hit on behalf of Charlie Adelson. And obviously they don't have a phone call or text message or email where there's that deal being made between Charlie Adelson and Katie mcdanaha, or between Katie mcdanawa and Sigfredo Garcia, so they have to prove it all circumstantially.
One of the biggest issues was this money that was deposited in August I believe, or July anyway that summer, and she had a hard time accounting for where she had increased sums compared to any other month in history. So I'll tell us about that issue and its relevance in this case.
Yeah, she deposited, if I remember right, about fifteen thousand dollars in the five weeks after the murder in cash. She was also receiving checks from the Adelson Institute, which is the dental practice at which Charlie Adelson worked, and he owned it as well. Harvey Adelson was the person who founded that practice. His dad. He worked there, and Donna Adelson worked there. And you have forty four checks signed by Donna Adelson directly to Kati mcdonaa with a
lot of those checks consecutively numbered. They started just weeks after the murder and they ended right after Sigfredo Garcia was arrested. So you have all those checks, you have all this cash. She has breast implants that are four thousand dollars that miraculously are paid for in cash. Shortly after the murder, she gets a lexus that was Charlie's lexus but titled to Harvey. Harvey signs that lexus over
to her in January of two fenty sixteen. So all of these benefits coming to Katie macdaniwa in addition to allegedly receiving some twenty five thousand dollars in payoff money from the murder itself. So all of this money coming to her, all of these checks, all of these benefits, and that was the primary way that the prosecution tried to through that evidence show that she had clearly been involved.
The wiretap calls were actually very effective as well, because Katie mcbaniwa is not saying, why are you involving me in your family's problem? I don't have anything to do with this. And in fact, in some of those calls, the language that Katie used and how aggressive she was in pushing back against Charlie Adelson made it seem like she was somebody who was capable of pulling off something as extreme as a murder.
Now, the defense tried to counter that, and still it's unusual for a defendant to take a stand or someone to take a stand.
She does take the stand, she does. What about this.
Dulce vita surveillance audio about this issue? Why was their surveillance, What was the relevance or the importance of this dulce vita video, and what was the problem with it.
We're talking about trial one because Trial two is going to change all that. But at trial one, which ends up in a hung jury as to Katie, conviction as to Sigfredo Garcia, hung jury, two jurors voted not to convictor. Tenjurers voted to convictor. So it was a mistrial. But at that first trial, they wanted the prosecution wanted to not only let the jury see the restaurant meeting between Katie McDonald and Charlie Adelson that happened the very afternoon
that Charlie had met with his mother. He then went straight to where Katie was working in Sunny Isles Beach and they got a table at a restaurant called Dulce Vita. And because their calls were being surveilled, the FBI knew they were going there, and they had two different agents show up and sit at the table right next to them, both of whom had recording devices. So little did Charlie or Katie know, but their entire conversation was being recorded
on sophistic recording devices. The problem is is that they were too far away from them and there was too much background noise in the restaurant. They were sitting literally within feet of the kitchen where all the dishes are clanking, and their children of the restaurant workers that are back in the kitchen. This is way too much noise to
hear anything. So what the prosecution did is they had the lead agent, Pat Sandford, have sophisticated noise canceling headphones, good software from the FBI, and he went through that hour long discussion between Katie and Charlie and literally tried to piece together every word and he put together a transcript, and the prosecution wanted the jury to have that transcript to follow along as Katie and Charlie talked about what
to do. This is the day after the bump talked about what to do about this perceived blackmailer, how to handle that, and the transcript was not permitted into evidence. The judge, Judge Hankinson, said no, you can't do that, that's not allowed. You can play the tape if you and let the jury make of the words that they
can hear what they make of it. So what Georgia Kapelman ended up doing was playing about one minute of the video from dulce Vita, even though it was an hour long, and she just did that to show the jury. I wish we could tell you what happened, because it's significant. I wish you could hear these words because they're significant.
But it turned out not being significant at all, because the jury couldn't hear anything, and all they knew was that something significant had happened at dulce Vita, and they literally had to decide the case without knowing what it was.
Not because of that necessarily, but there's a hung jury. There's a couple hold outs that don't believe that she is guilty, and this is a hung jury.
I wouldn't agree with that assessment or characterization. As I described in the book the very strong twenty five year old juror one yes, who I, by the way, met with in person during my first coat to Tallahassee. The things that she was thinking about were primarily not related
to Katie's guilty innocence. They were primarily related to both Sigfredo Garcia and Katie mcdanna was spending the rest of their life in prison, with their two children being rightwards of the state, and that was something she wrestled with that the jury was actually sequestered a hotel. She wrestled with late into the evening, couldn't sleep, and just couldn't stomach the notion of sending both of them to prison for the rest of their lives and leaving those kids
without parents. She had a hard enough time convicting Sigfredo Garcia, even though the evidence against him, which did include all that surveillance footage, was overwhelming, so she finally and reluctantly agreed to convict Sigfredo Garcia, but she would not agree to convict Katie Garcia without crystal clear evidence against her. And of course the evidence against her wasn't crystal clear, it was circumstantial.
Thanks for that correction. So with this one person that had reservations there hung. Jerry Garcia is sentenced to life without parole and also conspiracy as well. So how do the prosecution Kapelman and the prosecution team decide to retry Katie.
Well, The trial ended in Ober of two thoy nineteen. They were supposed to get going again for a new trial in April of twenty twenty, and of course everybody knows what was going on in April of twenty twenty. The whole world shut down. Yes, and it took a very long time before they were able to get this case back on track. And that gave Georgia Kaplman time and an opportunity to fix the biggest thing that went wrong, which was not being able to use that dulce Vita recording.
She had Pat Sandford, the lead agent from the FBI, do everything he could to find an audio forensics expert who would be able to get rid of some of that background noise and really zoom in on the voices of Charlie and Katie, and they had several false starts and audio forensics experts telling them it just can't be done. Georgia Kaplman was unwilling to accept that, and they finally found the right guy to do this work. His name is Keith maclvine. He spent ten years as a war
crimes investigator with the CIA. He has twelve patents in forensics technologies that can be used to eliminate background noise from crowded, noisy environments. And he took the raw audio and was able to enhance it considerably to the point that you can now hear virtually everything that Charlie Adelson is saying, although you can't hear very much of what Katie is saying because her voice is weaker, she's more soft spoken, and the recording devices weren't angled in quite
the correct way to get what she was saying. But you can hear pretty darn well what Charlie is saying. And when Kapelman heard that recording and they actually got it transcribes and they superimposed the words onto the screen sort of like subtitles. When she saw the combination of the subtitles and the back and forth conversation. Her epiphany wasn't just that they had stronger evidence now against Katie.
Her epiphany was they had been waiting all this time for Katie to flip on Charlie because they wanted to have the hardest evidence, the most solid evidence they could against Charlie, and they weren't going to go forward against him until they did. Her epiphany was they didn't need Katie anymore in order to be able to pursue a
prosecution of Charlie for first degree murder. Charlie's own words, she concluded, were tantamount to a confession, and that's what led almost immediately to his indictment and his arrest for first degree murder for the murder of Dan Mark.
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Now you talk about Charlie, Charlie Adelson being arrested and the retrial of Katie. Let's talk about that she takes to stand again at this retrial, doesn't she?
She does?
And there are two things different. One it's a different prosecutor cross examining her. It's another assistant state attorney named Sarah Catherine Dugan wasn't involved in the first trial. Interesting she was doing it because there was this projection by the defense lawyers that they were going to call Sigfrido Garcia as a witness in Katie's defense, and Georgia Kapelman was ready to do that cross examination while he never testified.
But she did.
And they now had this recording forty one minutes, not the full hour, but forty one minutes of excellent recording that they played I think fourteen snippets of during her cross examination, basically challenging her to come up with an explanation of why she didn't run for the hills when Charlie was saying all the incriminating things that he was saying, and she didn't have any explanation for why she didn't run for the hills, why she sat there and continued
talking with him, leading to the obvious conclusion that they were strategizing together how to deal with the fact that a blackmail or even perhaps a cop was onto them about the murder of Dan Markel.
She also had the misfortune of having a couple of her friends testify, one in particular, name Missquerro, that did considerable damage with her testimony, didn't.
She Yes, she was a repeat witness from the first trial. Misscuero was a very effective prosecution witness, one of her best friends, and in fact, Katie was the godmother to one of her children. So this is not somebody who was a biased prosecution witness like Louis Rivera, who you know, basically turned state's evidence and had to testify in a
certain way. Mesquero, although she was subpoenaed by the government, she was not someone you would have expected to throw her very good friend for many years and the godmother of her children under the bus. But there were just so many things that had happened that were objective evidence of Katie's involvement that Jindra Masquero knew about. The most significant, which the most significant of which was Katie had Misscuero keep her children overnight the very night that Dan Markel
was killed. The prosecution theory was is that she went and spent the night with Charlie Adelson and filled the money bags up to go pay off the hitmen the next morning. And that testimony was a lot more believable because Jinra Mascuero kept her kids that night and no other night in their history, very rarely ever looked after her kids. It was so unusual that that's what that's when circumstantial evidence is at its most powerful, is when
it's really unusual and doesn't fit the normal pattern. And that was really, really devastating to Katie that Miss Scuaro was with her kids overnight that very same night, and it fit the prosecution's timeline in theory.
Prosecutor dig in two, really you say no pity, And so that testimony was rough to hear.
If you were a fan of Katie whatsoever.
Yes, But I think at the end of the day. What was the worst part of the case for Katie mcbanoll was her own testimony, especially when Sarah Catherine Dugan was cross examining her. She by all accounts, she didn't do as well as she did in the first trial, not that she convinced anybody the first trial she didn't, But in the second trial, in particular with the delcha vita evidence she just had, she was tripping over herself
so often. It just didn't look good. She didn't confess to having been involved in the murder, but she didn't make a powerful case for herself that she wasn't involved in the murder. The lies seemed to be pretty easy to pick out.
What was the result of that trial in terms of the sentence and conviction, She.
Was convicted on all counts first degree murder, conspiracy to commit first green murder, and solicitation of first green murder, and after forty five days or so, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of pearl. So she and Garcia both now have the exact same sentence. They will both die in prison unless there's some miraculous development of some sort.
Now, what is the status of the investigation into Charles Adelson.
Well, the investigation is done. He's now on track to be tried sometime in twenty twenty three. The lawyers are talking about possibly as early as March of two thousand, twenty three. It may get delayed until the summer of twenty twenty three. But he's the only other defendant currently charged with murder or involvement in the Dan Markel case.
There are others, most significantly Donna Adelson. That there are probable cause affidavits that make very clear that the investigators believe she is as much involved in this conspiracy as the others. They just haven't seen fit at this point to arrest her, And maybe that's being used as leverage with Charlie and trying to get him to negotiate a plea. Who knows. It's tough to say exactly what the strategy is and the strategies evolving over time. They may arrest
her before the next trial. They may not arrest her before the next trial. Sigfredo Garcia may decide to come talk before the next trial. Katie Magdanawa might There's a lot of things that can still happen between now in the time Charlie Adelson stands trial, and any one of those things can change dramatically the trajectory of this case.
As a result, you talk about the Markel Act. Something for Ruth and PHILM. Markel will tell us about this well.
Part of the story that I haven't been able to talk about yet, but I'm glad I get this chance now, is that there are so many horrible things that have happened to the Markell family. Obviously the murder of Dan Markel at the top of that list. But remember he had two very young boys at the time, and they were immediately brought down to South Florida, where, if you believe the prosecution's theory, the very people who plotted the murder against their father are involved in raising them, and
that's horrible in and of itself. Two years after the murder, Wendy Adelson stops allowing visitation between the Markell family and Ben and Lincoln, so they're completely cut off from the Phil and Ruth are completely cut off from their grandchildren, which is the only living the only living human beings that have the lineage of Dan Markel, and they can't
have any communication because Wendy won't allow it. And that led Ruth to fight for grandparents' rights in the Florida legislature, ultimately resulting almost the same exact time as all these amazing developments with Charlie Adelson's arrest, adulce Vita enhancement, a conviction of Katie mcdonaa In that exact same time frame, the bill passes the Florida legislature and is signed by the Governor of the State of Florida and expands grandparent
rights in Florida to allow someone like Ruth and Phil whose child is killed murdered to be able to get visitation if the only living parent has complicity in that crime.
What's very very interesting in this fascinating and very very interesting book is how you came to this story in the first place.
Your last book was Murder.
At Lake Seminole, Evil at Lake Seminol, Oh, pardon me sorry, Evil at Lake Seminole, and you were talking to the victim's mother. Tell us about this conversation and also what you say. You are a strong believer in fate and divine intervention. Tell us how it worked in this case you believe.
Well, I was finished with that book. It was during COVID, so I didn't have a lot of events, live events associated. I didn't have any live events associated with that book because of COVID, and I was my mind was getting restless and ready to write another book. And every now and again I would talk to Cheryl Williams and she became a fan of mine, and she asked me, what are you going to write about next? And I said, I've been looking. I haven't found the right story yet.
And she said, well, you really ought to think about writing about the Dan Markell case. And I literally knew next to nothing about the Dan Markell case at that time. The only things that I knew were from the pages of the Tallahassee Democrat, of the local newspaper, because sometimes there were stories about the Mike Williams murder, her son's murder, and the Dan Markell murder on the same page on the same day, and I would my peripheral vision would
see it. But that was about it. Cheryl is somebody that's really important to me. I told her I would consider it thinking about it, and literally, almost like the next day, I sit down on my couch and I look on the DVR of our satellite TV and lo and behold, there is a Dateline episode on the Dan markl case that I never asked my d to record. Wow, but it was just sitting there and I watched it, and I was mesmerized by what I learned about this story.
Now literally learning about this story for the first time. And one of the talking heads that was connecting the various segments together was a guy named Matt Scherr who had done a podcast for Wondery called over My Dead Body. Well, that led me in my next direction, which was to listen to that podcast, and I was floored by how good that podcast was and how amazing and fascinating this story was. And that was the point at which I decided I am going to write this story. At least
I'm going to try. And you know how life comes full circle and you know the whole thing about divine intervention. If you'll look on the front cover of my book, at the very bottom is a quote from Matthew Cher, who's become a friend of mine in this process, who read my book and he wrote, and it's on the front cover empathetic, engrossing, and impeccaby researched the single best
piece of reporting I've read on the Dan Markel case. Matthews, share creator and host of Wondery's Over My Dead Body podcast, which I'm immensely grateful for that quote and that he allowed us to put it on the front cover of the book, And that's this whole thing coming full circle.
Absolutely, and I agree with you.
There's so many cases where and so many stories, and so many authors have come and I've interviewed them and they've said something similar where it was definitely divine intervention for the author's participation in the case and the investigation and any interaction with the family, which is so important as well. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about extreme punishment, the chilling true
story of acclaimed law professor Dan Markel's murder. Can you tell us about any social media that you do regarding this Facebook or otherwise.
The best place to find me is on my website. I have a website that goes into a lot of details about the three books that I've written, which you've been kind enough to interview me about each one. Yes, in fact that those podcasts can be found on my website, which is Stephenbiepstein dot com. I do have Facebook. You can find my Facebook and everything else through my website. But like I said, there's a lot of information about these crimes, the murders, the investigation, well beyond what's in
the book. There are pictures, there are videos. The whole trial from the evil like Seminole case can be watched straight from my website, and good chunks of trials, the two trials in this case can be watched straight from my website.
Thank you so much, Stephen b Epstein. Extreme Punishment, the chilling true story of acclaimed law professor Dan Markel's murder. Thank you so much. You have a great evening, and thank you so much.
For this interview. Good night, Thanks for having me. Good Night,