Perhaps the first clue was at the wedding. Although Wendi Adelson and her new husband Dan Markel were both Jewish, he was the more religious of the pair.
He had insisted on kosher food for the wedding celebration and expected several rabbi friends to attend. Wendi’s mother, Donna Adelson, was in charge of the food. The starters came and prawns were served. The rabbis walked out.
That was the start.
As time went on, it became clear that Donna was insistent on being a key part of her daughter’s life. But it was only when Wendi and Dan split up that things became nasty. They could not have been nastier. Donna truly became the mother-in-law from hell. Law courts and furious rows were to turn to murder in this astonishing story, and it took a decade for justice to be fully served. The four-part series Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel, which is airing on Disney+, takes the trope of overbearing Jewish in-laws and shows just how bad it can get. It is little wonder that this Florida story has obsessed true-crime podcast fans for the past decade. It is jaw-droppingly astonishing.
The facts are these. In 2004, Canadian-born Dan, a super-bright Harvard graduate, met south Florida native Wendi on Jewish dating site J-date. Both were studying law and immediately hit it off. Just two years later, they married.
Two sons followed in quick succession, and the family moved to Tallahassee when Dan became a professor at Florida State University and Wendi got a teaching job there. But the honeymoon didn’t last long.
The documentary’s producer Lily Fletcher spoke to a friend of Wendi about those early years. The friend was due to appear on the documentary but was put off when Wendi warned what might happen: a former friend who had spoken up for Wendi had been harassed at her workplace and home by people who remain obsessed with this story and the idea that there may be people who escaped justice.
“This friend had got to know Wendi at college and said she was mollycoddled by her family,” reveals Fletcher. “She hadn’t done a lot of practical things. It was conceivable to this friend that Wendi’s family had done things for Wendi without her buy-in.
“She recalled how Wendi was dissatisfied in the marriage because she wasn’t getting the attention she felt she deserved either from Dan or for her career. Both Wendi and Dan had been raised by their families as these prized jewels, but in Tallahassee Wendi was made to feel like she was riding on Dan’s coattails, which was hard when she was accomplished in her own right.
“And she would complain about having to look after the kids and do the cleaning while Dan’s career was seen as more important.”
In 2012 the pair split. Wendi left the family home with the children, while Dan was away with work, and went to live with her parents. He came home to find she had fled with half the things in the house – even half the dining room chairs.
The family home was a wealthy south Florida neighbourhood some 400 miles away. Wendi’s father, Harvey, was a successful dentist. Donna worked with him managing the practice, while their youngest son, Charlie, also worked for the practice and was known for being flash with his cash but an adoring brother. A third sibling, Robert, the eldest, had a strained relationship with his family for marrying out.
Messages between Donna and Wendi showed her mother even suggested dressing the kids up in Hitler Youth costumes to upset Dan
The first court action Dan brought was to attempt to force the children back to Tallahassee from Wendi’s parents’ home. He won. The rows over the children became increasingly bitter with Wendi feeling forced to live in a place she didn’t belong. Dan would tell friends that he felt that Wendi’s family in particular were trying to harm him psychologically: trying to take control from him by playing mind games. While he was religious, and a regular shul goer, when the boys were staying with Donna they would appear on Skype calls with him eating shrimp or other non-kosher food. Messages between Donna and Wendi showed her mother even suggested dressing the kids up in Hitler Youth costumes to upset Dan. Another time, Wendi put photos up of the boys outside a Catholic school – the message appeared to be that if he was going to insist on them staying in what was known as “the Bible Belt” they might as well convert to Christianity. In 2014, Dan had the children and one of his sons told him: “Grandma says you’re stupid. Grandma says she hates you. She says you’re trying to take her sunshines away from her.”
Convinced Donna was trying to turn his sons against him, he brought a new motion in court – the “Grandma Motion” – demanding that she be supervised when around the children. Jason Newland, chief investigator for the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee, says he believes the motion made murder the next step. “Donna’s world was crumbling,” he tells the documentary. “The kids were going to be in Tallahassee for ever. Now she was the subject of this motion hearing. Donna was angry, feeling like she was losing this war that she was in. I think she had pure hatred for Dan after that.”
On the morning of July 18, 2014, Dan was on the phone with a teacher friend of a friend after dropping his boys off at preschool. The teacher makes a poignant appearance on the show. Dan wanted to know about the school he taught at; he was thinking of sending the boys there.
As they chat on the phone Dan approaches his house and says, “Can you hold on for a second? There is an unfamiliar person in my driveway.” Then the teacher heard “a really loud sound, like a loud boom”.
Dan had been shot twice in the head. A neighbour heard a bang, called 911 and found him unresponsive in his car. He died a few hours later in hospital.
The police were at first flummoxed. Wendi certainly had a motive but she also had an alibi and seemed distraught. He had enemies thanks to a blog he did; he’d worked on some high-profile cases, but was that enough for murder?
But after painstaking work from the police and FBI, they worked out the car the murderer had travelled in, who it belonged to, and who the driver was.
The shooter was a man called Sigfredo Garcia, who was not previously known to the police. The driver was Luis Rivera, a well-known gang member who was already in prison by the time police caught up with them. The link between them and the Adelsons appeared to come via Katherine Magbanua.
Sigfredo was her former lover and he was the father of her two children. She had then dated Charlie Adelson. There were calls between her and Sigfredo and calls between her and Charlie. But while there was enough evidence to eventually convict Sigfredo on a charge of first-degree murder in 2016, and Rivera pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2019, the police struggled to find enough evidence to even charge the Adelsons. Katherine, who was tried jointly with Sigfredo, also walked free as the jury could not reach a unanimous decision in her case so the judge declared a mistrial. She was tried again in 2022 and convicted.
A story stranger than fiction: Charlie Adelson, Katherine Magbanua and Sigfredo Garcia[Missing Credit]
The police knew Charlie was connected to the people who had murdered his brother-in-law through Katherine. They knew the dentistry company was paying her a monthly fee in the year after the murder, with the cheques signed by Donna. But the prosecutors still felt they didn’t have enough evidence to charge the Adelsons. Even a wiretap on Charlie and Donna’s phones wasn’t giving them the results they needed. It looked like the family might get away with it. So in 2016 they staged an astonishing sting.
Pretending to be a gangland associate of Rivera, a police officer approached Donna and asked her for more money to maintain his silence.
Donna phoned Charlie to say there was an issue and that they needed to meet. The police followed them to a café where they discussed what needed to be done but – tantalisingly – the restaurant was too noisy and their discussion couldn’t be heard.
It took years and the increased sophistication of people working on audio recordings to finally, finally, fine tune the audio recording so they could hear Charlie and Donna talking. It wasn’t perfect but it was their smoking gun. Without it, the Adelsons might have got away with murder.
Charlie was arrested in April 2022, and he was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation of murder in November 2023. He insisted that he had never asked for Markel to be murdered and that Katherine and her former lover had done it and then blackmailed him.
Donna wasn’t arrested until Charlie was found guilty; police had learnt she was planning to leave the country and arrested her at the airport. Nicknamed the “matriarch mastermind” by the prosecution, she was charged with the same offences as her son and was convicted on all counts in September 2025 – more than a decade after the murder.
What inspired these two to take matters of a toxic divorce of their relative into their hands in such a cruel way? Fletcher, who has read much of their correspondence to each other and spoken to many of the people we see on camera, wonders whether this was a “folie à deux” or shared delusional disorder condition.
“The whole story is stranger than fiction,” she says. “It is so far-fetched that murder could in any way feel like a proportionate response by Charlie and Donna.
“Folie à deux is when two people talk to themselves on repeat about something, and they kind of go mad. Charlie and Donna just keep talking about this on a loop, over and over again, and they convince themselves that this feels like a response and a rational way to solve their problem, and don’t think about any of the consequences. There is a real madness to it in lots of ways.
“Wendi was exhausted from motherhood and normal marital stuff. I don’t think she was really living such a bad life. But her mother, you know, sprang into this sort of deranged-mother-bear instinct. Her relationship with Charlie is so interesting and between them they appear to have transmitted between each other the most outlandish solutions that don’t make any sense.”
Part of the documentary looks at the insane internet chatter and podcasting about a case that fascinated America.
“I have never worked on a story like this, where there was as much stuff online as intense geopolitical situations,” says Fletcher. “There were Reddit forums that were posting on it daily for years. I think people were obsessed because it starts with something so familiar – a custody dispute and then it gets so out of hand. And I think also because the people involved were wealthy, and they finally get their comeuppance.”
In the frame: Donna Adelson[Missing Credit]
That interest is only likely to grow now the documentary series is online as it leaves unanswered questions about how much Wendi and her father knew.
Wendi is now living in anonymity with her two boys in Florida and Fletcher believes she has changed her name. “A lot of the online chatter is about Wendi and they say the most horrific things about her – it is like they are out for blood,” she says. “Yes, we want to know about what she knew, but there is evidence that her family would do a lot of meddling without her involvement. I think people enjoy going after this attractive, accomplished woman. I hope that one day we will get to hear her story.”
In the meantime, the cost of this action has been hellish. A murdered man; two parents who have lost their son, two sons who have lost their father. Meanwhile, for the children of Katherine and Sigfredo, both their parents are in prison.
“This is an enormous story with all these big characters and an investigation that has so many twists and turns,” says Fletcher. “But we never wanted to lose sight of the human cost. Of the tragedy that has happened.”
Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel is on Disney+ now
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.