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Speaker 6: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 6: killers in True crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 6: written about him Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 6: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 6: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 6: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 1: Good Evening.
Speaker 5: A devoted father, one of the most accomplished criminal law
Speaker 5: scholars in the country. Someone wanted him dead, but why.
Speaker 5: On the morning of July eighteenth, twenty fourteen, forty one
Speaker 5: year old Florida State law professor Dan Markel dropped his
Speaker 5: boys off at preschool at the gym and headed home
Speaker 5: to his quiet tree canopied neighborhood. Within seconds of pulling
Speaker 5: into his garage, two thirty eight caliber bullets fired from
Speaker 5: point blank range were lodged in his brain. His brutal
Speaker 5: slaying defied explanation. The case went stone cold for nearly
Speaker 5: two years before dogget pursued by the Tallahassee Police and
Speaker 5: the FBI resulted in the arrest of two lifelong criminals
Speaker 5: who had driven ten hours from Miami with one singular
Speaker 5: purpose to murder the esteem professor were his ex wife,
Speaker 5: Wendy Adelson and her South Florida family. The masterminds behind
Speaker 5: this horrific crime. Extreme Punishment is the riveting story of
Speaker 5: a divorce between two law professors that spiraled out of control,
Speaker 5: wealthy in laws, hell bent on revenge, and an unlikely
Speaker 5: love triangle, and the relentless quest to bring Dan's killers,
Speaker 5: all of them to justice.
Speaker 1: The book that we're.
Speaker 5: Featuring this evening is Extreme Punishment, The chillings true story
Speaker 5: of acclaimed law professor Dan Markel's murder, with my special guest,
Speaker 5: journalist and author Steven b Epstein. Welcome back to the program,
Speaker 5: and thank you so much for this interview. Steven b Epstein,
Speaker 5: thanks so much for having me Dan. One slight correction,
Speaker 5: not a journalist, I'm an attorney. Thank you so much
Speaker 5: for that correction. Let's start as you do right in
Speaker 5: the very beginning, and you take us to July eighteenth,
Speaker 5: twenty fourteen, and too right next door to two thousand
Speaker 5: and two one one six Trescott Drive, Benton Hill's a
Speaker 5: suburb of Tallahassee, and the neighbors Jim and Sharon Geiger
Speaker 5: what do they see?
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen.
Speaker 7: It was actually a little before eleven am. They were
Speaker 7: sitting in their living room fiddling on an iPad when
Speaker 7: Jim Geiger, who was a seventy two year old grandfather
Speaker 7: former school teacher, heard something that sounded like a firecracker
Speaker 7: go off toward his front yard. He sprang up from
Speaker 7: the left seat they were sitting on and started looking
Speaker 7: around trying to figure out what had happened, and eventually
Speaker 7: cluded on the fact that the noise had come from
Speaker 7: Dan Markel's property just next door. So he goes over
Speaker 7: to the driveway, walks up toward the garage, but he
Speaker 7: notices that Dan's car is there and it's on, so
Speaker 7: he figures everything's fine. He goes back home, and he
Speaker 7: figures Dan's going to leave the driveway and go somewhere,
Speaker 7: but that doesn't happen. So he goes back a second time,
Speaker 7: and when he gets right up beside the car next
Speaker 7: to the driver's seat, front window is shattered, the driver's
Speaker 7: side window is shattered, and he's stepping on glass, and
Speaker 7: he looks inside and Dan Markel is all bloody, slumped
Speaker 7: over behind the steering wheel of his car.
Speaker 5: At the same time, his wife, Wendy is where is
Speaker 5: she and what is she doing?
Speaker 7: By that time, Wendy was his ex wife. They had
Speaker 7: gotten divorced the prior summer, so they've now been divorced
Speaker 7: a little bit more than one year. She is living
Speaker 7: about fifteen minutes away, and she's going through her morning
Speaker 7: in her home. It's a summer, so neither of them
Speaker 7: have teaching responsibilities at Florida State Law School where they
Speaker 7: both taught. And she's going about her day now.
Speaker 5: She's doing some errands and she's running around. She goes
Speaker 5: to a liquor store, and she went to lunch with
Speaker 5: a couple of friends. At about two point thirty though,
Speaker 5: she's approached by someone correct tell us about that who
Speaker 5: approaches her at that time.
Speaker 7: The person who approaches her is a police investigator with
Speaker 7: the Tallahassee Police Department named Craig Isom, and Craig Isom
Speaker 7: says to the three women, is there a Wendy Agelson
Speaker 7: here and Wendy She officially says, well, yes, that's me,
Speaker 7: and he tells her that there's been an incident and
Speaker 7: he needs her to come downtown to the police station
Speaker 7: to talk about it.
Speaker 5: Now, he wants to speak with her when he gives
Speaker 5: her the details, and what are those details, what is
Speaker 5: her reaction?
Speaker 7: Well, she understand that she was at the police station
Speaker 7: from two forty five PM until about seven forty five
Speaker 7: or even close to eight o'clock PM, So she was
Speaker 7: there for a very long time, and her reactions ranged
Speaker 7: the gamut. So she became fairly hysterical upon finding out
Speaker 7: that Dan had been shot and that he wasn't going
Speaker 7: to survive, And lots of stuff happened during those five
Speaker 7: plus hours. In fact, so much so that two entire
Speaker 7: chapters chapter two and three of my book are pretty
Speaker 7: much just that interview of Wendy Adelson at the police station.
Speaker 5: Talk about Wendy Adelson in that five hour interview, and
Speaker 5: Investigator Isom felt that it was quite important to talk
Speaker 5: to her and talk about the divorce and the divorce proceedings. So,
Speaker 5: as you say, much of that is spoken about in
Speaker 5: the book. Tell us what she informs him about the
Speaker 5: status of their marriage and the reasons for the divorce
Speaker 5: and the status of the hearing that was upcoming.
Speaker 7: Well, she says a lot of things, and again it's
Speaker 7: quite a broad range, but she said that Dan Markel
Speaker 7: had been emotionally abusive to her during the marriage, that
Speaker 7: they had lots of disagreements. They disagreed about Judaism. They
Speaker 7: were both Jewish, but they disagreed about how Jewish they
Speaker 7: should be and how Jewish they should raise their two boys.
Speaker 7: They disagreed about things about the children, and so on
Speaker 7: and so on. But one of the things that you
Speaker 7: pick up on fairly quickly from the interview is that
Speaker 7: her family members, most significantly her mother Donna, her father Harvey,
Speaker 7: and her brother Charlie, really don't like Dan Markel, and
Speaker 7: we're angry with him for the way they perceived he
Speaker 7: was treating her both during the marriage and especially after
Speaker 7: they separated, And she brings them up constantly, and at
Speaker 7: one point even says that as a joke, Charlie had
Speaker 7: said he had gotten her a large screen TV as
Speaker 7: a divorce present because it was cheaper than hiring a
Speaker 7: hit man. So there's all kinds of stuff that she
Speaker 7: says that pretty much points the finger at her family
Speaker 7: members as being mad enough to not necessarily do this,
Speaker 7: but to do something.
Speaker 5: One of the major things that had happened was that
Speaker 5: she had lost again along with her family, the real
Speaker 5: location motion to be able to relocate near her family.
Speaker 5: Can you explain what she how she explained that to im.
Speaker 7: I don't remember the specifics of how she explained it
Speaker 7: to IM because it blurs in my mind with what
Speaker 7: was actually happening in the relocation battle. And in fact,
Speaker 7: there is a chapter in the book, chapter ten, entitled Relocation.
Speaker 7: But the long and short of it is Wendy and
Speaker 7: Dan wound up in Tallahassee, Florida when Dan got a
Speaker 7: assistant professor position on the law faculty in two thousand
Speaker 7: and five. Wendy was still in law school at the
Speaker 7: University of Miami at the time, and ironically she was
Speaker 7: living in Miami, he was living in Washington, d C.
Speaker 7: They weren't even engaged at that point, and they decide,
Speaker 7: you know what, if this whole thing between us works out,
Speaker 7: we'll wind up going wherever I land a teaching job.
Speaker 7: They eventually get engaged, and that summer they moved to Tallahassee,
Speaker 7: Florida to start a life together with Their wedding tended
Speaker 7: to take place in February of two thousand and six,
Speaker 7: and so they wind up in this place neither has
Speaker 7: ever lived. Wendy's family, as you said, is from South Florida.
Speaker 7: She's seven hours away, and she doesn't really want to
Speaker 7: be there. Dan didn't really want to be there either.
Speaker 7: He wanted to be in a higher profile faculty position
Speaker 7: on a faculty at He actually had a job interview
Speaker 7: at Berkeley, and he wanted to be at a place
Speaker 7: more like that than Florida State. But circumstances being what
Speaker 7: they were, they wind up in Tallahassee and they have
Speaker 7: two kids, and the kids are both in preschool, and
Speaker 7: at the time of the separation, Wendy said, I don't
Speaker 7: need to stay here anymore. I'm not married to him anymore.
Speaker 7: I want to go back home, and she filed emotion
Speaker 7: in the family court to permit her to relocate to
Speaker 7: South Florida with the two children, which would require Dan
Speaker 7: basically to become a long distance dad. And not surprisingly,
Speaker 7: Dan said, no, I'm not agreeing to that, and he
Speaker 7: fought very hard to prevent it from happening, and he won.
Speaker 7: That was in the summer of twenty thirteen, about a
Speaker 7: year before he was killed.
Speaker 5: Now back to Tallahassee investigators, how do they proceed with
Speaker 5: the limited evidence that they do have, like the eyewitness
Speaker 5: testimony of the next door neighbors, how do they proceed?
Speaker 7: Well, it was interesting because Jim Geiger had seen the
Speaker 7: car leaving the driveway. I'm sorry I left that part
Speaker 7: out earlier. I apologize, but when that's why he had
Speaker 7: a suspicion that something nefarious had gone on. Was not
Speaker 7: only about the firecracker, but he saw a car at
Speaker 7: the edge of Dan's driveway that was speeding away, and
Speaker 7: that's why he initially went over to see if everything
Speaker 7: was okay and was convinced it was when he saw
Speaker 7: Dan's car running. But he described that car to the
Speaker 7: nine to one to one dispatcher as a light colored
Speaker 7: Prius and that was the first clue that investigators had
Speaker 7: as to who might have done this to Dan Markel.
Speaker 7: Very quickly, they were able to retrace dan steps from
Speaker 7: that morning and learn that he had been to his gym,
Speaker 7: Premier Fitness, and got security camera footage of the parking lot,
Speaker 7: and lo and behold, they saw Dan's Honda Accord, his
Speaker 7: black Honed Accord, come into the parking lot about nine
Speaker 7: to fifteen that more, and right behind it was a
Speaker 7: light colored prius, and they were actually able to see
Speaker 7: Dan leave the parking lot after his workout and the
Speaker 7: prius was following him. They couldn't get the license plate.
Speaker 7: The clarity of the video wasn't good enough to get
Speaker 7: the license plate. But then they got more security camera
Speaker 7: footage from city buses and they literally watched this prius
Speaker 7: following Dan almost all the way to his home before
Speaker 7: the buses lost sight of that car. And then after
Speaker 7: the murder was committed, another bus had this vehicle, this
Speaker 7: Prius in its security footage and it showed not only
Speaker 7: a driver, but somebody sitting in the passenger seat. The
Speaker 7: windows were tinted so you couldn't really make anything out
Speaker 7: as to who these people were. And again they still
Speaker 7: didn't have a good image where they could make out
Speaker 7: the drivers the license plate, but they were well on
Speaker 7: their way, and lo and behold, this vehicle had a
Speaker 7: SunPass transponder for the tollways down there, and eventually they
Speaker 7: were able through the sun Pass transponder and DOT records
Speaker 7: to find the exact vehicle that was pictured in all
Speaker 7: of the security camera footage. And the home run for
Speaker 7: them was when they got information regarding one of the
Speaker 7: men who had actually rented the car. His name is
Speaker 7: Louis Rivera. They got bank records from him that showed
Speaker 7: he had made a withdrawal of fifty dollars or forty
Speaker 7: dollars from his bank down in South Florida that same
Speaker 7: evening after the murder had been committed, and the security
Speaker 7: camera footage from the ATM gave crystal clear images of
Speaker 7: both men, who were Leuis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia, in
Speaker 7: a light colored Toyota Prias, and they had solved it
Speaker 7: at that point. Now, everything that I just described took
Speaker 7: a year and a half basically for investigators to piece together.
Speaker 5: Now, what did they do when they have these two
Speaker 5: people that they believe are the hitmen? What do they
Speaker 5: do to further expand on their investigation?
Speaker 7: They did an undercover sting operation, and so they The
Speaker 7: theory of Craig Eisen literally from the moment was sitting
Speaker 7: across from him talking about her divorce and how nasty
Speaker 7: it was talked about her parents and her brother. His
Speaker 7: theory from day one was that that's the motive he
Speaker 7: wouldn't cooperate in the relocation Dan Markel and lo and
Speaker 7: behold two days after he's killed, Wendy literally was relocated
Speaker 7: with her children to South Florida because there was no
Speaker 7: more Dan Markel, no more divorce court to stand in
Speaker 7: the way. So that was the theory from day one.
Speaker 7: And they didn't know initially what the connection was between
Speaker 7: these two Hispanic hit men who had long rap sheets
Speaker 7: and the Adelson's, but they were determined to find out.
Speaker 7: One of the ways they started finding out was street
Speaker 7: telephone records, which established that not only did Sigfredo Garcia
Speaker 7: father two children with a woman named Katie Magbenowa, that
Speaker 7: same woman, Katie Macbaniwa, was in a relationship, a romantic
Speaker 7: relationship with Charlie Adelson, Wendy's brother at the time of
Speaker 7: the hit on Dan Markel, essentially a love triangle where
Speaker 7: Katie was in the middle and the go between between
Speaker 7: Charlie Adelson and the Wilson family and the two men
Speaker 7: who put two bullets in Dan Markel's head. So they
Speaker 7: decided to do this sting operation, and they began it
Speaker 7: by what's called a bump where an undercover agent literally
Speaker 7: bumps into Donna Adelson who is at her condo in
Speaker 7: South Beach and walking across the street to pick up
Speaker 7: Wendy's children and Dan's children, Ben and Lincoln at their school,
Speaker 7: and hands her a piece of paper and tells her
Speaker 7: that my brother, he's incarcerated, and he wasn't taken care
Speaker 7: of the same way that Tuto, who is sik Credo
Speaker 7: Garcia's nickname, and Katie have been taken care of. You
Speaker 7: need to do the right thing and take care of
Speaker 7: my brother. And on that sheet of paper that he
Speaker 7: handed to Donna Adelson was an article about the one
Speaker 7: year anniversary of Dan Markel's slang and a figure five
Speaker 7: thousand dollars and a telephone number, essentially a blackmail demand
Speaker 7: to pay this guy who's posing as a gangster five
Speaker 7: thousand dollars or they're going to rat out the Adelson
Speaker 7: family because essentially what they're saying is we know exactly
Speaker 7: what happened, and we're going to turn y'all in if
Speaker 7: you don't pay us five thousand dollars. And that sets
Speaker 7: off a series of events and phone calls, many of
Speaker 7: which were wiretapped, that eventually leads to tons of information
Speaker 7: about what the Adolson family knew about the hit on
Speaker 7: Dan Markell and who was involved and so forth.
Speaker 5: This bump was meant designed to battle the cages of
Speaker 5: people involved, and one of those people that they believed
Speaker 5: Isisen believed was involved heavily was Donna Adelson herself, and.
Speaker 7: One of the reasons he believed that goes back to
Speaker 7: the divorce. Some of the material that they recovered from
Speaker 7: Wendy Adelson's computer, which they got in their possession the
Speaker 7: same day she was interviewed the night of the murder
Speaker 7: were emails that Donna had written to Wendy both before
Speaker 7: and after the relocation battle, where she was adamant that
Speaker 7: they were going to get Wendy and the kids relocated
Speaker 7: come hell or high water, and told Wendy that she
Speaker 7: needed to do some pretty horrible things to convince Dan
Speaker 7: to make the move to let the kids move to
Speaker 7: South Florida, the most significant of which were converting the
Speaker 7: kids to Catholicism. They were Jewish and Dan was very
Speaker 7: observant in his religion, and that would have killed them
Speaker 7: if the kids were converted to Catholicism. And that's the
Speaker 7: type of gamesmanship that Donna Adelson displayed in her emails
Speaker 7: to Wendy, who, by the way, didn't go along. She
Speaker 7: didn't convert the kids to Catholicism, or do any of
Speaker 7: the other things that Donna was urging her to do.
Speaker 7: This became Donna Adelson's battle, it was clear from those emails,
Speaker 7: perhaps even more so than Wendy's battle to get the
Speaker 7: kids relocated to where the Adelsons lived in South Floria.
Speaker 5: To put everything in context too, though Donna hated the family,
Speaker 5: hated Dan Markel, but in the proceedings with his ex
Speaker 5: wife Wendy, he had quite the aggressive behavior re litigiously
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 7: Can you explain no question about it. Dan was very
Speaker 7: skilled with the use of language. He was a prolific
Speaker 7: criminal law and criminal theory scholar. He had written twenty
Speaker 7: plus Lauriview articles a book, was speaking all over the country,
Speaker 7: all over the world on on topics regarding punishment and
Speaker 7: criminal punishment theory. And though he didn't represent himself in
Speaker 7: the divorce proceedings, he wrote all of the pleadings that
Speaker 7: were filed in Port and there was a lot of
Speaker 7: vitriolic language that he used. And you know, Wendy's parents
Speaker 7: were paying for her legal bills, and they were reading
Speaker 7: every word and it was just riling them up. And
Speaker 7: it was clear from the back and forth, Dan would
Speaker 7: file something and then the next day Donna would be
Speaker 7: emailing Wendy about it, and it was riling everybody up.
Speaker 7: And you know, nobody would have thought at the time
Speaker 7: that they would get so angry with him they would
Speaker 7: put two bullets in his head. But that's exactly what
Speaker 7: investigators believe happened.
Speaker 5: Now with Donna and this bump, and she's approached, and
Speaker 5: investigators believe that this will rattle her cage. But does
Speaker 5: it rattle Donna's cage? And but does But how does
Speaker 5: she react? And who does she speak to?
Speaker 7: The very first person she calls is Charlie Adelson, and
Speaker 7: she uses some cryptic language. But he asked her who
Speaker 7: does it involve, and she says, under her breath home
Speaker 7: the two of us. He says who, because he didn't
Speaker 7: hear her, and she says, the two of us. I
Speaker 7: think you know what I'm talking about, which is obviously
Speaker 7: highly incriminating. She doesn't say, I have no idea what
Speaker 7: this is about, Like why on earth would somebody be
Speaker 7: talking about this and handing me a thing about Danny's murder?
Speaker 7: Should we go to the police? And none of that happened.
Speaker 7: It was right away. This involves the two of us.
Speaker 7: I think you know what I'm talking about, and they
Speaker 7: arrange to get together the next day. In fact, Donna
Speaker 7: really wanted to talk with him that afternoon, but it wasn'tconvenient,
Speaker 7: and Wendy was going to come pick up the kids,
Speaker 7: and then there was Harvey and where was he going
Speaker 7: to fit in? So they arranged to meet the next
Speaker 7: day around lunchtime, which they did just outside of the
Speaker 7: South Beach condo that Donna lived in. It's actually a
Speaker 7: picture in the book of the two of them sitting
Speaker 7: in plotting strategy. And right after that meeting with Donna
Speaker 7: and Charlie goes to meet with Katie macbanoa. Now I
Speaker 7: should say that right after he gets off the phone
Speaker 7: with Donna, Charlie calls Katie mcbanawa and tells her what
Speaker 7: had happened with the bump and of significance, Katie mcbana,
Speaker 7: what hasn't been his girlfriend? This is April of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 7: This is happening. She hasn't been his girlfriend since the
Speaker 7: fall of twenty fourteen. And the reason why he says
Speaker 7: he's calling her is because Donna told him that that
Speaker 7: the undercover agent, who she at the time thought was
Speaker 7: a gangster, had mentioned one of Charlie's ex girlfriends, and
Speaker 7: that's the pretense under which Charlie says he's calling her,
Speaker 7: and they say. She says to him, well, you have
Speaker 7: like a thousand ex girlfriends, Why are you calling me?
Speaker 7: He says, yeah, that's right, I do. Maybe it's one
Speaker 7: of the other ones. But he never calls anybody else
Speaker 7: because he knows this is about this bump, is about
Speaker 7: what happened to Dan Markel, and this bump therefore had
Speaker 7: to do with who was involved in the plot. And
Speaker 7: the first person he calls after Donna tells him about
Speaker 7: the bump is Katie mcbana. Why her, well, because she
Speaker 7: was the middle person between the Atolsins and the hitman.
Speaker 5: Now investigators believe that they may be able to pressure
Speaker 5: her into giving up this entire scheme and who were involved.
Speaker 1: How does it work though, when she's.
Speaker 7: Questioned, well, you're talking about Katie mcmanawa, Yes, she isn't questioned.
Speaker 7: So they tried to talk to her. They got to
Speaker 7: the point where they had gotten all the useful information
Speaker 7: they were going to get out of the undercover operation,
Speaker 7: which essentially ended when both Charlie and Donna called the
Speaker 7: undercover agent and professed to knowing nothing. And so they
Speaker 7: were getting about ready to arrest Sigfredo Garcia. That was
Speaker 7: going to be the first arrest, and they showed up.
Speaker 7: The FBI shows up at his workplace, and at the
Speaker 7: same time, Craig Isom is banging on the front door
Speaker 7: to the town home that the two of them are
Speaker 7: living in. They're back together again. They got back together,
Speaker 7: you know, less than a year after the murder, and
Speaker 7: as I said, Charlie Adelson was no longer her boyfriend,
Speaker 7: and they're living together in this town home. And so
Speaker 7: now you have Sigfredo Garcia at his workplace having to
Speaker 7: answer questions from the FBI, and he tries to be
Speaker 7: cooperative or says he's trying to be cooperative. At the
Speaker 7: same time, Craig Isom and another FBI agent are knocking
Speaker 7: on the front door to their town home and Katie
Speaker 7: mcbanoh is inside panicking, calling her. She calls Garcia her husband.
Speaker 7: They were never legally married, but she calls her. She
Speaker 7: calls him her husband. She's calling him, no answer, and
Speaker 7: there's no answer because he's now talking with the FBI,
Speaker 7: and she gets a coworker of his and like, there's
Speaker 7: people knocking on my door. I don't know what to do.
Speaker 7: Are they the cops? Can you help me? And it's
Speaker 7: very clear she's panicked. The long and short of is
Speaker 7: she never actually opens that door. They never do question her,
Speaker 7: and not that day, but a couple of days later
Speaker 7: they arrest Sigfredo Garcia, and now she's living out, you know,
Speaker 7: without him. He's on the inside, she's on the outside,
Speaker 7: and she's trying to live her life. She doesn't get
Speaker 7: arrested until October first of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: He got arrested.
Speaker 7: I think it was May twenty fifth of two thousand,
Speaker 7: so there's a four plus month gap, and they don't
Speaker 7: question her in that time, and she doesn't volunteer to
Speaker 7: come in and talk to the police. It's kind of
Speaker 7: a cat and mouse game until she's finally arrested. And
Speaker 7: that's the point at which they thought she would squeal,
Speaker 7: because it's either that or spending a bunch of time,
Speaker 7: if not the rest of her life in prison. And
Speaker 7: amazingly enough, from October first, twenty sixteen to this very day,
Speaker 7: she's never spilled the beans on anybody.
Speaker 5: What do police learn from Rivera and where is he?
Speaker 7: So Rivera was arrested I want to say, two weeks
Speaker 7: approximately after Garcia, and it was a lot easier to
Speaker 7: bring him into custody than it was Garcia because he
Speaker 7: was already in custody. He was in a federal prison
Speaker 7: for being involved in gang activity. He was a member
Speaker 7: and actually a leader of the Latin Kings gang in
Speaker 7: North Miami and was rounded up as part of a
Speaker 7: huge Rico case a year before. So he had been
Speaker 7: in jail and then prison after he was convicted and
Speaker 7: senced for quite some time. At the time they arrested
Speaker 7: him on the charges of murder for the murder of
Speaker 7: Dan Markel. And he initially when he talked with Isom
Speaker 7: and the FBI lead agent Pat Sanford, the first time,
Speaker 7: he tried to play dumb, as if he didn't know
Speaker 7: who Garcia was, as if he had never been to Tallahassee.
Speaker 7: They showed him the ATM photograph of him and Garcia
Speaker 7: in the prius and he said, Okay, maybe we were
Speaker 7: in Tallahassee, but we were just going to visit Florida State.
Speaker 7: And eventually it became clear that he was going to
Speaker 7: have to talk or he was potentially facing the death penalty,
Speaker 7: and so his court appointed lawyer worked out a deal
Speaker 7: with the government where he was going to turn state's
Speaker 7: evidence and would offer a profit statement and then testify
Speaker 7: any resulting trials. In exchange for his current sentence, which
Speaker 7: was twelve and a half years, to be increased only
Speaker 7: by six and a half years. He would have a
Speaker 7: nineteen year sentence on the murder charges he would plead
Speaker 7: to second degree murder, he'd be sentenced to nineteen years,
Speaker 7: but those nineteen years would run concurrently with his existing
Speaker 7: twelve and a half year federal sentence, so basically only
Speaker 7: an additional six and a half years in prison because
Speaker 7: he was the first one to get to the government
Speaker 7: and turn state's evidence, and he did, and.
Speaker 5: He had a really good deal, and he also said
Speaker 5: that he was not the shooter, correct.
Speaker 7: Did I don't know how much that had to do
Speaker 7: with how good a deal he got, because at the
Speaker 7: end of the day, it didn't really matter that you
Speaker 7: had two men in that priests that pulled up right
Speaker 7: behind Dan Markel's vehicle and somebody had to go do
Speaker 7: the shooting, and they both knew it was going to
Speaker 7: be done, and Rivera was in the driver's seat bringing
Speaker 7: Garcia to kill Dan Markel, So the culpability was about
Speaker 7: equal on both sides, even though Garcia, according to Rivera,
Speaker 7: is the one who actually squeezed the trigger.
Speaker 5: So you talk about Garcia being arrested and in the
Speaker 5: ensuing time they do not be able to question meg
Speaker 5: Bawana mag Banowa.
Speaker 7: It's a lot of people say Magnanua. She herself says
Speaker 7: mag Banawa, her attorneys say mag Banawa. Therefore, I think
Speaker 7: the correct way of saying it is mag Banawa. But
Speaker 7: her name's been pronounced a lot of different ways by
Speaker 7: a lot of different people covering this case.
Speaker 5: Catherine meg Banoa plus enough, thank you. So this ensuing
Speaker 5: gap of time, when they're not they're not able to
Speaker 5: question her, how do they proceed with Garcia? And what
Speaker 5: information do they get from him that they won't already have?
Speaker 1: Whatsoever?
Speaker 7: They get nothing from him? Unlike Rivera's attorney. First of all, he,
Speaker 7: unlike Rivera, has a privately retained attorney named som Zangana,
Speaker 7: who has a very interesting backstory that I develop in
Speaker 7: great detail and book. But Zangana never enters into plean
Speaker 7: negotiations with the government. There's a pretty good reason why not,
Speaker 7: and that's because sick Fredo Garcia can Just as much
Speaker 7: as Katie mcbanowa considered Sigfredo Garcia her husband, Sigfredo Garcia
Speaker 7: considered Katie McDonald his wife and squealing. If you look
Speaker 7: at this the way that the evidence has been developed
Speaker 7: and the way it's been proven in court, squealing would
Speaker 7: have involved squealing on her. And remember, initially she wasn't
Speaker 7: even arrested, so you have this period of four to
Speaker 7: five months where she's not even arrested, then she is,
Speaker 7: and that, in my view, is what prevented him from
Speaker 7: coming forward and making a deal. The way that Rivera
Speaker 7: made a deal, Rivera was ratting out his best friend
Speaker 7: in the world, Sigfredo Garcia, and Sigfredo Garcia's wife. But
Speaker 7: he knew that it was that or facing the death penalty,
Speaker 7: and so has between those two, ratting out his best
Speaker 7: friend since childhood made more sense. Sigfredo Garcia was not
Speaker 7: going to rat out his wife, and so she wasn't
Speaker 7: convicted until May of twenty twenty two. So it wasn't
Speaker 7: until that point where she was actually convicted of this
Speaker 7: murder where he finally was freed of the notion you know,
Speaker 7: if I say something that's going to get her convicted,
Speaker 7: She's now been convicted. So it's only been a few
Speaker 7: months where perhaps the calculus is now somewhat different for
Speaker 7: him about whether he will tell what he knows, But
Speaker 7: the big difference is he's already been convicted in the
Speaker 7: sentence to life in prison.
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Speaker 5: smartest way to hire. Now, Stephen, we were talking about
Speaker 5: we jumped ahead a little bit to the trial of
Speaker 5: all these characters involved in Dan Markel's murder. Take us
Speaker 5: up to that trial and the prosecutor involved, the judge involved,
Speaker 5: and the defense attorneys that were assigned.
Speaker 7: Okay, so there were lots and lots and lots of
Speaker 7: delays and procedural wrangling. Finally the case gets to trial
Speaker 7: in September of twenty nineteen, and if you'll remember the
Speaker 7: players that we've talked about, Sigfredo Garcia was facing the
Speaker 7: death penalty, his wife, Katie Macbanawa was not facing the
Speaker 7: death penalty but was facing life in prison. And Louis
Speaker 7: Rivera had turned state's evidence, so he's already been sentenced
Speaker 7: to nineteen years in prison. And so at this trial
Speaker 7: you have, the lead prosecutor is Georgia Kapelman. She's essentially
Speaker 7: second in command in the State Attorney's office in Tallahassee.
Speaker 7: For Sigfredo Garcia, I've already mentioned, his attorney was a
Speaker 7: gentleman named Sam Zangana who's an attorney, a defense attorney
Speaker 7: out of Miami. And for Katie Megdanawash, she has two attorneys.
Speaker 7: Her attorneys are Tara Kawas, who is also an attorney
Speaker 7: from Miami, and Chris Dukost, who is also an attorney
Speaker 7: for Miami. So all of the defense attorneys literally had
Speaker 7: a schlep seven hours from Miami and live in hotel
Speaker 7: rooms for essentially a month. And I describe all that
Speaker 7: in the book. While Georgia Kappelman has a huge home
Speaker 7: court advantage, literally her home court was that courthouse, and
Speaker 7: her office was literally steps away in the same building,
Speaker 7: and she had an army of other prosecutors and paralegals
Speaker 7: at her Beckham call to assist her, so she had
Speaker 7: a very distinct advantage. The judge was James Hankinson, who
Speaker 7: has tried many high profile cases in Tallahassee criminal history.
Speaker 7: A very good, very stern judge, a stickler for the
Speaker 7: rules and a stickler for lawyers being punctual and respectful,
Speaker 7: although that wasn't true for a lot of the case.
Speaker 7: The lawyers snapped at each other quite a bit. The
Speaker 7: lawyer's backstory is very interesting. Georgia Kapelman grew up in
Speaker 7: Tallahassee because her father was a football player at Florida
Speaker 7: State University and played in the NFL and then returned
Speaker 7: to Tallahassee when he wanted to start a family, and
Speaker 7: that's where Georgia grew up. Krista Coast grew up in
Speaker 7: the Boston area and then became a prosecutor in Miami
Speaker 7: before he became a defense attorney. Sam Zanganay his family
Speaker 7: was actually from Iran and he wound up in this
Speaker 7: country as a youngster because he was born here and
Speaker 7: had American citizenship. He wound up in Miami as a
Speaker 7: prosecutor as well, and then became a defense attorney. And
Speaker 7: who have I missed, I've gotten to Coast, I've gotten Cowas,
Speaker 7: I've missed Cowas. Tara Kuwas has the most interesting backstory
Speaker 7: of all of them. She grew up in Jamaica and
Speaker 7: only came to the United States when she was eighteen
Speaker 7: years old to go to college at Florida International University.
Speaker 7: And she herself had been arrested and thrown in the
Speaker 7: Broward County jail when she was a freshman in college
Speaker 7: and it was that experience that led her to wanting
Speaker 7: to become a defense lawyer. So she was a defense
Speaker 7: lawyer from the moment she graduated from from law school.
Speaker 7: And those are the lawyers. That's the judge who populated
Speaker 7: the courtroom as this trial gets underway where the government
Speaker 7: is seeking to have a jury find the defendants sekred
Speaker 7: of Garcia and Katie mcdonalah guilty of first degree murder.
Speaker 5: Now this Terra kuaas you mentioned that she really does
Speaker 5: believe Katie's story, doesn't she.
Speaker 7: Well, I think at the time Katie came to that
Speaker 7: Christacoast and Tara Kawas came to see her in jail
Speaker 7: the day that she was arrested. She was arrested and
Speaker 7: taken to that same Broward County jail that Taro Coas
Speaker 7: herself had been in when she was a college student.
Speaker 7: I think Katie was so insistent that she had nothing
Speaker 7: to do with any of this and knew nothing about it,
Speaker 7: that Christoicost and Tara Kawas bought in right away. Obviously
Speaker 7: they received mountains of evidence from the government, but they
Speaker 7: had explanations for every piece of evidence that they were
Speaker 7: able to spin in the opposite direction. And that was
Speaker 7: what they did throughout the trial. Everything that the government
Speaker 7: used to try to show that Katie had been involved,
Speaker 7: they spun it to show No, a guilty person wouldn't
Speaker 7: deposit tens of thousands of dollars in hush money. No
Speaker 7: guilty person would do that. Obviously that money had nothing
Speaker 7: to do with trying to hush her up, because if
Speaker 7: it did, she wouldn't have been depositing it. So things
Speaker 7: like that, that's how Dacost and Coass tried to explain
Speaker 7: away the most damning and incremitting evidence against Katie. Remember,
Speaker 7: Katie wasn't at the scene of the crime. There's no
Speaker 7: surveillance footage showing her at the scene of the crime.
Speaker 7: That's not the allegation against her. The allegation against her
Speaker 7: is that she basically solicited her husband Garcia to do
Speaker 7: this hit on behalf of Charlie Adelson. And obviously they
Speaker 7: don't have a phone call or text message or email
Speaker 7: where there's that deal being made between Charlie Adelson and
Speaker 7: Katie mcdanaha, or between Katie mcdanawa and Sigfredo Garcia, so
Speaker 7: they have to prove it all circumstantially.
Speaker 5: One of the biggest issues was this money that was
Speaker 5: deposited in August I believe, or July anyway that summer,
Speaker 5: and she had a hard time accounting for where she
Speaker 5: had increased sums compared to any other month in history.
Speaker 5: So I'll tell us about that issue and its relevance
Speaker 5: in this case.
Speaker 7: Yeah, she deposited, if I remember right, about fifteen thousand
Speaker 7: dollars in the five weeks after the murder in cash.
Speaker 7: She was also receiving checks from the Adelson Institute, which
Speaker 7: is the dental practice at which Charlie Adelson worked, and
Speaker 7: he owned it as well. Harvey Adelson was the person
Speaker 7: who founded that practice. His dad. He worked there, and
Speaker 7: Donna Adelson worked there. And you have forty four checks
Speaker 7: signed by Donna Adelson directly to Kati mcdonaa with a
Speaker 7: lot of those checks consecutively numbered. They started just weeks
Speaker 7: after the murder and they ended right after Sigfredo Garcia
Speaker 7: was arrested. So you have all those checks, you have
Speaker 7: all this cash. She has breast implants that are four
Speaker 7: thousand dollars that miraculously are paid for in cash. Shortly
Speaker 7: after the murder, she gets a lexus that was Charlie's
Speaker 7: lexus but titled to Harvey. Harvey signs that lexus over
Speaker 7: to her in January of two fenty sixteen. So all
Speaker 7: of these benefits coming to Katie macdaniwa in addition to
Speaker 7: allegedly receiving some twenty five thousand dollars in payoff money
Speaker 7: from the murder itself. So all of this money coming
Speaker 7: to her, all of these checks, all of these benefits,
Speaker 7: and that was the primary way that the prosecution tried
Speaker 7: to through that evidence show that she had clearly been involved.
Speaker 7: The wiretap calls were actually very effective as well, because
Speaker 7: Katie mcbaniwa is not saying, why are you involving me
Speaker 7: in your family's problem? I don't have anything to do
Speaker 7: with this. And in fact, in some of those calls,
Speaker 7: the language that Katie used and how aggressive she was
Speaker 7: in pushing back against Charlie Adelson made it seem like
Speaker 7: she was somebody who was capable of pulling off something
Speaker 7: as extreme as a murder.
Speaker 5: Now, the defense tried to counter that, and still it's
Speaker 5: unusual for a defendant to take a stand or someone
Speaker 5: to take a stand.
Speaker 1: She does take the stand, she does. What about this.
Speaker 5: Dulce vita surveillance audio about this issue? Why was their surveillance,
Speaker 5: What was the relevance or the importance of this dulce
Speaker 5: vita video, and what was the problem with it.
Speaker 7: We're talking about trial one because Trial two is going
Speaker 7: to change all that. But at trial one, which ends
Speaker 7: up in a hung jury as to Katie, conviction as
Speaker 7: to Sigfredo Garcia, hung jury, two jurors voted not to convictor.
Speaker 7: Tenjurers voted to convictor. So it was a mistrial. But
Speaker 7: at that first trial, they wanted the prosecution wanted to
Speaker 7: not only let the jury see the restaurant meeting between
Speaker 7: Katie McDonald and Charlie Adelson that happened the very afternoon
Speaker 7: that Charlie had met with his mother. He then went
Speaker 7: straight to where Katie was working in Sunny Isles Beach
Speaker 7: and they got a table at a restaurant called Dulce Vita.
Speaker 7: And because their calls were being surveilled, the FBI knew
Speaker 7: they were going there, and they had two different agents
Speaker 7: show up and sit at the table right next to them,
Speaker 7: both of whom had recording devices. So little did Charlie
Speaker 7: or Katie know, but their entire conversation was being recorded
Speaker 7: on sophistic recording devices. The problem is is that they
Speaker 7: were too far away from them and there was too
Speaker 7: much background noise in the restaurant. They were sitting literally
Speaker 7: within feet of the kitchen where all the dishes are clanking,
Speaker 7: and their children of the restaurant workers that are back
Speaker 7: in the kitchen. This is way too much noise to
Speaker 7: hear anything. So what the prosecution did is they had
Speaker 7: the lead agent, Pat Sandford, have sophisticated noise canceling headphones,
Speaker 7: good software from the FBI, and he went through that
Speaker 7: hour long discussion between Katie and Charlie and literally tried
Speaker 7: to piece together every word and he put together a transcript,
Speaker 7: and the prosecution wanted the jury to have that transcript
Speaker 7: to follow along as Katie and Charlie talked about what
Speaker 7: to do. This is the day after the bump talked
Speaker 7: about what to do about this perceived blackmailer, how to
Speaker 7: handle that, and the transcript was not permitted into evidence.
Speaker 7: The judge, Judge Hankinson, said no, you can't do that,
Speaker 7: that's not allowed. You can play the tape if you
Speaker 7: and let the jury make of the words that they
Speaker 7: can hear what they make of it. So what Georgia
Speaker 7: Kapelman ended up doing was playing about one minute of
Speaker 7: the video from dulce Vita, even though it was an
Speaker 7: hour long, and she just did that to show the jury.
Speaker 7: I wish we could tell you what happened, because it's significant.
Speaker 7: I wish you could hear these words because they're significant.
Speaker 7: But it turned out not being significant at all, because
Speaker 7: the jury couldn't hear anything, and all they knew was
Speaker 7: that something significant had happened at dulce Vita, and they
Speaker 7: literally had to decide the case without knowing what it was.
Speaker 5: Not because of that necessarily, but there's a hung jury.
Speaker 5: There's a couple hold outs that don't believe that she
Speaker 5: is guilty, and this is a hung jury.
Speaker 7: I wouldn't agree with that assessment or characterization. As I
Speaker 7: described in the book the very strong twenty five year
Speaker 7: old juror one yes, who I, by the way, met
Speaker 7: with in person during my first coat to Tallahassee. The
Speaker 7: things that she was thinking about were primarily not related
Speaker 7: to Katie's guilty innocence. They were primarily related to both
Speaker 7: Sigfredo Garcia and Katie mcdanna was spending the rest of
Speaker 7: their life in prison, with their two children being rightwards
Speaker 7: of the state, and that was something she wrestled with
Speaker 7: that the jury was actually sequestered a hotel. She wrestled
Speaker 7: with late into the evening, couldn't sleep, and just couldn't
Speaker 7: stomach the notion of sending both of them to prison
Speaker 7: for the rest of their lives and leaving those kids
Speaker 7: without parents. She had a hard enough time convicting Sigfredo Garcia,
Speaker 7: even though the evidence against him, which did include all
Speaker 7: that surveillance footage, was overwhelming, so she finally and reluctantly
Speaker 7: agreed to convict Sigfredo Garcia, but she would not agree
Speaker 7: to convict Katie Garcia without crystal clear evidence against her.
Speaker 7: And of course the evidence against her wasn't crystal clear,
Speaker 7: it was circumstantial.
Speaker 5: Thanks for that correction. So with this one person that
Speaker 5: had reservations there hung. Jerry Garcia is sentenced to life
Speaker 5: without parole and also conspiracy as well. So how do
Speaker 5: the prosecution Kapelman and the prosecution team decide to retry Katie.
Speaker 7: Well, The trial ended in Ober of two thoy nineteen.
Speaker 7: They were supposed to get going again for a new
Speaker 7: trial in April of twenty twenty, and of course everybody
Speaker 7: knows what was going on in April of twenty twenty.
Speaker 7: The whole world shut down. Yes, and it took a
Speaker 7: very long time before they were able to get this
Speaker 7: case back on track. And that gave Georgia Kaplman time
Speaker 7: and an opportunity to fix the biggest thing that went wrong,
Speaker 7: which was not being able to use that dulce Vita recording.
Speaker 7: She had Pat Sandford, the lead agent from the FBI,
Speaker 7: do everything he could to find an audio forensics expert
Speaker 7: who would be able to get rid of some of
Speaker 7: that background noise and really zoom in on the voices
Speaker 7: of Charlie and Katie, and they had several false starts
Speaker 7: and audio forensics experts telling them it just can't be done.
Speaker 7: Georgia Kaplman was unwilling to accept that, and they finally
Speaker 7: found the right guy to do this work. His name
Speaker 7: is Keith maclvine. He spent ten years as a war
Speaker 7: crimes investigator with the CIA. He has twelve patents in
Speaker 7: forensics technologies that can be used to eliminate background noise
Speaker 7: from crowded, noisy environments. And he took the raw audio
Speaker 7: and was able to enhance it considerably to the point
Speaker 7: that you can now hear virtually everything that Charlie Adelson
Speaker 7: is saying, although you can't hear very much of what
Speaker 7: Katie is saying because her voice is weaker, she's more
Speaker 7: soft spoken, and the recording devices weren't angled in quite
Speaker 7: the correct way to get what she was saying. But
Speaker 7: you can hear pretty darn well what Charlie is saying.
Speaker 7: And when Kapelman heard that recording and they actually got
Speaker 7: it transcribes and they superimposed the words onto the screen
Speaker 7: sort of like subtitles. When she saw the combination of
Speaker 7: the subtitles and the back and forth conversation. Her epiphany
Speaker 7: wasn't just that they had stronger evidence now against Katie.
Speaker 7: Her epiphany was they had been waiting all this time
Speaker 7: for Katie to flip on Charlie because they wanted to
Speaker 7: have the hardest evidence, the most solid evidence they could
Speaker 7: against Charlie, and they weren't going to go forward against
Speaker 7: him until they did. Her epiphany was they didn't need
Speaker 7: Katie anymore in order to be able to pursue a
Speaker 7: prosecution of Charlie for first degree murder. Charlie's own words,
Speaker 7: she concluded, were tantamount to a confession, and that's what
Speaker 7: led almost immediately to his indictment and his arrest for
Speaker 7: first degree murder for the murder of Dan Mark.
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Speaker 5: Now you talk about Charlie, Charlie Adelson being arrested and
Speaker 5: the retrial of Katie. Let's talk about that she takes
Speaker 5: to stand again at this retrial, doesn't she?
Speaker 1: She does?
Speaker 7: And there are two things different. One it's a different
Speaker 7: prosecutor cross examining her. It's another assistant state attorney named
Speaker 7: Sarah Catherine Dugan wasn't involved in the first trial. Interesting
Speaker 7: she was doing it because there was this projection by
Speaker 7: the defense lawyers that they were going to call Sigfrido
Speaker 7: Garcia as a witness in Katie's defense, and Georgia Kapelman
Speaker 7: was ready to do that cross examination while he never testified.
Speaker 1: But she did.
Speaker 7: And they now had this recording forty one minutes, not
Speaker 7: the full hour, but forty one minutes of excellent recording
Speaker 7: that they played I think fourteen snippets of during her
Speaker 7: cross examination, basically challenging her to come up with an
Speaker 7: explanation of why she didn't run for the hills when
Speaker 7: Charlie was saying all the incriminating things that he was saying,
Speaker 7: and she didn't have any explanation for why she didn't
Speaker 7: run for the hills, why she sat there and continued
Speaker 7: talking with him, leading to the obvious conclusion that they
Speaker 7: were strategizing together how to deal with the fact that
Speaker 7: a blackmail or even perhaps a cop was onto them
Speaker 7: about the murder of Dan Markel.
Speaker 5: She also had the misfortune of having a couple of
Speaker 5: her friends testify, one in particular, name Missquerro, that did
Speaker 5: considerable damage with her testimony, didn't.
Speaker 7: She Yes, she was a repeat witness from the first trial.
Speaker 7: Misscuero was a very effective prosecution witness, one of her
Speaker 7: best friends, and in fact, Katie was the godmother to
Speaker 7: one of her children. So this is not somebody who
Speaker 7: was a biased prosecution witness like Louis Rivera, who you know,
Speaker 7: basically turned state's evidence and had to testify in a
Speaker 7: certain way. Mesquero, although she was subpoenaed by the government,
Speaker 7: she was not someone you would have expected to throw
Speaker 7: her very good friend for many years and the godmother
Speaker 7: of her children under the bus. But there were just
Speaker 7: so many things that had happened that were objective evidence
Speaker 7: of Katie's involvement that Jindra Masquero knew about. The most significant,
Speaker 7: which the most significant of which was Katie had Misscuero
Speaker 7: keep her children overnight the very night that Dan Markel
Speaker 7: was killed. The prosecution theory was is that she went
Speaker 7: and spent the night with Charlie Adelson and filled the
Speaker 7: money bags up to go pay off the hitmen the
Speaker 7: next morning. And that testimony was a lot more believable
Speaker 7: because Jinra Mascuero kept her kids that night and no
Speaker 7: other night in their history, very rarely ever looked after
Speaker 7: her kids. It was so unusual that that's what that's
Speaker 7: when circumstantial evidence is at its most powerful, is when
Speaker 7: it's really unusual and doesn't fit the normal pattern. And
Speaker 7: that was really, really devastating to Katie that Miss Scuaro
Speaker 7: was with her kids overnight that very same night, and
Speaker 7: it fit the prosecution's timeline in theory.
Speaker 5: Prosecutor dig in two, really you say no pity, And
Speaker 5: so that testimony was rough to hear.
Speaker 1: If you were a fan of Katie whatsoever.
Speaker 7: Yes, But I think at the end of the day.
Speaker 7: What was the worst part of the case for Katie
Speaker 7: mcbanoll was her own testimony, especially when Sarah Catherine Dugan
Speaker 7: was cross examining her. She by all accounts, she didn't
Speaker 7: do as well as she did in the first trial,
Speaker 7: not that she convinced anybody the first trial she didn't,
Speaker 7: But in the second trial, in particular with the delcha
Speaker 7: vita evidence she just had, she was tripping over herself
Speaker 7: so often. It just didn't look good. She didn't confess
Speaker 7: to having been involved in the murder, but she didn't
Speaker 7: make a powerful case for herself that she wasn't involved
Speaker 7: in the murder. The lies seemed to be pretty easy
Speaker 7: to pick out.
Speaker 5: What was the result of that trial in terms of
Speaker 5: the sentence and conviction, She.
Speaker 7: Was convicted on all counts first degree murder, conspiracy to
Speaker 7: commit first green murder, and solicitation of first green murder,
Speaker 7: and after forty five days or so, she was sentenced
Speaker 7: to life in prison without the possibility of pearl. So
Speaker 7: she and Garcia both now have the exact same sentence.
Speaker 7: They will both die in prison unless there's some miraculous
Speaker 7: development of some sort.
Speaker 5: Now, what is the status of the investigation into Charles Adelson.
Speaker 7: Well, the investigation is done. He's now on track to
Speaker 7: be tried sometime in twenty twenty three. The lawyers are
Speaker 7: talking about possibly as early as March of two thousand,
Speaker 7: twenty three. It may get delayed until the summer of
Speaker 7: twenty twenty three. But he's the only other defendant currently
Speaker 7: charged with murder or involvement in the Dan Markel case.
Speaker 7: There are others, most significantly Donna Adelson. That there are
Speaker 7: probable cause affidavits that make very clear that the investigators
Speaker 7: believe she is as much involved in this conspiracy as
Speaker 7: the others. They just haven't seen fit at this point
Speaker 7: to arrest her, And maybe that's being used as leverage
Speaker 7: with Charlie and trying to get him to negotiate a plea.
Speaker 7: Who knows. It's tough to say exactly what the strategy
Speaker 7: is and the strategies evolving over time. They may arrest
Speaker 7: her before the next trial. They may not arrest her
Speaker 7: before the next trial. Sigfredo Garcia may decide to come
Speaker 7: talk before the next trial. Katie Magdanawa might There's a
Speaker 7: lot of things that can still happen between now in
Speaker 7: the time Charlie Adelson stands trial, and any one of
Speaker 7: those things can change dramatically the trajectory of this case.
Speaker 5: As a result, you talk about the Markel Act. Something
Speaker 5: for Ruth and PHILM. Markel will tell us about this well.
Speaker 7: Part of the story that I haven't been able to
Speaker 7: talk about yet, but I'm glad I get this chance now,
Speaker 7: is that there are so many horrible things that have
Speaker 7: happened to the Markell family. Obviously the murder of Dan
Speaker 7: Markel at the top of that list. But remember he
Speaker 7: had two very young boys at the time, and they
Speaker 7: were immediately brought down to South Florida, where, if you
Speaker 7: believe the prosecution's theory, the very people who plotted the
Speaker 7: murder against their father are involved in raising them, and
Speaker 7: that's horrible in and of itself. Two years after the murder,
Speaker 7: Wendy Adelson stops allowing visitation between the Markell family and
Speaker 7: Ben and Lincoln, so they're completely cut off from the
Speaker 7: Phil and Ruth are completely cut off from their grandchildren,
Speaker 7: which is the only living the only living human beings
Speaker 7: that have the lineage of Dan Markel, and they can't
Speaker 7: have any communication because Wendy won't allow it. And that
Speaker 7: led Ruth to fight for grandparents' rights in the Florida legislature,
Speaker 7: ultimately resulting almost the same exact time as all these
Speaker 7: amazing developments with Charlie Adelson's arrest, adulce Vita enhancement, a
Speaker 7: conviction of Katie mcdonaa In that exact same time frame,
Speaker 7: the bill passes the Florida legislature and is signed by
Speaker 7: the Governor of the State of Florida and expands grandparent
Speaker 7: rights in Florida to allow someone like Ruth and Phil
Speaker 7: whose child is killed murdered to be able to get
Speaker 7: visitation if the only living parent has complicity in that crime.
Speaker 5: What's very very interesting in this fascinating and very very
Speaker 5: interesting book is how you came to this story in
Speaker 5: the first place.
Speaker 1: Your last book was Murder.
Speaker 5: At Lake Seminole, Evil at Lake Seminol, Oh, pardon me sorry,
Speaker 5: Evil at Lake Seminole, and you were talking to the
Speaker 5: victim's mother. Tell us about this conversation and also what
Speaker 5: you say. You are a strong believer in fate and
Speaker 5: divine intervention. Tell us how it worked in this case
Speaker 5: you believe.
Speaker 7: Well, I was finished with that book. It was during COVID,
Speaker 7: so I didn't have a lot of events, live events associated.
Speaker 7: I didn't have any live events associated with that book
Speaker 7: because of COVID, and I was my mind was getting
Speaker 7: restless and ready to write another book. And every now
Speaker 7: and again I would talk to Cheryl Williams and she
Speaker 7: became a fan of mine, and she asked me, what
Speaker 7: are you going to write about next? And I said,
Speaker 7: I've been looking. I haven't found the right story yet.
Speaker 7: And she said, well, you really ought to think about
Speaker 7: writing about the Dan Markell case. And I literally knew
Speaker 7: next to nothing about the Dan Markell case at that time.
Speaker 7: The only things that I knew were from the pages
Speaker 7: of the Tallahassee Democrat, of the local newspaper, because sometimes there
Speaker 7: were stories about the Mike Williams murder, her son's murder,
Speaker 7: and the Dan Markell murder on the same page on
Speaker 7: the same day, and I would my peripheral vision would
Speaker 7: see it. But that was about it. Cheryl is somebody
Speaker 7: that's really important to me. I told her I would
Speaker 7: consider it thinking about it, and literally, almost like the
Speaker 7: next day, I sit down on my couch and I
Speaker 7: look on the DVR of our satellite TV and lo
Speaker 7: and behold, there is a Dateline episode on the Dan
Speaker 7: markl case that I never asked my d to record. Wow,
Speaker 7: but it was just sitting there and I watched it,
Speaker 7: and I was mesmerized by what I learned about this story.
Speaker 7: Now literally learning about this story for the first time.
Speaker 7: And one of the talking heads that was connecting the
Speaker 7: various segments together was a guy named Matt Scherr who
Speaker 7: had done a podcast for Wondery called over My Dead Body. Well,
Speaker 7: that led me in my next direction, which was to
Speaker 7: listen to that podcast, and I was floored by how
Speaker 7: good that podcast was and how amazing and fascinating this
Speaker 7: story was. And that was the point at which I
Speaker 7: decided I am going to write this story. At least
Speaker 7: I'm going to try. And you know how life comes
Speaker 7: full circle and you know the whole thing about divine intervention.
Speaker 7: If you'll look on the front cover of my book,
Speaker 7: at the very bottom is a quote from Matthew Cher,
Speaker 7: who's become a friend of mine in this process, who
Speaker 7: read my book and he wrote, and it's on the
Speaker 7: front cover empathetic, engrossing, and impeccaby researched the single best
Speaker 7: piece of reporting I've read on the Dan Markel case. Matthews,
Speaker 7: share creator and host of Wondery's Over My Dead Body podcast,
Speaker 7: which I'm immensely grateful for that quote and that he
Speaker 7: allowed us to put it on the front cover of
Speaker 7: the book, And that's this whole thing coming full circle.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and I agree with you.
Speaker 5: There's so many cases where and so many stories, and
Speaker 5: so many authors have come and I've interviewed them and
Speaker 5: they've said something similar where it was definitely divine intervention
Speaker 5: for the author's participation in the case and the investigation
Speaker 5: and any interaction with the family, which is so important
Speaker 5: as well. I want to thank you very much for
Speaker 5: coming on and talking about extreme punishment, the chilling true
Speaker 5: story of acclaimed law professor Dan Markel's murder. Can you
Speaker 5: tell us about any social media that you do regarding
Speaker 5: this Facebook or otherwise.
Speaker 7: The best place to find me is on my website.
Speaker 7: I have a website that goes into a lot of
Speaker 7: details about the three books that I've written, which you've
Speaker 7: been kind enough to interview me about each one. Yes,
Speaker 7: in fact that those podcasts can be found on my website,
Speaker 7: which is Stephenbiepstein dot com. I do have Facebook. You
Speaker 7: can find my Facebook and everything else through my website.
Speaker 7: But like I said, there's a lot of information about
Speaker 7: these crimes, the murders, the investigation, well beyond what's in
Speaker 7: the book. There are pictures, there are videos. The whole
Speaker 7: trial from the evil like Seminole case can be watched
Speaker 7: straight from my website, and good chunks of trials, the
Speaker 7: two trials in this case can be watched straight from
Speaker 7: my website.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, Stephen b Epstein. Extreme Punishment, the
Speaker 5: chilling true story of acclaimed law professor Dan Markel's murder.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. You have a great evening, and
Speaker 5: thank you so much.
Speaker 1: For this interview. Good night, Thanks for having me. Good Night,