After leaving the gym, Dan Markel drove home expecting an ordinary day. Instead, his killer was waiting for him.
As he arrived home, the prominent Florida State University law professor was talking on the phone with music teacher Stewart Schlazer about school options for his children. Then the conversation took a terrifying turn.
“Can you please hold on a second? There’s an unfamiliar person in my driveway,” Markel said.
Seconds later, Schlazer heard what he described as “a loud boom.”
“There are really eerie parts of those final hours,” producer Lily Fletcher told Fox News Digital. “You look at the CCTV footage, and it’s a normal day. Dan dropped off the kids at school, he’s gone to work out at the gym, and then there’s a Prius driving around the gym car park. It never stops. It’s clearly waiting for him.”
“It’s always reminded me of a shark circling,” Fletcher said. “There was something just so sinister and eerie during such a mundane part of his day, just going to the gym. That really stayed with me. That’s a really chilling part, just watching that footage.”
Markel was shot in the head while sitting in his car in the garage of his Tallahassee, Florida, home on July 18, 2014. The 41-year-old died the following day.
The case is the subject of a new true crime docuseries from ABC News Studios, “Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel,” now streaming on Hulu.
It features exclusive interviews, including with FBI agent Pat Sanford and a recorded conversation with Rob Adelson, the oldest Adelson son, who testified against his mother, Donna Adelson, at her trial. It largely follows the prosecution’s investigation and trial evidence, while also including testimony and recordings introduced during court proceedings.
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Markel married Wendi Adelson in 2006 after the two met online. depicts prosecutors’ theory that Wendi’s mother, Donna, was a dominating, controlling figure in their lives with strong opinions about her daughter’s choices.
Wendi later said the couple’s marriage fell apart after they had two sons, Benjamin and Lincoln. Their contentious divorce in 2013 centered on one question: where the boys would grow up. Wendi fought to move them to to be near her family, while Markel pressed to keep them in Tallahassee, where the parents shared custody.
According to the docuseries, Donna was furious after the relocation request was denied.
Prosecutors said the custody dispute became the catalyst for a murder-for-hire plot that would take years to unravel. They argued at trial that Donna helped orchestrate Markels killing after he stood in the way of letting her daughter and two young grandsons make the move south.
They also revealed that her son Charlie Adelson arranged for Markel’s killing through his then-girlfriend, Katherine Magbanua, who connected him to Sigfredo Garcia, the father of her children, and Garcia’s friend Luis Rivera.
Prosecutors said Garcia shot Markel while Rivera drove the getaway car. Over the next decade, investigators used cellphone records, surveillance video, financial records and secretly recorded conversations to build the case.
“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.
“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 the calcula
