And, yes you’d be correct that you’d have to be in Florida for this one. A more bizarre and sad story we couldn’t invent.
Miami New Times reports…..
Dan Markel, a Florida State University law professor and one of America’s most eminent legal scholars, was chatting idly on his cell phone as he drove up to his Tallahassee home. The morning was bright and a humid 85 degrees. The magnolia trees drooped over the winding street as Markel drew near.
In the driveway of 2116 Trescott Dr., Luis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia waited in a rented Toyota Prius. They had come from Miami. Garcia fingered the trigger of a black .38 snub-nose that Rivera had scored a week earlier for $150 from a trailer-park gun dealer.
They were there to make $100,000.
Markel pulled up in his Honda Accord, clicked the remote to open the garage door, and passed the Prius in the driveway as he entered the garage.
Garcia exited the driver’s seat, his right hand nestled against his stomach. Rivera jumped out as well, and they both walked briskly to the garage, where the Accord idled. Garcia approached the closed driver’s-side window and fired two shots, shattering the glass and striking Markel on the bridge of his nose and left cheek.
It was 11 a.m. Friday, July 18, 2014. Markel died 14 hours later. He never regained consciousness.
In the 15 months preceding what investigators say was a “murder for hire,” Dan Markel’s ex-mother-in-law, Donna Adelson, had sent her only daughter a flurry of emails. They were pointed and vitriolic, filled with hatred for her son-in-law.
She called the man with two Harvard degrees an “idiot,” a “fucker,” and a “bastard.”
“You suffered under his ‘reign,’” Donna wrote to her daughter, Dan’s ex-wife Wendi, in May 2013. “Narcissistic personality disorder causes major problems in a marriage.”
Donna continued by derogatorily calling Dan “Jibbers” for his habit of talking incessantly and “Elvis” for what she perceived as his swollen self-regard.
She concluded the email, “I’m too angry to write any more. I’m going to shower, wash my hair, and get ready for you and the boys to come home.”
The email is one of hundreds of thousands of documents, CDs, and photos of evidence in a file in the Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee, where Sigfredo Garcia, age 37, and Kathy Magbanua, his 34-year-old, on-again, off-again girlfriend and the mother of his two children, will soon face trial on first-degree murder charges.
Cops say Donna Adelson and her son Charlie, Wendi’s older brother, paid $100,000 to have Markel killed. According to law enforcement, they hoped to free Wendi to move with her two pre-school-aged sons to South Florida, where she grew up. But almost five years after the murder, neither has been criminally charged.
“This is such an unusual situation, in that law enforcement is alleging a conspiracy but only some members of that conspiracy have been charged,” says David Lat, a New York lawyer who has tracked the case from the beginning on his blog, Above the Law.
Three suspects from Miami were arrested in 2016. One of them was Luis Rivera, AKA “King Tato.” By the time of the indictment, Rivera was already serving a 12-year federal sentence on criminal conspiracy charges for his role as a leader of the Latin Kings’ North Miami operation. Rivera received a reduced sentence of 19 years to run concurrent with his federal sentence in exchange for his confession and cooperation in the case.
If Garcia or Magbanua are convicted in Tallahassee, they might be inclined to cooperate with the state — if they have information, that is. “If they implicate the Adelsons, the case will be much stronger,” Lat says. “So I don’t think the Adelsons are out of the legal woods yet.”
The case has been roundly dissected and discussed on legal blogs, in law journals, in true-crime internet hangouts, and on most every TV network, major and minor. A six-episode podcast, Over My Dead Body, held the top slot on iTunes in February. The already sad drama of the broken family, one in which the Markel wedding was feted in the pages of the New York Times, is a tragedy for all involved.
More at https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/fsu-professor-dan-markels-murder-was-a-contract-hit-11188262
