Lily Fletcher says surveillance footage of a silver Prius trailing Dan Markel feels like watching a predator hunt.
The ABC News Studios producer, who spent months immersed in the case for the new docuseries “Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel,” described the gym parking lot footage to Fox News Digital last week. Markel, 41, had just finished his workout on July 18, 2014, and was preparing to drive home to Tallahassee, Florida, where his killer waited.
“You look at the CCTV footage, and it’s a normal day,” Fletcher said. “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,” she added. “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 never made it inside his house. He was on the phone with music teacher Stewart Schlazer, discussing school options for his two young sons, when he pulled into his garage and noticed a stranger.
“Can you please hold on a second? There’s an unfamiliar person in my driveway,” Markel told Schlazer, according to the docuseries.
Seconds later, Schlazer heard what he described as “a loud boom.” Markel was shot in the head and died the following day.
The case, now streaming on Hulu, traces how a bitter custody battle spiraled into a murder-for-hire plot that took more than a decade to unravel. Markel had married Wendi Adelson in 2006 after the two met online, and their 2013 divorce centered on a single question: whether their sons, Benjamin and Lincoln, would remain in Tallahassee or move south with Wendi. Markel fought to keep them in Tallahassee, where the parents shared custody, and a judge denied Wendi’s relocation request.
According to the docuseries, Wendi’s mother, Donna Adelson, was furious at the outcome. Prosecutors would later argue that Donna helped orchestrate Markel’s killing after he stood in the way of letting her daughter and grandsons move to South Florida.
“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 investigation required extraordinary patience and precision. “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.”
Prosecutors laid out a chain of connections: Donna’s son Charlie Adelson, a dentist, arranged the killing through his then-girlfriend Katherine Magbanua, who connected him to Sigfredo Garcia, the father of her children, and Garcia’s childhood friend Luis Rivera. Garcia shot Markel while Rivera drove the getaway car, prosecutors said.
Charlie was convicted in 2023 of first-degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation, and sentenced to life in prison. He 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. He also said he needed to pay more than $300,000 in 48 hours or he would be killed.
Magbanua and Garcia were convicted of first-degree murder. Rivera was sentenced to 19 years after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and cooperating with prosecutors.
In 2025, Donna was convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy and solicitation, and sentenced to life without parole plus an additional 30 years.
Fletcher found the hundreds of FBI wiretap recordings even more disturbing than the surveillance footage.
“There are hundreds of wiretapped phone calls of the Adelson family,” she 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.”
Two years after the murder, Donna and Charlie spent hours on recorded calls discussing Wendi’s boyfriend and whether she should stay in the relationship. “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 involvement and has never been charged. Fletcher, after hearing the wiretaps, believes the online vitriol against her may be misplaced.
“I don’t know why people online have such strong levels of certainty,” Fletcher said. “In listening to the wiretap conversations of Wendi’s mother and brother, and the way they are so accustomed to meddling in her life and deciding what is best for her, I could imagine a scenario in which she wasn’t involved in it at all. I think that the vitriol around Wendi, especially online, is sad in a way. I imagine a scenario in which Wendi’s family did this without her knowledge.”
The docuseries includes exclusive interviews with FBI agent Pat Sanford and a recorded conversation with Rob Adelson, the oldest Adelson son, who testified against his mother at her trial.
“This is the story of a breakdown of a marriage, a custody dispute, and problems that escalated and seemed so irreconcilable,” Fletcher said. “But this was an instance where things got so out of hand, and no one comes out with what they want.”
“Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel” is now streaming on Hulu.