It’s a cruel world! Florida dentist Charles Adelson has been arrested and charged with hiring hitmen to kill his sister’s ex-husband Daniel Markel over “a bitter custody dispute over the estranged couple’s two children.” The Daily Mail reports that Charles is facing “charges of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder after newly enhanced audio recordings implicated him in the slaying.”
Here are the details;
Adelson was being held on Thursday without bond at the Broward County jail after being arrested at his home by U.S. marshals. He is awaiting transfer to Tallahassee.
Adelson and other members of his family have long been cited by prosecutors and investigators as potential suspects in the July 18, 2014, killing of Florida State University law professor Daniel Markel at his Tallahassee home.
Markel, 41, had been married to Adelson’s sister Wendi, who had been unable to return to South Florida because Markel had joint custody of their young children after a highly contentious divorce.
Markel was gunned down in his garage by two men, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, who prosecutors say were hired through Katherine Magbanua, a former girlfriend and employee of Adelson and the mother of Garcia’s two children.
Garcia is serving a life sentence after being convicted of first-degree murder in 2019. Rivera is serving a 19-year sentence after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for testifying against Garcia and Magbanua.
Magbanua is facing a retrial on a first-degree murder charge next month after a hung jury at her first trial in 2019.
Leon County State Attorney Jack Campbell said in a statement that Adelson was indicted by a grand jury after technicians were able to enhance the sound on a 2016 video recording made secretly of him talking to Magbanua inside a noisy South Florida restaurant, La Dolce Vita.
Flip to the next page for a news video going over the crazy murder plot.