Talking Dateline: Deadly Mischief

0:03Hi, everyone. I'm Blaine Alexander, and today we are talking Dateline. I'm here with my good friend, Dennis Murphy. Hi, Dennis. Hey, Blaine. How are you? I'm good. But we also have a special guest, the one and only Brad Davis, super producer here, who is really our resident expert on the case to talk about this sprawling family drama. Brad, thanks so much for joining us. Sure. Glad to be here. If you haven't seen this episode, you can watch it on Peacock or listen to it in the Dateline podcast feed and then come right back here. But just a quick recap. When FSU law professor Dan Markell was shot in the garage of his home back in 2014, investigators uncovered a murder-for-hire plot that they say was orchestrated by his mother-in-law, Donna Adelson.

0:45Now, 11 years after his murder, Donna's murder trial ended with a guilty verdict, making her the fifth person to be convicted in this case. The big question now, of course, will anyone else be charged? We'll discuss that during today's Talking Dateline. In this episode, we've also got an extra clip of Wendy Adelson testifying during her mother's trial. And of course, later, we will take some of your questions from social media. All right, guys, let's talk Dateline. Great. Okay. Of course, I've followed this case. I know the stories and the backstories and everything. But just watching this was so unbelievably fascinating to me, just how many people are involved in the killing of this one man.

1:25This has unfolded over more than a decade. I just wonder what it's like following a case like this. I mean, that really seems to, you think both shoes have dropped and then yet there's another shoe and another shoe and things just kind of keep coming in this. Yes. And Blaine here, Brad and I are going back to the same courtroom in Tallahassee, Florida every couple of years. And we look at the tables to the right and the left of the prosecutor's same and are the same, but the defendants keep changing with different lawyers and the years go by and Ruth and Phil Markell, the parents of the murdered man, are still there.

2:00And you get a sense of the elapsed time. But it always crook me, Blaine, there's something Shakespearean about it, where there's a tragic flaw that brings down an entire family. But first, I can't think of any other Dateline episode that begins with Wheel of Fortune. When that kicked off, I said, okay, where are we going with this one? And then to see that Donna Adelson was actually a Wheel of Fortune contestant, And one, I was immediately jealous because that's one of my dreams is to be on Wheel of Fortune. But secondly, to find that and then have what seemed to be almost the perfect puzzle, Mischief Maker, was unbelievable.

2:35It provides this fantastic through line because I noticed, Brad and Dennis and your writing, that you wove Mischief Maker and making mischief throughout the script, throughout the entire two hours. And I just thought that that was brilliantly done. That kind of a thing can wear out its welcome, but I think we got away with it. I think it did. And you can't make it up. I mean, Mischief Maker, you know, it just, it writes itself almost. I didn't have to do very much, or Dennis and I both. So we talk about Donna Adelson and all of your reporting on this case. I mean, how would you describe her? Who is this woman?

3:06Someone who puts on just a shiny veneer, but there's someone completely different underneath? I think there is a shiny veneer. She's, you know, I think a lovely woman, you know, to meet her running the office at the dental practice, raising three very fine young people, you know, as far as their professions and educational background. But the dark side of it is the control. Yes, I totally agree. She's sort of like the ultimate controlling mother who, you know, helicopter parenting is one thing, but this was like, you know, really in your face, you know, choosing dates for you to go on for Wendy, you know, trying to do all sorts of things to control.

3:44And that's where her Achilles heel lies. And I mean, the signature for her defense is this phrase, she's a meddler, not a murderer. But there is evidence that she meddled in her children's lives for years and years and years. And her grandchildren. She wants to control where her grandchildren are. She wants them to be with her. And that's, you know, if you go by what the prosecution has said, that's what this case has always been about. And that's my Shakespearean flaw, this desire for control of all elements of your life in a very uncontrollable kind of world we live in. One thing that really stuck out to me about this episode is that the video that we had was just incredible.

4:21I mean, from the interrogation video of Wendy to the bump video to the video inside Dolce Vita to all of this video that really came together to tell the story. I wonder if we could talk about that bump video a little bit more. Do we know why investigators targeted her and not Charlie? That's a good question. I don't know the exact answer to it. I'd have to ask Georgia, but the Kaplan and the state prosecutor. But I think they felt like Donna, that Donna would be sort of more open to sort of freaking out and being fearful and sort of doing something. Whereas Charlie might have been more confrontational.

4:59The ultimate goal is to get them chattering on, you know, the chatter on the wiretaps. That's what the bump is really about, the idea of the bumping that up so that they'll start talking potentially about the crime that's been committed. Blaine, I think of the strategy here is something like a pool break shot where you're there going to make the balls scatter and you fire your shot and there they go and they're in the pocket and they're moving around the table. Let's scatter the balls and see what happens. And what happened was precisely what they hoped, which is that she started making calls, not to the police, not to her husband, but to her son, Charlie, was the first one.

5:35What's going on? Let me tell you what's happening here. I mean, it set in motion this chain of events that even though none of them actually said anything incriminating on the lines or when they were being tapped, to your point, just the fact that they started calling, that gave police enough to start connecting dots. Brad, I think it produced maybe the best single bit of evidence in the trial, which is this monitored wiretap phone call between Charlie and his mother after the bump, where Charlie's asking, is it about me? She said, well, and Brad, here's the quote I think is the quote of the trial.

6:08It's about us. It's about the two of us. Probably both of us. Which makes you say two of us in what? What's going on? What is Donna telling her son? I think that's maybe the most important bit of evidence of the trial. It's not incriminating that since they're not saying we murdered our son-in-law, our brother-in-law. But it's creating this image of what this conspiracy was after the fact. And that's what really was hit home for the prosecution. Watching all of this, I got the sense that this was a family that knew, certainly knew enough to be careful, right? They know enough to kind of avoid what you would think to be your common pitfalls if you're trying to not get caught for murder.

6:50But they did just enough to obviously give investigators what they needed to piece it together. It's a web put together of wiretapped calls, emails, text messages. that becomes the spider web that pulls everybody in. And Charlie just never shuts up. He talks himself into a conviction and pulls the other people in with him. Let's talk about the other piece of video that I thought was very striking, which was that video of Donna and Harvey preparing to board the flight to Vietnam. I can watch that video over and over. And the tussle blame for her phone. Donna is holding out her phone, which is evidence.

7:27And the FBI agent, Pat Sanford, is reaching for it and grappling with it. And all of a sudden, it all happens in an enclosed space, and she's cuffed and being walked in. It all happens, Brad, I get the feeling it's like a minute and a half on that jetway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was able to get a hold of that video. We were the first people to actually air the video, which, to you on a horn a little bit. But you could really see that and see, like, the craziness in that moment. Had they gotten on that flight, had the plane actually taken off, it would have been a very different story. I agree.

7:59As we know. It would be. We might have had to go to Vietnam. Who knows? When we get back, Wendy Adelson will take the stand in her mother's murder trial, and she testifies about a phone call that she made to Donna sharing the news of Dan Markell's death.

8:18So let's get into the trial. And Brad, I know that you were there, faithfully. You reported it every week on Andrea's podcast, Dateline Shrew Crime Weekly. this is now the fifth installment related to this case. What was it like there in the courtroom? Well, it's actually very different than it was when I first started covering this because there's a lot of media, but there's also a lot of podcasts. The story has sort of taken on a life of its own. And I was struck by the fact that there are just so many more people. There are people flying in from the UK, from England, just to be there for the trial, these regular people.

8:54And then you also have, well, you have the Markels who, like, you know, saw, again, the parents and Dan's sister, Shelley. You know, just, it's almost like a family reunion, you know, in a way where you see all these people again for this really sorrowful reason. But, and it was the first time seeing Harvey Adelson and anyone from the Adelson family in court because we had these previous trials and they were nowhere to be found. And so now you have Harvey there supporting his wife right behind her. So that was a very different dynamic than what was happening. And you have the in-laws on both sides of the court.

9:32I can't imagine what that felt like. Let's talk about Donna Adelson's appearance very quickly. She was wearing headphones. That was one of my first questions. Why was she wearing those headphones the whole time? She gets earwax in her ears a lot, and she has trouble hearing. So they wanted to make accommodation for that. And there's so much surveillance, you know, audio in this case that even the jury members would have headphones, too. So it was not that unusual. And beyond that, I think there were some optics going on here portraying this woman as not only elderly, but maybe frail on her way to being feeble.

10:07And jurors, this can't be a killer before you. What the story you're hearing is not matched on Adelson with a cardigan sweater and the glasses and gray hair. I had that thought that the Donna Adelson we saw there in the courtroom was a very different Donna Adelson than the one that we saw in that bump video where she was walking, you know, quickly down the stairs. I mean, very clearly like South Beach. I mean, yeah, clearly keeps in shape. I mean, just very, very different, very different look. One little detail that came out in some of this pretrial stuff was that she, before they were going to flee, to go to Vietnam, she actually had an appointment with a plastic surgeon to get her neck tucked or do something, which I think she had to cancel because she could go to Vietnam and flee the country.

10:54So, you know, this woman who took good care of herself, you know, before all this, she did not look like the dowdy grandmother that you saw in court. Right, right. So prosecutors really had this challenge on their hands in prosecuting this case because this was a circumstantial case. But they did have some jarring, some very jarring pieces of evidence. This note about, hey, let's put the boys in Hitler uniforms and then we can show Dan who's really in control, right? Dan who is, you know, Jewish. And so this is something that certainly one would look at and say, okay, this is certainly in stark contrast to this image of, oh, she's the kind grandmother who's babysitting and baking custom banana bread, right?

11:33Yeah, those emails, I mean, I think a lot of things were damning for Donna, but those emails are really pretty awful. They're awful to read, and they really do show someone who really hates this person and will basically do anything to get this person out of their lives. Just oozes with vitriol, which becomes the foundation of their accusation that she is the architect of this whole thing. She hated Danny so much that she would get rid of him by killing him, having him killed. Brad, I think that you and I, I think we talked about this because I remember I was guest hosting on Andrea's podcast, I think, the week that Rob Adelson testified.

12:11The way that you brought him into the episode and kind of teed him up to be this guy and then he comes out and he is a state's witness. I'm just so curious about these family dynamics. Talk to me about Rob Adelson. Where does he come from? Why did he decide to testify? What's he about? Well, Rob is, he's an ENT surgeon outside of Albany. He is the oldest of the three Adelson kids. And he, you know, he has not seen the family as much over the years. One thing that we don't get into in the episode, and we, they didn't get into on the stand either in the trial, was that Rob has a longstanding issue with his parents.

12:53They did not approve of the woman that he wanted to marry. and he entered into a marriage that he didn't think was really right for him because of his parents' feelings, specifically his mother's feelings. And he eventually divorced that person and finally married the woman that he really was in love with from the beginning. So that in itself is a window into the dynamics of the family, that their approval was so important, and he defied it ultimately. From just the drama, here he is testifying against his mother in a first-degree murder case and tells the story. Well, what was it, calling up after Harvey's birthday, I guess, and it was one of these, the news has been released, Mom, they've got the guys.

13:43They've got the two killers, and it's crickets on the phone. Donna will not engage. And you couple that with that moment right after the murder where he is talking with his mother and he's already talked to the FBI and she's telling him, oh, by the way, honey, don't talk to the FBI if they call you. But he's already talked to them. And so he tells her that and she's like, oh, well, you don't know anything anyway. I mean, to me, that statement is as incriminating as anything else because that implies that, oh, well, I know something. I thought it was such strong testimony, Brad, that you could almost imagine Georgia Kappelman rising after he left the stand and say, your honor, the state rest.

14:20I mean, it was that devastating. And in fact, you and I were both in the courtroom for it. And then I left the courtroom and I ran into Georgia, the prosecutor, and she just said, wow, after his testimony. And I'll always remember that. Another thing that they did was they, Wendy testified right before Rob. And Wendy was on the stand for a few hours. And as she was leaving the court, Rob came in from the back and from a different entrance. And this was all to separate Wendy and Rob, who have not seen each other in years, or spoken. You know, you had all these members of this family in this courthouse.

14:56Charlie is in jail, you know, right by, ready to testify. You know, it was a very weird family reunion, to say the least. Well, we've talked about every Adelson up to this point, except Wendy. I guess the first question, and this is probably the question many viewers have and probably you two yourselves, will she face charges? I mean, she's seemingly the woman at the center of all of this. Well, whatever we say about Wendy from here on I, we should boilerplate by saying that she has never been accused. She has always denied any involvement in any aspect of this plot. And that so far the state has not said whether they're going to go for her with a charge or not.

15:36But she is of fascinating, endless interest in the court of public opinion here. I mean, she testified under immunity agreements in several of these trials. Does that have any impact, though, on whether she could be charged in the future? Prosecution has said no. That is not a limiting factor for them. And there's a whole record of what things that Wendy has said about this case. I mean, the story that has a lot of people wondering is, on the day of the murder, what is she doing getting in the car and she's going on a mission to the liquor store to buy a bottle of bourbon? Why does she go down her very old street, go out of her way?

16:16Why is it that she sees flashing lights and disturbance around her house that she doesn't approach an office and say, it's where my ex-husband lives. What's going on? That kind of circumstantial story would be used against her, but I don't think there's any reason And it couldn't be used against her in any pending prosecution. Yeah, she's had many explanations for that. And the other question is, why does she not call the daycare where her kids are to make sure that they're okay and that they're there? Why does she not call Dan? There are a lot of questions that that whole incident raised. She said it was she would go down that street a lot because she just would be nostalgic and want to see the house and the kids.

16:58you know, she was on her way somewhere to pick up some liquor for a bar party that she was going to. But she did go strangely out of her way. And that she's always said, well, that's the way that I knew the way to go. So it's a murky question, but it's a big question. But a question. Yes. So we have some extra sound from Wendy testifying. Brad, can you kind of just tell us what we're going to listen to? Yeah, this is Wendy testifying at Donna's trial. And the prosecution is just asking her, you know, about her time in the interrogation room and some of the questions that she was asked and the fact that she spoke to her mother during that time period.

17:41Did you ask your mom in that telephone conversation to tell Charlie what was going on? I think I did. I didn't want to make any more phone calls. Yes. And your mom took the news pretty well, didn't she, this phone call? I wouldn't say she took the news well. I think she was upset. Did you say something different in your law enforcement interview after you got off the phone with her? I don't think I did. I don't think I said something like that. Didn't you say page 265, line 5 through 6, quote, my mom handled that pretty well? I may have said that. I can check it. Can you tell me the line again?

18:20Yes, ma 'am. Page 265, line 5 and 6. Yes, that's what I said. And then page 280, line 22 and 23. Did you also say, well, my parents sounded really surprised, so that's at least a relief. Yes, I see that here. No further questions. I think a good defense attorney could spin that in a way to make it sound less damning to her. Yeah. I mean, we actually included that little excerpt from the interrogation in our date line. It goes by very quickly at the end where she says, you know, well, my mom handled that pretty well. If you think about it, yes, it can be read a couple of different ways. But you listen to Donna Adelson talking and she says, what, what, on the phone when she hears this news.

19:07But there's not a lot of other stuff coming from Donna at that point. She's not asking a lot of questions, to be honest. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about Donna's attorney. In her closing argument, I was struck by the fact that she pointed the finger at Charlie. She kind of pointed the finger at Wendy to point it away from Donna there. I think the phrase is throw under the bus. Yeah. Right, which has been the pattern in these trials, too, where everyone has been blaming someone else. You know, actually in the closing arguments, the prosecution even had a thing with different like Spider-Man, like with different like clones of Spider-Man pulling the finger at each other.

19:43And it was sort of a joke in court. And, you know, that's sort of what this has been. Like they're all blaming each other. So three hours, three hours to find Donna guilty, three hours to find Charlie guilty. Were either of you surprised? I think I was surprised at both of them, Brad. I thought Charlie would take a little more time. I thought they both would take more time. I thought Donna would take more time than Charlie, but they really did end up being about the same. And I think the fact that Charlie did take such a short amount of time gave the prosecution even more confidence that they could go after Donna.

20:18Without Charlie's conviction, you could not have gone after Donna, I think. So I'm curious from both of you. I mean, this has taken a significant chunk of your last decade. Where do you see this going next, knowing what you know about this case? Well, I think the world of Georgia Kappelman's skills, the prosecutor in Tallahassee, and the post-mortem assembly that she had after Charlie's trial, we were all out outside the courtroom there. And she said, and somebody said, is this the end of the prosecution of the Adelson family? And she said, quotably, famously, stay tuned. And immediately, within a week, I think it was, Brad, we had the indictment of Donna Adelson.

21:03This time, she also took a victory lap outside, as was deserved. And Brad, I think you threw her the question of, should we stay tuned? I always say it was funny, because she came out, and people were just, they, of course, wanted to ask you about Wendy. That was the immediate thing. Who's going to ask the Wendy question? And she said, yeah, and she said, don't use the W word. Don't say that. Don't ask me that. Don't ask me that. She was smiling and joking, but not really joking. And finally, to sort of get into it, at least in a roundabout way, I said, well, should we stay tuned? And she said, oh, yeah, sure, you can stay tuned.

21:40But, you know, it's the really big, burning question. There are only a few people who know the answer. There might not even be an answer yet, to be honest. So we'll see. Wow. Well, I know that we will certainly be staying tuned. We'll stay tuned to your coverage of this, which has been exceptional. Coming up after the break, we are going to answer some of your questions from social media.

22:04We've got some social media questions. We have, as you would expect, there are a lot of questions about this one, a lot of reactions from viewers. So let's start with a video question from Al Romas. Let's take a look. Hey, Dennis. It's Al Romas. I'm in the sun here in Florida. Question. I've been following the trial for a while. Any background on the other son? I think his name is Robert. Just wondering why he escaped the mess of that family and how he did it. Any insight into this character would be welcome. Thanks, man. And enjoy your work. Thanks, Al. Appreciate it. It's a good observation.

22:47as I say to me, the star witness of this trial is Rob, the son who did not get pulled into any of this. It was always on the skirts. And I think we talked about Brad, some of his background and why he was removed, but he had not talked to his mother in nine years, 10 years? Yeah, he did not want to be controlled by his parents, by his mother, and was living far away. Fascinating. The situation resisted putting him on the stand until they absolutely had to use him, and that was in the trial of his mother. So dramatic. Very, very. Let's listen to another audio question. I found it extremely odd at the end when they said that Wendy changed the two boys' names back to Adelson to protect them.

23:38Why would she do that? The Adelson name is associated with murder. Well, I think if you ask that questions of Ruth and Phil Markell, who are the parents of the murdered man, they say that this is a blatant attempt to just erase entirely the memory of Dan Markell. So the boys will have no association with him, with the heritage of their names, with their relatives in Canada, that he will be gone from their memory. And that's why it happened. Yeah. The defense, and actually Wendy herself would say, that she did it to protect them, their security and privacy, the boys. And she would say that, well, if you go back to when this initially happened, it was the headlines were Dan Markell, FSU law professor murdered.

24:26And Markell was the name that was in the paper so much. So she says that that's why she changed to Adelson. You know, they're teenagers now, as you mentioned in the story. But this just has to be such a terrible situation for them. Even just that notion of having their names changed and having to go through this and watching trial after trial and, you know, their uncle, their grandmother go to prison. Do we have any sense of how they're holding up in all of this? Well, they've been kept offstage from the media, the likes of us. So we hear about them mainly through Phil and Ruth Markel, and they're quite candid.

25:03And they tell us about the Zoom calls and the very limited visits they've had. And the in-person visits always have Wendy in the room. So they desire to have more visits. And yet, this very odd situation where Wendy has custody of the kids, so the grandparents have to play nice with her in order to keep the contacts open at all. So how are the boys doing? You can only imagine. They'll be able to go online and read all of this if they haven't already. It's going to be out there forever. We have another question. This is something that we actually touched on earlier in our discussion about Harvey and the question of whether Harvey will ever be charged.