Adelson, who looked to be crying when he re-entered the courtroom to hear the verdict, ducked his head and appeared to mouth the word "no" as he heard the jury's decision.
He was found guilty on all counts: first-degree murder, solicitation to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit murder.
The original story follows below.
Nearly ten years in the making, the murder case against Broward dentist Charlie Adelson is now squarely in the hands of a Leon County jury.
Prosecutors say Adelson enlisted two hit men to kill Florida State University law professor Dan Markel, his former brother-in-law, at Markel's Tallahassee home in 2014. At the time of the murder, Adelson's sister Wendi and Markel were fighting a bitter custody dispute, and Adelson's parents were pushing for Wendi and her two boys to move back to South Florida.
During closing arguments on Monday, Assistant State Attorney Georgia Cappleman said Adelson was on police's figurative radar almost immediately after the murder.
"Within one hour of the shooting and before professor Markel was even pronounced dead, this path was already pointing to the defendant when his sister revealed to law enforcement that her family hated Dan Markel, and her brother Charlie had joked about hiring a hit man to kill him," Cappleman said.
Cappleman presented a series of emails and divorce filings in an effort to show the jury how volatile the dispute had become — and to dispel what prosecutors portrayed as an attempt by the defense to minimize the bitterness of the divorce. She noted Adelson's mother, Donna, was upset after a judge denied Wendi's motion to relocate her children to South Florida the year before the murder.
"It's time for action," an email from Donna to Wendi allegedly stated. "It's time to take control of your life and not let Jibbers think he's won anything."
Cappleman said Adelson set the murder-for-hire plot in motion when, on Halloween in 2013, he asked his then-girlfriend, Katherine Magbanua, if she knew of anyone who could "harm somebody." Adelson wanted to solve the family's problems for his mother, according to prosecutors.
"She presented an opportunity to the defendant to do what he does and solve this problem," Cappleman continued. "This conspiracy spread when the defendant met someone who can actually get this thing done — someone who was in a position of trust in his life and a person who had connections to the kind of people who, for a price, were willing to point a gun at a complete stranger and pull the trigger."
Dan Markel was a prominent law professor at Florida State University.
Florida State University College of Law
Cappleman claimed cellphone records show information traveled from Adelson to Magbanua and then to the two killers, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera. (Rivera previously cooperated with prosecutors and received a 19-year sentence; Garcia and Magbanua went to trial and both received life sentences for their role in the murder.)
As part of her closing, Cappleman sought to raise doubts about Adelson's defense — that Magbanua, Garcia, and Rivera extorted him after they murdered Markel. Adelson claims Magbanua had told Garcia, the father of Magbanua's children, about a one-million-dollar offer the Adelsons were willing to make to induce Markel to move the family to South Florida. Once they heard about the Adelson family's wealth and the bitter custody dispute, Garcia and Rivera took it upon themselves to murder the law professor, Adelson claims.
Cappleman argued the extortion defense defied logic.
"These two dudes with no connection at all to Dan Markel, and without two nickels to rub together, rented a car and paid for gas to come to Tallahassee twice in order to kill someone this defendant hated, to harm him?" Cappleman said during her closing argument. "Why not just kill and rob him if what you are after is money and there is no hired hit?"
When the defense opened its closing argument, attorney Daniel Rashbaum said the evidence in the trial was a "mountain of reasonable doubt."
"Charlie Adelson didn't have a motive to upend his life," Rashbaum said.
He noted that Adelson was living a successful life as a periodontist and was not preoccupied with his sister's divorce and his former brother-in-law.
"And by the way, Wendi Adelson and her two boys moving to South Florida would have no impact on Charlie Adelson," Rashbaum continued. "Would he be happy when they were there? Sure. Would it change his life? No."
The defense attorney argued that Garcia hated Adelson and wanted to rekindle his relationship with Magbanua. It would make little sense for Garcia to risk going to jail to carry out a hit for a man he despised, Rashbaum argued. Rashbaum called Magbanua "a professional liar and con artist" and said she heard Adelson's repeated jokes about hiring a hit man — and the Adelsons' one-million-dollar offer to entice Markel to move — and got the idea in her head to extort Adelson.
"You heard testimony from repeated witnesses that on July 1, just 17 days before the murder, Sigfredo Garcia tried to run Charlie off the road, threatened him, left a threatening voicemail that he was going to kill him," the attorney argued.
"You don't have to like Charlie Adelson," Rashbaum told the jury. "There are plenty of reasons not to like him. That doesn't make him a murderer."
The attorneys wrapped up their closing arguments mid-afternoon, and the jury began deliberations shortly after.
The trial commenced on October 26 and featured testimony from key players in the alleged plot, including Magbanua, who publicly admitted her role in the murder for the first time.
