Dan Markel was shot in the head in his own driveway.

He had just dropped his kids off at daycare. He had just finished his morning workout at the gym. He pulled into the driveway of his home in Tallahassee, Florida, on July 18th, 2014, and someone was waiting for him.

A light-colored Toyota Prius had followed him to daycare that morning. Then to the gym. Then home.

The Prius pulled into the driveway right behind him. A man got out. He walked to the driver’s side window. He shot Dan Markel twice through the glass.

Then they drove away.

Dan Markel was a law professor at Florida State University. He was respected, accomplished, and deeply loved by the colleagues and students who knew him. He was also the father of two young boys, and he had been fighting a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife.

He died in the hospital the following day.

He was forty-one years old.

And the person who set his murder in motion — the person who connected the family that wanted him dead with the men who pulled the trigger — never drove to Tallahassee. Never touched a weapon. Never stood in that driveway.

Her name was Katherine McBan.

She was Charlie Adlesen’s girlfriend.

And for years, she sat at the center of one of the most complicated and chilling murder conspiracies in recent Florida history, insisting she had nothing to do with any of it.

She was lying.

To understand Katherine McBan, you have to start with the man she loved before Charlie Adlesen.

His name was Sigfredo Garcia.

Katherine and Sigfredo met through a mutual friend sometime after high school. They were young, they fell into each other, and over the years their relationship became the complicated, tangled kind that is very hard to walk away from. They had two children together — a boy in 2007, a girl in 2012. They referred to each other as husband and wife even though they were never legally married.

But the relationship was turbulent. There were accusations of cheating. There were issues with Sigfredo’s alleged drug use. And eventually, a phone call that Katherine didn’t mean to hear ended things — or tried to end them.

“His phone kind of called me by accident,” she would later say in court. “And I kind of overheard him talking about something to one of his friends about a girl. And I was just — I was done.”

By late 2013, she meant it.

Katherine moved on. She met a new man at a dental office in South Beach, Florida — a periodontist named Charlie Adlesen, son of a successful Coral Springs dentist, with a reputation around South Florida as a bit of a playboy.

Charlie drove nice cars. He came from money. His family ran the Adlesen Institute, a dental practice his father Harvey had built from the ground up. His brother Rob was a doctor. His sister Wendy was a lawyer.

Charlie put his number in Katherine’s phone at work one day.

That was the beginning of everything.

—

Katherine and Charlie’s relationship was casual. They were never officially boyfriend and girlfriend. They overlapped — Katherine would later admit in court that she continued sleeping with Sigfredo Garcia during the same period she was dating Charlie Adlesen.

Sigfredo, for his part, was not happy about Charlie.

Not at all.

According to Katherine’s friend Yindra Velasquez Mascaro, things nearly came to physical blows between the two men in July of 2014. Sigfredo pulled up out of nowhere, blocked Charlie’s car in, jumped out, and started confronting him in the street. Charlie managed to get away without it escalating further.

What no one outside the Adlesen family knew at that moment was what was already in motion.

Because that same month — July 2014 — about 500 miles north in Tallahassee, someone hired two men from South Florida to kill Dan Markel.

Dan Markel was Charlie Adlesen’s former brother-in-law.

His ex-wife was Charlie’s sister, Wendy.

And the Adlesen family had wanted him out of the picture for a long time.

—

Here is what the divorce case looked like from the outside.

Wendy Adlesen and Dan Markel had married, had two sons together, and then their marriage fell apart. The divorce was finalized in July of 2013. But the litigation didn’t stop there.

Wendy had wanted to move back to South Florida, closer to her family. She had actually already moved with the children once. A court ordered her back to Tallahassee in June of 2013. Dan Markell had fought that relocation effort, and he won.

The Adlesen family was furious.

Before Dan’s murder, he had filed a motion to have Donna Adlesen — Wendy’s mother, his children’s grandmother — barred from unsupervised contact with the boys. He alleged she had been disparaging him to the kids.

A ruling was never made on that motion.

Dan Markel was murdered before the hearing could take place.

In the hours after the shooting, as Wendy was being interviewed by detectives, she said something that would follow this case for years. She mentioned her brother Charlie. She mentioned that he had made a joke — that he had looked into hiring a hitman, but decided buying her a TV as a divorce present would be cheaper.

“It was always his joke,” she said.

Detectives noted it. And they kept looking.

—

The key to the entire investigation started with a neighbor’s phone call.

Dan Markel’s neighbor had spotted a light-colored car — something that looked like a Toyota Prius — backing out of the driveway at the time of the shooting. Investigators released a surveillance photo of the vehicle five days after the murder.

Then, in July of 2015, police obtained video footage from a city bus camera that appeared to show the same Prius. The image was too grainy to make out a driver or a license plate. But it caught something else.

A toll transponder on the windshield.

Investigators pulled toll records for every Toyota Prius that had traveled into Tallahassee around the time of the murder. Those records led to a car rental agency in Miami, Florida. The rental agreement showed that the car had been rented by a man named Luis Rivera.

On the agreement, alongside Rivera’s contact information, was a second phone number. It was labeled simply: “brother.”

That number belonged to Sigfredo Garcia. Rivera’s childhood friend. Katherine McBan’s children’s father.

The Prius had led to Rivera. Rivera had led to Garcia. And Garcia — once investigators began following his connections — led directly to the Adlesen family.

The trail ran through one person.

Katherine McBan.

—

In May of 2016, Sigfredo Garcia was arrested at a South Florida gas station.

The charges: cocaine possession and first-degree murder in connection with the death of Dan Markel.

Luis Rivera, already serving federal prison time on an unrelated charge, was arrested on the same case.

The arrests sent shockwaves through Miami. What could a convicted gang member and a South Florida man possibly have to do with an FSU law professor in Tallahassee?

Then the answer started coming together.

Luis Rivera, facing murder charges that could carry the death penalty, made a deal.

He pleaded guilty. He cooperated. He agreed to testify against Katherine McBan and Sigfredo Garcia. In exchange, he received an additional seven years in prison on top of the twelve he was already serving for the federal case.

Seven years. For participating in a murder-for-hire.

It was, by any measure, the deal of a lifetime.

And what Rivera said in exchange for that deal was this: Katherine McBan had set the whole thing up. She was the link between the Adlesen family and the men who pulled the trigger. She had told Sigfredo to go to Tallahassee. She was the one Sigfredo called when it was done.

“Hey, it’s done already,” Rivera quoted Garcia as saying into the phone while they were still driving out of Tallahassee.

And Katherine’s response, which Rivera said he could hear clearly from the passenger seat?

“I know.”

—

On October 1st, 2016, Katherine McBan was arrested.

She was thirty-one years old.

The arrest warrant described her as the quiet connector — the person who bridged the gap between a wealthy South Florida family’s rage and the men willing to act on it for money.

Investigators had something else, too.

Phone records.

On the day Dan Markel was shot, after Wendy Adlesen called her mother Donna from the detective’s interview room to tell her what had happened, the calls moved in a chain.

Donna called Charlie. Charlie called Donna back. They spoke for five minutes and forty-seven seconds. Then he called Donna again for six minutes and thirty-one seconds.

And then, almost immediately after those calls, Charlie called Katherine McBan.

They spoke for nearly three minutes.

That phone call — made to Katherine in the hours after Dan Markel was shot, following a chain of calls that started with Wendy in a police interview room — was, according to investigators, not a coincidence.

It was a confirmation.

—

Then came the money.

In the fall of 2014 — approximately two months after Dan Markel’s murder — checks began appearing in Katherine McBan’s financial records from a specific source.

The Adlesen Institute.

Charlie Adlesen’s family dental practice.

The payments were made approximately every two weeks. They continued from September 2014 all the way through March of 2016 — which was, almost exactly, when the first arrests in the case were made.

Investigators found no evidence that Katherine McBan had ever physically gone to the Adlesen Institute to perform any work. There were no timesheets. No records of duties performed. No documentation of services rendered.

Just checks. Steady, regular, every two weeks.

A salary paid to a woman who apparently did nothing at all for it.

And Luis Rivera had told investigators exactly what those payments were for.

“$35,000,” he said. “Stapled into packs of $1,000 apiece.”

That was Rivera’s payment for helping kill Dan Markel. He said Garcia handed it to him in person at Rivera’s house, with Katherine present.

Then Garcia gave Rivera a little extra money later that night while they were out celebrating.

—

The 2019 trial brought everything into the open.

Katherine and Sigfredo were tried together before a Leon County jury. The prosecution laid out the full conspiracy: the Adlesen family’s motive, the connection through Katherine to Sigfredo, the Prius, the toll records, the phone calls, the money.

Luis Rivera took the stand.

He described the morning of July 18th, 2014, in methodical detail. The Prius pulling into Dan Markel’s driveway. Sigfredo Garcia jumping out, walking to the driver’s side window, shooting Markel twice. The drive back to Miami. Garcia turning his phone back on. The call to Katherine.

“He called and said, ‘It’s done already,’” Rivera testified. “I could hear her. She goes, ‘Okay.’”

The prosecution also brought Wendy Adlesen to the stand under an immunity deal.

Wendy maintained that her brother had only made a joke about the hitman. That it was bad taste, not intent. That she had no knowledge of any plan to kill her ex-husband.

She did admit one thing: Charlie had repeated that joke. Multiple times. At least twice, she said, though probably more. He had a tendency to repeat himself.

A joke you tell twice stops being just a joke.

Katherine McBan testified in her own defense.

She denied everything. She said Charlie had only told her his brother-in-law had “gotten in an accident.” She said she had no knowledge of any plan. She said she had no idea why she was receiving those checks from the Adlesen Institute.

She looked at the jury and said, directly and clearly: “No, ma’am. I had nothing to do with the murder of Dan Markel.”

The jury could not reach a unanimous decision.

Mistrial.

—

By the time Katherine’s retrial came around in 2022, the case had shifted dramatically.

In April of 2022, the FBI arrested Charlie Adlesen.

Charged with first-degree murder. Conspiracy to commit murder. Solicitation of murder.

The arrest confirmed what investigators had believed for years: that this was never just about Katherine McBan and two hitmen from South Florida. This went higher. It went into the Adlesen family itself.

In the retrial, the prosecution presented the same evidence — the phone calls, the Prius, the checks from the Adlesen Institute, Luis Rivera’s testimony — plus something new.

The pattern was clearer now. The payments. The timing. The web of calls that moved from Wendy’s police interview through Donna and Charlie and then to Katherine in the hours after the murder.

Katherine took the stand again.

She said the same things she had said in 2019. That she was innocent. That Charlie had used her. That she was caught in the middle.

This time, the jury didn’t deadlock.

“We the jury find as follows as to count one: the defendant is guilty of first-degree murder.”

Guilty on all three counts.

—

On July 29th, 2022, Katherine McBan was sentenced.

Count one, first-degree murder: life in prison, no possibility of parole.

Count two, conspiracy to commit murder: a consecutive sentence of thirty years.

Count three, solicitation to commit murder: another consecutive sentence of thirty years.

She had never pulled a trigger. She had never driven to Tallahassee. She had never stood in that driveway.

But she received the same sentence as one of the men who had.

Because the law understands something that common sense confirms: the person who arranges a murder is as responsible for that murder as the person who commits it. Being physically absent from the crime scene does not mean being absent from the crime.

Katherine McBan was the middle. Her own word, eventually. The connector. The link that made the whole machine work.

—

In October of 2023, Katherine was brought back to court.

Not for her own case. For Charlie Adlesen’s trial.

She walked in wearing jail clothes. She sat in the witness chair and answered questions from a prosecutor who had spent years trying to put her away.

“What was your defense when you were tried?” the prosecutor asked.

“That I had nothing to do with it,” Katherine said.

“Was that true?”

“No, ma’am. It was not.”

She told the jury that both she and Sigfredo Garcia had been involved. She told them Charlie Adlesen had arranged the murder of his former brother-in-law. She told them everything she had spent years denying.

“Why tell the truth now?” the prosecutor asked.

“I think that the truth needed to come out,” Katherine said. “And the people responsible needed to get arrested.”

The prosecutor didn’t let that answer sit.

“Why didn’t the truth need to come out last year? Or the year before that?”

“I was trying to defend myself,” Katherine said.

“You were trying to get off.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She had been offered immunity years earlier in exchange for cooperation. She had turned it down. She had believed she could walk away from all of it with a not-guilty verdict. She had been wrong.

Now she was serving a life sentence, testifying against the man she once dated, watching the full weight of the conspiracy land on everyone who had been part of it.

A Leon County jury convicted Charlie Adlesen on all counts.

In December of 2023, he was sentenced to life in prison.

—

Then came the final arrest.

In November of 2023, Donna Adlesen — Charlie’s mother, Wendy’s mother, grandmother to the boys that Dan Markel had fought to keep in Tallahassee — was arrested at an airport while allegedly attempting to flee to Vietnam.

She was charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy, and solicitation.

She pleaded not guilty.

Her trial did not come until August of 2025 — more than eleven years after Dan Markel was shot in his driveway.

Katherine McBan testified against her too.

Donna Adlesen did not take the stand in her own defense.

The jury deliberated. They came back. The foreperson read the verdict.

“We the jury find as follows as to count one of the indictment, first-degree murder. The defendant is guilty of first-degree murder.”

Tears ran down Donna Adlesen’s face.

—

Here is where everyone ended up.

Luis Rivera, the man who drove the Prius and watched Sigfredo Garcia shoot Dan Markel twice through the driver’s window — he was released from federal custody in June of 2025, serving the remainder of his sentence at a state prison in Florida. Seven extra years was the price of his cooperation.

Sigfredo Garcia is serving a life sentence at the Liberty Correctional Institution in Bristol, Florida. He never took the stand in his own defense. He maintained his innocence. The jury convicted him anyway.

Charlie Adlesen is serving his life sentence in a prison in South Dakota, far from the South Florida world he grew up in. The dental practice. The Ferrari. The jokes about hitmen that he told over and over and over again, recycling them at every appropriate moment, until they stopped being jokes at all.

Donna Adlesen will spend the rest of her life at the Homestead Correctional Institution.

And Katherine McBan — the woman at the center of all of it, the connector, the middle — is serving her life sentence at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Florida.

She never went to Tallahassee.

She never stood in that driveway.

She just made a phone call. Or answered one. She passed messages and facilitated arrangements and collected checks from the Adlesen Institute every two weeks for twenty months after Dan Markel was dead.

And then she tried to lie her way out of it.

—

There is one detail in this story that keeps coming back.

It is the TV.

Charlie Adlesen bought his sister Wendy a television as a divorce present. And when he gave it to her, he made a joke. He said he had looked into hiring a hitman, but the TV was cheaper, so he went with the TV instead.

He told that joke over and over. To Wendy. To other people. To Katherine McBan.

Wendy testified that her brother just had a tendency to repeat himself. That it was dark humor. That it didn’t mean anything.

But prosecutors argued — and two separate juries agreed — that it meant everything.

Because the TV was the cover story. The innocent explanation. The thing you point to when someone starts asking questions. “Oh, that? It was a joke. He bought me a TV.”

Except the TV was bought. And the hitman was also hired. Those two things were not mutually exclusive.

The TV shows up in the early interrogations. Wendy mentioned it to detectives within hours of the shooting. She mentioned it like an alibi — here, look at this harmless thing my brother said, look how innocent it is.

But it wasn’t innocent.

The TV was Charlie’s way of telling people, in advance, that whatever they might suspect about him, he had a funny story to offer instead.

That joke — told at least twice, probably more, recycled and repeated until it felt like something casual and harmless — was the first lie in a conspiracy that would eventually put five people behind bars.

The TV that Charlie Adlesen bought his sister instead of hiring a hitman.

And then he hired the hitman anyway.

Dan Markel was shot twice through the driver’s window of his car in his driveway in Tallahassee on July 18th, 2014. He was forty-one years old. He had two young sons who had just been dropped off at daycare.

He never came home to pick them up.

That is the part that sits underneath all of it. Beneath the Prius and the toll records and the phone calls and the checks and the trials and the convictions and the sentences. Beneath Katherine McBan’s lies and Charlie Adlesen’s jokes and Donna Adlesen’s tears in a Leon County courtroom.

A father drove home from the gym one morning and someone was waiting for him.

And the reason they were waiting — the reason his address had been researched and his schedule had been followed and his driveway had been chosen — was because a family on the other side of the state wanted him gone.

Not gone from their lives.

Gone.

Five people were convicted. Five people are serving prison time. And not one of them has expressed anything that looks like genuine remorse for what they did to a man who simply wanted to raise his children.

Katherine McBan said the truth needed to come out.

She said that after she was already serving a life sentence.

After she had spent years lying on a witness stand, trying to convince jury after jury that she had nothing to do with any of it.

The truth didn’t need to come out when it could have saved someone.

It came out when saving herself was no longer an option.

That is the final thing worth remembering about Katherine McBan. Not the life sentence. Not the charges. Not the way she sat in a courtroom in October of 2023 in jail clothes and admitted, finally, that she had been lying all along.

What is worth remembering is this: she had a chance to cooperate from the beginning. She was offered immunity in exchange for the truth. She turned it down.

She thought she could win.

She was wrong.

And somewhere in Florida, in a prison in Ocala, a woman who never pulled a trigger is spending the rest of her life paying for the one she arranged.

The TV was cheaper, Charlie had said.

It turned out not to be cheap at all.