Closing Arguments

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Thank you, Your Honor. May it please the court.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Members of the jury, good morning.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This is Dan Markel.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Dan Markel is the only victim in this case.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This is what he looked like before this defendant sent her friends up to see him.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And this is what he looked like afterwards. The evidence has shown that on July 18th, 2014, this community suffered a tragic blow when this revered law professor, colleague, son, father, brother, and friend was gunned down in broad daylight in his own home.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And what enemies had Dan Markel made that set his brutal fate into motion?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: His own family.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And what offense had Mr. Markel committed against these people?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Refusing to let his children be taken away from him?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Objecting to them disparaging him to his kids?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: What was the motive for this heinous murder?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The motive is clear. It's undisputed that the divorce between Wendi Adelson and Dan Markel was a particularly nasty one.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Look at State's Exhibit 59. This is their divorce.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: 700 pages thick.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They fought over everything from the education, the religious training of their children, down to a tennis racket.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In January of 2013, Wendi Adelson filed a motion to allow her to relocate to South Florida with her two children, ages two and three at the time.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: As one basis for this request, Wendi Adelson cites that the wife's parents reside in Coral Springs and the wife's brother resides 20 minutes away. The children are very close to the wife's parents.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The husband has also created a hostile work environment for the wife at the FSU School of Law.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Wendi Adelson viewed herself as stuck in Tallahassee, a word used to describe her situation by Jeffrey Lacasse on the witness stand the other day and also mentioned in her pleadings on page 152 of that exhibit.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In Markel's answer he seeks continued equal time sharing in Tallahassee. He seeks sole parental responsibility on issues related to the education, religion, and medical upbringing of these children.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Markel's dedication to these kids, especially in these areas, is undisputed. He was devout in his beliefs and felt strongly that his boys should be raised in an environment that observed the Jewish traditions, and he was committed to the Jewish faith, a fact that was exploited by Donna Adelson, who suggested that Wendi could threaten to convert her boys to Catholicism in an effort to try to bully Markel into agreeing to the relocation.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She also suggested that she and Harvey Adelson and Charlie Adelson would chip in on a million-dollar bribe to buy Markel's agreement to this move.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: What a bargain they ended up getting to solve this problem for only $100,000.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Consider the venom in the emails that Donna Adelson wrote to Wendi referring to Dan Markel as an asshole, a bastard, a religious zealot, and much more. A sentiment that continued to fester and grow within that family when on June 20, 2013, a judge entered an order denying Wendi Adelson's motion for relocation.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This is the summer of 2013, the timeframe in which Charlie Adelson began looking into all options to resolve his sister's relocation problem, including hiring a hitman to kill Dan Markel.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The divorce was final on July 31st, 2013, but the anger and bitterness continued.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Even increasing, litigation continued as both parties filed motions alleging that the other was in violation of the marital settlement agreement.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then, on March 26, 2014, less than four months prior to his murder, Dan Markel files his counter motion for enforcement of MSA on parenting issues and motion for contempt and sanctions, again alleging that Wendi Adelson was failing to facilitate communication between him and the kids and that Donna Adelson was disparaging him. He alleges on that motion that on three separate occasions in November of 2013, the kids informed him that their grandmother, Donna Adelson, was saying things like, "Grandma says you're stupid."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "She says you're trying to take her sunshines away from her." And "Grandma hates you."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Dan Markel requests the court to enjoin the former wife from allowing the maternal grandmother to have unsupervised time with the children and to impose appropriate limitations to safeguard the children from being subjected to disparaging comments about their father. And as we know, this is a hot button.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Grandma can't have access to the kids unsupervised if this thing gets granted. But we know it never got decided. It never got litigated because Dan Markel was murdered before the hearing.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So back in the summer of 2013 when Wendi Adelson's motion for relocation was initially denied, Charlie Adelson looked into having Dan Markel killed.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: But as the defense correctly points out, Charlie Adelson didn't even know Katherine Magbanua back in 2013.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And hence, the murder did not happen back in 2013.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The murder did not happen until Katherine Magbanua came into the picture.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The murder did not happen until Katherine Magbanua made it happen.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And what about the timing of when Wendi Adelson stood in the kitchen and told Jeffrey Lacasse, "Can I tell you something in confidence, my brother did seriously look into having Dan Markel killed."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That statement was made in 2014, just five days before Dan Markel was murdered by a hitman.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So the seed for this conspiracy was planted when Charlie Adelson began looking into committing the murder in the summer of 2013 after the judge ruled against Wendi's relocation, and it continued to grow when all efforts to coerce and bully Dan Markel into permitting this relocation failed.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then it further festered with this motion to have no contact with Grandma unsupervised.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And as Wendi relayed to Jeffrey Lacasse just five days before the murder, she was never going to be able to resolve this problem unless something happened to Danny.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: But this conspiracy took root when Charlie Adelson met somebody that could get it done.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Someone who was in a position of trust in his life, a person that was his girlfriend, this defendant.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And Katherine Magbanua had ties to the kind of people who were willing and able to walk up to a complete stranger and point a gun at his head and pull the trigger twice.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And guess what wasn't a problem once Dan Markel was gone?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Relocation. A couple days after the murder, Wendi Adelson and her boys are living within walking distance from the Adelson residence at the Icon.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Their names were changed from Markel to Adelson.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And just like that, their father was erased from their lives. Two and three years old.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: No more fights over kosher diets, no more squabbles over marital assets, and no more Dan Markel. And they might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for Mr. Geiger, who bothered to be a good neighbor on July 18, 2014, and investigate a situation that was really none of his business because something just didn't seem right. His description of that Prius was critical to this investigation, that identification of that suspect vehicle, a Prius that would later be detected following Dan Markel earlier that day at the gym.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They might have gotten away with it if not for the tireless efforts of law enforcement to cull through the mountains of records and data that were collected in this case, really just looking for needles in a haystack.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And they found a few.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: For example, they found Sigfredo Garcia's phone number amongst the hundreds of numbers present at or near the gym that day. They cross-referenced that number with all the call detail records collected from all the Adelsons, which bore a single hit call from Sigfredo Garcia to Harvey Adelson on July 1st, 2014, an ill-fated attempt to confront who Garcia thought was his wife's new boyfriend, but who turned out to be the dad of the boyfriend.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He got the wrong Dr. Adelson and left a nasty message on the dad's cell phone, causing much embarrassment to this defendant.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That was on July 1st, 2014. Another needle in the haystack example is the tracking of Garcia and Rivera's cell phones to particular toll booths at particular times to locate one particular SunPass attached to one particular Prius, which led to a rental contract bearing information implicating both Luis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: A third example is tracking down the rental car contract for the first trip and being able to track this defendant's phone to the rental car place at the same time that that car is being rented out by the airport. We discussed in jury selection that although you will not be asked to decide the guilt of anyone other than this defendant, it's going to be necessary for you to understand the roles of each person that's involved, each player that's involved in this case, in order to understand how it is that this defendant fits into this conspiracy. And we get to her through these people in two ways, or by two different paths. Path one: the Prius. The Prius led to Garcia and Rivera, and those two led to Magbanua. Notice how we get it right in reference to Garcia, we get it right in reference to Rivera, we get it right in reference to Charlie Adelson. And you've heard quite a lot about the government's theory — they call us the government because nobody likes the government — and per the defense, our theory is completely correct in all regards except for one. We got it all right except for her. Got it wrong on her. Everything is not as it appears when it comes to her. The defense has characterized this investigation as biased. Luis Rivera and Jessica Rodriguez are liars. The cops and prosecutors are all crooked. But please remember that what the lawyers say is not evidence.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You must look to the evidence alone in deciding your verdict.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And what the evidence has shown is that we had a law enforcement team that had a lot of work to do, with a lot of details and a lot of pieces that we had to sort of try to distill for you into one cognizable presentation.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And that's what we've attempted to do. The law enforcement team managed to pull a single Prius out of a haystack of Priuses and tie it to two men, one of whom is the defendant's children's father and the other of whom took the witness stand and told you that she's the mastermind behind this whole thing.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The second path this investigation took was the motive. Who wanted to kill Dan Markel? The ex-wife and the in-laws hated his guts and are also connected to this defendant — the woman who knew people who could get a thing like this done.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This is the defendant's day in court, and we talked at jury selection about the importance of focusing on her and her role. I know that's been hard to do because the proceedings sometimes felt like we were talking about other people the whole time.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And I encourage you to consider the fact that it's easy to point at an empty chair. It's easy to pile on to bad actors when those folks are not represented in court.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And I think one of the lawyers pointed out, oh, their lawyers are out there in the audience watching.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And, you know, it suits the defendant's purposes in this trial to pile on to everybody else. Everybody else is guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty. That one did it. That one did it. But not me. I don't know anything.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You better believe that when it is time for one of those other actors to be tried in court, it'll be a dogfight just like it was here, except it'll be "she's guilty, I don't know, I didn't do anything, she acted on her own, all I did was make a joke and she went hauled off and hired a hitman." So let's review what we can agree on in this case. We got it right that the motive for killing Dan Markel was for the benefit of Wendi Adelson. We got it right that the in-laws were desperate to move her to South Florida, and had the money and the audacity to actually do this kind of thing.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: We got it right that Charlie paid with his staple money. And we got it right that Luis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia were paid to kill Dan Markel.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: It's natural for you to find yourself wondering, what's going on with all these other people? It's okay. It's natural. It's human for you to have feelings and emotions about the case, the people involved, lawyers involved. You can think Luis Rivera should not have gotten a deal, or Luis Rivera's deal was too great.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You can think other people should be arrested, other people should be prosecuted. That's fine. You just have to separate those emotions out and weigh your verdict — base your verdict solely on the evidence in this case against this defendant.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: As we talked about in jury selection, you're asked to make a wise and legal decision solely about her role in this. Was this crime committed, and was she one of the people that committed this crime? Anyone else is for another day and another jury. But you just can't talk about the case without talking about all of them. It's the Adelsons that had a motive to get this murder done so that they could move. You will not be asked to decide about them, but the evidence is clear that the thing was ultimately done for Wendi.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera were told that it was for Wendi. They believed they were doing it for Wendi, possibly because that's true. I mean, it ultimately was for Wendi, but also possibly because the person that hired them, this defendant, was walling Charlie off from them — walling Sigfredo off from knowing that the money was coming from Charlie, the boyfriend, the dentist.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: TV is the first piece of code that we hear in this case. Charlie Adelson got Wendi a TV as a divorce present, as a cheaper alternative to hiring a hitman. Then the same TV is her alibi for the murder — a service appointment that her mother set up for her from South Florida, or at least there's some indication of that. And then on the wire, when Donna Adelson is speaking in code in that first call. Weird thing to do after being approached by an alleged gangster.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She says this TV is going to cost about five, referring to the $5,000 on the note that the undercover handed her. It's obvious they're referring to their conspiracy and hearkening back to this TV as code for the murder of Dan Markel.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The players in this case are very smart.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The crime in this case was given a lot of thought and preparation. We know that the seed was planted for this thing almost a year or more before it came to fruition. They thought of everything: a clever TV-related alibi for Wendi, a frame job for Lacasse, bullet bourbon. And they insulated themselves by hiring this defendant as a middleman between them — the ones that wanted it done — and the shooters.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Everyone on the board in this case had some limits to their knowledge.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And that was really smart.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That made this case much harder to break.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: But don't let the way that they thought they would get away with this case be the way they get away with this case.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Let's talk about Luis Rivera.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The defense seeks to discredit his testimony as an extremely bad dude.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He's got this status as a felon and a gang member, and those are things you should definitely consider when you're weighing the credibility of a witness.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: But please consider that his resume as a bad guy is precisely why he was selected by other parties to do this thing.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I did not hire him to be a part of this case. I didn't hire him to be a witness, and wouldn't have if I had a choice. That was done by this defendant. This defendant and her husband selected Luis Rivera to be a part of this gruesome job. Rivera's not my friend from childhood. He's not the guy that my husband spends all his time with. He's not the person that I hired to do a murder. I did not choose him. But Rivera is here because he was willing to cooperate, willing to cut a sweet deal to tell the truth. He had one job: tell the truth. It's all he has to do.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You know, he was chosen not only because he's got the right credentials with his gang status and his felon status, and, you know, he's also trusted.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He is a lifelong friend of Sigfredo Garcia, and they didn't think he would roll. They didn't think he would talk.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They thought he could be trusted.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: His gang status comes with a code of silence that made him more attractive as a candidate to do this murder with Sigfredo Garcia.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And according to the defense, he got this amazing deal of the century to give testimony that I or someone else spoon-fed to him.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: First, there is no evidence of this. To the contrary, Rivera denies it. All the law enforcement involved has denied it. And with his limited ability to read, you must ask yourself if you even think it's reasonable that he could study the materials — I mean, y'all have seen what this case is like — and provide some kind of fake regurgitated frame job on Catherine Magbanua, and also have the wherewithal to pepper in details that could later be verified. Second, if it's true that I or the law enforcement on the case are so unethical, so desperate to try this case a couple more times, that we were willing to risk our careers and suborn perjury, why on earth didn't we just spoon-feed him all the names on this poster, so that we could just, you know, get on with it? The actual only condition of his cooperation deal — the sole thing he had to do — was tell the truth. Cooperate. Nobody put a name in his mouth. Nobody told him what to say.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In jury selection, we talked about all the different types of evidence, and you each agreed to keep an open mind to all kinds of evidence. So how do you judge the credibility of a bad dude like Luis Rivera? This particular bad dude has now given 10 statements in this case over a six-year period about events that happened eight years ago, so there's going to be inconsistencies. You have to evaluate the inconsistencies and say, is this an important one or not? Does this create a reasonable doubt or not? And only you can do that. Ask yourself if he was honest and straightforward in answering the attorneys' questions. Compare that to Catherine Magbanua's testimony.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Ask yourself if he seemed to have an accurate memory about things he was testifying to, and compare that to Catherine Magbanua's testimony in this case. How could he have known about the shot fired through the passenger floorboard of the Prius? Because he was there and he saw it.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The fact is, that wasn't in any police report, that wasn't in any 20/20. And how could he have known that Dan Markel was scheduled to leave town the next day, the day after the murder — a fact that Wendi Adelson confirmed — because the defendant told him. That wasn't in any police report, that wasn't on 20/20. They were told they had to get it done for that reason: "Y'all got to get it done today because he's going out of town tomorrow."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Rivera testified that the defendant hired Sigfredo Garcia to kill Dan Markel, and that Sigfredo Garcia hired him to assist in the murder, and defendant was responsible for getting the money and paying them when the job was done. And Jessica Rodriguez further confirmed that defendant was involved in the money drop. She said to Sigfredo Garcia, "Did you give him the package?" According to Jessica Rodriguez, this defendant acknowledged that package, said to Garcia, "Did you give it to him?" Jessica was nosy and wanted to know what was in there.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Defendant says, "I don't know." But the defendant's not interested.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Jessica assumed it was drugs.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Why wasn't the defendant interested in knowing what was in there?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She's so anti-drug, and they're dropping off this suspicious package for Luis Rivera, that she's not interested in knowing what was in there or talking about what was in there.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So these are examples of direct evidence: the testimony of Jessica Rodriguez, the testimony of Luis Rivera. But you must also consider Luis Rivera's testimony in light of all the other evidence in the case. The phone evidence is consistent with Rivera's testimony. The phone evidence ties both Garcia and Rivera to the murder trip, and further evidences Catherine Magbanua as the middleman between the killers and the Adelsons. All right, so let's go to June of 2014. We've got a rental car that month. There's phone evidence consistent with the defendant taking Sigfredo Garcia to Comfort Rental on June 2nd, 2014 at 8:53.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She's there from about 8:53 to 8 — I don't know, 8:58, I think, maybe a little longer — where he rented a silver sedan.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That was due back on June 5th, 2014 at 8:50 p.m. because it was rented at approximately 8:50 p.m. Could this be a coincidence? Could she have just been out near the airport visiting a friend while, unbeknownst to her, Sigfredo Garcia was renting a Comfort Rental car to take to Tallahassee to do a murder of her boyfriend's brother-in-law?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Could be a coincidence. It's possible.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: But if so, she drove all the way out there only to hang out with Kenya for a few minutes, all the while talking to Charlie Adelson on the phone.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In fact, she talks to Charlie Adelson for 25 minutes all the way home from the rental car place. Only an hour after renting the car, Sigfredo Garcia gets a ticket in the vehicle and ends up swapping it out for a different car the next day. Now, why would he swap it out if he got a ticket after the first trip to Tallahassee? The rental car's last known location before its return was this defendant's home. So that rental car was consistent being at her residence, and then at 4:30 p.m. the next day she travels all the way back over to the airport, I guess, to see Kenya again for 20 more minutes, consistent with the rental car return.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All right, so that's the June rental car.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Let's talk about this first trip. Luis Rivera's phone shows the first trip to Tallahassee on June 4, 2014.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Now remember that the cell phone provider had no location information at all for Sigfredo Garcia for any early June events in 2014, so we can't put him anywhere — can't say he was there, can't say he wasn't there. But we do know that he rented a car for the trip, received a citation while driving that first car, like we just talked about, and that that rental car pinged in Tallahassee at Winthrop Park, next to Dan Markel's house, where Rivera says they waited while scoping out Dan Markel still.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: When they returned to Miami, arriving in the early morning hours of June 6, 2014, the GPS data on the vehicle is consistent with traveling back to Miami along the same route and time as Rivera's phone. So we only have one GPS location on the way back, and it's consistent.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And as I said before, upon returning to Miami, the rental car goes to the defendant's residence, and then the GPS ping puts the car at her home at 8:48 a.m. that next morning.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: During the first trip to Tallahassee, the defendant and Sigfredo Garcia have 16 total communications or attempted communications over the course of approximately 48 hours, which is how long approximately that first trip was.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The defendant also calls Luis Rivera during that June trip, which is unusual. On June 5th, 2014, she dials Sigfredo Garcia at 10:57 and 10:58 p.m. When she can't reach him, she then dials this number ending in 6615 — a number that she had saved in her phone as "Tato" — and that was at 10:59 p.m. It's unusual because this is the first time in the records that we have where this defendant is attempting to communicate with Rivera at all. It's important because it suggests that she knew Sigfredo and Luis Rivera were together.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Sigfredo Garcia then returns her call at 11:01.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: At that time, the two men are in the rental car headed back from Tallahassee, where they had been for the purpose of surveilling and possibly murdering Dan Markel, her boyfriend's problem relative.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All right, let's talk about the July trip preparations.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie and the defendant have dinner together on July 14th. So remember, he's killed on the 18th.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: A couple days before, on July 14th, 2014, Charlie Adelson and the defendant have dinner. We know from the cell records and iCloud messages that they made these plans to eat near the defendant's residence.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And then there are multiple communications between the defendant and Garcia that night between midnight and 2 a.m. The next morning, July 15th, Sigfredo Garcia calls Comfort Rental Car — that's the same rental place from the first trip — at 9:09 a.m., and then calls the hybrid save-gas rental car place at 4:30 p.m. Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera then communicate several times, and then Luis Rivera and Sigfredo Garcia rent the Prius at 6:15 p.m. Then Sigfredo Garcia leaves Shrimp's house — that's Stephanie Carmona, out near the beach — and moves toward defendant's house.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So there's several communications over the course of that evening between 6:15 and 9:30 between Sigfredo Garcia and the defendant, but the communications between the two stop at 9:30 p.m., consistent with them being together. We don't usually text and call each other when we're in the same room.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And their phones are consistent with being at Katherine Magbanua's that night.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The Prius also pings at her residence at 10:25 p.m. on July 15th.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All right, so let's go to our July trip.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera traveled to Tallahassee on July 16th at around 2 p.m., getting in around 1 a.m. on July 17th, 2014.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Rivera testified that Garcia was talking to and getting instructions from Katherine Magbanua quite a bit during this trip.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She says things like, "Don't do anything stupid, make sure you do everything right."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Although this trip was only about 36 hours from the time they left Miami to the time they returned to Miami, there were 22 phone events between Garcia and the defendant in that timeframe.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And on July 17th, the defendant also says, "You have to get it done tomorrow. You have to get it done because he's going to be leaving town."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: As we know, Dan Markel was scheduled to fly to New York City on July 19th to visit his girlfriend.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: It's hard to imagine how Rivera could have been in possession of this piece of information if the info had not flowed, as we see repeatedly in our communication records, from Charlie to Katie to Garcia to Rivera.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And Rivera says he posted a picture on Instagram and the defendant called and said, "Take it down, you idiots."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You know, you make a post on social media, there can be data associated with that that can tie you to where you are. We don't want anybody to know you're in Tallahassee.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He obliged and removed the post, which is why we were not able to retrieve it from Instagram.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: But if you look at the slides for the July trip communication, there is a call from this defendant to Luis Rivera at 11:40 p.m. Again, this is unusual because this is only the second time anywhere in the records where we see her attempting to call Luis Rivera, with the first time being the June trip.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She doesn't get an answer, and she calls Garcia a few seconds later. When she can't get in touch with Garcia, she calls Rivera again at 11:41.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Why was she calling Rivera and then calling Garcia when she couldn't get in touch with them? Because she knew they were together.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She was calling to say, "Take this stupid thing down."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They were doing something stupid, just as she predicted.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: When she can't get one of them, she starts calling the other one. All right, so Friday, July 18, 2014 — this is the murder day. The Prius arrives at Premier at 9:16 a.m. The last phone communications at all between either one of the men that came to do the killing was at 9:58 a.m., when their phones get turned off and remain off until after the murder. The Prius pulls out of the gym parking lot following Markel toward his residence at 10:38 a.m. The bus video shows the Prius turning onto Benton Road, really close to the Markel residence, at 10:44 a.m., whereby they pulled right up behind Markel in the driveway, executed him in cold blood, hopped back in the car, and they're off again.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They're on the bus video, leaving town at 10:55.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The 911 call from Mr. Geiger comes in at 11 or 11:01. The first phone call either Sigfredo Garcia or Luis Rivera make after completing this murder-for-hire is Katherine Magbanua.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Sigfredo Garcia calls the defendant and says, "It's done." Defendant says, "I know." We don't know how she knew — maybe they had their phones off and then all of a sudden they called, and when she saw it ring, she knew, "Oh, it's gotta be them telling me it's done." Maybe somebody gave her information before they called that it was done.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: We do not have that piece of information in the evidence.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The defendant assures the killers that they will get their money. They are going to get their money the next day.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: When we look at the phone activity from all the parties, from midnight before the murder through the first call after the murder — and you can see the murder designated by a red line in this slide — we see a flurry of calls between our people of interest, and it's in that pattern: Donna to Charlie to Katie to Garcia and back the same way.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then we see the killers on an ATM camera in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The ATM photos show both Garcia and Rivera in the Prius taking some money out of the bank at — four, no, sorry — 6:46 p.m. The location after this ATM image is consistent with both men being at the Rivera residence at about 7:00 p.m. So where is Katherine Magbanua once Garcia and Rivera arrived back in Miami after the murder Friday evening? She's speaking to Charlie Adelson, she's speaking to Sigfredo Garcia, she's also speaking to Yindra.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: After 8:46 p.m., she leaves her home and travels towards Rivera's residence, getting there at about 9:46 p.m., and on the way there she drops her kids off at Yindra Mascaro's residence.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This was unusual — she didn't usually leave her kids anywhere overnight, and it was documented, the date of this particular event, on Ms. Mascaro's social media. Remember, she had to go refresh her memory as to when that photo was taken of the kids at her house, and came back to tell you that the night that those kids stayed at her house was July 18, 2014 — the night after Dan Markel was killed, the night she needed to go to Charlie's to get the money to pay them the next morning.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: There's a text earlier in the day where she's making plans to stay at Charlie's house that night. She turns her phone off on the way and it stays off for almost 11 hours — 11 hours of time when her kids are in the care of Yindra while she's with Charlie. This is about 14 hours later after the shooting, and this is about the time that Dan Markel is pronounced deceased at the hospital here in Tallahassee, succumbing to the terrible injuries that he sustained when he was shot. When the defendant's phone pops back up after spending the night at Charlie's the night of the murder, it's Saturday morning, and she's headed back south from Charlie's house toward the money drop location. All right, so let's talk about this July 19th, the money drop. We've got a 45-minute call flurry that's observed, and again, it's that same sort of pattern of communication that we're seeing over and over again.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The defendant's phone is powered on and she starts calling Garcia at 9:44 a.m. She calls him five times and texts him as she's driving south from Charlie's home.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: When she can't reach Garcia, she calls a number that she had programmed into her phone as "Jessica Flocka." That was at 9:47 a.m. Then that number, that Jessica Flocka number, starts trying to reach Rivera as well, and simultaneously Rivera starts trying to reach Garcia, and the defendant continues to try to reach out to Garcia as well — remember, he's out at Shrimp's house. Then Rivera calls the defendant. So that's the call where everyone's like, "Oh, he called her, she didn't call him." But a lot of things happened before he called her.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So he did talk to her — that seems to be undisputed. And defendant now has a working number for Rivera, because she's actually talked to him on this new phone, this phone number that he had that he brought to Tallahassee.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She then calls him back twice after their last call.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And his phone, remember, goes out to Shrimp's and then comes back where they're all consistent with being at Rivera and Jessica's residence, and that's when the money drop occurs.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Phones put them all there for the money drop.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That wasn't in any police report. That's something we got from Luis Rivera and were able to verify with evidence.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: We learned about the money drop from Rivera, and then called Jessica and said, "Hey, did this happen?" And she said, "Oh yeah, that did happen."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Sergeant Corbitt testified about Luis Rivera's locations the morning of the money drop when the call flurry began. So Rivera's phone starts out — and there seems to be some dispute about this — it's consistent with his residence or the barbershop, which are close together, when this call flurry begins.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then it travels out to Shrimp's house, where Garcia was, and then they all converge back together at Rivera's place at 10:34 a.m.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Okay, so the defendant does not have any activity on her phone during this money drop time, 10:31 to 11:23 a.m. that morning, consistent with her going inside Rivera's for a few minutes, seeing the baby, the package getting delivered, and then going on their way.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: 11:23 is her next communication, and by then she's just south of Rivera's, consistent with heading to Yindra Mascaro's residence, and we know why she's there. She's got to pick up her kids where she had dropped them off the night before.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And when she picks the kids up, what does she say to Yindra?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "Charlie Adelson's brother-in-law was in a car accident."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All right, so let's talk about the financial evidence.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Katherine Magbanua began getting checks from the Adelson Institute two months after Markel's murder.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Is it reasonable that Charlie Adelson would put her on the payroll two months after this murder if they were in a status where they had broken up and he was ghosting her, if she had nothing to do with the killing?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She received over $17,000 from the Adelson Institute over the course of a year and a half for doing something that is yet to be determined.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Despite my co-counsel's best efforts, she didn't work in the office.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She didn't seem to have been making phone calls on the Adelson Institute's behalf or Charlie Adelson's behalf, never went to the office on weekends, didn't clean up. We've established that the cleaner-uppers was a husband-and-wife team. As far as we can tell, she made an appointment to get a website a month before her first paycheck was received.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Many of her checks that she received from the Adelson Institute were sequential, meaning written in numerical order, so a bunch of checks at once.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She got six sequential checks two times in just a few months.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Other Adelson employees said that they had gotten a couple — I think they said either two or three sequential checks before — but never six, and that was only if the Adelsons were going to be going on vacation and missed the pay period. It should be noted that the Adelson Institute — you know, they stopped issuing her checks after Garcia was arrested. You heard about the breast augmentation. So a month after the defendant was added to the Adelson Institute payroll for the supposed purpose of getting Medicaid insurance for her kids, she paid $4,400 in cash for a breast augmentation surgery.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This expenditure was just three months after the murder.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: There is no corresponding cash withdrawal from her account for the purchase.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And note that June said Charlie had admitted to paying for one of them.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Yindra told — I guess she said that the defendant told her that Garcia had paid for them, and the defendant told you on the stand that she paid for them and had saved up for them.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Defendant's highest source of income in 2014 and 2015 is cash. Cash was only 23% of her total income in 2013, but jumped up to 64% of her total income, as shown here, in 2014. In 2015, cash checks from the Adelson Institute made up 71% of her total income that year.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In 2014, she deposits $46,000 — three times as much money as the year before the murder, and twice as much as the year after the murder. She deposits $13,200 in cash in the month following the murder. That's a big spike.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That's more than she deposited in the entire previous year.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Whatever she was doing or not doing at the clubs, she is very unlucky if she's not guilty, because she happened to have the most incredible month of her life financially immediately following the murder of Dan Markel.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I want to talk about the wiretap. When the undercover hands Donna Adelson an article about her murdered son-in-law and insinuates that she was involved, and then tries to extort $5,000 out of her — does she go straight to the police? Does she give law enforcement this valuable information that could be used to solve the murder of her son — a former son-in-law? I mean, this guy that approached her supposedly was involved in the murder. So first of all, he's a gangster. He's dangerous.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He's murdered one of her family members, or knows someone who has, or has information about this murder that's unsolved in her family.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And she does not call the police.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She calls Charlie Adelson.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She puts that paper, without even looking at it — looking at it — into her purse, goes, gets the kids, goes back into the Icon, calls Charlie Adelson and says, "This TV is going to be about five.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Has to do with the two of us. They mentioned an ex-girlfriend." Does Charlie Adelson say, "An ex-girlfriend? Whose ex-girlfriend? My ex-girlfriend? Which ex-girlfriend?" He doesn't have to ask that. Like, undercover does put Katie's name in this — he does say Katie — but Donna doesn't say Katie, and he doesn't have to ask which ex-girlfriend. They don't even say your son.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They just — they mention an ex-girlfriend, and he goes straight to her.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Once he — Charlie Adelson — meets with his mother and gets the details and the paper with the undercover's phone number, he goes straight to Katherine Magbanua. They do this meeting at Dolce Vita.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And the defendant, in Dolce, she took the stand and she claimed she does not know there was a murder — she never even knew there was a murder in this case. Not just she didn't have anything to do with it. So y'all have to, like, listen to those wiretaps and consider that as her defense. She's supposedly doing and saying all these things with no information whatsoever — that there was even a murder. And this is a college-educated woman. Charlie Adelson says this is either someone trying to blackmail his family, or it's the cops working undercover. I mean, that much you can definitely — I can hear it. I hope y'all can hear it.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I don't know why she can't hear it.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Why doesn't she say, "Why are the cops approaching your mother? Is there a reason?"

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I mean, what's this about?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Did your mother do something that the police would be investigating?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Does he even have to explain to her, like, "My brother-in-law was killed in Tallahassee. There's suspicion on us, and I suspect this could be law enforcement undercover operation trying to investigate the murder. It could be somebody that has information about the murder that's affiliated with these killers." He doesn't have to explain any of that to her. And they say, "Oh, well, maybe he did it in the car before they went in there." But she says she never knew about a murder at all until Garcia's arrest in May.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie adelson says, "If they had any evidence, we'd already be at the airport by now. Even if they bug your phone, you're still not talking about any of this." What else would she have not been talking about other than the murder of Dan Markel? And how could she be talking about it or not talking about it if she didn't know a darn thing about it?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie begins explaining how you have to be able to put the person at the scene at the time in order to be able to prove the crime. You can't just say my brother shot JFK. You have to have evidence.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So he's reassuring her, "We're good.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: We're not in this.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Even if you sat in the Prius, it doesn't matter.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Just because a car went to do a crime and you sat in it previously is not going to make a difference. They're not going to be able to prove you did the crime. I'm not going to be able to prove you robbed the Burger King."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie says it's one of two scenarios — so number one being the cops, number two being a legitimate blackmail effort. And at some point, a third possibility is discussed, which is maybe this is just somebody who read something in the papers and saw an opportunity to try to go up to my mother and see if they could make some money.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And that is why it was important to give details and information in the bump, because otherwise they would have discounted it as not being legitimate. So what really does worry them and think that this might be coming from the inside is the fact that this person has information, and they talk about that. Charlie says, "Whoever it is knows information. This person knows information. So Katie, they'll be back.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: There's not a lot of people that know much about" — can't hear what she says. What is she — what could she be referring to? Not a lot of people that know much about — what?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: A lot of people that know much about what? She doesn't know. She can't tell you. No memory of it, no information about what happened in that restaurant, no memory of a man coming to you and trying to get you to have contact with some thugs that approached his mother to blackmail her about a murder.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie says, if they're a bad guy, there's two ways of dealing with it. Go ahead and contact the police.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They'll contact him and arrange a setup, take him down, and he'll proper 10 years and tell everything.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "Tell us everything you know, or else you're going to serve 10 years in prison." The next thing you know, this person is singing. He starts calling your name out, and my parents are going to have to tell the story of what happened. Why would a bad guy be calling her name out if she knows nothing? Why are the cops knocking at her door an issue of concern for her if she knows nothing? They talk about going to cops, going to the FBI, but nobody ever does that obvious thing, including this defendant. If you're innocent and a bad guy is out there trying to put your name in something, you go straight to the cops. All right, so Charlie says, "This is my idea. I give you the money, you talk to him on the phone," and he gives very precise instructions: "Say my friends have no idea what you're talking about, and frankly, I don't know what you're talking about, but the name sounds familiar of who's incarcerated. So I'm going to give you something as charity to help the less fortunate. But do not contact these people again, or they're going to the police." He's instructing her to call this thug and say something particular.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "And the whole time, just say, 'I don't know what's going on,' and only use the words 'help' and 'charity.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: '" then he talks or mentions who we think and are arguing is Sigfredo Garcia. He says, "Now he's fucking with his wife, and he's fucking with him, and you fuck with the king himself — you'd better kill him, because he's going to be a big problem." Katherine Magbanua, seated at this table in Dolce Vita having no information whatsoever about this case, no knowledge whatsoever about a murder, has now been — it's been suggested to her — that she might need to kill, or arrange to kill, or have Sigfredo Garcia kill this undercover operative who they think is a thug. And what is her reaction to that? "My god"? She continues to engage in the conversation. She gets up and goes to the bathroom and comes back, and then goes out to the car and goes about her business. And then she engages and, following up on the instructions he gave her, she doesn't call the number. She tries to get Garcia to call it.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She doesn't say kill.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "I'm not killing anybody. What are you talking about, kill?" Kill might be a word you might remember.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Okay, Katherine Magbanua, what did you think when he said you might have to kill the guy?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "I don't know.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I have no recollection of that, no knowledge of that, no information whatsoever to give you."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All right, well, after he said he was going to kill the guy, why did you go out and do what he asked you to do? Why didn't you just say, "Oh, okay, I'll take care of that, please"?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Because she's involved. I mean, there's no other explanation.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I'm not taking it out of context. There is only one context.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The alternate context is, "I don't know anything.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I can't offer any context. I can't tell you what I was thinking. I can't tell you why I did what I did. Because I have no memory of doing it, no memory of saying it, no memory of being there. I can't offer you nothing."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then Charlie says — "and so help me God, and please, I know I'm dropping all these F-bombs on you, but it's not my words" —

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "And so help me God, if they fuck with my family, it's gonna be fucking Nazi shit, because this will be done. I mean, Katie, I don't care what I spend, okay?"

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He doesn't care what it costs him. She needs to take care of this problem.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then they talk about Garcia. "He doesn't have any bad feelings toward me, does he? Our paths never crossed." He's making sure everything is kosher with Garcia to get this thing resolved.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: There's more evidence here that Charlie doesn't have an independent relationship with Garcia, because he's going through her.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: If someone's on to him, and it's somebody that this information is leaked to, or it's worse — law enforcement — he is not going to invite someone new into his conspiracy.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He's checking with her to see if Garcia has any bad feelings toward him after he talks about having someone killed and not caring what he has to spend. He checks in on Garcia, and then assures her that she will be taken care of. Quote: "I don't have to sit here and tell you what I would do. I show you what I could do.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You know what I'm saying? You know how I am. I look for things to do. You don't ask me for shit. I'm the one that's like, 'Hey, someone's birthday's coming up, I got you.' I'm the one who's like, 'I'll sell you the Lexus for a very good price.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: 'I know you're having car problems.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: '" and then he says, "Listen, you giving somebody money is not an admission of any kind of guilt."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Guilt of what, folks?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: What would she be guilty of?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She doesn't even know there's a murder.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "Charlie, let me ask you a question. When everybody was there the next day, and there's something about money..." And then he says this.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: "It's not like you're driving around in a Bentley, cruising around in a mega yacht."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: At the end of the conversation, he says, "You know who this is coming from?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The inside."

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Katherine Magbanua, what did you understand that to mean — "It's coming from the inside"? She doesn't know.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And wasn't curious to find out.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And wasn't curious to call the cops.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: To end it. To get herself out of it.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In these initial recordings that we've got, the Dolce and the first few calls, it's like they're dancing around each other, you know? The code and the, I don't know, it's like neither one is sure if the other is working with law enforcement. Neither one is sure if the other is affiliated with the blackmail attempt. I mean, she's sure he's not — he's not sure she's not affiliated with the guy that approached his mother, he's not sure she's not wearing a wire, and she can't be sure that this guy that approached Donna Adelson isn't in fact one of Rivera's brothers. And you'll hear on the wire clarifying that a couple times: did he say brother or did he say family member?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Because brother potentially could mean gang member, right?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And she isn't honest with Charlie about those concerns because she's walled him off from Tuto and Tato. And neither defendant nor Charlie can be sure, you know, what this thing really is, what the risks are here.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So they're both just sort of feeling each other out. After the meeting with Donna that we saw, Charlie and Donna there at the marina, there's several calls where he's assuring her, like, this is being handled, don't worry about it, you know, mom, you're freaking out, it's nothing, I got this, it's all handled.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: We hear call H.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: H is the first call where we hear Garcia, and he is not happy. He doesn't sound like a guy who's done something stupid and gotten her involved in a murder that he's to blame for, and sounds more like he's someone who she's gotten involved in something and now he's going to have to clean up the mess.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Maybe because, you know, she came clean about, I don't know, he's angry.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He's angry.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Ultimately, Garcia says he will take care of the problem.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The less she knows, the better. Stop talking about it on the phone. And he hangs up.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All right, so then the defendant calls Garcia with a number. She repeatedly is talking in code about a phone number. Why on earth would she be talking in code about a phone number? Just say 6570.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The number is 6570.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: But instead she says the kid's clothes cost $65.70.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He doesn't get it, it goes back and forth several times, and finally he does get what she's saying.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The defendant's asked about talking in code and why it would be necessary if she had nothing to conceal, and she says a couple things. One, she says she had to disguise the phone number while speaking on the phone because her co-workers were around, which makes no sense.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Two, she says, oh, I just started talking in code because I picked it up from Charlie.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Doesn't make sense that she would then carry it over to her conversations with other people, including Sigfredo Garcia. The only reason to talk in code is for fear that the call might be — this is the time frame. You hear that bad argument between the defendant and Sigfredo Garcia.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: They split at some point.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Call M she's wanting to talk to him and he's not interested. She sends a text saying she needs to talk to him about something. That's text and —

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And also in text, so he replies and says, whatever is going on with you and your homie is your business. You guys work that shit out. Don't text me.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Call P, where the code "really good client" is born.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Defendant says she has forgotten the number for that client.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And Charlie says he'll get it to her. Then he calls his mom and says, hey, what's the number on the paper?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She says, I don't know. I gave it to you.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So then he's got to go home and get it. There's a volley of calls, a lot of number confusion where everybody's talking about the number, but when I say everybody, what I mean is Donna to Charlie to Katie to Garcia and back that same way. Never jumping over one car. So if you think about it, I'm like — train cars on a track. Got to go through one to get to the other.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In call R, Charlie tells the defendant that it's going to be a while before he can get the number.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Again, she initiates code saying, it's always so hard to get that particular agent.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then we get call S, where Magbanua is giving Garcia the undercover's number again, and she does it in code.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Remember one of the listings I had to tell you, one of the properties. I believe it's 305-712-6570.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then call U is from Donna to Charlie about the undercover calling the office, so that's the tickling the wire, and we went through that during the testimony. And that's when we get to call W. And this is the call W where I say we've got an illustration of the fact that there's two Katies in this case. We've got the Katie that was on the stand and we've got the Katie that was in call W. When Charlie calls and informs her about the call to the office, he's getting a little fussy with her, pressuring her, find out who this is.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And she pushes back.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: It's really important because when she pushes back, she kind of drops the code and comes really close to revealing the truth more so than any other statement she's made.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie's trying to get the defendant to call the number. The defendant is trying to get Garcia to call the number.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Garcia is lying to the defendant saying he called the number when he didn't.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She's lying to Charlie saying she called the number when she didn't, and Charlie's lying to his mother telling her everything's fine, handled.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Eventually Charlie ends up calling the undercover and y'all heard that call.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So what does he say when the undercover says, you know, your family's problem up north has been taken care of.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You've been taking care of Katie and Tuto but haven't done anything for Tato.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: What does he say about this family problem up north? Does he say, I have no idea what you're talking about. Why did you give my mom a picture of my murdered brother-in-law? What do you know about that? What information do you have? Who are you? You know, he just says, all right, let me look into things.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Then in call Y, Charlie Adelson is reporting back to Katherine Magbanua what the undercover told him in that call.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And Charlie says the undercover says Tuto and Tato, although he struggles with those names because he doesn't seem to know them.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Magbanua doesn't enlighten him as to who those people are, but she knows who Tuto and Tato are.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She's supposedly trying to help him. She doesn't know anything about this murder.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She's only trying to help him because his family's being harassed. Yet, in her help, she doesn't suggest, well, Tuto and Tato are these two guys.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That's because she's insulating Garcia and Charlie from each other. She's walling them off.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She was the glue in this conspiracy. It does not work without her.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Call Z, Katherine Magbanua reporting the latest bump to Garcia.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And she says, quote, this is call Z, it's getting too detailed. It's somebody that knows for sure.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This call ends with more discussion about what the number is. Garcia wants her to text it to him and she says no, I don't want to. Why? Why don't you want — why are we talking in code? You're just trying to help out a friend figure this thing out. You have nothing to do with it. Call DD, Charlie is further relating his discussion with the undercover. He said he was brothers with someone in Broward, and she clarifies again — and that's the call where she's saying brother or family member a couple times, and that's the call where she says they really mess with the wrong person, I fuck bitches up for no reason, you know, she's talking really tough. Call FF, Katie is bragging about the really nasty voicemail that she left on the undercover's voicemail, when the truth is nobody has called and left any such voicemail on the undercover's recorder. So she's playing both of these guys. She's lying, she's manipulating both sides of this conspiracy. And then we've got call GG — you've got a couple more calls after this on the exhibit, but this was the last one that I played because I thought you guys were starting to yawn, understandably — but she says in that call, it can only be one of two. Apparently they're talking about different scenarios. If somebody — it's somebody that's desperate, not from the inside, and I'm not saying this makes sense, but not from the inside because there's too much from the inside that the other person knows from the outside, so they won't risk it. That's why I know for a fact it's not from the inside. It's somebody trying to be greedy probably, you know, hey, everybody knew — everybody knew who I've dated in the past and stuff, I've had a couple boyfriends, you know. So she's saying, like, I have investigated the matter and I do not think this is a legitimate threat from the inside of our conspiracy to murder Dan Markel.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie replies, it's somebody not from the first layer but probably the second layer, yeah, and they just made a big mistake. So that's sort of the finale of the evidence in the case, is her saying she's resolved it, it's not somebody from the inside. I want to turn my attention a little bit to the jury instructions. The defendant in this case is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation to commit murder, and first-degree murder as a principal. Why all three charges? The defendant didn't just ask Sigfredo Garcia to do this and pay for it. That would be solicitation. She didn't just take Charlie Adelson's family problem and turn it into action. That would be conspiracy.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She got the thing done.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Dan Markel is dead.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This is the work of this conspiracy, and this is why there is a murder charge, not just conspiracy and solicitation.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: To prove the crime of first-degree murder, I must prove to you that this was premeditated. I don't even want to talk to you about the lesser included offenses because there is so much evidence of premeditation. Whoever did it was definitely premeditated, right?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Premeditation is defined as killing after consciously deciding to do so. So I think that's abundantly clear. This murder was in the works for over a year. It began with the failed relocation efforts when Charlie first looked into hiring a hitman, and it took root when Katherine Magbanua enlisted Garcia, who then enlisted Rivera, to do this killing.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The planning that went into the killing was extensive, spanning a six-week period, including 2,000-mile trips to Tallahassee made in rented vehicles, scouting and stalking Professor Markel.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All the planning, all the meetings, and all the calls came to fruition when Sigfredo Garcia fired those two shots into Mr. Markel's vehicle, which devastated so many lives.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: When you think about how this case was proven, we started at a single point — the crime scene — and we went in two totally different directions. We chased a Prius, and we chased the bad blood with the in-laws.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: All these little breadcrumbs led to the same place. The Prius led to Garcia and Rivera, the bad blood led to the Adelsons, and both trails lead to this defendant.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I want to spend a little time talking about the principal instruction.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And we talked about this in jury selection.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Katherine Magbanua didn't pull the trigger that day. She didn't come to Tallahassee. But that doesn't mean that she isn't just as responsible as the folks that did and the people that reported to her.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Think of it like this.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: If you have a gun, each player can be a part in how the shot is fired. Garcia was the bullet.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Charlie Adelson was the finger wrapped around the trigger.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The defendant was the gun.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Without every piece, without every function, without every part of it, you don't have the end result.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And Dan Markel would still be alive.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: May still be alive.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So in your jury instructions, it says there's two ways to prove Katherine Magbanua's guilt under the law of principals. One: if she intended that the murder be done and she did some act or said some word that caused or helped another to commit the crime, then she's guilty of first-degree murder. Or two: if she intended the murder be done and she promised payment in exchange for the murder and the crime was committed by another person, then she's guilty of first-degree murder. So there's two ways — it can be either or both. In this case, I would suggest it's both, but if y'all are unanimous on either, then your verdict should be guilty. Luis Rivera called the defendant the mastermind. He said she hired Sigfredo Garcia to do this murder. She told him when the murder needed to happen because Markel was leaving town the next day. She gave Garcia spending money for both trips to Tallahassee. She drove Garcia to get a rental car. She got angry with Rivera when he posted something on social media from Tallahassee. She got the money from Charlie. She delivered the stapled money to the killers.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And finally, she got paid too.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The burden today on the state is to prove to you this case beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury instructions tell you that a reasonable doubt is not a mere possible, speculative, or imaginary doubt. It's not forced. So when you're back there deliberating, ask yourself — you have to assess these things — is this a reasonable doubt? Is this a reasonable doubt? What is reasonable? If you find yourself speculating, then it's not a reasonable doubt. Well, what if it's possible? If you don't have evidence to support it — actual evidence, not what the lawyers say, evidence, testimony, or items introduced — then that's speculation. I want to touch on the defendant's statements just a little bit more. She took the stand, and there's some things that we heard from her. She was confronted with the fact that Charlie did a lot of favors for her right after the murder, even though they weren't together. He paid for a trip to the Dominican Republic, offered to pay for a cruise, paid for car repairs, gave her money and loans when she asked for it. You saw a text where she was asking for money, and then the next day deposits $1,400 worth of cash into her account. Then he put her on the payroll. The defendant told us — when her attorney was asking her questions — that the defendant had ghosted her. Ghosted her prior to putting her on the payroll. He ghosted her after the murder in August of 2014. Why would he want her to become his personal assistant?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She could not answer that question. When asked what do you do as his personal assistant, she could not answer that question.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: These are easy questions, folks. What was your job?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She couldn't answer them.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She said she didn't schedule patients.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She said she set up an appointment. You know, you heard about the one appointment. She said she collected rent, but couldn't tell you a winner from whom.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She was paid over $17,000 over the course of a year and a half to help Charlie set up an appointment to go get a website. And that was done two months before she started collecting the money.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Why would Donna Adelson agree to write all these checks to her son's ex-girlfriend who wasn't doing anything for the money?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That text about what she had done for the family — what about her is so special? And he's got a million ex-girlfriends; he's not paying for all the stuff for them. She couldn't answer that question. You heard she was previously questioned in 2019. You heard about this jail interview where the defense invited my team to come ask her anything we wanted. And you saw Ms. Dugan do her damnedest to ask questions, and it's like trying to nail jello to a wall.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You're not gonna get answers.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Where were you working in the summer of 2014?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I don't know.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You heard from Yindra about the work. You heard from the club owners that she wasn't making the kind of money that she says she was making there.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She said she was making $1,500 a night, but the evidence is to the contrary.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And if she was doing it, she only did it the month after the murder.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The wiretap calls.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Defendant says Charlie called her because she was his last ex-girlfriend, but we know that's not true.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: When Charlie was acting like he didn't know who Tuto was on the wiretap, she doesn't enlighten him. He doesn't know who Toto is. She doesn't enlighten him. The only reason they're walling each other off, the only reason they're speaking in code, is because they are guilty — because they are concerned law enforcement is listening.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: She testified that she knows nothing about this crime at all. Even after the bump and all of her involvement in these wire calls — and calling the number, not calling the number, getting someone else to call the number — she says she did not even know there was a murder.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: In opening statement, the defense told us that they would offer definitive proof that there was a link between Garcia and Katherine Magbanua that did not involve this defendant.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And now you have seen all of the evidence in this case and heard the testimony of the witnesses, including this defendant. And we are no closer to proving the defense's theory than we were in opening statement. What is the smoking gun? The fact that they both had the same auto mechanic? That would be speculation. A reasonable doubt is not a speculative doubt. Has the evidence shown communication through the auto mechanic? No. To the contrary, the evidence has repeatedly shown communication through this defendant — communication around all the critical times in this case, communication that was overheard by or relayed to Luis Rivera, communication related to the murder. Even on the wiretaps, you get to hear them talking about issues related to this case, and you get to see how the communication does in fact flow through here. You don't have to guess. You don't have to just look at the communication pattern and listen to the testimony of Luis Rivera — you can hear it for yourself. What happens when we plant information in the hands of Donna Adelson? Because boom, boom, boom, right down the line, she is right in the middle of it. As she acknowledged: "I know how it looks. I know I'm right in the middle of it." But she's not there because she was manipulated by others. She's there because of the choices that she made.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I've been straining my pea brain trying to figure out why the defense — who agrees wholeheartedly that Sigfredo Garcia did this murder — has worked so hard to suggest that he wasn't on that June trip with Luis Rivera.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And you remember the traffic ticket where there's that little box that you check for if it's a 16-passenger vehicle or not — it wasn't checked, and they're interpreting that to mean Rivera was the only one in the car.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: It finally came to me this morning that it's because of their confrontation-at-dinner theory. So there's no evidence of a confrontation at all, but there was a dinner that occurred in March of 2014.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Lacasse was there, Wendi was there, Charlie was there, and this defendant were there.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Luis Rivera told you that Garcia was furious. He couldn't stand Charlie's guts, and he and Rivera were both in the car watching her eating with the dentist, and Garcia wanted to run through the patio and kill everybody on the patio. And Rivera talked him down, and they decided not to do that and went on their way.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: There was no confrontation.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Lacasse hung out with Charlie later in the hot tub that night, and there was no mention of it. The defendant even told you herself that there was no confrontation other than the jet ski incident that occurred on July 1st. So I thought, well, July 1st — that's when Sigfredo Garcia tries to confront the defendant and Charlie Adelson as they're backing out to go jet skiing. And he's making a scene in the street, and Charlie Adelson refuses to engage and edges around them, and they are able to drive away.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That is the same day, July 1st, 2014, is when Garcia attempts to call Charlie Adelson and gets Harvey Adelson and leaves that voicemail. So that's when the confrontation occurs, although they don't really get face-to-face because Charlie's in a car the whole time.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: The problem for the defense is, if Garcia and Charlie struck up this deal that they told you about in opening statement — whereby Charlie, you know, it goes from "I'm gonna fight you because you're sleeping with my wife" to "I'll do a murder for you for $100,000 if you'll leave my wife alone" — if that happens on or about March 11th at the dinner meeting, then it doesn't make sense that he would make this deal with Charlie, go to Tallahassee in June to stalk and/or kill, and then July 1st not know how to get in touch with Charlie Adelson. So that's the problem — it doesn't make sense.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: He's looking for Charlie Adelson; he doesn't know how to get in touch with him. If he had this confrontation that resulted in a pact to do a murder in March, then he would already have Charlie Adelson's information, be able to call Charlie Adelson and confront him after the jet ski incident, wouldn't need to accidentally leave a voice message for Harvey.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: So that theory is completely speculative. It does not fit with the evidence in this case. All the evidence is consistent with Garcia traveling to Tallahassee. Remember, he's the one that rented the car.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: That car pinged in Tallahassee.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: And I would even take this analysis a step further and suggest that the fact that Garcia is trying to confront Charlie on July 1st, which is after that June trip, is evidence that he is walled off from Charlie in reference to this conspiracy.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: I don't think he's going to be trying to fight the guy that he's in the process of trying to do a murder for.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: A guy that's about to pay him a hundred thousand dollars, or his portion of a hundred thousand dollars, to do a murder two weeks later.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: This theory is further evidenced by what he told Rivera. He told Rivera they were coming to Tallahassee to do a murder so that the lady, Wendi, could get her kids back. Does that say ten minutes?

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Okay. I believe he did think he was doing this murder for a lady in Tallahassee, not Charlie Adelson — and possibly not even with the knowledge that the lady in Tallahassee was related to Charlie Adelson, the dentist.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: Regardless of how completely clueless she acted on the stand yesterday, the evidence shows that this defendant was not the pawn in someone else's scheme. She was not the pawn of two master manipulators. She herself was the stage manager in this thing. She was directing these guys. The defendant is guilty of everything she's charged with. You have all been so very patient throughout this entire process, and when you get back there to the deliberation room, I encourage you to bring your common sense with you — and you're going to need it to cull through all this stuff. The defense may ask you to speculate about things that are not in evidence. Don't do that. Remember that what the lawyers say, including me, is not evidence. Remember that you alone must decide what the evidence is, what evidence to accept, and how reliable the evidence is. They may tell you that just because all the evidence fits, it's not what it appears to be — it's really the opposite of what it appears, or that the state is blindly or willfully misleading you in some way. Please remember that your feelings about the lawyers should not influence your verdict at all. You should use your common sense in deciding based on the evidence and the law that the judge gives you.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: You decide what to accept and what to disregard.

MS. CAPPLEMAN: We are all trusting you to render a wise and legal verdict in this case, and I trust that that verdict will be guilty as charged. Thank you.