Talking Dateline: Family Matters

Hi, everybody. This is Talking Dateline. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and our guest today is Dennis Murphy.

Hey, bud.

How are you? I'm good. Great to see you. This episode is called Family Matters. Now, if you haven't heard the podcast of this, or if you haven't seen it on television, it's the podcast episode right below this one on the list of podcasts that you just chose from.

This story changes by the minute, Josh. It's been going on for 10 years, but if you were up to date as of a month ago, you don't really know the case. The shoes just keep dropping. Not only is Charlie convicted of first-degree murder, he's gone away for the rest of his life. One week later, police arrest the mother.

I guess the moral here is, no matter what, try to get along with your spouse's parents.

Oh, boy. Have a good Thanksgiving. This really is like a Super Bowl, a Florida crime story. There's a murder, and then it morphs into this extraordinary story. We go from a police procedural to these huge themes of blood and rage and hate and venom between family members.

And they see the Fast Pass on it, the Sun Pass. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, that's great.

That's just as an example. Josh, how about this? You're going through one of those funky cameras on the ATM, and it takes a picture suitable for framing of these two guys who have just arrived back in the Miami area after killing Danny Markell. And, you know, one almost leans out of the way, so you can get a good shot of the other guy.

Missing you in sunny Florida. Yeah, it was nice.

These guys are not Lex Luthor, master criminal. A rent car is at the start of all this thing. On the rental document, he puts his real name with his real address, with his real phone. Once they come upon that, I mean, it all starts to fall together.

I mean, you've got all these people. You've got the in-laws and you've got the outlaws, you know?

How can you commission a murder for hire on your brother-in-law?

It is, I have to say, just unfathomable. And while I was watching this, in the first 15 minutes of this story, the name that kept coming to my lips was Dahlia Polito, because this is that kind of bonker story that you just can't take your eyes off of.

A brief on Dahlia, she was a young, beautiful, unhappily married bride who wanted to get rid of her husband. And she made inquiries and she ended up hiring a Boynton Beach undercover police officer. And they staged this great fake killing when she was away at the gym with crime scene tape and cameras and, you know, looked like a violent thing had happened. And she boo-hoos and goes into the interview room and, of course, she's done. In walks, the dead husband.

She's alive!

That is one of the great moments of all time on Dateline. One more thing that I thought this showed, which was so great, was the value of not just that great police investigation, identifying the suspects over 22 months, but also the wiretaps and the capturing of the conversations.

And the interesting thing, I think it almost could be a breakaway special hour, is this brilliant shakedown of Donna on the streets of Miami, outside her condo. It's called The Bump. Imagine a game of pool and you take the cue ball and you make the break and balls fly in all directions. That's what they wanted to do. They wanted to make the break there and see what would happen if she's provoked with this apparent extortion attempt from a very bad guy.

Now, an innocent person in that situation says, I don't know what you're talking about. Get away from me. I'm calling the police. And then you call the police.

She calls Charlie immediately and he's playing 20 questions trying to figure out what's happened. He doesn't know who this guy is. It's intercepted her on the street. He says, is it about me? Does it concern me?

That's not the kind of thing you want to have to explain in front of 12 impartial jurors. And then the Dolce Vita tape, which is, the thing I love about it is that it's inaudible the first time we hear it. And then later on, after they've cleaned it up, you're going, oh, I got it. I love that.

My goodness. They put a lot of effort into it. And somebody pointed out, and I think that's right, if Meg Bonowa, just to get too far into the weeds, she was tried twice. In that time while they were waiting to put her on trial again, Georgia Kappelman, one of our great American prosecutors, hires this guy, this audio expert, to take yet another detailed pass at the Dolce Vita tape and see what they can come up with. And son of a gun, you can hear it.

It's astonishing how many people don't read that sign that says this is being recorded, or think, well, they don't mean me. I mean, you and I have both done cases in which people say things from inside the slam that they later wish they hadn't say. And then they're astonished when it turns out there's a recording of that.

The best advice would be, why don't you all just shut up?

And he mentions Dateline. I love that. Couple of times. Yeah.

Charlie said, you know, this prosecution was like watching Dateline. It wasn't wrong.

Something I think we're going to do more of on Talking Dateline is play little bits that did not make it into the TV broadcast. So here's one, and it's from Charlie, post-conviction, talking about how much trouble he's in and how his life has changed and is going to continue to change forever.

Oh, it's like,

That's a clip of Charlie talking from behind bars to his mom, who is.

Self-pitying, huh?

Yeah.

No more boat, no more beach.

No more nice dinners, no more dates. I got a solution to that problem.

Don't commission a murder. There are consequences for your actions.

You can do all of those things if you just don't hire any hitmen. That phone call from when Charlie was locked up, he drops off the call like at six minutes in, but the line stays open, and Donna keeps talking for another 17 minutes.

I don't know if we'll make it out in time, I really don't.

I'm no lawyer, but I would expect that recording is going to get challenged on the grounds that at some point, that was no longer a jail call, and it's essentially her talking to herself, even though she didn't realize she was talking to herself, or it's eavesdropping on a private conversation between her and whoever was in the room with her.

Yeah, I think it's probably beyond the understanding of what happens in a jailhouse call.

I'm sure that's going to be litigated at some future point. And I know that you and your team that has seen this through for 10 years will be there for that, too.

I hate to say I'm chomping at the bit for a development in a murder case, but I really am.

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You ready for what's coming?

It really isn't. I believe, the prosecution's theory and the jury's verdict to date. That Charlie was the mastermind, the person who put this awful thing together.

He's the one that would have known the way to get to those two killers. But, you know, the family that slays together stays together.

The wonderful prosecutor in this case says in one of her closing thoughts, you know, you got to step back and look at the mother and Charlie and see that he's really a mama's boy.

A wheel of fortune, right?

Don't you love that? I dropped my teeth when I saw the clip that A had existed. There. she introduces, you know, to Pat and Vanna, all the children, whose names we now know in a totally different context. And she solves the puzzle, which was mischief maker.

Mischief maker. Yeah, well, you know, art imitating life. The pretty amazing image of this 73-year-old, you know, grandmother getting arrested at the airport, and she's going to Vietnam. I have trouble believing that she was going to have the kind of life in Vietnam that she wanted to have.

But here she is. She and her husband have just finished the passport check. They got their tickets in hand. They're not outside where the gate agents are. They are in the jetway.

And she kisses her husband goodbye, and that's it.

And that's it, Josh. Her husband is standing right there, Harvey, who's been this, you know, mild-mannered, hardworking dentist, I guess.

He's never charged in this.

That's true. And it's like, call this guy in Uber. We don't need him. I mean, what a scene. You know, I talked to Ruth Markel, the mother of the victim in this thing, a few weeks ago.

Donna, in my mind, is the architect.

But Donna denied that accusation in court.

How does she plead?

Not guilty, Your Honor.

You talk with the prosecutor. The prosecutor's asked in this, you know, are you done trying people? And she's like, well, we'll see. Could Wendy still be charged?

That's what the court of public opinion wants to know, Josh. She does not have a get-out-of-jail-free card. She testified under what they called limited immunity, which means she couldn't be challenged on the things she said in court that day. But that's not the larger case. So, yes, she could very well be tried.

That final text of Wendy's, that sounds like it was written by somebody's legal team.

Wendy is an attorney. She has a law degree. She was fairly unruffled on the stand for a lot of her testimony until Kaplan went after her directly. But, you know, let's talk turkey here. Your family did this, right?

She says a couple of times, Danny treated me badly.

It's not on the record, whatever it is.

Well, and we would know that because it would have been an issue in the divorce. Sure.

They brought everything out. All the dirty socks were out in the court for everyone to see.

When Wendy is told, you know, on camera that Dan has been killed, I thought, I mean, if she knew about it, she did a great job. She definitely appears horrified, crushed, grief-stricken. And, as we know from Dateline, that's not always the case. People don't always look right. And she did.

Crying without tears, yeah. Wendy's problems, it seems to me, Josh, that she has this sketchy account of her timeline of the morning that he's killed. Danny had the two children that particular day. She's a few miles away. And she says she has to go get a bottle of bourbon for a party that night to fill up the bar kind of gift.

I mean, the thing that keeps coming back to me is, like, nobody thought about those kids. Nobody thought, what's it going to be like for them to have their dad murdered? It is astonishing that people don't think about the effect of what they do on the kids, who are frequently the actual rope in this tug of war that the two sides of a family are fighting. It's just absolutely nuts.

I thought it was chilling, Josh, in one of the intercepted phone calls. I think it's Donna talking to Charlie after the bump. And she interrupts her conversation because she's dealing with the kids, who are obviously very close there. And you hear their little voices, and she's putting on her grandmother voice. And it's time to get ready to get your bath and go upstairs.

Your heart just sort of goes out to them watching this thing, as they watch this horror unfold, not just losing their son, but then everything else that went with it.

Well, what happened is after their son's murder, they live in Canada. They were able to come down to Florida to visit the children a few times. And then Wendy, mother of the children, said, that's it. No more visitations. And the kids were out of their lives for the next six years.

I've covered three or four families where that act would really help, because I definitely know other grandparents who, for exactly these kind of reasons, haven't been allowed to see their grandkids. And these folks on that side are blameless. Not only are they suffering because they lost their son in a horrible, violent way, but they're cut off from his kids, which is extra punishment.

And changing their last name, that really hurts them, too.

Yeah, what is that?

Phil Markell told us, look, if you want to protect them by changing their name, don't call them Adelson. Call them Smith or Jones. This just doesn't make any sense.

We're going to come back in a minute with some questions from viewers and listeners.

I'm in a producer's car in the middle of Georgia.

That will explain the differences in audio. So let's see. The first one here comes from someone whose initials are HR. And their message is, repeatedly parking in Keith's space is a firing of—oh, that's internal email. Sorry, that's not viewer mail.

Yes, he was already in prison. And so they added time on to him with the deal that he cut with Georgia Kaplan. And so he did not have to get out of jail free card. He's got to serve this federal sentence, and then he goes on to the next thing.

Which I think is a total of 19 years.

Well, grab a headset and put a coffee down in front of you, and you can join the other six Dateliners who sat with headphones on and listened to some 30 hours of Jailhouse Conversations. Tell us when you get tired of it, but that's what it takes to put the story together.

Charlie mentioned Dateline 30 times over four days of calls. He's a regular viewer. We should send him a hat.

Yeah, there must be something in the swag bag. What do you think, Josh? You've got control of that stuff.

I don't think there's a Dateline file, so I think we're probably safe.

No, and his big point was, you know, I sat there listening to this case, and I felt like I was watching the prosecutor argue Dateline. He said it was Dateline, Dateline, Dateline. It's not. It was criminal court. He was charged with first-degree murder, facing a jury, and he got life.

Here's a question from Tara, who wants to know whether Charlie and Donna are going to see your episode in The Slam. What do you think?

Well, they've got TVs, but they're limited. They live in kind of pod areas, you know, where there's like 30 or 40 people together, and then there's a consensus, I guess, about what they will allow them to watch. They tend to not let them watch shows like Dateline, I think. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen, but I doubt if Charlie saw it, and I doubt if Donna Adelson saw it.

Here's a question from Chris Ron, and Chris wants to know, why would she hire, she, Donna, the same attorney that unsuccessfully represented her son, Charlie?

Well, she's talking about Dan Rashbaum, who's been the family attorney, well, since 2015.

Here's a question. People wanted to talk a little bit about Jeff LaCasse. Explain just briefly who he is and what's the significance of his police interview.

He became Wendy's boyfriend after the divorce from Dan, and she is complaining to him constantly about the divorce. And he has some interesting stories to tell, table conversations about. He's the source of the story that Wendy told him in a not-joking context. You know, Charlie's been trying to find a hitman. Words to that effect, which was a bombshell that she denies.

Dennis, thank you. I have a feeling this is not the last time we're going to be talking about the Adelson family on Talking Dateline. But I'm going to let you get back to actually covering the next episode of Dateline that you're working on. And I'm writing two of them today. So we're both busy.

Always good to talk to you, bud.

Dennis, thank you. And everybody else, see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.