Donna Adelson Trial: Detective Maps July 18th Phone Calls Before Dan Markel’s Murder
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.3 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
The jury in the Trial of Donna Adelson was riveted today as Tallahassee Police Sergeant Christopher Corbitt traced the timeline of phone calls on July 18, 2014—the very morning Dan Markel was shot in his driveway. This wasn’t just a list of calls. It was a carefully woven narrative of how the alleged conspiracy operated in real time, connecting the hitmen, Katherine Magbanua, Charlie Adelson, and ultimately Donna Adelson herself.
Corbitt walked the jury through the early-morning hours, showing how Magbanua and Charlie Adelson exchanged a flurry of calls while the hitmen’s phones pinged near their Tallahassee motel. At 1:02 a.m., Charlie called his mother, Donna, pulling her directly into the communications chain just hours before the murder. By mid-morning, calls bounced between Donna, Wendi, and Charlie, with Wendi speaking to both her brother and her mother minutes before Markel was due to arrive home.
Then came the chilling detail: at 11:22 a.m., barely 30 minutes after Markel was shot, Charlie Adelson placed a 7-minute call to Donna. Prosecutors argue this wasn’t coincidence—it was coordination, a family scrambling in the aftermath of a hit they helped arrange.
Why does this matter? Because phone records don’t forget, and they don’t get confused on the stand. These logs provide jurors with a roadmap of connection—showing not only who called whom, but when and how often. Combined with other testimony, this timeline suggests the Adelsons weren’t just worried relatives but active participants in orchestrating and managing the murder-for-hire plot.
For the prosecution, Corbitt’s testimony is about more than phone numbers. It’s about establishing a pattern of conspiracy—a trail of calls that prosecutors say leads straight back to Donna Adelson.
#DonnaAdelsonTrial #ChristopherCorbitt #DanMarkel #CharlieAdelson #DonnaAdelson #KatherineMagbanua #TrueCrime #FloridaTrial #CourtroomDrama #JusticeForDan
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is continuing coverage in the trial of Donna Adelson from the Hidden Killers podcast and true crime today. |
| 0:07.5 | Now, back to the courtroom. |
| 0:10.4 | It generally has less information, correct? |
| 0:14.6 | In this case, if you look at the extraction, the forensic extraction, there's significantly less data in her phone extraction |
| 0:23.9 | than in other devices extractions in this case? |
| 0:27.4 | Yes. |
| 0:29.4 | Yes, there is less data, but that may be an indication of less data on her device as well. I want to talk about the morning of July 18th of 2014. |
| 0:51.3 | I don't, I didn't write down the slide number |
| 0:55.0 | But you indicated earlier that |
| 1:01.0 | And you had a slide that Wendy called Donna Donna called Wendy. Can you pull that up? I can. Thank you. What slide to Merzis? |
| 1:20.6 | This is slide 196. |
| 1:22.6 | Thank you. |
| 1:23.6 | So slide 196, your analysis reveals that Wendy called her mother first, correct? |
| 1:35.3 | Well, these calls are as noted at the same time. |
| 1:38.8 | So they're both at 809. |
| 1:41.1 | And one of the limitations we have with some of the sets of records we have is that some were provided with only hours and minutes of call, and some were provided with hours, minutes, and seconds. |
| 1:52.0 | So these calls actually occurred in the same minute, but it's possible that Donna's call was first. |
| 1:59.0 | Okay. |
| 2:00.0 | Aren't, don't you have records that indicate seconds? |
| 2:02.4 | We do have records that indicate. |
| 2:03.7 | Specific for this day? |
| 2:05.7 | I don't know if we have specific for this day. |
... |
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