This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske.

Here now, Tony Bruske.

Before Donna Edelson, what happened?

How did we get here?

That's the story we are going to be talking about today.

Because there was a world before Donna Adelson got involved in all of this,

at least a world that she would like most of us to forget.

I mean, because behind the scene, she was playing her part, but

what part were the others playing? The people she was steering from behind the curtain.

That's what we're about to get into today. It started with silence, a silence so deep, so wrong, that it felt like the world itself

held its breath.

Tallahassee, July 18th, 2014, Dan Markell pulls into his garage after dropping off

his two boys at daycare.

He never makes it out.

Two bullets to the head, precision, no struggle, no theft, just

a cold calculated execution. The sound of those gunshots didn't echo along, but the ripples they

made, they reached all the way to South Florida to a family that thought money could rewrite

fate. The Edelson's. The thing about evil is that it

doesn't always start with monsters. Sometimes it starts with ordinary people making selfish choices in

quiet rooms. And sometimes those choices, they grow teeth. Dan Markell's murder didn't come out of nowhere. It was the

final punctuation mark in a bitter, years-long custody war. His ex-wife, Wendy Adelson,

wanted to move the kids to Miami. Dan said no. The courts agreed with him. And somewhere in that web of resentment,

...