Donna Adelson Wrote a Script in Jail. In Her Own Handwriting.

Tony Brueski (0:00)

This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:10)

A one-way plane ticket is not necessarily a confession. People buy one-way tickets for innocent reasons.

We're talking about the Adelson's. I don't know how innocent the reasons are. The ticket alone does not prove that Donna was fleeing. And that's true, if it's by itself, just a ticket. A ticket doesn't mean much.

What made the Vietnam trip look so bad was everything Donna Adelson said before she reached the Jet Bridge. We're talking about the Adelson's. This is part three in our series. We're going through the family story, the history. If you've just seen the Hulu documentary, this is one you may be sitting here going, you know what? I think I'd like a better understanding of all this. So part one and part two are already out in our feed. Check that out. Pick it up here with part three. One day after Charlie Adelson was found guilty, Donna was speaking on a jail call that she apparently believed had ended. The line was still open.

Tony Brueski (1:15)

She forgot to hang up the phone.

Tony Brueski (1:17)

Juries later heard her discuss s, you know, ending it, taking the self-exit ramp of life, leaving the United States, non-extradition countries, wills, papers, and getting affairs and orders. Prosecutors argued that this was not a grieving mother trying to clear her head. It was a woman who believed that illegal machinery was turning straight towards her.

Then Donna and her husband Harvey booked a one-way itinerary to Vietnam. On November 13, 2023, FBI agents reached them on the jet bridge at Miami International Airport before they boarded the first leg of the trip. Harvey was not arrested and had not been charged. Donna was arrested that night and indicted two days later on first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and solicitation of murder. Her defense had an answer for the trip. They had an answer for everything, really. The family friend testified that he recommended a one-way ticket because the return date was uncertain and they planned to return for their grandson's bar mitzvah. They'll be back. Donna's attorneys argued that she was shattered by Charlie's conviction and wanted to clear her mind, maybe. When your destination is a country without a US extradition treaty and you have been recorded discussing gas, non-extradition countries, wills and papers, clearing your mind, stop sounding like an explanation and start sounding kind of like a brochure copy. That became the pattern at trial. Each damning fact derived with an innocent label and a very long footnote. The prosecution's theory was that Donna was not simply a loud mother-in-law who inserted herself into a bitter divorce. It portrayed her as the family manager, the person who ran the office, pushed the relocation campaign, kept Charlie informed, signed the checks and treated DanMarkel as a problem that had to be removed from the family's path. The defense said the state had taken a controlling personality and converted it into a murder case. Being controlling is not a felony, and ugly emails are not a murder agreement. Donna's behavior mattered because prosecutors said it revealed how she responded when somebody told her no. After a judge refused to let Wendy move the children from Tallahassee to South Florida, Donna did not treat that decision as the end of the matter. Emails shown at trial included increasingly aggressive ideas for pressuring Dan. There were discussions of offering as much as $1 million to agree to move. There were proposals involving the children's religious upbringing. And there was Donna suggesting that the boys be dressed in Nazi uniforms to provoke their Jewish father.

Yes, that's part of the story.

Donna was so angry, she threatened to raise the grandchildren Catholic and dress them in Nazi uniforms and send them to their father as a F you, love from grandma sort of thing. You know, what sane people do.

When he testified that some of those ideas were crazy and that she did not carry them out, she was right about the first part. Dressing children as Nazis to antagonize their father is not a normal grandmother strategy for some reason. It is what happens when resentment puts on a cardigan and calls itself family problem solving. Still, ugliness is not necessarily proof of murder. The prosecution's point was narrower and more damaging. Donna did not seem to experience boundaries as boundaries. She's experienced them as challenges. The court denied relocation, so another pressure campaign followed. Dan resisted the money, the pressure and the threats to change his children's religious life. He also had a pending motion seeking to limit Donna's unsupervised access to the boys. The state argued that the conflict kept narrowing until Dan himself became the only obstacle left. Then came the money. After Dan was shot in July 2014, Catherine McBonna began receiving checks from the Adelson Institute. Financial investigator Mary Hull testified that 44 checks were issued, that Donna signed every one, and that the twice monthly payments continued until May of 2016 Prosecutors said McBonna did not perform legitimate work for the practice, and that the checks were ongoing compensation tied to the killing. Donna's defense did not deny the signatures. It's said she signed the checks because she managed the office under Charlie's. Extortion story, the family was paying because McBonna.