Murder for Hire in Tallahassee: the Killing of Law Professor Dan Markel and Case That Took Years to Unravel

On a summer morning in 2014, law professor Dan Markel drove home from the gym and was shot in his own garage. He died the next day. He was forty-one, a respected scholar, and the father of two young sons. At first, no one knew who had killed him, or why.The answer, when it came, was extraordinary. Markel had not been killed by a stranger or a robber. He had been killed, prosecutors proved, by hired men, in a murder-for-hire plot that grew out of a bitter divorce and a fight over where his children would live. It took years, an undercover sting, and a series of trials to establish what had happened, and the case reached, step by step, from two hired killers in Miami into the family at the center of the conflict.Built entirely from the public record, the court files, the trial testimony, and years of reporting, this book tells the whole story. The man and the marriage. The murder and the baffling investigation. The rented car that cracked the case. The hired killers, the intermediary, and the money. The undercover operation. The trials, the mistrial, and the convictions. And the disciplined truth about who was convicted, who was charged, and who was never charged at all.Careful, fair, and fully sourced, it keeps Dan Markel at its center and holds the distinctions that justice requires, a true-crime account that refuses to convict anyone the law has not. It is the story of a good man's murder, and of the long, hard road to justice that followed.