"This TV will cost about 5". Such a bizarre thing to say. Why not a lampshade or a giraffe? I think everyone can accept that this statement by Donna to convey in code to Charlie that someone approached her on the street with paperwork about the murder of Dan Markel. And the people who approached her were asking for 5 thousands dollars. TV = Dan Markel's murder. Or maybe TV = the people we hired to murder Dan Markel.
If we can all accept that the TV is code for Dan Markel's murder in April of 2016, is it that much of a leap to suggest that it also meant his murder in July of 2014?
And, what is happening with that TV in June and July of 2014? Jeff Lacasse just testified that the TV was broken - like someone (unlikely the kids) struck it with a fist or object - in the week of June 11-18th, 2014. Which is one week after the first failed murder trip. He offered several times to go buy her a new one. He tried to set up the DVD player in her bedroom so they could watch movies on a normal TV and she adamantly refused all these offers. She forced her kids to suffer through watching a shattered and distorted TV for a month. Strange.
The morning of the murder, her mom texts her to tell her that Best Buy is coming over to fix her TV set in the living room but to confirm with them if she can't make the appointment. And instead of texting her mom back about this TV appointment, she texts Charlie "This is so sweet". Deletes that text. Despite the fact that it was her mom organizing this appointment, she calls Charlie out of the blue to update him on the TV repair. For 18 minutes.
Everyone thinks of this TV repair as a weird alibi but I don't think of it that way. She doesn't need an alibi cause its a murder for hire. What she would need to do, is make sure her kids aren't in the line of fire. And what is she doing? She's arguing with Dan Markel over text about the kids. He has them until 4:30pm that day and she wants to take them early. He wants to take them swimming. Dan Markel leaves Wendi a voicemail 20 minutes before she talks to Charlie and says he will be at the gym until 10:30am (i.e., the kids are already at Daycare).
And everyone assumes that her driving right up to the crime scene is extremely odd behaviour. But is it? Dan would not let her pull the kids out of daycare early. She was not getting them back until 4:30. He was going to take them out of daycare to go swimming sometime early that afternoon. She went there to see if anything happened yet or whether she needed to do something on her end to keep them out of danger. IMO.
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Agree about Wendi's email to Dan confirming he would be in Tallahassee July 13-18th is a big piece of new evidence. Another one is her agreeing to back out of buying a house after talking to Charlie on Halloween. The very same day Charlie approached KM.
Another interesting pattern is that the crazy and deranged emails from Donna are all in the June/July of 2013 period. They seem to drop off the map once the plan to murder Dan Markel had taken shape. Instead of crazy emails, we start getting code messages about Harvey's 70th bday gift. Dan is filing motions in court to restrict Donna's access and....nothing? Wendi just forwards her the motion. No response from Donna. Wonder why?
Brilliant analysis. I like what you said about the phone call to Charlie that morning. And she does bring up the argument about the swimming pretty early on in the police interview.
The first attempt failed because he was with the kids, according to Luis, or rather they couldn’t confirm he wasn’t with them. They would have wanted to make sure he wasn’t with them the second time. This could explain the text to Dan (and even her wanting the kids that week, though in the end she didn’t take them for some reason, which is strange).
So him wanting to take the kids swimming and bring them to her later, instead of her getting them directly from the school, could have put a sudden wrinkle in the plans. Maybe she DID talk to Charlie about this, like she said on the stand. Maybe he assured her it was still going to be OK. Maybe they were still trying to figure this out. There are a lot of calls back and forth with Katie and the killers in that time, too.
It appears that she left her house suddenly that morning. She tells Isom she didn’t have time to shower, and she was running late. But she makes sure to say she left at 12:15 (and later, she says she left even earlier, “around 12) in the interview. (Records at trial show she indeed left later, closer to 12:30.) Her lunch was at 1. She says she was running late, but she wouldn’t have been late if she left at 12, or 12:15 as she said, even if she did run some errands. So this doesn’t make sense. What if her plans were originally to shower and get ready for lunch and leave at around 12:45 and do the errands later? But she ran out of the house earlier without showering for some reason? All speculation, of course.
ETA- there’s an email in Feb 2014 about the financial litigation, which was heating up. The “birthday surprise” texts start around March. Katie in her proffer says he first brought it up in October (when they were concerned about the relocation/house buying) and then he brought it up again sometime after the beginning of the year (when the texts between Donna and Charlie show that Donna is really upset about the financial claims Dan is making).
