Donna Adelson, the Murdering Mischief-Maker
Part One: Long before Donna Adelson allegedly paid to have her son-in-law killed, she appeared on Wheel of Fortune and solved a puzzle: "Mischief-Maker"
There’s a rare club you never want to join. Not that you join it, exactly. No, this is a club you get dragged into—in stunned silence—and it is a horrible place. I know this because I’m a member.
The initiation is simple: A parent convicted of the ultimate crime. Murder. That’s your sponsor. That’s your inheritance.
In 1947, long before I was born in 1965, my father was accused of a horrific murder in Boston. The crime—the hammer killing of an elderly antiques store owner—became a cause célèbre, in part because my father was handsome, well-off, a decorated war hero. The newspapers loved him. A leading man in a real-life noir. It became national and international news when he fled Boston and led law enforcement on a cross-country chase through the United States and into Canada before being apprehended, finally, in San Francisco.
His trial was one of the largest in Boston history. His conviction would forever fracture my family along fault lines that would take decades to reveal themselves fully. My father died in 1976. It was not until 1995—nearly two decades after his death, nearly half a century after the crime—that I learned he had actually committed it. But even before I knew the truth, I understood its consequences. I didn’t meet many members of my paternal family until I was ten years old. The crime had scattered us like shrapnel. We were still finding pieces of ourselves in unexpected places, generations later.
Welcome to the club, Dr. Adelson. I’m so sorry you’re here.
It was over ten years ago. I was CEO of Capital Region Special Surgery, doing the work that administrators do—budgets, personnel, the mundane machinery of keeping a medical group afloat. Late one afternoon, one of our ENT surgeons appeared in my doorway, still in scrubs. Dr. Awwad closed the door behind him with the deliberate care of someone carrying gossip too explosive for hallways.
He had news, he said. But I had to keep it secret. Yes, the irony of a person spilling another’s secret lecturing another about trust and secrets did not escape me.
A new physician at a rival practice across town—a Dr. Robert Adelson—was about to become famous or should I say infamous. His mother, Dr. Awwad reported with barely suppressed glee, was under investigation for hiring someone to murder her son-in-law.
He was vibrating with that particular energy people get when someone else’s catastrophe arrives gift-wrapped as entertainment. The details were delicious, weren’t they? A prominent South Florida family. A law professor gunned down in his own driveway. A bitter custody dispute. Hitmen. Hitmen! In Tallahassee, of all places. It was the kind of story that made you feel better about your own messy divorce, your own difficult mother, your own family dysfunction. At least your people hadn’t commissioned a murder.
I had a different reaction.
