He’s the black-hearted husband accused of snapping his wife’s neck so he could reap her $5.2 million fortune and then, in a twist worthy of “Law & Order,” trying to frame his innocent 9-year-old daughter.
Rod Covlin allegedly murdered his wife, Shele Danishefsky, and left her body in the bathtub of their ritzy Upper West Side apartment in 2009. The crime’s lurid details mesmerized New Yorkers and inspired screaming headlines such as “SLAIN FINANCIER FEARED HUSBAND” and “SHIFTY TALE IN WIFE SLAY.”
But those tales barely touch the depraved depths into which Covlin allegedly descended as he sought to secure his wife’s fortune after the New Year’s Eve murder, according to new court filings in his trial, which is set to begin Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
The documents reveal a man who allegedly drew inspiration from sinister TV shows as he plotted conscripting his young daughter to poison his own parents, donning blackface to murder his mother, and marrying off the little girl in Mexico when she turned 14 so he could control her inheritance.
They are among a trove of details uncovered by prosecutors that may be introduced only in the event Covlin takes the stand.
Danishefsky, a successful UBS wealth manager, met Covlin at a Jewish singles event in 1998, and they were married in a matter of weeks despite her being 11 years older.
Rather than pursue his own career, failed stockbroker Covlin preferred to live off his wife’s largesse and put scant effort into steady employment — instead devoting his time to compulsively pursuing women online and developing a fanciful career as a pro backgammon player.
The Lothario wannabe once contacted more than 40 women on Facebook in a single day, according to prosecutors.
The couple had one daughter, Anna, before learning that Danishefsky, 47 when she died, could not conceive again. So when they had their son, Myles, Covlin never let his wife forget that she had to resort to a donor egg — and he even taunted the boy, telling him Danishefsky was not his biological mom, Manhattan Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos wrote in court papers.
On their 10th wedding anniversary, Covlin suggested an open marriage — a proposition Danishefsky swiftly rejected.
Undeterred, he continued to philander with a manic zeal, meeting countless women on Jewish dating service JDate under the pseudonym “James Early” and juggling more than two dozen potential paramours at a time, according to a weekly schedule recovered from his computer — which also contained two pornographic stories he’d written involving the rape of children as young as age 10, prosecutors say.
After he came home at 6 a.m. one morning reeking of another woman’s perfume, Danishefsky had had enough of the gross mistreatment and they separated, with Covlin moving into a smaller apartment across the hall to make the transition easier on their two children, court papers state.
Wary of Covlin’s dark impulses, Danishefsky had the locks changed on her apartment door and obtained an order of protection in favor of her and the kids in May 2009.
When she served him with divorce papers, Covlin soon realized that his debauched lifestyle would wither without a steady flow of his wife’s money, prosecutors said.
Desperate for dough and incensed that his wife was thriving post-split, an unhinged Covlin hacked into the woman’s phone and emails — and then initiated his young children into his dark world by trying to weaponize them against their mother, according to prosecutors.
“As Shele Covlin seemed to be flourishing in her professional and personal life — getting new clients and meeting new men . . . the defendant’s life and situation grew more bleak and desperate by the day,” Bogdanos wrote.
In a farfetched scheme to gain custody of the kids — and thus their claims to Danishefsky’s money — Covlin coached his 3-year-old son to falsely accuse his mother of sexual abuse, even going so far as to take him to an emergency room to report it, court papers state.
The stunt outraged a Family Court judge, who curtailed Covlin’s visitation and required that he only meet with the boy under supervision.
Covlin’s schemes grew more physical as he grew more desperate, and two months before the murder, Danishefsky told her doctor that Covlin “had choked her during an argument by putting his arm around her neck, while screaming, ‘I’ll f–king kill you.’”
The increasingly terrified mom confided in family and colleagues that she feared Covlin would indeed be her demise, court papers allege.
She was dead right.
Just two days after she emailed her lawyer about cutting Covlin out of her will — a message her estranged husband likely intercepted — she was murdered.
Prosecutors say Covlin, a taekwondo expert, snapped Danishefsky’s neck with a martial arts hold and then staged the scene to conjure an accidental drowning for his daughter to discover.
“His primary motive to kill her was pure, unadulterated greed,” Bogdanos wrote in court papers.
Little Anna stumbled on the body and immediately called Covlin, but he waited two minutes before calling 911 — though he did make a 6-second call that may or may not have connected to his lawyer.
Although he was always the prime suspect, it was six years before he was arrested for the slaying, and he spent the intervening years scrambling to cover up his crime and collect his dead wife’s fortune.
Following the death, extended family members did not trust Covlin to care for the children, and Anna and Myles were sent to live with his parents, David and Carol, in Scarsdale.
But Covlin soon moved in to the home and turned his wrath on his mother and father, viewing them as little more than a roadblock to his dead wife’s money, according to prosecutors.
He allegedly slammed his mother head-first into a wall and knocked his father to the floor, injuring his eye, papers state.
Meanwhile, he exploited his children like they were “his own automated teller machines,” siphoning more than $80,000 from their college funds, filings allege.
David and Carol Covlin obtained custody of the kids in 2012 and secured a restraining order against their son, but that only incensed him — and nearly cost them their lives.
Inspired by episodes of “Breaking Bad” and “Dexter,” Covlin researched various poisons used on the shows, prosecutors allege, including ricin and aconite, along with this then-girlfriend, Debra Oles — who secretly recorded their conversations and is now the government’s star witness.
Covlin even considered conscripting his daughter into dosing his folks with rat poison, only to later abandon the plan “because of the exposure that might cause [her] to be arrested.”
The ghoulish Covlin seized on every opportunity available as he clambered to get his hands on the inheritance or kill off his own parents without raising suspicions any further.
During Hurricane Sandy, he told his girlfriend he hoped to go to their home, start a fire, remove the children and trap his parents.
“He had this look on his face,” Oles recalled in court papers. “It was so intense. I was so afraid at that moment when I realized what he was really capable of.”
In yet another bid to get the inheritance, Covlin planned to kidnap his teen daughter when she turned 14 and pay a man to marry her in Mexico, according to court papers. He would then be able to independently control her money, he reasoned.
“Oh goody,” Oles told him with incredulous sarcasm. “Then her name could be in the New York Post again. ‘Married at 14.’”
Covlin’s final unrealized plan involved “killing his mother by breaking her neck while disguised as a ‘black man’ who was ‘going door-to-door’ during the election,” according to court documents. Oles even drove him to a costume store, where he bought a mustache, “black man wig” and “black man makeup,” papers state.
On Election Day, he allegedly planned to ring his mother’s bell and then “ ‘karate chop’ her in the throat and kill her,” but Oles talked him out of it.
As the Manhattan DA’s Office ratcheted up its investigation in 2013, Covlin reached new depths of evil, court papers state.
He plotted to frame his own daughter for Danishefsky’s murder, Bogdanos wrote.
Covlin penned an Apple note purportedly written by his daughter to her law guardian and synced it to her email account on June 25, 2013, court papers allege.
“All of these years I have been so incredibly afraid and guilty about the night my mom died,” Covlin allegedly wrote, posing as Anna, in the unsent missive.
“I lied. She didn’t just slip. That day we got into a fight about her dating . . . I got mad so I pushed her, but it couldn’t have been that hard! I didn’t mean to hurt her! I swear! But she fell and i (sic) heard a terrible noise and the water started turning red and I tried to pull her head up but she remained still . . .”
Covlin’s lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, has said there’s no proof he penned the letter, arguing Anna could actually have done it.
Many of the stomach-churning allegations — cobbled together from 6,000 pages of Facebook posts, 100,000 text messages and more than 700,000 emails seized from Covlin — will go unheard by the men and women who will ultimately determine his fate.
In a sealed decision, Justice Ruth Pickholz ruled that the deeply disturbing — and overwhelmingly prejudicial — evidence can’t be presented at trial and could only be introduced in the unlikely event that Covlin takes the stand.
“None of these alleged acts have anything to do with his wife’s unfortunate death,” Gottlieb said. “Mr. Covlin, from the beginning, has insisted on his innocence.”
Covlin was arrested in 2015 — six years after the killing and just two months before he was set to inherit at least $1.6 million of his dead wife’s fortune.
At the time, he was living under a pseudonym and working as a head loan collector at a Manhattan financial company.
A split from Oles in 2014 hastened his downfall after the jilted gal pal blabbed to cops about Covlin’s alleged scheming — but his lawyer Gottlieb has argued in court papers that the arrest was actually the result of pressure from Danishefsky’s family to charge Covlin before he could get his hands on her money.
“The DA’s Office brought this case before a grand jury despite no direct evidence connecting Mr. Covlin to Mrs. Covlin’s death and internal strife within the DA’s Office over the viability of the case against Mr. Covlin,” Gottlieb wrote.
Covlin’s own parents could take the stand as witnesses, but his daughter will be spared the public embarrassment.
Covlin, now 45, is charged with two counts of second-degree murder and faces a maximum life in prison if convicted.
Additional reporting by Max Jaeger