A finance executive’s estranged husband was arrested on a murder charge Monday, more than five years after his wife was found strangled to death in a New York City bathtub, in a case full of dramatic twists.
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Longtime suspect Roderick Covlin now faces two counts of the murder in the second degree of his estranged wife, financier Shele Covlin.
Covlin’s lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, said his client was “stunned” by the Sunday arrest. She was found dead on New Year’s Eve 2009. The death was initially believed to be an accidental slip-and-fall, and her body was buried the day after her death. An autopsy was not immediately done for religious reasons, and the body was badly decomposed by the time they got a rabbi’s blessing to exhume the body three months later.
Danishefsky’s body was found by her then nine-year-old daughter at 7:15 a.m. on New Year’s Day with her head underwater in the bathtub in the family’s West 68th Street apartment. Rod Covlin was charged with murder.
DNAInfo reported that witnesses said Covlin was acting suspiciously around the time of the murder, with one saying he was “roaming the lobby at 4 in the morning, he hadn’t changed his clothes in days, and he looked whacked”. He is being held without bail.
An attorney for the surviving Covlin, a noted backgammon player, did not respond to a request for comment.
Rod Covlin moved into an apartment across the hall in their Upper West Side building, just blocks from Central Park.
But as an investigation began, her body was exhumed and autopsied with her family’s permission.
The Manhattan public administrator, who was named temporary custodian over Shele Covlin’s estate, filed a wrongful death suit in 2011 in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, claiming that Rod Covlin “intentionally, deliberately, willfully, wantonly, maliciously, brutally and without provocation or just cause did strangle, choke, strike, injure, assault, abuse, beat and murder” his wife, according to the Daily News.
Roderick Covlin, a New Rochelle native, was arrested at the Scarsdale train station Sunday by detectives from the NYPD.
According to DNAInfo, citing court documents, before her murder Danishefsky had expressed fears that Covlin “intended to kill her”, and got a restraining order that would bar him from contact with her or their two children.
Shele Covlin reportedly told friends that her husband had threatened to hurt her, and that she was going to remove him from her will.
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The woman’s mother, Elaine Danishefsky, is pleased with Covlin’s arrest and says it’s been “terrible” without her daughter.
