https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...ar-old-daughter-wifes-murder-prosecutors.html
A former stock broker accused of murdering his wealthy estranged wife in 2009 before she could cut him out of her will tried to frame their daughter when he realized police were closing in on him years later, it has been claimed.
Rod Covlin, now 45, is accused of of murdering his businesswoman wife, Shele Danishefsky Covlin then leaving her body in the bathtub of her Manhattan apartment for their daughter, Anna, to find at 7am on New Year's Eve in 2009.
He was 36 at the time. Shele, a UBS executive from a wealthy Jewish orthodox family, was 47 and was the sole breadwinner while her husband pursued a career as a professional backgammon player.
Shele had been put in a choke-hold, strangled, then turned face down in the tub in what prosecutors say was set up to look like an accidental drowning.
She was found by the couple's daughter Anna. Their other child, Myles, was at home asleep.
Because the only visible injury on her body was a cut to the back of the head and because her religious family protested against an invasive autopsy, the cause of her death was undetermined.
At the time, the couple were in the midst of a bitter custody and divorce battle which centered around Covlin's alleged infidelity. The day before her death, Shele, made an appointment to meet with her attorney to discuss taking Rod, a Columbia-graduate, out of her $4million will.
Prosecutors also contend that he wanted to start seeing other women and that he was cheating at the time of his wife's death.
For six years, her death was deemed to be an accident until 2015 when Covlin was recorded by a girlfriend hatching up a plan to marry Anna off so that he would be able to control her inheritance.
His hope was that by her getting married, she would no longer be considered a minor and that technicality would grant him access to the money.
He was prepared to pay a Mexican teenage boy $10,000 to go through with the marriage.
By then, the children had been removed from his care and given to his parents and he had no way of accessing the $4million which had been left to them by their deceased mother.
On Monday, nine years after his wife's death, he appeared in court to face murder charges and was accused of trying to frame Anna for killing Shele by penning an Apple note in 2013, allegedly pretending to be his daughter, where she confessed to the killing.
It read: 'All of these years I have been so incredibly afraid and guilty about the night my mom died.
'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 heard a terrible noise and the water started turning red and I tried to pull her head up but she remained still…'
Prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos claimed he wrote the note once he learned the DA's investigation into him was heating up again.
On the morning of his wife's death, Covlin left the apartment building where they lived at 4am to go for a walk.
It piqued prosecutors' interest because on his way out, he offered their doorman a cup of coffee.
The doorman told investigators that it was odd behavior from a man who had scarcely ever acknowledged him before. Shele's body was found at 7am, three hours after their encounter.
Though suspicion against him was abundant, police did not file charges until six years later.
In 2010, a year after Shele died, her family allowed her body to be exhumed so that a full autopsy could be carried out.
They had previously refused on grounds of their religion but changed their minds as suspicion against Covlin mounted.
The autopsy revealed that she had been strangled and a medical examiner ruled the cause of death as homicide but no charges were brought against her ex-husband.
Her family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him and, as part of it, a judge placed an order prohibiting him from seeing any of the money that had been left to him or her children but he still did not face murder charges.
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Covlin was reported to police by a girlfriend who secretly recorded a conversation they had where he allegedly discussed marrying Anna off so that he would finally be able to get control of her trust fund.
After their mother's death, the children were entrusted to their father's parents' care after they raised concern that he was physically abusing their son.
There were also claims he had been trying to contact underage girls by 'poking' them on Facebook.
One threatened to report him to the police if he did not stop, according to prosecutors, and there were other allegations which prosecutors made vague reference to in court that he had actually engaged in sexual contact with a minor.
Covlin, who has been described as greedy and unscrupulous by prosecutors, was enraged by it because he was desperate to control the children's trust fund.
To try to regain control of it, he allegedly hatched a plan to kill his own parents.
He also, it is claimed, tried to convince Anna to accuse her grandfather, his father, of molesting her and sickeningly, gave her instructions on how to break her own hymen with a cucumber to make it appear as though she had been sexually assaulted.
He denies all of the allegations against him and maintains that Shele's death was an accident.
After the new accusations emerged on Wednesday, his lawyer Robert Gottlieb said: 'It's disgusting because it's clear what happened here.
'These garbage allegations, which the DA has been desperate to get before a jury has been thrown out of the case by the judge in a very clear decision.
'The allegations are absurd, ridiculous and they will have no role to play in this case.'
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In the months before his 2017 arrest, he had been working for a loan collectors company under a different name.
Calling himself Rod Sommer, he worked at Pearl Capital as a head loan collector.
After his arrest, former co-workers said he was a 'f****** psychopath' who came to work reeking of alcohol and who was aggressive towards some of the people he was collecting money from.
'This guy is a f–king psychopath. He is out of his bird. Sometimes he’d come nose-to-nose with me.
'Whenever he was in my face, he reeked of liquor...
'There was always alcohol on his breath — early in the morning, all day, in fact,' the worker, who declined to be named, told The New York Post in 2017.
