Shele Covlin

Case background and investigation

Shele Danishefsky Covlin was a successful 47-year-old wealth manager, a senior executive at the investment bank UBS, who lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. By the end of 2009 she was in the midst of a bitter separation from her husband, Roderick Covlin, a trader and competitive backgammon player who lived in an apartment across the hall in the same building. The couple's contentious divorce and custody dispute, and Shele's considerable fortune, would later become central to the case.

On the morning of December 31, 2009, Shele's nine-year-old daughter found her mother lying face-down in the bathtub of her apartment. Because Shele came from an Orthodox Jewish family that objected to autopsies on religious grounds, no postmortem examination was performed at the time, and her death was initially treated as an accident, as though she had slipped and drowned. She was buried without the cause of death being scientifically established.

Suspicions grew in the months that followed, and investigators came to believe Shele had been killed. Her body was exhumed, and an examination by the medical examiner's office determined that she had in fact been strangled, reclassifying her death as a homicide. Attention focused on Roderick Covlin, who stood to benefit enormously from her death. Prosecutors would later argue that Shele had been planning to remove him as a beneficiary of her multimillion-dollar estate, and that he killed her the night before she could do so, denying him more than five million dollars.

The investigation stretched on for years before Roderick Covlin was arrested and charged with murder, nearly six years after Shele's death. Prosecutors assembled evidence that he had grown enraged upon learning of the changes to her will and that he had gone to extraordinary lengths afterward, including a scheme to frame others. Investigators found that he had drafted an email from his own daughter's account appearing to confess to the killing, a message that read in part that she had pushed her mother, though it was never actually sent.

In March 2019, after a trial that drew intense media attention, a New York jury convicted Roderick Covlin of second-degree murder for strangling his estranged wife and staging the scene to look like a bathtub accident. On April 10, 2019, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, with the Manhattan district attorney describing his conduct as an act of domestic violence, depravity and deception. Covlin has continued to maintain his innocence, claiming that he tried to revive Shele and called for help, and he has pursued appeals of his conviction on grounds including alleged prosecutorial misconduct. As it stands, however, the case is resolved with a standing murder conviction, closing nearly a decade of investigation into one of Manhattan's most closely watched domestic homicide cases and providing a measure of accountability for Shele Covlin's death.