His family plot
Accused wife killer targeted folks, too: DA
THE BACKGAMMON-obsessed deadbeat accused of strangling his estranged wife in 2009 in a bid to inherit millions was an abusive philanderer who later plotted to kill his own parents, prosecutors asserted in court papers filed this week.
Roderick Covlin, 44, allegedly contemplated killing his mom and dad in the days after Hurricane Sandy — almost three years after authorities say he choked Shele Danishefsky Covlin lifeless and tried to make it look like she drowned in the bathtub of her W. 68th St. apartment, right as she was planning to cut Covlin out of her will.
The pale-skinned suspect (photo) even had the ludicrous idea of posing as a bespectacled black man, pretending to be “a door-todoor election volunteer and breaking (his mother’s) neck,” proscecutors wrote.
Carol and David Covlin, both 69, were in Westchester raising the two kids their son had with the victim when — during a custody conflict — he thought of rubbing them out, prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos disclosed in a pretrial filing this week.
Covlin considered offing the pair “during the power outage caused by Hurricane Sandy because there would be no lights or alarm.”
His “multiple plots to kill both of his parents in the fall of 2012 during the dispute over the custody of his children” included “the use of rat poison in their sugar” and “killing his parents by the use of an untraceable poison that he researched” in a public library, Bogdanos said in a Manhattan Supreme Court filing. It is not clear what, if any, steps the Manhattan district attorney contends Covlin took to hatch the would-be killings. The bombshell details were included as part of a bid by Bogdanos to have Covlin’s history of alleged bad conduct and abusiveness put before a jury at his upcoming second-degree murder trial, slated to begin in late May. Danishefsky Covlin, 47, was terrified of her ex and told several people he would kill her, the prosecutor wrote. She was found dead in her bathroom by their 9-year-old daughter Anna on Dec. 31, 2009. The trail of evidence she’d left behind — in emails, text messages and conversations with friends and family — paint a picture of a battered woman who grew more fearful of her controlling ex after their split.
“I feel like i’m at my wits end. Scared if I stay with person with this kind of temper then something very bad cud happen in the future 2 my kids or me,” the victim wrote in early 2009.
The jobless creep allegedly spent his nights trolling online for women. He kept a schedule of dates he booked in cities where he traveled for backgammon competitions, prosecutors said.
Covlin’s lawyer Robert Gottlieb slammed the suggestion that he was going to kill his parents, and said their relationship is solid.
“His parents are 1,000% supportive. They are constantly in touch with me and have made it very clear that they support him 1,000%, and the DA knows it,” Gottlieb said.
He said other allegations raised in the motion from “during the marriage and the divorce proceeding” are an attempt to “paint him as a bad person” in what is actually a weak case.