My face-to-face encounter with New York’s most notorious wife-slayer Rod Covlin persuaded me he DID murder his beautiful financier spouse
It was the murder that scandalized New York.
Beautiful, wealthy financier Shele Danishefsky Covlin was found dead in her bloody bathtub by her horrified young daughter in what seemed to be a tragic accident.
Only it wasn’t.
She’d been killed by her estranged husband, Roderick “Rod” Covlin, who brutally strangled her and then made it look like an accident.
Why?
Prosecutors said he was a deadbeat leech of a spouse who did it as revenge for her divorcing him over his constant womanizing and then threatening to cut him out of her $5.2 million will.
Shele died before the new will was finalized, meaning her estate would automatically pass to Rod under the terms of the existing one.
And he very nearly got away with what criminologists dubbed the “perfect murder.”
But in 2019, after a staggeringly long, nine-year investigation prompted by Shele’s suspicious family, Covlin was finally convicted of murdering his wife.
To this day, though, he has continued to protest his innocence, and in an effort to persuade me of that, he granted me his first-ever TV interview for my new eight-part crime series, “The Killer Interview with Piers Morgan,” which drops Tuesday on Fox Nation.
I went to see Covlin at the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he is serving 25 years to life.
It’s a forbidding place, scene of America’s worst-ever prison riot in 1971 when 33 inmates and 10 staff were killed.
This is a very different environment from the glamorous high life Covlin enjoyed with Shele on Manhattan’s Upper West Side until their marriage fell apart.
And the graying, bearded man who was led in to see me looked a shadow of the handsome, cocky, quick-witted professional backgammon player who’d first wooed Shele in a whirlwind romance.
I asked him why he’d agreed to do the interview with me, and he replied:
“You seem like somebody who evaluates things honestly and on a fact basis. I’m just looking for a fair shake.”
I’d brought two sheets of paper to the interview, one with all the arguments for his guilt, the other with all the arguments for his innocence.
“There’s a lot on both,” I told Covlin. “Depending on who you talk to, either you’re an evil, ruthless mastermind murderer who carefully planned all this for pure financial greed. Or you’re the victim of a massive miscarriage of justice.”
Unsurprisingly, he said the latter was the correct narrative.
It’s certainly a fascinating case in which certainties are hard to come by.
As with so many murders, it begins with a love story.
Rod and Shele met at a singles event. She was an incredibly successful banker 11 years his senior. He was a smart guy with an engineering degree who had big ambitions.
He told me that first meeting was “electric” and that she was “everything that I wanted.”
By the end of that night, they were already talking marriage and children.
They duly married and had two children, Anna and Myles, and by all accounts enjoyed a good time for a few years until things began to fall apart due to his repeated infidelities and demand for an “open marriage.”
Shele rejected that suggestion and requested a divorce, but for the sake of their kids, she arranged for him to have his own apartment across the hall from hers in a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Was that fateful decision the biggest mistake of her life?
Did it give Rod Covlin the access and opportunity to kill her for her money, while making it look like an accident, and then portray himself as some kind of hero who tried to save her life?
That’s what detectives, and later a jury, eventually concluded.
But that was not the initial assessment.
The cops who first attended the death scene in Shele’s apartment in 2009 believed it was an accidental death.
They deduced she simply must have slipped and fallen face down into the bath where she drowned, and they believed Covlin when he said he was alerted by their daughter, rushed over from his own apartment, pulled his wife out of the bath, and tried to revive her with CPR before calling 911.
The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as “undetermined” and Shele’s body was swiftly released for burial under Jewish custom without an autopsy being conducted.
But her family weren’t as convinced it was an accident and grew so suspicious over subsequent months that they requested Shele’s body be exhumed for an autopsy.
This revealed she had in fact died after her neck was snapped before she drowned, and after a lengthy investigation — which revealed details of Covlin’s multiple affairs, gambling issues, propensity for violence including to Shele, and even shocking claims of plots to kill his own parents and a sickening plan to marry off his daughter, Anna, to access Shele’s inheritance — detectives gathered enough evidence to charge him with killing his wife.
And although the evidence against him was largely circumstantial, with no definitive smoking gun, Covlin was convicted of second-degree murder.
I’ve interviewed scores of murderers over the years, and they all try different ways to convince me of their innocence.
Some get animated, or indignant, or angry, or they weep crocodile tears.
Others try to disingenuously portray themselves as the nicest, gentlest people to ever draw breath when you know from the case files that they’re heinous monsters.
Covlin just looked desperate for me to believe him, his pleading eyes boring into mine throughout our hour-long encounter.
He was articulate, intelligent, and had an answer for everything — which wasn’t entirely surprising given he’s had nothing else to do for years but rehearse his version of events for an appeals court, or for a media interview platform like mine.
At times, he was quite persuasive in his own defense, but at other times, I was convinced he was lying through his teeth — and I caught him lying.
He denied being physically aggressive, then, under my determined questioning, he admitted being violent with both Shele and his parents.
Once you know someone’s lying in an interview, it’s very hard to believe ANYTHING they say.
There were numerous other alarm bells.
Why, if he dragged her out of the water as he said, was there barely any water on the bathroom floor?
Why was Shele’s face covered in scratches consistent with some kind of fight?
How did her neck get broken?
Why did Rod change clothes before calling emergency services?
And those alarm bells rang even louder when it was discovered during the investigation that Shele had taken out a restraining order against her husband, and that Rod had hacked into her emails, possibly to find out what she was planning to do with her will.
You don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to smell a rat.
The clincher for me came with the supposed bombshell “revelation” just before his trial began that his daughter, Anna, then 12, had written a confession draft email saying she had killed her mother in a furious argument.
The email read: “All of these years, I’ve been so incredibly afraid and guilty about the night my mum 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.”
As I said to Covlin: “A 12-year-old girl didn’t write that.”
He insisted she had, but hadn’t meant it, which seemed even more preposterous than the more obvious explanation that he had hacked into her email and drafted it himself to get himself off the murder rap.
But what kind of man would throw his daughter under the bus like that?
The kind of man, other evidence from an ex-girlfriend suggested, who would plan to pay a young man in Mexico $10,000 to marry his daughter, purely so he could get his hands on her share of her mother’s inheritance.
Or a man who was found to have gone to a library to research the poison ricin at a time when he threatened to murder his parents.
I always try to go into such interviews with an open mind, aware that a small number of convicted killers languishing in prison are indeed innocent.
But as I said to Covlin, it comes down to a simple process of elimination.
“You can be very convincing, Rod,” I told him. “And I don’t know where the truth lies. But there are parts of this story that just don’t add up. And one of the key things to me is if your wife WAS murdered, as everybody apart from you now seems to believe … if it wasn’t you, who did it, Rod?”
He didn’t have any credible answer, and there is none because nobody else had a motive to do it.
After Covlin was taken back to his cell, I recorded my quick real-time verdict on camera, which I always like to do because it’s the best way to record my gut reaction to what I’ve just heard.
“Ultimately, I sort of finish where I began,” I said. “You could construct a very compelling argument for why he killed his wife, and that indeed is what he has been convicted of doing. You could also construct an argument in his defense, that he didn’t. And the real question comes down to do I believe him? I just don’t know that I do. I think in the appeals process, we’ll find out what really happened with Rod Covlin.”
Covlin’s most recent appeal, in May last year, failed.
A New York appeals court upheld his conviction and ruled: “We find that there was overwhelming evidence of [Covlin’s] guilt of intentionally killing his wife. There was ample evidence that the victim’s death was a homicide that had been disguised as an accident.”
For all his bluster, I agree with them, and with those contributors who took part in my film on Covlin and described him variously as a “bad, bad human,” a “sociopath” and someone who lived for “uninhibited sex, greed and money.”
Covlin told me that “she was everything that I wanted” when I asked why he fell in love with Shele.
But in fact, it was everything she had that he really wanted.
