By DAREH GREGORIAN and DAN MANGAN
Last Updated: 2:52 PM, April 14, 2010
Posted: 1:03 PM, April 14, 2010
An act of kindness by a Manhattan man suspected of strangling his estranged money manager wife is being eyed by authorities as particularly suspicious, The Post has learned.
Rod Covlin, 36, left their apartment building in the middle of the night — hours after he is suspected of killing Shele Danishefsky Covlin — but first stopped and offered to buy coffee for a doorman he routinely ignored, sources said yesterday.
Covlin’s actions at 4 a.m. last Dec. 31 "were inconsistent" with his past behavior at the Upper West Side building, a law-enforcement source said.
"He stopped and talked to the doorman and offered him coffee," the source said. "And the doorman said he never did that before."
Another source said Covlin — whose 47-year-old wife was found dead in her bathtub at 7 a.m. by their 9-year-old young daughter — previously "was very arrogant" to doormen.
"He never acknowledged them," that source said.
A third source, said the doormen later said that "the night [Shele died] he was roaming the lobby at 4 in the morning, he hadn’t changed his clothes in days, and he looked whacked."
At the time, the unemployed Covlin was living across the hall from Shele and their daughter and son, all of whom had an order of protection against him.
After the daughter found Shele in the bathroom, she went to get her dad and let him in the apartment.
Sources have told The Post that in the aftermath of Shele’s death, her purse and smart-phone went missing. Both contained her schedule for meetings with a lawyer to discuss removing Rod from her will.
Shele’s cause of death was originally ruled undetermined because her Orthodox Jewish family objected on religious grounds to an autopsy being performed.
Cops at the time said she apparently had fallen and fatally struck her head after a support bar in the tub gave way when she grabbed it.
But authorities also suspected that she had been murdered — as did Shele’s family.
Within weeks of her death, the Danishefsky family received a rabbinical exemption to allow an autopsy, and backed the Manhattan DA’s efforts to exhume her body.
The Medical Examiner’s office conducted an autopsy on Shele’s body on March 3.
Last Thursday, the ME’s office told The Post that Shele’s death was found to be a homicide due to "neck compression."
Surrogate Court records show that Shele had already obtained a "get" — a Jewish religious divorce — from Rod before she was murdered.
Records also show that Shele had a $1.2 million estate. On Jan. 1 — the day before she was murdered — she had scheduled a meeting with an estate planning attorney to remove Rod as beneficiary from her 2004 will.
Shele already had removed Rod — an unemployed backgammon player whom she was suing in a "bitter and acrimonious" civil divorce — as a beneficiary from her employer-sponsored insurance policy, records show.
About six weeks before she was killed, Shele obtained an order of protection barring Rod from most contact with her or their two kids, with the exception of supervised visits with the children, records show.
Shele "was fearful for her life, believed Rod intended to kill her," a lawyer for her brother, Philip Danishefsky, wrote in a Jan. 13 court filing. "There was some urgency to make changes in her will."
Rod, who has not been charged, has refused to answer multiple requests for comment by The Post, as has his lawyer.
Shele’s brother, Philip Danishefsky, is suing Covlin in Manhattan Supreme Court in an action related to the custody of the couple’s two children — the daughter, and a 3-year-old boy. Both kids were sleeping in the apartment when Shele was murdered.
Danishefsky’s lawyer, in court papers, noted that Philip and his wife were asking for custody of Shele’s kids, and that Judge Ellen France Gesmer on Jan. 13 issued an order of protection allowing Rod "only supervised visitation with the children."
And the lawyer noted that while Danishefsky was not contesting the will, which named Rod as Shele’s beneficiary, the brother was asking that "he be allowed to challenge the [will] pending resolution of certain factual and legal issues that are being investigated."
That lawyer, who was also requesting that Rod not be named executor of Shele’s estate, wrote that Danishefsky "is extremely concerned that if Rod is appointed the executor, he will waste and dissipate the assets of the estate and not act in the interest of the estate or its beneficiaries."
"There is the concern that Rod will not pay [Shele’s] debts and expense . . . causing potential liability for [Shele’s] children, the lawyer wrote. "Rod is unemployed, and has not been gainfully employed for some time . . . he gambles regularly, participating (but not generally profiting from) backgammon tournaments."
A judge last month appointed a public administrator to handle Shele’s estate, going along with Danishefsky’s recommendation to bar Rod from being executor.
dan.mangan@nypost.com
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