By Shayna Jacobs and Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producers
MANHATTAN — When Shele Danishefsky Covlin’s 9-year-old daughter found her dead in a bathtub on New Year’s Eve, police ruled the death "accidental." However, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office suspected murder from the start, a law enforcement source said Tuesday.
There was little the office could do quickly to keep the 47-year-old Upper West Side wealth manager’s Orthodox Jewish family from legally refusing an autopsy on religious grounds, the source said. At the time, police said her injuries, including lacerations on the back of her head, appeared to be “consistent with a fall.”
And the medical examiner’s office had no evidence that an autopsy was needed, a spokeswoman from the M.E.'s office said.
So, on Jan. 3, three days after her 9-year-old daughter found her dead in a bathtub, Danishefsky Covlin was buried. In its files, the medical examiner’s office labeled the manner and cause of death as “undetermined.”
But the DA’s office kept at it. Over the next several weeks, investigators met with members of Danishefsky Covlin’s family, some of whom had expressed their own concerns in court papers concerning her estate filed after she died.
At the time of her death, Danishefsky Covlin, a senior vice president for investments and private wealth advisor at UBS Wealth Management, was embroiled in a divorce battle. She had expressed fears that her husband, Rod Covlin, “intended to kill her,” according to an affidavit her brother filed in Surrogate's Court. Shortly before she died, Danishefsky Covlin changed her company-sponsored insurance policy to remove her husband as her beneficiary. And she was preparing to replace him as the executor of her will.
The decision to refuse an autopsy was debated in the Manhattan Jewish community, particularly online. Some commenters on Jewish websites praised efforts by member of the community who apparently encouraged the family not to have the examination. Others said Jewish law allowed autopsies in such cases, and raised the possibility that a killer could be on the loose.
"Is this necessarily a good thing?" a commenter identified as "eses" said on the site The Yeshiva World. "Perhaps a respectfully performed limited autopsy under rabbinic guidance would reveal foul play..."
By February, the family had dropped its religious objections and allowed the DA to obtain a court order for her body to be removed from a Hawthorne, N.Y., cemetery and studied. It was the first time in “a good decade” that the office had had requested a body to be exhumed for an investigation.
The Medical Examiner’s Office started its work on March 1. It released Danishefsky Covlin’s body back to her family the next day. On April 8, it came back with its conclusion: homicide by strangulation.
Now the DA’s office is looking at Covlin as a possible suspect.
The investigation could take weeks, so it is “doubtful” an arrest will be made in the immediate future, the law enforcement source said.
Danishefsky Covlin’s brother, Philip, has taken up his sister’s court fight with Covlin. Philip Danishefsky wants custody of his sister’s son and daughter, and wants limits on Covlin’s ability to visit them.
Covlin’s divorce lawyer could not be reached for comment. A lawyer representing Danishefsky Covlin’s family declined to comment, citing a judge’s gag order Monday preventing both sides in the divorce case from talking publicly about it.
