By Heather Grossmann
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — The husband of a wealth manager discovered dead in her bathtub on New Year’s Eve was never known for random acts of kindness, so a cup of coffee proffered to his Upper West Side doorman in the wee hours of the morning of his wife’s death raised red flags for those investigating the case, the New York Post reported.
Ron Covlin, 36, the husband of slain Shele Danishefsky Covlin, inexplicably purchased a cup of coffee for his building’s doorman — whom he had previously ignored — when he left his apartment within hours of her murder, the Post said.
"He stopped and talked to the doorman and offered him coffee," a source told the paper. "And the doorman said he never did that before."
Covlin had always been “very arrogant" to doormen in the past, another source told the Post.
"He never acknowledged them," the source told the paper.
A third unidentified source said the doormen said that the night of Danishefsky Covlin’s death, her husband Ron was “roaming the lobby at 4 in the morning, he hadn’t changed his clothes in days, and he looked whacked."
Covlin lived across the hall from his family, who had a restraining order against him. The couple was in the midst of a bitter divorce.
Shortly before her death, Danishefsky Covlin had 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, court papers revealed.
Danishefsky Covlin’s death was initially ruled an accident and her family did not want an autopsy for religious reasons. But by February they had been convinced of foul play and allowed the DA’s office to get a court order to exhume her body.
Her death was reclassified as a homicide, caused by strangulation.
Danishefsky Covlin’s brother Philip obtained a court order limiting Ron Covlin’s contact with his son and daughter. Philip Danishefsky is also trying to block Covlin from inheriting his wife’s estate.
