The Case of Rod Covlin

hey you and welcome my name is mike and in this whole video we're going to talk about backgammon pro rod covlin first things first i know absolutely nothing about backgammon it's one of the world's oldest games there you go that's some rod was married to shelley danishevsky and when things took a turn for the worse he may have blamed someone else his daughter and concocted just some bizarre schemes it's always really hard to do these intros without uh spoiling anything but let's just say he was in quite the pickle in the big apple let's go [Music] so in this one i think we're going to somewhere we've never been before in these old videos and that's the upper west side of manhattan on west 68th street don't even want to know how much we're talking here as for the date how about new year's eve crowd is hyped up they are ready to say goodbye to 2009 and bring in 2010. look who's here chris daughtry jennifer lopez marquette at about 7am backgammon pro rod coupling called 911 to tell them that his daughter found his wife unconscious in the bat rod pulled his wife out of the bat laid her face up on the ground started to yell cpr but to no avail when the paramedics arrived minutes after the call rod covlin's wife shelly danishevsky she was already gone rod covlin was inconsolable when the detectives arrived on the scene they did an examination to see what had happened how did 47 year old shelly possibly and probably drown in her own bathtub the tub was full of blood shelley wrapped in a blanket beside see above the bat a press was open with the door hanging off its hinge somehow as she was falling she grabbed the door and fell into the water at first glance it seemed to be you know just a just a tragic accident but if it was just a tragic accident i wouldn't be telling you this story so who exactly was shelley danishevsky and who exactly is roderick covlin shelley was a very wealthy and successful businesswoman a wealth manager at merrill lynch so so you know when you're so rich you have to actually pay somebody to manage your money you're probably doing all right then i guess living a dream she was rich with a big ol or fancy prestigious well-educated probably exactly who you would imagine you know would live on the upper west side in manhattan and in february 1998 at a jewish singles mixer she met rod covlin who was 11 years her junior pleased to meet you they hit it off i mean how could it not when he said he played backgammon and when i say hit it off i mean hit it out of the park they nearly eloped the very night they met until shelley was talked out of it by her sister i'm telling you she wanted that [ __ ] money rod his day job was a stop trader he was he was fine at it six months after they met they married two years later they had a baby girl anna shelley got pregnant again after that twins this time but this time it wasn't to be but in 2006 shelley had a baby boy named miles and three years later shelley ended up in a bathtub at the time on new year's eve it seemed to have been a just a tragic accident an autopsy was decided against as jewish tradition seems to forbid it that might come up again maybe no spoilers but as i said you know at the time it seemed to have been just a tragic accident like why would you why would you need one and in the days that followed conversations between the family and friends turned to the marriage between rod and shelley which was a boo damn the toilet rod had a temper like you wouldn't believe mood swings he was cheating on shelley here he is with a girlfriend he met online oh i'm getting you so have you it's video it's video i got some video going oh yes this is good stuff this happened after shelley wasn't too keen on the open marriage idea rod was unemployed at the time of shelley's death he hung out was obsessed with backgammon went to the gym and practiced taekwondo so he could he could karate chop the [ __ ] out of you hey a real five-star man according to his linkedin he had left his job or well he'd actually been fired in august 2009 where he worked in algorithmic execution services and dark pool liquidity offerings which is just a bunch of made up words he was also founder chairman and el presidente of the u.s back hammond federation where he worked to promote backgammon in the old us of a got your work cut out for you there we go it's still 11. right what do you like i like you yeah you like medium size uh anyways it seems that the marriage was going to end sooner rather than later when what happened happened by the time new years rolled around in 2009 rod wasn't even living with shelly and the kids anymore he was living miles away across the hall literally living rent-free in another apartment shelley owned see she had done it you know to make it easier for the kids so they could see their dad whenever they wanted as i said across the hall while she was definitely making it easier for old rod who was unemployed obsessed with backgammon and uh just kind of a lazy piece of [ __ ] rod was moving on had started dating someone else shelley had begun to also and the divorce was in full swing then december 31st rolled around friends and family were suspicious of the story about what happened to shelley rod said anna called him that morning in a panic and let him in as he didn't have a key and that he pulled her body out of the bathtub yet his clothes were dry the medical examiner wrote the cause of death as undetermined shelley also didn't normally take baths she had also gotten her hair cured and treated the day before i don't know lads and wasn't supposed to get her hair wet she had bruising on her lip scratch marks bruises on her hand so what really happened the doorman also thought it was weird that early that morning at about 4am shelley was found at 7am rod popped out to get some sweets and gave one to the doorman and rod wasn't exactly you know the chatty type who would uh do something like that normally so the police were thinking right whoever smelt it dealt it but you know as uh they weren't able to do an autopsy their hands were kind of tight the family however pressed for more hiring a private investigator they learned the marriage was more turbulent than they thought rod had even tried to get her fired from work he was also draining their joint bank account they fought over child support and a judge even told rod he couldn't play backgammon anymore he was losing too much money but leave backgammon out of this two days before shelley died she changed her will so that her kids would be the sole beneficiaries of her multi-million dollar estate rod had started tracking shelley's location reading her emails and on the night before she died she was walking home and ran into a friend shelley told her she thought she was being followed when the family of shelley took the private eye to her apartment he noticed that the press she may or may not have grabbed as she fell the screws were taken out of the wall which the private detective thought would have taken more effort than shelley could muster can i hear you say staged that was enough for the family to decide to have her exhumed which they did two months after her death the police were then back on the scene and the medical examiner now could positively say a neck bone was broken she had been choked which you know combined when they did the post-mortem her eyes the the blood vessels were all broken homicide but at that time that was as far as they could they kind of take it by 2012 rod was living with his parents in a new york city suburb and rod's parents were now the legal guardians shelley's family well they um they had their suspicions about already and so that meant that rod couldn't get shelley's money because he was skint see the money shelley's money had gone straight to the kids rod living with his parents and the kids didn't seem to get along too well though as we know rudd had quite the temper sometimes even physically fighting his parents did you steal from your children you stole before why don't you tell anna that every penny you're spending right now is her money and miles money hold on a second adam i'd like you to come here hold on a second come here please yeah because you haven't come out here five years in the 12 years you're not talking you never worked you know your mother worked her off for every penny that he's spending let me tell you the danishes are not wrong they may be wrong about something not the money what you're saying now what you are what you are saying now in front of anna and miles okay will ensure that you never see my children again if you continue okay you threatened us with no children no i'm not drinking i'm telling you excuse me by october first okay you know what excuse me i spent a million dollars of my money to make sure you didn't go to the dennis ships they eventually locked him out of the house while keeping the children now that didn't sit too well with old rod [Music] and when hurricane sandy hit in 2012 he hatched a plan to get into the house as the power would be out no alarms and murder his parents and set the gaff on fire another idea was to get his daughter anna to put rat poison into his parents tea see he'd been watching a lot of breaking bad dexter that kind of stuff you know you slip it into his food or drink there shouldn't be any taste or smell 36 hours later he was looking at bryson and then he had another bright idea right to get his you know was gonna be ex-wife's money which as i said had gone straight to the kids he had actually he had quite a few bright ideas about how he would get back guardianship he plotted to kidnap anna and take her to mexico where he would pay someone ten thousand dollars to marry her with a prenup in order to emancipate her from her grandparents that plan also never came to pass but he was always scheming you know how would he get his kids back so he could maybe get some dollar dollar bills get some kibosh rod's final plan to uh off his own parents was to get this dress up as a black man on election you know 2012 during the election while they were going door-to-door and when his mother opened the door he would karate chop her in the neck not making this up he even drove to a costume store where he bought a moustache a black man wig and black man makeup according to court documents so he had all this planned out bought all the stuff and then his girlfriend talked him out of it don't know why you would need to be talked out of doing something incredibly stupid like that and so as you know to investigators to family members things are beginning to multiply and not look like an accident rob became a bit more uh desperate to um pass the book and in fact an email was found in the drafts folder of their daughter anna's account in 2013. it makes for interesting reading all of these years i've been so incredibly afraid and guilty about the night my mom died i lied she didn't just slip that day we got into a fight about her dating and i was still mad when i went to bed i heard her go into her room and run a bath so i went in and argued some more and she told me to go back to my room and i got so mad 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 so i took miles crawled into my bed and cried myself back to sleep hoping i would wake up to see her right next to me but when i woke up she wasn't so i called daddy and he tried cpr and all sorts of stuff like that but it didn't work at which point he called the police and you know it from there fascinating well remember uh how rod was tracking hit you know shelley's movements hacking into her emails he wasn't just doing it to her framing your kid that's that's a new one no obviously no one bought that [ __ ] it would take six years of slowly gathering evidence an ex-girlfriend told the police about his schemes before rod covlin would be charged with murder in 2015. he was arrested at a train station in scarsdale that case was a case that's been going on since uh december of 2009 i believe it entailed a lot of work between both detectives from manhattan detectives manhattan homicide and and the da's office over the course of the last couple of years it's really taken a real extensive police work and forensics and we made an arrest in that case yesterday interestingly as we see here in this jail footage he seemed to know the best way to choke someone learned that playing backgammon his trial however wouldn't begin until 2019 a prosecutor said he wanted the kids her money and her out of here prosecutors told the jury rod coughlin hit a personal jackpot when he married his millionaire wife shelly coughlin but when she decided to file for divorce and cut him out of her will prosecutors say he killed her but coughlin's defense attorneys say that he's not guilty they say he's a scapegoat rod covlin's defense told the jury he's just a fall guy an easy target for the prosecution to accuse for the murder of his estranged wife shelly coblin because they say he's a husband with a motive shelly coughlin was worth more than 5 million dollars when she died while prosecutors say rod coblin was a chronically unemployed backgammon addict who loved the lavish life his wife afforded him after her death prosecutors claim he even stole from the college fund of the couple's two children and allegedly conspired to kill his own parents whom he thought would hamper efforts to claim his wife's estate the question was never is he going to kill shelley the question was always when the nanny took the stand and told a story she said to me said rad throw her down on the floor and when he asks her to go into the bedroom she said she was scared of going in there with him because she don't know what he'll do a girlfriend took the stand and told a story because there was no electricity the alarms the alarm would not be on he wanted to go through a window in the basement kill his parents set his and set his house on fire [Music] at one point during their marriage and acrimonious divorce rod had even taken his son miles to the hospital and coached him to tell the doctors and nurses that shelley had been sexually assaulting him see rod was broke back coming i'll leave you on the street and you know if something happened to shelley he might be the beneficiary of her five million dollar estate however as i said two days before her death she wrote to a lawyer changing you know the beneficiaries in case something should happen to her the money would go straight to her children and when rod found out about this snapped but despite all of this there was not much evidence that rod had killed shelley he said his daughter led him in which was a lie by the way he had a key but there were no signs of a struggle so what really happened the broken bone in the neck the defense said that could have been done during the exhumation in fact even rod's parents still thought it was an accident let me tell you the danishes are not wrong they may be wrong about something not the money couldn't be my boy he's an angel you know uh they would have learned by the way that he had like tried to kill them multiple times at least three this is a case that has taken nearly 10 years to come to court and while prosecutors insist that the defendant here is the only one with the access and the motive to commit murder the defense counters that the state's case is full of what they call gaps as wide as the ocean the investigation was poor no dna taken no dusting for fingerprints they initially thought it was an accidental death they didn't secure items in the bathroom for evidence they took no notes and spoke to only a few neighbors they never searched rod's apartment across the way they even allowed the family's rabbi to clean the bathroom with peroxide eliminating any evidence after an eight-week trial it was up to the jury to decide if this had been a tragic accident or a murder after a day of deliberations rod was found guilty guilty of murder in the second degree jury number one is that your verdict guilty juror number two is that your verdict journal number three is that your verdict yes your number four is that's your verdict journal number five is that your verdict your number six is that your verdict journal number seven is not your verdict journal number eight is that your verdict twenty-five years to life for the murder of shelley danishevsky the it evidence overwhelming the jury spoke i sentenced mr coppman to 25 years it's an interesting case and that the evidence he actually committed the act is largely circumstantial he must have you know when he um when he went out early that morning to get some sweets and made sure the camera saw him and made sure the doorman saw him too when he came back early that morning he let himself into the apartment taekwondo shelley's neck somehow without making you know much of a disturbance put her in the bathtub filled it up and left that's really all there is so it's kind of actually interesting that the jury found him guilty i mean i agree with them because there's more than enough evidence that he's a shitty person who would probably you know do something like that from trying to murder his own parents coming up with multiple schemes and plots trying to frame his own daughter or send her to mexico to marry somebody also he could get that sweet inheritance keep up his backgammon lifestyle and chicks and partying and all that i think the lesson here lads is you know it's obvious don't let backgammon go to your head thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it i will see you as always real soon in the next video take care of yourselves [Music] you

Channel: That Chapter

Views: 2,030,483

Keywords: that chapter, rod covlin, shele danishefsky, rod covlin case, rod covlin video, rod covlin girlfriend

Id: gLauCdskytI

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020