New York Stockbroker Tried to Frame 9-year-old Daughter for Wife's Murder, Prosecutors Say

A New York stockbroker tried to frame his daughter for the murder of his wife several years after her death, prosecutors said Monday.

Roderick Covlin, 45, is said to have posed as his daughter Anna and wrote a confession note regarding the 2009 death of Shele Danishefsky, the New York Post reported.

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The confession was written in June 2013 when Anna was 12 years old. It was in the form of an Apple note that synced to her email address, court documents allege.

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office said Covlin wrote the note in an effort to confuse investigators and divert suspicion away from himself over Danishefsky's death. The 47-year-old was found dead in a bathtub in her New York apartment in January 2010.

"All of these years I have been so incredibly afraid and guilty about the night my mom died," the fake confession read.

"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!," the note continued. "But she fell and i (sic) heard a terrible noise and the water started turning red and I tried to pull her head up but she remained still."

Covlin is to go on trial accused of strangling his wife on December 31, 2009. The couple was going through a divorce at the time and living in separate apartments in the same building. Danishefsky's body was discovered face down in the tub by daughter Anna, then just 9 years old.

Danishefsky had arranged a meeting with a lawyer on January 1, 2010, to remove Covlin from her will and deny him access to her $4 million estate. He had been entitled to half of her fortune, with the rest earmarked for the couple's two children.

Investigators first thought Danishefsky had died after slipping and falling in the bathtub, as the only clear sign of trauma was a cut on the back of her head. Her family, who are Orthodox Jewish, chose not to have an autopsy on religious grounds, so her official cause of death was listed as undetermined.

But as the investigation into her death continued, Danishefsky's family gave permission for her body to be exhumed and autopsied. In April 2010, examiners concluded her cause of death was strangulation.

Prosecutors said Danishefsky's death was not the last of Covlin's nefarious plots. After his wife's death, custody of the couple's children was granted to Covlin's parents, excluding him from their $5 million inheritance.

In response, Covlin allegedly planned to kill his parents using sugar laced with rat poison, but never followed through with the plot.

Prosecutors also said he told Anna to accuse her grandfather of rape, even telling her how to break her own hymen to fabricate proof of the imagined crime, though Anna refused. He later told a girlfriend he was considering kidnapping his daughter—then 14—and marrying her off to someone in Mexico in an attempt to gain control of her inheritance.

Covlin was only charged with his wife's murder in 2015, after his girlfriend told police he had confessed to the crime. At the time of his arrest, the stockbroker was just months away from inheriting his wife's fortune, which had been held in a trust since 2011.

Covlin's lawyer dismissed the allegations as "garbage," arguing they were "absurd, ridiculous and they will have no role to play in this case." The jury for the trial is set to be selected on January 14, the Post noted.

In the court documents, prosecutors alleged that Covlin developed an obsession with female escorts, backgammon and drugs, the Post explained. They said he attempted to eliminate anyone who threatened his lifestyle, including his wife and parents.