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About this Episode
Did a mom found dead in a luxury apartment slip and fall, or was it something more sinister? (OAD 1/27/23
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Hosts & Guests
Transcript
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Welcome back to the 2020 True Crime Vault.
That awful day, December 31st.
Shelley's last day, you see the last time she's captured on video, which is entering the
building at about 8 p.m.
Rod says his daughter called him, said something's wrong with mommy.
He sees his wife face down in the bathtub.
I got a call from Shelley's babysitter, she said to me, there's been an accident.
Shelley slipped in the film, and I said, bros, she'll be alive, and she said no.
I heard that she had slipped in the bathtub and died, obviously that was beyond shocking,
because she was young and she had little children.
She's a detective, you could understand why this did look like an accident.
Absolutely.
Your sister's 47 years old, pretty healthy, it didn't make sense.
But there are some things that seem inconsistent with a simple slip and fall.
She says, I may need to drop my kids off by you, I'm afraid for my life.
They don't dust for fingerprints, they've taken a DNA evidence at this time.
The family objected to an autopsy.
I hate to say this, but without an autopsy, sometimes people can get away with murder.
Good morning, everybody.
On this New Year's Eve December 31st, 2009, we're going to go for a high of 58 degrees today.
It's December 31st, 2009, and New Year's Eve preparations are underway in Times Square.
In just a few hours, Times Square is going to be transformed into the biggest New Year's Eve party in the world.
Meantime, a mile and a half north, a tragedy is unfolding inside a Manhattan luxury apartment building.
The unexpected death of 47-year-old mom of two, Shelley Covlan.
There's a lot of shock at the St. Upper West Side address.
Shelley was a healthy, vibrant woman in the prime of her life.
I was living in the building at the time when I heard the tragic news that a young mother had lost her life by slipping in a bathtub.
Shelley was an acquaintance. I knew her from the lobby.
She seemed like a very lovely person and very attentive to her kids.
People described Shelley as very warm and a really kind person.
She's very beautiful.
Blonde, very petite. She's five-four.
How did you see Shelley growing up as the older sister?
She was a great sister. She was very loving. She was fun. She was energetic.
She was electric. She would walk into a room and she would light it up.
Shelley was the glue that kept us all together.
Shelley was an orthodox Jew. Her religion was very important to her,
and she lived a traditional Jewish life.
My father came from a very religious home himself,
and we were observant, modern orthodox family.
After studying marketing in college,
Shelley later developed surpassing for numbers.
It begins to climb the corporate ladder of New York's world of high finance.
Shelley was very driven.
She worked at Maryland with her father and her brother as a wealth manager,
and then they were recruited to UBS.
What was it that made her so good at what she was doing?
She was such an honorable person and a reliable person.
In our business, to be trusted, to be a valued advisor is so important.
In addition to her career success,
Shelley was longing to start a family.
You had found love and got married to Mark.
Shelley, in her early 30s,
still trying to find that right person. What was that like for her?
I'm sure it was very frustrating for her.
She was looking for Mr. Wright.
She wanted to be married. She wanted children.
That's what she wanted.
I met Shelley February 15th today after Valentine's Day in 1998
at a Jewish singles party at a place called La Barbat.
We started chatting and I mean we hit it off.
What was it about her that sparked interest for you?
She was smart. We wanted the same things in life.
It was just an instant connection.
They met and just fell head over heels for each other.
She was a much younger man.
Six, two, good looking, blue eyes, solid muscle,
and a completely swept over feet.
We had this whirlwind romance.
Even though there was this significant age gap,
he was 25 at the time. She was 36.
She called us probably around 11 o'clock.
She was giggling and she said, I met a guy
and we're flying to Las Vegas to a lobe.
And I said, oh my god, Shelley, please don't do this.
Please don't do this.
He said he met this most wonderful woman in the world.
He proposed marriage that night.
Rod is a graduate from Columbia University with a degree in civil engineering.
And he lavishes Shelley with attention.
Just six weeks after they meet,
Rod and Shelley are engaged.
So he was smitten.
So she's terrific.
And I guess she felt the same way
because they got married within six months.
Early on, things were fantastic.
We did everything together.
And we enjoyed each other's company very much.
They moved into a very nice apartment in the Dorchester Towers
on the Upper West Side.
It's located in an affluent area just blocks from Lincoln Center
and Central Park.
This is the same neighborhood serving as a backdrop for only murders in the building.
The popular Hulu series,
about a trio of true crime fanatics
intent on solving the murder in their own building.
I don't like my door, never have.
That's insane, neighborly.
I mean, a murderer probably lives in the building.
I lived in the Dorchester for 15 years,
24-7-door man.
I felt very safe there.
It's a very family-oriented part of Manhattan.
Shelley's younger sister knows that
she desperately wants to start a family.
She didn't get pregnant right away.
You know, she was in her 30s.
And so she knew she just wanted to go straight to IVF
and the first one worked.
They have a baby girl, Anna.
How happy was the family?
Everyone was thrilled.
She was elated.
She loved being a mother.
When we finally had Anna, it was fantastic.
I had always made her birthday cakes for her parties.
We did science projects together.
I mean, it was great.
I thought I had to make balloon animals
when we go to the playground
and she would make balloon animals for the other kids.
Rod and Shelley want to expand their family.
And soon, she's pregnant again with twins.
But their complications.
The babies are born prematurely at just six months.
But she delivered them.
One died at birth,
and the other one died several hours later.
How did that impact her?
She was devastated.
She really was.
That heartbreak had to be tough on the marriage.
It was.
How did that affect your son and his wife?
They were all very, very upset for quite a while.
A year and a half later,
Shelley gives birth to a son
who they named Miles.
This is the four of them.
That's very sweet.
Very, very sweet family.
She had her girl and she had her boy.
Yeah.
And the family was happy for her.
Absolutely.
Very?
Yes.
Did the happiness return to the marriage?
You know, initially, sure.
But I think that it unfortunately didn't change things for very long.
I think at that point,
the marriage was deteriorating.
Rod had barely worked at all.
He always had a bit of difficulty with steady employment.
He was a stockbroker at one point.
That didn't quite work out.
She really would have loved to stay home and be with the kids.
But she saw that was not in the cards.
I mean, he couldn't hold a job.
And just as Shelley in Rod's relationship seems to be crumbling,
her family says he makes her a shocking proposition.
Backgammon is not simply a matter of shaking the dice.
It's how you use particular role that you get.
And it appeals to people who are very mathematically minded.
What was it about the game that attracted you?
There is plenty of math and there's a lot of deep thought required,
which again is very surprising, given the fact that there are dice involved in the game.
Fair to say, it became an obsession?
I don't think so.
I think if I'd say a passion.
Rod spent a lot of his time and whatever money he was making
on his life.
I think it was a good idea.
Rod spent a lot of his time and whatever money he was making
on his dream of becoming a professional backgammon player.
Backgammon's Rod's main focus.
So Shelley is the major breadwinner in the family.
And according to her family, it takes a terrible toll on their marriage.
Whenever we would have family gatherings, he would sit on the side
and either play backgammon on the computer or have a game going.
He is online at all hours, pulling all nighters,
and just constantly reaching out to women.
Were other women starting to catch your eye?
Sure, sure.
I definitely dated.
Even though you were married.
Correct.
So you began to see other women?
I did.
I did.
Rod often liked to take his dates to a place called Laura Fishbar.
It's an upscale restaurant in Lower Manhattan known for its yacht
like Interior Decor.
He went on dates with numerous women.
He favored this location because, I believe he said,
quote, they had yummy drinks.
As Shelley and Rod approached their 10-year wedding anniversary,
their marriage on Raffles.
She discovered that Rod was having an affair.
It wasn't just one affair, it was several.
He had left up an email from one of the women.
And so that's how she found out.
At a certain point, there probably wasn't very much love
between Shelley and me.
We were, I guess, out of love and, you know, we had two kids.
Yet Shelley doesn't say anything to Rod at the time.
And the couple celebrate their 10-year wedding anniversary.
Shelley tells her sister that's when Rod makes a stunning proposition.
He said to her, he wanted to have an open marriage.
She still loved her, but wanted an open marriage.
Ten years after they've been married.
Yeah.
How did she respond to that?
Oh, she was disgusted.
She said, this is not okay for me.
And it's not okay for my children to see it.
That anybody should be treated like this.
Here's a traditional Jewish woman and her husband wants an open marriage.
And she swiftly rejected the idea.
But that really caused a lot of problems.
Not long after that, he returned home at 6 a.m.
Smelling of perfume.
A few days later, Shelley tells her sister Eve that she had gotten fed up with Rod.
Writing in an email, I confronted him about my suspicions of him being with other people.
And he confirmed that admitted to cheating.
In March of 2009, Shelley contacted me.
She just wanted to get an idea of what her options were.
How she could protect her kids.
How she could protect her future.
And really prepare herself for the next step,
which would be actually filing for divorce.
Shelley doesn't move forward with the divorce at that time.
But her family says that her husband's cheating and his constant absences
were becoming unbearable for her.
He was having these a phase.
She just didn't want to be anywhere close to him.
He came up with the idea that he would leave the apartment
if she would sign the lease next door.
The apartment across the hall became available
and the kids wouldn't have me out of their life.
Any more than was absolutely necessary.
So there was always this thought of doing what was best for the kids from both of us.
I did not feel it was the best idea.
I was just letting them in such a close vicinity to each other.
But Shelley thought it might provide a little bit of consistency for the children.
She loved her children.
And that was what she lived for.
And in miles, in every fiber of her body, she loved them.
In April of 2009, even though they're separated,
Rod and Shelley take their kids to New Jersey
for the week-long Jewish holiday of Passover.
They stay in the same hotel, but in different rooms.
The four of them had gone away for Passover week together
and Rod left midway through the holiday.
He leaves his family to head the Las Vegas with another woman
to attend the backamp and tourning them.
Though they're no longer together as a couple,
his family says Rod is still incredibly demanding for him.
When he came back and Shelley had come back from Passover,
his suitcase was not unpacked and his laundry was not done.
He flew off the handle.
And mind you, he was already living in the apartment across the hall at that point.
She called me absolutely.
He expected her to unpack his suitcase.
Good morning America and happy Mother's Day to all the special women in our lives.
Thank you.
Mother's Day to everybody out there.
On Mother's Day, Shelley organizes an outing with Rod's family,
hoping to maintain a relationship for the sake of the children.
They had gone to the Botanical Gardens as a family together
with his parents.
In public, Rod went into this major explosive temper rage.
And was screaming at Shelley.
And he was calling her every ugly name in the book.
In front of the children?
In front of the children.
And that's when she communicates with me and says,
I may need to drop my kids off by you.
I'm afraid for my life.
She was texting me and calling me frantically.
It's hitting the fan.
Said he's going to move back into my apartment and kicked me out
at Botanical Gardens ready to proceed.
And she followed up with what should I do.
That's the last straw for Shelley.
She decides to file for divorce.
She changed the locks immediately.
Once she knew that the papers were being served on him, his divorce to be papers.
Rod had pretty standard visitation with the children.
He was seeing them on a regular basis.
But soon there's a fight over custody of the children.
This is where it really gets extremely ugly.
One night when Rod is supposed to return the children,
he doesn't show up.
Shelley is in a panic.
Every possible, horrible thought was going through a mind.
He was charming, very charming, intelligent, funny,
in a quirky sort of way.
And he was a good backup employer.
It's the 4th of July weekend in 2009.
Shelley has already filed for divorce.
And Rod is now in Michigan at a backgammon tournament.
Here he runs into another backgammon player named Deborah,
who he had become Facebook friends with.
Deborah asked 2020 not to show her face during our interview.
It never occurred to me that he would be attracted to me.
I'm a lot older than he is.
But when Rod wants something, he can be very aggressive.
The first time we met asked me out for a drink,
asked me if I wanted to play a couple of games after.
We walked back to the hotel and went to his room.
And I went into the restroom.
And when I came out, he was nude from the waist down down.
And he came at me.
And I mean, I didn't say no.
He begins the relationship with Deborah Oles.
She's a woman from North Carolina,
and about 14 and a half years his senior.
He said that he had been separated for, I think,
he said seven months at that point.
And she had filed for divorce.
To me, it was just like you'd hear of a typical divorce
custody battle.
But after Rod comes back to New York,
things take a dark turn during a scheduled visit with the kids.
One night, when Rod is supposed to return the children,
he doesn't show up.
She called me and she was frantic.
And she said, I don't know what I said is everything okay.
She says, no, I don't know where my children are.
And Rod was supposed to return them.
He's not answering any text messages.
He's answering phone calls and I don't know where they are.
Shelly is in a panic.
She is beside herself.
She calls the police.
She calls hospitals.
She doesn't know what to do.
Shelly has no idea where Rod is.
All attempts to reach him go unanswered.
And she's desperate.
I received frantic phone calls and emails from Shelly.
She was crying.
She was extremely concerned.
That's something really better than that.
God forbid, there was an accident.
She thought maybe he fled with the children.
Every possible horrible thought was going through a mine.
But in reality, what had happened
was something Shelly couldn't have even fathomed.
It turns out Rod had taken the children to a nearby hospital,
claiming that his wife had sexually abused
their two-year-old son Miles.
One, two o'clock in the morning,
child protective services got involved.
They were up at Columbia Presbyterian.
ACS was interviewing them to make sure
that there were no concerns about their safety
and until all these interviews and medical examinations were done,
the children were not returned home to our.
There was an investigation,
and it was determined that there was just no basis for this at all.
This was getting ugly.
She said, his hatred for me is stronger than his love for his children.
We immediately began to draft an application
to suspend all of Rod's visitation,
based upon his behavior.
It's really backfires on him.
The judge is so outraged that she now says
you can only visit with the children now
with the supervision of someone else.
You had to be present for him to see the children.
They had to be supervised after he took them to the hospital.
Despite the custody issues as the months go by,
Shelley seems to be finding herself again.
Though the divorce wasn't legally finalized yet,
Rod offers Shelley a religious document called a get,
which terminates the marriage under Jewish law.
The get allowed her to start dating
and so she started to kind of get out there
and she was on JD and just meeting other men.
Shelley also begins meeting friends at the Friars Club.
It's a private gathering spot in Manhattan
that's known for those televised celebrity roasts.
The Friars Club has a long and distinguished tradition
of paying tribute to the very finest entertainers
in our nation's history.
Tonight, they've broken with that tradition
and are honoring Jerry Stone.
This holy chapter of her life was opening
and she just looked really, really great
and it seemed as though she was very excited
about her future.
Were you starting to see a different Shelley?
Yeah.
A lot more of the old Shelley
and it was like this really bright light
and it was showing again.
After being dimmed for so long.
Yeah.
It was sparkly again.
Was she happier from what you could see?
I think she was hopeful.
Yeah.
hopeful.
And she was hopeful.
By the end of the year, how was she?
She seemed fine.
You know, getting on with things.
She was just on the phone with work.
Another call coming in was a fella.
She was dating and you know, things were,
things were good for her.
Things seemed pretty good.
So it looked like she was about to get this divorce
and move on with her life.
Exactly.
But on the morning of New Year's Eve,
Shelley's nine-year-old daughter makes a gruesome discovery.
Rod says his daughter, Halton,
very distraught, said something's wrong with mommy.
It's the morning of New Year's Eve 2009.
Rod Kotlin, who's living across the hall
from his estranged wife, says he gets a frantic call
from their nine-year-old daughter Anna.
I got a call from Anna in the morning
and she stuttered out something about mommy
and the bathtub and she was distraught.
I mean, clearly distraught.
And he rushed across to the apartment.
And he told her to let him in.
He said he came into the apartment.
Inside, Rod says he heads into the bathroom
and finds a horrific scene.
Shelley was floating in a pool of dark water.
I mean, bloody water.
Yeah, I grabbed her, pulled her out.
He says that he pulls her out
and then he eventually calls 911
and they tell him to perform CPR on his wife.
On surveillance footage,
you can see members of the New York Fire Department
arrive followed by paramedics.
He continues to do CPR until EMS arrives
and they come in and pretty quickly say that she's gone.
She's been dead a significant period of time.
I get to the scene.
I walk back to the bathroom.
I observe the victim, Shelley column laying on the floor.
There was a blanket over.
There was a bloody water in the tub.
Above the bathtub, there is a cabinet door.
And when police come in,
the cabinet door is halfway off its hinges.
Rod tells the police that he thinks his wife
had a terrible accident.
That awful day, December 31st, 2009.
How did you get word
that your grandchildren's mother was dead?
Rod called us.
I have never, ever before or since seen my son
in that state of mind.
He said they told me I had to keep doing CPR until they got there.
And I did it.
How distraught was Rod?
Horrible.
He was completely,
completely and totally.
I've never seen him out of it before.
That morning, Shelley's nanny arrives
and is stunned to learn of her death.
And she immediately reaches out to Shelley's sister, Eve.
I got a call from Shelley's babies
and she said to me,
there's been an accident.
Shelley slipped and fell in the bathtub.
And I said, Rose,
is Shelley alive?
And she said no.
I just had this involuntary scream that came out.
It was just an extreme grief.
Eve, it said that there was an accident.
I didn't believe it when I heard it again.
And I just, I just wailed and cried.
Your sister's 47 years old.
Pretty healthy.
God.
It didn't make sense.
And it could have been a slip.
It could have been a fall.
She had bruising to her face.
Like a scratch mark.
Some bruising to her hands.
It didn't really look consistent with a fall.
But a lot of people fall in the tub and die in New York.
I wanted a second opinion.
So I called over to the homicide squad,
asked the tech to move and need to respond over.
My boss called and said,
can you meet me at this address?
The two always got suspicious death.
I walked down the hallway to where her body is.
But I'm paying attention to what the rest of the apartment looks like.
It's clearly a lived-in apartment
where there's two little kids that are there.
And I get to her bedroom.
And I can see that there's some disarray in there.
The bed is not certainly not made,
but it doesn't even look like anybody was really sleeping in it.
This is because Rod took the top sheet
and the comforter off the bed to drape over her body
because he didn't want the kids to see her as what he said to us.
Anna was trying to shield Miles.
I was trying to shield Anna.
It was a nightmare of a scenario.
Did you get to talk to Anna?
I got to sit in on her interview with one of the detectives.
They started questioning her.
And she told them that mommy had tapped the two of them into bed,
in her bed.
She said that she woke up at either one or three o'clock in the morning.
She doesn't really remember.
Her of the bath running went in and looked and saw her mother in the tub.
And she thinks her mother is washing her hair.
So she goes back to sleep.
When she wakes up at seven o'clock,
she goes back and she sees her mother is still in the bathtub
though this time her head was submerged.
And so that's when she said she realized something was wrong.
Rod opined that she must have been standing in the tub
and slipped and grabbed this cabinet door
and he anchored out and fell down and hit her head
and then drowned in the bathtub.
The detectives had no reason to believe that it was a crime scene.
There's nothing there that would say, hey, this wasn't an accident.
Father Dorter's story matched up and looking at the scene
and listening to what the husband had to say,
it made sense that she accidentally fell.
They have a crime scene guy come and take pictures
but they don't take any forensic evidence.
They don't dust for fingerprints, take any DNA evidence at this time.
This was pretty much of an airtight surveillance system
that was set up on that building.
So this eliminates any possibility in my opinion
of a stranger having come in and done this.
You're a private investigator but you were a detective
with the New York City Police for 16 years.
The thinking was that she maybe grabbed for the cabinet.
So as a detective you could understand why this did look like an accident.
Absolutely. It would have been obvious if there were gunshot wounds,
stab wounds, some type of ligature mark around the neck,
something that would indicate that this was anything other than an accident.
None of that was present.
The water in the tub though is bloody.
Why would it be if there was no sign of any foul play?
If she accidentally slipped, fell, landed face down in the water.
Over the course of time after you pass away, blood pools, gravity pulls it down.
The blood would start to seep out from the nostrils and discolor the water.
No forced entry.
They looked at the lock, photos, they had no forced entry, no stranger in the apartment.
No sign of a struggle in the house.
No struggle. I mean, just a normal apartment.
She's got two children in the household.
Presumably they would have heard if there had been something that happened.
That's correct, the nine-year-old daughter had a very consistent story
with Rod Coblin's story.
I need to do an investigation to try to figure out exactly what happened
but until I had anything concrete, I had to go with an accidental fool.
But there's a big problem.
Before detectives can determine what exactly happened to Shelley,
the scene would be scrubbed clean.
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As Shelley's family grapples with her death, they can't understand how a day that started like any other
could end in such a tragic way.
December 30th, Shelley's last day,
she has a hairstylist come to her home to give her a keratin treatment,
which is a hair straightening treatment.
There's a surveillance video in the building,
and you actually see her leaving for work at 11 a.m. after keratin treatment.
At around 6 p.m., Shelley leaves work and heads to the Friars Club.
Pings out for a little bit, chats with some friends,
and then she goes home to see her children.
You'll see the last time she's captured on video,
which is entering the building at about 8 p.m., talking on her cell phone.
Shelley says good night to her nanny,
and apparently begins helping her daughter Anna with her homework.
When the last Google searches on her computer was for long division,
she goes online on two J-Date at one point to see if she has any messages,
and that's the end of her online activity.
The morning after, Anna finds her mom's body in the bathroom.
Shelley Danishevsky-Kovlin, 47 years old, a mother of two, found dead.
I pretty quickly heard that she had slipped in the bathtub and died.
Obviously, that was beyond shocking, because she was young,
and she had little children. I had two little kids as well,
and I quickly ran out and bought non-stick bath mats for the tubs,
and this is the thought of something like that happening to my kids or to myself,
or it was really, really a scary thought.
I don't think they had a rubber mat in the bottom of the tub.
It could have been just a tragic accident.
But to police, there are some things that seem inconsistent with a simple slip and fall.
I look at her body, and I see things that are suspicious to me.
She has some scrapes, but I didn't see her the day before.
Whatever they are, there are questions that need to be answered,
and those questions can be answered by pathologists.
Shelley's body is taken from the apartment to the medical examiner's office for further examination.
So once the detective left the scene that day,
the door is being guarded by a police officer.
I mean, it's still technically, you know, a potential crime scene.
It's being safeguarded.
During the time that the officer was there,
a member of a religious organization showed up.
We have an organization that helps families in time of need.
In the Jewish custom, it is customary to collect all bodily fluids
and to be buried with the deceased.
The same way that God put you on this earth is the same way you should go back to God.
Remember, Shelley's family belongs to a form of Judaism called modern orthodox,
and this is one of the practices they observe.
Shelley's rabbi reached out and called us that there is a cleanup that has to be done.
I went down to the apartment.
There were police officers there.
They allowed me in.
He was led in at some point, which I had no idea about.
More than likely, had I still been at the scene,
I doubt very seriously that I would have allowed him to go in there.
The bathtub was the bulk of where I had to clean up.
I was in the apartment that evening for approximately an hour and a half to a house.
The notion that a scene is cleaned up so quickly due to religious reasons,
have you seen that before?
Yeah, absolutely.
I investigated many Jewish natural causes, deaths, accidental deaths, and this is common.
This is part of their religious belief.
All parts of the body have to be buried with the body.
Whether it's blood, tissue, hair, whatever might be there,
it gets cleaned up and it all gets buried with the body.
The body gets buried whole.
Meanwhile, down to Corner's office,
the medical examiner, Dr. Jonathan Hayes,
had just finished conducting an external examination of Shelley's body
when he received a call from Shelley's family.
We called the medical examiner who at that point wasn't sure.
You'd only have a cursory look at Shelley.
So we asked him, how does a healthy 47-year-old woman suddenly die like this?
Tell us.
What could have been caused a death?
So he said, well, you know, I don't know. Could have been a fool.
It could have been a heart attack.
It could have been a drug interaction.
It could have been anyone else's thing.
The only way we would know is by junior North Toxie.
The medical examiner, Dr. John Hayes,
would later say that as he's about to make his first incision,
he's told to stop.
The family initially wants an autopsy.
But then the Jewish official who'd cleaned up the scene calls them.
And this individual called me, said, listen,
I heard that the family are looking to do an autopsy.
It's a terrible mistake.
It's a terrible mistake because I've just come from the police
and I spoke to the medical examiner
and both of them say it's an accident.
And the Jewish law, if it's an accident, you can't do the autopsy.
By that point, Dr. Hayes' boss, the cheek medical examiner,
had determined that there wasn't enough that was suspicious
to warrant overruling a religious objection.
If there's no autopsy, then there's nothing really for the amy to do.
Then to be able to say there was a cause of death.
No. The medical examiner, without conducting an autopsy,
can't assume anything other than whatever the police say.
The family objected to an autopsy.
The family was buried.
After the body's buried, we kind of slowed down
because we really didn't have a cause of death.
An accidental death has no meaning to the homicide squad.
We got plenty of other work to do.
There was no reason for me to continue with this.
So I just went about my business.
The children have been living with Shelley
Apple's contentious custody battle.
The question now was, where would they go?
Initially, we had thought we were going to be taking
temporary custody of the children.
Police officer in charge said that the children would have to go home
with their maternal aunt, Uncle.
Upon hearing that news, Anna threw the motherable fits.
She wanted to stay with her daddy.
She wanted to stay with her daddy.
Unbeknown to us, the covelants that's fraud
and his parents had cool child protective services.
The woman from Child Protective Services said,
sweetheart, who do you want to go home with?
Anna raised one hand and pointed at me,
raised her other hand and pointed at my wife.
And she said, those grandparents.
The bottom line was, the children were assigned or given
to the senior covelants.
That's where we live.
A week after her death, Shelley's family goes to the funeral home
to pick up the death certificate.
And when they read it, that's when everything changes.
I opened the envelope to look at a death certificate
and I see the cause of death is listed there as undetermined.
And my heart lost a beat.
We were absolutely stunned.
I mean, we buried her based on, you know,
the initial thought that it was an accident.
I hate to say this, but without an autopsy,
sometimes people can get away with murder.
The family sees only one way forward.
They need to exume Shelley's body.
What they find and what we learn inside a replica
2020 built of Shelley's bathroom,
does this bring back your memories of the scene?
Oh, absolutely.
Would help answer the big question.
Was her death truly an accident?
Was it possible?
Sure, it was possible.
Until I actually got into the bathroom myself.
You're finding your wife dead in the tub.
The children are there.
What do you think has happened?
Why is she dead?
This is such a sensational story
that at this Tony Upper West Side address,
you now have a murder.
But this is your wife.
This is the woman that you fell in love with.
I was administering CPR to somebody who was a corpse.
I mean, it wasn't my wife anymore.
She said to me numerous times,
if something happens to me,
he is your number one suspect.
You look into Rod Coveland.
We want her out of the ground.
We want her body telling its story.
And Amy looks up at us and he goes,
this is going to be a homicide.
So this is kind of a replica
that 2020 built of Shelley's bathroom.
So you had suspicions right away?
Oh, yeah.
The whole cabinet looks staged.
Drint flags were going up all over the place.
You began to think that she had been murdered.
We're talking about absurd reticulous murder plots
with zero evidence.
It's several days after 47-year-old mother of two
Shelley Coveland has found dead in her bathtub.
And rumors are swirling around door chestretowers.
Her luxury high rise in New York's Upper West Side.
What started as a slip and fall
turned into rumors of a possibly a murder
involving her ex-husband who lived right across the hall.
Shelley's family is devastated
and struggling to come to terms with her death.
We were in this fog of pure shock
and just extreme grief.
And it's not until after they received Shelley's death certificate
from the funeral home that they learned
she had suspicious scratches on her face
and that her cause of death was ruled undetermined.
I called up a private investigator
and I asked him what does undetermined mean
and he said case undetermined pending police investigation.
In other words, it's a suspicious death
and my heart sunk.
Mark actually took charge.
Mark took it upon himself to play detective
and he did a very good job at it.
He went out.
He spoke to people.
He never stopped.
A lot of information was starting to come in
and it was very suspicious.
Red flags were going up all over the place
and a lot of it was pointed to Rod.
Rod and Shelley were going through this incredibly
contentious divorce and a brutal custody battle
for their two kids.
But now there are new revelations about how bad
had it all become.
For instance, they learned the night of her death.
Shelley was telling friends at the Friars Club
she was planning to remove Rod from her will.
She had told several people that she planned to change her will.
She had reached out to an estate lawyer.
She'd even told her door man that she planned to change her will.
Do you think Rod knew this?
We really believed she knew this.
He took about five and a quarter million dollars.
Another suspicious element here is that her iPhones
know where to be found in the apartment.
She was observed on surveillance video
walking into the building, talking on that cell phone.
How did the phone disappear from the apartment?
If in fact, this was just an accidental death.
This information adds to what they already knew about Rod
that Shelley feared him.
She would regularly say she was afraid of Rod
that was consistent from the very beginning.
Shelley's family says that Rod actually assaulted her
during that argument over his laundry.
She called me absolutely mistaken
because he pushed her to the ground in an argument
in front of the children.
I was getting very loud and angry
and she started pushing at me and I took her
and I put her on the floor.
Shabger?
No, I specifically did not shove her.
I grabbed her, held her and in a controlled
but quick fashion put her on the floor.
So yes, there was one incident that got physical
between us.
Yet Shelley seems to have become so frightened of her husband.
She's granted an order of protection during divorce proceedings.
She said to me numerous times,
if something happens to me,
he is your number one suspect.
You look into Rod Copeland.
There was no acceptance in your mind that this was an accident.
You began to think that she had been murdered.
We absolutely believed she had been murdered.
And in a heart of hearts, we believed he murdered her.
I hired private investigators to help
with the investigation into a death.
Former NYPD detective Mike Swain was one of those
private eyes that Mark hired to begin investigating Shelley's death.
The NYPD was basically closing the case.
Without an autopsy, there is no cause of death
and this was going to be a very, very uphill battle.
We would need to consume the body.
Shelley's family took this video
after they were allowed into the apartment with Swain.
It would later be used in court.
I needed to get into the apartment.
I needed to see the scene.
Maybe something was missed.
2020 built this model recreation
of the bathroom where Shelley was found.
Let's go.
So this is kind of a replica
that 2020 built of Shelley's bathroom.
Close?
Very close.
Does this bring back sort of your memories of the scene?
Oh, absolutely.
What did you notice right away when you got here?
The first thing was the cabinet.
The story was that she slipped fell
and possibly grabbed on to the cabinet,
yanking at office hinges and winding up deceased.
Did that make sense to you initially?
Was it possible? Sure.
It was possible.
Until I actually got into the bathroom myself.
I realized how high this cabinet is.
I realized how far away from the tub it is.
There are little knobs here too.
Does that make sense to somebody who's relatively short?
Five, four.
Could actually catch that knob for support?
It's not like a doorknob.
You're actually going to grab on to it with a hand.
It's a little tiny knob.
She wasn't a very big woman.
I don't know if I could take this knob,
put my hand on it and put all my dead weight
and yank that out of a wall.
I certainly don't think she could have done that.
So the idea is that if she's in the tub and she's fallen,
she's grabbing for this.
Imagine trying to grab that knob.
Look where you are, the distance to the cabinets.
Why wouldn't you try to brace yourself on the forces?
Yes, exactly.
Why wouldn't you try?
The family came out of that apartment
feeling that we just have to continue to move forward.
We want her out of the ground.
We want her body telling its story.
And we want justice.
The police get permission to dig up her grave.
So they can now do the autopsy
that should have been done from the beginning.
We actually watched them dig the body up.
They honest the rope around it.
They pulled it up.
It must have been the pain all over again.
It was.
I remember sobbing all night.
I was so crying.
You'd put her to rest and then she had to be disturbed.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It was for good cause, though.
We're actually in the room with the medical examiner
when he's doing the autopsy.
When he looked up at us, it was shocking.
Holy Michael, are we shocked?
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This all-in-one smart touchscreen calendar
brings visual structure and color coding
to your schedules, tasks, lists, and other family needs.
It syncs seamlessly with Google Calendar,
Apple Calendar, Outlook, and even write in your email
with customizable views of daily, weekly, or monthly planning.
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15-inch calendars by going to myskylight.com slash get30.
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It's now two months after Shelley Covelin's been laid to rest
and investigators have assumed her body to complete an autopsy.
We watched the body be rolled into the medical examiner's office
to do the autopsy.
Dr. Jonathan Hayes, the medical examiner on the case,
begins the autopsy by noting those same scratches on Shelley's face
that had raised suspicions during the first examination
before the autopsy was stopped.
The fact that there are scratches and lacerations to the face
is an indication that there may be more of foot.
Then the medical examiner notices a new injury to pen points
in Shelley's right eye known as Patekia.
A Patekia is like a red spot or a dot in the eye,
and that was a telltale sign to him.
Patekia are not typically seen in a normal person.
Patekia, though tiny, have major medical implications.
They're very often caused by pressure applied to the neck
or strangulation.
It raises red flags, but obviously it's got to be looked into further.
You can't draw conclusions just from the Patekia.
Then as the autopsy continues,
the medical examiner makes a shocking discovery.
There's a bone in Shelley's neck that is completely fractured,
the hyoid bone.
The hyoid bone allows you to chew and swallow.
It's very easy to break, and if it does, there may be a chokehold here.
When you put together all the evidence,
the scratch marks to the face, the Patekia in the eye,
and the broken hyoid bone,
there's no way this is not a chokehold.
We're actually in the room with the medical examiner
when he's doing the autopsy.
He looks up at us and he goes,
this is going to be a homicide.
I was a holy mackerel.
I was shocked.
Six weeks later, the official autopsy report is issued.
The cause of death is listed as neck compression.
The manner of death, homicide.
Shelley Kotlin's death is now officially a murder.
I remember exactly where I was, Mark called me,
and he said the results are back.
It was murder.
And I remember, I just kept saying,
oh my god, oh my god.
There's a lot of shock.
This is such a sensational story that at this Tony Upper West Side address,
you now have a murder.
I was horrified. I mean, just the thought of somebody murdered
in the building was really awful.
So this is now a homicide,
but the DA doesn't feel like it has enough yet
to bring an indictment.
Rods the suspect that they have a very circumstantial case.
June 2nd was the day we finally got a warrant to process the apartment.
Investigators for the first time treat it as an actual crime scene.
I obviously knew we were six months behind me,
eight bull for the investigation,
but I was pretty excited.
By then, the apartment has been badly contaminated
for ever tainted.
Remember, the bathroom has been cleaned by a religious official.
They allowed him to go into that apartment,
and with peroxide washed down the bathroom,
you've got to be kidding me.
I had no idea but to let somebody into that crime scene.
If it was my decision, nobody would have been in that apartment.
The crime scene had been compromised,
but police did have those original pictures
that were taken on the morning of Shelley's death,
and those photos now raise several red flags.
Some of the things that might not have looked very suspicious
when you thought that it was an accidental death,
now you take a different look at it.
This is no longer a slip in the tub,
which would mean that the tub itself
is part of the staged crime scene.
There are clothes on the floor.
There's water on the floor.
What's leading the DA to think that this is suspicious?
Picture a lot of water coming out with that body.
But there is some water on the floor.
Yeah, there's obviously dry blood,
so there obviously was some type of bloody water
that came out of the tub.
There was talk about Rod's clothes being dry.
For somebody that had lifted a body out of the water,
moments earlier, why wasn't he wet?
I had pulled Shelley out.
I was soaking wet,
so I raced across the hall,
I stripped my clothes off,
and I changed my clothes.
Even in this moment of distress,
you're thinking about changing your clothes.
I'm thinking about comforting my kids.
I couldn't fathom the idea of hugging Anna
and Miles and, you know,
soaking them with Shelley's bloody.
We went back to that bathroom replica
to get an idea of other red flags that stood out.
The only towel was a towel on the rail,
which a hand towel.
It wasn't a bath towel.
If somebody's coming in to take a bath,
I sort of would want to see a bath towel in some place.
But many people go to the bathroom,
forget their towel?
Absolutely. This is all just basic speculation.
It's all circumstantial.
The other thing was,
there was shampoo,
conditioner out.
The way the story was presented was that
she was going to be washing her hair.
Not many people washed their hair while taking a bath.
And that came out from the nanny
that the positioning of the shampoo and the conditioner,
it's always in the shower,
because that's where she washed her hair
in the shower, not in the bath towel.
So all of these little things,
when you put them all together and add them up,
it creates a picture.
The district attorney was going to have to
build a circumstantial case.
So two weeks later, investigators decided to
pay a visit to one of Rod's confidants.
His girlfriend, Deborah Ols.
When I came home,
detectives from New York were
behind me in my driveway.
And I talked to them.
I just gave them whatever information I could.
Ols gives them access to her online
backgammon records.
And that's a goldmine for investigators,
because she's been playing backgammon
and chatting with Rod online
the night of Shelley's death.
He was actually very quiet that night.
He didn't have a lot to say.
Once Rod and Deborah Ols finish gaming online
about 1am,
he tells her he's going to
go do some work for a backgammon organization
he was involved in.
But security cameras would show
that Rod was up and active in the middle of the night.
What would surveillance footage show
about Rod's movements
the night of Shelley's murder?
As the investigation
into the death of Shelley Covlin
continues,
detectives begin to retrace
her husband's actions
the night of her murder.
They learned that Rod and Deborah Ols
had been playing backgammon
online that night.
We finished our matches.
103am.
I wanted to play a little bit longer,
but he said he had to go.
Then he goes completely dark online.
There's no activity
of nothing on his computer, nothing on his phone.
This is a guy who usually was up all night
online the whole time.
Why did you go dark
after 1am?
I know it certainly sounds strange,
but it wasn't unusual for me to
catch a three-air nap in the middle of the night
and then get up and start being active.
Sometime around four o'clock in the morning
Rod comes downstairs.
He engages in conversation
with the concierge.
He says, hey, what do you want?
Can I get you something?
And this kind of struck the door.
He doesn't speak to the employees
in the building in a friendly manner ever.
So the door man finally said, okay, get me a snickers.
So he came back with a candy bar
and gave it to the guy on the desk.
It's a feeble attempt
to sort of visually alibi himself.
Rod leaves the building one more time
at 5.02 a.m. to go buy seltzer.
And then isn't seen again
until first responders arrive at Shelley's apartment.
Deborah Ols remembers the phone call
from Rod that next day.
It just seems so surreal.
Like, what?
What do you mean? She's dead.
He said it wasn't accident.
In the months after Shelley's death,
Rod and Deborah intensifies.
She frequently drives to New York to stay with Rod
who had now moved in with his parents
but they say it was a tense situation.
He had brought Deborah into the house
so that was a source of some concern.
Oh, that was a source of huge conflict.
We just didn't think it was a healthy situation
for the children.
Anything could set him off.
He could be charming in one minute
just later. He could fly into a rage.
Rod got so mad.
He shoved his dad as hard as he could.
His dad went flying into the next room
and hit his head on the floor.
So there was sort of a volatile situation happened?
Yes, there was.
Were you worried?
Were you scared of your son?
Not really.
Not really.
No.
Yet Rod's parents filed a new custody petition
arguing that he was an unfit parent.
In your October 2012 custody petition,
you even painted a picture
of kind of a violent man saying that he had assaulted you both.
If you take two alpha males
and you put them in the same house to you,
you're going to have conflict.
It was not a happy situation.
Carolyn Dave regretted custody
after evicting Rod from their house,
accusing him of spending his kids' college savings,
as heard in this dramatic audio recording
that would later be played in court.
I know how much time you've taken from your children.
You steal from your children.
You stole before.
You're stealing from college money.
No, I'm not doing it.
I want you back in the house by October 1st.
You were frustrated.
It's extremely.
Rod told us that he left the house willingly,
but Deborah Oles says that he was extremely upset
that his parents were granted custody of his children.
He was enraged.
His parents took custody of his children away from him
to control the money and he was enraged.
According to Deborah Oles,
Rod proposes a horrifying plan.
Right as Superstorm Sandy is hitting New York.
It is happening right now.
And Sandy crashing on shore.
Winds now at 90 miles per hour.
He wanted to go over and kill his parents.
She said that because electricity was off,
their alarm system would be off
and he wanted to kill them, set the house on fire.
I'm trying to think of something to say to stop this lunacy
and then I said,
how are you going to explain the presence there?
You're miraculously just happened to be there
to save Anna and Miles.
In the midst of this investigation,
some shocking revelations.
Authorities say that your son had actually plotted to kill you both.
Did you believe it?
No.
No?
No?
No, we were laughing because it was so absurd.
Rod also denies ever trying to kill his parents
and no charges are ever filed.
But that Deborah Oles,
it was no laughing matter.
It doesn't matter how much I care for a person.
I'm not going to sanction cold blood and murder.
Deborah ultimately flips on Rod.
She comes forward to police
with several hard drives from Rod's computer
that he had given her for safekeeping.
She explains to us that he would give her these hard drives
and say,
take these home with you and put them in a closet.
Investigators combed through nearly two million documents
on these hard drives,
building a case against Rod Covlin.
At the end of the day,
there was no smoking gun there.
You just keep piling up rocks
until you have a pile big enough that you think
that you can win a case with it.
Prosecutors have spent years building that case,
but it's largely circumstantial.
Still, they finally feel they have enough evidence against Rod
to bring an indictment,
almost six years after the death of his wife.
We at the Scarsdale train station.
He had pulled up in a car,
said he'd run to the arrest,
and cuffed them,
put them in the back of the car.
He looked shocked.
The 42 year old's house of cards came crashing down
here at the Metro North Station in Scarsdale
yesterday morning.
After six long years,
his world was just turned upside down,
and he never saw it coming.
Mr. Covlin is stunned.
He's stunned by what has happened.
What was that moment for you to hear
that he was arrested for your sister's murder?
I started to tear up.
I said, I've just been waiting so long to hear those words.
It's the backgammon champion's match of his life.
The people versus Rodric Covlin.
But it's no slam dunk.
Remember, there's still no physical evidence
tying him to the murder.
So prosecutors plan to play their ace card.
Rod's former flanks under oath,
and oversharing.
His face, his eyes.
They were getting glossy, like, almost like psychotic.
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This all-in-one, smart touchscreen calendar
brings visual structure and color coding to your schedules,
tasks, lists, and other family needs.
It syncs seamlessly with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar,
Outlook, and even writes your email
with customizable views of daily, weekly, or monthly planning.
Right now, Skylight is offering listeners $30 off
there of 15-inch calendars by going to myskylight.com-get30.
Go to myskylight.com-get30 for $30 off your 15-inch calendar.
That is M-Y-S-K-Y-L-I-G-H-T.com-get30.
Hey, mom and dads!
If you're tired of getting the deer in the headlights response,
every time you bring up family plans with your kids,
let me introduce you to your new best friend,
the Skylight Calendar.
The Skylight Calendar was designed
to help you manage the chaos of family life.
Ditch the mental load of juggling everyone's schedules
by pulling it all into one clear place.
This all-in-one, smart touchscreen calendar
brings visual structure and color coding to your schedules,
tasks, lists, and other family needs.
It syncs seamlessly with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar,
Outlook, and even writes your email
with customizable views of daily, weekly, or monthly planning.
Right now, Skylight is offering listeners $30 off
there of 15-inch calendars by going to myskylight.com-get30.
Go to myskylight.com-get30 for $30 off your 15-inch calendar.
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A little over nine years after Shelley Covlin was found dead
in that bathtub, Rod Covlin is about to face a jury.
Opening statements underway today in the trial of Rodrick Covlin.
Prosecutors say he staged the scene of his wife Shelley's
strangulation back in 2009 to make it look like a drowning.
People of a state in New York were subscribed to Covlin.
You attended the trial every day, every day, every day.
We all did.
And then you have Rod's mother, who sits on the opposite side of the gallery.
What was the hardest part for you?
The first time I saw him walk in with handcuffs
that had to be difficult.
This was not an accident.
The defendant didn't.
Leading the prosecution, Matthew Bogdano's,
a former boxer and a war veteran,
his nickname, The Pit Bull.
The question was never.
Is he going to kill Shelley?
The question was always when.
Defending Covlin is Robert Godley.
No one will ever know the truth.
A former prosecutor now represents many high-profile defendants.
One fact is undeniable.
There is no evidence whatsoever proving that Mr. Covlin had anything to do with his wife's death.
This is very much a circumstantial case.
Seven weeks of testimony,
much of which had little to do with what actually happened that night.
This is one of the main reasons he murdered his wife, The Money.
She was going to change her will.
In lieu of any hard physical evidence,
Bogdano's tries to paint a character profile of Rod Covlin,
one of an obsessive, dangerous man.
To do that, he calls to the stand women who Covlin courted online.
One is Patricia Swenson.
Defender kept asking me out on dates and asking me to travel around the country
with him.
The jury hears about one of those dates.
Go ahead and play.
A weekend in Gettysburg,
and they see a video Covlin shot on that trip.
Oh, I'm getting you.
No!
That's so have you.
It's video.
It's video.
I got some video going.
I have the good scenery.
Don't worry.
Covlin may sound lighthearted in the video,
but Swenson testifies that totally changes later at brunch
when he begins talking about the wife from whom he says he separated.
He said that he wanted to kill her,
where he wanted her death.
Obviously, Debra Ols' testimony was very significant.
He had a mercurial temper.
It didn't take much to set him off.
To make that case that Rod had an explosive relationship with his own parents,
prosecutors present a video that Debra Ols recorded.
What have you been looking at?
That's a picture of Rod approaching his parents' front door.
She testifies that the video shows Rod finding himself locked out of his parents' house.
They changed the lock.
What just happened?
He said they changed the lock.
She tells the jury about that plot that Rod allegedly had to kill his parents during hurricane Sandy.
More than a million people in 11 states are already without power.
He said that because there was no electricity,
the alarm would not be on.
He wanted to go through a window in the basement,
kill his parents, set his house on fire.
I was not about to be a party to murder.
I tried talking, talking them out of it.
Are you able to talk him out of this?
Yes.
Ols testifies about three other plots she claims Kavelin revealed to her.
And incredibly, one of them supposedly involved his 12-year-old daughter.
He wanted his daughter Anna to poison Rod's parents.
He said that if Anna was able to kill his parents,
because she was a child,
if she got jailed at all, it wouldn't be for very long.
And I said, you cannot do that to your child.
Were you able to talk to Anna?
Yes.
We're talking about absurd, ridiculous murder plots with zero evidence.
You don't have any audio or video of any of those things, correct?
I do not.
When you spoke to Detective Mooney, did you not say,
I just thought it was typical and it bad for the force?
Yes.
Other witnesses discussed Rod Kavelin's behavior the night before the body was discovered.
Rose Reed, the former nanny, testified Rod asked her if she would be staying in the apartment for a sleepover.
Had he ever asked you if you were going to have a sleepover before?
No, no.
That's the first time he asked me.
The defense portrays it as an innocent question,
since Kavelin knew that Shelley was coming home late.
But the prosecution says what's really strange
is the idea that Shelley would have taken a bath that night at all.
What's your step?
They called to the stand Adam Aminoff,
the stylist who did Shelley's hair earlier in the day.
Tell us the instructions you gave Shelley.
No was, no sample, no gene, be careful from the rain.
Anybody who's ever had this treatment done knows you cannot get your hair wet.
It's this legally blonde moment in this case.
Did you ever gotten a perm before?
A legally blonde moment because of how similar it was to this scene in that famous movie.
Because isn't it the first cardinal rule of perm maintenance that you're forbidden to wet your hair for at least 24 hours after getting a perm?
At the risk of deactivating the ammonium thiclocolate?
Because someone gets a hair treatment.
It doesn't mean that you can't clean yourself for 72 hours.
You didn't tell her that you couldn't stay.
Did you?
Yes or no?
Done.
But as the trial focuses even more on exactly what happened in that bathroom.
What will a video recorded in jail reveal?
Today, Rod Covlan seemed days as he sat in a courtroom.
Charge was second degree murder.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing was done on December 31 when they were there inside the apartment.
I think that the testimony about the police investigation was really stunning to a lot.
Did you make any hint with notes of any of the interviews you took back then?
I don't police so.
While you were there, you didn't have any indication that Mr. Covlan would not speak with you, did you?
No sir.
If there's say that you considered that this could potentially be a homicide.
Yes sir.
No.
The lack of investigation on December 31.
That's a legitimate complaint.
But what's the point?
What would happen if...
Remember, there was a delay before an autopsy was done.
Which the medical examiner, Dr. Jonathan Hayes, testifies concerns.
When I opened up the bag and saw her, I turned to my colleague and said she needs an autopsy.
Why did you say that?
I was struck by injury she had on her face.
She had scratches on her face, which I considered suspicious.
And then Dr. Hayes tells the jury about his findings during the autopsy.
And the conclusion he reached about the autopsy.
And the conclusion he reached about the autopsy.
Dr. Hayes tells the jury about his findings during the autopsy.
And the conclusion he reached about Shelley's cause of death.
The cause of death was neck compression and this fit well with a chokehold.
One of the most striking things was that the scratches on her face.
As the person is put into the chokehold, they go to fight back.
And they fight back by trying to claw the arm away from the neck.
And in doing so, they will sometimes scratch their face.
The hardest part is just to get underneath the chin.
And that was a really significant part of the trial is when this martial arts expert got up there
and performed the chokehold on a skeleton.
But I'm here, I could just put my hand under or over the top,
I could go with my wheelchair, be grabbed.
And he could just start to pull back and it's really that simple.
How you could have that kind of neck compression and would be able to,
he said within 10 seconds, kill somebody.
Rod Coblin had posted on Facebook that he had studied Taekwondo for 11 years.
But did he know how to do a chokehold?
That's where a video becomes a key piece of evidence.
You see this video before?
Yes.
But Dono's introduces this recording from when Rod Coblin was in jail awaiting trial.
That's him talking to another inmate.
Watch what he does with his arms.
I think you see that?
Yes.
He's making two distinct movements.
He's that consistent or even consistent with the chokehold that it's bought martial arts.
It's consistent, it's taught in martial arts, it's a single armed chokehold.
I believe that was quite damning for the defense.
God leave dismisses that tape.
All he is doing is demonstrating to this guy, another inmate in jail,
a few months before the beginning of the trial.
This is the way the DA is saying, I killed Shelley Coblin.
But prosecutors have more.
They bring in Shelley's estate attorney who tells the jury about those plans she was making
to change her will just before she died.
She said, I need to change my will.
I want to make sure that Rod doesn't get any part of my estate.
And how would Rod have known about her communications with that lawyer?
Rod's friend testifies that Rod told him he installed a keystroke logger
on Shelley's computer which allowed him to spy on her.
On the very day, she is going to write the defendant out of her will
for $5.2 million.
On the very day, she has a fatal accident.
Are you kidding me?
The defendant denies a keystroke logger who was ever found on the computer.
You are the final arbiters of the facts.
After prosecutors rest their case, who does the defense call to testify?
No one.
Once you call a single witness, you change the entire dynamic of the jury deliberation.
It's no longer an evaluation as to whether or not the government proved its case
as opposed to do we believe the defense?
So the trial moves straight to closing arguments.
You may detest it.
You may not even be able to stomach him.
If the proof isn't there, it is right.
It is no to stand up and to say not guilty.
Even if it hurts.
Even if it's difficult.
Justice has a single voice and that voice tells you he is guilty.
Not because I say so, but because he is.
Thank you.
As the jury heads off to deliberate, nobody knows what they're thinking.
Or that there is still a big shock ahead from none other than Shelley's daughter, Anna.
A lot of us were very surprised by how quickly the jury came back.
I couldn't breathe.
I was terrified, really.
How say this from the first count of this indictment?
Charging and defendant?
What was the first emotion for you?
It was relief.
It was justice for Shelley.
And she can rest.
And that guy is hopefully going behind bars.
Please, God.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
And that guy is hopefully going behind bars.
Please, God, for the rest of his life.
And behind bars is where I talked with Rod Covlin, where even now he maintains his innocence.
You sit here convicted of murdering your wife.
Correct.
Did you kill your wife?
No, I did not.
I did absolutely not.
But a jury of your peers are convinced that you did.
Why should people believe you?
You don't have to believe me.
You have to believe the actual evidence.
There just isn't evidence that I did this thing.
The murder 10 years ago, the conviction last month, the sentencing today for 45-year-old Roderick Covlin.
And at that sentencing hearing, a surprise.
I'm going to be reading this for Anna.
Rod's mother Carol reads a statement from his daughter, Anna,
who by then is 18 years old.
I love my mom, and I will always love my mom.
My father has never hurt anyone, nor has he committed a murder.
My mom passed away.
My dad has been taken away for so long already.
Please let us know that it will come to an end.
What was that moment, like for you to hear your daughter, essentially defend you?
It was overwhelming.
She's the only person in the world who knows for a fact what happened that night.
The only person.
And she knows that I didn't do this.
The judge sentenced his Rod.
It's 25 years to life in prison.
I mean, the appeal was voluminous.
It was over 350 pages.
And there were many independent bases for the appeal.
There was some prosecutorial misconduct.
There was the admission of the video from prison, which should not have been permitted.
The character assassination.
It was impossible for Rod to receive a fair trial.
The District Attorney's Office rejected those claims.
And in May of 2022, that appeal is denied.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg says he hopes that it will bring closure to the family.
But Anna then sends him a follow-up letter saying...
I am Shelley's family.
My brother is Shelley's family.
And this decision has not brought us closure.
My grief is not aided by the malicious unjust imprisonment of my father.
That is an open wound caused by your office.
How worried are you for miles and Anna going forward?
My concerns are for them to grow up, to have wonderful lives.
I think it's important for the kids and for the world to know.
She had a tremendous mission in this world.
Between the way she cared for her kids with every fiber of herself.
And just, you know, a good, honorable person.
She was someone who had that light and spread that light in this world.
And that's, you know, that's what makes the tragedy that much greater.
Difficult for the family.
During my prison interview with Rod Coblin, he told me that he speaks to his son Miles every day that's possible.
And we've also learned that his daughter, Anna, has gotten married.
On the legal front, we should mention that Rod Coblin's lawyer tells us that they have filed a motion to vacate his murder conviction.
We'll stay on the story.
In the meantime, that is our program for tonight. I'm David Neuer.
And I'm Debra Roberts from all of us here at 2020 and ABC News. Good night.
You've been listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. Friday nights at 9 on ABC.
You can also find all new broadcast episodes of 2020. Thanks for listening.
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