By the end of the trial in March, nearly everyone in Covlin’s life viewed him as a calculated sociopath, willing not only to kill his wife, Shele Danishefsky Covlin, for her fortune, but to manipulate the couple’s two children to gain access to their inheritance.
Still, when Covlin was sentenced in state Supreme Court in Manhattan on Wednesday, there was a final twist to the sad saga: The couple’s children pleaded with the judge for leniency for their father.
Myles Covlin, who is 12, approached Justice Ruth Pickholz to speak, standing a short distance from his father at the defense table.
“I lost one parent and do not want to lose a second,” Myles said as his father turned toward him and wiped tears from his eyes.
Dressed in khakis and a blue and white patterned shirt, Myles added, “I’m afraid if he is given the maximum sentence, I won’t have the opportunity to do things with my dad.”
His sister, Anna Covlin, now 18, did not attend the sentencing. But in a letter read by her paternal grandmother, she also urged the judge to give her father a lighter sentence than prosecutors had recommended.
Anna Covlin was only 9 in December 2009 when she woke and discovered her mother facedown in bloody water in the tub of their Upper West Side apartment. Her father lived across the hall and had a spare key to the apartment. Danishefsky Covlin had filed for divorce, and the day she died, she was planning to cut Covlin out of her will.
Pickholz was unmoved by the children’s statements. She called the evidence presented at trial overwhelming and sentenced Covlin to the maximum allowed for second-degree murder — 25 years to life.
Other relatives of Danishefsky Covlin, who was a successful finance executive when she died at 47, called the sentence “totally justified.”
“The defendant is a heartless monster,” said Peggy Danishefsky, the victim’s sister-in-law. “He has torn our family apart and tried to destroy our family in so many ways.”
Prosecutors worked more than five years to build a case against Covlin. The initial investigation had been lacking because investigators assumed her death was an accident. (For instance, officers allowed the family to bury Danishefsky Covlin before an autopsy was done and to let a rabbi clean the blood-soaked bathroom with peroxide.)
In the end, the lead prosecutor, Matthew Bogdanos, mounted a case built largely on circumstantial evidence. He persuaded a jury that only Covlin could have committed the murder and that he had held his wife in a chokehold, squeezing her neck so tightly that he had snapped the hyoid bone and caused blood vessels to burst in her eye.
Covlin, 45, said before he was sentenced that he was innocent. “Luckily my daughter who was there that night knows the truth,” he said. “She’s the only one who could.”
Bogdanos said Covlin’s criminal behavior continued long after his wife’s death. He urged his daughter, for instance, to accuse her grandfather of rape as part of a scheme to regain custody of the children from his parents.
At another point he had planned to take Anna to Mexico, where she would be married, so that she could be emancipated from his parents. There was also evidence presented at trial that Covlin tried to forge a letter from his daughter, in which she took responsibility for the killing.
Covlin even made plans to kill his own parents, Bogdanos said.
“It is reasonable to ask: How long had he planned it?” Bogdanos told the court. “How many iterations had he gone through to come up with this particular plan?”
Speaking in the hallway after the sentencing, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said the family’s story contained lessons for all New Yorkers.
“This tragedy was compounded by the fact that it occurred in a family that is educated, wealthy and happy in so many ways,” he said. “Domestic violence occurs everywhere.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.