Rebecca Rosenberg - At Any Cost: A Fathers Betrayal, a Wifes Murder, and a Ten-Year War for Justice

In the snow-dappled early morning hours of New Years Eve, 2009, little Anna Covlin blinked herself out of slumber. The sound of running water had slowly awakened the 9-year-old girl, and her eyes flickered open in the blackness of her mothers bedroom. Anna had nestled beside her the prior evening and was still cocooned in a tangle of covers. Her 3-year-old brother, Myles, remained suspended in dreamland a few feet away. But there was a rumpled depression where she had expected to see her mothers form. Straining her ears, Anna detected the faint cascade of water from a nearby bathroom.

She planted her bare feet on the carpeted floor and advanced to the bathroom door. Myles awoke and joined her.

Peering inside, Anna saw her mother, Shele Covlin, seated in the tub with her bare back exposed and her thick blond mane flipped forward. Anna assumed that she was indulging in a nocturnal soak and washing her hair. Anna guided Myles back to bed and they burrowed beneath the comforter.

A few hours later, a piercing winter sun now fully aloft over Manhattan, Myles suddenly shook his sister awake.

Where is Mommy? the little boy asked.

Anna inventoried the room once again. She and her brother remained the beds only occupants.

It was now 7 in the morning. Five floors below, the city began issuing the opening notes of its daily cacophonythe stray bleat of a cabbys horn, the plaintive bellow of a reveler parrying the admonitions of daylight.

The Dorchester Towers, a regal if slightly dated 34-story apartment building, stood just three blocks from famed Lincoln Center, home to the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Ballet.

Anna again walked toward the bathroom in search of her motheronly this time with a surging dread. Inside, she saw Shele bobbing facedown in reddened bathwater.

The chilling scene would initiate a nearly decade-long mystery that baffled veteran New York City investigators, leveled two families and captivated hardened New Yorkers like few tragedies before it.

Barely able to make sense of the atrocity before her, Anna rushed to the apartments landline phone and dialed her father, Rod Covlin. He had recently separated from Shele after more than a decade of marriage and had moved into a studio apartment directly across the hall. The familiar number flashed on Rods phone at 7:04 A.M.

Something is wrong with Mommy! Anna wailed. Something is wrong with Mommy!

The broad-shouldered 36-year-old, who stood 6-foot-2, darted across the hall and told Anna to unlock the front door of apartment 515. He hurried to the master bathroom and saw his wife in the bloodied tub. Hoping to shield his children from the grisly scene, Rod shepherded them into Annas bedroom and ordered them to stay there. He returned to the bathroom, hoisted Sheles petite body out of the sloshing tub and placed her faceup on the white-tiled bathroom floor. There was no movement. Sheles shimmering blond hair was now soaked crimson. Rod frantically performed CPR before calling 911 at 7:14 A.M. An operator then guided him through a few more attempts at resuscitation before he surrendered.

As he waited for emergency crews to arrive, Rod snatched a beige comforter and pink blanket off of Sheles bed and draped them over her nude body. New York City Fire Department EMS Lt. Matthew Casey and four members of his team were the first to trundle into 155 West 68th Street at 7:18 A.M., making their way past a startled doorman and into an elevator. Casey knocked on the door and lowered his gaze to meet Annas. Instinctively softening his tone as the child peered up at him, he asked if her mother was home.

She just pointed down the dark hallway, he later remembered.

Casey and his men walked down the corridor. FDNY! the troop announced as they advanced into the silent gloom. FDNY!

Casey reached the master bathroom, the only lighted area in the house, and saw Rod sitting beside his estranged wife. Her head was resting at the base of the toilet, her mouth slightly agape and her eyes shut. Sheles left arm covered her left breast and her right hand lay near her navel. There were bright red scratches on the lower half of her face and a deep purple contusion, the size of a dime, on the left side of her lower lip.

The freshly manicured nails on her hands and feet were aflame with red polisha jarring counterpoint to her inert state. The medics remained silent, immediately recognizing death in her rigid limbs and alien pallor.

Do something! Do something! Rod barked at them.

A medic escorted him from the bathroom before checking Sheles vital signs. There were none.

Firefighter William Rix crouched beside her to check for rigor mortis, the setting of joints and muscles that occurs a few hours after death.

I pulled out her arm and noticed that it was completely stiff, he said. I grabbed her by the wrist to try to pull them away and they were locked. Her limbs had already curled into a pose of death.

At 7:20 A.M., paramedic Bobby Wong entered the apartment and made his way down the long hallway to document the conclusion of Sheles life and declared her dead at 7:25 A.M. In the living room, Wong saw Rod and his daughter weeping softly on a sofa. Unaware of the calamity that had just befallen him, Myles cheerfully played with toys. Rod, wearing a clean white T-shirt and dark gray sweatpants, received the stream of NYPD officers who began appearing at the front door. He directed them to the bathroom and pointed to a cabinet above the bathtub faucet that had been partially ripped from its hinges.

I think that she may have grabbed a piece of wood, the wooden cabinet, and fell and hit the back of her head, and slipped under the water, the husband told police. Overcome by the unfolding horror, Rod began retching at one point and rushed to a secondary bathroom to gather himself.

I cant believe this is happening, he later told a female sergeant as he extended his arms for a consolatory embrace. The unemployed Ivy League graduate told officers that he and his wife were separated and mired in a divorce proceeding. She had taken out a restraining order against him, but he lived across the hall to stay close to their children, he explained.

Shele, a thriving wealth manager at UBS, had long been the primary breadwinner, earning nearly half a million dollars a year. Well-regarded for both her professional successes and her exuberant charms, she worked alongside her brother, Philip Danishefsky, and her doting father, Joel Danishefsky, at the finance giant.