Victim’s sister feared husband now accused of murder
The sister of an Upper West Side woman whose estranged ne’er-do-well husband is accused of strangling her in a bid to get his hands on her fortune sobbed on the witness stand Wednesday, describing a tearful heart-to-heart with her terrified sibling.
“She started crying,” the sister, Eve Karstaedt, told the jury of speaking with Shele Danishefsky inside the Midtown Lord & Taylor department store on a day in May 2009, eight months before her murder.
As she sat with her sister in a quiet area in the shoe department, Danishefsky “showed me this letter she had composed,” the slender brunette told jurors through her tears.
The letter was addressed to her philandering, violent husband, failed stockbroker Rod Covlin, now on trial for her murder. Covlin is insisting that his estranged wife’s death was just a bathtub accident.
“And in the letter she was telling Rod it’s time for them to end their marriage,” Karstaedt said, bursting into sobs. “She said she’s terrified to send it, and she’s terrified not to send it.”
Two months later, in July, the sisters gathered for the Sabbath at Karstaedt’s house on the Upper West Side.
“As we were lighting our candles, Shele said to me, ‘Rod’s hatred for me is stronger than his love for the children,’” Karstaedt told jurors. “She was shaking and she was crying.”
Karstaedt also revealed to jurors that although the sisters’ father, Joel Danishefsky, demanded no autopsy be conducted — in observance of Orthodox Jewish tradition — the father, Karstaedt and Karstaedt’s husband nonetheless “were concerned that there was foul play.”
The three spoke together of this concern the night before Danishefsky’s father ultimately decided there be no autopsy, the sister testifies.
This counters the defense spin that the family’s decision to bury Danishefsky without a coroner’s examination shows that even those closest to the tragic mom agreed her death was accidental and not worthy of forensic investigation.
Additional reporting by Laura Italiano
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