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Dateline NBC

Endgame

Wed, 1 Jan 2025

Description

Rod Covlin calls 911 after his young daughter finds his estranged wife, Shele Danishefsky, unconscious in the bathtub. Soon after her mysterious death, Shele’s loved ones would come to suspect that what happened was no accident. Andrea Canning reports. 

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Transcription

00:00 - 00:01 David Kovlin

Tonight on Dateline.

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00:02 - 00:09 Deborah Oles

Rod Copland calls 911 and says that his wife appears dead. He said that Anna found her in the bathtub.

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00:10 - 00:12 David Kovlin

I've never seen my son shell-shocked.

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00:13 - 00:18 Mark Karstadt

I'm reading the death certificate and I saw that the cause of death was undetermined.

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00:18 - 00:25 Rebecca Rosenberg

This is a really sensational case, and you have this beautiful woman, a tall, handsome guy, greed, infidelity.

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00:26 - 00:34 Mark Karstadt

People were telling us things that were very worrying. He's sleeping around with other women. We believed it was a staged accident. Case bothered me for a long time.

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00:36 - 00:42 Deborah Oles

He was adamant about his innocence. They just don't have direct evidence.

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00:42 - 00:47 Lester Holt

A New Year's Eve mystery that would take the next nine years to solve.

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00:47 - 00:50 Eve Karstadt

The first thing I thought of was, she can finally rest.

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00:52 - 01:05 Lester Holt

I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Andrea Canning with Endgame.

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01:14 - 01:37 Andrea Canning

If you had to pick one place that screams New York City, it's usually this. Times Square is the city's heart and soul, and normally full of noise and lights and people rushing somewhere, or nowhere. Take a short walk uptown, however, maybe 25 minutes on foot, and the endless racket of tourist hotspots and commerce gives way to a quieter vibe.

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01:39 - 02:04 Andrea Canning

Here, you find the tree-lined streets and cozy apartments of the Upper West Side. I started my own family here on the Upper West Side, just steps from Central Park. During the day, this neighborhood is buzzing with families. At night, it's quiet and safe. But just two blocks from where I lived, in the early morning hours of New Year's Eve 2009, something terrible touched this neighborhood.

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02:07 - 02:27 Andrea Canning

It happened inside this pricey apartment building on West 68th Street. Around 7 a.m., a man named Rod Kovlin called 911 to say his 9-year-old daughter Anna found his wife Shelly unconscious in the bathtub. Rebecca Rosenberg covered the case for the New York Post and knows it inside and out.

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02:28 - 02:46 Rebecca Rosenberg

He sees his wife in the tub. He pulls her out, puts her face up on the ground, and starts performing CPR. Then he calls 911. And they tell him to keep performing CPR. This is a horrible scene. And I would imagine absolutely devastating for their daughter.

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02:48 - 02:58 Andrea Canning

The EMTs arrived in minutes. They found no pulse. 47-year-old Shelly Kovlin was beyond help. The police come to the scene.

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02:58 - 03:00 Rebecca Rosenberg

Eventually, a detective comes to the scene.

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03:01 - 03:26 Andrea Canning

Detectives found a tub full of bloody water, and Shelly wrapped in a comforter on the floor next to it. Above the tub, a cabinet with a door hanging off its hinge. They surmised Shelly had grabbed it as she fell and landed hard in the tub. And so investigators began the difficult process of deconstructing a life that had just come to a sad and mysterious end.

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03:27 - 03:37 Andrea Canning

The police would soon learn that Shelley Daniszewski-Kovlin was larger than life. Nobody admired her more than her sister Eve and brother-in-law Mark Karstadt.

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03:38 - 03:42 Mark Karstadt

We would have a blast. We would laugh a lot. She was a lot of fun.

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03:42 - 03:51 Eve Karstadt

She graduated with a marketing degree. And then my dad had asked her if she wanted to come and work with him at Merrill Lynch.

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03:51 - 03:57 Andrea Canning

Shelley eventually became a private wealth manager. The money was good. So was the prestige.

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03:58 - 04:16 Stephanie Goldman

Shelly was fancy. She was smart. She was educated. Shelly's friend, Stephanie Goldman, remembers the day Shelly took her to the upscale Friars Club. It was wintertime. She was wearing her fur coat, her mink coat. Men just came over to her. It was like being swept off her feet.

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04:17 - 04:24 Andrea Canning

She's got the finance job, the style. I mean, it sounds like she kind of was the classic New York City woman.

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04:24 - 04:27 Eve Karstadt

Absolutely. Absolutely, she was.

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04:29 - 04:42 Andrea Canning

In February of 1998, Shelly went to a Jewish singles mixer in Manhattan, where sparks flew with a guy she met there. His name? Rod Kovlin. She called her sister that night with an outrageous announcement.

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04:43 - 04:56 Eve Karstadt

She was all giggles, and she said, I met a guy, a really nice guy, and she said, we're on our way to the airport to Elope. She was laughing, and I said, Shelly, please don't do this.

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04:57 - 05:11 Andrea Canning

Eve talked her sister out of it that night, but Shelly was serious. And so was Rod. Shelly was 11 years older than him, but that didn't seem to matter. His parents, Dave and Carol Kovlin, say he adored her right from the start.

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05:12 - 05:20 Carol Kovlin

He told us he has a girlfriend and we have to meet her. And I said, OK, Passover's coming up. We don't have time right now. No, you have to meet her.

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05:21 - 05:39 Andrea Canning

A brunette back then, Shelley married Rod six months later, and reality set in as they settled down to life as a couple. It wasn't exactly bliss, because while Shelley was a stunning overachiever, Rod was, well, not in the same league. He was a stock trader of middling success.

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05:40 - 05:48 Mark Karstadt

What I did see was a guy that really had a lot of big ideas and was unable to execute on any of them.

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05:49 - 05:53 Andrea Canning

But he had a couple of talents, martial arts and backgammon.

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05:53 - 05:57 David Kovlin

And when he sat down and played, he won. And he won money.

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05:58 - 06:02 Andrea Canning

Two years after she married Rod, Shelley gave birth to baby Anna.

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06:02 - 06:08 Mark Karstadt

She was inseparable from Anna. She was doting on that child. She was an incredible mom.

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06:08 - 06:12 Andrea Canning

A second pregnancy followed, twins, but that ended in tragedy.

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06:13 - 06:21 Eve Karstadt

So they were born prematurely and then they died. Oh my gosh. One I think at childbirth and one like a few hours later.

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06:21 - 06:26 Andrea Canning

How did she handle that? How did you support her? It's just such an awful thing.

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06:27 - 06:32 Mark Karstadt

Devastating. The entire year was a nightmare for her.

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06:32 - 06:45 Andrea Canning

Then in 2006, Shelly had a baby boy. She and Rod named their son Miles. But now, three years later, Shelley was dead, and the scene inside that apartment on the Upper West Side was chaos.

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06:46 - 06:55 Mark Karstadt

Mark says Eve could barely function. When I first saw her, she walked down the corridor, and she was as white as a sheet. She was in terrible shock.

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06:56 - 07:02 Andrea Canning

NYPD detective Carl Rotermel was there too, pondering various scenarios.

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07:02 - 07:07 Carl Rotermel

I've been to places where people have fallen in a tub and anything's possible.

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07:08 - 07:11 Andrea Canning

In this case, that would be an understatement.

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07:14 - 07:19 Lester Holt

Coming up... A whirlwind romance that ended in a storm.

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07:19 - 07:26 Eve Karstadt

She said, he doesn't get a job, and he's just hanging around the house. And she was very frustrated. She said, he's driving me crazy.

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07:26 - 07:28 Lester Holt

And it might get worse.

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07:29 - 07:35 Stephanie Goldman

When Shelley told me that he was going to be living across the hall, my first instinct was, I don't think this is a good idea.

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07:48 - 08:18 Andrea Canning

New Year's in the Big Apple is usually a happy time. Celebrations everywhere and the promise of fresh starts and new dreams. But for those who knew and loved Shelley Covlin, 2010 began with sadness. Shelley's sister Eve and her husband Mark couldn't believe the mother of two was gone. Did it kind of hit you later, the more emotional side of things, as you think about your life without her?

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08:18 - 08:19 Eve Karstadt

Right, exactly.

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08:19 - 08:20 Andrea Canning

And the children without her.

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08:20 - 08:23 Eve Karstadt

Right. You can't even think about the magnitude of it all.

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08:25 - 08:31 Andrea Canning

Shelley's in-laws, David and Carol Kovlin, were also in shock. Their son, Rod, called with the news.

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08:32 - 08:36 David Kovlin

He says, Shelley's dead. I don't think I've ever made it to Manhattan faster in my life.

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08:36 - 08:38 Andrea Canning

Did you get any details?

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08:38 - 08:38 David Kovlin

No.

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08:39 - 08:40 Andrea Canning

In that first phone call? Nothing.

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08:40 - 08:41 David Kovlin

No, he just said, Shelley's dead.

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08:42 - 08:43 Andrea Canning

When you arrive, what's going on?

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08:44 - 08:54 David Kovlin

Roderick was sitting on the couch. He was in shock. Honestly, I've never seen my son shell-shocked and speechless in my life.

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08:55 - 09:02 Andrea Canning

The next few days were a blur. For religious reasons, the family decided not to have an autopsy performed.

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09:02 - 09:10 Mark Karstadt

My father-in-law obviously made the final decision He went by his rabbi who said, don't do the autopsy.

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09:11 - 09:20 Andrea Canning

It was only as friends and family gathered to sit shiva, the Jewish period of mourning, that they had time to think about the vibrant woman they'd just lost.

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09:21 - 09:26 Eve Karstadt

She was an incredibly devoted mother. She was an incredible person.

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09:27 - 09:33 Andrea Canning

But what was also on their minds was dark and troubling, Shelley's rocky marriage to Rod.

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09:34 - 09:44 Eve Karstadt

She said, he doesn't get a job. He goes to the gym twice a day, and he's just hanging around the house. And she was very frustrated. She said, he's driving me crazy.

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09:46 - 09:51 Andrea Canning

In 2009, Shelley confessed to her sister that her marriage was in serious trouble.

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09:51 - 09:58 Eve Karstadt

And she said, we're broken, and we just have to part ways. And she cried. She wept to me.

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09:59 - 10:04 Andrea Canning

One thing Mark and Eve say came between the couple was Rod's dramatic mood swings.

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10:05 - 10:18 Mark Karstadt

Rod has and has always had a violent, explosive temper. He could be sitting very calmly in a chair, and something can set him off, and in seconds, he will literally explode.

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10:19 - 10:24 Andrea Canning

Shelley also complained about Rod's growing obsession with backgammon.

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10:24 - 10:28 Mark Karstadt

It became a passion and then an obsession for him.

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10:28 - 10:31 Andrea Canning

Did he ever say why?

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10:31 - 10:38 Mark Karstadt

I think he had forged relationships in the backgammon community that he really liked.

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10:39 - 10:42 Andrea Canning

Even Rod's parents felt their son was spending too much time on the game.

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10:43 - 10:51 David Kovlin

I told him that he was being a little ridiculous with the backgammon and, you know, going to backgammon too much. I said, you've got a family.

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10:51 - 10:57 Andrea Canning

The Kovlins say they saw changes in Shelley too, ones they felt were equally damaging to the marriage.

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10:58 - 11:01 David Kovlin

She started going to the Friars Club.

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11:01 - 11:05 Carol Kovlin

From a once a week, it became much more frequent than that.

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11:06 - 11:20 Andrea Canning

The couple seemed to be living separate lives in what had to be a painful moment. Shelly told her sister it wasn't the backgammon or the fact that Rod wasn't pulling his weight that pushed her to separate. It was Rod's cheating.

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11:20 - 11:35 Eve Karstadt

She believes that he left an email up so she would purposely see it from another woman. And she confronted him and he said that, yes, he's sleeping around with other women and he wants an open marriage. He still loves her and wants an open marriage.

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11:35 - 11:38 Andrea Canning

Most women don't want to go along with the open marriage concept.

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11:38 - 11:41 Eve Karstadt

She was one of those who said absolutely no.

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11:44 - 11:57 Andrea Canning

By June, Rod had moved out, and he didn't go far. Shelley arranged for him to live for free in an apartment across the hall to make it easy for the kids. Her close friend, Stephanie Goldman, wasn't happy with the arrangement.

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11:58 - 12:10 Stephanie Goldman

When Shelly told me that he was going to be living across the hall, my first instinct was, my goodness, I don't think this is a good idea. Nevertheless, Shelly was moving on, and so was Rod.

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12:11 - 12:18 Deborah Oles

He was very charming, intelligent, funny in a quirky sort of way, and I really enjoyed playing backgammon with him.

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12:19 - 12:22 Andrea Canning

Deborah Oles met Rod at a backgammon tournament.

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12:22 - 12:43 Deborah Oles

Months later, their relationship became romantic. I wasn't looking for any sort of relationship. And he was pretty aggressive. And I think I was naive in the fact that I'm considerably older than Rod. So it never occurred to me that he would be interested in me in that way.

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12:44 - 12:46 Andrea Canning

So it surprised you when he made an overture?

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12:46 - 12:50 Deborah Oles

Right, and of course it made me feel good, you know, a younger man being attracted to me.

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12:51 - 12:55 Andrea Canning

Meanwhile, Shelley was working with divorce attorney Lance Meyer.

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12:55 - 13:06 Lance Meyer

We talked about all the problems she was having with her husband and the concern she had about herself, her children, and she was really trying to figure out the best way to go about proceeding with a divorce case.

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13:06 - 13:13 Eve Karstadt

By fall, she was dipping her toe in the dating pool again. She was on JDate. She had met some gentlemen.

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13:13 - 13:16 Andrea Canning

JDate, the Jewish dating website?

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13:16 - 13:17 Eve Karstadt

Yeah, yeah.

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13:18 - 13:26 Andrea Canning

Shelly seemed on track to make a fresh start in 2010. Until that fresh start ended in what seemed like a deadly accident.

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13:27 - 13:34 Stephanie Goldman

When I heard that she slipped and fell in the tub, my initial reaction was, she wouldn't even take a bath.

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13:35 - 13:46 Andrea Canning

And now Shelley's friends and family were wondering about the story Rod told police, that his daughter Anna called him that morning in a panic and let him into the apartment because he didn't have a key.

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13:47 - 13:49 Mark Karstadt

I was very suspicious.

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13:51 - 13:57 Andrea Canning

Suspicions that only deepened when Mark learned the medical examiner wasn't sure either.

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13:57 - 14:03 Mark Karstadt

I'm reading the death certificate and I saw that the cause of death was undetermined.

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14:06 - 14:13 Lester Holt

Coming up, Rod said he had pulled Shelly's wet body out of the tub. So why wasn't he wet?

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14:13 - 14:18 Rebecca Rosenberg

Two officers found this unusual and noted this. How would you not get wet?

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14:18 - 14:20 Lester Holt

When Dateline continues...

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14:31 - 14:40 Andrea Canning

From the moment Shelley Kovlin's family heard the story of her death, a slip and fall in a bathtub full of water, they felt it just didn't make sense.

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14:41 - 14:50 Eve Karstadt

How do you fall in a bathtub? And then I started thinking, and I said, Shelley takes a bath? She showers. You know, she's not taking a bath.

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14:51 - 15:02 Andrea Canning

Plus, Shelley had gotten a keratin hair straightening treatment the previous morning. She wasn't supposed to get her hair wet for several days. They say don't wash your hair for 72 hours. Yeah.

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15:02 - 15:03 Eve Karstadt

Not even supposed to go to the gym.

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15:04 - 15:24 Andrea Canning

This is what's been sort of labeled the legally blonde moment. Yeah. That any woman who knows about a keratin treatment to straighten your hair is not going to expose your hair like that. Shelley's death didn't sit right with lead detective Carl Rotermel either. While he felt her death could have been an accident, details of the scene bothered him.

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15:25 - 15:31 Andrea Canning

The way that cabinet door had been yanked down, the blood in the tub, and marks on Shelly's body.

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15:32 - 15:38 Carl Rotermel

She had bruising to her lip. She appeared to have some scratch marks. And she had bruising to her right hand.

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15:39 - 15:54 Andrea Canning

And what the detective would learn later cast suspicion directly on Rod. Rod told an officer that he had to pull Shelly's wet body out of the tub, yet his clothes were bone dry. Reporter Rebecca Rosenberg.

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15:54 - 16:04 Rebecca Rosenberg

Two officers found this unusual and noted this. How would you not get wet? He was wearing a light-colored shirt. He just wasn't wet at all, and it wasn't consistent with the story he had told.

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16:05 - 16:17 Andrea Canning

And their doorman remembered Rod doing something early that morning that was highly unusual for him. He stopped by the front desk on his way out of the building to get a snack, even bought the doorman a Snickers bar.

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16:18 - 16:25 Rebecca Rosenberg

The doorman thought this was weird because Rod Kovlin usually wasn't chatty and had, in all the years he'd been there, never offered to bring him anything back.

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16:26 - 16:39 Andrea Canning

Suspicious details indeed. The detective was hoping more clues would emerge from an autopsy. But remember, Shelley's family didn't have one done for religious reasons. How did you feel about that?

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16:40 - 16:49 Carl Rotermel

I was uncomfortable. But if that's what the family wanted, I mean, you always want to try to help the family the best you can. It's a hard time.

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16:50 - 17:02 Andrea Canning

But without autopsy results, he says there wasn't much he could do. So, less than a week after Shelley died, her family hired a private investigator. So you're not satisfied? Not at all.

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17:02 - 17:18 Mark Karstadt

The private investigator had started talking to friends of Shelley's, and we had a flood of information that was extremely suspicious. People were telling us things that were very worrying.

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17:19 - 17:25 Andrea Canning

Including things that confirmed what the family had already seen for themselves. Shelley's divorce attorney, Lance Meyer...

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17:26 - 17:34 Lance Meyer

He would belittle her. He would yell at her. He'd call her ugly. He would make fun of her looks. So he was a demeaning person. He would go low.

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17:35 - 17:48 Andrea Canning

So low, in fact, that at one point during their divorce, Rod tried to undermine her at work. He called her company to report that Shelley was on drugs, unstable, and depleting their joint bank account.

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17:49 - 17:58 Lance Meyer

He was trying to get her to lose her job, and it was obviously, she worked in a family operation within UBS, so it was a very serious thing. He was trying to hurt her and her family.

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17:59 - 18:18 Andrea Canning

The company determined Shelley was drug-free and found that Rod was taking much more money from their account than she was. The divorce got uglier. The two squabbled over child support. At one point, a judge told Rod he could no longer play backgammon, something he blamed on Shelly.

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18:18 - 18:24 Lance Meyer

He was beyond angry. She was taking away the thing he apparently cared about the most.

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18:25 - 18:47 Andrea Canning

A couple of weeks after Shelly's death, her family took their private investigator over to her apartment to check out the scene. Something caught the investigator's eye. The cabinet that Shelley had supposedly grabbed as she fell, the screws had been pulled out of the wall. He thought that would have taken more force than the 5'4", 132-pound Shelley could muster.

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18:48 - 18:53 Mark Karstadt

That it would have taken a lot of strength to pull the actual door of the cabinet off.

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18:54 - 18:56 Andrea Canning

Something that Shelley wouldn't have been able to do, he didn't believe?

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18:56 - 18:57 Mark Karstadt

Most likely.

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18:57 - 19:01 Andrea Canning

So there's no doubt in your minds now that this is a staged accident?

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19:01 - 19:03 Mark Karstadt

We believed it was a staged accident.

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19:04 - 19:25 Andrea Canning

But none of this was a smoking gun. The only way to know for sure how Shelly died was to exhume her body and do an autopsy. Two months after Shelly's death, at the family's urging, her body was pulled out of its grave and reexamined. Detective Rotermel was in the room with the medical examiner. What are you seeing? What are you thinking?

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19:26 - 19:31 Carl Rotermel

Pretty much near the end of it, he looked at us. He showed us the hyoid bone that was broken.

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19:31 - 19:33 Andrea Canning

That's in the neck?

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19:33 - 19:36 Carl Rotermel

Inside the neck area. And he says it was going to be a homicide.

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19:36 - 19:40 Andrea Canning

Wow. Shelley had been choked to death.

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19:42 - 19:46 Lester Holt

Coming up, a trial of lies, secrets, and surprises.

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19:47 - 19:52 Matthew Bogdanos

The question was never, is he going to kill Shelley? The question was always, when?

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20:06 - 20:32 Andrea Canning

Shelly Kovlin had been found dead in her bathtub in December 2009. Investigators had long believed her husband Rod had killed her, but they didn't have enough evidence to prove it. Then, after nearly six years of slowly building a case, prosecutors finally became convinced they had enough to persuade a jury. In November 2015, Shelly's sister Eve got word from the district attorney's office.

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20:33 - 20:48 Eve Karstadt

She said, we're about to arrest Rod Kovlin for the murder of Shelly Kovlin. So I started to get very emotional and she says to me, are you okay? And I said, I've just been waiting a really long time to hear those words.

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20:49 - 21:03 Andrea Canning

It would take three more years for Rod's trial to begin. After waiting so long for justice, Eve and her husband, Mark, steeled themselves. Why was it important for you to be there?

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21:04 - 21:12 Eve Karstadt

So I can tell you that on December 31, I said, I'm not leaving until they take Shelly's body out.

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21:13 - 21:22 Unidentified Family Member

And then when it came to the trial, I said, I will be there every single day so she knows that I'm there for her, along with the rest of the family.

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21:23 - 21:36 Andrea Canning

There's only one person. Prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos described Rod Kovlin as a cold-blooded killer determined to get his wife out of his life, take their children, and seize her assets at any cost.

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21:37 - 21:45 Matthew Bogdanos

Only one person had the motive, the opportunity, and the means to have done this.

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21:46 - 21:59 Andrea Canning

Prosecutors admitted their case wasn't a tidy one ready for CSI, but they put a lot of circumstantial evidence in front of the jury. We know it's a circumstantial case, but what do they have going for them with this jury?

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22:01 - 22:09 Rebecca Rosenberg

What they have going for them is that obviously Kovlin had access. He was right across the hall. He had motive, and he is not a sympathetic guy.

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22:09 - 22:20 Andrea Canning

Prosecutors presented witnesses who said Rod didn't even try to hide his abuse of his wife. The family nanny told the jury that at one point, he had become enraged and violent.

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22:21 - 22:34 Nanny

She said to me, said, Rod, throw her down on the floor. And when he asked her to go into the bedroom, she said she was scared of going in there with him because she don't know what he'll do.

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22:35 - 22:39 Andrea Canning

The prosecutor described Shelly as a textbook victim of domestic abuse.

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22:40 - 22:46 Matthew Bogdanos

The question was never answered. Is he going to kill Shelly? The question was always when.

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22:48 - 23:01 Andrea Canning

Shelly was living in fear, prosecutors said, because her estranged husband was boiling with rage in their custody battle. Shelly's divorce attorney, Lance Meyer, took the stand to say how Rod had even used his son as a weapon.

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23:02 - 23:10 Lance Meyer

Mr. Coblin took the children and... accuse Shelly of abusing Miles.

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23:11 - 23:18 Rebecca Rosenberg

It turns out that he took them to the hospital and made allegations that Shelly had sexually abused their son.

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23:19 - 23:41 Andrea Canning

Wow, so this is getting ugly. Yes. Prosecutors said those disturbing and false accusations were just one example of how Rod was becoming unhinged. He was also obsessively tracking Shelley's every move with secretly installed software on her computer. Rod told this co-worker that it enabled him to read her emails.

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23:42 - 23:53 Unidentified Speaker (Brief Interjection)

He was reading through things and he was upset with the number of people that she was talking to. And he was upset about the way he was being portrayed in her emails.

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23:54 - 24:13 Andrea Canning

By late 2009, he was also deeply in debt, with virtually no income. Still, even with their divorce pending, he believed he would gain control of her $5 million estate if she died. But then Rod found some emails Shelly sent just two days before her death.

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24:14 - 24:23 Rebecca Rosenberg

She reaches out to an attorney and also tells several people that she wants to change her will and essentially write Rod Kovlin out of her will.

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24:24 - 24:33 Andrea Canning

The state said that's when Rod snapped and hatched his plan. The night of December 30th, her friend Melissa Fields saw her and sensed something was wrong.

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24:34 - 24:46 Melissa Fields

Shelly was... On what would turn out to be her last night alive, Shelley remained in fear. It was all heavy on her mind when she got home to her apartment that night at 7.51, caught here on security cameras.

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25:01 - 25:28 Andrea Canning

Later, she logged on to her online dating profile at 10.13, the last activity on any of her devices. Rod, meanwhile, was across the hall. He was usually online playing backgammon late into the night. But suddenly, his online presence stopped at 1.03 a.m. No sign of him until he popped up on that surveillance video in the lobby at 4.13 a.m. The allegation was that he wanted to be seen on camera.

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25:28 - 25:32 Rebecca Rosenberg

Yes, he wanted to make an alibi, that this was like his way of sort of building an alibi.

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25:33 - 25:42 Andrea Canning

The prosecution called the New York State Medical Examiner. In the autopsy, he had noticed those scratches on her face and that fractured bone in her neck.

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25:43 - 25:49 Medical Examiner

My conclusion was that she had died as the result of neck compression, and I classified her death as a homicide.

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25:50 - 26:13 Andrea Canning

Strangulation, not an accidental fall. And in another sinister twist, prosecutors believe that three and a half years after Shelley's death, Rod drafted a note composed from his 12-year-old daughter's email account, pretending to be her. What father does that? Who does that to a child? Right. Who basically frames a child? Right. On their own.

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26:29 - 26:40 Andrea Canning

Prosecutors didn't get that note admitted into trial, but they were about to bring forward a star witness whose explosive allegations would rock the courtroom.

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26:41 - 26:42 Narrator

Coming up.

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26:43 - 26:49 Andrea Canning

What was it like walking into that courtroom and seeing Rod Kovlin in there? Terrifying.

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26:50 - 26:55 Lester Holt

She fell in love with one Rod Kovlin. Then she says she met the other.

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26:55 - 26:57 Deborah Oles

He said, you have to help me kill my parents.

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26:58 - 27:00 Lester Holt

when Dateline continues.

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27:09 - 27:20 Andrea Canning

Veteran prosecutors will tell you that once they've built their case for the jury, they try to put a closer on the stand, a witness who buttons everything up with a riveting tale.

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27:21 - 27:21 David Kovlin

Nothing but the truth?

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27:22 - 27:22 Andrea Canning

Yes.

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27:22 - 27:23 David Kovlin

Thank you, ma'am.

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27:23 - 27:40 Andrea Canning

In the trial of Rod Kovlin, the closer turned out to be none other than Deborah Ohls, Rod's backgammon buddy and his former lover. Taking the stand, sunglasses on. What was it like walking into that courtroom and seeing Rod Kovlin in there?

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27:40 - 27:48 Deborah Oles

Terrifying. I had to look at him one time, once, just to point him out and say that's who he is.

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27:48 - 27:53 Andrea Canning

Deborah testified that she got a late-night call from Rod on that fateful New Year's Day.

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27:54 - 28:12 Deborah Oles

He told me that his wife had an accident and died. My very first thought was, That's a really weird coincidence and timing. And that really basically solves all his problems. But then I felt guilty about thinking that because he said it was an accident. And then the paper said it was an accident.

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28:13 - 28:20 Andrea Canning

You're saying coincidence, like he needed money. Right. They've broken up and then she dies. So it makes Rod's life easier.

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28:20 - 28:25 Deborah Oles

Right. But then he was very adamant about his innocence, always.

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28:26 - 28:44 Andrea Canning

After that, their long-distance relationship progressed in fits and starts. They'd often play backgammon online. Deborah would drive from her home down south to tournaments, sometimes picking up Rod in New York and taking him with her. Then, one day in 2010, the police paid her a surprise visit.

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28:45 - 29:07 Deborah Oles

I answered all their questions and offered to give them a copy of the games, the Gregeman games that we played, so they'd have exact times that we played. Man, that was it. Did they tell you why they were there? They thought he was guilty. They said he was a really bad person and... I didn't believe them at the time. You had gotten to know him pretty well at this point, too. Right.

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29:07 - 29:12 Deborah Oles

I never saw the monster that I eventually came to know until later.

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29:14 - 29:21 Andrea Canning

But the monster was lurking. As Deborah told the court, over time, she began to see just how volatile Rod could be.

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29:22 - 29:26 Deborah Oles

He had a mercurial temper. It didn't take much to set him off.

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29:28 - 29:39 Andrea Canning

She also saw terrible fights that he had with his parents. By 2012, Rod and his children were living with his parents in a New York City suburb, and the fighting was constant.

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29:40 - 29:51 Deborah Oles

One time during one of these fights, Rod had brought his arms back, and he shoved his father as hard as he could. His father went flying into the room, hit his head on the floor.

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29:52 - 30:08 Andrea Canning

Eventually, Rod's parents evicted him and kept his kids. Rod was determined to strike back. Deborah says he hatched bizarre plots to kill his parents. She told the court about one he dreamt up when Superstorm Sandy struck the East Coast.

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30:08 - 30:33 Deborah Oles

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, and set his house on fire. I was, you know, just stunned. He was going to— He wanted to go over there— Set fire? Kill his parents, set fire to the house, and somehow get Anna and Miles out safely.

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30:33 - 30:55 Deborah Oles

And, you know, I discussed it with him for like 15 minutes or so. I'm like, no. You're not going to do this. And then finally I said, just how are you going to explain miraculously that you just happened to be there to save your children? And finally that, you know.

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30:55 - 30:55 Andrea Canning

So he backed out.

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30:55 - 30:57 Deborah Oles

He finally backed down.

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30:57 - 31:03 Andrea Canning

Then, she said, there was the poison plot that called for his young daughter Anna to participate.

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31:03 - 31:27 Deborah Oles

You wanted her to put rat poison in their food or sugar for their tea or whatever. Why don't you leave him at this point? How am I supposed to protect his parents if I don't know what he's plotting? You know, I can't be there and protect them. If I'm not there, he won't confide in me and let me know what's going on.

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31:27 - 31:32 Andrea Canning

You're helping the situation as to be the voice of reason for Rod?

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31:32 - 31:36 Deborah Oles

Either try and talk him out of it or have enough definitive proof where I can go to the police.

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31:37 - 31:52 Andrea Canning

By this time, Deborah had rented an apartment for herself and Rod to live in, just north of New York City. But she says she was growing weary of his anger and exasperated by his lurid schemes. One day, she testified, things came to a head.

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31:52 - 32:11 Deborah Oles

We were in the car driving, and he said to me, you have to help me kill my parents. And I said, I am not going to help you kill your parents. And he asked me like four or five times. And I finally, I just like, I'm not going to help you kill your parents. And even if I wanted to, which I don't, you'd kill me too. And he had this kind of creepy laugh.

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32:13 - 32:23 Deborah Oles

And he looked at me in a way that, like, oh, you're just now figuring this out? And then he said, quote, no, I only want to kill the people who try to take my children away from me.

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32:23 - 32:28 Andrea Canning

Did you believe now that Rod killed Shelly?

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32:28 - 32:32 Deborah Oles

There was no question, susceptible of doubt in my mind that he killed her at that point.

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32:33 - 32:56 Andrea Canning

Finally, Rod and Deborah split. In August 2014, she called investigators and told them everything she knew. Now, four and a half years later, she had told a jury, and she was about to get grilled by Rod Kovlin's defense attorneys. Coming up... So is it fair to say, yes or no, you were jealous?

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32:56 - 32:59 Deborah Oles

No, I wasn't. I was mad at him.

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32:59 - 33:05 Lester Holt

Questions. And after nine years, unanswered. How hard was it waiting for the verdict?

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33:05 - 33:09 Eve Karstadt

Oh my gosh, that was so painful. I had such butterflies.

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33:24 - 33:30 Andrea Canning

Carol Kovlin sat behind her son during the long weeks of trial. Why was it so important for you to be there?

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33:30 - 33:36 Carol Kovlin

He's my son, and I think any mother would do that for their child.

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33:37 - 33:44 Andrea Canning

You had to listen to your son being called a philanderer, a bum, an abuser, and a killer. How did you handle that?

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33:44 - 33:50 Carol Kovlin

You really wanted to get up and scream at them and call them liars, but you can't.

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33:50 - 34:05 Andrea Canning

One of the most explosive pieces of testimony was Deborah Oles alleging that Rod had wanted to kill you. And in grand fashion, we're talking arsenic, rat poison. Rod's dad, Dave, says Deborah's claims were laughable.

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34:06 - 34:08 David Kovlin

The alleged murder plots, I think, are a farce.

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34:08 - 34:20 Andrea Canning

Rod's defense attorney, Robert Gottlieb, agreed. During a testy cross-examination, he tried to poke holes in Deborah's testimony, starting with her story of those plots. Were you scared?

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34:21 - 34:21 Deborah Oles

Yes.

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34:21 - 34:26 Andrea Canning

Did you call the police? Yes or no? Did you call the police?

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34:26 - 34:26 Deborah Oles

No.

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34:27 - 34:31 Andrea Canning

Gottlieb says Deborah's stories of Rod's temper didn't add up either.

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34:32 - 34:45 Robert Gottlieb

Time and time again, when she is saying that she felt bullied by Rod, she was afraid of him, the only thing she ever says in her emails is, I love you, dear, I love you, over and over again.

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34:45 - 35:00 Andrea Canning

Despite her denials, Gottlieb said Deborah had been crushed when the relationship ended. Her testimony, he said, was nothing more than the words of a woman scorned. So is it fair to say, yes or no, you were jealous?

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35:00 - 35:06 Deborah Oles

No. I was mad at him. I was mad at him for a lot of reasons.

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35:06 - 35:13 Defense Attorney

Is it fair to say that you have a history and have admitted to being an habitual liar?

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35:14 - 35:18 Deborah Oles

That is disgusting and false. That is not true.

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35:18 - 35:24 Andrea Canning

The defense conceded Rod wasn't always a stand-up guy, but he said that didn't make him a murderer.

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35:25 - 35:36 Robert Gottlieb

You may despise him. You may not even be able to look at him. You may want to convict him to convict somebody of murder. There's got to be proof.

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35:37 - 35:56 Andrea Canning

There was none, Gottlieb said. Zero evidence there'd been foul play. No signs of a struggle. He said Rod couldn't have slipped into Shelley's apartment and killed her, like the prosecution argued, because there was no evidence he even had a key. Remember, Rod said little Anna had let him in that morning.

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35:56 - 36:03 Robert Gottlieb

There's been no evidence that Mr. Coughlin was ever in the apartment on December 30 or December 31 before 7 a.m.

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36:04 - 36:12 Andrea Canning

No evidence either, Gottlieb said, about what had caused Shelley's injuries. He suggested one explanation, the exhumation.

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36:13 - 36:21 Robert Gottlieb

They used backhoes to exhume. They used shovels to get to the coffin.

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36:22 - 36:36 Andrea Canning

Carol said there was nothing she heard in court that convinced her Shelley's death was anything but a tragic accident. If you see those photos, it doesn't look like she just slipped and fell. It looks like someone did something to her.

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36:36 - 36:41 Carol Kovlin

Not really. If you look at her face, if she slipped and fell and hit her face into the bathtub.

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36:41 - 36:45 Andrea Canning

So where did her scratches come from then? I mean, you don't get scratches falling in a bathtub.

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36:45 - 36:48 Carol Kovlin

It depends on what's in there, how they took her out.

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36:49 - 36:56 David Kovlin

I have no idea. I just, you know, again, you are left with a conundrum.

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36:58 - 37:03 Andrea Canning

A conundrum that would never be solved, the defense argued, because of bungling by investigators.

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37:04 - 37:08 Robert Gottlieb

And you do not have any notes for any of those interviews on December 31, correct?

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37:09 - 37:10 Carl Rotermel

Not that I recall, sir.

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37:11 - 37:21 Andrea Canning

Investigators hadn't dusted for fingerprints or collected DNA samples. There was a long list, Gottlieb said, of what investigators hadn't done at the scene.

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37:22 - 37:39 Robert Gottlieb

Every single viewer... would know that that's not the way you investigate a suspicious scene. If there's even a remote possibility that it could be a homicide, it was disgraceful.

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37:41 - 37:57 Andrea Canning

Then, in a bold move, the defense rested without calling any witnesses. After more than eight weeks of testimony, it was up to the jury to decide. Was this an accident or a cold-blooded murder? How hard was it waiting for the verdict?

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37:57 - 38:04 Eve Karstadt

Oh my gosh, that was so painful. And I had such butterflies. Oh my gosh, that was bad.

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38:07 - 38:12 Andrea Canning

They didn't have to wait long. After only a day of deliberations, the jury was back.

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38:14 - 38:29 Court Clerk

I'll say this is the first count of this indictment, charging the defendant, Roderick Conlon, with the crime of murder in the second degree. Guilty or not guilty? Guilty. Guilty.

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38:30 - 38:42 Andrea Canning

I've been through a lot of trials and I don't know that I've ever seen that much emotion from a family and that many hugs and that many tears. I mean, it was pretty incredible to watch your family.

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38:42 - 38:52 Mark Karstadt

It wasn't a moment of celebration. It was a moment of relief for fear of what would have been if the wrong verdict came down.

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38:53 - 38:56 Andrea Canning

And outside the courthouse, family and friends gathered.

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38:56 - 38:57 Unidentified Family Member

Finally!

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39:02 - 39:05 Andrea Canning

After all this time, they felt like they could breathe again.

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39:06 - 39:10 Eve Karstadt

First thing I thought of was, it's justice for Shelly, and she can finally rest.

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39:11 - 39:18 Andrea Canning

Deborah Oles hopes she can rest now, too. The prosecution's star witness is happy the jury believed her.

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39:19 - 39:32 Deborah Oles

It was like a huge weight has been lifted off of me, and I'm finally, like, completely relieved. You know, it's done. Do you regret the day you met Rod? I do. I really do.

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39:32 - 39:33 Andrea Canning

How are the children doing?

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39:35 - 39:38 Carol Kovlin

They're holding it together as best they could.

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39:40 - 39:51 Andrea Canning

Shelly's children are young adults now. They don't have much contact with Shelly's side of the family. Is there anything that you want the children to know about their mother and how you feel about them?

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39:52 - 40:01 Eve Karstadt

Their mother... With every breath she took and every ounce of her, she adored them.

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40:05 - 40:19 Lester Holt

That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Thursday at 10, 9 central. And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.

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