A former US stockbroker and renowned backgammon player accused of strangling his wife to death in her Manhattan apartment had attempted to marry off their 13-year-old daughter in Mexico to gain access to her million-dollar inheritance, a court has heard.
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Details of the bizarre alleged plot were revealed this week in the Manhattan Supreme Court, where Rod Covlin, the founder of the US Backgammon Federation, appeared at a bail hearing charged with murdering his estranged wife, Shele Danishefsky Covlin.
Prosecutors allege that Mr Covlin, 42, killed his wife and left her body in the bathtub of her upscale Upper West Side apartment around New Year's Eve in 2009. Mrs Covlin, 47, had been due to meet a lawyer the following day to remove her husband as the benefactor of her will, court papers allege.
The couple's then nine-year-old daughter, Anna, found her mother dead in the bathtub and alerted her father, who was living in an apartment in the same building following their acrimonious split.
After years of suspicion, Mr Covlin was arrested last week over his wife's death and charged with two counts of murder in the second degree. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Prosecutors alleged at a bail hearing on Monday, local time, that Mr Covlin hatched a second bizarre plot that would impact on his young daughter, the New York Daily News reported.
That plot allegedly involved marrying off his daughter in Mexico so he could claim the $US1 million ($1.4 million) inheritance his late wife had left her.
Prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos told the court on Monday that Mr Covlin's plan was to "get custody, get access to all of the money", the New York Daily News reported.
"The defendant comes up with a plan to kidnap his 13-year-old daughter, take her to Mexico, and pay some Mexican $10,000 to marry her so that she'll no longer be a minor," Mr Bogdanos said.
He also played snippets of a recorded phone call to the court in which Mr Covlin can be heard discussing the arranged marriage with an unidentified person.
"Some Mexican law firm can handle it, make sure it gets done properly," Mr Covlin can be heard saying in the recording.
The New York Daily News reported that Justice Bonnie Wittner "looked stunned as she heard what Covlin had described".
Mr Covlin's lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, told the court that the recording was of a "desperate" man who had lost custody of his children. He said the children wanted to live with Mr Covlin after their mother's death, but were stuck with their grandparents.
"He did something that looking back even Mr Covlin would say obviously he shouldn't have done, but it was not, again, money … it was to protect his children," he said.
Mr Bogdanos told the court that the hostility during the Covlins' divorce proceeding was "exacerbated" by the fact that Ms Covlin, who worked as a finance executive, "was the breadwinner".
"The defendant himself was unemployed and essentially being supported by both his parents and his estranged wife as he pursued his backgammon career," Mr Bogdanos said, adding Mr Covlin's "martial arts background" made him "ideally suited him for this murder."
When Ms Covlin's body was found in 2009, a cut was found on the back of her head, leading investigators initially to believe that she had slipped and fallen in the bathtub.
Her Orthodox Jewish family initially refused an autopsy on religious grounds, and she was buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Long Island.
However her family later dropped their objections to an autopsy, and investigators took the unusual step of exhuming her body.
On April 8, 2009, about four months after her body was discovered, an autopsy found that Ms Covlin died from compression to the neck, and her death was ruled a homicide.
