Rod Covlin still barred from controlling Jewish dead wife's insurance proceeds

Shele Danishefsky

This suspected killer's still got some 'splaining to do.

An angry judge today continued barring Rod Covlin - the sole suspect in his beautiful blonde money-manager wife Shele Danishefsky's vicious murder -- from controlling the $1.6 million insurance payout to their two young kids because of continued questions about whether Covlin misled that judge in seeking oversight of the fund last year.

Westchester County Surrogate Court Judge Anthony Scarpino also demanded to know how the creepy Covlin managed that money after it was placed under his control last year.

"You say everything is there and fine," Scarpino told Covlin's lawyers during an emergency hearing. "I need an accounting of that."

The judge gave Covlin's lawyers 30 days to produce that accounting.

The Post last week exclusively revealed that Covlin apparently conned his way into controlling the $1.6 million left his kids by neglecting to inform Scarpino in a Surrogate Court guardianship petition last year of several key facts -- including that he is suspected by Manhattan prosecutors and police of strangling Danishefsky on New Year's Eve day 2009 in her Upper West Side apartment.

Covlin never even mentioned that Danishefsky -- who about a month before her death removed him as the beneficiary of the police -- was a murder victim. She was scheduled to meet with her lawyer the next day to remove Covlin from her will.

After that bombshell story, Scarpino suspended Covlin's control of the money and ordered today's emergency hearing.

But Scarpino's effort to learn all the facts were stymied today by the absence of on of Covlin's lawyers, Phillip Shapiro, who was being treated for a pinched nerve, according to other lawyers.

Scarpino told them to make sure Shapiro is in court for the next hearing on March 6 "to explain exactly what went on here."

Scarpino asked Covlin's other lawyers if they would consent to the suspension of Covlin overseeing the money being continued until that hearing.

When the lawyers said they would agree, on the condition that Covlin's parents, David and Carol, be appointed guardians of the funds.

"Nobody gives me conditions," Scarpino snapped. "He is consenting to it, or not."

Gina Alberta, one of the lawyers who spoke for Covlin, agreed to the suspension continuing, but told Scarpino, "There is no fraud perpetuated on this court, your honor."

Alberta said Covlin's petition for guardianship of the money last year was "truthful by statute," that the money had been put in "appropriate financial institutions," and "not been spent."

Danishefsky, an Orthodox Jew, had already received a religious divorce from Covlin at the time of her death, and was living apart from him. After she was found dead in the bathtub of her West 68th Street apartment, she was buried quickly, without an autopsy because of religious reasons.

But her family later gave authorities to exhume her body and do an autopsy after reports from her friends that Covlin had threatened to kill her.

The autopsy found she had been strangled, and reclassified her death as a homicide.

Covlin has not been criminally charged in the case, which remains under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

But last month, in an extraordinary move, the New York County Public Administrator's Office sued him for allegedly causing Danishefsky's wrongful death by strangling her.