Martial arts expert breaks dummy skeleton while demonstrating to court how backgammon pro Rod Covlin may have choked to death his millionaire wife Shele Danishefsky
- Covlin allegedly murdered his estranged wife Shele Danishefsky in New York on December 31, 2009
- He is accused of strangling Danishefsky, 47, and staging the scene to look as though she slipped in the tub, struck her head and drowned in the bathwater
- Martial arts expert Dan Anderson broke the jaw off his plastic skeleton while demonstrating a choke hold to Manhattan Supreme Court jurors
- The court watched footage taken of Covlin in November 2018 at Brooklyn Detention Complex where he appears to show a prisoner how to choke someone
- Prosecutors at Manhattan Supreme Court claim Covlin, now 45, murdered Shele to get hold of her $5.4 million fortune
UBS executive Shele Danishefsky (pictured) was in the midst of divorcing her much younger husband Rod Covlin when she was killed on New Year's Eve in 2009
A martial arts expert showing jurors how backgammon pro Rod Covlin could have choked his millionaire financier wife to death ended up breaking the plastic skeleton he was demonstrating on.
Dan Anderson, who has taught martial arts for 34 years and taught for 24 of them, ended up breaking the jaw off the model as he demonstrated a deadly move to jurors at Manhattan Supreme Court.
Anderson said the vast majority of fighting forms include choke holds, but noted taekwondo, which prosecutors say Covlin has studied, is primarily a “jumping and kicking art” with choke holds only taught at an advanced level.
But he added choke holds are staples of wrestling, judo and jiujitsu, which Covlin is also alleged to have some experience with.
“The hardest part is to get under the chin,” Anderson said. “The natural response [for the victim] is to bring the chin down.”
When asked how to overcome that maneuver, he said, “You pull the head back further or pull the chin back.”
Martial arts expert Dan Anderson broke the jaw off his plastic skeleton while demonstrating a choke hold to Manhattan Supreme Court jurors in the Covlin murder trial on Monday
During his demonstration, Anderson yanked on the skeleton’s chin and, to titters throughout the courtroom, snapped the removable jawbone off the skeleton: “I broke it.”
Prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos told Anderson, 'Don’t do it again.
Bogdanos asked him what the purpose of a choke hold is.
“It’s to make you completely unconscious, cut off blood supply to the brain and then you die,” Anderson said.
But, he said, the move was consistent with a one-armed choke hold – or a “bouncer’s choke hold” – where one arm is placed around the neck and the other placed on the back to walk someone out of a club.
Manhattan Supreme Court watched footage taken of Rod Covlin (ringed) in November 2018 at Brooklyn Detention Complex where he appears to show a prisoner how to choke someone
Prosecutors at Manhattan Supreme Court claim 45-year-old Rod Covlin, pictured on Monday, murdered Shele to get hold of her $5.4 million fortune
Anderson, the prosecution’s $200-per-hour expert witness, admitted under cross examination that in his youth he had spent a year in an Arkansas jail – with nine years of a 10-year term suspended – having pleaded guilty to residential burglary for breaking into the Winnebago of a man who sold baseball cards out of the vehicle.
Later, Troy Holder, a criminalist with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, testified that he found evidence of Shele’s blood under two of her fingernails, which he said was consistent with her accidentally scratching herself while trying to escape a choke hold.
But on cross-examination he agreed that it was also consistent with Shele being found in a tub full of bloody water.
Troy Holder (pictured) , a criminalist with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, testified at Manhattan Supreme Court in the Rod Covlin murder trial
Prosecutors charge that the unemployed Covlin strangled Shele on Dec. 31, 2009 – days after she made inquiries about removing him from her will – and staged the scene to make it look like Shele had fallen in the tub and drowned in a freak accident.
She was initially buried without an autopsy at the insistence of her Orthodox Jewish family. Her body was exhumed months later and a post mortem examination revealed a broken hypoid bone, a hallmark of strangulation.
Covlin faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted.
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