The parents of the Manhattan man accused of strangling to death his money-manager wife are now making a grab for her $365,000 retirement account after a judge granted them custody of the couple’s two children.
Financial giant UBS, where Shele Danishefsky worked for just under a year until her gruesome death on New Years Eve in 2009, filed a petition in Manhattan Supreme Court Tuesday seeking guidance on the payout.
Danishefsky’s backgammon-whiz hubby Roderick Covlin, 40, is being sued in a wrongful death case by her estate, which accuses him of murdering his 47-year-old wife.
A source told The Post Covlin has surrendered custody of his 13-year-old daughter Anna and 7-year-old son Myles to his Scarsdale-based parents.
The paternal grandparents, David and Carol Covlin, want to deposit the money in a trust for the kids and use some of it to pay costs like tuition and medical insurance, the source said.
The beautiful blonde financial manger’s daughter found her mother’s lifeless body in the bathroom of the family’s W. 68th Street apartment.
The untimely death was ruled a homicide, but Covlin, an unemployed former trader, was never charged.
Covlin has insisted he is innocent.
UBS says Danishefsky at first designated her hubby as the beneficiary of her retirement account, but swapped him out for her two minor children a month before she died.
She had planned to write him out of her will the day after she was killed. Her estate is worth around $4 million and would typically be split between her children and husband.
The bank says other, unnamed parties had contested Covlin’s control of the funds.
The one-time head of the Backgammon Federation of America at first tried to gain access to the accounts in November 2011, but UBS blocked Covlin because he was engaged in a bitter custody battle with his late wife’s siblings.
Then, on Jan. 13 UBS says it received a fax from the children’s grandfather David Covlin saying that Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Ellen Gesmer had granted him and his wife custody of Anna and Myles.
UBS is confused by conflicting court orders because Westchester Judge Anthony Scarpino Jr. had removed Roderick as guardian of his kids’ money in January 2012.
“It is unclear whether Judge Gesmer’s Jan. 13, 2014 order granting legal and physical custody to David Covlin and Carol Covlin supersedes Judge Scarpino’s order,” the banks says in court papers.
Reps for the parties did not return calls for comment.