Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  “What did Jan do?”

  Roseboro did not hesitate: “I was sitting on a step on the deep end of the pool. She was lying right behind me.” He must have meant right before he went inside, although he never made it clear and Neff didn’t ask.

  “How long did you guys stay in the pool?”

  “I left the pool around ten P.M. and went inside. My stomach did not feel too well. I asked her if I should put the torches out. She told me she was going to stay outside and watch the planes a little longer. She told me she would be in, ‘in a little bit.’”

  Neff was able to stay focused on what Roseboro told him; he could type and listen at the same time. If he missed something, he’d ask Roseboro to stop so he could catch up. The conversation never grew into anything other than two men sitting, casually talking to each other about an event they had probably wished had never brought them together.

  Neff next asked Roseboro to explain what had happened between the time he last saw Jan—10:00 P.M.—lying poolside, and the time he spied his wife floating in the pool, somewhere between the top of the waterline and the bottom.

  Almost an hour had elapsed, according to Roseboro.

  “In the summer,” he said, “[our three youngest children] sleep on the floor in our bedroom. [Two of them] were sleeping, and [the other] was almost asleep. I told her good night. I turned off the TV and fell asleep.”

  “Did you wake up?”

  “I woke up at ten fifty-eight P.M. I looked out and saw the torches were still lit. I went outside to put the torches out. I went to put the first torch out, and saw Jan.”

  Neff asked where she was.

  Roseboro said Jan was on the “bottom of the deep end.” So he “jumped in and pulled her out. I laid her on the deck and called 911. I started giving her CPR. Someone from 911 walked me through it. I kept going until the ambulance got there.”

  In succession—Neff considered as Roseboro spoke—this guy walked outside in his boxer shorts to blow out the torches, noticed that his wife was on the bottom of their pool, jumped in, swam down into the deep end, grabbed hold of her, pulled her out, laid her down on her back, then called 911. Roseboro was likely huffing and puffing after all of that. Out of breath and frantic.

  Neff asked if Roseboro noticed “anything about Jan” that night that might have been different.

  Roseboro ignored that question and instead said he felt for a pulse, but he did not feel one, adding that Jan never swam in the clothing he found her in.

  “Did the kids ever wake up?”

  “No.”

  It was after 2:00 A.M. Neff asked Roseboro if he needed to take a break and collect his thoughts, maybe just chill out for a bit, use the bathroom, grab a smoke, relax.

  Roseboro said he would like that.

  *  *  *

  During the break, Larry Martin put in a call to Lancaster County assistant district attorney (ADA) Kelly Sekula. She had been informed of what was going on since Martin and Keith Neff had gone out to the scene and arrived back at the station house with a strange feeling there was more to an adult drowning in her own pool by accident. Martin had called ADA Sekula earlier and asked about boundaries and what the ECTPD should do in this situation. Sekula, in turn, woke up the district attorney (DA), Craig Stedman. They talked about the situation and agreed something didn’t seem right. They had better work closely with the ECTPD to make sure everyone was on the same page. If it was an accident, they would find that out. If it was more, well, at least things would be done under the supervision of the prosecuting attorney’s office from the get-go. It couldn’t hurt.

  Martin explained to Sekula exactly what had transpired thus far.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said.

  Sekula called Craig Stedman and conferred.

  “All we can do is a consent to search,” Stedman told his ADA. “Call me back and keep me in the loop as to what’s going on.” Stedman and Sekula talked for a brief moment more about what the ECTPD actually had—which amounted to nothing—and what they could do legally at this point.

  When Sekula got back on the phone with Martin, she said, “We don’t even have a crime here, Detective Martin. A consent to search is all we can do. But you need to get consent from Mr. Roseboro to go into his house.”

  Martin said, “Okay.” He called Neff over. “Ask Roseboro if he’ll consent us to taking a walk-through of his house.”

  9

  Detective Larry Martin had walked in and out of the interview with Michael Roseboro, talking to various people on the phone, doing his job as detective sergeant. Keith Neff waited for Roseboro to return from his break, so they could continue discussing what had happened. One professional Martin needed to get ahold of was the county coroner. There was a good chance the coroner, when given all the facts of the case, would order an autopsy of Jan Roseboro’s body, which might clear up things. Any type of “suspicious death” yields an autopsy. If Jan had had a heart attack, which was definitely on the minds of everyone, an autopsy would prove it and close the case.

  In the state of Pennsylvania, the coroner is an elected position. A coroner needs no background in the field to get the job.

  “The trash can,” someone in law enforcement told me, “if elected, could be the coroner in this state. You get the idea?”

  Coroners are not the same as pathologists. It’s a suit- and-tie office job, a tradition in Lancaster County that goes back some two hundred years.

  During the break, Larry Martin called the deputy coroner, who happened to be a doctor. He was in Elizabethtown, about a forty-five-minute drive west of Denver. Martin explained what was going on.

  “I’ll drive down to the hospital, check it out,” the deputy coroner promised, adding that it was going to be a while because he was tied up with another body. Unlike Denver, Reinholds, and those towns heading into Amish country from Lancaster City, downtown Lancaster was like any other major metropolis. Murderers and thugs and gangbangers were rather frequent creatures of the night.

  As were dead bodies.

  Martin said, “I’d like an autopsy.” It actually felt good saying that out loud, Martin thought. They were finally getting somewhere.

  It was going to be midmorning by the time he got out of there, the deputy coroner said.

  That was fine, Martin told him. Then he called Dr. Steven Zebert, the attending physician back at the hospital Jan had been brought to, explaining to the ER doctor what was going to happen next, saying, “I want to be there when the autopsy’s performed.”

  Zebert said okay. Then, seeing that he had Martin on the phone, the doctor mentioned that he had some news to share.

  “What’s going on?” Martin wondered aloud.

  “It’s not a bullet wound, Detective,” Zebert reported. “The X-ray clearly spells that out.”

  So she slipped and fell, Martin thought as he hung up the phone. Being especially careful, Martin didn’t want to rush to judgment.

  “I didn’t know it was a homicide,” Martin said later. “I had to be cautious. If this was an accidental drowning and we completely nuked this guy, and his wife had just died, that wouldn’t be right.”

  Because he knew Roseboro, and had met him professionally at times out in the field, Martin said, “When Mike first told us his story, I probably gave it a bit more credibility knowing who he was….”

  All of that, however, was about to change.

  At 2:19 A.M., Detective Keith Neff resumed his interview with Michael Roseboro. After Neff asked about any drugs or medications Jan might have been taking, Roseboro said his wife took ten to twenty milligrams of Adderall every day. An amphetamine, Adderall is said to stimulate the central nervous system, influencing different chemicals in the brain, specifically those nerves that lead to hyperactivity and impulse control. It is prescribed to treat narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the ever-more-popular ADHD. According to her husband, Jan suffered from attention deficit disorder (ADD) and needed
the medication to maintain a stable life, free of symptoms. This could turn out to be imperative to the investigation—that missing puzzle piece. Had Jan taken too much medication, or not enough? Maybe her meds had caused Jan some trouble with equilibrium and she accidentally slipped and hit her head? Was it possible Jan had gone into a state of shock or had a seizure while walking into the house from her seat at the pool?

  All good questions.

  But Neff’s next query centered around a possibility it seemed everyone else, besides Michael Roseboro, had answered: “Were either of you drinking?”

  “Jan did not drink anything,” Roseboro confirmed. “I had a few beers.”

  There was one other pending question that needed to be asked, regardless of what, on the surface, appeared to be an ideal marriage between two people who seemed to have it all: love, loads of money, four healthy kids, a successful family business, and a home fit for a segment of MTV’s Cribs.

  “What is your relationship with Jan?” Neff asked, looking for some insight into the Roseboro marriage.

  “Good,” Roseboro answered quickly. “I had a plan to renew our vows on the beach, the Outer Banks (in North Carolina). We were going to go on the tenth to the seventeenth of August.” There seemed to be a shake of the head by Roseboro there, as if the thought of the trip now not happening made him suddenly question things.

  “Who was the person who was going to renew your vows?”

  “Leslie Buck-Ferguson,” Roseboro said, as if he had just spoken to the woman before sitting down. “She does beach weddings in the Outer Banks. I found her on the Internet.”

  Roseboro explained how he and Jan had not argued at all on Tuesday, this after Neff pried deeper into how they had gotten along as husband and wife. Ditto for when Neff asked if Roseboro ever had a “physical confrontation with Jan.”

  In May, Roseboro said, just two months ago, it had been nineteen years of marriage. Sure, they’d had their ups and downs, and fights, throughout the years, like any married couple. But they were generally happy people, in love—at least from the impression Neff got from Roseboro as the mortician talked about renewing his marital vows, playing cards, and swimming with his kids.

  After answering another question about Jan having any major medical issues to contend with, besides ADD, Neff asked Roseboro if his wife could swim.

  “She is not real proficient,” Roseboro said, “but she can get around the pool.”

  Roseboro cleared up how deep the pool is after Neff asked: “Three to six feet.”

  It was getting close to 2:30 A.M. Neff asked Roseboro, “Would you consent to a walk-through by us of your home?”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  Neff left the room, grabbed the “consent to search” form, returned, then asked Roseboro to sign it, explaining that he and Detective Martin would be heading back out to West Main Street immediately. Was that going to be a problem for anyone?

  “No…. Sure,” Roseboro said again.

  Neff read back the Q&A he had typed on his laptop from their conversation. Then he asked Roseboro if he agreed with it.

  “Yes. Sounds accurate.”

  “Can you sign the bottom of each page?”

  It was four pages long.

  When he was finished, Roseboro stood and walked into the foyer to meet up with Rebecca Donahue and Gary Frees, who drove him back home then.

  Watching Gary Frees drive away from the ECTPD with Rebecca Donahue and Roseboro in the car, Larry Martin and Keith Neff considered the fact that not once during the entire interview did Michael Roseboro ever ask about the status of his wife. How was she doing? Did the ECTPD know if she was alive? How might she have died? Was she alive when she got to the hospital? It was 2:34 A.M., almost three hours after Jan had been taken away from her home in an ambulance, and her husband of nearly two decades had never inquired about her, nor had he gone to the hospital. In fact, as Martin and Neff learned, watching those swirling clouds above prepare for another round of powerful thunderstorms, not once did Michael Roseboro, or any one of his family members or friends, call the hospital to see if Jan was going to pull through. No one had asked when—or if—Jan had been pronounced dead. It was, quite oddly, as if they all knew not only that Jan had died, but how.

  “And that’s why we … asked if we could do a walk-through,” Neff said. “To find out what happened to this forty-five-year-old mother of four kids.”

  10

  What did Michael Roseboro do during that period of time when paramedics took his wife away from their home in an ambulance and a posse of family members and friends showed up at the house? For starters, how did everyone find out so quickly what had happened to Jan Roseboro? When it was looked at later, it was as if Roseboro had sent out a press release, or a text message, to a predetermined list of people.

  The first call Roseboro made was at 11:23 P.M., thirty-four minutes before the doctor at the hospital had pronounced Jan Roseboro dead. The doctor later said that a “pronouncement” is not necessarily the actual time of death; it is, for hospital personnel, the exact time efforts to bring a person back to life are suspended.

  Roseboro called his father, Ralph Roseboro, at his dad’s house. Ralph lived across the street from the Roseboro Funeral Home in downtown Denver, with Michael’s mother, Ann, who happened to be in Vermont at the time on a bus trip with a tour group.

  Two minutes after calling his dad, Jan’s husband called the Roseboro Funeral Home for some reason that no one could later discern. The ECTPD could never get out of Ralph Roseboro what his son had said to him, if anything. Ralph didn’t say one way or another if he was not at home but across the street at the funeral home, which would be a good reason why Roseboro called there after calling his parents’ home.

  Five minutes after calling Ralph, at 11:28 P.M., as the Roseboros’ yard filled with law enforcement, fire personnel, friends, and family, Roseboro called Susan Van Zant, his sister-in-law, at her home.

  Suzie picked up after just a few rings.

  “She’s gone …,” Roseboro told his sister-in-law without further explanation. Then, more quietly, “She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?” Suzie asked. “Who’s gone?” Was the guy half in the bag? Did he know what the heck he was talking about?

  “Jan,” Roseboro said. “I couldn’t save her.”

  Suzie still didn’t understand. “I’ll be right up,” she said. Suzie lived minutes away, in downtown Denver, directly across the street from the Roseboro Funeral Home.

  “Okay” was all Roseboro said before hanging up.

  Suzie got off the phone, thought about it a moment, and considered the idea that Jan might have had a heart attack and had fallen into the pool. At some point after cradling the phone, those words hit her: “She’s gone.” Jan was dead. It had to be an accident. What else could have happened?

  Jan’s sister called one friend, who didn’t answer. Then she phoned another, explained what was going on, as best she could, and asked her for a ride up to the house.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll wait outside,” Suzie explained, more frantic and worried now.

  Standing in front of her parents’ home where she was staying, waiting for her friend, Suzie heard a siren. She looked up. An ambulance went screaming by at a high rate of speed.

  Speaking through an avalanche of emotion and tears, Suzie later said, “I saw the ambulance go by. It had my sister’s body in it.”

  But Suzie didn’t know that as she waited for a ride to her sister and brother-in-law’s house. Jan, whom Suzie later described as “a rock to me,” someone who was “there for anyone, anytime,” was arguably fighting for her life inside that ambulance.

  Inside the car on the way to the house, Suzie’s friend, noticing how quickly Suzie was falling apart (“losing it”), said, “Just get it together for those kids.”

  And that was what Suzie began to focus on: “My concern was for the children,” she later said. “And that’s what I did.”

&nbs
p; After talking to Suzie, apparently convinced that his wife was dead by the way she looked when the ambulance took her away moments before, Michael Roseboro called Brian Binkley, Jan’s brother.

  Brian didn’t answer. So Roseboro left his brother-in-law a message.

  Then, at 11:50 P.M., Roseboro called the family’s Lutheran pastor, Larry Hummer.

  The final call—six in all—that Roseboro made within that time frame before Jan was pronounced dead was to his sister’s house, which led to a series of calls to other Roseboro family members, sending them all flocking to the West Main Street home.

  11

  No one in law enforcement had reported seeing anything out of place at the Roseboro residence, both in and around the concrete pool decking area, besides those two stones, Jan’s cell phone and reading glasses on the bottom of the pool. Nothing had been disturbed. There was no blood. No indication whatsoever that a struggle had ensued between two people, or that a woman had fallen, hit her head, and drowned. There was a bucket full of what appeared to be cleaning fluids, a red rag floating on top.

  And that was it.

  By now, the ECTPD had found out that the wound Jan had sustained on the back of her head was no surface bump or bruise. Jan Roseboro had a deep gash, the size of a nickel, shaped roughly like the letter L, on her scalp in back of her left ear, which burrowed all the way down to her skull. This was not a wound that had come to Jan easily, without pain or violence. Both the doctor and Detective Larry Martin were convinced there had to be evidence somewhere in or around the house explaining how Jan had received such a blow. Be it an overturned plant holder, remnants of hair and tissue on the corner of a kitchen countertop, or some other explanation. But a person does not receive a blow like the one Jan had sustained without leaving a clue behind as to how it got there.

  Police had not gone into the Roseboro home. They had no reason to. Which was why Detective Keith Neff had asked Michael Roseboro—who graciously agreed—to sign the “consent to search” form for the interior of the home.