Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  Habit. Every new mother relied on those ordinary—however routine and instinctual—things she did every night, whether she realized it or not.

  On the night Jan Roseboro was found lifeless and not breathing, Cassandra had run up to the local Getty Mart store—two minutes from her home on West Main—and returned at nine-fifteen. She was just about to step into her nightly routine and put Dakota to bed upstairs, when she realized that her husband, Richard, had already done so. Checking in on Dakota, Cassandra gave her baby a kiss. Then she went in and did the same to Richard, who was in bed, but he had rolled over and groggily said something before falling back out.

  Cassandra now had a chance to relax with some television.

  People often recall certain circumstances of a particular moment based on what they were watching on television. Cassandra later said, “That’s how I knew what time it was. I watched the news and was waiting for Friends to come on.”

  The first thing Cassandra heard on the night Jan died was a siren. It was close to 10:30 P.M. A fire alarm had been called in down the road. And the fire department being so close by, Cassandra heard the blaring of the horns and high-pitched sirens. Looking out the window, she watched as the trucks whizzed by on West Main Street.

  Just after the sirens passed and the nightly news was scrolling ending credits, Cassandra settled back down in her seat in the living room to that familiar “I’ll Be There for You” pop song by the Rembrandts, letting her know that Friends was starting.

  And that’s when she heard what would become known as “the scream.” A terrifyingly loud—like in a horror movie—shriek.

  What the …, Cassandra thought.

  Then got up and walked toward the window.

  Cassandra and Richard had an old air conditioner in the living-room window, which was loud when it kicked on and off. Cassandra thought maybe a belt in the machine had squealed. Perhaps when the thing turned on, it shifted inside the window, scraping against the glass or something. Who knew?

  “I didn’t think anything of it,” Cassandra later said, “at that time.”

  As she looked at the air conditioner, realizing there was no way it could have made such a shrill sound, she now knew it was definitely a scream. No doubt about it. And it had to have come from the Roseboros’ backyard, Cassandra was certain. She knew this because the Roseboro family had just opened their pool and the kids “were out there all the time, yelling and screaming.”

  At all hours of the night.

  After a moment, Cassandra told herself it was just the Roseboro kids outside having fun. The kids had been known to be out in the pool playing, until ten or even eleven o’clock. All the kids. They never went to bed at a reasonable hour. Even the young ones. They were always running around the yard, chasing one another, playing.

  Thinking about it a bit more after she sat down, this particular scream was different, Cassandra considered, and it was beginning to frighten her and cause some anxiety. So much so, Cassandra got up and went to check on Dakota. Just to make sure.

  “I’m a paranoid mom, you know,” Cassandra explained. “And I don’t know why I went to check on her, because I heard the scream outside. Motherly instinct, I guess.”

  The other notion Cassandra had considered as she came back from checking on Dakota, who was fine, was how the youngest Roseboro boy “when he screams, chasing his sister around, kind of sounds like a girl.”

  That must have been it, she told herself.

  So Cassandra looked out the window. But she didn’t see anything. It was dark outside. No one was swimming in the pool. Odd that it was so damn dark. And so early.

  Cassandra went back to her television show. It must have been the kids, she believed, chasing each other around the yard.

  By 11:30 P.M. on July 22, 2008, Cassandra had forgotten about the “female scream,” as she later described it. Before heading off to bed, she looked outside one last time. Now there were all sorts of people combing around the Roseboros’ backyard. There was an ambulance and several fire trucks parked in and near the driveway, lights flashing and pulsating in the dark night, blue and red colors bouncing off the trees and the sides of houses. She couldn’t really see the pool from her viewpoint, but Cassandra could tell it was all lit up out there now.

  What in the world?

  That scream meant something—Cassandra was sure of it.

  “And then I … thought something happened to one of the kids.”

  So Cassandra got dressed and went outside to see if she could find out what was going on. As she later put it, she started “snooping around.” What scared her was the Roseboro dogs, Jan’s prize possessions. They were always outside roaming around the yard. They often barked at Cassandra whenever she went out on the steps of her front door to have her late-night cigarette. Come to think of it, when Cassandra had gone out for a smoke earlier, the dogs had not approached her or barked. Cassandra couldn’t recall a night or day when Jan was outside without her dogs.

  Jan’s neighbor didn’t want to run into one or both of the dogs as she walked around the Roseboro property at 11:30 P.M., trying to find out what was going on, so she went about her snooping in a cautious manner.

  “I thought it was strange that not one cop came up and asked me what I was doing.”

  By then, she noticed there were cops everywhere.

  Cassandra wandered over to the side of the Roseboros’ house and watched for a few moments. She saw Sam, Jan’s oldest son, arrive home with a friend, and she watched as people stood around, with dumbfounded looks on their faces.

  When she went back into her home, Cassandra woke Richard up. “Something’s going on over at the Roseboros’,” Cassandra told her husband.

  Richard didn’t want to get up. The guy worked long, hard days. He needed to rise early. Richard said something Cassandra couldn’t understand, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

  Cassandra wasn’t going back out there. Not now, at this hour. So she lay down next to her husband and fell asleep.

  14

  Early the next morning, Wednesday, July 23, 2008, Richard Pope got up before his wife. Richard was outside getting something in his garage, when Suzie Van Zant walked over. Suzie had a somber, dark look about her. It was fairly obvious to Richard that Suzie had been up all night. She looked tired and spent. Pale as pizza dough.

  “Hey,” Richard said. He noticed all the people still hanging around the house, inside and out, but he didn’t think much of it. There were cars parked along the road and in the Roseboros’ driveway in back. Looking around, Richard vaguely recalled the night before, when Cassandra had woken him and told him something was going on next door.

  “Did you hear what happened?” Suzie asked.

  If you stood in the front of the Popes’ small brick garage with the white door, you can see clear across the Roseboro yard to the pool. The turkey house would be to your right. The Roseboro house to your left. The pool in the center.

  “No,” Richard said, wondering why Suzie was asking him this question so early in the morning.

  “Jan died last night,” Suzie said.

  “What?” Richard walked closer and hugged her. He could now tell Suzie was nearly shaking. “What happened?”

  “They think she fell and hit her head,” Suzie said. Then she explained how “they” had found Jan in the pool. (“But I don’t remember Suzie telling me that Jan had drowned,” Richard later recalled.)

  After they talked for a bit (Richard telling Suzie that if there was anything he could do, just say the words), Richard went inside and told Cassandra. It would certainly answer some questions Cassandra might have had about the previous night.

  Cassandra couldn’t believe it. Stunned, she walked over to the window, looked toward the Roseboro house, and asked Richard, “Why are so many people over there? What are they doing? Jan was just murdered.”

  Who said anything about a murder?

  “What?” Richard asked. Maybe even a roll of the eyes. The statement was
shocking. Jan had fallen into the pool, Richard said again. That’s what Suzie had told him.

  “Well, Richard,” Cassandra answered, explaining herself, “they just built that pool—and now they find Jan in it? Come on!”

  Two plus two, by Cassandra’s count, equaled four. It was clear.

  As the morning continued, it was troubling, Cassandra Pope later explained, to watch as “family members,” she wasn’t sure who the people were she was looking at, and “kids,” as she described them, “picked up pool paddles and walked around in the pool area, using the skimmer … putting things in the pool, just playing around near where Jan had died.”

  Cassandra soon found out that Jan was in the pool when Michael Roseboro found her. It seemed almost morbid and in terribly bad taste to see so many people out there parading around the pool deck. Throughout the morning, it had remained partly cloudy. Any rain was light, returning on and off. If Jan had died inside the pool, Cassandra thought, why were the children and some adults out there near the scene? Didn’t they think it was in bad taste, at the least, to stand around and look at the water from where Jan’s body had been pulled? What was more, Roseboro was out there, Cassandra noticed at one point, sitting, smoking, just staring blankly into the blue water as if it held answers.

  An additionally unnerving—or perhaps interesting?—period of the morning for Cassandra came when she saw “people” taking the Roseboros’ trash out and, not only tossing it into the garbage cans in the dawn-to-dusk garage, “but going through it. They were definitely cleaning the house.” There was one time when someone “washed out the garbage cans,” using a water hose to flush the cans out for some reason.

  The timing for this was odd, or suspect, to say the least.

  “These were older people,” another source told me. “Here it was, right? Someone had been murdered, and they’re cleaning out the garbage cans!” Then there was another “family member,” that same source added, “actually going through the trash. They were taking the trash cans out and going through the garbage….”

  Piece by piece.

  One had to wonder: Why would someone—presumably a Roseboro family member or friend—be going through the Roseboros’ trash? What were they looking for?

  15

  Larry Martin had a feeling that Jan Roseboro’s autopsy was going to shed some light on what the ECTPD was looking at: homicide or accidental death. Martin got in his cruiser and headed out to the Lancaster County Morgue, located in the basement of the Conestoga View nursing home, an eight-story brick building on twenty-six acres, with close to five hundred beds. The View, as it is called, was owned by Lancaster County until 2004, when it was sold to a private company. At one time, locals referred to this establishment just six blocks from downtown Lancaster as the “County Home.” Go back a few more generations than that and it went by the insalubrious name of the “County Poor-house.”

  Aptly located in the basement of the View, the Lancaster County Morgue is an L-shaped room about twenty feet wide, fifteen feet long, a small office attached to one side. The morgue was opened in June 1968 and still very much holds on to its original framework, with the exception of an added positive air-pressure system. The room contains one examination table, where Jan Roseboro’s body was lying in wait for Martin and the pathologist, surrounded by stainless-steel casework. There’s a walk-in refrigerator for, you guessed it, bodies and body parts. The walls are ivory-colored tile. For cops like Larry Martin, the one thing that bothers them about being in the morgue is not the sight of dead people, or organs lying around in stainless-steel dishes. It is the smell. The absolute unmistakable odor of decomposing flesh. The Lancaster Morgue has portable shelving on the walls that contains masks and gowns and other supplies to keep things clean and the smell to a minimum. Yet, the one way the county forensic pathologist, Dr. Wayne Ross, has managed to contain and control the rank odor of death, keeping the horrible stench to an acceptable level, is to burn candles.

  Martin met with Dr. Ross and his assistant after walking in that morning, July 23, 2008, somewhere near nine o’clock. Before they got started with the actual dissection of Jan’s body, Martin briefed Ross, who had been with the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office since 1994. He told the doctor what had happened, filling him in, thus far, on the investigation—if it could even be called such—pointing out the wound on the back of Jan’s head, which the hospital ER doctor had discovered. Martin explained how important he believed it was to the investigation to find out how the wound got there.

  Now that the pathologist had a chance to cut open the hoodie Jan was wearing at the time of her death, spread it apart, and take a look at the inside, quite a bit of bloodstaining was revealed.

  Martin looked; he had not expected to see so much blood.

  “Wow.”

  Where had it all come from?

  “Extensive bloodstains,” Dr. Ross later called them. He checked the hoodie front to back, “looking for various bloodstain patterns.” A lot of times, “bloodstains tell their own story,” the doctor said, adding, “I could see a lot of what we refer to as transfer bloodstains over the front of the sweatshirt. In particular, I could see there was a cut noted through the front of the sweatshirt. It went right through a bloodstain. So we know that bloodstain was deposited before any of the emergency medical personnel had done a cut to remove that hoodie.”

  There were also bloodstains, the pathologist observed, on the hood of the sweatshirt. There was a fairly prominent stain in the area of the hood where Jan had received that nasty gash to the back of her head.

  “Suffice it to say,” the doctor concluded after checking the sweatshirt, “there were bloodstains all over the hoodie.”

  One scenario that law enforcement had to rule out, as bizarre as it might have sounded, was a lightning strike. Had Jan been sitting poolside, enjoying the night sky as that thunderstorm rolled in, and been the victim of a direct lightning bolt strike? Although highly improbable, and perhaps against all odds, it was definitely possible. Perhaps that gash in her head was the lightning strike entryway or exit?

  “In the beginning, I keep an open mind,” Dr. Ross later explained, “as to what I was looking at. There was no evidence of a lightning strike. I ruled that out. I excluded that.”

  There were no burn marks, for one, on Jan’s body. And the injuries, which now looked to be substantial and plentiful, were consistent with blunt-force trauma.

  Nothing else.

  Jan had been beaten.

  Savagely, in fact.

  Ross found bloodstains, for example, on Jan’s bra and underwear.

  “Transfer bloodstains,” Ross explained. “This means the blood had been transferred from an object or from clothing or something on that clothing. So bloodshed had already occurred, had already taken place, and then the blood was transferred.”

  A new picture was slowly emerging.

  But how? Where had all this blood come from—that one wound to the back of Jan’s head?

  One of the first things Ross did was study the body and write down all of the injuries he felt Jan had endured during whatever incident had occurred. Once she was naked and lying on the gurney with high-powered lamps shining down, Ross could see how many injuries Jan had actually sustained. This was pure science. Ross made it clear in court later that an “abrasion is a scrape,” while a “contusion is a bruise, and a bruise is basically bleeding underneath the skin.”

  Most interesting to Larry Martin was how Ross explained that contusions do not typically take place after death.

  “Under some circumstances,” the doctor said, “somebody might raise that issue, but that’s why you’ve got to look at the amount of the contusion. You’ve got to look at it microscopically and that tells if you’re dealing with something that occurred before or after death.”

  In Jan’s case, the list of contusions and abrasions alone turned out to be enormous. In between her breast, for instance, there were “two bruises and abrasions…. There were actually
some stippled hemorrhages on [there].” (A fancy word for spotting.)

  On the lower region of Jan’s abdomen, there were two additional sets of abrasions or scrapes. Her upper left arm had three circular bruises; on the back of her left arm, near the elbow region, there was another “roughly” circular bruise; another bruise near her wrist. This was all consistent with someone grabbing Jan firmly and holding on to her. Wrestling her around, perhaps. Moreover, inside her right arm had a bruise. Her lower legs, both of them, had several bruises on the front and back. There was an abrasion or scrape again on the top of her right foot. And quite fascinating for Martin, when looking at the scenario as a homicide—the drowning as a possible cover-up—was that there were no bruises, other than two small spots on her lips, to Jan’s face, and nothing on her forehead.

  “It’s pretty much clean,” Ross said, referring to Jan’s face.

  Many of these bruises and contusions, the doctor knew from studying them, had been made on Jan’s body before her death.

  At that point during the autopsy, after observing all the wounds Jan had sustained, the doctor said, “I have what I refer to as significant stuff…. I’m concerned about what is going on here.”

  Still, Ross had not concluded on a cause of death, but the more he looked at Jan’s body, the more it seemed she had been the victim of murder.

  Before concluding his assessment of Jan’s body, Ross took scrapings from underneath all of Jan’s fingernails and placed them into evidence bags for shipping off to the forensic lab. There seemed to be “something” underneath the fingernails on Jan’s left hand. Ross noted that Jan had short fingernails, generally speaking, as compared to most women with long fingernails. On her left hand, however, Ross was able to obtain scrapings from only four fingers. Years ago, Jan had purchased a juicing machine. While juicing some vegetables and fruits one afternoon, she accidentally stuck her hand down into the juicer and it ground her left middle finger (the “F-U” finger) past the cuticle part of the fingernail down to the first joint. Jan had no left middle fingertip to extract any trace evidence or clippings from. Just a stub. Or “amputation,” as the doctor noted.