Still, that one small variable, that Jan had only four fingers on her left hand, would become one of the more important pieces of evidence the ECTPD would uncover throughout its investigation.
After he finished documenting all of the bruises and abrasions on Jan’s corpse, bagging those clippings and scrapings from Jan’s nails, Ross took his scalpel in hand and began to fillet Jan open. That was when things truly became interesting, as Martin and the doctor began to wonder how, in fact, Jan had died.
16
After Dr. Wayne Ross shaved Jan Roseboro’s head, he and Larry Martin could see that the wound to the back of Jan’s scalp was even more pronounced than they had originally thought, simply because now it wasn’t buried underneath her thick mane of blond hair anymore.
The next thing Dr. Ross did, as Martin stood nearby and watched, was make an incision with his razor-sharp scalpel above Jan’s forehead and back down over each ear. He then peeled the scalp back—as if it were a rubber wig—and let it hang from the back of Jan’s head. This exposed Jan’s skull and the tissue underneath her scalp.
Larry Martin stood next to Ross in the autopsy suite staring down at Jan’s skull. With Jan’s scalp stripped off her head, Martin couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
Before Ross even said anything, Martin thought, She was beaten over the head and killed.
The bruising was distinctive and noticeable, now that Jan’s skull was bare.
Wow, Martin thought.
“There was other bruising on the top of the head,” Martin recalled. “This was very clear to us.”
It wasn’t just a few localized bruises in a certain quadrant of Jan’s head, as if she had maybe fallen and bumped herself on a plant container, the side of the pool, or a table. There were sections of a white, milky substance—indicating violent contusions present (made) before death—overwhelming the blood vessels and muscle tissue.
As they stared at this, there was no doubt in either of their minds.
Jan had been beaten over the head.
Ross focused on the bruising. “Look, Larry, I want to check some other things out first, but this is looking more and more like it is going to be a homicide.”
Murder one.
Martin shook his head, agreeing. Then he asked the doctor to stop the autopsy. Martin wanted to call in Scott Eelman, a detective from the East Lampeter Township Police Department (ELTPD), who also happened to be the coordinator for the Lancaster County Forensic Unit (LCFU). Law enforcement liked to work together in Lancaster County, supporting one another. Where one department might lack a certain resource, it could call on another department specializing in a particular field to come in and help out.
Larry Martin had a digital camera with him, but Martin was the first to admit he was no Annie Leibovitz. On top of that, Ross wanted someone from forensics to take photos for his reports. Eelman was good at what he did.
“Get over here with your camera,” Ross told Eelman.
Along with Eelman, Kelly Sekula and one of the investigators working for the LCDA’s Office showed up. Not only was Eelman good with a camera, but when (and if) it came time to seal off any crime scenes that might be connected to Jan’s death, Eelman was going to be one of the crime scene investigators coordinating that effort. Bringing him into the fold now was a smart thing to do.
With everyone standing around twenty minutes later, Ross continued with his autopsy. As he worked from Jan’s head down, opening up Jan’s neck, he found something else: bruising on both sides—directly along the linear line of both carotid arteries on each side of Jan’s neck.
The evidence was clear: Jan Roseboro had been choked at some point.
Ross moved in, asking Martin to take a closer look.
“Strangulation,” Martin said. “I remember Dr. Ross showing me that. By then, I was sold that Jan had been murdered.”
The horror of Jan Roseboro’s final few minutes of life, however, didn’t end there. Down inside Jan’s chest, after Ross cut her lungs open, a frothlike, watery substance poured out.
Foam?
“I had been to enough autopsies of drowning victims to know,” Martin later commented, “that Jan had drowned to death.”
The most incredible part of all of this was that the water in Jan’s lungs proved she was alive inside her inground pool. Jan had drowned. This after being beaten and strangled.
Incredible, Martin thought.This is remarkable evidence.
It was near noon when Ross finished. Martin called Keith Neff.
“He ruled it a homicide,” Martin told his lead detective. “Multiple head injuries, strangulation, and drowning.”
“My goodness,” Neff said.
“You start thinking,” Martin recalled, “and you don’t want to be close-minded about it, but you start to ask yourself, ‘Who was the last person to see Jan alive?’ and ‘Who was the person who found Jan in the pool?’”
Michael Roseboro.
“From that person, you begin to work outward,” Martin added.
Larry Martin collected all of the evidence from Ross—the fingernail clippings, vaginal and rectal swabs, that plastic tube the EMTs put in Jan’s throat, nasal swabs, clothing, any tape lifts the pathologist took from all over the body, blood—and brought it back to the ECTPD station house, where it would then be sent out to various labs for testing.
17
When Larry Martin returned from the autopsy, he and Keith Neff sat down inside the ECTPD conference room. It was close to one o’clock, the afternoon of July 23, 2008. While Martin was at the autopsy, ECTPD office manager Heather Smith set it up so they could hear Michael Roseboro’s 911 call from the previous night. Neff and Martin would eventually get an actual recording of it from the communications center, but they had wanted to hear the 911 call as soon as they could.
There was a speakerphone in the middle of a conference room table with the 911 call on the other end of the line.
Certain things Roseboro had said were, at best, suspicious; at worst, these were the words of a guilty man. The 911 call could clear up some of that confusion, or, as the case would soon be, cause more problems for Roseboro. His wife’s death had been ruled a homicide. The ECTPD had a lot of work to do. Part of it started with this call.
The dispatcher on the other end of the line asked if they were ready. Neff, Martin, and the other officers in the room indicated they were.
“Go ahead,” someone said, “run that tape.”*
The call had come in at 11:03 P.M. the previous night to the communications center. It was made from the Roseboros’ landline number. The male operator said, “Lancaster County 911?”
“I believe my wife just drowned,” Roseboro said matter-of-factly. There was no emotion in his voice.
So abnormally soft was Roseboro’s voice, the 911 operator said, “I’m sorry?” as if he could not hear Roseboro.
What’s important is, according to Roseboro, this was just seconds after he had gone outside and found his wife in the deep end of the pool and pulled her out of the water. Yet, he was subdued and nonchalant, saying, “I believe my wife just drowned.”
The first question had to be: how could he know she had drowned?
“What’s your address?” 911 asked.
As Neff and Martin listened, they sat up closer to the speakerphone, looking at each other. It was an odd call. Roseboro sounded too calm and collected for a man describing the possibility that his wife was dead, or, at the least, in big trouble.
Roseboro told the operator the address and the township he lived in.
Then, “Okay, and what happened?” 911 queried.
Without hesitating, again without any emotion or fanfare, Roseboro said, “I had gone to bed about an hour and a half ago and she was outside, and I came out and saw the lights on by the pool, but—oh, God—her shorts and shoes are still on. I came out and found her in the deep end of the pool.”
“Okay, is she breathing?”
“No, she’s not.”
&n
bsp; “Is she still in the water?”
“No, I pulled her out.”
“Okay, do you want to try to start CPR on her?”
“I will, I will. Yeah.”
“Okay, do you need help to do that? I can give you instructions on what to do.”
“I was a lifeguard. I know.”
Martin and Neff looked at each other again while listening: What an odd thing to say at what you would assume to be a frantic time.
“I was a lifeguard.”
Why wasn’t this guy in stage-four panic?
“Okay, do you want me to help walk you through it?” 911 asked.
“I … Just compressions under the breast?” Roseboro said.
“Right. I can walk you through it, if you want help?”
“I wanna get her out of the pool.”
What? Neff thought. He said earlier that he had gotten her out of the pool. How could you confuse such a thing?
“What’s that?” 911 wanted to know, a bit of confusion in his voice.
“I wanna get her out of the pool,” Roseboro repeated.
“She’s still in the pool?”
There was a beat of silence. Thinking, perhaps. Then, “Yeah,” Roseboro said clearly.
“I thought you said she was out of the pool?”
“I … Oh, my God”—and again, he sounded as though he were being forced into this reaction—“I’m sorry, she’s out of the pool. Uh, yeah, help me through it, please.”
The 911 operator wanted to reaffirm that Jan was out of the pool.
Roseboro said yes, she was.
Then 911 asked Roseboro, where was he at that moment?
“I’m right beside her….”
That was assumed. He meant, where in the backyard?
“I’m on the deck.”
“You’re on the deck? Okay. What I want you to do … Is there anybody else there?”
“My children are asleep.”
“How old are your children?”
“Twelve, nine, and six.”
“Okay, what we need to do is get her on her back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have her flipped over on her back?”
“She’s on her back, yeah.”
“Okay, I want you to check and see if she has a pulse. Do you know how to do that?”
“I do.”
“Okay.”
A second later, “There’s no pulse.”
Martin and Neff wondered how the guy could have checked for a pulse in such a short period of time—this, with the phone apparently cradled in his shoulder. It took seconds, if not more, to find an artery. Even longer to determine if there was a heartbeat. Neff leaned back in his chair as the tape continued to play.
Come on….
“There is none?” 911 asked.
“No, there’s not.”
“Okay, what I want you to do …” The operator then explained how he wanted Roseboro to get his wife on her back, and look in her mouth to see if there was anything blocking the airway. “Vomit or anything like that?”
“No.”
“No?” 911 asked, surprised.
“No.”
911 then told Roseboro where to place his hands in order to tilt her head back, so he could put his ear next to her mouth to see if he heard breathing.
After another brief exchange, it was determined that Roseboro could not feel or hear any breathing coming from Jan’s mouth. She was definitely unconscious, if not dead.
911 explained how to start CPR. “Keep her head titled back. Pinch her nose. Cover her mouth with yours and give her two deep, regular breaths, about one second each.”
“Okay.”
After doing it a few times, Roseboro said he could feel air going “in and out” of Jan’s lungs.
“Okay, stay on the line with me …,” 911 said. “… We’re starting … The ambulance is on the way.”
“Okay.”
“What I want you to do is, we are going to start compressions. Okay, listen carefully, and I’ll tell you how to do it.” From there, the dispatcher explained how he wanted Roseboro to conduct the CPR compressions to Jan’s chest. You could hear sirens now from afar in the background of the call, and the 911 guy noted the noises, asking, “Okay, is that the siren from the fire department there [nearby]?”
“Yeah. Hold on,” Roseboro said. “I have to throw up. Please hold on.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
After being asked, Roseboro said nobody was there with him.
“Okay, what we’re going to do is start the compressions, okay? Go ahead and put your hand on her chest like I told you. I want you to pump her chest hard and fast, about thirty times, about twice a second.”
That would take, at the least, fifteen seconds, plus the time to position yourself to proceed. More than that, Neff and Martin considered as they sat and listened, trying to picture in their minds every movement Roseboro made, it would take two hands. Yet, there was never any indication that Roseboro put the phone down, or was wrestling with it, trying to cradle it in his ear and shoulder.
“Okay,” Roseboro said after 911 told him to make sure he let the chest come up between pumps.
“Let me know when you’ve done it thirty times.”
“Okay.”
“All right, go ahead and do that.”
A few seconds later. “Okay.”
“You did it about thirty times?” 911 asked, shocked.
“Yes, sir.”
911 asked Roseboro to check Jan’s mouth to see if the compression and the breathing brought anything up from her lungs.
“No, there’s not,” he said.
“Okay….”
“Oh, my God.”
“Okay, what we’re going to do is continue, okay?”
“All right.”
911 told Roseboro to continue keeping his hand under Jan’s neck, pinch her nose closed, tilt her head back, giving her two more regular breaths, and then pump her chest thirty additional times.
It took Roseboro a second or two to say, “Okay….”
“Okay?” 911 asked with some confusion. Okay, you understand me? Or, okay, you’ve done it? There just didn’t seem to be enough time in between the okays to perform such a procedure.
“Okay … okay,” Roseboro said.
“Okay, go ahead and give her the thirty chest pumps, okay?”
“I did. I did.”
“You did do that?”
“Yes.”
911 asked if there was any sign of life.
“No.”
911 then instructed Roseboro to continue with CPR. “I want you to keep doing that [until the ambulance arrives].”
“The ambulance is here, sir.”
“… Okay, sir, go get them.”
“Okay, thank you,” Roseboro said.
Neff was floored by that last comment…. “Thank you”? Your wife is struggling for life, possibly even dead, the ambulance is just pulling up, and you are thanking the 911 dispatcher instead of dashing off to flag down the medics?
“Strange,” Martin said as the call ended. “We need a copy of that so we can break it down line by line.”
“You got it,” Neff said.
*You can go online and hear this 911 call. Conduct a simple search on any reputable search engine.
18
Jan Walters had been a Lancaster County detective for eighteen years. Altogether, Jan had nearly forty-plus years of law enforcement experience by the time Michael and Jan Roseboro’s names crossed his busy desk at the LCDA’s Office on North Duke Street, downtown Lancaster. The LCDA did not want to step into the situation like cowboys and take control from the ECTPD, now that the pathologist had made the pronouncement cause of Jan’s death as blunt-force trauma, strangulation, and drowning, the manner of death homicide. DA Craig Stedman and ADA Kelly Sekula were adamant where it pertained to helping the ECTPD in a supporting role. But Stedman—according to almost everyone in law enforcement I spoke to l
ater—was going to now begin driving the bus. The investigation was the ECTPD’s; Keith Neff was the lead. That was not going to change. But in the reality of the situation, Neff had never investigated a homicide. A seasoned investigator like Jan Walters, with decades of murder investigation experience behind him, could help Neff along the way and, Neff knew, probably show him a thing or two about solving a case.
“I welcomed Jan’s help,” Neff said later.
“I have known Jan Walters for years,” Larry Martin recalled, “and have the utmost respect for him. I knew he would do a great job for us.”
Perhaps by rank alone, Martin had become the case manager of the investigation, which would keep him at the station logging and posting what each investigator did during the course of his or her day. There were now between ten to fifteen investigators activated for the Roseboro investigation. The media was sniffing around, looking for a crumb to run with. This was huge news in Denver/Lancaster, where the Roseboro name carried some serious social weight. With all of the media coverage that would ensue as soon as word got out that Jan had been murdered, and the presence of so many investigators coming to help, Larry Martin needed to keep everything tight. As the night and day shifts investigated different aspects of the case, both would need to know what the other was doing; and now with so many additional investigators part of the case, Martin had to delegate jobs and keep everyone on the same page while, at the same time, utilizing each investigator’s talents and experience.
The other advantage to having a case manager was so Martin could check off assignments as they were completed.
“You didn’t want to find out two weeks after the fact that this person was never interviewed, or that was never looked into.”
Coordination. Information was going to flood in. Someone needed to pore through it all and manage it. In addition, with extended families on both sides—the Roseboros and the Binkleys—scores of interviews were going to be conducted.
Love Her To Death Page 8