Authors: M. William Phelps
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.
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.”
“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.