Authors: M. William Phelps
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 later—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.
“And so,” Martin said, “we all got together and decided what to do next.”
The other important piece in managing the case was Heather Smith, the ECTPD office manager. Neff pulled
Martin aside and told him, “We need her to help with organizing—she is great with computers and putting things together.”
Neff didn’t need to be sold on the idea. Heather, with twenty years on the job, was good at what she did.
“Heather was always willing to help,” Martin said. To Neff, “Absolutely.”
Indeed, Smith’s input would prove crucial to the case, as Heather began to painstakingly keep track of what everyone was doing and how the information coming in was stored and categorized. When it came time to track people down via phone numbers, Smith would be the one to make those calls, look up the numbers, find addresses, and then put all of the info into some sort of graph or chart that the detectives could easily understand, plus coordinate for a possible (and potential) prosecution down the road.
Routine morning meetings between detectives, which Martin and Neff began right away, would soon prove to be essential in solving this case.
Whenever a murder is committed in Lancaster County, the county’s Major Crimes Unit (MCU) is officially activated. There’s no Bat Cave button to be pushed, or alarm sounded. The MCU is not a separate team of investigators, as the name might suggest. The MCU operates like an ad hoc force that forms on an as-needed basis. What this meant to the ECTPD and the Roseboro investigation was that the ECTPD would have the help it needed from any law enforcement agency in the county.
For Detectives Keith Neff and Jan Walters, who had shown up at the ECTPD that afternoon, July 23, the first job in front of them was to contact Michael Roseboro and see when he would be available for another little sit-down.
ADA Kelly Sekula got busy on the DA’s end, writing a search warrant for the Roseboro residence. The Roseboros’ pool was a crime scene, along with the entire house.
As Sekula wrote inside the ECTPD in Denver, Neff and Walters got together and talked about how they were going to approach Roseboro. What was the best way to talk to the guy, now that Jan’s death had been ruled a homicide? This would be a far different conversation from the one Larry Martin and Keith Neff had with Michael Roseboro the previous night.
Surprise was the best way to go about talking to Roseboro at this point. Go over there and knock on the door; see what he says when he’s given the information that his wife’s death was no accident. Reaction during a situation like this is
everything
to a cop. Ever since Jan’s death, Roseboro didn’t seem to have any emotional response whatsoever. Nearly everyone close to him during this time period later agreed that his demeanor was flat. Nonverbal.
Not even detached. But just, well, level.
Was Roseboro mourning the death of his wife?
In addition, Neff said later, the other purpose of the interview was to get an account from Roseboro of how he had removed his wife from the pool.
It was 2:11
P.M.
when Jan Walters and Keith Neff knocked on the Roseboros’ front door. Michael Roseboro’s black SUV was parked in the driveway alongside a few other vehicles. It was clear that he was home, and not alone.
“Can we talk to you again?” Neff asked after Roseboro opened the door.
“Sure … yeah, that would be okay,” he said.
Roseboro invited the investigators into the newer section of the house. The kitchen and living room were connected to each other. It was just the three of them. Everyone else was in another part of the house.
“We need to get some detail about what happened,” Neff said.
“Sure, sure.”
“Okay, we’re trying to figure out what happened to Jan. Can you just go through your night once more for us, Mr. Roseboro?” Walters asked after Neff introduced him as a detective from the DA’s office in Lancaster.
Roseboro did not hesitate. “I went to bed at about ten. Woke up at ten fifty-eight. Saw one of the torchlights were on and went outside. When I got to the first torchlight, I saw my wife in the pool.”
Neff was thinking of the 911 call that he and Larry Martin had listened to earlier that day and the statement Roseboro had given him—and Patrolman Firestone—the previous night. This statement—
went to bed at ten, found her in the pool near eleven
—was becoming the Roseboro mantra.
Like he’s reading from, a script,
Neff thought.
Walters watched Roseboro as he spoke, studying his movements and facial expressions.
“How did you get her out of the pool?” Neff asked.
It was odd to Neff, now that he’d had more time to think about the situation, that Jan Roseboro was found on her back in the deep end of the pool, then placed on the deck, one leg hanging over the edge, barely in the water. How had Roseboro hoisted her out of the pool?
“When I got to that first tiki torchlight,” Roseboro explained, “I noticed Jan was in the deep end of the pool. Her face was facing away from the residence. So I jumped into the pool, swam to her, and started pulling her out by her sweatshirt … toward the two sets of steps in the deep end of the pool…. When I got to the steps and the ledge, I started pulling her up.” Roseboro demonstrated his actions as he explained what happened. “I reached around her, crossed her arms, reached around her, and was using her forearms, the wrist area, kind of her shoulders, to pull her up onto the deck.”
Some struggle that must have been, Neff considered. Literally, Jan was dead and wet weight. Any husband would have had anxiety and fear and shock undoubtedly flowing through his bloodstream like adrenaline. Being a heavy smoker and drinker, Roseboro must have had a difficult time getting his wife out of the pool.
“Go on,” Neff encouraged.
“When I got her … to the deck, I had pulled her out by the sweatshirt. I checked for a pulse and started pushing her on the chest.
Then
called 911.”
Keep him talking….
“Okay. Then what happened?”
“The 911 operator instructed me to check for an airway obstruction and then told me how to do CPR … which, I believe, it was, um, two breaths for thirty compressions.”
As he told this part of his story, Roseboro acted it out. “He told me,” Neff later said, “that she was … He was demonstrating it and was leaning forward with his arms out and said that she was submerged in the water in the deep end of the pool” as Roseboro pulled her out. “I wanted to make sure his handling of her body could not account for the injuries.”
It all seemed so awkward. Who would pull someone out of the water like that—better yet, his own wife?
As the ECTPD, now with the help of the MCU, began to branch out and conduct a widespread investigation into the death of Jan Roseboro, one of the first things on the list was to create a victimology report, which took a look into Jan’s life to see what type of person she was and if anyone had a good reason to kill her. Who knew, really, if perhaps Jan had been living some sort of secret life? Or maybe was having an affair, broke it off, and her lover returned and drowned her as payback? What about a home invasion gone wrong? There were scores of possibilities to consider. At this time, nothing could be ruled out.