Authors: M. William Phelps
“We were looking at about two hundred fifty people
to interview in the early stages of the investigation,” Neff said.
And yet, it all started with Michael Roseboro, Jan’s husband. The guy who had found her dead. The last person who had seen her alive.
As Neff and Walters talked to Roseboro, near 2:30
P.M.,
Neff was still not convinced that Roseboro was being honest with them. Neff was now working under the assumption that Roseboro had killed his wife and tried to cover it up. The fact remained that if he had pulled Jan out of the pool by her arms, as he had explained in detail, why were there no scratches on Jan’s back or belly? The pool coping (edge mold) is rather rough, scratchy, like sandpaper. Why weren’t there scratches anywhere else on her body, indicating that she had been dragged?
Something wasn’t right.
Staring at Michael Roseboro, listening to him finish his explanation, Keith Neff noticed something else that began to bother him.
Scratches. Three of them. On Roseboro’s face. They were more pronounced now that they’d had time to scab over.
When he noticed the scratches, Neff thought,
Whoa.
There were two scratches on the left side of Roseboro’s mouth, one on the right. Although Neff and Walters didn’t know it yet, the number and placement of the scratches were significant. Jan Roseboro had that hand with one fingertip missing. Just a stub, actually. So if—a big
if,
mind you—she had scratched her husband with that hand, it would leave only three scratches, as opposed to four from a normal hand.
“I have a lot to do,” Roseboro said. “I need to write Jan’s obituary … and meet with the church people to set things up.”
“We understand,” Neff said. “Is there a time we can talk to you again? We need to go over a few more things.”
“Ah, maybe five-thirty today would work.”
“At the station, okay?” Neff told Roseboro.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll be there.”
As they walked away from the house, it occurred to Keith Neff and Jan Walters that Michael Roseboro had not asked one question regarding what had happened to his wife. Or, now that her death had been ruled a homicide, if they had a suspect.
19
Keith Neff and Jan Walters waited at the ECTPD for Michael Roseboro to show up. He said he’d be there at 5:30
P.M.
Wouldn’t you know it—as the big hand hit the six, the little hand the five, there was the man of the hour: Michael Roseboro stepped out of his friend Gary Frees’s vehicle and walked into the station house.
Roseboro came through the door with the same demeanor he’d had throughout the previous night. Some called it stoic. But “stoic” implied that Roseboro was struggling emotionally with his wife’s death and holding it together. That was not the attitude Keith Neff and Jan Walters observed.
To them, Roseboro seemed like a guy who didn’t give a hoot.
“Thanks for coming in, Mike,” Neff said, greeting him with a handshake. “Can you come on back into the interview room for us?” Neff and Walters stood with Roseboro and Gary Frees in the lobby.
“Yeah, okay.”
Walters, Neff, and Roseboro sat down in the interview room. Frees waited in the lobby. As soon as they got situated, Walters came right out with it, perhaps at the risk
of laying some of their cards on the table. “Mike,” the experienced detective said, “I want to thank you for coming in. Look, your wife’s death was
not
an accident. She was beaten and drowned.”
Not a flinch. Not a movement. Not a word.
Zombielike.
“Nothing,” Neff said later. “The guy did not say or do
anything
when we gave him that news. He just sat there.”
“There was no reaction,” Walters later added. “He said nothing. No gestures. Nothing.”
Not even close to an appropriate reaction,
Neff considered as he stared at Roseboro as Walters delivered the news.
What is going on with this guy?
“Mike, listen,” Walters continued, “since you’re in a police station, it would be proper if we advised you of your Miranda rights.”
Roseboro had his head down. He made little to no eye contact with either Neff or Walters as they spoke.
Neff took out a sheet of paper and read Roseboro his rights. They were not accusing him of the murder, officially. But they wanted Roseboro to understand that he didn’t have to speak to them without representation if he didn’t want. Essentially, Walters and Neff were saying that the questions they were going to be asking could get a bit more intimate and accusatory, so it would be best if he watched what he said or called his lawyer. The choice was his to continue.
“Mike,” Walters asked, “can you read me a portion of it out loud?” Standard procedure. It was to show the detectives that Roseboro understood and comprehended English.
Roseboro read. When he finished, Neff handed him a pen. Roseboro needed to sign the form indicating that he was willing to answer questions without a lawyer present.
He signed the Miranda form. As he did this, Neff
and Walters looked at each other with a bit of
Okay, yes, this is good.
Walters said they needed an explanation from Roseboro about what happened out at the pool. All those injuries the pathologist had reported on Jan’s body. Especially that gash in the back of Jan’s head. The fact that her lungs contained a soapy liquid meant she was alive when she went into the water. They never gave Roseboro all these details. But instead, Walters said, “Mike, it was just you and your wife at the house, except for the kids, who were sleeping.” The detective paused. “Mike, we need an explanation from you. You’re free to leave at any time. You are not under arrest. But we need to know
what
happened out there.”
“No,” Roseboro said. Then, after a brief gap of silence, as though a lightbulb went off and he suddenly understood what was going on, Roseboro pointed at himself and said, “Hey, are you saying
I
am a suspect?”
Walters didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Mike. Of course. You must have known it would come to this. It was just you and Jan out there.”
Roseboro looked at the two of them. He didn’t like the tone or where this was obviously heading.
“Can you think of any other explanation?” Walters asked.
“No,” Roseboro said. Then he broke into that familiar monologue: “I got up around ten fifty-eight…. I saw the torchlights were on and I went out and found her.”
Robotic. Rehearsed. Scripted.
“Well, Mike, put yourself in our place,” Walters said while Neff studied Roseboro’s reactions.
“I understand.”
“Mike, do you have
any
other explanation?” Neff piped in and asked.
“I don’t have one.”
Roseboro wasn’t looking down at the floor any longer.
Walters later said that he was “basically looking past us, down a little bit, but
past
us.” Walters was sitting in front of Roseboro, Neff to Roseboro’s right.
“Can you tell us about those scratches, Mike?” Walters asked.
“Oh, this,” he answered, touching his face. “I got those from my daughter. We were playing basketball at the house, inside the pool.”
“Can we photograph those scratches on your face, Mike?”
“Sure … sure.”
Walters got up and walked out of the room, presumably to get a camera.
When Walters was out of sight, Neff asked Roseboro, “What type of basketball did you play?”
“The net, in the water.” Neff understood it to be one of those floating basketball hoops.
“Mike, we really need an explanation from you about what happened to Jan. You don’t have
anything
you can tell us?”
“No.”
Neff decided to go for it. Give the guy a way out of this mess, if Roseboro wanted one. In a genial manner, one that said he was there to help Roseboro through this, if he wanted, Neff said, “Mike, we know this was something that either happened in the heat of passion or was planned out. But I don’t want to believe it was planned out.”
Neff was trying to tell Roseboro, without coming out and saying it, that there might be a way to escape real prison time—if only he came clean. Maybe it was manslaughter? Perhaps he and Jan got into an argument and Roseboro snapped?
“I didn’t do this,” Roseboro said in a near whisper. No defiance in his voice, or anger at the fact that two detectives were accusing him of brutally murdering his wife, a woman Roseboro had claimed he was going to renew his marriage vows with in a matter of weeks.
“I am past that, Mike.” Neff heard Walters coming back into the room. “Do you have
any
questions for us, Mike?” Here they were telling the guy his wife had been murdered, pointing a finger in his face, and he had not asked them one question. They expected Roseboro to have
nothing but questions.
Roseboro thought about it. Then he said, “No.”
Another detective took photographs of Roseboro’s goatee area, where the three scratches were located.
“Thanks for coming in, Mike,” Walters said. “We appreciate it.”
Roseboro left.
Neff and Walters needed to get a search warrant in hand and head over to the Roseboro residence and comb through that house, inch by inch—without anyone breathing down their backs. They needed to find evidence to arrest Roseboro on first-degree murder charges. As the officers stood and watched Roseboro leave, the ECTPD had no evidence and no motive. Just a few scratches and a hunch. The Roseboro family had money. Jan and Mike’s marriage appeared to be solid. Why would this guy kill his wife?
Soon after Roseboro left the parking lot, Neff grabbed one of the patrol officers and drove out to the Roseboro house, saying later, “We needed to take that house.” Seal it off until the warrant came through.
By now, they were told by Kelly Sekula that a search warrant was imminent. It was only a matter of time and a judge’s signature.
When Neff arrived with several officers, there were approximately thirty people at Michael Roseboro’s house, inside and out. The officers took down names as they explained that a search warrant was going to be served and everyone needed to leave.
As Neff stood outside the house, he had no idea that the case was about to yield its first major twist (or break, depending on how you looked at it). It would soon be
revealed that one of the most popular motivating factors for murder had been right underneath the ECTPD’s nose all along. It would have nothing to do with the Roseboro house or what the ECTPD was about to uncover inside, but everything to do with the type of human being, husband, and father Michael Roseboro was—something that would turn the small town of Denver, Pennsylvania, on its heels.
20
The first of two search warrants was signed by Judge Nancy G. Hamill, of the court of common pleas, on July 24, 2008, at 1:40
P.M.
The ECTPD had two days to go through the Roseboro house. The warrant stipulated some of the items the ECTPD was looking for: trace evidence, including hair fibers, blood, bodily fluids, and fingerprints, along with any items with bloodstains or apparent bloodstains. It allowed the ECTPD to process the entire residence: pool area, patio, and any other common area, for blood spatter analysis. The fact that it had rained so heavily the night before and continued, on and off, throughout that day, worked against the CSI team. Yet luminol could reveal blood hidden in plain sight. Little mist here, a bit over there, and boom!—there it is, like invisible ink—that Day-Glo light indicating the presence of plasma.
East Lampeter Township Police Department detective Scott Eelman, the coordinator for the Lancaster County Forensic Unit, was called back into the case as part of the MCU. Eelman had processed “hundreds” of crime scenes. It was Eelman who had checked the radar the night before. Learning that more storms were moving
into the region, he chose to forgo the search on the night Keith Neff took the house and instead decided to begin the following morning.
“We elected to wait until the twenty-fourth,” Eelman said. “It had already rained … and one more time wasn’t going to do anything to harm the situation.”
After photographing the inside of the house and the outside yard, which familiarized members of the LCFU helping Eelman with the layout, they started in the backyard. Inside the pool deck area, it was clear that people had been hanging out at the pool recently.
“It appeared that there were several drink containers,” Eelman reported, “glasses, bottles, that sort of thing, lying around the pool area up on the table and surrounding areas, and it appeared that there were … that there had been people there after the initial incident.”
One neighbor said she was appalled to see kids and adults swimming in the pool in the days after Jan had been found dead in that same water.
“I could not believe my eyes,” the neighbor said.
“Disgusting,” said another neighbor. “It was incredible.”
Nonetheless, Eelman had to deal with it. There was the chance that if they found anything outside near the pool, it would be worthless, anyway. There were so many variables at work here—albeit rain and people—searching for evidence of value outside near the pool was more or less a formality at this point.
After spending hours going through the house and the outdoor areas, Eelman and his team found “nothing of great significance,” he later described, that “really stood out. Nothing really jumped out as evidence.”
Along with computers and cell phones and everyday electronic gadgets that all search warrants covered these days, the team did not take much forensic evidence out of the Roseboro home. They listed:
two hairs from the edge of the pool coping near the gate
and
two white tissues/toilet paper and two Band-Aids all with blood staining,
along with
one pair of red & white swim shorts/suit—XL size, Counter Culture brand.
The swimsuit was an interesting discovery. It turned out to be the one Michael Roseboro wore on the night EMTs and ECTPD showed up after his 911 call. On the front of the garment, it appeared to have stains of some sort. The LCFU found the bathing suit inside the Roseboros’ downstairs bathroom. Yet, when the state police lab later tested it, the stains turned out to be nothing of any consequence to the investigation.