Authors: M. William Phelps
Jan and Shawn had lost touch for about a month before her death, making the impact of it even that much more overwhelming for him. Two days before Jan died, Shawn had sent Sam, Jan’s oldest son, a MySpace message, telling him to give his new phone number to Jan and to have her call him.
“So that was—that was,” Shawn recalled, choking up as the memory came back, “very hard on me. Jan was gone. I didn’t know what to do.”
When Charlotte Moyer, Jan’s married-into-the-family cousin, showed up at the house that morning after Jan’s death, she walked in and spied Sam crying. He looked terribly upset. And why wouldn’t he be? His mother …
Vanished like dust.
They sat on the ottoman at first and talked. Charlotte
wanted to be there for the child as much as she could. She had known Jan since Jan came into the world. Charlotte was married into the family by the time Jan was born in 1963. Charlotte had watched Jan grow from an infant into a wonderful adult with a family of her own.
After speaking with Sam, Charlotte walked into the sunroom. She sat, shaking her head, wondering.
Michael came into the room after seeing Charlotte sitting there.
He sat down.
“We were just sitting out there by the pool,” Michael said after a moment of silence between them. “I wasn’t feeling well. I went into the house. I had asked Jan if I should turn off the tiki lights, you know, put them out. Jan said no. She said she was going to stay out there a little while longer.”
Several parts of this conversation, as Charlotte remembered it, were far different from what Roseboro had told police. For one, he said Jan was sick. Two, he never told the police that Jan said she wanted the tiki lights left lit.
Charlotte asked Michael what happened next.
“I went to bed, and a bit later, I got up and the tiki lights were still on and the kitchen light was on.”
He’d never mentioned this to police.
Charlotte thought he was going to end the conversation there, but Michael said one other thing. “She had probably fallen into the pool and drowned,” he told Charlotte. Then, “She had a contusion on the left back of her head.”
That word, Charlotte said later, “stuck in my mind….”
“Contusion.”
What’s more, after saying this, Roseboro just up and walked out of the room, abruptly ending the conversation.
Thinking about it later, Charlotte considered his
demeanor to be “very matter-of-fact, not any kind of emotion….”
Later that morning, with everyone roaming about the grounds of the house and inside, Charlotte and Michael passed each other. They were walking down the hallway. Michael Roseboro stopped for a brief moment as Charlotte got close to him.
“Nice haircut,” he said, complimenting her.
43
By noon on July 23, 2008, word had worked its way through town that Jan Roseboro was dead. An improbable accident in the pool was the story being shouted back and forth across fuel pumps and from behind coffee counters. But grinding in the grist of the town gossip and rumor mills was a far different scenario.
Cassandra Pope called her mother, Marcia, who, with her husband, had been friends and neighbors of Jan and Michael Roseboro’s for years when they all lived next to one another on the opposite end of town.
“Jan’s dead,” Cassie said. “Suzie said she hit her head maybe, but they weren’t really sure.”
Suzie’s husband had died of a heart attack at a young age. Cassie said that Suzie mentioned she thought maybe the same thing might have happened to Jan.
Heart attack … a slip, fall, and then she drowned?
They just didn’t know.
Marcia got on the phone and called a neighbor, who had also known Jan rather well.
“Oh, my God …,” the neighbor said.
They talked for a few moments.
Two hours later, Marcia’s neighbor called back. “It just hit online that Jan was murdered!”
“Murdered? You’re kidding,” Marcia said. “Oh, my goodness—Mike did it!”
Where had that come from?
It was the first thought she had, Marcia later said, after hearing Jan might have been murdered. The Michael Roseboro whom Marcia had known all those years—the guy she had seen around the neighborhood, helping newly appointed widows and widowers deal with the loss of their spouses, that same guy who liked to be the bartender at all the neighborhood parties—had murdered his sweet wife, a good friend of hers. She was certain of it, for some strange reason. This was how the town reacted during those early moments, Marcia and her husband later said. The women in town were all under the impression that Michael had done it; while the men gave Michael the benefit of the doubt. For those who truly knew Michael and Jan, his reputation for sleeping with anything he could get his hands on was old news. So killing Jan
now
didn’t make sense in terms of an affair as motive. The guy, after all, had cheated on the woman for years.
“When you talk about small town,” Marcia, a romance novelist by trade, said, “you have to talk about Denver being part of Reinholds, because they are connected. Even though the Roseboros’ new home was in Reinholds, everyone called it Denver. Jan and Mike were … Well, let’s say I have never seen them as ‘the perfect couple.’”
“But they appeared to be the ‘perfect couple,’” Cassandra Pope remarked. From her point of view, as a child watching Jan and Michael from afar, the Roseboros seemed to have it all together. Living next door, renting from Jan, Cassie had watched them build the new house. She recalled Michael and Jan from family and neighborhood gatherings, cookouts and block parties. They appeared to be in love. Later, though, Cassie saw something different. They had grown apart. A
couple who had their individual roles inside the family rubric, played the part, but lived separate lives.
“Everyone knew that Mike was running around on Jan,” Marcia added. “Jan was the mother figure, the Earth Mother. She wasn’t out gardening with a big hat and gloves, but she did plant a garden the year she died and she was very excited about it. Jan enjoyed being a mother. She lived for those kids. That’s the horrible part. She loved kids. When Cassandra had her baby, Jan was right there. She went out and got Toys ‘Я’ Us gift cards for the baby, and she was positive it was a girl. After Cassandra had her, whenever Jan saw Cassandra outside with the baby, she’d run over and hold her and play with her.”
Michael Roseboro was never around. Always at work. Or “out.”
“It seemed to me,” Cassie’s husband, Richard Pope, said, “during those months leading up to her death, when Jan was home, Mike was gone. And when Mike was home, Jan wasn’t around. I don’t know if it was planned to be that way or it just worked out. But that’s what I saw while living next door.”
Being home with her new baby during those days after Jan was murdered, Cassie saw much more, she later said. And now that Jan was dead, Cassie was scared to death of this enigma of a man next door whom she knew only from childhood and from what she remembered. Roseboro now seemed to be this dark figure, the undertaker who possibly murdered his wife. And as the hours passed and rumors buzzed, Cassie and Richard watched the house, where Michael Roseboro, they said, was acting strange.
Looking out their window one morning, Cassie and Richard looked on as Michael, who was bent over inside Jan’s garden, stood there as though he was pulling weeds. He had a bunch of grass in his hands. This, while a man Cassie presumed to be one of his lawyers snapped
digital photographs of him. After the photo op concluded, Roseboro righted himself, brushed off his hands, and then walked into the house, Cassie and Richard said.
What in the heck are they doing?
Cassie asked herself.
Richard said something similar.
“They have a gardener,” Cassie recalled. “I don’t know why he would be out there pulling weeds!”
The Roseboros’ next-door neighbors were a little uneasy, anyway, considering that they believed a murder had taken place not one hundred yards from Cassie and her newborn. There were cops in unmarked cars sitting in their driveway, watching the Roseboro house at times. There also was a cop roaming around the neighborhood. Detectives had been by to take a statement, and Cassie and Richard had told them things. Cassie had described that scream she heard the night Jan died.
What would Roseboro do,
Cassie wondered,
if he knew I was talking to the police?
44
Jan’s best friend, Rebecca Donahue, was sitting outside on the little patio by the pool with Michael Roseboro and his father, Ralph. It was one of those shake-the-head-and-wonder-what-the-hell-happened moments. You turn on CNN and see that some boyfriend beat the snot out of a little baby and the child died. You shake your head. You hear that some dude dressed like a science teacher walked into a building and mowed down ten people with an automatic rifle because he lost his job. You shake your head. You find out your best friend, a woman you knew to be a fairly decent swimmer, drowned in her own pool. You cry first; then, like Rebecca Donahue, you shake your head and wonder,
How in the heck did
this
happen?
Rebecca was in a state of shock, to say the least. Her friend was here yesterday. Today she was dead. It made little sense. Jan was the sweetest person in the world. One of those women who comes along and changes your life for the better. Someone who cared about her community, having volunteered and supported various causes that truly helped people.
Michael was staring at the ground. Ralph and Rebecca sat, speechless. Then, finally, Michael spoke up. “We
were going to renew our vows,” he said, “on the beach while on vacation.”
Rebecca wanted to cry.
“Jan had always wanted to get married on the beach,” Michael added.
This was the first Rebecca had heard of Jan and Michael renewing their vows. Jan had not mentioned it to her.
One of the reasons why this subject had come up was that Michael Roseboro was scrambling around, trying to devise a good excuse as to why Angie Funk was contacting him. Angie had called the Roseboro house that morning—and several people in the house had seen her number and name appear on the caller ID. The unspoken word inside the Roseboro camp that morning:
who is this woman?
Roseboro was telling everyone Angie had contacted him because her sister was a wedding planner he had been using to help arrange the Outer Banks trip. She had called to inquire about it.
Why
Angie
and not her sister? some wondered.
If Michael Roseboro was so consumed with pain over not being able to renew his vows, he seemed to be over it. Twenty-year navy man Robert Bachman, who went on to get his Ph.D. in behavioral psychology from Penn State after serving in the military, was Jan’s cousin. “One of fifteen,” Robert later said, “on my mother’s side. I’m the oldest one, Jan [was] the youngest….”
After Jan’s dad passed away in 2003, Robert explained, he became more of a father figure to Jan. “She seemed like a daughter to me.”
Robert and Jan “talked frequently.” So much, in fact, that rarely two days went by when they didn’t see each other or speak over the telephone. “Anytime something came up,” Robert said, “I’d just call Jan and say, ‘Now what do I do?’”
Robert had a name for Jan: “Miss Yellow Pages.” She knew everyone.
Through that relationship with Jan, Robert got to know Michael Roseboro “really well,” he later explained in court. It was about a month prior to Jan’s murder that he and Michael got to talking about the trip to renew the couple’s wedding vows. Michael had told Robert about it, saying, “Jan and I are going to be renewing our vows and we’d like you [and your wife] to come.”
“Oh,” Robert said, “that’s nice.”
Robert and his wife got the call about Jan’s death and rushed over to the house. They got there about nine o’clock the morning after. It was somewhere just after noon, perhaps not long after Michael Roseboro had spoken with Rebecca Donahue and his dad, that Robert Bachman had a chance to sit down with his cousin’s husband and chat. They were, once again, in what would become Michael’s chosen place to hold family court, poolside, sitting at a patio sofa not ten yards from where Jan’s body had been pulled from the water fewer than fourteen hours before.
Michael had that look on his face. The one that nearly everyone around him—save for his immediate family, mother, father, sister—later described as empty and flat. Not sad. Not immensely burdened by the melancholy one would guess the death of a wife would bring. But an even keel, like the undertaker he was.
“We were sitting out here,” Michael told Robert, referring to the night before. “Just talking about various things.”
Robert didn’t know what to say.
“Jan said she was so glad that we had built this pool,” Michael continued. “The kids had such a good time in it yesterday afternoon.” Of course, Robert didn’t know this yet, but Michael had made what would turn out to be one of several bizarre comments, especially when put into the context of coming from a man who had spent the entire afternoon and part of the early evening with his lover—not his kids—having sex and talking of their
future wedding plans. Michael said, “Jan was not so in favor of building the pool. But she said, ‘Pop would have liked it.’” Meaning her dead father.
Robert was taken aback by these words. He had never heard anyone express an opinion that Jan was opposed to the pool. To the contrary, Jan was all for the pool. What was Michael trying to do here? What was he saying?
“And the conversation,” Robert later explained, talking about that day he sat with his dead cousin’s husband, “was a conversation as though nothing had happened. There was no indication that Jan was dead. There was no expression on his face like grief or anything else. It was just
casual
conversation.”
And then, when Robert got to a point where he believed their little chitchat could not get any more uncomfortable, Jan’s husband—simply sitting there, talking to Robert as though Jan were still alive—came out with what Robert later referred to as “an off-color joke.”