Authors: M. William Phelps
There had not been a spot of blood out on the pool deck or inside the water.
Where in the world was all this blood coming from?
2
Someone yelled, “Ephrata Community Hospital.”
Michael Roseboro was back outside and heard the comment. He had not gotten into the ambulance. He was also
told
by several professionals on scene where his wife was being taken. Jan was en route to a hospital about fifteen minutes across county. The ambulance attendants would continue CPR all the way to the emergency room (ER), where the mother of four would receive the best medical care available.
There was still a chance. Everyone has heard stories of people being dead fifteen, twenty, or even thirty minutes, only to be brought back to life at the hospital before telling a story about white lights and clouds and people from beyond.
Patrolman Firestone had watched the ambulance prepare to drive off. The vehicle was “very well lit” inside. From where he was standing inside the pool deck area, he’d had a clear view of what was going on and who was there.
Additional family members arrived. Phone records from the night indicate Michael Roseboro called his father, Ralph, at home, and then the family business, the Roseboro Funeral Home, which was closed at this hour, for some reason.
Michael had stayed at the house while Jan was whisked off. Perhaps he wanted to take his own vehicle and follow the ambulance? Or maybe wait for additional family members to show up? Still, there were plenty of people at the house to watch the kids if he wanted to be with Jan.
Why wasn’t he leaving?
Firestone took a walk around the pool area. He had an eye and instinct for crime scenes, having worked in the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) Unit for a time.
“I was looking for any signs of a struggle,” Firestone said. “Anything that might stand out as suspicious.”
Again, standard procedure. It wasn’t that Firestone suspected anything—in fact, quite to the contrary. If nothing else, the Roseboro family, because of who they were and the business they ran, were given the benefit of the doubt more than most others might have been. The problem Firestone encountered from within was that he was trained to think outside the box and search for a reason why this woman—a seemingly healthy adult who had not been drinking—ended up fully clothed and unconscious inside her pool. There was an answer somewhere. Probably an explanation that was going to make a lot of sense as soon as the ECTPD uncovered it.
After a careful walk around, Firestone didn’t see anything out of place. Every item—patio furniture, tables and chairs, and anything else associated with the pool area itself—“looked normal.” Nothing had been disturbed. In addition, the scene didn’t appear to be overly perfect, either, as if someone had gone around and tidied up. The area was well maintained and practical. At least by Firestone’s opinion.
More than anything else, Firestone was looking for a sign, he later said, indicating Jan had accidentally stumbled and fallen into the pool. There were only a few scenarios that could have placed Jan in that pool—an accident, right now, at the top of the list. Yet, there should be some indication of what had happened.
“I was looking for blood and hair,” Firestone added, “tissue, something of that nature, on the pool edge.”
There had to be evidence left behind indicating that Jan had slipped, fallen, and hit her head.
But Firestone found nothing.
Coming around to the deep end of the pool, staring into the water, something caught Firestone’s attention.
A cell phone?
The lights inside the pool were on, so it was easy to see to the bottom. As he came around the corner of the deep end, Firestone noticed the item, red in color, on the bottom of the pool.
Yes, a red cell phone was sitting there by a pair of what looked to be reading glasses and “two small brown stones.” The stones were similar to those used in the landscaping around that particular section of the pool.
It was near this time that Officer Steve Savage showed up and began combing through the scene with Firestone. Michael Roseboro, who had not gone to the hospital as of yet, was also roaming around, being consoled by family members and friends. Up near the screened-in porch, on the opposite side of the deep end of the pool, where, according to Roseboro, he had found his wife, Firestone and Savage saw a bucket.
They walked over. Took a whiff.
The bucket, filled with a foamy fluid, smelled “heavily of a cleaning solution of some type,” Firestone later noted.
Inside the bucket was a “whitish opaque fluid, and there appeared to be a rag floating in it.”
A red rag.
3
Mike Texter had been best friends with Jan and Michael Roseboro’s oldest child, Sam, for the past year. Mike had graduated just over a month ago from Cocalico High School and was planning to attend classes at Penn State Berks that coming fall, his focus on kinesiology, the science of studying the physical activity, or “movements,” of human beings. On July 22, 2008, after he got out of work at 9:00
P.M.,
Mike headed over to one of his favorite places these days, the Roseboro residence, arriving somewhere near nine-thirty.
“I went there every night,” Mike said later, “to hang out with Sam.”
Mike parked his car in the gravel section of the driveway near the pool.
Sam met his friend outside. “What’s up?”
“Hey,” Mike said. After being let in, he walked around the pool toward the screened-in porch. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Roseboro,” he said to Michael and Jan, who were sitting near each other on the concrete deck, poolside. All the lights were on. The night sky was brilliant. You could still count the stars with your finger. The moon glowed; pending rain clouds not yet visible.
Mike and Samuel headed into the pool house, grabbed
something to eat, watched a little television, and headed back out to the patio after another friend came by and asked if they wanted to go swimming at a fourth friend’s house down the road.
As they left, Mike Texter later recalled in court, it was about 10:05
P.M.
Michael Roseboro was sitting on the steps inside the pool, his arms out along the edge, half his body underwater, the other half above the waterline, the multicolored pool lights underwater shining on him.
“As far as I can remember,” Mike said, “… [his] chest would have been exposed out of the water, swimming trunks, legs, would have been in.”
Jan was lying on the ground in back of her husband, seemingly content with the wonder of such a glorious night. All the lights were on, Mike said. The tiki lamps, the pool lights, the dawn-to-dusk floodlight out in back of the house hanging off the garage like a kitchen faucet.
“See you later,” the kids said to Jan and Michael.
They left.
After swimming for an hour, as they were getting ready to head out to McDonald’s for a late-night snack, Mike Texter and Sam Roseboro heard sirens and wondered what was going on in town. Then Sam got word that an ambulance was at his house, so he and Mike took off.
Pulling up, seeing everyone milling about the Roseboros’ backyard, Sam wondered what had happened.
One of the first things Mike Texter noticed as he walked up was that Michael Roseboro was wearing those same red swim trunks he had on while sitting in the water a little over an hour earlier. Here was a kid prone to noticing those light shades of human behavior that many of us take for granted.
Asked later what Roseboro was wearing, which would become a key issue in the weeks and months ahead, Mike said, “I believe they were red swim trunks…. To
my knowledge, the same red swim trunks [he was wearing before] I left.”
Realizing that Jan Roseboro was in an ambulance on her way to the hospital, fighting for her life, Sam Roseboro and Mike Texter ran into the house to find out what had happened.
4
Detective Larry Martin had just fallen asleep. That night, a Tuesday, the veteran detective from a liberal Mennonite background had been working in his garden before watching a little television and then heading off to bed to read. It was a few minutes after eleven o’clock when a ringing telephone rustled Martin awake.
The balding white-haired detective, with penetrating blue eyes, had a feeling it wasn’t going to be good news—what else could it be at that hour? A call in the middle of the night is never someone expressing gratitude for a favor, or a family member with an invite to a party. In over twenty years of law enforcement experience, Martin had been shuffled out of bed more times than he cared to remember. Yet, inside the boundaries of what had been a simple way of life in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, those calls usually revolved around a deer struck by a car, maybe a brawl at a neighborhood bar that had gotten out of hand, an out-of-towner or couple of punk kids bothering an Amish family who were out minding their own business, trotting along the country roads in a black-as-a-hearse buggy, or perhaps a suicide that, at first glance, didn’t look so cut- and-dry. For Detective Larry Martin, the phone ringing when the stars were bright,
and his officers knew he was sound asleep, generally meant he was going to have to get himself dressed and head back out the door.
Ugh!
Martin got up and looked at the clock by his bed. It was 11:03
P.M.
on the nose, the detective noted to himself. For the next fifty-seven minutes, it was still July 22, 2008, a calm, peaceful night by most standards.
As he listened to the officer explain how he was heading out to a possible adult drowning, with others on the scene already, Martin believed from that first moment this call was not going to be routine. Something was up.
“Look, Sergeant, this lady, Jan Roseboro, was pulled out of her pool,” the officer explained. “Doesn’t look good…. They’re giving her CPR right now.”
Martin knew the name and said it a few times in his head:
Roseboro.
He had bumped into Jan Roseboro’s husband, Michael, on the job from time to time. Michael Roseboro was the local mortician, Martin knew. He and his family had owned and operated Roseboro Funeral Home in Denver, just a five-minute ride from the police department, for well over one hundred years, three generations. Roseboro had often shown up, Martin thought to himself, at death scenes to pick up bodies. An elderly lady would die in her sleep and Roseboro was right there, helping the family, consoling them, telling widows and widowers alike that all would be okay, he’d take care of everything. Roseboro and Martin would chitchat. You know,
How’s it going?
Nothing personal. Just men out in the world doing their jobs best they can. Forty-one-year-old Michael Roseboro knew his business; he was well liked and highly respected, in and around Lancaster County. Martin knew this because he had seen it himself on the job.
Boy … that’s odd,
Martin thought as the officer gave him the weak details he had at the time.
Adult people don’t normally drown in their own pools.
The officer explained how he had just gotten to the
scene himself and spoke to a few people, this after Michael Roseboro called 911.
“Let me ask you,” Martin questioned his officer, “do you know if she was drunk?” Any cop knew, excessive alcohol use and swimming were not a good mix.
“I don’t know that,” the officer responded. “But there’s no indication.”
By now, Jan was long gone from the scene—on her way to the hospital. The first officers responding, Mike Firestone and Steve Savage, Martin soon found out, had asked a few people around the Roseboros’ home, which recently had undergone an expansive and expensive addition, if Jan had been drinking. All indications thus far were that she had not been. On top of this, there was no evidence of it. Not an empty glass of wine or a beer bottle. According to her husband, Jan was a fan of going out and looking at the stars, sitting by the pool, contemplating—one could only guess—life.
“I’ll be heading out there,” Martin told the officer. “I just want to make sure, and interview some people.”
Because it seemed so strange for an adult to end up drowned in her own pool, Martin wanted to cross every
t
and dot every
i.
As a thorough cop, you do that by speaking to whoever was around the house at the time of the incident. There would be reports to write, lots and lots of paperwork. Martin was awake, anyway. Why not check it out himself?
Martin was no newbie. He understood how things worked: insurance companies and coroners. It was best just to take a spin out there and get a firsthand account. There was probably a sad, but extremely logical, explanation to the entire ordeal. Maybe Jan had fallen and hit her head? It appeared she was outside by herself. Maybe she decided on a late-night swim by herself? Martin knew of warnings about swimming by yourself at night. Cramp in the leg. Heart attack. Slip and fall. Any number of things could lead to an adult drowning.
Suicide was always on the table, too.
Martin hung up with the officer. Next, he called Keith Neff, one of two detectives, besides himself, whom Martin had on staff. Kerry Sweigart, Martin’s other detective, was on vacation. Thirty-eight-year-old Keith Neff was a vivacious and hyper cop who had never, in his career of more than eleven years, investigated a murder. He was a wiry, skinny guy, who had what his sparring partners might call “cauliflower ears,” flaps of skin mushroomed over and bent from all the ground fighting, grappling, and Brazilian jiujitsu that Neff did in his spare time. He was at home, sleeping, his wife by his side, and two kids down the hall.
Martin got no answer on Neff’s Nextel, so he left a message.
As Martin got dressed, Neff called to ask what was going on. Burglary and thefts (property crime) were Neff’s beat. There had been an explosion of burglaries in and around the Denver/Reinholds area lately.
Had another Turkey Hill convenience store been hit?
“Hey,” Martin said, “we have several officers on the scene of what appears to be a reported drowning. Meet me at the station and we’ll go up there together.”