Authors: M. William Phelps
At times, Martin got up and left the room, then returned.
Neff took out a laptop computer, opened it up on the table between them. He explained to Roseboro that he was going to type out a question and then wait for his answer and type that out before moving on.
Roseboro said he understood. “No problem.”
After he gave Neff his full name and a few other personal details, Neff asked what time Roseboro got up the previous day, July 21, 2008, almost two mornings ago now.
That was an easy question for Jan’s husband: “Five-thirty.”
Roseboro’s work schedule routine had started at the same time for years. Although he owned and operated the family business, Roseboro was a creature of habit.
“Was Jan with you when you woke up?”
“She did not feel well last night,” Roseboro said. He seemed focused and detached, as if he were talking about somebody else’s life. Roseboro spoke in a rather low monotone, soft and borderline effeminate. Neff could not judge the guy’s emotional reaction one way or another. Maybe Roseboro’s passive demeanor was the way he reacted to any social or personal situation? “She slept until about ten forty-five,” Roseboro continued. “She took some NyQuil last night.” He thought about what day that would be. Then:
“Monday
night.”
“Did you sleep together Monday into Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“We were down to Longstreth (a female sporting-goods store) Monday morning, and we stopped … and she came out and said she was not feeling well.”
Neff rustled in his seat for a moment, tapping away on his laptop, trying to get more comfortable in the stiff chair. There was a delicate balance going on here between pushing Michael Roseboro too far at what was, Neff assumed, one of the worst nights of his life. Still, getting the facts so the ECTPD could hopefully close this case as an accidental drowning and move on was the goal. Nothing more.
“Um, did she see a doctor?” Neff asked.
“No. She thought it was a stomach virus. She did not feel good all of Monday. I went to the funeral home and came back around three-thirty
P.M.
and she was sleeping. She slept until four
P.M.
on Monday.”
“What did you guys do on Monday?”
“We sat around and were playing cards. It was myself,
her and our three youngest kids. She had my oldest son [go out and] get Coke Slushies. He got them for her and the three kids.”
Roseboro had no trouble answering questions. Here was a husband explaining an average day in the life of what appeared to be a normal suburban family.
“What did you do next?” Neff asked.
“Around nine
P.M.
on Monday night, she laid down and asked me to rub Vicks VapoRub on her back. I rubbed it on her back, and then she took some NyQuil.” Roseboro ran a hand across the side of his face. It was getting late, somewhere near 2:00
A.M.
He looked tired. Beaten down. “I went downstairs and watched TV until about ten-thirty
P.M.
and came upstairs and went to bed.”
“Did she wake up during the night?”
“She woke up a couple of times to tell me I was snoring and to roll over to my stomach.”
“What time did you guys get up on Tuesday?”
“I got up at five-thirty. She got up around ten forty-five. She told me she felt a lot better. I was home until about seven-thirty and then went down to the funeral home. I was there until about nine
A.M.
All the kids were home.”
“What did you do when you got home?”
“I was swimming with the kids, from about nine-fifteen
A.M.
until she got up.”
“When she woke up, what did you guys do?”
“She ate a bowl of cereal and then we played cards. It was me, Jan and [one of our kids].”
“What happened next?”
“Around noon, I went to get a shower, and she left and went to the bank and post office.” Roseboro said that by the time Jan went out, she was feeling better.
Roseboro gave it to him, and said he had managed to get to the funeral home by about three o’clock that day. Then he corrected himself, explaining that his doctor’s appointment was actually scheduled for one-thirty. It was
near five o’clock when he finally returned home on Tuesday evening, July 22—the last night of Jan’s life.
Neff asked for the doctor’s name. Roseboro gave it to him.
“I jumped in the pool with all the kids and made burgers.”
But Jan never went in the pool, Roseboro explained. She played cards with her two oldest daughters on the patio. It was near 85 degrees all day long, a perfect summer afternoon to hang out by the pool. They’d had such fun playing cards, Roseboro said. The game lasted all the way until about 8:45 or 9:00
P.M.
They laughed and joked, and Jan felt so much better than she had during the two previous days.
It was about 9:15
P.M.,
Roseboro was certain, when he finally got out of the pool with two of his kids and went inside to go and get ready for bed.
“What did Jan do?”
Roseboro did not hesitate: “I was sitting on a step on the deep end of the pool. She was lying right behind me.” He must have meant right before he went inside, although he never made it clear and Neff didn’t ask.
“How long did you guys stay in the pool?”
“I left the pool around ten
P.M.
and went inside. My stomach did not feel too well. I asked her if I should put the torches out. She told me she was going to stay outside and watch the planes a little longer. She told me she would be in, ‘in a little bit.’”
Neff was able to stay focused on what Roseboro told him; he could type and listen at the same time. If he missed something, he’d ask Roseboro to stop so he could catch up. The conversation never grew into anything other than two men sitting, casually talking to each other about an event they had probably wished had never brought them together.
Neff next asked Roseboro to explain what had
happened between the time he last saw Jan—10:00
P.M.
—lying poolside, and the time he spied his wife floating in the pool, somewhere between the top of the waterline and the bottom.
Almost an hour had elapsed, according to Roseboro.
“In the summer,” he said, “[our three youngest children] sleep on the floor in our bedroom. [Two of them] were sleeping, and [the other] was almost asleep. I told her good night. I turned off the TV and fell asleep.”
“Did you wake up?”
“I woke up at ten fifty-eight
P.M.
I looked out and saw the torches were still lit. I went outside to put the torches out. I went to put the first torch out, and saw Jan.”
Neff asked where she was.
Roseboro said Jan was on the “bottom of the deep end.” So he “jumped in and pulled her out. I laid her on the deck and called 911. I started giving her CPR. Someone from 911 walked me through it. I kept going until the ambulance got there.”
In succession—Neff considered as Roseboro spoke—this guy walked outside in his boxer shorts to blow out the torches, noticed that his wife was on the bottom of their pool, jumped in, swam down into the deep end, grabbed hold of her, pulled her out, laid her down on her back,
then
called 911. Roseboro was likely huffing and puffing after all of that. Out of breath and frantic.
Neff asked if Roseboro noticed “anything about Jan” that night that might have been different.
Roseboro ignored that question and instead said he felt for a pulse, but he did not feel one, adding that Jan never swam in the clothing he found her in.
“Did the kids ever wake up?”
“No.”
It was after 2:00
A.M.
Neff asked Roseboro if he needed to take a break and collect his thoughts, maybe just chill out for a bit, use the bathroom, grab a smoke, relax.
Roseboro said he would like that.
* * *
During the break, Larry Martin put in a call to Lancaster County assistant district attorney (ADA) Kelly Sekula. She had been informed of what was going on since Martin and Keith Neff had gone out to the scene and arrived back at the station house with a strange feeling there was more to an adult drowning in her own pool by accident. Martin had called ADA Sekula earlier and asked about boundaries and what the ECTPD should do in this situation. Sekula, in turn, woke up the district attorney (DA), Craig Stedman. They talked about the situation and agreed something didn’t seem right. They had better work closely with the ECTPD to make sure everyone was on the same page. If it was an accident, they would find that out. If it was more, well, at least things would be done under the supervision of the prosecuting attorney’s office from the get-go. It couldn’t hurt.
Martin explained to Sekula exactly what had transpired thus far.
“I’ll call you back,” she said.
Sekula called Craig Stedman and conferred.
“All we can do is a consent to search,” Stedman told his ADA. “Call me back and keep me in the loop as to what’s going on.” Stedman and Sekula talked for a brief moment more about what the ECTPD actually had—which amounted to nothing—and what they could do legally at this point.
When Sekula got back on the phone with Martin, she said, “We don’t even have a crime here, Detective Martin. A consent to search is all we can do. But you need to get consent from Mr. Roseboro to go into his house.”
Martin said, “Okay.” He called Neff over. “Ask Roseboro if he’ll consent us to taking a walk-through of his house.”
9
Detective Larry Martin had walked in and out of the interview with Michael Roseboro, talking to various people on the phone, doing his job as detective sergeant. Keith Neff waited for Roseboro to return from his break, so they could continue discussing what had happened. One professional Martin needed to get ahold of was the county coroner. There was a good chance the coroner, when given all the facts of the case, would order an autopsy of Jan Roseboro’s body, which might clear up things. Any type of “suspicious death” yields an autopsy. If Jan had had a heart attack, which was definitely on the minds of everyone, an autopsy would prove it and close the case.
In the state of Pennsylvania, the coroner is an elected position. A coroner needs no background in the field to get the job.
“The trash can,” someone in law enforcement told me, “if elected, could be the coroner in this state. You get the idea?”
Coroners are not the same as pathologists. It’s a suit- and-tie office job, a tradition in Lancaster County that goes back some two hundred years.
During the break, Larry Martin called the deputy coroner,
who happened to be a doctor. He was in Elizabethtown, about a forty-five-minute drive west of Denver. Martin explained what was going on.
“I’ll drive down to the hospital, check it out,” the deputy coroner promised, adding that it was going to be a while because he was tied up with another body. Unlike Denver, Reinholds, and those towns heading into Amish country from Lancaster City, downtown Lancaster was like any other major metropolis. Murderers and thugs and gangbangers were rather frequent creatures of the night.
As were dead bodies.
Martin said, “I’d like an autopsy.” It actually felt good saying that out loud, Martin thought. They were finally getting somewhere.
It was going to be midmorning by the time he got out of there, the deputy coroner said.
That was fine, Martin told him. Then he called Dr. Steven Zebert, the attending physician back at the hospital Jan had been brought to, explaining to the ER doctor what was going to happen next, saying, “I want to be there when the autopsy’s performed.”
Zebert said okay. Then, seeing that he had Martin on the phone, the doctor mentioned that he had some news to share.
“What’s going on?” Martin wondered aloud.
“It’s not a bullet wound, Detective,” Zebert reported. “The X-ray clearly spells that out.”
So she slipped and fell,
Martin thought as he hung up the phone. Being especially careful, Martin didn’t want to rush to judgment.
“I didn’t know it was a homicide,” Martin said later. “I had to be cautious. If this was an accidental drowning and we completely nuked this guy, and his wife had just died, that wouldn’t be right.”
Because he knew Roseboro, and had met him professionally at times out in the field, Martin said, “When
Mike first told us his story, I probably gave it a bit more credibility knowing who he was….”
All of that, however, was about to change.
At 2:19
A.M.,
Detective Keith Neff resumed his interview with Michael Roseboro. After Neff asked about any drugs or medications Jan might have been taking, Roseboro said his wife took ten to twenty milligrams of Adderall every day. An amphetamine, Adderall is said to stimulate the central nervous system, influencing different chemicals in the brain, specifically those nerves that lead to hyperactivity and impulse control. It is prescribed to treat narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the ever-more-popular ADHD. According to her husband, Jan suffered from attention deficit disorder (ADD) and needed the medication to maintain a stable life, free of symptoms. This could turn out to be imperative to the investigation—that missing puzzle piece. Had Jan taken too much medication, or not enough? Maybe her meds had caused Jan some trouble with equilibrium and she accidentally slipped and hit her head? Was it possible Jan had gone into a state of shock or had a seizure while walking into the house from her seat at the pool?
All good questions.
But Neff’s next query centered around a possibility it seemed everyone else, besides Michael Roseboro, had answered: “Were either of you drinking?”
“Jan did not drink anything,” Roseboro confirmed. “I had a few beers.”
There was one other pending question that needed to be asked, regardless of what, on the surface, appeared to be an ideal marriage between two people who seemed to have it all: love, loads of money, four healthy kids, a successful family business, and a home fit for a segment of MTV’s
Cribs
.
“What is your relationship with Jan?” Neff asked, looking for some insight into the Roseboro marriage.