Love Her To Death (7 page)

“Good,” Roseboro answered quickly. “I had a plan to renew our vows on the beach, the Outer Banks (in North Carolina). We were going to go on the tenth to the seventeenth of August.” There seemed to be a shake of the head by Roseboro there, as if the thought of the trip now not happening made him suddenly question things.

“Who was the person who was going to renew your vows?”

“Leslie Buck-Ferguson,” Roseboro said, as if he had just spoken to the woman before sitting down. “She does beach weddings in the Outer Banks. I found her on the Internet.”

Roseboro explained how he and Jan had not argued at all on Tuesday, this after Neff pried deeper into how they had gotten along as husband and wife. Ditto for when Neff asked if Roseboro ever had a “physical confrontation with Jan.”

In May, Roseboro said, just two months ago, it had been nineteen years of marriage. Sure, they’d had their ups and downs, and fights, throughout the years, like any married couple. But they were generally happy people, in love—at least from the impression Neff got from Roseboro as the mortician talked about renewing his marital vows, playing cards, and swimming with his kids.

After answering another question about Jan having any major medical issues to contend with, besides ADD, Neff asked Roseboro if his wife could swim.

“She is not real proficient,” Roseboro said, “but she can get around the pool.”

Roseboro cleared up how deep the pool is after Neff asked: “Three to six feet.”

It was getting close to 2:30
A.M.
Neff asked Roseboro, “Would you consent to a walk-through by us of your home?”

“Of course. Yes.”

Neff left the room, grabbed the “consent to search” form, returned, then asked Roseboro to sign it, explaining
that he and Detective Martin would be heading back out to West Main Street immediately. Was that going to be a problem for anyone?

“No…. Sure,” Roseboro said again.

Neff read back the Q&A he had typed on his laptop from their conversation. Then he asked Roseboro if he agreed with it.

“Yes. Sounds accurate.”

“Can you sign the bottom of each page?”

It was four pages long.

When he was finished, Roseboro stood and walked into the foyer to meet up with Rebecca Donahue and Gary Frees, who drove him back home then.

Watching Gary Frees drive away from the ECTPD with Rebecca Donahue and Roseboro in the car, Larry Martin and Keith Neff considered the fact that not once during the entire interview did Michael Roseboro ever ask about the status of his wife. How was she doing? Did the ECTPD know if she was alive? How might she have died? Was she alive when she got to the hospital? It was 2:34
A.M.,
almost three hours after Jan had been taken away from her home in an ambulance, and her husband of nearly two decades had never inquired about her, nor had he gone to the hospital. In fact, as Martin and Neff learned, watching those swirling clouds above prepare for another round of powerful thunderstorms, not once did Michael Roseboro, or any one of his family members or friends, call the hospital to see if Jan was going to pull through. No one had asked when—or if—Jan had been pronounced dead. It was, quite oddly, as if they all knew not only that Jan had died, but how.

“And that’s why we … asked if we could do a walk-through,” Neff said. “To find out what happened to this forty-five-year-old mother of four kids.”

10

What did Michael Roseboro do during that period of time when paramedics took his wife away from their home in an ambulance and a posse of family members and friends showed up at the house? For starters, how did everyone find out so quickly what had happened to Jan Roseboro? When it was looked at later, it was as if Roseboro had sent out a press release, or a text message, to a predetermined list of people.

The first call Roseboro made was at 11:23
P.M.,
thirty-four minutes before the doctor at the hospital had pronounced Jan Roseboro dead. The doctor later said that a “pronouncement” is not necessarily the actual time of death; it is, for hospital personnel, the exact time efforts to bring a person back to life are suspended.

Roseboro called his father, Ralph Roseboro, at his dad’s house. Ralph lived across the street from the Roseboro Funeral Home in downtown Denver, with Michael’s mother, Ann, who happened to be in Vermont at the time on a bus trip with a tour group.

Two minutes after calling his dad, Jan’s husband called the Roseboro Funeral Home for some reason that no one could later discern. The ECTPD could never get out of Ralph Roseboro what his son had said to him, if
anything. Ralph didn’t say one way or another if he was not at home but across the street at the funeral home, which would be a good reason why Roseboro called there after calling his parents’ home.

Five minutes after calling Ralph, at 11:28
P.M.,
as the Roseboros’ yard filled with law enforcement, fire personnel, friends, and family, Roseboro called Susan Van Zant, his sister-in-law, at her home.

Suzie picked up after just a few rings.

“She’s gone …,” Roseboro told his sister-in-law without further explanation. Then, more quietly, “She’s gone.”

“What do you mean?” Suzie asked. “Who’s gone?” Was the guy half in the bag? Did he know what the heck he was talking about?

“Jan,” Roseboro said. “I couldn’t save her.”

Suzie still didn’t understand. “I’ll be right up,” she said. Suzie lived minutes away, in downtown Denver, directly across the street from the Roseboro Funeral Home.

“Okay” was all Roseboro said before hanging up.

Suzie got off the phone, thought about it a moment, and considered the idea that Jan might have had a heart attack and had fallen into the pool. At some point after cradling the phone, those words hit her: “
She’s gone
.” Jan was dead. It had to be an accident. What else could have happened?

Jan’s sister called one friend, who didn’t answer. Then she phoned another, explained what was going on, as best she could, and asked her for a ride up to the house.

“Sure.”

“I’ll wait outside,” Suzie explained, more frantic and worried now.

Standing in front of her parents’ home where she was staying, waiting for her friend, Suzie heard a siren. She looked up. An ambulance went screaming by at a high rate of speed.

Speaking through an avalanche of emotion and tears,
Suzie later said, “I saw the ambulance go by. It had my sister’s body in it.”

But Suzie didn’t know that as she waited for a ride to her sister and brother-in-law’s house. Jan, whom Suzie later described as “a rock to me,” someone who was “there for anyone, anytime,” was arguably fighting for her life inside that ambulance.

Inside the car on the way to the house, Suzie’s friend, noticing how quickly Suzie was falling apart (“losing it”), said, “Just get it together for those kids.”

And that was what Suzie began to focus on: “My concern was for the children,” she later said. “And that’s what I did.”

After talking to Suzie, apparently convinced that his wife was dead by the way she looked when the ambulance took her away moments before, Michael Roseboro called Brian Binkley, Jan’s brother.

Brian didn’t answer. So Roseboro left his brother-in-law a message.

Then, at 11:50
P.M.,
Roseboro called the family’s Lutheran pastor, Larry Hummer.

The final call—six in all—that Roseboro made within that time frame before Jan was pronounced dead was to his sister’s house, which led to a series of calls to other Roseboro family members, sending them all flocking to the West Main Street home.

11

No one in law enforcement had reported seeing anything out of place at the Roseboro residence, both in and around the concrete pool decking area, besides those two stones, Jan’s cell phone and reading glasses on the bottom of the pool. Nothing had been disturbed. There was no blood. No indication whatsoever that a struggle had ensued between two people, or that a woman had fallen, hit her head, and drowned. There was a bucket full of what appeared to be cleaning fluids, a red rag floating on top.

And that was it.

By now, the ECTPD had found out that the wound Jan had sustained on the back of her head was no surface bump or bruise. Jan Roseboro had a deep gash, the size of a nickel, shaped roughly like the letter
L,
on her scalp in back of her left ear, which burrowed all the way down to her skull. This was not a wound that had come to Jan easily, without pain or violence. Both the doctor and Detective Larry Martin were convinced there had to be evidence somewhere in or around the house explaining how Jan had received such a blow. Be it an overturned plant holder, remnants of hair and tissue on the corner of a kitchen countertop, or some other explanation. But a person
does not receive a blow like the one Jan had sustained without leaving a clue behind as to how it got there.

Police had not gone into the Roseboro home. They had no reason to. Which was why Detective Keith Neff had asked Michael Roseboro—who graciously agreed—to sign the “consent to search” form for the interior of the home.

Heading back over to the house, Neff and Martin got to talking. Neff was more than a little concerned by now. Roseboro had not once asked about his wife, what happened, or what the police thought
might
have happened. He had never shed a tear that Neff or Martin had seen. Stranger still, the ER doctor at the hospital had reported that in over thirty years of experience in dealing with death in the ER, he had never had a family member—wife, husband, sister, brother, mother, father—fail to show up at the hospital or call during a situation similar to Jan’s. Roseboro not only had never gone to the hospital to inquire about his wife’s well-being, but had never called, either. No one in the family had, for that matter. And yet they were all under the impression that Jan had died.

“That is not the appropriate reaction that I am used to seeing when talking to someone who has just lost a loved one,” Neff remarked. “Mike Roseboro was pretty much quiet. He was not asking me questions: ‘What do you know? What’s going on?’ That sort of thing.”

Martin was a bit more guarded about his judgments concerning Roseboro. With more investigatory experience, Martin was taking the case in, a breath at a time, following the evidence. Neff was too, it should be noted, but Neff had a sneaky suspicion (maybe a gut instinct) that all was not what it seemed, and that the answer could very well be found inside the Roseboro house.

When they arrived that second time, early morning, July 23, 2008, the heaviest rain of the night began. Cats and dogs. Buckets upon buckets of thick, slanted rain, with thunder and lightning, to boot. If there was any sign of
blood outside the house, on the lawn, or around the pool, consider it washed away by God’s hand at this point.

Gone.

Inside the Roseboro residence by 2:52
A.M.,
Neff explained, there was, “and I am going to estimate here, between fifteen to twenty family and friends walking around the house.”

Neff and Martin knew going into the situation that Roseboro could yank the “consent to search” form out of their hands anytime he felt like it, then demand they hightail it out of his house at once. So they had to be careful with their reactions and what they said, making the visit as quick and thorough as they could under the circumstances.

“That house was cold,” Neff said later, referring to the reaction from Roseboro’s family and friends as he and Martin began their walk-through. Nobody wanted them there, and they were not concealing those feelings for the officers as Martin and Neff entered.

“I just kept my head down,” Neff added, “and did what we had to do.”

The house itself was “confusing to navigate,” Neff explained. Which was one of the reasons why they asked Roseboro to show them around. The other problem was that everyone in the house was startled by their presence this second time:
Why in the heavens are the cops back here again?
Jan had drowned accidentally. Everyone at the house had signed off on that as a cause of death. Heart attack. Fall. Drowning. Jan’s death was a tragedy enough all by itself. Did the police have to make matters worse by continuing to pester this grieving family?

“We were not welcome with open arms,” Martin said. “I’ll leave it at that.”

There was a lot of strange feelings in the house, too, Martin felt. The pastor from the Roseboro’s church, Larry Hummer, who also happened to be the ECTPD’s chaplain, was inside, talking to Roseboro friends and
family, helping out where he could. Many of these people inside the house were professionals: doctors, lawyers, businesspeople.

Martin had called ADA Kelly Sekula back and asked if the ECTPD had any chance of obtaining a search warrant.

“You just don’t have enough,” Sekula said. Most in law enforcement will admit that Pennsylvania is one of those states where getting a search warrant is tough business. It’s not as easy as people might think. Here, in this situation, the ECTPD had absolutely nothing: speculation and theory, a cop’s gut instinct. But no evidence whatsoever—the “probable cause” a judge wants to see—showing them Roseboro had anything to do with his wife’s untimely death.

That would all change the instant Neff or Martin spotted something in the house that could kindle a search warrant: a bloody towel on the floor, hair or blood in the washer or dryer, a bloody weapon of some sort, maybe some furniture out of place, a broken vase, anything of concern. But they were walking on eggshells, being hawked and watched as if they were intruders.

Larry Martin pulled Michael Roseboro aside before they started. “Mike, listen, is there anything strange or out of place—i.e., somebody who could have broken into the house, robbery, burglary, or evidence of an intruder—that you see?”

There was always the possibility that while Roseboro was asleep, which he had claimed to be during that crucial hour Jan had died, a home invasion could have been uncovered by Jan, who died trying to bust it up.

Roseboro did not hesitate with his answer: “Nope. Everything looks normal.”