Authors: M. William Phelps
Groggily, rubbing sleep from his eyes, Neff said, “Okay, Lar (pronounced ‘lair’), see you at the station.”
5
The Pennsylvania sky looked menacing as Detective Sergeant Larry Martin and Detective Keith Neff met at the ECTPD station house near midnight on July 22. In the starless Lancaster County night, where light pollution is generally at an absolute minimum, the clouds, black as motor oil, swirled like ink in water, no doubt preparing to put on a show. The air was moist, thick, heavy.
By the time Martin and Neff grabbed what they needed and headed out to the Roseboro residence on West Main Street, just on the Denver/Reinholds town line, it was a balmy 72 degrees, just a few minutes after midnight, now July 23. The humidity level had spiked off the charts at a whopping 93 percent; this, mind you, while a composed, subtle haze—which could now be called a slight drizzle—settled down on the region, inspiring the wipers on Neff’s white Chevy Impala to pulsate back and forth.
“Odd,” Martin said again, thinking out loud, Neff nodding in agreement as he drove, “that an adult could drown in her own pool.”
Kids, yeah. Teens fooling around, sure. Those things sometimes happened. But sober adults? Not so much.
And this was certainly not a scenario either of these two cops had ever heard of or encountered before.
Still, Neff and Martin knew better. There is a first for everything. And the only way to be sure was to have a look at the scene, ask a few questions of the family and Michael Roseboro, then hopefully head back home and go back to bed.
“That’s what we thought, anyway,” Neff said later, “as we headed out there. But, boy, were we wrong.”
The ECTPD isn’t the type of law enforcement agency brimming with detectives out in the field investigating a laundry list of murder cases, like perhaps in nearby Reading, Allentown, or downtown Lancaster City. In fact, as the summer of 2008 commenced, it had been years since the ECTPD had investigated a single murder case, and over ten since a murder case wasn’t actually solved within a few hours.
According to a history of the department, it was 1838 when the Township of Cocalico was divided into Ephrata and East and West Cocalico. Legend has it that Cocalico was a name given by the local Native Americans, back before the Revolutionary War. Translated,
cocalico
means “den of snakes.”
The ECTPD was formally organized in the early 1970s. In 1978, according to the department’s website, the ECTPD began to provide police service to the Borough of Adamstown under a contractual agreement. It wasn’t until 1986 that West Cocalico Township contracted out the department’s services. In 1995, the Borough of Denver joined.
That all said, the ECTPD provides law enforcement coverage to an area of approximately fifty square miles and twenty-two thousand people, including the gorgeous rolling hills of the Amish, Mennonite, and Pennsylvania Dutch farming regions housing somewhere just south of ten thousand. The department employs twenty-two
full-time officers and two full-time civilian employees, which breaks down into two sergeants, three corporals, fourteen patrolmen, two detectives, and the chief.
Located just outside Denver, a farming community of a little over four thousand, the ECTPD is located in the bottom floor of what looks like an old library, but is actually the Town Services Department. There’s a $75,000 crime scene van with all the latest high-tech gadgets parked out back—a gift during the Homeland Security frenzy of bloated government funding—that is rarely ever used, simply because Lancaster County has a team of forensic investigators and crime scene techs at its disposal.
Things are generally slow in the Denver/Reinholds part of the county, and burglary, fueled by an obsession some Americans have with old-school drugs, such as heroin and crack cocaine, is the most popular problem rousting cops from behind their desks.
Or out of bed in the middle of the night.
Keith Neff and Larry Martin considered that Michael Roseboro had to be feeling this pretty darn hard—and was probably frantic and an emotional mess, holding his wife’s hand as paramedics and hospital personnel worked on Jan at the hospital. The guy must be going out of his mind. From what Martin and Neff had been told, it appeared that it was Michael Roseboro who had found his wife in the pool, jumped in, and fished her out. Medics had taken Jan away and, theoretically, she was still being worked on.
But things didn’t look so good for the mother and wife.
Even though, in his profession, Roseboro had dealt with dead bodies on a daily basis, and had probably been desensitized to death at this point—having been around skin white as chalk, purple fingernails, and cold-as-steel body temperatures for the better part of his life—this was his wife. The mother of his four children.
Things had to be different when it’s someone you love. Michael Roseboro himself had talked about how difficult it was working on and being around the body of a family member. E-mailing a friend after his grandfather had died less than a month prior, in June, Roseboro had said he “just got done [with] the embalming” of his eighty-nine-year-old grandpa, E. Louis Roseboro, the patriarch of the Roseboro clan, when “a lot of emotions and thoughts” kicked up and started to burden him. Grandpa Roseboro had lived a long, productive life. But still, preparing a family member’s body for burial, seeing him or her lying there on a slab, hoses and needles sticking into the skin, their mouth wired shut, was tough. And now this: Jan, with whom Michael Roseboro was just about to renew his marital vows during an extended vacation to North Carolina in front of a host of friends and family. Jan, the woman everybody adored and loved, was fighting for her life.
How could it be?
Martin and Neff were about to begin looking for that answer.
6
Martin and Neff drove into Reinholds via Hill and Creek Roads. It was probably going to be a quick in and out. At least, that’s what they hoped. Speak to a few people, find out what happened to Jan, say a silent prayer, hoping doctors could revive her back at the ER, and then head back home to get some sleep before the sun rose and another day started.
Forty-five-year-old Larry Martin had five kids whom his wife homeschooled. From there, Martin’s family tree spread out like roots to three siblings and a whopping twenty-eight cousins. Besides one sister, who had moved to Queens, New York, Martin’s Mennonite family had stayed in the confines of Lancaster County—Amish-Mennonite-Pennsylvania Dutch central—for generations.
“As far as I know,” Martin said later, “all of my cousins’ children live in Lancaster or the neighboring Berks County—which is probably around seventy-five.”
In these parts, “family” means
family,
in every sense of the word. It’s safe to say Larry Martin knew everybody, and—perhaps more important to how much his professional life was about to be transformed by what at first appeared to be a routine drowning—everybody knew Larry Martin.
Neff parked the Impala in the driveway. The scene was bustling with people, both detectives noticed. Fire trucks and cop cars and medic vehicles lined up and down both streets straddling the Roseboros’ corner lot. The backyard was overflowing with friends and family and other people. Neighbors were just now turning on their lights and emerging from their homes, no doubt curious and unnerved by all the commotion.
It was 12:22
A.M.
when Neff and Martin started up the driveway and walked into the backyard. As Neff went to unlatch the gate into the pool area, “I had trouble with it,” he said later, noting to himself how difficult the thing was to open. Probably for good reason: Michael and Jan Roseboro did not want some curious toddler or teen sneaking into the pool and falling in. Yet, it was so difficult for Neff to open, “I had to actually ask for assistance,” he added, “to get in the gate the first time I went in.”
ECTPD officers Mike Firestone, Gail Sizer, and Steve Savage briefed Neff and Martin about what was going on as a light rain began to fall a bit steadier now.
The Roseboro house was by far the largest and most contemporary in the neighborhood. In fact, the initial house itself, a World War II-era Cape, was buried—lost and swallowed up—inside the new addition, rendered nearly unnoticeable. If one looked at the house from West Main Street (the front yard), the new addition started from the left side and continued in an L-shaped pattern to nearly the corner of the lot. From the corner, it stretched into the back, ending in a T shape, a courtyard and patio in the middle of it all, leading into the stone deck surrounding the spacious, inkblot-shaped inground pool. Think of the house as three separate ranch-style homes connected together, laid out in a horseshoe, with the pool almost inside the open end. A lot of planning and thought had gone into the making of this custom home. As one family friend later put it:
“Jan and Mike hired architects and builders, and Mike supervised
every
aspect of the building process.”
It was an addition that had just been completed as the summer of 2008 began.
What Neff and Martin soon learned—a few simple facts that would become important to the case as the night wore on—was that, spread out around the outside of the home, including that dusk-to-dawn light on the peak of the garage roof nearly overlooking the pool, were floodlights and “soft” lights, not to mention that series of tiki torches and underwater pool lights in the deck area. The grounds of the entire Roseboro home were always well lit up, neighbors and friends and family said.
Neff and Martin spoke with Firestone first. There seemed to be a lot of people in the house. Even more family and friends had arrived. Neighbors and onlookers were beginning to emerge and settle around the house.
“Mike Roseboro told me he went to bed at around ten,” Firestone explained, looking down at his notes. “Jan, his wife, stayed outside to watch the night sky. He said he got up to use the bathroom and saw that the torch lights were still lit.”
It made sense. At that time of the night, it had been clear out; and, arguably, a person could have wanted to go outside, especially out here, where the sky on a clear night is as dark and sparkling as a planetarium. The pool was part of the massive new addition. The tiki torch lamps along the southwest side of the deck were permanent, not the kind you impulsively buy at the local Walmart or supermarket. All of the torches were equally spaced around one side of the pool, the last two of the bunch positioned between the stone walkway into the pool deck area, one on each side. There was a black cast-iron fence, those pointy medieval-like spikes at approximately five feet two inches high all the way around the pool, the only way into the deck area from the yard being through the gate that Neff had had so much trouble unlatching.
“Anything else?” Neff asked.
Martin stood by his side, curious already as to the circumstances. Something just wasn’t sitting right with the veteran detective.
“Mr. Roseboro said he went to attend to the torchlights and saw Jan in the deep end of the pool. He said he pulled her from the pool, retrieved a phone, called 911, and started CPR. I spotted a pair of glasses, some stones, and a cell phone on the bottom of the pool.”
Martin was curious. There were people in the yard. Lots of people.
“Yeah,” Firestone noted, looking around, “the Roseboros’ son Sam and a friend … came home while we were working on her.”
“Did you tell Mike Roseboro anything?” Neff wondered.
“Well, I explained to him that based on my experience his wife had probably died. But the ambulance people, I told him, were still working on her and she would get more treatment at the hospital. I explained that a medical doctor would have to make the call whether she died.”
Martin stopped him.
“Was
she pronounced?”
“Yeah, at the hospital.”
Jan Roseboro was dead. The actual time of death was 11:57
P.M.,
July 22, 2008. But no one had told Michael Roseboro any of this. He had no idea what was going on, and, surprisingly, had never asked. He had not driven to the hospital or demanded to go in the ambulance. Nor had anyone given him status information on Jan. Yet, everyone walking around was under the assumption (or impression) that Jan Roseboro had died. How in the heck did they know? Did someone call the hospital?
When Martin heard that CPR had been performed from the time police arrived until Jan left in an ambulance, he didn’t assume she was going to die, but “my gut told me it was not a good situation. I’ve heard of them bringing people back.”
In any case, with Jan’s death came a new set of investigatory problems for the ECTPD. It was going to be a long night. Even accidental drownings can take cops hours upon hours to clear, not to mention all the interviews and paperwork.
Martin found Neff, who had been roaming around, trying to get a feel for the scene. The rain had let up some, yet there was rumbling off in the distance, along with flashes of light. A whopper of a storm was rolling in. You could almost smell it.
“Hey, Keith, she was pronounced,” Martin told his detective.
“No kidding,” Neff said. He felt bad. By now, they knew that Jan had four children; three of them young kids, the oldest, Sam, just seventeen.
Neff needed to talk with anyone on the scene willing. For Martin, he found it odd that Michael Roseboro was
still
at the house. Watching Roseboro work the crowd around him, Martin thought,
Why is he not at the hospital?
7
In 1997, Keith Neff transferred from a police force in Reading, which had been in turmoil, a city undergoing a crisis of crime, to the ECTPD. Before that, he had worked part-time for a half year with a police department in Berks County. By the time Neff became a detective in March 2004, just four years before he found himself at Michael Roseboro’s house investigating a seemingly uncomplicated and accidental adult drowning, he was experienced in various degrees of police work—with the exception of murder. Murder, if truth be told, was something Neff had never investigated. In the ECTPD there were only two other detectives, including Neff’s boss, Larry Martin.