Love Her To Death Read online

  Firestone reacted like the pro he was, kneeling beside Jan, asking Showalter, “Do you need the AED?” The cop had the machine in his hand.

  “Yes … please,” Showalter said breathlessly.

  “Get her feet out of the water.” Firestone said it would be impossible to use the automated external defibrillator (AED) if the person’s feet were in the water, or the person was wet.

  Firestone prepared the AED he had brought from his cruiser. The machine analyzes the rhythm of the heart. It would take a reading of Jan’s vital signs and indicate whether to deliver a shock to Jan’s heart with the paddles or continue manual CPR. Showalter wasn’t getting a pulse. It didn’t mean Jan was gone; it told them, perhaps alarmingly, that they needed to get her heart beating again before any major brain damage occurred, or there was no chance of getting a rhythm back. Neither Showalter nor Firestone had any idea how long Jan had been unconscious.

  During this critical process of utilizing the AED, which Firestone, like all cops, had been trained to use, Showalter continued working on Jan. As they conducted this procedure together, an ambulance arrived, additional EMTs running toward the pool. Fire trucks pulled up and parked along Creek Road. Roseboro family members were beginning to arrive as well.

  After briefly talking to Michael Roseboro, Firestone noticed that Jan’s husband had walked off to the side and, smoking a cigarette, was talking on his cell phone.

  Once the AED was hooked up to Jan’s chest, the apparatus advised them not to shock Jan’s heart, but to continue CPR, instead.

  Was this good news? Did it mean Jan Roseboro was still alive?

  Technically, she was. There was no doctor on scene to make a pronouncement of death. By all logical assumptions, however, it seemed Jan Roseboro had breathed her last. She was listless, cold to the touch, not moving. Pale. She had no heart rate or pulse. None of this, of course, was ever mentioned or talked about among those at the scene. To anyone there, watching the events transpire in front of them, it appeared that there was hope for Jan. EMTs were focused on reviving Jan Roseboro and getting her from the ground into the ambulance, then to the nearest hospital emergency room. By all accounts, Jan had only been unconscious and not breathing for minutes.

  As Showalter continued CPR and, as Firestone later told it, “people more qualified than me” took over, the patrolman stepped away from Jan, looked around, found Michael Roseboro, and explained to Jan’s husband that he needed to ask him a few questions.

  You know, procedure. Formalities. For starters, “What happened?”

  Roseboro was standing by a patio table, smoking, quietly watching what was going on, cell phone in hand. “I have no idea how long [she has] been in the pool,” Roseboro said.

  “Okay. But what happened?” Firestone asked again.

  “I went to bed at approximately ten o’clock,” Jan Roseboro’s husband of nineteen years stated, “but Jan stayed outside in the pool area to watch the night sky. I was inside sleeping when I got up to go to the bathroom and noticed that the pool lights and outside torches were still lit.” So Roseboro, after finishing up in the bathroom, walked outside to extinguish the tiki lamps and shut off the remaining lights. “When I entered the pool area … I noticed my wife in the deep end of the pool, retrieved a telephone, and immediately called 911. The operator advised me how to perform CPR, which I did until [everyone] arrived.”

  All Firestone had to do was some quick math to realize that Jan could have been in the water anywhere between one and sixty minutes, according to her husband’s timeline. Roseboro said he went to bed at ten. The 911 call had been made at 11:02. Either way you added it up, it did not look good for Jan. Yet, Firestone never said any of this to Roseboro.

  “Was Jan drinking?” Firestone asked. He was standing closer to Roseboro now and could smell alcohol on his breath.

  “No,” he said.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Yes….”

  “Were you swimming earlier tonight, Mr. Roseboro?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jan was not wearing swimming attire. Had she been swimming, too?”

  “No.”

  A gurney was wheeled toward Jan as EMTs continued working on her. One of the medics put a suction device in Jan’s mouth to extract any vomit that might have been lodged in her throat. Showalter later said he believed they were able to suction a small amount of vomit from Jan’s mouth.

  By now, maybe five minutes since Showalter and Firestone had responded to the scene, it seemed there were people everywhere.

  Michael Roseboro—his and Jan’s three youngest children inside the house sleeping through all of this—stood by and could only watch as his wife was hoisted onto a gurney and wheeled off toward the driveway and a waiting ambulance.

  “His demeanor was sort of flat and calm,” Firestone later said, referring to this moment. “Even rote.”

  One of the officers who had arrived on scene was off to the side calling into the station to get an investigator out there. Another cop regulation. Just a routine matter to check things out. Standard procedure after an incident like this.

  Firestone and Roseboro stood together watching the medic wheel Jan away. There was “an uncomfortable lull there,” Firestone remembered, “where we were kind of standing and staring at each other.”

  Breaking that silence, Firestone asked Roseboro, “Hey, is there a pastor or anybody I can call for you?”

  “Yes …,” Jan’s husband said. For some reason, before giving Firestone one of the names, Roseboro felt the need to then explain that he and Jan had separate churches they attended.

  Roseboro never approached the ambulance. Nor had he asked Firestone or anyone else which hospital his wife was being taken to, how she was, if she was alive, or if she had died at the scene. Instead, he walked off and put his cell phone to his ear, lit another smoke, and dialed a number.

  Firestone assumed Roseboro was calling family and friends. Maybe he was still in shock? Too upset to think or react.

  “You can have your suspicions,” Firestone commented later, “but you do your best to maintain a neutral and open mind.”

  Who knew what the guy was going through?

  Just then, as the team worked to get Jan secured in back of the ambulance, Firestone noticed two young males walking hurriedly about the scene. They had that what-in-the-world-is-going-on look. One of them, the patrolman learned, was Michael and Jan Roseboro’s oldest son, seventeen-year-old Samuel (Sam, they called him).

  But where had the boy come from? Why had they shown up at this moment?

  Then, as Firestone looked around the property for Michael Roseboro, it was as if the guy had vanished.

  Michael Roseboro was nowhere to be found.

  Maybe he finally got into the ambulance with his wife?

  Quite shockingly, as medics got Jan Roseboro’s heart beating again—if only mechanically—inside the ambulance as it took off, blood poured out of the back of her head, turning the pillow underneath red as paint, as if a vessel had burst.

  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 b
right, 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.