Love Her To Death Read online

  The job of detective was a position you tested for. So Neff took the examination, passed, and was offered a desk and a badge.

  In his four years as a detective, Neff had never testified in a jury trial. He’d been scheduled a few times, but the defendants pled out. Just as well. Like most detectives, Neff preferred being out in the field, solving cases, not necessarily having to explain them later in great detail in front of a room of strangers, some of whom are looking to tangle you up with your own words.

  *  *  *

  As Keith Neff walked the scene and looked for the opportunity to speak with Michael Roseboro, he considered the only case of an adult drowning he had ever seen. It was a man who had ingested way too much alcohol and had decided to swim across a lake—and failed to make it to the other side.

  Neff noticed that Michael Roseboro was standing off in the back of the house inside the screened-in porch, surrounded by family, including his son Sam. The other three children, Neff and Larry Martin learned, were still sleeping. Neff later estimated that near “thirty people” were roaming around the scene—family, friends, neighbors, cops, medics, fire personnel. And even with everything going on, the children did not wake up.

  Strange.

  Neff spoke to a few of the medics, got their stories, then walked the perimeter of the pool, looking for anything different. The idea was to get a mental picture of the scene and then lock people down to whatever it was they wanted to say, all while getting to the facts of what happened. There was no cause for alarm just because the police were still present at the scene; it was protocol. Any death needed to be explained. Didn’t matter how it happened.

  “Mike Roseboro,” someone close to the case later lamented, “stood off to the side away from where the body had been.”

  “He never came up and asked any questions,” Neff said. “Or even, ‘How’s it look?’ He just never asked anybody, ‘How is Jan doing?’ Where she was. Or what was going on. He had surrounded himself with this group of people who were, it seemed, protecting him.”

  The question was: From what? What did Michael Roseboro have to hide?

  A family reputation, for one. The wife of a wealthy undertaker drowns in her own pool. Sounded as creepy as the guy’s chosen profession. People were going to ask questions. Point fingers. Michael Roseboro must have felt the need to watch out for himself and his family.

  It was near one o’clock in the morning. Officer Savage called Larry Martin from the hospital. Savage had followed the ambulance and stayed with Jan. Savage told Martin that doctors had found a noticeable “mark behind the victim’s ear.” A pronounced wound of some sort that went deep. One of the only reasons they noticed the wound was because Jan had started bleeding inside the ambulance on the way to the hospital as medics pumped life back into her heart and it started beating, if only mechanically. Lying outside on the deck, Jan had not bled, because her heart had stopped beating. But the head bleeds copiously, like no other part of the body.

  Martin spoke to Dr. Steven Zebert at the hospital. It being such a small community, Zebert and Martin knew each other. “What do you think, Doctor?” Martin asked.

  “Man, this is a deep wound, Larry. It goes all the way to the skull. I’m not even one hundred percent sure it’s not a bullet wound!”

  Martin was shocked by the suggestion. “Huh?”

  “But listen, I am going to send her downstairs for an X-ray and we’ll find out.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Martin said, flipping his cell phone closed.

  This comment, at least for Larry Martin, made the situation a bit more fluid, if not downright mysterious. Martin asked who was awake inside the house—and if any of the kids were up.

  He wanted to speak to them.

  They were all sleeping.

  The injury was later described as a “puncture wound … to the left side of [Jan’s] head … behind the left ear approximately one centimeter in diameter.” About the size and shape, in other words, of a bullet wound. And wouldn’t you know it, the wound was in the exact place a hit man or someone who knew how to kill would place a pistol and fire.

  One shot.

  Pop.

  Done.

  Detective Martin thought about it. Bullet wound? Puncture to the back of the head? If she had not been shot, had Jan fallen, hit her head, and maybe rolled into the pool and drowned? Perhaps Michael Roseboro was so distressed over the idea of not being there for his wife when she needed him that he was upset and wanted to crawl into a corner somewhere. That would explain his odd behavior. The guy was possibly blaming himself for what had happened.

  Martin gave Keith Neff this new information. Yet it occurred to Neff after surveying the scene fairly meticulously that there was no blood anywhere outside. How could she have fallen, hit her head hard enough to produce such a severe wound, and not leave any blood behind?

  “This rain,” Neff said. It had come down hard, in intervals. It was one of those midsummer downpours that seem to come out of nowhere and dump bucket loads of rain and then abruptly stop, only to begin again minutes later. The rain could have washed away any blood, concealing where Jan had fallen.

  “Of course, I don’t want to overlook the obvious,” Neff later explained, talking about what he was thinking as he walked the scene. “But I still need to stay focused and not get too zeroed in on anything in the beginning of an investigation.”

  Anything was possible.

  *  *  *

  According to Keith Neff’s meticulous notes of that night, it was 1:07 A.M. when he approached Michael Roseboro for the first time. In his gentle manner, soft-spoken and congenial, Neff asked Roseboro, “I was hoping you could come down to the station and talk about what happened.” Neff explained that the ECTPD was obligated to fill out reports and get statements from everyone it could. Since Roseboro was the person who had found his wife, his input might help clear up things. During this short conversation, Neff never told Roseboro that his wife had died at the hospital.

  And Michael Roseboro never asked.

  “Sure,” Roseboro said, responding to a trip downtown.

  The guy was preoccupied and flat, Neff observed. No emotion one way or the other. Family members nearby—Neff didn’t know at this point whose side of the family they were from—gave Neff a feeling that he was not wanted. There was a sadness there for what had happened, implicit on the faces of everyone. But it was overshadowed in some ways by an eerie feeling of coldness, Neff later explained. It made the detective feel that in the Roseboro house, men in blue were the enemy. That Neff and his cohorts from the ECTPD were unwelcome guests and needed to leave at once.

  8

  Jan and Michael Roseboro’s friends Rebecca Donahue and Gary Frees offered to drive Roseboro to the ECTPD so he could speak with Keith Neff and Larry Martin. It had to be done. Roseboro needed to clear up any confusion, add any details he could, so Detective Neff, now the lead investigator, could write his reports. After that was done, Roseboro could focus on perhaps the most important part of the ordeal thus far: preparing his three youngest children, who were still sound asleep back at the house, for what would be the worst news of their lives. Sam was the only Roseboro child to know what had happened. Sam was back at the scene, family surrounding him, some later claimed, walking around the pool deck area, smoking cigarettes, and, one might guess, searching for answers.

  A teacher of special education, Rebecca Donahue lived about a mile away from the Roseboro house. She had known Jan for “a little over ten years,” Rebecca later said, and considered herself to be Jan’s best friend. Before Jan and Michael had moved into Jan’s childhood home on West Main and Creek Road, they lived “two houses down from me, and across the street from my mother, and we were together often. My kids were at her house, and her kids were at my house, staying overnight and [on] holidays [and] birthdays.” Rebecca Donahue had been over to the Roseboro house socially on Sunday and Monday of that week. It was gut-wrenching for Rebecca to think that Jan was no
longer going to be there to talk to, or whiz by with the kids, stop in, maybe have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. It was those subtle, everyday experiences we think are just simply part of our daily lives we miss the most after tragedy strikes. The way in which Rebecca was notified that something had happened to Jan was enough, in and of itself, to jolt her into the stark reality that Jan was gone forever. Rebecca had been sleeping. Susan Van Zant, Jan’s sister, had tried calling, but Rebecca wasn’t answering her phone. So Susan grabbed Mike Texter and drove over to Rebecca’s house. Susan was frantic. Crying. Shaking. She had walked in, found Rebecca, and put it as bluntly as possible: “Jan’s gone…. She had a heart attack and fell in the pool and drowned.”

  Yet no one, by that time of the night (near midnight), had said how Jan had died, or if Jan was even dead. Susan Van Zant, better known as Suzie, was telling people Jan was gone before the ER doctor had pronounced her.

  During the quick ride, in which Gary Frees drove and Rebecca Donahue sat in the back, Michael Roseboro was quiet. Frees, Jan’s sister Suzie’s boyfriend at the time, had known Jan and Michael for just over a year.

  Neff and Martin were ready and waiting for Roseboro, who walked into the lobby of the ECTPD through the glass doors around to the back of the town building. The ECTPD’s foyer is about a five-by-ten-foot area of whitewashed concrete cinder block walls. There are a few stiff and uncomfortable chairs for sitting on each side as you walk in. There’s a bulletin board with posters reminding the public that crime doesn’t pay and that drugs make you stupid and put you in prison. Directly facing people as they enter, there’s a door leading into the small “squad room” office space, and another door, to the right, leading into the two-cell holding tank and booking station.

  Small-town Andy Griffith stuff.

  Sitting in the lobby, waiting for Detectives Neff and Martin, Roseboro was quiet. The room was well lit, and Gary Frees sat on one side of the lobby, Roseboro on the other, directly across from him, just a few feet between the two men.

  Frees noticed that Roseboro “kept dabbing,” as he later put it, at his face—and that something was “oozing,” Frees added, from an area around Roseboro’s chin and upper lip. Roseboro had recently grown a salt-and-pepper goatee. Still, “I took notice that he was wiping his upper lip,” Frees said later. “Just … there was oozing coming out of his upper lip. He was wiping that with his finger. You could actually see it was oozing blood.”

  Watching Roseboro dab at his lip, that blood obvious in the fluorescent light of the ECTPD lobby, Frees wondered, Did you cut yourself shaving?

  He decided, however, not to say anything.

  Neff came out of the squad room and into the lobby. He asked Roseboro to follow him. All he wanted, Neff explained in not so many words, was a timeline from Roseboro of the day and night. He needed to know if Jan had been drinking. If, perhaps, she had been complaining of any pain the previous day, or later on that night. Was there anything out of the ordinary or odd that had struck Roseboro regarding his wife? Tests on Jan’s blood would take time. Who knew if Jan wasn’t some sort of a closeted alcoholic. Or maybe a drug addict.

  Secrets … everybody’s got ‘em. When you die, they emerge gradually, like the grass over your grave.

  All of this was fairly routine for the ECTPD. They needed to find out what had happened, and Michael Roseboro might have that answer. No one was going to be shining a light in Roseboro’s face and pointedly asking him tough questions. There was no crime, as far as the ECTPD could tell by this point.

  The conversation would be fairly informal, unless something came up. In fact, Keith Neff was dressed in civilian clothes. He was not wearing any police equipment, didn’t have his weapon, or even his badge.

  “Thanks for coming in,” Neff said as they got settled inside the small room. “I greatly appreciate this. I want to be clear here. You can leave at any time. If you need a break, at any time, just let me know, Mr. Roseboro. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Roseboro said.

  Neff and Roseboro sat down, the cinder block walls, devoid of pictures, paintings, or any other distracting items, painted a nicotine yellow around them. Larry Martin sat, too, but he allowed Neff to do most of the talking. There was a walnut-brown Formica table with a few chairs. A three-by-five window (one-way mirror) on the north end of the room. And that was about it. The tone was going to be entirely conversational. Neff even felt bad, having to ask the guy questions so soon after what appeared to be a tragedy that would continue to grow in emotional magnitude before it got better for anyone close to Jan Roseboro.

  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 wer
e 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.