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.