After Dr. Wayne Ross shaved Jan Roseboro’s head, he and Larry Martin could see that the wound to the back of Jan’s scalp was even more pronounced than they had originally thought, simply because now it wasn’t buried underneath her thick mane of blond hair anymore.
The next thing Dr. Ross did, as Martin stood nearby and watched, was make an incision with his razor-sharp scalpel above Jan’s forehead and back down over each ear. He then peeled the scalp back—as if it were a rubber wig—and let it hang from the back of Jan’s head. This exposed Jan’s skull and the tissue underneath her scalp.
Larry Martin stood next to Ross in the autopsy suite staring down at Jan’s skull. With Jan’s scalp stripped off her head, Martin couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
Before Ross even said anything, Martin thought, She was beaten over the head and killed.
The bruising was distinctive and noticeable, now that Jan’s skull was bare.
Wow, Martin thought.
“There was other bruising on the top of the head,” Martin recalled. “This was very clear to us.”
It wasn’t just a few localized bruises in a certain quadrant of Jan’s head, as if she had maybe fallen and bumped herself on a plant container, the side of the pool, or a table. There were sections of a white, milky substance—indicating violent contusions present (made) before death—overwhelming the blood vessels and muscle tissue.
As they stared at this, there was no doubt in either of their minds.
Jan had been beaten over the head.
Ross focused on the bruising. “Look, Larry, I want to check some other things out first, but this is looking more and more like it is going to be a homicide.”
Murder one.
Martin shook his head, agreeing. Then he asked the doctor to stop the autopsy. Martin wanted to call in Scott Eelman, a detective from the East Lampeter Township Police Department (ELTPD), who also happened to be the coordinator for the Lancaster County Forensic Unit (LCFU). Law enforcement liked to work together in Lancaster County, supporting one another. Where one department might lack a certain resource, it could call on another department specializing in a particular field to come in and help out.
Larry Martin had a digital camera with him, but Martin was the first to admit he was no Annie Leibovitz. On top of that, Ross wanted someone from forensics to take photos for his reports. Eelman was good at what he did.
“Get over here with your camera,” Ross told Eelman.
Along with Eelman, Kelly Sekula and one of the investigators working for the LCDA’s Office showed up. Not only was Eelman good with a camera, but when (and if) it came time to seal off any crime scenes that might be connected to Jan’s death, Eelman was going to be one of the crime scene investigators coordinating that effort. Bringing him into the fold now was a smart thing to do.
With everyone standing around twenty minutes later, Ross continued with his autopsy. As he worked from Jan’s head down, opening up Jan’s neck, he found something else: bruising on both sides—directly along the linear line of both carotid arteries on each side of Jan’s neck.
The evidence was clear: Jan Roseboro had been choked at some point.
Ross moved in, asking Martin to take a closer look.
“Strangulation,” Martin said. “I remember Dr. Ross showing me that. By then, I was sold that Jan had been murdered.”
The horror of Jan Roseboro’s final few minutes of life, however, didn’t end there. Down inside Jan’s chest, after Ross cut her lungs open, a frothlike, watery substance poured out.
Foam?
“I had been to enough autopsies of drowning victims to know,” Martin later commented, “that Jan had drowned to death.”
The most incredible part of all of this was that the water in Jan’s lungs proved she was alive inside her inground pool. Jan had drowned. This after being beaten and strangled.
Incredible, Martin thought.This is remarkable evidence.
It was near noon when Ross finished. Martin called Keith Neff.
“He ruled it a homicide,” Martin told his lead detective. “Multiple head injuries, strangulation, and drowning.”
“My goodness,” Neff said.
“You start thinking,” Martin recalled, “and you don’t want to be close-minded about it, but you start to ask yourself, ‘Who was the last person to see Jan alive?’ and ‘Who was the person who found Jan in the pool?’”
Michael Roseboro.
“From that person, you begin to work outward,” Martin added.
Larry Martin collected all of the evidence from Ross—the fingernail clippings, vaginal and rectal swabs, that plastic tube the EMTs put in Jan’s throat, nasal swabs, clothing, any tape lifts the pathologist took from all over the body, blood—and brought it back to the ECTPD station house, where it would then be sent out to various labs for testing.