Shawn Roseboro had just lost his house and his job. Times were tough on the kid. Much of it, Shawn later said, he had brought on himself with his drinking. But still, there seemed to be a “bad luck” vibe all around him during the summer of 2008. He could feel it, and it was making his own selfish behavior worse.
On the day after Jan Roseboro was murdered, Shawn was alone. His sister and her family had gone to the beach. He was staying at her house. The phone rang. It was his dad.
“Mike found Jan in the pool, and she’s dead.”
Was there really any other way to put it?
Shawn recalled that he “hit the floor before the phone did—I lost it at that point.”
After picking himself up off the ground, Shawn let his anger go and punched a hole through the door.
“I didn’t know what to do with my emotions at that point.”
With no one to lean on, Shawn said, he logged onto Lancaster Online, a local blog, that afternoon, just to see what was being said about Jan’s death. While reading and thinking and reminiscing about Jan, Shawn started drinking.
It was one of the only ways to deaden all the pain. Shawn lost Pa just a month prior, he said, which was devastating enough, even though the guy had lived a long life. Now the only person in the family who “totally got” who he was and understood his feelings was gone.
What am I going to do?
“When Pa died, it was at the peak of everything going on in my life, and I was, like, completely numb. Jan dying on top of that—well, everything just clicked in at once.”
In his heart, Shawn said, he questioned it a little: Jan’s death, that is—the way she had died. Over and over, he asked himself: How could Jan drown?
It seemed so illogical. So impossible. So … unreal.
“But I never thought anything else.”
No one did—at least in those early days when Michael Roseboro was being questioned by Keith Neff, Larry Martin, and now Jan Walters—and the secret of Angie Funk was still being kept under wraps.
Jan and Shawn had lost touch for about a month before her death, making the impact of it even that much more overwhelming for him. Two days before Jan died, Shawn had sent Sam, Jan’s oldest son, a MySpace message, telling him to give his new phone number to Jan and to have her call him.
“So that was—that was,” Shawn recalled, choking up as the memory came back, “very hard on me. Jan was gone. I didn’t know what to do.”
When Charlotte Moyer, Jan’s married-into-the-family cousin, showed up at the house that morning after Jan’s death, she walked in and spied Sam crying. He looked terribly upset. And why wouldn’t he be? His mother …
Vanished like dust.
They sat on the ottoman at first and talked. Charlotte wanted to be there for the child as much as she could. She had known Jan since Jan came into the world. Charlotte was married into the family by the time Jan was born in 1963. Charlotte had watched Jan grow from an infant into a wonderful adult with a family of her own.
After speaking with Sam, Charlotte walked into the sunroom. She sat, shaking her head, wondering.
Michael came into the room after seeing Charlotte sitting there.
He sat down.
“We were just sitting out there by the pool,” Michael said after a moment of silence between them. “I wasn’t feeling well. I went into the house. I had asked Jan if I should turn off the tiki lights, you know, put them out. Jan said no. She said she was going to stay out there a little while longer.”
Several parts of this conversation, as Charlotte remembered it, were far different from what Roseboro had told police. For one, he said Jan was sick. Two, he never told the police that Jan said she wanted the tiki lights left lit.
Charlotte asked Michael what happened next.
“I went to bed, and a bit later, I got up and the tiki lights were still on and the kitchen light was on.”
He’d never mentioned this to police.
Charlotte thought he was going to end the conversation there, but Michael said one other thing. “She had probably fallen into the pool and drowned,” he told Charlotte. Then, “She had a contusion on the left back of her head.”
That word, Charlotte said later, “stuck in my mind….”
“Contusion.”
What’s more, after saying this, Roseboro just up and walked out of the room, abruptly ending the conversation.
Thinking about it later, Charlotte considered his demeanor to be “very matter-of-fact, not any kind of emotion….”
Later that morning, with everyone roaming about the grounds of the house and inside, Charlotte and Michael passed each other. They were walking down the hallway. Michael Roseboro stopped for a brief moment as Charlotte got close to him.
“Nice haircut,” he said, complimenting her.