Detective Keith Neff called Suzie Van Zant on May 19, 2009. Neff wanted to give the family the results from the PSP’s forensic lab that the outside lab, unaffiliated with the PSP or LCDA’s Office, had confirmed. Neff told Suzie he wanted to do this in person. These good people, Neff surmised, deserved nothing less than a face-to-face.
Larry Martin and Keith Neff met with Suzie and other family members, including Sam, while Jan’s brother, Brian Binkley, listened on speakerphone.
Neff explained that DNA found underneath Jan Roseboro’s fingernails had been confirmed to be Michael’s. More significantly, both labs insisted the DNA—skin and blood cells—underneath Jan’s fingernails was not from “casual contact,” say, scratching someone’s back, a handshake, or any other routine touch. The only way that this particular amount of DNA found could have accumulated underneath Jan’s nails was under violent or aggressive conditions.
Suzie became “quite upset” and left the room when she heard this. It was disturbing information, certainly. It made a strong case against any doubt Suzie or the family might have had up until then that Michael was being railroaded by the state. Here was forensic proof, or so it seemed, that Jan and Michael were involved in a struggle on the night Jan died.
After sitting with the family for a time, Neff and Martin said they’d be in touch, then left.
Later that same day, Sam Roseboro took a call from his dad. Sam was living at his grandparents’ house on Walnut Street and helping out at the funeral home. Roseboro was calling the house as much as he could. Some later said Sam was being groomed to take over the family business, where his father had left off; others, however, said Sam had no interest in making the handling of dead bodies and consoling grieving families his vocation.
After some small talk about how everyone was doing, the conversation shifted. “Yeah, they talked,” Sam said. “They came down then and talked.” (They were Martin and Neff.)
The fuzz.
“Yeah,” Michael Roseboro told his son. “Yup…. Yup….” He wanted off this subject. Fast.
“So I was glad,” Sam continued, not picking up on his father’s wish to stifle the conversation, “‘cause that’s what I was thinking this morning, just something like that … but then [the private investigator] said—” It was almost as if they were speaking in code about an earlier agreement.
Michael cut his son off abruptly, speaking over him, skipping his voice like a stone on water: “Ah … bup-bup-bup-bup-bup … okay?”
“What?” Sam asked.
“Nothing!”
“O-o-o-kay.”
“Um … um …”—Roseboro changed the subject entirely—“did you get the Jeep taken care of?”
They talked about other inconsequential things for a few more minutes and then hung up.
Nine days after that call, on May 28, the private investigator hired by Michael Roseboro interviewed Sam as part of this “new investigation” that the defense had promised. Just so happened that this interview took place after the results of the DNA had come back from both labs. If one was to view this with the eye of a skeptic, Roseboro needed to explain two things: the DNA found underneath Jan’s nails and the scratches on his face.
The private investigator asked Sam about the scratches on his dad’s face. Did he know anything about that?
“My dad told me that he was scratched [by my sister in the pool while playing basketball earlier that day], but I didn’t see it happen.”
Sam later said he was there, poolside, his back turned to them as they played in the water, but that he had heard them horsing around.
Turned out, though, that the child who had supposedly scratched her father on the face was a chronic nail biter. She had no fingernails. Just nubs. Those scratches were deep. So profound, in fact, they were oozing on the night of Jan’s murder.
During this interview with the private investigator, Sam mentioned how he thought he knew where the DNA underneath his mother’s fingernails might have come from. He had recalled (for the first time) that he saw his mother scratching his father’s back as he was leaving the pool patio area with his friend that night. He had just remembered this.
The problem investigators had with this sudden revelation was that Sam, who had been questioned by the police extensively about that night and his father’s life in general, had never mentioned this back-scratching incident. Moreover, Sam had gone to visit his father on that Monday after Neff and Martin had told the family about the DNA. As an aside, Sam and his father had spoken, according to prison phone records, almost every day since Michael’s arrest. Literally, hundreds of conversations.
“I—I was … I was told not to tell anybody,” Sam said in court later, referring to the notion of keeping this information to himself all that time, “because … I thought I was told not to tell anybody outside of, like, my grandmother.”
When asked who had told him not to talk about the back-scratching incident, Sam responded, “My grandmother.”
Keith Neff and office manager Heather Smith were going through Jan’s phone records in preparation for trial, which was now slated to begin in mid-to-late July. In looking at the calls made to and from Jan’s cell phone, they realized a call had been made to Jan’s voice mail on July 22, 2008, at 10:36 P.M., close to what police believed was the time of her death. This meant someone was checking Jan’s voice mail messages. And there was another call made a minute later at 10:37 P.M. from Jan’s cell phone to her mother-in-law, Ann Roseboro, who Jan knew was not at home.
Both calls seemed out of place when compared to the behavior Jan elicited with her cell phone. For one, Jan hardly ever called her mother-in-law. In the three months leading up to the murder, Jan’s phone had communicated three times with Ann Roseboro’s: one incoming call and two outgoing calls, including that one at ten thirty-seven on the night Jan was murdered. Number two, Jan’s best friend, Rebecca Donahue, had “a problem” with the idea of Jan having her cell phone out at the pool. It was so unlike Jan that it grated on Rebecca’s conscience postmurder. After thinking about it for a few days, Rebecca confronted Michael Roseboro about it, asking him, “Why was Jan’s cell phone out there?”
Michael shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Rebecca called Michael some days later, just before his arrest. She asked him again. (“It bothered me,” she recalled later.)
“I don’t know,” Michael said. He paused. Then: “She was checking her messages. She was checking her messages when I went to bed.”
“Who was the last person Jan spoke to?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know,” Michael answered.
“You can go in right now and pull it up on the computer, the billing information,” Rebecca explained.
Michael changed the subject. (“He never answered me.”)
The last time Jan had checked her voice mail before that night (if it was indeed her) was a week prior. She could have cared less who called her—especially at 10:37 P.M., while supposedly sitting poolside by herself.
More important: how could Roseboro, law enforcement wondered, see his wife checking her cell phone messages at 10:37 P.M., which Jan’s cell phone records proved, if he was in bed, as he had originally told them? (Roseboro’s story was that he did not find his wife until 10:58 P.M.)
“You cannot know that Jan checked her messages at that time,” one investigator told me, “unless you were up and you did it yourself.”