Love Her To Death (39 page)

With witnesses, Craig Stedman and Kelly Sekula were able to establish that every one of these people had a hard time opening the gate into the pool area. If you didn’t know how to unlatch the gate, you needed help. (This was more testimony that spoke to how difficult it would have been for an intruder to simply wander onto
the property without Jan noticing and calling 911 from the cell phone she supposedly had with her.)

Then Sam’s friend Mike Texter, an extremely nervous, tense, and, some might contend, hostile witness, came in and explained what he saw that night. Texter mentioned nothing about seeing Jan scratching her husband’s back as he left with Sam. Protocol for examining witnesses was that the attorneys remained seated, unless they needed to point out something on an exhibit or show a piece of evidence. Witnesses faced the prosecution table, but it was easy to turn and face Michael Roseboro, who, as Texter talked about being one of the last people outside the family to see Jan alive, wept openly, dabbing his crocodile tears with tissues.

At one point, Stedman asked Texter, “You don’t want him (Roseboro) to be convicted of murder, do you?” There was some obvious animosity between the two of them. Texter had raised his voice a few times. Stedman too.

“Of course not! No one would who knew him. He’s a nice guy.”

“Oh, well, please,” Stedman said, his voice increasing with disgust. “Do you want to tell us more great things about Mr. Roseboro right now? And keep going! I’m more than happy to sit here and listen to you tell us how
great
Mr. Roseboro is!”

There was a pause.

“All right, counsel,” the judge said, “let’s dial down the sarcasm.”

Craig Stedman was flushed.

After lunch, Detective Keith Neff sat in the witness stand and raised his right hand. Neff had come close a few times, but he had never testified in a trial. This, like investigating the murder of Jan Roseboro, was a first for the ECTPD investigator. Neff was anxious, he later
admitted, but he had taken some rather sage advice from his colleagues, who had told him not to sweat it. Tell the truth. Let the facts hang out there by themselves for the jury to contemplate, feel, understand. What else
can
you do? You explained what you knew without expanding on it or coloring in the gray areas. A lot of times the truth was more powerful than anything you could come up with, anyway. As dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the acclaimed Russian author, speaking words that epitomized what Lady Justice would say to those sitting in a courtroom, once observed, “Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.”

Tell it like it is, and let the chips fall.

Neff was a keeper of excellent records. He was well organized and on top of his game. All of which was going to help. He sat and told the jury how he had become part of the case and how the investigation quickly became his full-time (at times night and day) job. He read the jury a note-for-note account of the first statement Michael Roseboro gave to him and Larry Martin on the night of Jan’s death. Neff said that Roseboro read the statement and signed it, initialing every question.

He next talked the jury through the lighting on the Roseboro property, setting up the state’s contention that it would be nearly impossible for an intruder to turn out every light after cleaning up a crime scene. He also talked Craig Stedman through a series of photographs depicting the inside and outside of the Roseboro home.

After a break, Stedman had Neff describe the content of that second interview he conducted with Michael Roseboro, the one out by the pool Jan Walters had participated in. Roseboro was asked to give them more details about how he had found Jan.

Near the end of his direct examination, Stedman had Neff talk about the scratches on Roseboro’s face, telling
the court that the detective would have to be recalled “for some other things later.”

Deferring the witness to Allan Sodomsky, the defense attorney tried getting out of the detective anything he could use to cause doubt. They went back and forth for a time, talking about
how
Michael Roseboro said he had pulled Jan from the pool. Then Sodomsky keyed on the idea that Roseboro didn’t know Larry Martin, who had sat in on the interview that night at the station house, was a police officer. The implication was that Larry Martin and Keith Neff intimidated Roseboro, shined a light in his face, and pushed him into talking.

“And during that first interview, you were just trying to find out what happened, right?”

“Correct,” Neff answered.

“You thought it was a drowning, right?”

“It was a
possibility
that it was a drowning,” Neff answered. “We weren’t sure what happened, and that’s why we asked him to come back—to try to get some answers and figure out what happened.”

But Michael Roseboro seemed evasive and unhelpful, not to mention unemotional and not upset by the loss of his wife. All indicators to Neff and Martin that he was hiding something.

The witness and attorney discussed the interviews that Neff and Martin had done with Roseboro. Sodomsky couldn’t draw much of anything out of Neff that was going to help him. This sort of cross-examination rarely worked: questioning someone about the minutia of an event or events. It came across, as it did here, like bullying; beating an issue to the ground. Sodomsky was searching for something, hoping to catch Neff off guard, but there was nothing there. The detective had done
his job by the book. If Neff wasn’t sure of something, he asked someone more experienced.

By 4:59
P.M.,
the judge recessed until the following day.

Craig Stedman had taken over as Lancaster County DA nearly seven months before the Michael Roseboro case had come across his desk. Heading into trial, the ambitious, hardworking DA was feeling the weight of the case getting to him.

“We didn’t have an eyewitness. We didn’t have a confession. We had very little forensic evidence—that is, until that DNA underneath Jan’s nails came into play.”

Stedman respected Allan Sodomsky. He had known him for “many, many years,” but he had never met up with Sodomsky on the opposing sides of a courtroom. From Stedman’s view, the trial was “battle royal.” Roseboro was sparing no expense on experts, doctors, private investigators, and, of course, a high-powered, high-profile attorney who knew his way around a courtroom. “He’s not going to hold back,” Stedman added, meaning Sodomsky. “He’s a fighter.”

Still, Craig Stedman was convinced of Michael Roseboro’s guilt
and
the evidence his staff and team of law enforcement had prepared for trial. The DA had created lists, very long lists, for Keith Neff and others to check off as they went through and made sure nothing was left undone. But one of the biggest obstacles Stedman now faced wasn’t overlooking an important piece of evidence. Or forgetting to prepare a witness. It was Angie Funk. She was a reluctant witness. Not that she was going to protect Michael Roseboro, but Angie had made it clear to the DA’s office through her attorney that yes, she’d show up for court. Yes, she’d testify truthfully to what she recalled. But several months before trial, Angie had decided not to help the DA by giving additional interviews
or participating in meetings before trial to prepare. So it was on the shoulders of the DA whether to use Angie.

Yet how could he not? The commonwealth’s entire case centered around the affair. Angie was one of Roseboro’s motives for killing his wife.

Stedman kept going back to those calls between Angie and Roseboro in April. She was giddy and laughing and talking to Roseboro as if she still loved him. She had even expressed her love to him during the first call.

“It was clear her feelings had not gone away,” Stedman said. “So we had to ask ourselves, ‘What were we going to get out of Angie during trial?’”

Because of the ambiguity swirling around Angie, Stedman and Kelly Sekula prepared for whichever Angie Funk showed up: hostile or cooperative. It was the only way to be completely ready. But Stedman wasn’t convinced that Angie was the right witness to call early on, or at all, just yet. So on July 15, 2009, he stuck to the flow of the investigation in calling Dr. Steven Zebert, the ER doctor from Ephrata Community Hospital. Angie could wait.

Dr. Zebert described the scene at the hospital on the night Jan Roseboro was brought in. He said it was his decision to stop CPR near midnight. There just wasn’t any use.

Jan was dead.

The other key piece of information Dr. Steven Zebert offered was his surprise and shock that no one had called the hospital to check in on Jan to see how she was doing. Nor had Michael Roseboro shown up to see his wife and hear from the doctor firsthand what had happened.

*  *  *

Allan Sodomsky’s cross-examination produced nothing that could be even remotely construed as doubt.

With Dr. Zebert out of the way, Keith Neff was recalled for the conclusion of his cross-examination. For the most part, Sodomsky hammered Neff on one point: when did law enforcement decide it was a murder and not a drowning?

Neff explained himself thoroughly, honestly, pointedly, never backing down from his reports. The facts spoke for themselves.

The remainder of the morning was consumed by Jan Roseboro’s family: Suzie Van Zant, Brian Binkley, Alex and Melissa Van Zant (Suzie’s son and daughter-in-law), and Allison Van Zant (another of Jan’s nieces).

Most talked about Michael’s demeanor post–Jan’s death. Level. Unaffected. Unworried. Eerily tolerable of Jan not being alive anymore. Nor had Michael seemed bothered by the fact that someone had murdered his wife.

Strange—but true.

“In your presence,” Craig Stedman asked Allison Van Zant, “did [Mr. Roseboro] ever even say that Jan Roseboro had actually been murdered?”

“Never.”

“Did he ever make any statements about anything being stolen or missing from the home?” (This was a reference to that mysterious missing $40,000 worth of jewelry.)

“Not to me directly.”

Allan Sodomsky did not have much for Jan’s family members. They had spoken their truth, repeated what they had heard, and that was it. There was no sense in badgering people who had lost someone dear to them. It would serve no purpose but to alienate jurors.

*  *  *

Detective Scott Eelman, coordinator for the Lancaster County Forensic Unit, talked about his fourteen years of experience before telling jurors that he and others inspected the crime scene, which had been washed out by that crash-and-boom, soaking thunderstorm on the night of the murder.

Eelman helped introduce photographs of the crime scene. He had sprayed down several areas with luminol, he testified, looking for any trace of blood, but he could not find one droplet. Yet, through what seemed to be a disappointing investigation of a crime scene, Eelman was able to give the jury a proper explanation as to why there might
not
have been any blood on the scene, despite all the rain.

“Are there any substances,” Craig Stedman asked, “that you’re aware of, from your training or experiences, that can, in addition to, obviously, rain … get rid of blood?”

“A common substance would be hydrogen peroxide.”

Which every household medicine cabinet had—and funeral homes likely purchased in five-gallon buckets.

It would also make blood “nondetectable,” Stedman pointed out in his next question.

“Hydrogen peroxide will make blood nondetectable if significant amounts are used….”

Surprisingly, Stedman was done with his direct examination after just a few more questions regarding photographs.

One of Allan Sodomsky’s co-counsels, Jay Nigrini, asked Scott Eelman if he had attended Jan Roseboro’s autopsy.

He said yes.

Nigrini asked about the injury behind Jan’s ear, if Eelman was aware of it.

He said he was.

Then Nigrini probed the notion that the pathologist had “removed” that section of skin, like a patch, containing the injury, for “tool mark” analysis so it could be checked against anything found at the Roseboro house.

Eelman said he had heard that, but he couldn’t recall if the doctor “removed it or not.”

The impression was made that inside or outside the house, the “blunt object” that had supposedly made an L-shaped gash in the skull of Jan’s head could not be located.

Eelman said they had not found anything with blood on it to match up to the wound.

Sodomsky’s intruder theory was beckoning.

By the time Nigrini was finished with Eelman, it was close to 4:41
P.M.

“Counsel,” Judge Cullen said, looking at both sides, “we will resume at nine.”

70

Keith Neff was recalled on July 16, when court resumed at 9:04
A.M.
Neff talked Craig Stedman through one of the many charts—photographs of the neighborhood where the Roseboro family lived. For the few minutes he was on the stand, Neff’s purpose was to explain what the jury would be looking at that morning, setting up the next several witnesses.

Jan Roseboro’s neighbors.

And so in and out they came, ten of Michael and Jan Roseboro’s neighbors, describing for the jury that not one of them had seen a prowler that night lurking in the shadows of the dark; and also that the neighborhood was not known for burglaries or strangers walking about. It was a quiet suburban Amish township. Peaceful. The same activity, day after day, night after night—the kind of redundant monotony that small-town life breeds. Nothing ever really happened out of the norm. Many of these people had dogs, they said, that would have barked if an outsider had been roaming through yards, hanging around the streets.

The last of the neighbors, a teenager who lived just down the street from the Roseboro house on Creek Road, said he actually saw Michael Roseboro the morning
after the murder. It was near six-thirty. He had walked by the Roseboro house, poolside, down to the end of Creek Road, adding, “Well, I was walking by and I saw Michael Roseboro. He was around the side, and he was pacing up and down alongside the pool. It looked like he was
cleaning
the pool.”