Kill For Me (36 page)

For the next paragraph, Sandra told Ashley the story of her daughter’s life and death. She referred to Humphrey as the mastermind, “pure scum,” reminding Ashley that she
gave her soul to the Devil for the price of love
.

On the second page, after going into great detail surrounding the idea that Ashley will never be free from the weight of guilt the Devil has placed on her soul, Sandra talked about her decision to, as she put it, “go lenient on” Ashley during the penalty phase of the trial and not push the court for a longer, stiffer sentence, as if it would have made any difference. The reason she did that, Sandra explained, was because she needed Ashley to talk. Period. She needed to see Humphrey put behind bars for his role, and nothing could stand in the way of that justice.

This letter, in many ways, was a cathartic experience for Sandra Poole. It was her own little way, one could argue, of venting all the anger she had carried around with her since her daughter was so viciously, unnecessarily murdered. It gave Sandra the opportunity to speak directly to her daughter’s killer, without being interrupted or censored or silenced. In the end, though, she promised Ashley that there would be
no mercy on this earth and in this lifetime
for her.

Sandra also included several photos of Sandee: one of Sandee’s grave, how she looked five days after Humphrey raped and pummeled her, and one depicting how “beautiful she was” back in her prime.

Sandra asked Ashley to hang them in her cell to remind her every day of what she had done.

I asked Sandra if she would share Ashley’s response.

“Her response was six pages long,” Sandra told me. “And at present, I am not sure how I feel in what she says. When I sort it out in my own head, I may share it with you. My family has not read it yet. I am not writing Ashley back.”

I cannot thank enough the officers from the PPPD and the FDLE who were involved in this case. They are experts at not only investigating felony criminal cases, but also documenting those cases so that the public can have full access to what took place before, during, and after the crimes. These men and women should be commended in the highest regard for their work both out in the field and inside the office. PPPD detectives Paul Andrews and Scott “Ski” Golczewski went far above and beyond anything I would have imagined—both men were extremely accommodating in helping me to gather documents and understand every single nuance of this complex case. They never once pulled any punches or asked me for anything, and I so much appreciate their candid, uncensored manner, knowing, of course, that there are parts of this case that they will never discuss with me or anyone else.

For their work on this case, I need to recognize PPPD officers Harry Augello, Cynthia “Cindy” Martin, Shannon Rozzi, Michael “Mike” Lynch, Doug Weaver, Brian Cook, Joseph Puglia, and Taichiang Ku. Special thanks to Chief Dorene Thomas and Captain Michael Haworth for making their fine officers available to me. Victim Advocate Nong Cavender provided support to the victim’s family and also counseled Green Iguana employees in a group session shortly after the murder. Leading up to and during the trial, Amy Tyson. PPPD officers involved on day one include Melinda Lane, Robert W. “R.W.” Cook Jr., Michael Erwin, Sergeant John Hicks, Jason Nosal, Ed Day, and Tim Jandola. Forensic technicians who worked tirelessly on the case are: Karen Waulk, Sandee Jacobs, Marie Milges, J. Grubb, and Jeff Richardz. Those key FDLE agents who supported the PPPD include Supervisor Ray Velboom, Steve Davenport, Don Schrenker, Barbara Smith, and intelligence analysts Ellison Smith and Amanda VanHorn.

At the court and accompanying research facilities and warehouses, Joanne Payne, Cheryl, Eve, and Robin were extremely helpful in compiling, photocopying, and gathering the hundreds upon hundreds of pages of documents I needed to tell this story. This group of women was always ready and willing to take my calls, and quick to get things out to me in the mail. Truly, as a professional working author, getting these documents in a timely fashion is a blessing. I would also like to acknowledge Bernie McCabe’s Office of the State Attorney, Sixth Judicial Circuit of Florida, Pasco and Pinellas County.

Tobe White was open and honest with me about everything that she could be, and I appreciate her input immensely. She is a courageous, stupendous woman who helped the state of Florida make its case against Humphrey. Tobe is an inspiration to any victim of crime; her story showcases how part of the redemption and healing process is in finding out and telling the truth.

Sandra Poole helped me reconstruct Sandee’s early life and honor her memory. I appreciate that. Sandra is a tough woman. I am in awe of her emotional muscle.

There is a heaping handful of sources I used for this book who wish to remain anonymous. I could not write books without these brave people who come forward with information no other media outlet has reported. I am indebted to those of you who helped me.

Fred Schaub and Bob Schock were great in helping me understand the legal end of the case. Thank you kindly, fellas.

I know that I have forgotten someone, or perhaps several—I always do. If I have, and, in that way, offended someone for not thanking him or her, I am sincerely sorry and do apologize. It is never my intention to forget anyone.

As always, literary agent and submissions manager Adrienne Rosado, Peter Miller, my business manager, and everyone else at PMA Literary and Film Management, Inc., are always working hard behind the scenes in my corner. I would be lost without them.

Kudos to my immediate family: Mathew Jr., Jordon, April, and Regina.

Perhaps most important, a special note to my wonderful readers. Thank you so much for continuing to purchase my books and write to me with your comments and suggestions for future cases. I am honored and humbled to have the best fans in the business. If you’d like to connect with me via Facebook and stay in touch and get the latest on everything happening, visit my public Facebook page: www.facebook.com/people/M-William-Phelps/501385223.

Once again, to my friends at Jupiter Entertainment, Donna Dudek especially, for turning me on to such an interesting, complicated true-crime case.

Michaela Hamilton, my longtime editor at Kensington Publishing Corp., publisher Laurie Parkin, and sales manager Doug Mendini have always had my back. Equally important are Stephanie Finnegan and Richard Ember, whose work on this book is greatly appreciated. I could not ask for a better, more professional team to work with.

Enjoy this exclusive preview of M. William Phelps’s
next exciting true-crime release!

LOVE HER TO DEATH

A secret life…a brutal murder

M. William Phelps

Coming in the spring of 2011 from Pinnacle Books

Turn the page for a preview of

Love Her to Death…

She was fighting for her life. That was about all East Cocalico Township Police Department (ECTPD) patrolman Michael Firestone knew as he sat behind the wheel of his cruiser and sped off.

It took Firestone five minutes to get to the Roseboro residence in Reinholds, Pennsylvania, from the ECTPD in nearby Denver, once the call from Lancaster County Wide Communications had come in. “The reporting person,” Firestone was told along the way, meaning the 911 caller, “had woken up and found his wife in a swimming pool on the property.”

And that was all Patrolman Firestone knew going into the situation. Yet that name,
Roseboro…
it was synonymous in this part of Lancaster County with wealth, status, good standing. You mention the name Roseboro to any store clerk or Denver native and you’d likely hear, “Don’t they own that funeral home?”

Indeed, the Roseboro family had been morticians for over a century.

On July 22, 2008, at 11:09
P.M
., Firestone pulled into the Roseboros’ off Creek Road, a half-tarred, half-gravel, slightly uphill driveway heading toward a white garage off to the right. The massive home took up the entire corner lot of West Main Street (Route 897) and Creek Road. The smaller garage Firestone had pulled up in front of faced the east end of the Roseboros’ pool, at the back of the home. This smaller garage stood about twenty to thirty feet in front of a much larger and longer cooplike structure used years ago to house turkeys, when the land was a farm. On either side of the smaller garage were walkways, one heading toward the house, the other into the pool area. Firestone spotted emergency medical technician (EMT) Cory Showalter, who had gotten a page and had driven from his house, a half mile down the road, beating Firestone to the scene. Showalter, a thirty-year volunteer for Reinholds Ambulance, six years with the Adamstown Fire Department, was performing CPR on a middle-aged female lying on the ground. By trade, Showalter was a full-time painter, and quite familiar with the layout of the Roseboro house. He knew the Roseboro family personally, having been hired by Michael Roseboro to paint part of the new addition.

“I saw,” Showalter later said, “when I got there, I saw it was Mike that was—he was kneeling beside Jan.”

Jan Roseboro, the blond forty-five-year-old wife of the undertaker, was on the ground, unresponsive.

Firestone had an “immediate view” of the back of the Roseboros’ house as he parked and dashed from his car toward the pool deck area. After having trouble getting into the patio through the iron gate because he could not get it open, Firestone said later that he thought maybe Michael Roseboro had to come over and open the gate from the inside for him. Either way, when Firestone got close enough to Roseboro, he noted that the mortician appeared calm. His breathing was normal. Roseboro didn’t appear to be sucking in or gasping heavily for air, as if winded. He wasn’t sweating, either. In fact, Roseboro seemed fairly “with it” for a man who had found his wife in the bottom of their pool. Moreover, he “was not dripping wet, if he was wet at all,” Firestone later remembered. When calling 911 only minutes prior, Roseboro had said he just pulled Jan out of the water.

Heading for the victim, Firestone noticed that Showalter was kneeling beside her with his hands crossed over Jan’s chest, performing CPR. Jan was wearing a sweatshirt and shorts. She was on the ground, a halo of water stain on the concrete surrounding her body.

Because the Roseboros owned such a large corner lot (by far the biggest in the neighborhood), to the south of the pool area, heading toward the turkey house, was a wide open space, a grassy knoll fenced in by a line of trees and thorny pricker bushes. Beyond that were three additional homes (all facing Creek Road), their backyards the beginning of that wooded area, which was actually part of the Roseboros’ property.

As Firestone came up on Showalter, he nodded to the EMT, who was working hard to get Jan’s motionless body to show any signs of life. Sirens were going off around them. The fire department, located on West Main Street, almost diagonally across from the Roseboro home, was but a five-minute walk from where they were.

Firestone also noticed several—he wouldn’t know the number until he later counted (six)—tiki torch lamps around the pool, on the opposite side of where Jan’s body was positioned. All of them were burning. What was more, the entire area was lit up by spotlights from the house.

“Once I went through the gate and walked up to the edge of the pool,” Firestone later said, “…I noticed there were interior pool lights on, as well as that dusk-to-dawn light, which was on the freestanding garage.”

Michael Roseboro was dressed in what appeared to be red boxer shorts, nothing else, but no one was later sure. “It was either boxer shorts or a swimsuit,” someone on the scene later said. Roseboro stood nearby, Firestone observed, with little to no expression on his face. Perhaps the guy was in such a state of shock, denial, or both, he didn’t know what to do with himself. It was better, anyway, that he stayed back at this point.

Jan was positioned between the pool and the main house, her head facing the back of the home. Her body was on a slab of the concrete decking bordering the pool, nearly hanging over the edge. That sweatshirt, a sports bra, and gym shorts she was wearing were soon cut off.

Showalter had not seen any vomit around Jan’s body. This told the experienced medic that she had not coughed up any water. Coming up on the body and Michael Roseboro moments before Firestone had arrived, Showalter had started cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) immediately, yelling to Roseboro, “Open my bag…. Get my airways out!”

Roseboro reacted quickly. He dug in the bag, found the piece of plastic, and then handed Showalter the oral airway—a small half-moon–shaped tube that medics stick in the mouth to keep the tongue down so air can get into the lungs as quickly as possible.

Firestone reacted like the pro he was, kneeling beside Jan, asking Showalter, “Do you need the AED?” He had the machine in his hand.

“Yes…please,” Showalter said breathlessly.

Firestone prepared the automated external defibrillator (AED), which he had brought from his cruiser. The machine analyzes the rhythm of the heart. It would take a reading of Jan’s vitals and indicate whether to deliver a shock to Jan’s heart with the paddles or continue CPR. Showalter wasn’t getting a pulse. It didn’t mean Jan was gone; it told them, perhaps alarmingly, that they needed to get her heart beating again before any major brain damage occurred, or there was no chance of getting a rhythm back. Neither Showalter nor Firestone had any idea how long Jan had been unconscious.

During this critical process of utilizing the AED, which Firestone, like all cops, had been trained to use, Showalter continued working on Jan. As they conducted this procedure together, an ambulance arrived, additional EMTs running to the pool deck. Fire trucks pulled up and parked along Creek Road. Even Roseboro family members were starting to arrive. After briefly talking to Michael Roseboro, Firestone noticed that the undertaker had walked off to the side and, smoking cigarettes, was talking on his cell phone.

Once the AED was hooked up to Jan’s chest, the apparatus advised them
not
to shock her heart, but to continue CPR, instead.

Was this good news? Did it mean Jan Roseboro was still alive?

Technically, she was. There was no doctor on scene to make a pronouncement of death. By all logical assumptions, however, it seemed Jan Roseboro had breathed her last. She was listless, cold to the touch, not moving. Pale. She had no heart rate or pulse. Yet, none of this, of course, was ever mentioned or talked about among those at the scene. To anyone at the scene watching this, it appeared that there was hope for Jan. EMTs were focused on reviving Jan Roseboro and getting her from the ground into the ambulance, and then to the nearest hospital emergency room (ER).

As Showalter continued CPR and, as Firestone later told it, “people more qualified than me” took over, the patrolman stepped away from Jan, looked around, found Michael Roseboro, and told the mortician that he needed to ask him a few questions. Procedure, a formality.

For starters, “What happened?”

Roseboro was standing by a patio table, still smoking cigarettes, quietly watching what was going on, cell phone in hand. “I have no idea how long [she has] been in the pool,” Roseboro said.

“Okay. What happened?” Firestone asked again.

“I went to bed at approximately ten o’clock,” Jan Roseboro’s husband of nineteen years said, “but Jan stayed outside in the pool area to watch the night sky. I was inside sleeping when I got up to go to the bathroom and noticed that the pool lights and outside torches were still lit.” So after finishing up in the bathroom, Roseboro walked outside to extinguish the tiki lamps and shut off the remaining lights. “When I entered the pool area…I noticed my wife in the deep end of the pool, retrieved a telephone, and immediately called 911. The operator advised me how to perform CPR, which I did until [everyone] arrived.”

All Firestone had to do was some quick math to realize that Jan Roseboro could have been in the water anywhere between one and sixty minutes, according to Michael Roseboro’s timeline. Roseboro said he went to bed at ten. The 911 call had been made at 11:02. Either way you added it up, it did not look good for Jan Roseboro.

“Was Jan drinking?” Firestone asked. He was standing closer to Roseboro now and could smell alcohol on his breath.

“No,” he said.

“Have
you
been drinking?”

“Yes…”

“Were you swimming earlier tonight, Mr. Roseboro?”

“Yeah.”

“Jan was not wearing swimming attire. Had she been swimming, too?”

“No.”

A gurney was wheeled toward Jan as EMTs continued working on her. One of the medics put a suction device in Jan’s mouth to extract any vomit that might have been lodged in her throat. Showalter later said he believed they were able to suction a little bit of vomit from Jan’s mouth.

By now, maybe five minutes since Showalter and Firestone had responded to the scene, it seemed there were people everywhere.

Michael Roseboro stood by and could only watch as his wife was hoisted onto a gurney and wheeled off toward the driveway and a waiting ambulance. His and Jan’s three small children were sleeping inside the house through all of this.

“His demeanor was sort of flat and calm,” Firestone later said, referring to this moment.

“Will you call our pastor?” Roseboro asked Firestone.

“Sure, no problem,” Firestone responded, and then ran toward the ambulance.

Roseboro never approached the ambulance, however. Nor had he asked which hospital his wife was being taken to, how she was, if she was still alive, or if she had died on the scene. Maybe he was still in shock? Too upset to think or react.

Who knew?

Just then, as the team worked to get Jan secured in back of the ambulance, Firestone noticed two young males walking hurriedly about the scene. They had that “what in the world is going on?” look, as if they had just gotten there. One of them, the patrolman learned, was Michael and Jan Roseboro’s oldest son, seventeen-year-old Samuel.

But where had the boy come from? Why had he shown up at this moment?

Then, as Firestone looked around the property for Michael Roseboro, it was as if the guy had vanished. Roseboro was nowhere to be found.

Quite shockingly, inside the ambulance as it took off, medics had gotten Jan Roseboro’s heart beating again—if only mechanically—when blood, as if a vessel had burst, poured from the back of her head, turning the pillow underneath red.

There had not been a spot of blood out on the pool deck or inside the water. Where was all this blood coming from?