Love Her To Death by M. William Phelps

on.”
    “Okay.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    After being asked, Roseboro said nobody was there with him.
    “Okay, what we’re going to do is start the compressions, okay? Go ahead and put your hand on her chest like I told you. I want you to pump her chest hard and fast, about thirty times, about twice a second.”
    That would take, at the least, fifteen seconds, plus the time to position yourself to proceed. More than that, Neff and Martin considered as they sat and listened, trying to picture in their minds every movement Roseboro made, it would take two hands. Yet, there was never any indication that Roseboro put the phone down, or was wrestling with it, trying to cradle it in his ear and shoulder.
    “Okay,” Roseboro said after 911 told him to make sure he let the chest come up between pumps.
    “Let me know when you’ve done it thirty times.”
    “Okay.”
    “All right, go ahead and do that.”
    A few seconds later. “Okay.”
    “You did it about thirty times?” 911 asked, shocked.
    “Yes, sir.”
    911 asked Roseboro to check Jan’s mouth to see if the compression and the breathing brought anything up from her lungs.
    “No, there’s not,” he said.
    “Okay….”
    “Oh, my God.”
    “Okay, what we’re going to do is continue, okay?”
    “All right.”
    911 told Roseboro to continue keeping his hand under Jan’s neck, pinch her nose closed, tilt her head back, giving her two more regular breaths, and then pump her chest thirty additional times.
    It took Roseboro a second or two to say, “Okay….”
    “Okay?” 911 asked with some confusion. Okay, you understand me? Or, okay, you’ve done it? There just didn’t seem to be enough time in between the okays to perform such a procedure.
    “Okay … okay,” Roseboro said.
    “Okay, go ahead and give her the thirty chest pumps, okay?”
    “I did. I did.”
    “You did do that?”
    “Yes.”
    911 asked if there was any sign of life.
    “No.”
    911 then instructed Roseboro to continue with CPR. “I want you to keep doing that [until the ambulance arrives].”
    “The ambulance is here, sir.”
    “… Okay, sir, go get them.”
    “Okay, thank you,” Roseboro said.
    Neff was floored by that last comment…. “Thank you”? Your wife is struggling for life, possibly even dead, the ambulance is just pulling up, and you are thanking the 911 dispatcher instead of dashing off to flag down the medics?
    “Strange,” Martin said as the call ended. “We need a copy of that so we can break it down line by line.”
    “You got it,” Neff said.
* You can go online and hear this 911 call. Conduct a simple search on any reputable search engine.

18
    Jan Walters had been a Lancaster County detective for eighteen years. Altogether, Jan had nearly forty-plus years of law enforcement experience by the time Michael and Jan Roseboro’s names crossed his busy desk at the LCDA’s Office on North Duke Street, downtown Lancaster. The LCDA did not want to step into the situation like cowboys and take control from the ECTPD, now that the pathologist had made the pronouncement cause of Jan’s death as blunt-force trauma, strangulation, and drowning, the manner of death homicide. DA Craig Stedman and ADA Kelly Sekula were adamant where it pertained to helping the ECTPD in a supporting role. But Stedman—according to almost everyone in law enforcement I spoke to later—was going to now begin driving the bus. The investigation was the ECTPD’s; Keith Neff was the lead. That was not going to change. But in the reality of the situation, Neff had never investigated a homicide. A seasoned investigator like Jan Walters, with decades of murder investigation experience behind him, could help Neff along the way and, Neff knew, probably show him a thing or two about solving a case.
    “I welcomed Jan’s help,” Neff said later.
    “I have known Jan Walters for years,” Larry Martin recalled, “and have the utmost respect for him. I knew he would do a great job for