Free Love Her To Death by M. William Phelps

forever. A straightforward, effortless business model small-town people had no trouble accepting.
    “Mr. Binkley would just sit outside with his dog in the evenings,” that neighbor added, “and just keep to himself. He was a simple man. I’d say hello and he would nod.”
    Cassandra “Cassie” Evanick Pope grew up around Jan and Michael Roseboro; she and her family knew them long before they moved next door to where Cassandra and her husband, Richard, now lived on West Main Street. Before she was married, Cassandra lived southeast of the Roseboros’ West Main Street home with her parents on the outskirts of Reinholds, about two miles away. Jan and Michael Roseboro lived in the same neighborhood. Cassandra was familiar with the Roseboro family: picnics, block parties, get-togethers. Of course, anytime a family member, friend, or someone in the neighborhood passed, there was Michael Roseboro taking care of everything. There was not another funeral home any one of the Roseboros’ neighbors would dream of using. Roseboro, said one of his customers, “was the kindest, nicest man to our family when my father died.”
    At neighborhood parties, Roseboro insisted on being the bartender. He made strong drinks, some said, especially for the women. He liked to frolic around, too, others added, raising eyebrows to the ladies, maybe commenting on a tight pair of jeans or short skirt.
    “I was seventeen,” one former neighbor told me, “when he hit on me the first time at one of the block parties. That was Mike … always eyeing the young girls. Very creepy.”
    “Jan was the typical soccer mom,” Richard Pope said of his former neighbor. At the time Jan died, Richard and Cassandra lived next door, the first house after the Roseboros’ heading down West Main, after taking a left off Creek Road. “She was always running around … and taking the kids here and there. Very pleasant woman.” Living next door to Michael and Jan Roseboro, Richard watched the new addition go up. He also saw Jan once a month, because Jan and her siblings owned the two-storyhouse Richard lived in with Cassandra and their newborn. So Richard Pope would walk over and hand Jan the rent check every month. They’d chat. Jan was always sociable and talkative. “Whenever I had any problems in the house, I just called Jan and she’d take care of it. I never dealt with Mike.”
    A good-looking woman, Jan had kept herself physically fit and reasonably trim. She was in good shape. “She wasn’t bone-skinny, like a model,” Marcia Evanick, Cassandra’s mother, later said. “She ate, but took care of herself. Jan was constantly with her kids. Anything having to do with her kids, Jan was there! Her younger ones were on the swim team…. That’s why she was gone every morning—to watch them practice….”
    Whereas, some later said, the Roseboro clan weren’t afraid to show what they were worth, and buy the toys and finer things in life they wanted, the Binkley family never flaunted what they had.
    “They were humble people, I’d say so, yes,” Marcia Evanick added. “Jan had the fancy jewelry and everything … but you always saw her in shorts and jeans.”
    Flip-flops, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
    Marcia called Jan “the mother. She’d jump rope with the kids, be out there swimming and playing.”
    “For a mother of four,” Michael Evanick, Marcia’s husband, said, with a respectful laugh, “Jan had it together. She was hot! All those firemen across the street from the house, they would all look over at Jan if she was out at the pool and they were heading out for a fire or just driving by.”
    This was why, on the night of Jan Roseboro’s death, that same team of firefighters, heading off to an alarm in town shortly before the call came in about Jan being found, unresponsive, in the water, didn’t notice Jan outside at the pool. Many of them later said they would have definitely noticed if Jan was outside, not only because