"This was a very up close and personal attack," a county detective told a Lancaster County jury this morning in the trial of Michael Roseboro.

The fact that Jan Roseboro, 45, was strangled, beaten and drown while sitting by her backyard pool in rural Reinholds, Detective Jan Walters said, caused him to focus his  attention on her husband early in the investigation.

"I didn't have a closed mind," Walters said, but he had a "pretty good" suspicion that Roseboro was the killer.

Defense attorneys, who maintain Roseboro is innocent, have suggested that intruders killed Jan Roseboro while she sat alone by the pool.

Walters, a detective for 42 years, said in his experience, "people are almost always killed by someone with whom they have a relationship."

And the motive is always "love, hate, greed, rage, ideology," Walters said, "they don't change much."

District Attorney Craig Stedman asked Walters if he knew about Roseboro's relationship with his girlfriend, Angela Funk.

Walters said he did not, but based his feelings on other factors, such as the scratches on Roseboro's face and his call to 911 dispatchers that night.

The day after the murder, Walters said he asked Roseboro what happened, since he was the only other adult

"I asked him did he have any other explanation for how this happened," Walters said, "and he said, 'I don't have one.' "

Roseboro spontaneously began reciting his sequence of the events: "I got up at 10:58. I saw the lights were on. I went out and I found her."

"It was basically identical," Walters said, "it was rote."

E-mail: jkelley@lnpnews.com