For Angie, the first few days after that first phone call from Michael Roseboro in late May—when they were arguably courting—were “just like dating him…. It was just like anybody dating somebody—that’s how it progressed.”
“Anybody dating somebody….”
Well, perhaps if you take into account the man was married and had four kids, and Angie the same, with two kids. Otherwise, this was not a relationship that most people with morals choose to get involved in, or would refer to as “normal.”
E-mails as early as June 2, 2008, sent from Michael to Angie, and e-mails she sent back to his account, tell the story of how aggressive and sexual this affair was from the moment it began. It was not anywhere close to “anybody dating somebody.” On June 2, for example, at 7:29 P.M., Roseboro sent Angie an e-mail under the subject “Daydreaming.” This only a few days, mind you, after that supposed first call. In that e-mail, Michael talked about watching his new target as she walked around on the front porch of her home, and how turned-on he was by the jeans she was wearing earlier that day. He said the “pants should be outlawed.” It was clear that Roseboro was infatuated, feeding off the thrill and mystery of not yet bedding Angie down. He said he went “right back to dreaming” after seeing her in the pants, just stopping short of perhaps admitting he had decided to do something nasty that might grow hair on his palms. He told her he couldn’t wait to “be alone” with her “and to see you dance for me.”
For Angie, with that first e-mail, she started a file at work. After printing each e-mail out on her work computer, she saved all of those e-mails from Roseboro that were special to her, so she would be able to look back at them at a later time, according to a later police interview transcript.
Reminisce.
Moreover, at the end of every workday, Angie deleted all the e-mails Michael Roseboro had sent her—and just those—on that day.
“I would also empty those files from my ‘deleted folder’ or ‘trash’ mail,” Angie told police. Police called this “double deleting.” She never forwarded any of the e-mails to her home computer and would not give Roseboro her home e-mail address.
“Anybody dating somebody….”
The next morning, June 3, no sooner had Angie got behind her desk at seven fifty-four, did she write back to Roseboro, saying how she didn’t think the pants would have that much of an effect, but she’d be more than willing to wear them again. Farther along in the note, she admitted—we’re talking fewer than five days after the initial call to go out to lunch—that she was having “fantasies” about him and she could not “get them out of” her head, adding that she felt as if she had “known [Roseboro] forever….”
The idea that secrecy was going to become a major part of the affair was obvious in the way they communicated and the words they chose. Angie explained that her mother was supposed to be “dropping in” later on that afternoon. So if her new lover called her at that time and she “sounded funny,” he’d know why. It had nothing to do with him, she went on to say, only that they needed to think about things more thoroughly now and hide everything they did.
Roseboro answered Angie’s response e-mail at eleven forty-four that same morning, writing that he didn’t want to “pressure” her in any way. He talked about how he hoped her fantasies were “as good as” his. Those fantasies he’d been having left him “weak and smiling.” In fact, he dreamt of kissing Angie and holding her and running his “fingers through [her] hair and touching [her] face and lips.” Roseboro sounded like a junior-high-school kid who had been promised his first piece of ass. There was desperation and surrealism in the tone of his e-mails. Almost an effeminate quality to them.
Ending that brief note, Roseboro said he was “surprised and flattered” to hear from Angie that she felt the same way about him. He thanked her for making him smile.
They talked about having sex. They talked about passion. They talked about how the romance they both adored and needed, but had been—surprise!—lost in the tedium and boringness of their marriages was now back in full swing—and they loved it. The lust between them grew daily. They viewed it as love and called themselves soul mates. Yet, the expeditious progression and secretive nature of the affair spoke to how it was structured and fueled more by the thrill of not being caught and the freshness and contagiousness of it all more than a true love and a desperate need to be with each other. Love at first sight, in other words, was not what this affair was based on; for if that were the case, both would have gone to their spouses and admitted that nothing would stand in the way of this love. But this affair, energized by the sexual charge between them, went from zero to one hundred, it seemed, overnight: from the local Turkey Hill store by the coffeepots to phone calls and e-mails, to meetings and nights of tossing and turning, thinking about each other while lying next to their spouses.
Michael Roseboro soon forgot all about life as he knew it. Everything he did, every thought he had, centered on Angie Funk—and what he was going to do to her once he got her alone, in bed, her clothes scattered about the floor. The guy got up in the morning and e-mailed Angie. Then he texted her. They met at the Turkey Hill store. They looked at each other from across the street, that secret lust hovering there between them, disguising itself as sparks and chemistry. He told Angie repeatedly—in e-mails and calls and texts numbering upward of fifty a day—that he was a simple guy falling in love all over again. That he was grateful for her having shown him how to rediscover love as he had never known it.
But this was a game to Michael Roseboro, one he had played with several other women at various times throughout his marriage. This was an unadulterated obsession like he had never experienced, a deep-seated desire to bed this woman, to be with her. Angie Funk had done something to Michael Roseboro no other woman had. And yet, studying his behavior, one might gander a speculative thought that Roseboro had turned a corner with his compulsive nature. Because while Roseboro was drooling over Angie in those e-mails and phone calls and text messages, his hormones jumping through the computer screen, he was back at home making surprise plans for Jan to renew their wedding vows during an Outer Banks ceremony. He had gone on the Internet and set up a pastor. Looked into rental cottages. Places to have a reception. He had talked to friends and family he thought Jan would want there. In addition, Jan and Michael Roseboro were also planning a family trip to Niagara Falls. It was business as usual for Roseboro back at home. That, or the guy was so infatuated with this new flame and had become so engrossed in the idea of having her, maybe having fixated on her over the years as she walked in and out of her home and sauntered by the funeral home with her friends and children, that everything he did after getting her attention and beginning the affair would now revolve around a master—sinister—plan to be with her. And now he would cancel all plans with Jan. He wouldn’t care about causing an uproar inside the Roseboro family dynamic and possibly losing all he, his father, and his grandfather had worked for. There was one source who later said that after Jan found out about an affair Michael had years before Angie had come into the picture, Jan had told her husband that she had no trouble walking out the door with half of everything—and the children. Thus, it was clear to Michael Roseboro by the feelings he had for Angie, one would think, that this was not going to be just a fling in the backseat of his SUV, or a few nights at a sleazy hotel. The way he felt about Angie was something more.
Much more.
“You’ve got a guy,” DA Craig Stedman said later, “obsessed with his new girlfriend, thinking about nothing else but being with her. Gotta be with her! ‘We’ve got to be together! We’ve gotta be together soon!’ … But there’s a little problem—the man is married and has four kids—and an even bigger problem.
“His wife is alive.”
24
On June 5, 2008, Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk met at Turkey Hill that morning as usual. Roseboro gave his new girlfriend a letter he’d written during another of what he said were sleepless nights he’d been havi
ng lately, thinking about her. When she got to work a short while later, at 7:50 A.M., Angie sat down at her desk and sent her lover an e-mail. She explained how she had read the letter three times already; it had not been twenty minutes since they had seen each other. She said she “ached” for her new married boyfriend’s embrace. His touch. To hear his voice. In the letter, Michael had laid out one of the oldest lines from the Cheating Husbands Manual, telling Angie, although he might not be alone at home, it didn’t mean he wasn’t lonely.
Poor guy.
In her response, Angie said the same back. She ended the short e-mail on an exciting note, saying that “next week” could not “come soon enough.”
Their first planned meeting—alone.
My goodness, it was almost here.
In response, nine minutes later, as if he had been sitting at the funeral home behind his desk waiting for Angie’s e-mail, Michael answered, saying how “smitten” and “in love” he was, but “also very confused.”
Confused?
Not, mind you, because of the enigmatic situation between them. Or how they would have to carry on in secret, as though they were terrorists, during the coming weeks and months.
Nope.
Instead, Michael was befuddled over what color pants he wanted Angie to wear next.
Decisions, decisions.
Moments later, in another e-mail, Angie said she liked to “hear” that he was in love with her, but longed to, as an alternative, hear him say “it in person,” when he could hold her in his arms, cuddle, and whisper in her ear. She concluded this very brief e-mail by saying how she had taken a walk in the rain the previous night and dreamt of “dancing in the rain” with her new married lover.
Michael answered right away, telling Angie how he fell asleep at night thinking of her, then dreaming about her throughout the night, waking in the morning with only—you guessed it—Angie on his mind. His life, he had decided, because of Angie’s presence, was now filled with “so much happiness.”
According to what Angie later told police, during this early stage of the affair, she laid the law down for Michael Roseboro as it pertained to the price of that happiness he had so much enjoyed and believed she could offer him. There were some lifestyle changes in the future for Michael if he wanted to stay with Angie, she insisted. Number one, the cigarette smoking. Angie hated it. She told Michael he’d have to go on the patch and quit.
Or else.
And guess what? Michael went out and bought the patch.
There was one day when Michael told Angie, “Both Jan’s side and my side of the family like to drink.”
“I don’t like someone who drinks all the time,” Angie responded.
“I’ll drink less,” he said.
Yet, the goatee, which wasn’t something Roseboro had always worn, Angie said, “she liked.”
So Michael Roseboro kept it.
Later that same night, June 5, 2008, the correspondence between them got to an adolescent point, where Roseboro was quoting Bon Jovi songs.
Angie said she loved it, before explaining that she would “always love” him, too, admonishing their current situation, upset at not being able to tell the world how she felt about her man. You know, scream it from the rooftops in Denver. And yet there was nothing, essentially, stopping either of them from leaving their spouses and holding a press conference to announce their undeniable love for each other.
Michael answered tersely by saying how glad he was that she felt that way, how warm and fuzzy it made him feel inside. Then, in an e-mail two minutes later, perhaps rethinking his position on the matter, Michael said Angie had made him “feel more loved” than he had ever felt in his life. Such a bold statement coming from a guy who had stayed married for nearly twenty years to a woman who had given him four kids.
As the e-mails indicated quite candidly, page after page after page (so many, the DA would later refer to the stack as “the e-mail book”), Angie Funk and Michael Roseboro displayed a certain sexual energy and euphoria leading up to what was going to be their first sexual encounter. The buildup was intense and fanatical, almost hypnotic. Their heads were buzzing with fancy and expectation. Yet looking back, one would have to say that, at best, it was more pomp than actual circumstance. These people didn’t know each other, after all. They were locked in some sort of cyber fairy tale that—as competent, intelligent adults, they had to realize—would conclude on a painful, sour note someday. There was no pot of gold here. There was only overblown purple prose saturated in the flight of the imagination between a man, who obviously hated himself and the life he had made, and a woman, who was looking for a way out of a marriage she was obviously unhappy in, but not tough enough to walk away from. So much so, in fact, that one night Angie told Michael, “I want my marriage to dissolve naturally so as not to cause bad feelings with Randy.” Later, she said that when she began the affair with Michael Roseboro, “Based on my home life, it was a vulnerable time for me to have an affair…. Michael was progressing with the relationship faster than I was,” Angie claimed. “I was not ready to leave Randy because my affairs were not in order. I had not figured out everything regarding the custody of my kids, or if Randy would contest the divorce.”
But she still played along with Michael Roseboro, not once trying to slow him down. And, some later claimed, it was Angie’s plan from the beginning, a continuation of a pattern she’d shown for years. This relationship was much more than a chance encounter that Michael was pushing along at full steam. There was an underlying cause and effect on Angie Funk’s part. And that plan, as any solid plan by “the other woman” would have to be, needed to start with the best sex this guy ever had. Angie needed to deliver. Big-time. The buildup had been too intense and heated. The guy was expecting to see stars afterward.
Meanwhile, what was Michael Roseboro planning for the two of them during that first special moment, with all the money the guy had? A day in the Poconos? A five-star hotel in Harrisburg, with rose petals on the floor, champagne on ice, a warm Jacuzzi bubbling away? Maybe he’d even gone out and bought Angie an expensive red-and-black negligee? Or five dozen red roses? A diamond necklace or bracelet? How would Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk launch their supposed love for each other into a sexual realm?
The first time they slept together, Angie later explained, was in a vacant apartment in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, about a forty-minute drive east of Denver, heading in the direction of Elizabethtown and Harrisburg. Angie’s family owned an apartment complex in town, and Angie managed one of the units, showing the apartments to prospective renters, keeping it clean, etc. It was June 8, 2008, just under ten days before that first call Roseboro had made to Angie, this after scores of e-mails and phone calls, text messages and meetings at Turkey Hill. This wasn’t some sort of spontaneous moment of passion. They had planned the rendezvous inside apartment 66. They were together, alone, many miles from home, no chance of anyone catching them. Roseboro made his move. He had even asked Angie a few days before, she later said, if sex was in their immediate future. Not with a Casanova-inspired love poem, or a few lines he had borrowed from Shakespeare.
Uh-uh.
Instead, Michael called Angie on the phone, she explained, and said, “Let’s have sex.”
Like, Let’s go shopping. Or, Let’s have chicken salad.
“Let’s have sex.”
Angie said she balked at first. “No … Mike … no.” She didn’t want their relationship to be about the sex.
But, well, it was, now, wasn’t it?
And after Michael kissed Angie inside that unfurnished apartment, just a rug and empty rooms and the dank smell of must and past tenants encircling them like a weather front, she gave in to her passions and allowed Roseboro to enter her.
That affair they had been having through cyberspace, over the phone, and standing next to each other at the Turkey Hill coffee counter each morning had officially moved to the next stage.
Which would only drive Michael Roseboro, m
entally, into a sexually obsessive frenzy.
25
After that first time, when they had sex on the floor of the empty apartment on June 8, committing what would become one of many transgressive acts throughout a short period of time, Angie Funk started to meet her lover inside the funeral home.
“I’d go in the back door,” she explained.
Sneak in was probably more like it. Angie Funk’s house was down the street from the back of the funeral home—and, wouldn’t you know it—Michael Roseboro’s parents’ house was next door to the Funk house. There can be no doubt that Angie looked both ways before walking into the back door of the funeral home, making certain she was not being seen by anyone.
They’d sit in the office and chat, Angie explained to police.
“It would be nice to have a child together,” Angie later said Michael told her during one of those conversations. Regarding the young children he had at home and the state of the affair post Jan finding out: “He said he didn’t want to lose his children,” Angie reported.
After talking in the office, Angie said, they’d sometimes head into the parlor and continue the conversations as Roseboro did paperwork or perhaps spit-shined a coffin or two. And “once,” Angie later admitted, just one time, she had sex with Michael Roseboro there in the parlor. Just the undertaker, his Mennonite mistress, and a few dead bodies below. How romantic that must have been. The smell of embalming fluid and rotting flesh wafting up from everywhere, permeating the air. The scent of old flowers mixing with perfume that Angie probably sprayed on herself before heading over. The somber lighting and eerie silence of death balanced pleasantly around them. Everyone can attest to the absolute stale stench of a funeral home. Now, how arousing that must have been for these two lovebirds. Considering what Angie later said, you’d have to believe they couldn’t contain their desires. Roseboro had to have this woman. There. Inside the place where his family had served the dead of Lancaster County for over one hundred years. A funeral home, for crying out loud. What the families of the dead would have thought had they known that while suffering and mourning was taking place inside their hearts, the undertaker—a guy they respected, the same guy who had consoled them and told them he would show their deceased the utmost respect—was having sex with his mistress in the same building where he was preparing their loved ones for viewing and burial.
Love Her To Death Page 12