Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  Roseboro returned the e-mail, which was more of the same “I cannot live without you; I adore the air you breathe; you make life worth living” gushy spew they had been sharing with each other now for over a month. The sugary compliments seeped out of Michael—the tight pants Angie wore, the way she kept her hair, the perfume she sprayed on her neck, the cards she sent. It was as if anything she did was perfect. They used the word “love” as commonly as a conjunction or pronoun. To them, love was passion. Love was lust. Love was the intense euphoria they felt while either talking about having sex or actually committing the act.

  In the following e-mails—on that same day—you could almost feel the desperation in Michael Roseboro’s tone as he extolled the need to be with Angie all the time. It was beginning to be too much for him to bear. He couldn’t work. Certainly couldn’t sleep or think. Drive. Walk. Eat. He could do nothing—without Angie slipping into his thoughts. He was so consumed with desire that it was all he could do not to run across the street, grab Angie, take her in his arms, and have her there on the front lawn or foyer inside her house. The way he described his feelings was almost like a Bogie and Bacall film he had just seen on cable. Yet, the longing was the driving, motivating factor behind whatever Roseboro now said or did. One would have to ask how long this overly sentimental talk between them could go on if they left their spouses and actually moved in together?

  In an e-mail at 8:22 A.M. on June 30, 2008, Michael Roseboro made a direct promise to Angie Funk. He said he would always take care of her and her girls—that he would love them, as if they were his own.

  Angie darted an e-mail back saying she had wanted the same things. Yes. She had been thinking about this, too. How perfect was this? The both of them concerned with their children, and her new man now willing to take care of them. She couldn’t imagine life without him, Angie said after glorifying his willingness to include her children in their future. He was her “world,” her “heart and soul.” It was getting hard, Angie said halfway through her response, to have to wait around for something to happen. What, indeed, were they waiting for, actually? Was there a plan?

  Michael Roseboro said he didn’t “want to wait” anymore. He then described the “deep need and desire” he had within him to be with Angie.

  It was almost “unbearable to hold inside” anymore, Roseboro explained.

  29

  Sometime after Jan Roseboro’s death, Angie Funk shared a letter with police. Michael Roseboro had scribed the missive on the night of his and Angie’s one-month anniversary, which would have been somewhere around June 30, 2008.

  My Dearest Angela …, the letter began. The previous night had been another round of sleepless hours of darkness, Roseboro explained, which he had gotten all too used to by that point. His life—every aspect of it—was now consumed with the thought of being with this woman, having sex with her, sharing his life with her, and marrying Angie inside the next year. Michael could not get the idea of marrying Angie from his mind, he admitted in this letter.

  Looking back on the relationship, studying every nuance of it, a part of it all seemed as though Roseboro had a terrible lack of personal insight: He never saw who he was as a father and/or husband (to Jan and his children). And yet none of that mattered anymore. He could not rationally take a look at his life and see that Angie Funk, an object of his desire, represented a fantasy and surrealism. She was a thing he had sought out to conquer, a woman he’d had his eye on for what was years, by some estimates. Now that he finally had a taste, he needed to take it to the next level in order to justify the amount of time and thought she had taken from him. And that’s what it came down to for Roseboro: more. Running around town wasn’t enough. Meeting and having sex wasn’t doing it. Talking to Angie on the phone dozens of times per day, sending dozens of text messages and scores of e-mails wasn’t satisfying this man’s gargantuan thirst for this woman.

  He was now convinced that only marriage could put the kibosh on such a ravenous appetite.

  For every obsession, there is a consequence for the obsessed. There has to be. It makes it all worth it. A fan becomes infatuated with a celebrity. Those feelings fester inside him for weeks, months, years. Finally, overcome with emotion and confusion, not to mention an inconceivable amount of desire to gain control of the situation and a fear of losing her, he suddenly realizes one day he’ll never have her (maybe he steps into reality for a moment) and lashes out, shooting or stabbing her to death.

  If I cannot have you, no one …

  This letter Michael Roseboro wrote in late June was the first time he had ever discussed “how far” the relationship had come in such a short period of time. He called his love for Angie—again—“immeasurable.” He said he would never let Angie down—ever—and placed that promise at “the depth of [his] soul.” He admitted that Angie was now his “dreams,” “passion,” “longing,” “laughter,” “tears,” “hopes,” “future,” and “love.” She was everything. His entire being—Roseboro said in not so many words—was built around this unassuming, average-looking, five-foot-five, part-time insurance consultant, wife, and mother of two—a woman across the street from his work he had watched and groveled over. And now she was all his.

  In that handwritten letter, Roseboro acknowledged he would “go to any length to show” Angie how much he adored and loved her.

  Any length.

  Still, while Roseboro was saying all of these things to his most current obsession, he was back at home on the computer, searching for pastors and beach resorts in the Outer Banks to renew his marriage vows to Jan. In fact, Michael had even set a date: August 13, 2008, now just six weeks away. He was forced into marking the calendar, because he wanted many of Jan’s friends and family there to share in the celebration and surprise.

  “He doesn’t tell [Angie] about his plans to renew his wedding vows with his wife,” DA Craig Stedman said, “because he’s telling [Angie], of course, all along [that] ‘my wife doesn’t mean anything to me, our relationship is nothing, there’s no love there, we’re not really together, we’re only in the same house.’ That’s what he’s telling [Angie].

  “Lies.”

  Many would later ask: What in the world was Michael Roseboro up to? Two worlds—of which he was actively participating in—were on a collision course. He had to know this.

  “What he’s doing,” Stedman added, “is carrying on an affair in secret. Secret sexual encounters. Secret e-mails. Secret from the whole world, from anybody in his world, but him and his girlfriend. Secret texts. E-mails that are so full of obsession that you actually probably [cannot] believe the content….”

  As the month of July beckoned, Roseboro was “a man who’s living on borrowed time,” Stedman said. Roseboro’s cell phone bill was $688 for that one month he had been with Angie, all because of the text messages and phone calls. The bill itself looked like a teletype readout for a list of someone’s assets, with Angie Funk’s number coming up repeatedly, page after page after page, as if misprinted.

  “So he’s … running out of his ability to carry on two relationships,” Stedman concluded, describing Roseboro’s state of mind as he headed into the month of July—“and to plan two weddings at the same time.”

  30

  Jan Roseboro knew about Michael’s affair, one source told me. Not that she knew her husband was running around the county, having sex with Angela Funk inside vacant apartments, his SUV, and the funeral home. But Jan knew when her husband was stepping out. He had done it before, plenty enough times, and Jan had caught him. Add to this something Jan had said to a friend weeks before her death: “Mike has an awful lot of paperwork to do at the funeral home lately….”

  Jan was not some naive housewife.

  She damn well knew.

  Few women can deny that feeling, no matter how much they try to repress, stuff, or ignore it. It might be the way he acts. The fact that he wants to have more sex—doubling up, if you will. Or that he brings home flowers for no apparent reas
on, out of character. Maybe he likes to minimize the computer screen when his wife walks into the room. Or hang up his cell phone quickly when the Mrs. comes around, and rushes to get the mail on certain days. A wife’s intuition cannot be stifled; it is too strong an emotion. And Jan was a smart woman. If her husband had done it once before, was it so hard to believe he would do it again?

  Susan Van Zant, a family consumer science teacher during the time of Jan’s murder, had been working for the Cocalico School District since 1974. Jan’s sister was well known around town. She had kids of her own. She had even grown up in the original house on Main Street in Reinholds/Denver that Michael and Jan Roseboro had converted into that U-shaped “estate,” if you’ll permit the term, which now took up the corner lot.

  Jan and Suzie were close, and they had lived about three miles from each other, or in the same house, for what was forever. Being the older sibling, Suzie viewed Jan, she later said, “like a daughter.”

  Jan had grown into the person Suzie had envisioned when they were kids. Down-to-earth. Kindhearted. Easy to get along with. Modest. Cheerful. And, for the most part, happy. Jan was so at ease with life that she owned a cell phone, but, Suzie later said, she “never checked her messages,” or even used it if she didn’t have to. And that was Jan. She’d just as well sit outside, enjoy her new pool and the kids, and leave the darn cell phone inside, where it belonged. That, or hang out with her dogs, whom she loved greatly. Whenever Jan was outside by the pool or hanging around, maybe weeding the garden, walking around the land, her dogs went with her.

  When the pool was officially opened on the weekend of July 4, 2008, Jan was the first one to call and tell Suzie she could use it anytime she wanted.

  Jan and Michael Roseboro had invited Suzie, her fiancé, Gary Frees, and her family to North Carolina that summer, and Suzie accepted. There were other family members going, too, Suzie said later. Cousins and brothers and friends. The group, including Michael and Jan and their kids, was large.

  “It was a huge house,” Suzie explained, describing the place where they were supposed to stay at the Outer Banks. “It was a very, very huge house. Everybody had a suite with a Jacuzzi and a fireplace….” Her brother-in-law, Michael Roseboro, Suzie recalled, had even pulled her aside one day and mentioned his plans. Michael said he “planned on renewing his vows with Jan down there and he was making arrangements to do so….” He said it was going “to be on the beach.” Apparently, like Angie Funk, Jan was a big fan of the ocean. She adored the feeling of sand between her toes, the warm breeze and constant hum of the water crashing into the shoreline. This would have fit well into her ideal day on the beach: renewing her wedding vows, making new promises of love, hanging out with friends and family. To Jan, it might have meant that her husband was taking their life together seriously once again.

  Or maybe Jan would have decided not to go through with it at all.

  “That will make her very happy,” Michael told Suzie, meaning the beach setting.

  Suzie agreed.

  Brian Binkley, Jan’s brother, had been close to his sister throughout the years. Living in Pittsburgh, Brian, a twenty-two-year CPA by trade, enjoyed those times with Jan, his nieces, nephews, and brother-in-law. They got along well. Yet living far away from Denver, not seeing everyone as much as he would have liked, afforded Brian the opportunity to view the changes in family members perhaps more objectively than those involved on a daily basis could. Brian noticed things whenever he got together with his sister and her family.

  “I think we had a great relationship,” Brian recalled. “I can tell you the first part of 2008, everybody really enjoyed moving into the new house. Everybody was happy. We had a lot of celebrations there.” And if work hadn’t called him out, Michael Roseboro was at every one of those parties and get-togethers, generally manning the bar, cracking jokes, drinking, and smoking cigarettes.

  The consummate dad and husband.

  It was June, Brian explained later, during a trip he took to see his sister and her family, that Brian noticed a considerable change in his brother-in-law.

  “I started seeing a difference in some of the characteristics of Mike,” Brian recalled. “There were just some changes, some changes that I saw in terms of discussing things with him and Jan, and raising the children, things in terms of behaviors with the dogs.”

  There was a certain “possessiveness,” Brian shared, on his brother-in-law’s part, he had noticed. It stood out. Knowing Michael Roseboro for more than twenty years, Brian said he had never seen him act that way before.

  “There were changes in his personality.”

  Brian Binkley recalled one instance that took place. Brian couldn’t say exactly what he had been talking to his brother-in-law about, but at some point during the conversation, Michael shouted, “This is my house!” in a voice Brian was unfamiliar with.

  “It was a possessiveness I had never seen in Mike before.”

  Pressure. Roseboro’s two lives were closing in on him and he was flying off the handle at the slightest thing.

  Some in town who knew Michael Roseboro were struck when, in late June and early July, Roseboro’s SUV was seen parked at the downtown neighborhood bar. It was one of those local joints—some might call it a “dive”—that working men go to get their drunk on and talk about what’s going on in town. But there was Roseboro, the local wealthy undertaker, a new goatee, a smile from ear to ear, a cocky nervousness about him few could ever recall him exhibiting, bellied up to the bar, ordering beers, stubbing out cigarettes, mixing it up with the locals as if he belonged there.

  “The type of person he was,” Richard Pope later said, “that was not the type of bar you’d expect Mike to go to. It was just odd. That’s all. I had never seen that before.”

  “Jan walked in on him one time,” Angie Funk later told police, “when we were on the phone and Michael immediately hung up.”

  Angie asked him about the incident a day later.

  “Jan was not upset,” Roseboro insisted to his lover, as if it were business as usual.

  Sometime later, Angie asked, “Does anyone ever hit on you?”

  It was a question rooted in jealousy. The two of them were cheating on their spouses with each other, and Angie was insecure, believing that Michael might or might not be cheating on her with someone else?

  “Some woman hit my leg on an airplane once,” Roseboro said, explaining that he took it as an invitation to a conversation.

  “But he has never admitted to me,” Angie told police, “that he had other affairs.”

  As the relationship between Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk took on this insecure dynamic near the end of June, Angie and Michael talked, she later confirmed to police, about their spouses.

  “I figured Jan would find out about the affair,” Angie recalled to Keith Neff, “due to the phone records. But I never talked to Michael about what we would do when our spouses found out.”

  Sneaking around, Angie admitted, was “hard on my home life.” She said she never discussed with Roseboro what would happen to the funeral home or custody of his children after he left Jan and married her.

  “I assumed he would leave the house to Jan,” Angie said.

  On the morning of June 30, 2008, Angie Funk sat at her work computer composing yet another string of e-mails to her lover. The first e-mail was more of the same promises to love and cherish you and your kids for the rest of my life.

  Flirtatious gibberish.

  Mike Roseboro responded with another one of his quirky, adolescent turns of phrase, telling Angie how there was “no ‘I’ in love.” He mentioned the shower again, before telling Angie it was becoming increasingly hard on him to be away from her for one minute. When they were together, he said, she’d be there working with him, playing, sleeping. They’d spend every second of every day together.

  In return, Angie said she knew she was going to have to wait, and the thought of having him to herself one day kept her going.

  Mi
chael said in response that he didn’t want to wait any longer. Something needed to be done—and fast. He admitted that she had turned him “into a babbling and giddy teenager….”

  They made plans in the next series of e-mails to meet at the Cloister later that day.

  Roseboro said he was “smiling just thinking about” the rendezvous.

  On July 1, Mike Roseboro e-mailed first, telling Angie how seeing her in the morning at Turkey Hill was the highlight of his day. He carried on about how beautiful she was and how he could never, at this point, “live without” her. It wasn’t going to be possible to go on without having Angie Funk by his side.

  It seemed the strain weighed on Roseboro to do something in the order of moving his relationship with Angie to the next level.

  Angie, in turn, ratcheted things up by telling Michael in her response that she needed to wake up next to him and go to sleep by his side. That she couldn’t “wait to be Mrs. Roseboro” and “share everything.”

  Roseboro said he would never squander an “opportunity to make love” to Angie when they were together. He explained that she would never have to worry about him “being in the mood” because just a gentle kiss from her aroused him. Either they spent a night together—although no record of it exists—or Roseboro watched as Angie went out to get the morning newspaper, because he told Angie how gorgeous she was in her pajamas, her “hair undone, no makeup at all.” He called Angie the most “beautiful woman in the world” and professed that he was going to be her husband, no matter what stood in their way.

  31

  Angie Funk fell deeper and deeper for the fantasy Michael Roseboro described, both in his daily e-mail dispatches and the conversations they had in person. For Angie Lynn Funk, Roseboro represented a man out of her league. Although she had fixated on and dreamed of being with him, she thought she would never get him. She told Roseboro that “in a million years” she would have never “thought” of being with him, especially not in the capacity their relationship had grown to between June and July (talking about getting married and raising a Brady Bunch–type family). Still, whenever she saw Roseboro, maybe around town or during her daily walks throughout the years, Angie said she had felt there was some sort of “connection” between them, beyond a general attraction. And here she was, now writing in e-mails to the same man she had fantasized about and had viewed as a catch beyond her means.