It was like a dream.
Roseboro later admitted that he was intimidated by Angie Funk from the first moment they had met at the Denver Parade many years before he had made the first phone call. It was a day both Angie and Mike had gone back to in their e-mails from time to time.
* * *
“I’m Michael Roseboro,” the distinguished undertaker said, sticking out his hand that day of the parade. As he stared at Angie, Roseboro later admitted, he was thinking what it would feel like to kiss her and get to know her better. He had seen Angie around town. He had noticed that when they stared at each other, both had given that second look, a slight moment of hesitation in the eyes as they turned away. He said thinking about being with Angie back then (five years prior to their hooking up) was a “dream”—and he never imagined he would one day “act on” his “impulses.” From that moment, Roseboro explained, whenever he saw Angie, either walking into the Turkey Hill store alone (or with her friend), or just around the neighborhood (even with her husband), his “palms would get sweaty” and his “heart would race….”
He had to have her.
They had come so far since those days of playing games. From meeting at a parade, to “flirtatious fun,” as Angie put it, to that lunch invitation Roseboro had made on May 29, 2008, to having sex.
From motionless to mach one in just weeks.
Before Angie had kids with Randall Funk, she and her husband traveled a lot, former family members and friends said, taking cruises and visiting other touristy spots throughout the globe. Angie Funk was not a person who talked all that much about her dreams, goals, and what she wanted out of life beyond the normal material stuff most of us cling to. Instead, Angie was into talking about sports, the Pittsburgh Steelers—her favorite sports team by far—in particular. The other thing Angie never mentioned was sex. “I never heard her once talk about it,” said a former friend. It was either something that wasn’t on her mind, or something she’d rather do than talk about. But it was clear to many around Angie as she grew up and into her early years of being married to her first husband that she was definitely into the romance part of relationships. The long walks, arm in arm. Candlelight dinners. Expensive trips to exotic locales. Naughty talk.
“Big wedding person,” said two sources. “Angie was into planning weddings and having extravagant weddings herself.” And when she planned a wedding with a friend or family member, Angie took over. “She liked being in control.”
Even demanded it.
There came a time in early July when Michael Roseboro mentioned to his lover that he was going to be gone for a week in August. He had to bring it up. Face the fact of disappearing with his wife and family. He and Jan and the gang were going. He couldn’t back out of the trip. Angie Funk needed to know.
But how much would Casanova divulge?
“We’re going for a week,” Roseboro explained. “I won’t get to talk to you or anything. It’s a family trip. It’s no big deal, really.” He further added that “everybody in his (and Jan’s) family” was going with them on the trip. He talked it down, Angie later implied, as though it wasn’t anything special. A family obligation he was being forced to fulfill. It was nothing. Same as Niagara. There would be scores of kids and others around. Angie had no need to worry about anything.
Had she known that the trip to the Outer Banks was actually being planned around her boyfriend renewing his vows with his wife, Angie later said, “I would not have got involved.” But she was involved—in a big way. The main reason, Angie said, was because Roseboro had repeatedly told her that he and Jan were together only for the kids’ sake. Nothing else.
“There was no love there,” Angie told police.
Two ships …
A couple staying married to raise a family.
Still, the trip was on the calendar, and although “it created some anxiety” for Angie, “there was nothing,” Angie later said, “that [I] could do about it.”
The topic of what Jan would do when she found out about the affair came up between Roseboro and Angie a few times, she claimed. Angie was no dummy. She was a woman. She knew women thought about those sorts of things. Plus, with four kids on the line, a huge house, all that money, a family business. Running around with Angie and ultimately leaving Jan, Angie realized, Michael Roseboro was looking at potentially losing a lot. The question became: was he willing to risk it all?
“If she finds out about us, she’s going to take the kids and everything,” Angie told Roseboro one night, reminding her lover how much was at stake. “A woman scorned usually, you know, especially a wife, can hurt you pretty bad sometimes. Bleed you dry.”
Roseboro thought about this. He was concerned about the family business, sure. So much so, he responded to Angie, “I am going to see about putting the funeral home in my dad’s name—that way she cannot touch it.”
Five years prior to the affair with Angie Funk (and presumably many other women in between), while Michael Roseboro was having an affair with Liz Cannon (pseudonym), whom he would text and talk to by cell, same as he was with Angie, Jan found out about the affair after going through the cell phone bills one day. When Roseboro told Cannon about Jan uncovering their little ongoing tryst, he discussed the financial consequences of getting a divorce from Jan, a 2009 court stipulation reported. More than that, Roseboro’s father found out—and he wasn’t happy about it. “My father explained to me,” Roseboro told Cannon, “that if I continued the affair … he was going to divide the funeral business into quarters between himself, my mother, my sister, Melissa, and me!” Considering he was married to Jan and a divorce might split that quarter into an eighth, Roseboro expressed to Cannon that “one half of one fourth is not enough to live on.” Another woman Roseboro knew years before he met Cannon, according to a second stipulation (both of which Roseboro ultimately signed, thus inserting his stamp of validity on each document), heard him bemoan the fact that he “could not get a divorce from [Jan] because he would ‘lose his kids.’”
So Roseboro had some trepidation regarding the stakes of committing adultery and getting caught; he knew damn well that, in his case, he stood to lose just about everything he had.
On Tuesday, July 1, 2008, Angie e-mailed her lover. As the morning wore on, they became engaged in an e-conversation about how the relationship had developed over the course of the past several weeks. Angie said Roseboro had “composed himself really well” during that period when he was stealthily watching her from afar. She called him a “gentleman.” She said it was still hard for her to imagine that the Michael Alan Roseboro actually loved her. And now that they were actually together, the thought of it all was something she was having a tough time wrapping her brain around.
Roseboro responded with one of the longer e-mails he would ever send to Angie Funk. He talked about “a journey” his “heart” was taking him on—one he thought he could never have expected in his lifetime. He said it was a “ride that [he] never wanted to see end.” Part of the allure driving the relationship, he added, was to “see what the future holds for us.” He couldn’t wait to see what it was; nor could he wait to “roll over,” as he put it, each morning and tell Angie how much he loved her. “I know it is going to happen,” he added, before saying how Angie “rocked” his “world” and that he was in “awe” of her.
They saw each other the following morning at Turkey Hill. Roseboro explained in an e-mail later on that morning how he “could cry every time” Angie smiled at him inside that tiny convenience store with the dirty floors and coffee-stained counters. She had always looked “so perfect” in the mornings, he said. Farther along in the e-mail, Roseboro gave Angie the website URL for a resort in Turtle Island, Fiji. He said he could have never seen himself horseback riding along the beach in Fiji, but Angie had brought that romantic, free-spirited side out of him, and he now looked forward to it. He sketched out how great it was going to be to ride horses side by side along the shoreline, the water crashing at the hooves
of their horses, the two of them holding hands as the horses walked slowly behind them.
The next series of e-mails were a combination of the transparency most adulterous affairs brought out of those involved, not to mention the utter disregard for the shame Roseboro had. He carried on and on, for example, about how he had never felt loved and how his love for Angie had no limitations. He never considered that making love to a woman “could be so consuming” and “passionate” and “tender” and “gentle” and “wonderful.” He never thought it would be possible to work with his wife, but now that he knew Angie’s love, that idea was not only a possibility, it was going to be a reality: apparently, Angie was going to become part of the family business as soon as he dumped Jan and married her.
Beyond that, Roseboro said he was feeling emotions he had never experienced in his marriage with Jan. Near the end of the e-mail, if he had to, Roseboro said, he would “die for” Angie.
That last e-mail had made Angie fight back tears of emotion while at work, according to what Roseboro wrote on the morning of July 3. Angie was so overcome by the tenderness and love Roseboro had shared, it took everything she had not to cry in front of the girls and guys in her office.
In response, Michael Roseboro said he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to be “completely open and honest with” her. No matter what. And if there was ever a doubt in her mind about the love he felt, Roseboro wrote that he would gladly give up “everything I have if that’s what it” took to be “your husband.”
This sparked some anxiety on Angie’s part. She didn’t want to, obviously, hold that much power over someone’s existence. In saying this, it would appear that Angie Funk was grounded more in reality than her smitten lover. She said she would never ask him to give up everything, because sooner or later he would resent her for doing it. There would come a day, Angie was certain, when Roseboro would throw it all back in her face. She didn’t want their relationship to begin with this dark cloud hovering over it. She was glad she made Roseboro happy, Angie wrote, but “I am not the only thing that makes you happy.” She assumed his kids provided a warm feeling in his heart that she could never hold a candle to.
Michael Roseboro never answered the e-mail with any sort of antidotal response to her trepidation and concern.
July Fourth weekend came. On Saturday afternoon, Angie Funk and Michael Roseboro met and had sex. By Monday morning, Roseboro was giddy again, talking about how much fun he was having with Angie, sneaking around and hanging out together. There’s no doubt that part of the thrill for Roseboro was in running around town, hiding from their spouses and friends: that double-life scenario he had been living for a decade or more. There was one time when Roseboro met Angie at a local Costco shopping mart in Lancaster County. They were frolicking around the megastore like an old married couple shopping for their family, when Roseboro spotted somebody he knew, and Angie conspicuously slipped away from him so as not to be noticed, later having the audacity to tell DA Craig Stedman, downplaying the moment, “I went on my way … [because] I had shopping to do and I wanted to get home.”
From the hundreds of pages of e-mails left behind by Roseboro and Angie, considering how fast the relationship progressed and how immature and terribly lust-struck Michael Roseboro sounded during this period, it’s quite clear he was having the time of his life, screwing Angie Funk any chance he got, while maintaining that family man image at home. In his mind, Roseboro had the best of both worlds. He wrote Angie that he had never thought of ever looking forward to Mondays, but because he could see her at the store, talk on the phone, text and e-mail all day long, Mondays were now well worth getting up for. That “Saturday afternooner,” he added, coining a phrase in an e-mail on Monday morning, “didn’t hurt either.”
Wink-wink.
What Roseboro didn’t know was that a turn of events was about to take place in his life with Angie that would change everything. Long before Jan Roseboro was murdered, a set of circumstances began in Michael Roseboro’s life with Angie, placing a tremendous burden on the man, with the potential to cause a great crisis, or scandal, not to mention embarrassment.
This, mind you, beyond the affair with Angie being exposed.
While Angie was beginning to show signs that all of the lust-filled, teenage-inspired romantic e-chitchat was fun and sounded good, her mind raced. This as Roseboro sent her messages that included gems of prose to the tune of, “You have unleashed the lion in me….”
Angie wrote and asked Michael Roseboro what time he was leaving for his first funeral that morning. She wanted to know if it was at a church or the funeral home? Apparently, Angie Funk wanted to attend. She needed to see her man.
It sounded urgent.
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Every problem that came between Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk, the undertaker quickly learned, could be resolved with another overstated, oversexed e-mail, perhaps opening with a scene of them holding hands and running into the sunset along the shoreline while dolphins crested on the horizon. Michael kept sketching the image of the dream Angie now believed in, without letting up. On July 7, for instance, the obsession of the day became Angie’s face. It was “so beautiful,” Michael said in the beginning of his first e-mail. He felt the love she had for him in every smile, adding that her “eyes sparkle,” even though, he said, he could “see the naughty side coming out” of that surprisingly subtle twinkle. Angie was “magnificent” this morning. His “dream come true.” She was “every tear that” he shed. Just a simple touch by this woman sent a shiver down Roseboro’s spine.
Angie never documented or later talked about why she wanted to see her lover so urgently that morning. Maybe she just wanted to be with him. Or perhaps ask Michael Roseboro what was going on at home: was he making any progress with that little problem of having a wife and four kids?
But the following morning, July 8, a day both Angie and Roseboro would have trouble forgetting in the weeks, months, and even years to come, Roseboro had sex on his mind. When he saw Angie at Turkey Hill, he said an hour later in an e-mail, he had pictured her not wearing any panties. He felt so lucky, he claimed, standing there, mixing his coffee, chatting with townies, watching Angie waltz in, knowing that someday she was going to be his wife—and that later on that afternoon, she was going to be servicing him with that killer body.
Michael kept feeding Angie little nuggets to keep her going. Here, this morning, he said that when the time was “right, my love for you will be a secret to nobody.” Beyond telling Angie that every kiss was something born out of a deep passion he had never felt in life before meeting her, he said it made him “weak in the knees” to touch her lips with his—“literally.” He was speechless, he added, but obviously that was just a turn of phrase, because Roseboro couldn’t stop writing, texting, or talking on the phone to Angie. He couldn’t wait, he said, until their lives became “one life.” Near the end of that over-the-top e-mail, he said pointedly, “I am going to marry you….”
Angie bought it all.
Hook. Line. Sinker.
Any worry or fear she had could always be wiped away by a few morning e-mails from her lover. Michael Roseboro, the accomplished cheater, had a way of making everything sound so perfect.
Angie wrote back explaining how she had “read that e-mail you sent several times….” She called it “beautiful,” same as the love they shared for each other. There were times, Angie Funk continued, when it was overwhelming to believe that “you are so in love with me.” Here, in this e-mail, she admitted to having been “attracted” to Michael Roseboro “for years.”
With words alone, Roseboro had turned Angie back around and kept her focused not on the future, the next day, next hour, or the Outer Banks, but now.
The moment.
Writing back at 8:29 A.M., Michael Roseboro broke into a diatribe about what the term “soul mates” meant to him. It was so exaggerated, he must have felt a pang of childish volatility in him as he wrote it. He used every cliché associated with lov
e imaginable, not sparing a word.
They made plans to meet for sex that afternoon.
“Yeah,” Angie later said, “July eighth, somewhere in that time frame,” speaking of an afternoon sexual romp she would be forced to remember.
How was it that Angie Funk was so sure it was that day she had gotten pregnant with Michael Roseboro’s child?
“Because that’s the only time when the condom broke,” she later said in court.
Broke?
Well, she added next, “Yeah. Or came off.”
Angie wasn’t sure which. She explained that when that mistake happened, she and Michael discussed it, but she could not recall any details about their conversation.
Others later speculated, based on knowing Angie, that she became impatient and made sure the condom didn’t work the way that it should have. Or told Michael to forget about the condom altogether.
A source close to Angie believed that Angie “needed this baby.”
Before the affair with Michael started, Angie would give subtle hints within the family that she had her eye on someone in particular—this, mind you, while still married to Randall Funk. “There’s this guy,” she said once to a family member. “We’ve had coffee…. He’s really nice.”
That same source later observed, “I never put two and two together until later. It was the way she said it. She made it seem like they were ‘friends.’”
Love Her To Death Page 16