Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  The evidence the pathologist uncovered pointed to Jan’s murderer having begun by putting her in a carotid neck choke hold. In cutting off blood and oxygen to the brain via Jan’s carotid arteries, those two main veins on each side of the neck that throb under stressful conditions or from a tight necktie, Jan would have passed out quickly. This would have allowed Jan’s killer to fake the drowning then, which everyone agreed was Roseboro’s plan from the start.

  Likely, as Jan struggled with her killer inside the pool, she scratched him on the face by reaching behind herself as he continued to strangle her. (This theory lines up with the scream Cassandra Pope heard that night, which, she said, came from that area of the yard at about this time, ten-thirty.)

  The scream indicated Jan was confronted and murdered outside the home, as opposed to down in the basement, or in a section of the house near the pool deck. No one could have heard her scream if Michael Roseboro accosted his wife in the basement. On top of that, the deep gash on Jan’s head behind her ear was likely caused by her head hitting the corner of one of the large planters next to the pool as she struggled and/or fell backward, or was simply bashed over the head with some sort of weapon never recovered.

  With Jan bleeding and perhaps unconscious, Michael needed to get her into the pool so he could call 911 and put that accident theory into motion. As Jan was tossed into the water, there’s an indication she “came to” while in the water. She was definitely alive and breathing while in the water; the soapy liquid released from her lungs during the autopsy proved that.

  The question became, then: did Jan Roseboro wake up entirely, or was she partially awake and unable to fight off her attacker?

  The minor bruising found all over Jan’s body indicated a struggle. Or at least a partial fight on Jan’s part.

  No doubt about it: Jan Roseboro wanted to live.

  She fought for her life until the end.

  With blood all over the deck of the pool, one would have to ask why no blood was found when the CSI Unit sprayed luminol, or when the first responders took a walk around and looked for evidence of an accident or a struggle.

  How had Michael Roseboro gotten rid of all the blood?

  Being a funeral director, a person who dealt with blood on a daily basis while embalming bodies, Roseboro was well schooled in how to clean up blood.

  Why weren’t any traces of chemicals found, the same chemicals he had access to at the funeral home? All that rain, and a crime scene that the ECTPD didn’t get to until nearly a day after Jan Roseboro was murdered.

  41

  Angie Funk was worried when she didn’t hear from Michael Roseboro on the morning of July 23, 2008. Roseboro had always called, every morning during the week, near five forty-five, as soon as Randall Funk left for work.

  Not hearing from him, Angie dialed Michael’s cell phone.

  It went straight to voice mail. Michael had his phone turned off.

  As the morning wore on, and a hazy sun burned off the cloud cover, Angie called her lover twice, she admitted, between nine-thirty and ten forty-five.

  She was unable to reach him.

  “I hadn’t heard anything [from him],” Angie later testified, “and I was starting to get a little worried, ‘cause it wasn’t like him not to call me.”

  Interestingly enough, Angie got into her car and drove by the Roseboro home out on West Main Street. Moving slowly by the house, looking at all the cars and people roaming around, Angie became even more concerned, she later said.

  “I was trying to get in touch with Michael,” Angie told police, “because I knew something was wrong.”

  She drove back home and called the funeral home. When he wasn’t at the funeral home, Roseboro would roll the calls over to his home phone.

  “Hello?” Michael said, picking up the phone call at his home.

  “What’s going on?” Angie asked breathlessly.

  “I cannot talk. Jan died. It was a drowning,” he said. Angie was “in shock.” She had never heard Roseboro sound so static, flatlined. The guy was generally upbeat and drooling when they spoke, making jokes about what she would wear, how she smelled, what time they were going to meet up.

  But not today. Michael Roseboro had his hands full.

  During an interview with Detective Keith Neff, Angie said her first thought, after hearing that Jan had (conveniently) died, was, “Oh, crap!”Then: “I did not want to be a full-time mother of six children. I did not want any more children.”

  At the time that she was thinking about having just been saddled with Jan’s kids, Angie Funk was carrying Roseboro’s fifth child.

  “What happened?” Angie asked Michael, wondering how Jan had died.

  Roseboro gave Angie that familiar mantra he had been repeating to everyone in law enforcement, along with anyone else who asked: “I woke up,” he told Angie on that morning, “saw a light on, went outside, and saw Jan in the pool.”

  “He did not go into detail,” Angie explained during that interview with Neff. “He was never ‘broken up’ about what happened, but he sounded upset when I first talked to him.”

  Speaking to Michael during those days right after the murder, Angie said that she just assumed he had told police about their affair (and that’s why, she seemed to suggest, she never came forward). And yet as the ECTPD and Detective Jan Walters, of the LCDA’s Office, split up and began interviewing friends and family connected to Jan and Michael Roseboro, not one person reported the affair. Even after Angie Funk’s name was brought into the discourse of the case, Roseboro still held firm and told people that any suggestion of an affair was a lie. A terrible misunderstanding. Roseboro had told family and friends that Angie was nothing more than a woman helping him plan the renewal of his marital vows to the woman he truly loved, Jan.

  Later on that day after Jan’s murder, Michael called Angie.

  “Hey …”

  “Michael.”

  “I just wanted to hear your voice,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “I need more time,” he stated.

  Angie presumed he was saying this because Jan had died such a tragic death—and he needed to be with his family. She completely understood. No pressure.

  “Yes,” Angie responded.

  “I just need to be in your arms,” Roseboro said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Michael.”

  42

  Shawn Roseboro had just lost his house and his job. Times were tough on the kid. Much of it, Shawn later said, he had brought on himself with his drinking. But still, there seemed to be a “bad luck” vibe all around him during the summer of 2008. He could feel it, and it was making his own selfish behavior worse.

  On the day after Jan Roseboro was murdered, Shawn was alone. His sister and her family had gone to the beach. He was staying at her house. The phone rang. It was his dad.

  “Mike found Jan in the pool, and she’s dead.”

  Was there really any other way to put it?

  Shawn recalled that he “hit the floor before the phone did—I lost it at that point.”

  After picking himself up off the ground, Shawn let his anger go and punched a hole through the door.

  “I didn’t know what to do with my emotions at that point.”

  With no one to lean on, Shawn said, he logged onto Lancaster Online, a local blog, that afternoon, just to see what was being said about Jan’s death. While reading and thinking and reminiscing about Jan, Shawn started drinking.

  Heavily.

  It was one of the only ways to deaden all the pain. Shawn lost Pa just a month prior, he said, which was devastating enough, even though the guy had lived a long life. Now the only person in the family who “totally got” who he was and understood his feelings was gone.

  What am I going to do?

  “When Pa died, it was at the peak of everything going on in my life, and I was, like, completely numb. Jan dying on top of that—well, everything just clicked in at once.”

  In his h
eart, Shawn said, he questioned it a little: Jan’s death, that is—the way she had died. Over and over, he asked himself: How could Jan drown?

  It seemed so illogical. So impossible. So … unreal.

  “But I never thought anything else.”

  No one did—at least in those early days when Michael Roseboro was being questioned by Keith Neff, Larry Martin, and now Jan Walters—and the secret of Angie Funk was still being kept under wraps.

  Jan and Shawn had lost touch for about a month before her death, making the impact of it even that much more overwhelming for him. Two days before Jan died, Shawn had sent Sam, Jan’s oldest son, a MySpace message, telling him to give his new phone number to Jan and to have her call him.

  “So that was—that was,” Shawn recalled, choking up as the memory came back, “very hard on me. Jan was gone. I didn’t know what to do.”

  When Charlotte Moyer, Jan’s married-into-the-family cousin, showed up at the house that morning after Jan’s death, she walked in and spied Sam crying. He looked terribly upset. And why wouldn’t he be? His mother …

  Vanished like dust.

  They sat on the ottoman at first and talked. Charlotte wanted to be there for the child as much as she could. She had known Jan since Jan came into the world. Charlotte was married into the family by the time Jan was born in 1963. Charlotte had watched Jan grow from an infant into a wonderful adult with a family of her own.

  After speaking with Sam, Charlotte walked into the sunroom. She sat, shaking her head, wondering.

  Michael came into the room after seeing Charlotte sitting there.

  He sat down.

  “We were just sitting out there by the pool,” Michael said after a moment of silence between them. “I wasn’t feeling well. I went into the house. I had asked Jan if I should turn off the tiki lights, you know, put them out. Jan said no. She said she was going to stay out there a little while longer.”

  Several parts of this conversation, as Charlotte remembered it, were far different from what Roseboro had told police. For one, he said Jan was sick. Two, he never told the police that Jan said she wanted the tiki lights left lit.

  Charlotte asked Michael what happened next.

  “I went to bed, and a bit later, I got up and the tiki lights were still on and the kitchen light was on.”

  He’d never mentioned this to police.

  Charlotte thought he was going to end the conversation there, but Michael said one other thing. “She had probably fallen into the pool and drowned,” he told Charlotte. Then, “She had a contusion on the left back of her head.”

  That word, Charlotte said later, “stuck in my mind….”

  “Contusion.”

  What’s more, after saying this, Roseboro just up and walked out of the room, abruptly ending the conversation.

  Thinking about it later, Charlotte considered his demeanor to be “very matter-of-fact, not any kind of emotion….”

  Later that morning, with everyone roaming about the grounds of the house and inside, Charlotte and Michael passed each other. They were walking down the hallway. Michael Roseboro stopped for a brief moment as Charlotte got close to him.

  “Nice haircut,” he said, complimenting her.

  43

  By noon on July 23, 2008, word had worked its way through town that Jan Roseboro was dead. An improbable accident in the pool was the story being shouted back and forth across fuel pumps and from behind coffee counters. But grinding in the grist of the town gossip and rumor mills was a far different scenario.

  Cassandra Pope called her mother, Marcia, who, with her husband, had been friends and neighbors of Jan and Michael Roseboro’s for years when they all lived next to one another on the opposite end of town.

  “Jan’s dead,” Cassie said. “Suzie said she hit her head maybe, but they weren’t really sure.”

  Suzie’s husband had died of a heart attack at a young age. Cassie said that Suzie mentioned she thought maybe the same thing might have happened to Jan.

  Heart attack … a slip, fall, and then she drowned?

  They just didn’t know.

  Marcia got on the phone and called a neighbor, who had also known Jan rather well.

  “Oh, my God …,” the neighbor said.

  They talked for a few moments.

  Two hours later, Marcia’s neighbor called back. “It just hit online that Jan was murdered!”

  “Murdered? You’re kidding,” Marcia said. “Oh, my goodness—Mike did it!”

  Where had that come from?

  It was the first thought she had, Marcia later said, after hearing Jan might have been murdered. The Michael Roseboro whom Marcia had known all those years—the guy she had seen around the neighborhood, helping newly appointed widows and widowers deal with the loss of their spouses, that same guy who liked to be the bartender at all the neighborhood parties—had murdered his sweet wife, a good friend of hers. She was certain of it, for some strange reason. This was how the town reacted during those early moments, Marcia and her husband later said. The women in town were all under the impression that Michael had done it; while the men gave Michael the benefit of the doubt. For those who truly knew Michael and Jan, his reputation for sleeping with anything he could get his hands on was old news. So killing Jan now didn’t make sense in terms of an affair as motive. The guy, after all, had cheated on the woman for years.

  “When you talk about small town,” Marcia, a romance novelist by trade, said, “you have to talk about Denver being part of Reinholds, because they are connected. Even though the Roseboros’ new home was in Reinholds, everyone called it Denver. Jan and Mike were … Well, let’s say I have never seen them as ‘the perfect couple.’”

  “But they appeared to be the ‘perfect couple,’” Cassandra Pope remarked. From her point of view, as a child watching Jan and Michael from afar, the Roseboros seemed to have it all together. Living next door, renting from Jan, Cassie had watched them build the new house. She recalled Michael and Jan from family and neighborhood gatherings, cookouts and block parties. They appeared to be in love. Later, though, Cassie saw something different. They had grown apart. A couple who had their individual roles inside the family rubric, played the part, but lived separate lives.

  “Everyone knew that Mike was running around on Jan,” Marcia added. “Jan was the mother figure, the Earth Mother. She wasn’t out gardening with a big hat and gloves, but she did plant a garden the year she died and she was very excited about it. Jan enjoyed being a mother. She lived for those kids. That’s the horrible part. She loved kids. When Cassandra had her baby, Jan was right there. She went out and got Toys ‘Я’ Us gift cards for the baby, and she was positive it was a girl. After Cassandra had her, whenever Jan saw Cassandra outside with the baby, she’d run over and hold her and play with her.”

  Michael Roseboro was never around. Always at work. Or “out.”

  “It seemed to me,” Cassie’s husband, Richard Pope, said, “during those months leading up to her death, when Jan was home, Mike was gone. And when Mike was home, Jan wasn’t around. I don’t know if it was planned to be that way or it just worked out. But that’s what I saw while living next door.”

  Being home with her new baby during those days after Jan was murdered, Cassie saw much more, she later said. And now that Jan was dead, Cassie was scared to death of this enigma of a man next door whom she knew only from childhood and from what she remembered. Roseboro now seemed to be this dark figure, the undertaker who possibly murdered his wife. And as the hours passed and rumors buzzed, Cassie and Richard watched the house, where Michael Roseboro, they said, was acting strange.

  Looking out their window one morning, Cassie and Richard looked on as Michael, who was bent over inside Jan’s garden, stood there as though he was pulling weeds. He had a bunch of grass in his hands. This, while a man Cassie presumed to be one of his lawyers snapped digital photographs of him. After the photo op concluded, Roseboro righted himself, brushed off his hands, and then walked into t
he house, Cassie and Richard said.

  What in the heck are they doing? Cassie asked herself.

  Richard said something similar.

  “They have a gardener,” Cassie recalled. “I don’t know why he would be out there pulling weeds!”

  The Roseboros’ next-door neighbors were a little uneasy, anyway, considering that they believed a murder had taken place not one hundred yards from Cassie and her newborn. There were cops in unmarked cars sitting in their driveway, watching the Roseboro house at times. There also was a cop roaming around the neighborhood. Detectives had been by to take a statement, and Cassie and Richard had told them things. Cassie had described that scream she heard the night Jan died.

  What would Roseboro do, Cassie wondered, if he knew I was talking to the police?

  44

  Jan’s best friend, Rebecca Donahue, was sitting outside on the little patio by the pool with Michael Roseboro and his father, Ralph. It was one of those shake-the-head-and-wonder-what-the-hell-happened moments. You turn on CNN and see that some boyfriend beat the snot out of a little baby and the child died. You shake your head. You hear that some dude dressed like a science teacher walked into a building and mowed down ten people with an automatic rifle because he lost his job. You shake your head. You find out your best friend, a woman you knew to be a fairly decent swimmer, drowned in her own pool. You cry first; then, like Rebecca Donahue, you shake your head and wonder, How in the heck did this happen?

  Rebecca was in a state of shock, to say the least. Her friend was here yesterday. Today she was dead. It made little sense. Jan was the sweetest person in the world. One of those women who comes along and changes your life for the better. Someone who cared about her community, having volunteered and supported various causes that truly helped people.

  Michael was staring at the ground. Ralph and Rebecca sat, speechless. Then, finally, Michael spoke up. “We were going to renew our vows,” he said, “on the beach while on vacation.”