Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  On Monday, July 28, investigators confiscated several items from the Roseboro Funeral Home: computers, fax machines, four Maxwell CD-Rs with cases, some paperwork, and other potential pieces of evidence.

  Throughout the day, investigators read e-mail after e-mail—those that weren’t double deleted and needed to be recovered via computer forensics. In just about every e-mail either Angie Funk or Michael Roseboro sent, that blazing, obsessive nature of their affair became evident. This gave the team a clear indication that Angie and Michael were much more than mere casual sexual partners. From the e-mails, it was apparent they were planning a life together.

  Angie turned over several e-mails she had printed and stuffed in a file at work—the remainder they uncovered from her computer during a forensic search.

  Meanwhile, Craig Stedman and Kelly Sekula discovered a vital piece of information that would fit congenially into the matrix of circumstantial evidence they were busy weighing. In speaking with Brian Binkley, Jan’s brother, it was discovered Binkley had learned that Jan had been murdered after he arrived on scene at the house a day after Jan’s death. Brian was talking to a police officer he knew. But Jan’s brother had kept this fact to himself for a time. What struck Brian as odd as the week progressed was that his brother-in-law never—not once—mentioned this fact to anyone in the family: the idea that police believed Jan had been murdered and had not drowned accidentally. Many found out via the media. Michael Roseboro had known about it at least twenty-four hours before anyone. Why wouldn’t he go running to family members bemoaning the shocking revelation that his wife had not died accidentally but had, in fact, been murdered? Why wouldn’t Roseboro be enraged by this information?

  “One of the conclusions we came to based on that information,” Stedman said later, “was that Mr. Roseboro had murdered his wife. But this was not super significant. It was one more piece of circumstantial evidence.”

  Late afternoon or early evening, Monday, July 28, Angie Funk went out for a walk in the Walnut Street neighborhood near Sixth Street. As she sauntered down the block, Michael Roseboro phoned her.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.” A car drove by speedily as Angie answered. She was just down the road from the funeral home.

  “Was that a car in the background?” Roseboro asked. “Where are you?”

  “Just a few blocks from the funeral home,” she explained.

  “Can you meet me real quick out back? …”

  There was an alcove in back of the funeral home, a place to slip into without being seen—perfect if you’re two people embroiled in a murder investigation and really shouldn’t be spotted together. How would it look, after all, Michael Roseboro and his mistress embracing days after his wife had been murdered?

  Angie walked toward the back parking lot of the funeral home. Roseboro was standing there in the alcove. He looked “upset,” she said, “scared.”

  They hugged tightly. “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too.”

  Then they kissed.

  Beyond that, Angie and her selective memory could not recall what was said or what happened. All she could tell police was that the meeting between them did not last long.

  That night, Angie got a call from Michael, a conversation well documented in her testimony a year later and in several interviews she gave to the ECTPD in August 2008. It was one of fifty-nine calls and 165 text messages Angie and her lover would share between July 23, the day after Jan’s murder, and August 2, 2008, a coming day that both would not forget.

  “I’m leaving … going out to Pittsburgh, where Jan’s brother Brian [Binkley] is,” Michael told Angie. “I need to get away.”

  Angie said later, “I just thought he wanted to get away from everything.”

  Continuing, Michael added, “We’re [he and Brian] going to try and find out who really killed Jan.” Next, he said something about hiring a private investigator. “I noticed the jewelry Jan wore was missing.”

  Pittsburgh was an awfully long way from Denver to go in search of a killer—a 250-mile, four-and-a-half-hour ride, to be more exact. Sounded like Michael Roseboro was running from something more than helping the investigation.

  “Jewelry?” It was the first Angie had heard about this jewelry. Where was this coming from?

  “Yeah, I looked for it (that jewelry),” he explained, “where she normally kept it, and it wasn’t there after her death.” He mentioned nothing about Jan wearing the jewelry on the day she died. The fact of the matter: if Jan had been wearing it, why would he feel the need to look for it where it was normally kept? This statement would make no sense when placed under a microscope next to a claim Roseboro would make about this jewelry in the days to come.

  “Michael, I saw in the news,” Angie asked more in the vein of a question, “that they said you had scratches on your face?”

  “Oh, that,” he answered. “My youngest daughter did that while we were playing in the pool.”

  They talked about other things, Angie said, but she had a hard time recalling what. At some point, she asked him again: “Did you have any prior affairs, Michael?”

  “No. No.”

  “What about [that woman the investigators told me about—who you claimed was stalking you and your family]?”

  “No,” Michael reiterated. “That’s not true.”

  The fact that Angie Funk asked this question, however, was an indication that she was beginning to look at Michael Roseboro in a different light.

  Michael Roseboro spent much of Wednesday, July 30, over at his sister and brother-in-law’s spacious home in the affluent Mustang Trail neighborhood in Reinholds. He and friends and family sat poolside; they had food and drinks over conversation. Later that day, a few of them went over to one of Roseboro’s good friends’ home and continued the party in her dining room.

  “And every time we always got together,” that friend recalled later, “before Jan passed away, we would always play Catch Phrase,” a board game.

  As they all sat around the dining table, Michael said, “Let’s play Catch Phrase!”

  They all looked at each other.

  A moment later, they were playing the game (which would last about three hours).

  Roseboro’s wife was dead—murdered—and the cops were breathing down his back like vampires, ready to draw first blood. According to Michael, he hadn’t killed Jan. So that meant there was a killer on the loose. He had told Angie Funk he was looking into the missing jewelry and working with Brian Binkley to find Jan’s killer. But on this day, Roseboro was more interested in sitting poolside with drinks, smoking cigarettes, and playing board games. The idea that he was worried about a killer, or was out there running around like a private eye, trying to catch a killer, flew in the face of credibility for anyone who later learned what he had been doing.

  At some point, this same friend had a conversation with Michael about the investigation. Roseboro said the cops had been asking him about “a woman he was calling.”

  Angie.

  But he did not say her name on that night.

  “Who is she?” the friend asked.

  “Just the person who is planning … renewing … making plans to renew our vows.”

  For Michael Roseboro’s friends and family, all of whom were eager and ready to believe whatever it was he had to say, this had been enough of an explanation for some. But for this one particular friend, who had known Jan and loved her dearly, something wasn’t quite adding up. She sensed a bit of hesitation in his voice.

  As the conversation between them became more serious, Michael said he needed to say something.

  Jan’s friend was all ears. What is it?

  He wanted to warn her that, on the following morning, the newspapers were going to be saying that he’d had an affair with someone named Angela Funk. It was all going to come out, Michael explained. He wanted to let Jan’s friend know ahead of time. But he also had a favor to ask of her.

  “I need you to tell everyo
ne,” Roseboro pled, “that it is not true. I wasn’t having an affair with her….”

  “Mike, are you having an affair with Angela Funk?” the friend asked.

  “No. You know I’ve had problems in the past, but I swear to God,” Michael said, “I’m not having an affair with Angela Funk.”

  The friend didn’t know how to respond to such frankness and what seemed like genuine sincerity.

  “Look,” Roseboro continued, “they are even going to say that I was having sex with Angela Funk on the day Jan died.”

  “Well, were you?”

  “No, no, no. I had a doctor’s appointment in Lancaster that day….”

  “Well, then, you shouldn’t have any problem—because they can prove where you were.”

  Michael Roseboro didn’t respond to that particular statement. Instead, he repeated a previous point, adding, “Just please tell everyone that I was absolutely not having an affair with this woman. She is this woman who walks her little kids [in the neighborhood], and I was friendly with her…. She was planning our renewal thing.”

  50

  Keith Neff was in his office on Thursday, July 31, when a call from Allan Sodomsky, Michael Roseboro’s attorney, came in. It was a message from the lawyer that would soon raise the stakes for investigators, a continuation of the same idea that Roseboro had planted in Angie Funk’s mind two days before.

  “Listen, Jan was wearing some jewelry that night she died … valued at approximately forty thousand dollars,” Sodomsky said.

  Neff was stunned by this disclosure. Jan had put on jewelry worth twice as much as the car Neff drove? Just to go out to the pool? And this was the first time the ECTPD was hearing about it, nine days after her death?

  Sodomsky read from a list of what Jan had been wearing: emerald-cut diamond earrings (two carats), platinum wedding band with six diamonds, a David Yurman bracelet (silver and gold), a one-carat diamond-studded earring, and a necklace of “minimal value.”

  News to Neff.

  But there was more. The punch line of the call was that Sodomsky was now informing the ECTPD that when the family picked up the body after the coroner released it, Jan wasn’t wearing any of this jewelry. Nor had anyone claimed to have returned it to them from the hospital, or anywhere else.

  It was gone.

  Was Roseboro providing an alternative motive for murder? Were they putting it out there—this after reports in the newspapers had clearly stated that the Lancaster County district attorney had repeatedly said there was no evidence of a robbery in the case of Jan’s death—to provide a second scenario and maybe take the heat off Michael Roseboro? Others wondered after the news broke, if Roseboro was reaching for those same stars that he had insisted his wife had been watching on the night of her murder.

  Or, was Michael Roseboro lying to Allan Sodomsky?

  One of the investigators told Sodomsky they needed photographs of the jewelry, if any were available. Receipts too, if Roseboro could produce them. If he was claiming the jewelry had been stolen, an official report needed to be filed.

  The following day, Roseboro’s brother-in-law showed up at the ECTPD with photographs of Jan wearing the jewelry. Roseboro was telling his lawyer that anyone who knew Jan could testify to the fact that she loved to wear jewelry and was hardly seen without it.

  The investigator at the ECTPD told Roseboro’s brother-in-law that they needed Michael himself to come down and report the jewelry missing. “We’ll need to ask him a few questions.”

  The brother-in-law left.

  Michael would never walk into the station house or call to report the jewelry missing.

  The tipping point here was that Michael Roseboro had not reported Jan wearing any jewelry on the night he pulled her out of the pool. And he never mentioned it at any time after. Why now? Why come forward now and say that she had been wearing expensive jewelry and that it was gone?

  51

  Laurie Sauder had known Jan Roseboro since their days in high school together. They had been friends ever since. Sauder had also worked for Fulton Bank, which Jan’s family had been connected to professionally up until Jan’s dad sold his business—Denver National Bank—to Fulton. Sauder was one of Fulton’s assistant managers. She worked at both the Cocalico and Reinholds offices, splitting her time. On July 22, 2008, Sauder had been working at the Reinholds branch.

  Jan had happened to do some banking on that day and Laurie ran into her inside the building.

  When Laurie saw Jan at one of the teller’s booths, she walked over.

  “There was a conversation between the teller … and me and Jan,” Sauder said later. “She (Jan) made a deposit or payment or something.”

  Laurie stood within breathing distance of her high-school friend. Laurie adored Jan. Had nothing but great things to say about her. And there was Jan, dressed down, as usual, in a sweatshirt—the same one she would later be found dead in—and flip-flops and black shorts.

  “She was not wearing any jewelry,” Laurie Sauder later said. Laurie knew this because it was more than a chance meeting. They spoke for ten to fifteen minutes. Laurie knew Jan well enough, and like many other friends of Jan’s later recalled, she was not about flaunting what she had and wearing flashy clothes and pricey jewelry around town. Okay, she drove a Range Rover, but that was about where it ended for Jan. It just wasn’t part of her DNA to wear what was later reported to be $40,000 worth of jewelry to the bank at lunchtime to take care of her financials. Same as it wasn’t part of who she was to go home after an afternoon of errands and dress up like Cleopatra in bulky jewelry to hang out at her pool. If anything, she would have taken the jewelry off before she got settled outside. Chlorine wreaks havoc on jewelry.

  If Sauder’s memory wasn’t good enough, however, she called Keith Neff and explained that the bank took surveillance video daily of its customers coming and going. It would have video of Jan at the counter and walking into the bank.

  Neff interviewed Laurie Sauder.

  “She was the first person I interviewed who actually broke down and cried for Jan,” Neff said later.

  Nevertheless, that information had to give Keith Neff a warm feeling. Here might be proof, beyond witness testimony, of what Jan Roseboro was wearing on the day of her murder.

  Cassandra Pope was in her apartment tending to her baby. Richard, her husband, was at work. Cassie was alone.

  And terrified.

  “Mom,” she said, calling her mother, Marcia Evanick, Jan and Mike’s old neighbors, “I see his [SUV] over there.” She was referring to Michael Roseboro’s vehicle. “What do I do?”

  “What …,” Marcia said. “He’s not going to do anything to you.”

  “Mom!”

  “Is your door locked? Look, if you don’t want to say hi to him, don’t go outside while he’s there.”

  Cassie probably knew this, but hearing it from her mom felt good. It wasn’t that she was concerned Michael was going to barge into her apartment and try to kill her—that was a bit absurd and an overreaction.

  Nonetheless, she was “creeped out,” Cassie said, “by his mere presence.”

  Cassie watched her neighbor, along with the ebb and flow of the house, as the days went on and Michael was still a free man. Sometimes she’d look out the window and see Michael Roseboro sitting by the pool, alone, staring into the water, chain-smoking, drinking beers.

  “He just sat there and stared at that water.”

  And that, she said, was horrifying to watch.

  52

  All she had to do was walk across the street. It was not hard to see when his big black Denali was parked out back. The cops had told Angie Funk to stay away from Michael Roseboro. She herself, maybe without realizing it, by asking him certain questions, was beginning to have second thoughts about their love and their future. But Angie couldn’t stay away. She still loved the guy. She had met him once already behind the funeral home—what could one more time hurt?

  Strange that he would be at work when th
ere was a maelstrom of criminal difficulties spiraling around him. But Michael was in his office. He had explained to Angie during a phone call that he never went to Pittsburgh because his family members had asked him to stick around town.

  “I’m talking to the police and telling them everything,” Angie said, embracing her lover, kissing him inside that same back alcove.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too, Michael.”

  They had to be quick. No one could see them together.

  “I never felt threatened,” Angie later explained, describing this second meeting with Michael, “when I met him. And if I did, I would have never met him.”

  Investigators had asked Angie not to tell Michael that she was talking to them. During that second week after Jan Roseboro’s murder, Angie and Michael communicated daily, often multiple times. They met, too. Angie never said if she continued to sleep with Michael after learning Jan was murdered. One would guess that sex was the last thing on her mind. But then again, Michael was cut from a different cloth. A narcissist by clinical definition, there’s no doubt he would have slept with Angie in a New York minute, had she initiated sex.

  Regarding why she continued talking to and meeting with her lover, the only suspect in his wife’s murder, after learning Jan had been brutally beaten and drowned, Angie said, “I did not feel that Michael was lying to me, and I did not believe that he did the murder.”

  What about all those other women? Didn’t the fact that Michael Roseboro turned out to be a serial cheater put a damper on future plans?

  “I believed,” Angie said, “that [the one woman] was stalking Michael. I believed him when he said he was the one being harassed, and I had no reason to fear him…. [But] if he did [murder Jan], I would be afraid.”

  Ignorance truly is bliss (and blind).

  During one phone call during that second week, after Angie had been told by investigators that Jan and Michael Roseboro had been planning a trip to the Outer Banks, and he had made rather extensive arrangements to renew their marital vows, she confronted Michael. She asked the man whom she thought she would one day marry about this North Carolina trip.