Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  “I canceled it,” Roseboro said, meaning the vow-renewal celebration. “The plans were made before we [started our affair].”

  Angie was asked if she had ever placed a phone call for Michael to a reverend in the Outer Banks, acting, so to speak, as the Roseboros’ wedding planner, strange as that might have sounded. They had solid information, investigators told Angie, that she had called, and they wanted to know if she knew anyone in North Carolina. There was a reverend in the Outer Banks who claimed to have “remembered possibly getting a message from Angela Funk,” Keith Neff explained when he spoke to Angie about this.

  “Well, that freaks me out,” she responded to Neff. “I do not know if I should be worried about this.”

  No, she had never called anyone in North Carolina, Angie said. It concerned her, though, that someone had her name and was saying she had made the call.

  The question then became: had Michael Roseboro had someone else call North Carolina and disguise herself as Angie Funk?

  Neff wanted to know why Angie had spoken to Michael when they had specifically asked her not to do so. It seemed strange that she would emphatically defy a request by law enforcement.

  She never gave him an answer.

  Angie explained how Michael reacted when she told him she was talking to the police. “The police contacted me,” she told him, “and I told them everything. I am not going to lie, Michael.”

  Silence for a moment. Michael Roseboro never asked what she had told the police or how many times she had spoken to them. It was as if he didn’t care. As if he had expected it. Still, he was more upset with her, she said later, for telling law enforcement about the affair than anything else.

  In another conversation, near the same day (Angie wasn’t sure when), she asked Michael about the bruising on Jan, which was reported by investigators. She wanted to know, again, if he had ever touched Jan. Ever got physical with her.

  He never addressed any of the “bruising” specifically, Angie later said. Instead, Michael offered: “If that’s what police are saying … but you have to believe me when I say that I never touched Jan…. I love you, Angie.”

  “I love you, too, Michael.”

  During another call, Michael said, “I wish you hadn’t told police about our affair.” He sounded disappointed, desperate. “But you need to cooperate with them.”

  “I won’t lie, Michael.”

  Angie couldn’t remember who brought it up, but they discussed the jewelry again as the second week came to an end. It was near August 1.

  “Me and Brian [Binkley] are looking into it” was all Michael said about the jewelry.

  There was a familiar tone to Michael’s voice as the conversations with Angie carried on during the latter part of that second week. He never expressed “shock,” Angie later said, “that this turned out to be a murder and not a drowning, as he had told me.”

  Michael had given Angie that familiar story about waking up, going to the bathroom, finding the tiki lights still on, seeing Jan in the pool. The fact that police had ruled Jan’s death a homicide had not, apparently, had any effect whatsoever on Michael Roseboro’s demeanor or his relationship with Angie Funk. According to Angie, Michael never mentioned to her that Jan’s death was classified a murder. He said he was going to look for her killer, but he didn’t express any anger or sorrow that she had been murdered. What’s more, he never displayed any bitterness toward the police that they were accusing him of murder and were not out searching for the “real killer.”

  Business as usual for Michael Roseboro. Jan’s death, if anything, had become a disruption in his plans with Angie. A nuisance. Some sort of hindrance.

  A complication.

  Yet, as August 1 brought hazy, hot, and humid temperatures, Angie and Michael’s lives were about to change once again. Not because he was facing perhaps the rest of his life in prison, if he was tried and found guilty. But Angie had learned—so she claimed—on the morning of August 1 that she was carrying Michael Roseboro’s love child, a baby they had made together during one of their many sexual encounters.

  How would she tell him? More important, how would she tell the police? If Angie thought the media had been unkind to her thus far—her being the “other woman”—what was going to happen when they got ahold of this piece of salacious information? In addition, what would family members think? Michael Roseboro wouldn’t be able to write Angie Funk off as a simple distraction any longer. And Angie’s husband, whom she was still living with, what was Randall Funk going to do?

  53

  There was probably only one way to put it.

  “I’m pregnant!” Angie Funk said after calling her lover on August 1.

  Was there any other way? Could things get any more complicated?

  “Disbelief, shock,” Angie later said Michael Roseboro conveyed in those first moments after she broke the news. He had to be baffled, confused, and, almost certainly, a little angry. They had used birth control: condoms. Angie would later talk about a condom malfunctioning, breaking, or coming off; again, she could not recall what exactly happened.

  “Well,” Michael responded after getting his breath back, “at any other time this would have been, you know, good news. But right now … it’s not. It’s just not the right time.”

  The timing, actually, could not have been any worse.

  They talked about what had happened, Angie said. Then Roseboro mentioned that maybe she should have an abortion.

  “I’m against it,” he told her, “but, you know, considering what’s going on…. Well … I’m against it … but in this case, it might be a good idea.”

  “No! That’s not an option,” Angie snapped. There was no changing her mind. She was going to have Michael Roseboro’s baby. There was nothing he could say or do to change that. He had better start accepting and dealing with it—because in nine months, Angie Funk was going to give birth to another successor to the Roseboro throne.

  Angie said later that she had taken a home pregnancy test that morning. She claimed to have purchased the test at a local Lancaster County CVS with a debit card that had subsequently expired from a bank that had changed names. She was asked about the account number she had used to make the purchase.

  “I don’t remember,” Angie said.

  Craig Stedman was with ECTPD detective Kerry Sweigart on Saturday, August 2, 2008. They were sitting in Stedman’s downtown Lancaster office, finishing up a search warrant. Larry Martin, Keith Neff, and Jan Walters had nearly finished Michael Roseboro’s arrest warrant and were preparing to have a judge sign it.

  Sweigart’s cell phone buzzed. He looked down.

  Angela Funk …

  The two lawmen looked at each other.

  What does she want? It wasn’t like Angie to call. If anything, detectives were resigned to have to call her.

  Sweigart flipped open his cell. “Yeah?”

  Stedman stared at the detective, watching his reaction to what Angie was saying. Sweigart was “turning all sorts of shades of red,” Stedman recalled. Whatever Angie had to offer, Stedman could tell, was big news.

  After a few moments, Sweigart said, “Okay, Angie …” and hung up.

  Stedman waited.

  “Well? …”

  “I got some news for ya. Angie says she’s pregnant with Mike’s baby.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Stedman leaned back in his chair.

  “I am not kidding you.”

  They both sat, shaking their heads.

  “Yeah, she made a point of saying that she just found out, you know, after everything.” Meaning she didn’t know she was pregnant when Jan Roseboro was murdered.

  “She said,” Sweigart continued, “that she had told Mike, and now she wanted to tell us.”

  Stedman called the ECTPD to let them know.

  Michael Roseboro was biding his time. He must have known this. Law enforcement was not going away. If anything, they were closing in. One more piece of the puzzle—which was actually a familiar
one, but from a second impartial witness—came in just before Craig Stedman and Kelly Sekula finished writing Roseboro’s arrest warrant, which ultimately helped Stedman make the call that they now had enough to arrest the undertaker.

  Jill Showalter, a senior educator for the North Museum of Natural History & Science in Lancaster, came forward and explained what she thought was a significant piece of information.

  During the summer of 2008, Jill’s father, Luke, owned a house about four lots from the Roseboros’ home on West Main, heading west, away from Creek Road. Jill often stopped at her parents’ house after work to visit with them. She recalled something about the night of July 22, 2008.

  Driving to and then leaving her parents’ home, Jill had taken the same route for as long as she could remember. West Main Street to Creek Road. Jill had been busy all day at the Northern Lancaster County Fish and Game, conducting what she called “a reptile program for the Youth Conservation School.” It had run into the night and Jill didn’t arrive at her parents’ house until “probably about ten or after ten,” she told police.

  She stayed about “twenty minutes.” Then left. Out of the driveway, a right onto West Main, past the front of the Roseboro home, a right onto Creek Road, and past the side of the Roseboro house where the pool and backyard was. Jill was certain it was dark, pitch dark.

  Beyond that, what was more striking to Jill was that the Roseboro home, the inside of the house, “seemed unusually dark that night, the house, the lighting inside the house.”

  She was talking about the front of the house, the section facing West Main.

  The only light she saw that was on—when looking at the house from the front—was in the basement. Odd, she thought, that the basement light would be the only light in the entire house left on.

  Turning onto Creek Road, driving south, you cannot really see from the road the pool area because of the grade in the landscaping on that side of the house. The pool sits up on a mound, with shrubbery around it for privacy and the land grade sloping downward from the pool patio. However, it’s not hard to see the tiki lights, that black fence, and the pool area itself, which are sort of up on a stage of land.

  Driving by the poolside of the house on Creek Road, Jill looked over and saw that there were no lights on: the tiki torches or any other lights.

  “I have seen the tiki torches lit at nighttime,” she recalled, “on other nights.” In addition, she didn’t see anybody outside, no one walking around, any strange cars, or anything else that caught her attention.

  Just blackness.

  When they heard this new information for the first time, it was clear to police now that there were no lights on in the backyard of the Roseboro home. Two separate witnesses had come forward and relayed this information—people who had not known each other, had never spoken to each other, and didn’t know that the other was speaking to the police.

  Impartial, corroborating evidence.

  54

  Craig Stedman and his team were getting nervous that Michael Roseboro might do something to endanger the lives of family and friends—and, maybe worse, take another life. It was time to put the cuffs on, drag him in, see if he wanted to talk, then put him in a cell until his lawyer could figure out what to do.

  At 10:31 P.M. on August 2, 2008, ECTPD officers and detectives moved in on the six-foot, two-hundred-pound undertaker as he was inside his parents’ house on Walnut Street, down the block from the funeral home, next door to Angie and Randall Funk’s house. The bench warrant for Roseboro’s arrest stated “criminal homicide” as the complaint. They wanted DNA from Roseboro, too, along with fingerprints. According to the warrant, Michael Roseboro had intentionally, knowingly, recklessly or negligently caused the death of another human being: To wit: the defendant did cause the death of Jan E. Roseboro…. The defendant did cause her death by substantial physical contact to include multiple blunt force trauma, strangulation and drowning, thereby causing her death.

  This charge (criminal homicide) carries a no-bail initiative, which residents voted for in the state of Pennsylvania.

  Detective Kerry Sweigart knocked on the door. He explained to Ralph Roseboro that they had come for his son.

  Michael Roseboro walked out onto the porch and closed the door behind him.

  “What’s up?” Michael said. He looked tired and pale, but not in the least bit worried. With all the cops and cars out there in the front of his parents’ house, Michael must have known that his time on the street—at least for now—had come to an end.

  “You’re under arrest …,” Sweigart said.

  Michael had no reaction.

  “Michael Roseboro was arrested without incident,” Keith Neff later said. “It was pretty fast. He was cooperative and did not give us any problems. We were in and out, fast.”

  The hope for Neff was that when they got Roseboro back to the station house, he would open up. Break down. Make this as easy as possible on himself, his kids, and everyone else involved.

  Be a man.

  After getting him out of the car and allowing him to get comfortable, Michael Roseboro was placed in the interview room at the ECTPD.

  Keith Neff and Jan Walters walked in.

  “I’m not going to talk to you,” he said. “I want to speak to my lawyer.”

  End of interview.

  Roseboro would not spend a long time at the ECTPD. That night, per the law, he was brought before the magisterial justice to be arraigned on charges of criminal homicide and then, right after, locked up in Lancaster County Prison.

  On the same day the arrest warrant was served, and Michael Roseboro was being processed, a second search warrant was executed at the Roseboro residence. This time, the warrant asserted that investigators were looking to examine [and] test… all electrical switches and controls and circuit breakers at the residence to determine the location and operation of controls and breakers which correspond to any and all outside lighting to include but not limited to dusk-to-dawn lighting.

  The idea was to go into the house and find out how to turn on and off all the lights. Witnesses claimed the lights were off. If an outside attacker had killed Jan—for example, someone who wanted to steal her jewelry—he (or she) would’ve had to turn on all the lights before leaving the premises. In order to do that, you’d have to know where the switches were (and have a lighter for the tiki torches on you).

  The ECTPD thought this to be a ludicrous theory, but yet one that Michael Roseboro would no doubt try to propagate once he and his lawyer got to talking.

  What other choice did he have, essentially?

  55

  On Monday morning, August 4, Craig Stedman sat behind a mahogany conference table in the county commissioner’s room, just around the corner from the DA’s office, on the fifth floor of 50 North Duke Street, downtown Lancaster. There were several microphones, propped up like Wizard of Oz Munchkin lollipops, positioned in front of Stedman’s face. Next to him sat Larry Martin, a serious and ominous aura about him. The room was jam-packed with media.

  Stedman wore a dark blue suit, gold tie, white shirt. He appeared tired and beaten down, his eyes staring at the paper in front of him. Every once in a while, he looked up at reporters and around the room. He knew most of these people. He had a fairly decent relationship with the press. They were doing their jobs, on hand to get any new details surrounding Michael Roseboro’s arrest, which had been the news of the past weekend. The black half-moons under Stedman’s eyes were an indication of how taxing the case had been thus far. He and other members of law enforcement had worked around the clock on several nights, putting in twenty-hour days right up until the time Michael was placed in cuffs.

  This was it: the fall of Denver’s reigning royal family. Or, as one source later called Michael Roseboro, “The king, so to speak, of the community.” Perhaps some liked to see the mighty fall: the poor rob the rich; the rich become destitute; the powerful reduced to mere mortals. If so, this was their day. Many had considered Roseboro
infallible, even untouchable. Stedman had seen him as just another murderer who would be found guilty by the evidence.

  Craig Stedman liked to deal in facts. He spoke straightforwardly, thought long and hard about what he said, and tried to make sure the community that had appointed him top lawman had as much information as he could give. Here he was, eleven days after Jan Roseboro had been found dead in her pool, announcing that two days prior, on August 2, her husband had been arrested on charges of “one criminal complaint of homicide….”

  Fixing his tie every so often, perhaps a nervous tic, Stedman explained the charges in their dramatic, violent detail. The guy had strangled and beaten and drowned his wife. There was no way to put a passive bow on that.

  “He’s being held in Lancaster County Prison,” Stedman added, a ten-minute ride, several blocks southeast of the DA’s office, “without bail, pending a preliminary hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.”

  Trying to head off questions before they came at him like darts, Stedman said, “We have no evidence that there were any other participants in this crime, and no further arrests are expected at this point.” This was perhaps a way to put out there—without saying—that charges were not going to be filed against Angie Funk, nor was the DA’s office looking into the possibility that she had provoked her lover in any way, or that perhaps Michael Roseboro had hired someone to do his dirty work.

  The lanky DA explained that he had not yet looked at the consideration of seeking the death penalty against Roseboro (which, under Pennsylvania law, was not an option for the DA’s office). He was focused, instead, on building his case and working with law enforcement to see that they were ready for the preliminary hearing. There was still a lot of work to do. Information was still filing in.

  He thanked everyone. Talked about all the hours his officers and the various departments helping out had put in the entire previous weekend and the one before it. The long nights. The teamwork. It had all paid off. Jan Roseboro’s killer was behind bars.