Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  Suzie became “quite upset” and left the room when she heard this. It was disturbing information, certainly. It made a strong case against any doubt Suzie or the family might have had up until then that Michael was being railroaded by the state. Here was forensic proof, or so it seemed, that Jan and Michael were involved in a struggle on the night Jan died.

  After sitting with the family for a time, Neff and Martin said they’d be in touch, then left.

  Later that same day, Sam Roseboro took a call from his dad. Sam was living at his grandparents’ house on Walnut Street and helping out at the funeral home. Roseboro was calling the house as much as he could. Some later said Sam was being groomed to take over the family business, where his father had left off; others, however, said Sam had no interest in making the handling of dead bodies and consoling grieving families his vocation.

  After some small talk about how everyone was doing, the conversation shifted. “Yeah, they talked,” Sam said. “They came down then and talked.” (They were Martin and Neff.)

  The fuzz.

  “Yeah,” Michael Roseboro told his son. “Yup…. Yup….” He wanted off this subject. Fast.

  “So I was glad,” Sam continued, not picking up on his father’s wish to stifle the conversation, “‘cause that’s what I was thinking this morning, just something like that … but then [the private investigator] said—” It was almost as if they were speaking in code about an earlier agreement.

  Michael cut his son off abruptly, speaking over him, skipping his voice like a stone on water: “Ah … bup-bup-bup-bup-bup … okay?”

  “What?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing!”

  “O-o-o-kay.”

  “Um … um …”—Roseboro changed the subject entirely—“did you get the Jeep taken care of?”

  They talked about other inconsequential things for a few more minutes and then hung up.

  Nine days after that call, on May 28, the private investigator hired by Michael Roseboro interviewed Sam as part of this “new investigation” that the defense had promised. Just so happened that this interview took place after the results of the DNA had come back from both labs. If one was to view this with the eye of a skeptic, Roseboro needed to explain two things: the DNA found underneath Jan’s nails and the scratches on his face.

  The private investigator asked Sam about the scratches on his dad’s face. Did he know anything about that?

  “My dad told me that he was scratched [by my sister in the pool while playing basketball earlier that day], but I didn’t see it happen.”

  Sam later said he was there, poolside, his back turned to them as they played in the water, but that he had heard them horsing around.

  Turned out, though, that the child who had supposedly scratched her father on the face was a chronic nail biter. She had no fingernails. Just nubs. Those scratches were deep. So profound, in fact, they were oozing on the night of Jan’s murder.

  During this interview with the private investigator, Sam mentioned how he thought he knew where the DNA underneath his mother’s fingernails might have come from. He had recalled (for the first time) that he saw his mother scratching his father’s back as he was leaving the pool patio area with his friend that night. He had just remembered this.

  The problem investigators had with this sudden revelation was that Sam, who had been questioned by the police extensively about that night and his father’s life in general, had never mentioned this back-scratching incident. Moreover, Sam had gone to visit his father on that Monday after Neff and Martin had told the family about the DNA. As an aside, Sam and his father had spoken, according to prison phone records, almost every day since Michael’s arrest. Literally, hundreds of conversations.

  “I—I was … I was told not to tell anybody,” Sam said in court later, referring to the notion of keeping this information to himself all that time, “because … I thought I was told not to tell anybody outside of, like, my grandmother.”

  When asked who had told him not to talk about the back-scratching incident, Sam responded, “My grandmother.”

  Keith Neff and office manager Heather Smith were going through Jan’s phone records in preparation for trial, which was now slated to begin in mid-to-late July. In looking at the calls made to and from Jan’s cell phone, they realized a call had been made to Jan’s voice mail on July 22, 2008, at 10:36 P.M., close to what police believed was the time of her death. This meant someone was checking Jan’s voice mail messages. And there was another call made a minute later at 10:37 P.M. from Jan’s cell phone to her mother-in-law, Ann Roseboro, who Jan knew was not at home.

  Both calls seemed out of place when compared to the behavior Jan elicited with her cell phone. For one, Jan hardly ever called her mother-in-law. In the three months leading up to the murder, Jan’s phone had communicated three times with Ann Roseboro’s: one incoming call and two outgoing calls, including that one at ten thirty-seven on the night Jan was murdered. Number two, Jan’s best friend, Rebecca Donahue, had “a problem” with the idea of Jan having her cell phone out at the pool. It was so unlike Jan that it grated on Rebecca’s conscience postmurder. After thinking about it for a few days, Rebecca confronted Michael Roseboro about it, asking him, “Why was Jan’s cell phone out there?”

  Michael shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Rebecca called Michael some days later, just before his arrest. She asked him again. (“It bothered me,” she recalled later.)

  “I don’t know,” Michael said. He paused. Then: “She was checking her messages. She was checking her messages when I went to bed.”

  “Who was the last person Jan spoke to?” Rebecca asked.

  “I don’t know,” Michael answered.

  “You can go in right now and pull it up on the computer, the billing information,” Rebecca explained.

  Michael changed the subject. (“He never answered me.”)

  The last time Jan had checked her voice mail before that night (if it was indeed her) was a week prior. She could have cared less who called her—especially at 10:37 P.M., while supposedly sitting poolside by herself.

  More important: how could Roseboro, law enforcement wondered, see his wife checking her cell phone messages at 10:37 P.M., which Jan’s cell phone records proved, if he was in bed, as he had originally told them? (Roseboro’s story was that he did not find his wife until 10:58 P.M.)

  “You cannot know that Jan checked her messages at that time,” one investigator told me, “unless you were up and you did it yourself.”

  BOOK FIVE

  ANGIE AND THE ROCK STAR

  66

  The dream team, as clichéd as it might sound today, was what Michael Roseboro’s defense resembled as they wheeled their briefcases and boxes of documents along the sidewalk toward 50 North Duke Street, downtown Lancaster, heading for courtroom 12 on July 8, 2009. The ephemeral presence of such a serious-looking group of lawyers aptly set the stage. Accusations from both sides had been hurled like insults for months. The local news media was primed, ready for a spectacle; a packed courtroom buzzed with anticipation, everyone geared up to hear testimony in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Michael Alan Roseboro, the Honorable Judge James Cullen overseeing the drama. Allan Sodomsky, flanked by his group of assistants, legal experts and co-counsel, walked with the guarded sense of gravity his role in this tragedy carried. District Attorney Craig Stedman, representing the state with ADAs Kelly Sekula and Christopher Larsen, had only to saunter a few short steps out of his office to the elevator and head down to the fourth floor.

  This much activity, centered around such a high-profile family, was certainly not a sight Lancaster County, Denver and Reinholds in particular, was used to. One newspaper estimated that its online version of a public forum had produced 150,000 words of comments about the case since Jan’s death. Denver residents could not get enough of a case that seemed to have all the earmarks of a Lifetime Television movie of the week: sex, drugs, booze, wealthy people, rumor and gossip driving the
ship, adultery and—of course—a sympathetic victim, adored by her community, viciously murdered. To top it off, not much beyond the obvious was known about the defendant, other than his family members were icons in this small, tight-knit Amish community known more for its rolling hills and simple living, strawberry and peach preserves, pepper jellies, breads and antiques. The promise had been made long ago that Michael Roseboro needed only his day in court to prove he was no murderer.

  Well, that time was upon him.

  The state had subpoenaed 164 witnesses (an unprecedented number); while Allan Sodomsky had sent word to sixty-four that their testimony could be needed.

  Neither would come close to utilizing all of these people.

  In the packed gallery sat producers from the CBS magazine show 48 Hours. They took notes, made contact with the players, hoping to see if there was fodder here for one of the network’s salacious, over-the-top, hour-long Saturday-night crime shows.

  Sodomsky had motioned for a change of venue.

  It was denied.

  His concern—very much warranted, to be fair—was that too many rumors had been spread. Picking an untainted jury among a community of peers so flushed by the rancorous outpouring of speculation circling the case was going to be difficult. With the World Wide Web (www) came a host of new problems for attorneys, a few of which would ultimately play out in this trial. Early on, the fear Sodomsky had, it’s safe to say, was that all of those comments being made by anonymous, faceless people sitting in front of keyboards, screen names hiding who they were, would somehow trickle down into the minds of jurors and poison their judgment. Heck, a few of the potential jurors could have made remarks themselves. Not to mention all the talk about town, in the newspapers and on local television. The guy had every reason to voice concern for his client.

  By the end of the day, July 8, 2009, ten of twelve jurors had been chosen, however. Word was that testimony would begin as soon as Friday, July 10.

  The following day, July 9, had brought one more juror.

  The next day, the final juror was selected, with testimony now slated to begin on Monday morning, July 13, nine o’clock.

  Ann Roseboro, one of the local newspapers reported, caught a glimpse of her son from a courtroom door’s tiny window—she watched as the star of the show, Michael Roseboro himself, shackled and in handcuffs, was walked into the courtroom by guards. It was a surreal moment for the Roseboro matriarch: to see her son presented to the public as the accused felon he was. Ann looked to be almost in tears as she watched her boy sit at the table that would become his home for, some predicted, the next three weeks. Craig Stedman had given Ann and Ralph Roseboro the option of sitting in on proceedings, even though they were slated to testify. But both chose not to sit behind their golden child. Michael would have to brave this impasse himself, with only his legal team and a few others to lean on, one of whom was the Reverend William Cluley, a Lutheran pastor chosen by the family to be its ears and eyes in the courtroom. Cluley was there, keeping tabs on every moment, no doubt reporting back to the family.

  Michael Roseboro had a grim look to him that many presumed was his natural state—the glum deportment of an undertaker: dark, cold, baleful. Yet beyond those beady eyes (one that appeared larger than the other), there had to be a serious sense of dread and fear weighing on the forty-two-year-old, whispering in his ear ever so softly that his life could be lost in a matrix of steel doors, concrete walls, lonely hallways, and the obedience that had become his daily routine for almost the past year while residing in Lancaster County Prison.

  67

  Michael Roseboro was a man who had to look a certain way before he left the house. Everything—clothes, hair, nails, anything outwardly trendy or stylish that the public would see—had to be just right. One might picture Roseboro standing in front of a mirror, straightening his cuffs, brushing a piece of lint off his suit shoulder, wetting a finger to fix a stray, out-of-place hair, flattening his eyebrows, pushing the knot of his tie up tightly. Then he would stop for a long moment to check himself out before departure. Indeed, if he wore black shoes, Michael insisted on a black belt and matching sunglasses. Regarding that sort of attention to detail, “Michael,” said one Roseboro family member, “took this to the extreme.”

  On Monday, July 13, Michael Roseboro would not have the advantage of a dressing room and his array of ostentatious suits, chic colognes, and vanity at his disposal. Instead, he would have to rely on the suit his attorney had sent over to the prison (black, of course).

  After the judge gave about an hour and a half’s worth of directives to the jury, Craig Stedman stood. He looked at Michael, who was—incredibly—wearing his wedding ring, sitting next to his attorneys with a look that said he was going to walk away from this trial unscathed, right back into that life he had left behind.

  It was 10:38 A.M. when Judge James Cullen turned the courtroom over to Craig Stedman. The opening was something Stedman had been working on until the wee hours of the morning on most nights leading up to trial. There in the basement of his home, little notes he had written and collected throughout the case spread around him as though he had been writing a Ph.D. dissertation, the prosecutor had scribed what would be one of the most extensive openings he had ever given.

  One of the main “themes” (his word) Stedman had to get across to the jury—as senseless as pointing this out to the jury seemed—was that Jan Roseboro had been murdered.

  “If I can get the jury to internalize that Jan was murdered,” Stedman recalled, “then the only reasonable conclusion, based on all of this evidence, is that Mike did it.”

  And yet, most trial attorneys knew from experience that juries recalled the opening lines, the last few, and just some of the more dramatic elements in the middle of an opening argument. The key was to keep the flow moving toward a revealing, thunderous conclusion.

  Equally important to consider was the idea that Michael Roseboro did not look like your average killer, with his superficial charm, tears turned on and off when he believed he needed them, and an overall good standing in the community. Another impediment Stedman would have to overcome: the pretense that your next-door neighbor—in this case, a mild-mannered, perhaps even docile man with a laconic, seemingly nonthreatening way about him, smiling to you every morning and consoling you when your loved one died—was a violent and vicious murderer who had beaten and strangled his wife.

  “By the time of trial, Mike had lost about thirty to forty pounds,” Stedman said. “He was pretty thin. He looks a little effeminate, too. We had an image problem to contend with. But I kept thinking, ‘If I can get the jury to accept that Jan was murdered, they’re going to convict him.’”

  There was a time when the DA’s office seriously looked into the idea that Michael Roseboro was a closeted homosexual. Some men double up on women and sex more than the average guy in order to prove to themselves that they can live a straight life. This breeds a suppressed, aggressive storm within a fraction of these men—one that can sometimes emerge later in life as violence against females.

  “The theory (of Roseboro being a homosexual) was discussed by us,” Stedman said. “But there was no direct evidence, so we did not pursue it.”

  The first few lines of Stedman’s opening put Jan’s murder into context: “This case is about lies. It’s about betrayal. It’s about some greed, of course. It’s about murder. But more than anything else, it’s about obsession.”

  The prosecutor allowed the words to hang in the room for a brief moment.

  Roaming back and forth in front of the jury, wound up and passionate about what he was saying, Stedman introduced the affair, then talked about how often Michael Roseboro had called Angie Funk, no doubt the witness everyone was waiting to hear from more than any other. “Sometimes thirty, forty, even fifty (calls) every day…. And, of course, that doesn’t even count the times they would get together and have sex and see each other.”

  There was not a single sound—beyond Stedman’s ti
red-sounding voice—echoing throughout that courtroom after he said those words. The speculation around town, the rumor mill, the Internet gossip, conversations over coffee counters, at gas stations, and at watercoolers all came down to cold, hard facts now. Craig Stedman was there to present evidence; Allan Sodomsky waiting patiently to pounce on any contravention he saw.

  Stedman mentioned motive, the cost of divorce, losing the family business, that obsession he had focused on, Michael’s social status, and how much he lied to everyone around him before and after the murder. He went into Jan Roseboro’s bio, her friends, how she was well revered around town. How much Jan will be missed. How people “know each other’s business” in Denver, and how evil can sometimes penetrate the veneer of good and come across in many different forms.

  Yes, even as a mild-mannered undertaker who seemed to have it all.

  Then the DA focused on Angie Funk. Poor Angie was going to take a tremendous hit from all sides during this trial. Neighbors had reported that Angie, unabashed by the accusations and determined not to crawl into a shell and disappear, had been spotted at times pushing the little Roseboro love child in a stroller around Denver, past the funeral home and Roseboro’s parents’ house. This woman was not going away. Scared, and yet unafraid to speak her truth, she was prepared to testify.

  “Basically,” Stedman said about Angie and her feelings toward Michael Roseboro before the affair started, “he was a rock star to her.”

  She had sought him out. Set her fiery eyes upon this man and—lo and behold—caught him.