Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  Stedman talked about all those e-mails.

  The phone calls.

  The text messages.

  The sexual trysts inside the vacant apartment.

  The supposed wedding vow renewal ceremony that never was.

  Niagara Falls.

  Then, of course, the pregnancy—Roseboro and Funk’s child.

  And for the next two hours, Stedman spoke to every possible piece of evidence the state had uncovered, leaving nothing left unsaid. He covered all the bases, as if no one piece of evidence was more crucial than the next, but all together created a carefully planned out picture of murder that each witness would reinforce.

  “We’re going to show you through the evidence,” Craig Stedman concluded near the end, “… that the defendant murdered his wife because he was obsessed with his girlfriend and he needed to do what he needed to do to be with his girlfriend—so he could have it all.”

  Allan Sodomsky, looking on, listening intently, was ready. It was his turn now to put on the best argument he could for his client.

  68

  After a break for lunch, Allan Sodomsky got right to work. In the opening few lines of his argument, Sodomsky boiled Michael Roseboro’s case down to what he described as, smartly, one crucial piece of evidence missing from the DA’s two-hour-plus condemnation of his client. “The only thing you don’t have to guess or speculate about when it comes to what the evidence will show is that Mike Roseboro went in to go to sleep around ten P.M. on July 22, 2008.” And it was that “fact” alone, Sodomsky insisted, that jurors should hold close to their vests all the way through the trial: Roseboro was sound asleep when his wife was killed.

  From that point, Sodomsky turned to the lights being on, not off, as several neighbors had reported; the children watching TV in the Roseboro bedroom; and how Roseboro “saw his wife floating in the pool, head underwater,” a fact that had not been disclosed until this moment. The ongoing belief by just about everyone (including the description Michael gave police) was that Jan had been found somewhere near the bottom of the pool.

  Then the defense attorney—who came across as believable and knowledgeable about the law, maybe even sincere—talked about how Michael had pulled his wife from the pool near eleven o’clock, calling all of what he had to say thus far “direct evidence … and there will be no direct evidence to contradict that!”

  Then he mentioned Sam and the other kids. How well everyone got along. How distressed Michael Roseboro was when Sam and his friend returned to find chaos abounding, and his mother on her way to the hospital, presumably fighting for her life or even dead.

  He said Jan had made calls that night—at ten thirty-six and ten thirty-seven—from her cell phone. And Michael Roseboro spoke to the police without question. There was no evidence found to indicate a murder had taken place, and that their medical experts would contradict the state’s on that front.

  Sodomsky admitted there was an affair, which seemed to be the first time Roseboro had indicated and submitted to this fact in public. How could he deny it, with so much evidence to the contrary?

  From there, Sodomsky bit into Angie Funk, saying, “It began over a cup of coffee at a Turkey Hill.” He said this unabashedly, as if it was nothing more than a mere happenstance meeting of two souls destined to fall in love. “And on June thirteenth … exactly sixteen days later, that affair became sexual.”

  Sodomsky kept saying that the “evidence time frame” would play a role in proving his client’s innocence, but he made no mention of exactly how it would play out. Money could not have been the motive here, he said, explaining that “1.63 million” was the half that Michael Roseboro would have received in a divorce settlement, which was a lot of money to walk away with “without killing anybody.”

  In listening to this, one was jostled into hearkening back to Craig Stedman’s point that greed would be central to the state’s case. A greedy man knows no bounds. When is enough, enough? How much is enough? It’s not about the money, one could argue, when speaking to greed as motive—it’s about all or nothing.

  Moving on to the DNA, Sodomsky downplayed it. “The experts will say that DNA absolutely could have come from scratching of the back…. There was no evidence of her head hitting the ground. It is much more likely, so the medical evidence will show, that she was hit with a blunt object, presumably a fist or two or three or four. She was beaten, strangled, and drowned. And the injuries on her head and body are significant…. Mr. Stedman said the evidence will show that Jan died in hand-to-hand combat. With whom?” Sodomsky asked rhetorically. “And the evidence will show it wasn’t with Mike Roseboro.”

  Quite elegantly, Allan Sodomsky made a great point as he finished his hour-long opening, relaying to the jury one major hurdle Craig Stedman’s team was going to have to make it over at some point: “Ladies and gentlemen, based on the evidence you will hear … you will have to guess or speculate as to what happened between that ten and eleven P.M. hour on July 22, 2008—and that, ladies and gentlemen, is something your oath just will not let you do.”

  69

  Ending the previous day, Craig Stedman had called Michael Firestone, the first cop to respond to the scene, and another, Officer Brian Dilliplaine, putting jurors right in the center of what had happened on the night of July 22, 2008. Each witness, beyond giving a detailed account of how Jan Roseboro had been worked on at the scene and taken away quickly after being found unresponsive, made a point to say that Michael had not once asked about the status of his wife’s condition, or jumped at the opportunity to ride with Jan in the ambulance. To their shock, Michael Roseboro had stayed behind.

  Proceedings on Tuesday, July 14, got under way at 9:04 A.M. ADA Kelly Sekula had been waiting on this day for some time. One of Sekula’s interests throughout the year had been the 911 call. She had focused a lot of attention on it, studying it ten ways to Sunday. Sekula, who had even argued with her father about the veracity of the call at one point, believed—same as just about everyone else in law enforcement—that the 911 call, by itself, spoke to Michael Roseboro’s guilt.

  “The first thing he says on the 911 tape,” Sekula later explained, “is ‘I believe my wife just drowned….’ He doesn’t know what happened to Jan. He could say he found her in the pool. But he shouldn’t know that she is dead. For all he knew, she had a heart attack, or tripped and fell. Why doesn’t he say, ‘Get over here now and save her!’ And then he begins stalling and stalling and stalling about doing CPR. Why?

  “Because he knows she’s dead.”

  The flat demeanor on the tape depicts a man calling 911 to report a dead woman in his pool—not a man who has just found his wife unconscious in his pool.

  “He’s not the least bit winded,” Sekula added. “This, after supposedly dragging his wife out from the deep end, the bottom of the pool, and finding her unresponsive.”

  Before any of the day’s witnesses were questioned—witnesses who would soon describe what had happened after Roseboro made the call—the DA’s office played the 911 tape to put into context what they would be talking about.

  The unfolding of that night continued throughout much of the morning as those professionals (paramedics and police) on hand the night Jan died came in and told different versions of the same truth. All of them mentioned how Roseboro seemed too damn composed for a man who had just pulled his listless, breathless wife from their pool. Several of the witnesses described what Roseboro was wearing—no shirt, swimming trunks, no shoes—and how he started to tell that scripted story he would soon vocalize to anybody and everyone.

  With witnesses, Craig Stedman and Kelly Sekula were able to establish that every one of these people had a hard time opening the gate into the pool area. If you didn’t know how to unlatch the gate, you needed help. (This was more testimony that spoke to how difficult it would have been for an intruder to simply wander onto the property without Jan noticing and calling 911 from the cell phone she supposedly had with her.)

  Then Sam’s
friend Mike Texter, an extremely nervous, tense, and, some might contend, hostile witness, came in and explained what he saw that night. Texter mentioned nothing about seeing Jan scratching her husband’s back as he left with Sam. Protocol for examining witnesses was that the attorneys remained seated, unless they needed to point out something on an exhibit or show a piece of evidence. Witnesses faced the prosecution table, but it was easy to turn and face Michael Roseboro, who, as Texter talked about being one of the last people outside the family to see Jan alive, wept openly, dabbing his crocodile tears with tissues.

  At one point, Stedman asked Texter, “You don’t want him (Roseboro) to be convicted of murder, do you?” There was some obvious animosity between the two of them. Texter had raised his voice a few times. Stedman too.

  “Of course not! No one would who knew him. He’s a nice guy.”

  “Oh, well, please,” Stedman said, his voice increasing with disgust. “Do you want to tell us more great things about Mr. Roseboro right now? And keep going! I’m more than happy to sit here and listen to you tell us how great Mr. Roseboro is!”

  There was a pause.

  “All right, counsel,” the judge said, “let’s dial down the sarcasm.”

  Craig Stedman was flushed.

  After lunch, Detective Keith Neff sat in the witness stand and raised his right hand. Neff had come close a few times, but he had never testified in a trial. This, like investigating the murder of Jan Roseboro, was a first for the ECTPD investigator. Neff was anxious, he later admitted, but he had taken some rather sage advice from his colleagues, who had told him not to sweat it. Tell the truth. Let the facts hang out there by themselves for the jury to contemplate, feel, understand. What else can you do? You explained what you knew without expanding on it or coloring in the gray areas. A lot of times the truth was more powerful than anything you could come up with, anyway. As dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the acclaimed Russian author, speaking words that epitomized what Lady Justice would say to those sitting in a courtroom, once observed, “Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.”

  Tell it like it is, and let the chips fall.

  Neff was a keeper of excellent records. He was well organized and on top of his game. All of which was going to help. He sat and told the jury how he had become part of the case and how the investigation quickly became his full-time (at times night and day) job. He read the jury a note-for-note account of the first statement Michael Roseboro gave to him and Larry Martin on the night of Jan’s death. Neff said that Roseboro read the statement and signed it, initialing every question.

  He next talked the jury through the lighting on the Roseboro property, setting up the state’s contention that it would be nearly impossible for an intruder to turn out every light after cleaning up a crime scene. He also talked Craig Stedman through a series of photographs depicting the inside and outside of the Roseboro home.

  After a break, Stedman had Neff describe the content of that second interview he conducted with Michael Roseboro, the one out by the pool Jan Walters had participated in. Roseboro was asked to give them more details about how he had found Jan.

  Near the end of his direct examination, Stedman had Neff talk about the scratches on Roseboro’s face, telling the court that the detective would have to be recalled “for some other things later.”

  Deferring the witness to Allan Sodomsky, the defense attorney tried getting out of the detective anything he could use to cause doubt. They went back and forth for a time, talking about how Michael Roseboro said he had pulled Jan from the pool. Then Sodomsky keyed on the idea that Roseboro didn’t know Larry Martin, who had sat in on the interview that night at the station house, was a police officer. The implication was that Larry Martin and Keith Neff intimidated Roseboro, shined a light in his face, and pushed him into talking.

  “And during that first interview, you were just trying to find out what happened, right?”

  “Correct,” Neff answered.

  “You thought it was a drowning, right?”

  “It was a possibility that it was a drowning,” Neff answered. “We weren’t sure what happened, and that’s why we asked him to come back—to try to get some answers and figure out what happened.”

  But Michael Roseboro seemed evasive and unhelpful, not to mention unemotional and not upset by the loss of his wife. All indicators to Neff and Martin that he was hiding something.

  The witness and attorney discussed the interviews that Neff and Martin had done with Roseboro. Sodomsky couldn’t draw much of anything out of Neff that was going to help him. This sort of cross-examination rarely worked: questioning someone about the minutia of an event or events. It came across, as it did here, like bullying; beating an issue to the ground. Sodomsky was searching for something, hoping to catch Neff off guard, but there was nothing there. The detective had done his job by the book. If Neff wasn’t sure of something, he asked someone more experienced.

  By 4:59 P.M., the judge recessed until the following day.

  Craig Stedman had taken over as Lancaster County DA nearly seven months before the Michael Roseboro case had come across his desk. Heading into trial, the ambitious, hardworking DA was feeling the weight of the case getting to him.

  “We didn’t have an eyewitness. We didn’t have a confession. We had very little forensic evidence—that is, until that DNA underneath Jan’s nails came into play.”

  Stedman respected Allan Sodomsky. He had known him for “many, many years,” but he had never met up with Sodomsky on the opposing sides of a courtroom. From Stedman’s view, the trial was “battle royal.” Roseboro was sparing no expense on experts, doctors, private investigators, and, of course, a high-powered, high-profile attorney who knew his way around a courtroom. “He’s not going to hold back,” Stedman added, meaning Sodomsky. “He’s a fighter.”

  Still, Craig Stedman was convinced of Michael Roseboro’s guilt and the evidence his staff and team of law enforcement had prepared for trial. The DA had created lists, very long lists, for Keith Neff and others to check off as they went through and made sure nothing was left undone. But one of the biggest obstacles Stedman now faced wasn’t overlooking an important piece of evidence. Or forgetting to prepare a witness. It was Angie Funk. She was a reluctant witness. Not that she was going to protect Michael Roseboro, but Angie had made it clear to the DA’s office through her attorney that yes, she’d show up for court. Yes, she’d testify truthfully to what she recalled. But several months before trial, Angie had decided not to help the DA by giving additional interviews or participating in meetings before trial to prepare. So it was on the shoulders of the DA whether to use Angie.

  Yet how could he not? The commonwealth’s entire case centered around the affair. Angie was one of Roseboro’s motives for killing his wife.

  Stedman kept going back to those calls between Angie and Roseboro in April. She was giddy and laughing and talking to Roseboro as if she still loved him. She had even expressed her love to him during the first call.

  “It was clear her feelings had not gone away,” Stedman said. “So we had to ask ourselves, ‘What were we going to get out of Angie during trial?’”

  Because of the ambiguity swirling around Angie, Stedman and Kelly Sekula prepared for whichever Angie Funk showed up: hostile or cooperative. It was the only way to be completely ready. But Stedman wasn’t convinced that Angie was the right witness to call early on, or at all, just yet. So on July 15, 2009, he stuck to the flow of the investigation in calling Dr. Steven Zebert, the ER doctor from Ephrata Community Hospital. Angie could wait.

  Dr. Zebert described the scene at the hospital on the night Jan Roseboro was brought in. He said it was his decision to stop CPR near midnight. There just wasn’t any use.

  Jan was dead.

  The other key piece of information Dr. Steven Zebert offered was his surprise and shock that no one had called the hospital to check in on Jan to see how she was doing. Nor had Michael Roseboro shown up t
o see his wife and hear from the doctor firsthand what had happened.

  *  *  *

  Allan Sodomsky’s cross-examination produced nothing that could be even remotely construed as doubt.

  With Dr. Zebert out of the way, Keith Neff was recalled for the conclusion of his cross-examination. For the most part, Sodomsky hammered Neff on one point: when did law enforcement decide it was a murder and not a drowning?

  Neff explained himself thoroughly, honestly, pointedly, never backing down from his reports. The facts spoke for themselves.

  The remainder of the morning was consumed by Jan Roseboro’s family: Suzie Van Zant, Brian Binkley, Alex and Melissa Van Zant (Suzie’s son and daughter-in-law), and Allison Van Zant (another of Jan’s nieces).

  Most talked about Michael’s demeanor post–Jan’s death. Level. Unaffected. Unworried. Eerily tolerable of Jan not being alive anymore. Nor had Michael seemed bothered by the fact that someone had murdered his wife.

  Strange—but true.

  “In your presence,” Craig Stedman asked Allison Van Zant, “did [Mr. Roseboro] ever even say that Jan Roseboro had actually been murdered?”

  “Never.”

  “Did he ever make any statements about anything being stolen or missing from the home?” (This was a reference to that mysterious missing $40,000 worth of jewelry.)

  “Not to me directly.”

  Allan Sodomsky did not have much for Jan’s family members. They had spoken their truth, repeated what they had heard, and that was it. There was no sense in badgering people who had lost someone dear to them. It would serve no purpose but to alienate jurors.

  *  *  *

  Detective Scott Eelman, coordinator for the Lancaster County Forensic Unit, talked about his fourteen years of experience before telling jurors that he and others inspected the crime scene, which had been washed out by that crash-and-boom, soaking thunderstorm on the night of the murder.