Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  “No, that was Mr. Stedman’s words.”

  “Mr. Roseboro is not your future anymore in terms of a husband. Is that a fair statement?”

  “Yes.”

  Sodomsky did his best to minimize the phone calls, trying to sell the jury, in the form of a question, that 1,400 calls over a seven-week period really weren’t that numerous when one took into account how many hangups there would have been, how many times they said “hi” and “bye” quickly, or left messages on each other’s voice mail.

  Angie agreed.

  Some in the courtroom wondered what in the world this guy was talking about. Fourteen hundred calls in forty-nine days was more than what most teenagers made, an exorbitant amount. Trying to downplay it—well, it simply made the calls stand out all that much more.

  “… Did you tell the police,” Sodomsky asked Angie, “on July twenty-fourth, that a week or two before that date, Mike Roseboro said to you that he would be willing to give up the funeral home for you, if it came to that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what he said to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Several questions later, “The two of you got fairly deeply sexually involved in thirty-nine days—fair statement?”

  “Yes.”

  As the questioning went on throughout the latter part of the afternoon, the jury was already exhausted from a day’s worth of testimony. Mostly, it was a “yes/no” back-and-forth tennis match that didn’t shed too much light on anything that could help or hurt Roseboro. Angie verified that she loved Michael. She said she didn’t know he was going to kill Jan—if he indeed did. She talked about their relationship being in a “dream stage” most of the time, as if it weren’t real.

  Craig Stedman objected a few times, asking the court if the questions were relevant. The judge told Sodomsky to continue, but to move things forward.

  The jury looked tired, bored.

  “Mrs. Funk, at any time, did you ever tell anyone, including the police, that Mr. Roseboro told you that July 22, 2008, was going to be significant because he was going to tell his wife about you?”

  This was probably the most emphatic question of Sodomsky’s entire cross-exam.

  “No,” Angie stated, clearly sick of answering questions.

  From there, Sodomsky had Angie discuss how she and Roseboro had talked about leaving their spouses. Most of this had been covered already to a great degree. It was beyond redundant.

  “Look,” one legal professional in the courtroom told me later, “Sodomsky had his hands tied. What did he really have to work with?”

  “Sodomsky is an excellent lawyer and has a tremendous courtroom presence, but had very little to work with in this case,” Stedman explained. “The defendant was guilty, and the evidence was overwhelming.”

  True, Stedman had all but quashed the intruder theory with several of the neighbor witnesses, along with lengthy testimony about the lights being off and then Michael Roseboro claiming they were on. The only real defense Roseboro had left was to get up on the stand himself and claim he snapped—that it was an accident. Clinical narcissists, however, rarely cave and admit any culpability simply because they believe they’re smarter than everyone else. It’s all or nothing. In addition, Sodomsky had indicated in his voir dire questioning of potential jurors that Roseboro was not going to take the stand, somewhat showing his cards, when the lawyer asked potential jurors if they would be biased against a defendant who chose not to testify.

  Sodomsky ended by going through several of the e-mails. Angie once more agreed that she had written them, making the point that she had never discussed (and neither had her lover) killing Jan in any of the e-mails.

  The day was over.

  Finally.

  Wednesday, July 22, 2009, a year to the day that Jan Roseboro was murdered, began with a blast of hot and humid weather. Proceedings began promptly at 9:00 A.M. as Angie Funk was reminded that she was under oath.

  As if she could forget.

  The tone was different this morning. Allan Sodomsky started by having Angie talk about how ambivalent Michael Roseboro was regarding their affair being made public. He didn’t care one way or the other, Angie suggested. He didn’t express concern.

  That was a reach. Angie had told police he did care.

  Craig Stedman was eager to get another crack at Angie. The only thing that mattered, from where the prosecutor sat, was the content of those e-mails, not what Angie thought about Roseboro’s demeanor or his feelings about telling Jan. Those e-mails portrayed a man who was fixated on a woman and would have done anything—including murder—to be with her. He had made that clear in just about every e-mail. This talk about not getting divorce attorneys and not taking real steps to end their marriages was significant: Roseboro was going to fix all that, Stedman wanted to clarify, by strangling and drowning his wife.

  After a half hour or so, Sodomsky concluded.

  Craig Stedman had that stack of e-mails sitting on the table in front of him. “Mr. Sodomsky,” he said with passion, “asked you some questions yesterday about your communications with the defendant … and I think you ended up saying to him and agreeing with him … that they were ‘lustful banter,’ is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Stedman held up the stack of e-mails. He told Angie Funk she could see them if she needed to refresh her memory.

  “No!” Angie said, looking away.

  “There’s actually not a lot about sex in there. There’s a few comments here and there, but there’s not much in there about just lust and sex, is there?”

  “I—I—I,” Angie said, stumbling now, tired and dazed by all these questions, “I wanted it clean for work, so I didn’t—yeah, there’s not a whole lot about sex, no.”

  Stedman pointed out that Angie and Roseboro had made specific wedding plans.

  “They were not specific,” she said. “I mean, those were dreaming….”

  As Stedman’s redirect continued, he sounded like he was beating up on Angie by continually raising his voice and calling her on many of the vague responses she had given Allan Sodomsky.

  Angie appeared to be ready to break down. She was kept on the stand until 10:30 A.M., an hour and a half, answering more questions from Sodomsky on recross, before being cut loose. Sodomsky, in concluding his recross, apologized to Angie for having to put her through such a taxing experience.

  Craig Stedman brought in a few more neighbors to expand on his “the lights were off” argument. Then Sabine Panzer-Kaelin came in and schooled the jury on DNA. It was time to get into that whole skin-under-the-fingernails/scratches-on-Roseboro’s-face part of the saga.

  Panzer-Kaelin clarified that the DNA found underneath Jan’s three fingernails was, indeed, from her husband. All the technical mumbo jumbo she talked about—explaining in detail the minutia involved in DNA collecting and testing—led to one conclusion that the jury was certain to grasp. In Panzer-Kaelin’s perfectly crafted layman’s way of talking about such complicated matters, it became obvious that Michael Roseboro “donated” that DNA under the fingernails, but there was no test available that would tell how it got there.

  That was a piece of the puzzle left up to Gary Frees to explain.

  Frees, a senior planner for a local concrete company, had known Jan and Michael Roseboro about a year, he said. Frees had driven Michael to the ECTPD on that night of Jan’s death. When they got to the station house, Frees testified, he noticed something about his friend.

  “He was wiping his upper lip. Just … there was oozing [of blood and pus] coming out of his upper lip. He was wiping that.”

  As Frees left the stand after cross, redirect, and recross, Judge James Cullen banged his gavel. It was 5:02 P.M. Another day in the books.

  74

  It is, in the end, those subtle pieces of evidence that ultimately put the proverbial nail in the lying killer’s coffin. You know, those “things” mos
t killers never think of. It’s generally not DNA, eyewitness testimony, or phone records that put a person away. No. Some of that helps, sure. But if killing is an art, then every brushstroke one ponders and labors over must add to the picture, not contort it, or toss confusion into the psychology behind its meaning.

  For example, on July 23, 2009, Craig Stedman brought in several witnesses to talk about what Michael Roseboro was wearing on the night he “found” his wife in the family pool. It was thought that Roseboro had been wearing the same swimming trunks he had said he swam in earlier that night.

  If that was the case, Roseboro had gone to bed wearing wet swimming trunks.

  No one would do that.

  But this was something he probably overlooked when planning a way out of killing his wife.

  Then, at one point, witnesses talked about Jan Roseboro’s dogs. Jan loved her dogs, maybe even more than her philandering husband. Wherever Jan went outside on the Roseboro property, she generally had those dogs by her side, especially if she was out at the pool at night by herself.

  Just so happened on the night of her murder, Jan’s dogs had been caged in the basement of the house.

  One had to ask, why? Or, better yet, by whom?

  Then there were the kids. Besides Sam, who had left to go swimming with friends, the three other children—a thirteen-year-old among them—were in bed sleeping by 9:30 to 9:45 P.M. A thirteen-year-old during summer break sleeping by 9:45 P.M.? It seemed impossible. Neighbors had said the kids were awake—on most nights—until eleven or twelve. The family had just opened this new pool. More than that, the kids—all of them—slept through the entire episode until late the following morning. Dozens of people inside the house. The cops walking into their rooms at one point, and they were all out.

  Cold.

  Without saying it, or providing evidence, it was clear that the prosecution believed Roseboro had maybe slipped a few milliliters of Benadryl into the kids’ late-night snacks.

  Subtle evidence. It is part of every murder case. Here, Craig Stedman was convinced that the jury could come to only one conclusion based on all of this evidence.

  Like the dawn-to-dusk light. How could anyone besides Michael Roseboro turn that light on or off?

  It would be absurd to think anyone else killed Jan Roseboro.

  And so that is how the next few days, save for the weekend in between, went in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Michael Alan Roseboro: for those sitting, day in and day out, watching the proceedings, it seemed as though the state won every round. Not one witness or statement had gone against them. Not one piece of evidence disputed or was out of place.

  Ending the state’s case on July 27, 2009, Stedman had Dr. Wayne Ross talk about how Jan Roseboro died. Ross told his tale of pathology as Craig Stedman introduced graphic photographs, showing clearly how deep and brutal that gouge was on the back of Jan’s shaved head. It was no accidental tap. Whatever caused that injury to the back of Jan’s head had struck her with force and anger and violence.

  Intruders, the insinuation was made clear, do not kill in this manner.

  Ross brought a sense of authenticity to the trial, a true realization that Jan had been murdered in a fit of aggression and rage. This trial was no longer about an affair. It was now focused on murder—the victim no longer a headline in the newspapers, but a homicide victim on a slab of steel being dissected like an eighth-grade biology experiment.

  At one point, Ross talked about drowning, saying, “It is a good way to hide murder.”

  Then, in a dramatic turn of events, Dr. Ross stood in front of the jury box as Detective Keith Neff got up from his seat and walked toward him. Ross then put Neff into a choke hold like the one he believed Jan’s killer had used in order to demonstrate how, “like a vise, or nutcracker,” Jan’s killer squeezed her unconscious. Neff knew this hold from his jiujitsu experience. There were two or three jurors, Neff said, whom he looked at while under the choke hold, who became emotional watching the display.

  “I was not aware we were going to do the demo,” Neff recalled. “So it caught me by surprise. The choke hold is common in jiujitsu, and I have been put in it many times. I never thought I would end up on the receiving end of this choke in open court, in front of a jury.”

  After a long morning of medical testimony, wrapped around that one striking moment of Dr. Wayne Ross and Keith Neff acting out the murder, and Allan Sodomsky then trying to trip the doctor up on anything he could manage (to no avail), Stedman introduced a litany of photographs and additional pieces of evidence. Then the DA stood.

  “Judge,” Craig Stedman said, “with that, the commonwealth rests.”

  75

  Jay Nigrini, Allan Sodomsky’s co-counsel, called Dr. Neil Allan Hoffman first. Hoffman was there to dispute how Jan Roseboro had died, and certainly had the credentials to argue an alternative theory. Hoffman had acquired his medical degree in 1967, the year Michael Roseboro was born. He was a pathologist at Reading Hospital. He had conducted over three thousand autopsies.

  Hoffman had done a second autopsy on Jan Roseboro’s body. In doing so, he had come to, basically, the same conclusion (strangulation and drowning), agreeing with Dr. Wayne Ross on the cause, but disagreeing on how Jan had gotten her injuries.

  Jan’s injuries, he said, “were caused by blunt impact to the head. By that, I mean either the head hit a blunt object or a blunt object hit the head, and there were multiple impacts”—and here came the major difference in opinions—“not necessarily all from the same source, or at the same time.”

  The point was then made that Jan could have fallen or been pushed into the water. Hoffman mentioned that some of the injuries could have been “preexisting.”

  Nigrini’s direct was brief. No need to bore the jury, or tire them any more than necessary; the trial was beginning to get long and tedious.

  Craig Stedman had the doctor talk about who hired him (Allan Sodomsky) and how much his services had cost the defendant.

  “Twenty-five hundred, I believe,” Dr. Hoffman said.

  “And are you getting three hundred and fifty dollars an hour today?”

  “Yes.”

  Stedman thought about that a moment. After calculating, he said, “So you’ve made over two thousand dollars sitting here today?”

  “Perhaps, yes.”

  “And I guess the longer I keep talking, the more you keep making. Is that right?”

  The doctor didn’t answer.

  Stedman, having made his point, moved on.

  He ripped apart, medical report by medical report, every possible aspect of Dr. Neil Hoffman’s argument, leaving the jury to draw one conclusion: This guy was being paid to have a different opinion, which, when the facts were further explained, wasn’t all that much different from what the state’s medical examiner had uncovered. Jan Roseboro was murdered violently and died in that water, still breathing.

  Allan Sodomsky called Zach Martin, one of Sam Roseboro’s friends, who was with Sam on July 22, 2008.

  Zach testified that nothing seemed out of whack when he saw Mr. and Mrs. Roseboro by the pool. They seemed happy. They seemed at ease. Just an old married couple enjoying a night out at the pool.

  Craig Stedman smartly focused on one item during his cross-examination, asking Zach, “You didn’t see any scratches on the face of Mr. Roseboro during the period of time that you were there, did you, sir?” “No.”

  A few more questions and Zach Martin was excused.

  Jay Nigrini called Scott Eelman, the state’s forensic examiner. Nigrini was concerned about two hairs found by the pool that the state police’s forensic lab had refused to test.

  Eelman explained that the hairs were found on the coping of the pool, and the lab refused to test them.

  On cross, Eelman explained why.

  There were no roots in the hairs. Testing them would be fruitless, a waste of taxpayer money.

  Talk inside the courthouse as Michael Roseboro’s defense put on witnesses
the following day, July 28, 2009, a Tuesday, was When is this thing going to end? There was not a chance Roseboro would be acquitted. Save for a stranger, walking into the courtroom, who proclaimed his guilt, Roseboro was finished.

  Allan Sodomsky called Brandi Walls. She was as nervous as a child sitting outside the principal’s office. Sodomsky told Brandi to take a deep breath and relax.

  Brandi had been a fire hall volunteer at the time Jan Roseboro was murdered. She was on the Roseboro property that night. Not yet eighteen years old, she was in training, and knew the Roseboro family.

  The young woman told the jury that all the lights were on when she arrived, including the tiki torches. She said the time was 11:05 P.M. when she got there, just minutes after Michael Roseboro had phoned 911. She said Roseboro was “slightly calm,” and became much more stable after Sam arrived.

  At one point, Brandi said she believed Michael was wearing “boxer length–type shorts.” And so, with that, Brandi’s presence had been established: she was there to toss out the claim that Roseboro was wearing his swimsuit, as nearly everyone else had testified.

  When Craig Stedman questioned Brandi, she admitted she wasn’t sure if Roseboro was wearing boxers, shorts, or a swimsuit. She just didn’t know.

  If this was all Roseboro had up his sleeve, he had better hope for that stranger to show up right about now; because a wet swimsuit was the least of his problems heading into the homestretch of this trial.

  LCDA’s Office detective David Odenwalt took a seat in the witness stand next. Allan Sodomsky tried to get Odenwalt to admit he screwed up a report detailing that scream Cassandra Pope said she heard on the night Jan Roseboro was murdered. Odenwalt never backed down from what he reported. He had created a facsimile of what Cassie had told him.

  Craig Stedman had Odenwalt reiterate this point.

  Michael Roseboro’s defense called three more witnesses, then rested. It wasn’t even three o’clock yet. Still plenty of time left in the day.