Love Her To Death

by M. William Phelps

  The judge recessed until the following morning.

  On Wednesday, July 29, 2009, court resumed. The judge announced that closing arguments were about to begin.

  Allan Sodomsky went first.

  Within the first two minutes, Sodomsky said “reasonable doubt” eight times, hammering home his point that if jurors had one qualm of uncertainty, they would have to acquit.

  “Let’s talk a minute about the lie,” Sodomsky said. “Let’s talk for a moment about the big lie. And I do not mean that facetiously…. Mr. Roseboro, Michael Roseboro, lied, and he cheated. But … he only lied about cheating.”

  Craig Stedman smiled.

  “I’m not asking you to go over there and pat him on the back and say, ‘It’s okay, don’t worry about it,’” Sodomsky continued. “Because it’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace when you lie. It’s a disgrace when you lie, and, of course, when you lie about cheating—it’s even worse. But it isn’t cheating and lying, I guess, unless you lie about the cheating. And that’s what you have.”

  Sodomsky toned down the swimsuit angle, arguing plaid versus patterns of colors that witnesses had described, asking if they were truly certain about what they had seen?

  He said Michael’s daughter most certainly scratched his face in the pool that afternoon while they were playing basketball—only problem with this was that everyone else had disagreed, and Michael Roseboro was having sex all afternoon with Angie. He was not swimming with his kids.

  He talked about how Michael was comforting and consoling everyone during those first few days after Jan’s death, which was why he never had a chance to grieve himself. He was in work mode, being the skilled undertaker even when it was his wife lying in the morgue awaiting preparation for cremation.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Roseboro is a funeral director. Guess what he does for a living? He comforts and consoles others.”

  The worst thing a defense attorney can do is carry on and on during his closing when the trial that jurors have witnessed is leaning the way of the prosecution. There’s a pleading, begging quality to the argument, turning jurors away. Not to say Sodomsky could not fight for his client—and, boy, did he ever; the outcome here would not be a reflection on the quality of defense or the expert trial lawyer Sodomsky was and will always be—and a jury needed to understand that and be patient. But there comes a time when an attorney must consider that less is more. Sodomsky kept referring back to the state not proving motive. He did this, mainly, by mentioning Angie Funk as little as possible. (That lust Roseboro had for this woman. It overpowered him. Overtook his emotions. He was going to do anything to make it work and not lose all he had worked for. This had been clear throughout the trial. Not addressing the subject was an insult to the intelligence of jurors.)

  When he finally did talk about Angie, Sodomsky said he couldn’t make sense out of a dream and lust turning a guy into a murderer.

  “Six sexual rendezvous, thirty-nine days, ladies and gentlemen, and for that “—he raised his voice and then paused—“you orphan your children?”

  No mention of the baby. Or that beach wedding with flowing gowns and the sun and surf and wind in their hair. Or of the fact that Roseboro was communicating with Angie, on some days, hundreds of times.

  Sodomsky finished his closing where he started: reasonable doubt. It was stamped, he suggested, all over this case. Anywhere you looked. Questions unanswered. Evidence missing. A lot of he said/she said, lights on/lights off nonsense. None of it amounted to a man killing his wife as their children slept mere feet away inside the house. There is only speculation as to what occurred between that witching hour, ten to eleven, Sodomsky asserted.

  “There is no reason, ladies and gentlemen. There is no reason. That’s your reasonable doubt.”

  Allan Sodomsky’s closing had eaten up most of the morning session.

  Court would resume, the judge said, at one o’clock.

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  Craig Stedman had listened open-mindedly to Allan Sodomsky’s closing. The DA had even agreed with Sodomsky on one major point. Sodomsky had told the jury during his closing that it made little sense for a killer to “stop the carotid neck hold” once he had gotten his victim into it. That theory, proven by both doctors, flew in the face of common sense. Reasonably speaking, a random killer would have grabbed Jan by the neck and choked her to death, tossing her limp (dead) body into the pool, before stealing that jewelry Michael Roseboro had claimed went missing.

  Thus, in effect, Stedman believed, Sodomsky had argued for the state’s case in bringing up this idea. Addressing the jury early into his closing, Stedman said, “It makes no sense for a random killer to stop the carotid neck hold once you’ve got your victim in that. It makes absolutely no sense!”

  Then the prosecutor sketched out the scene for jurors.

  “You’re a random killer. You’re there to kill her. You do kill her. You’ve got her in a position where she’s unconscious … keeping [the choke hold] going until she is dead. Absolutely. [Mr. Sodomsky] is absolutely right! It makes no sense for a random killer to stop once he’s got her in that position.”

  Then the drumroll and cymbal crash…. “But it does make sense,” Stedman said, raising his voice, “for one person to stop the carotid neck hold. This person,” he said thunderously, pointing to Roseboro. “You know why? Because he wants to make it look like an accident. You’ve got to stop the … neck hold before she dies so you can get her in the pool so she can gulp in water. If you kill her before—if you kill her before you put her in the pool … there’s no water in her lungs. There’s no drowning. There’s no accident.” He paused and lowered his voice. “You don’t get away with murder.”

  Stedman went on to explain how Roseboro had gone to great lengths to make the murder appear to be an accident—but failed.

  Then Stedman laid out his case, point by point, noting that Roseboro’s DNA underneath his wife’s fingernails and the scratches on Roseboro’s face told a story all by itself.

  Whatever you want to call it, Stedman said, the writing was not on the wall. It was written all over Michael Roseboro’s demeanor and behavior, beginning with the 911 call, and following into those ten days after Jan Roseboro’s murder as he told one lie after the next, then had the audacity to write a letter saying Jan had had an affair.

  This was all nothing more than a desperate man grasping for a lifeline.

  One important factor Stedman brought up was that Roseboro had been expecting a phone bill days after Jan was murdered. The bill was $688 and some change. Jan did the household finances. She was going to see that bill and know her husband had been stepping out on her once again. Thus, the phone bill, that talk of marrying Angie and being with her all the time, along with his compulsive desire for the woman, had backed him into a corner. The time had come. He was going to lose everything, or so he feared. Sprinkle a bit of mania and a bastard child on that situation and you have a recipe for murder.

  Stedman spent two hours outlining his case. In the end, he told jurors, “You’ve got a mountain of evidence…. Find him guilty of murder in the first degree, not because I say so,” he said, pointing at himself, “but because the evidence says so.”

  It was 3:26 P.M.

  The judge released the jury for the day. He wanted everyone back first thing in the morning, when deliberations were set to begin.

  The following day, July 30, 2009, Judge James Cullen gave instructions to the eight women and four men of the jury.

  By 9:53 A.M., Michael Roseboro’s fate was in their hands.

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  “There’s nothing else I could have done,” Craig Stedman recalled. He was addressing co-counsel Kelly Sekula as they waited for the jury. “No matter what the verdict is, we gave it all.”

  Sekula agreed.

  “I felt like we were going to win,” Stedman said, adding later, “Despite all Angie did … she did one fundamentally huge thing Mr. Roseboro did not. She admitted the affair right from the start.”
He paused. “While [Roseboro] lied to everyone.”

  Stedman retreated to his office. He wanted to be alone.

  An hour into deliberations, the jury asked to hear the 911 tape.

  When Stedman heard about the request, he felt a sense of relief. That 911 tape was a crucial piece of evidence. So important to Stedman, he had planned on playing it during his closing; but at the last minute, he decided not to, for fear of running too long.

  The jury got to hear it again, anyway.

  Yes!

  So everyone piled back into the courtroom. As the tape was played for the jury this second time, Stedman and Sekula could see some of the jurors counting along with the compressions the 911 operator had instructed Roseboro to perform on Jan’s chest. Thirty was the number the operator had told Roseboro.

  “One, two, three …” Some jurors were counting along under their breath.

  Michael Roseboro whipped up some “faux tears,” said one person in the courtroom, and got louder and more animated, shuffling papers around and sniffling, when he felt the jury wasn’t watching him. It was so strange that Roseboro had cried in court listening to the tape, and yet had not shed one tear during the call itself.

  But when the compression count (by jurors) stopped at about ten, and some jurors realized Roseboro had come nowhere near thirty (but had told the 911 operator he had), there were sighs and raised eyebrows by those jurors. Roseboro had never done the compressions—it was obvious when listening to the tape that he was lying to the 911 operator.

  Unstated evidence once again poking its head back into proceedings.

  Lunch hour came, and the jury hadn’t indicated it was ready.

  Patience.

  Detective Keith Neff was upstairs in the DA’s office, sitting around, fidgeting, wondering when the jury was going to come back. At one point, he got up and walked down the corridor to Detective Jan Walters’s office, which is in the same building, on the same floor, as the DA’s office.

  Near 2:30 P.M., Larry Martin poked his head into Walters’s office doorway as Neff and Walters were yapping.

  “The jury’s back.”

  Neff recalled later that a “jolt of adrenaline” shot through him. “I had gone over to talk with Jan several times during the trial,” Neff remembered. “Jan is such a calm presence and talking to him always seemed to get me on point.” There were others, Neff said respectfully, who were mere balls of stress, and Neff didn’t want to absorb any of it. So he stayed away from them. “After being told the verdict was in, I felt like we all had to rush down to the courtroom, when we really had plenty of time.”

  During the elevator ride downstairs, there was no conversation. Everyone was numb. All that work had come down to this: a human decision. Most law enforcement can tell you that juries can go either way. It’s when you think you have one in the bag that you’re slapped with a dose of reality and the jury acquits. Strange things happen during deliberations. One holdout and a verdict is in jeopardy.

  The courtroom was filled more than usual. Standing room only. And many took advantage of any empty space.

  The jury walked in and the foreman handed the verdict to the bailiff, who then walked it over to the judge.

  Judge James Cullen read the verdict to himself, nodded, then folded the piece of paper back in half.

  The bailiff took the verdict slip and returned it to the jury.

  The jury forewoman stood and read the verdict at 2:47 P.M.

  “‘Guilty.’”

  Everyone let out a deep breath.

  Jurors were polled individually and each stated that one word Michael Roseboro did not want to hear.

  The convicted murderer showed no reaction.

  “I really believe it took me weeks to totally recover,” Keith Neff later said. “My wife told me she felt the same way. Afterward, she told me I had been preoccupied that entire year. She understood why, but there was no one more glad it was over than her. I’m sure I was hard to live with. My wife was very supportive of me and took care of the home front. I was so glad to be back with my family.”

  “There was no way,” Craig Stedman concluded, “I expected to hear not guilty at the time the jury came back. They came back so fast. Going into the case, I thought the worst we could do would have been a hung jury.”

  Michael Roseboro did not, at any time, respond to the verdict, but his mother, Ann Roseboro, had “an extreme reaction,” said one trial watcher, obviously swept away with dread and fear for a son whom she still believed in.

  78

  Michael Roseboro was in lockup. A report claimed he was on “suicide watch,” but that was an overstatement, taken out of context. Like anyone else convicted of murder, Roseboro was in the facility’s medical housing unit undergoing observation and evaluation to see how he was handling the jury’s verdict. Lancaster County Prison warden Vincent Guarini confirmed to the local press that Roseboro was “moved to the unit” on Friday, July 31, but he called the move what it was: “a precaution.”

  Guarini told one reporter, “There’s been no behavioral change. When someone gets a life or murder conviction, we’ll look at the prisoner and make sure he’s okay.”

  When he got out of the psych unit and was placed into the general population, trolling around Lancaster County Prison one afternoon, waiting for his sentencing date, Roseboro was approached by an inmate.

  “Why you in here?” the guy asked.

  “I killed my wife,” Roseboro said in jest, as if the guy didn’t know who he was. Heck, Roseboro’s face had been plastered all over the front pages of the local papers, guilty written across it. He was a quasi celebrity.

  Acting shocked by the statement, the guy repeated, “You killed your wife, man?” He said it more as a question. He was likely referring to Roseboro’s unwavering determination all throughout the trial that he was innocent. “What do you think?” Roseboro asked. The guy thought about it. “I think you did it.” Roseboro shook his head. Nodded yes. And, according to multiple sources, Michael Roseboro then said, “Yeah, I did it,” finally admitting to murdering his wife.

  79

  Michael Roseboro might have thought he caught a break a week after the verdict. A local newspaper broke a story that had the potential to turn things around for the embattled murderer. There was light, hope on Roseboro’s part for a second wind.

  The Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era reported shortly after the verdict that two jurors, Nick Keene and Michael Hecker, did not necessarily enjoy the time they spent on the jury during Roseboro’s murder trial. They had often been vocal about it on Facebook.

  Before, during, and after the trial, the newspaper uncovered, both jurors had “facebooked” friends regarding their feelings. They had complained to Facebook friends that they were, for one, picked for the jury; and two, the trial had dragged along.

  Yea, it blows, nineteen-year-old Nick Keene wrote in one Facebook post that June, before jury selection concluded. Three [f-ing] weeks. If the trial went that long, Keene continued, he’d have all of two weeks until school starts.

  Then on July 27, the start of what turned out to be the final week of the trial, Michael Hecker, somewhat older than Keene, wrote that he was hoping this will be the last week of court.

  That comment, posted at 7:24 A.M., close to two hours before court started, wasn’t so bad. It was the answers the comment elicited that stunned many later, and perhaps raised some concern that Keene and Hecker had stepped over the line and failed to follow the judge’s order not to talk about the case.

  Ha, one friend posted in reaction to Hecker’s line.

  Fry him, another friend answered.

  Why were you in court? asked another.

  I’m a juror on a 1st degree murder trial, Hecker responded to his friends that night, well after court had ended for the day. He then explained how he had been on the jury for the last three weeks, saying how unfortunate it was and how he couldn’t wait till I can share my thoughts on it.

  A friend enco
uraged Hecker to stop in at work sometime and share….

  There was no indication if Hecker ever did.

  On the day Stedman rested the state’s case, at 5:53 P.M., Hecker posted this gem: THANK GOD, before explaining how the case had been dragging on and on.

  The ethical question about all this banter wasn’t if these jurors had done anything wrong. They did not discuss the content of the case, evidence, witnesses, or Michael Roseboro himself. Basically, they were venting, same as you might at the local diner or post office, about being a juror.

  Still, did these jurors disregard the judge’s instructions? Did they maintain their integrity as jurists?

  Allan Sodomsky didn’t think they had. In fact, he believed Michael Roseboro deserved a new trial based on this revelation.

  On August 3, 2009, Judge James Cullen asked for a conference call with both attorneys to discuss what had been brought to light.

  “In our opinion,” Craig Stedman told reporters, “there’s nothing there.” The DA explained that while the jurors in question talked about their feelings, they did not talk about facts. “A person on Facebook, that’s their way of coming home and blowing off steam,” he added. “Whereas, before you would do it at the dinner table and talking to people.”

  After the conference call, Stedman was confident the issue had been resolved, saying, “The judge had the power to schedule a hearing if he felt he needed to, in this case. He didn’t do that. You can draw your own conclusion.”

  It wouldn’t end there, however.

  But first, regardless of what was going on with the Facebook allegations, the judge needed to impose a sentence on Michael Roseboro.

  The sentencing was a mere formality. On September 25, 2009, Roseboro received a mandatory life sentence without parole. He could appeal, of course, which Allan Sodomsky was actually working on already. But for now, Roseboro was slated to spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security facility upstate, far away from family and friends.