Authors: M. William Phelps
Even after they sprayed the entire pool deck area with the chemical leuco crystal, which turns traces of blood purple, and another chemical compound called Starlight Bloodhound, which works more like straight luminol and makes blood essentially give off a glow, there was not one trace of blood anywhere. Not even a speck. This after several members of the CSI Unit got on their hands and knees with flashlights and searched inch by inch along the concrete, looking for any, however remote, trace that blood was present on the concrete near the area where Jan’s body had been worked on.
If Jan had bled outside, someone knew what he was doing when cleaning it up.
There were several large planters around the pool. But not a trace of blood or hair was located on any of them. The accidental slipping idea—Jan could have fallen on one of those planters, cracked her head open, and then, dazed and dizzy, fell into the pool and drowned—was superseded by the fact that there was not one single piece of trace evidence to suggest such a scenario.
Given that news, Keith Neff thought it was possible that Jan could have been killed inside the house and brought outside.
But there was no trace of blood inside the house—carpets, floors, furniture, walls, ceiling, doors, anywhere—
or outside on the lawn, pool deck, or anywhere else. None of this made sense. Jan had definitely bled profusely; yet there was no indication that she had bled anywhere in or around the house.
Then again, Neff considered,
Jan could have been killed outside, near the pool? …
There was one substance just about every household had on hand that could clean any trace of blood and throw off the luminol tests the LCFU had conducted with meticulous precision.
Hydrogen peroxide.
It was the only solution available to the average home owner that could distill blood enough to make it disappear.
Yet, the LCFU did not find one empty bottle of hydrogen peroxide or a trace of it anywhere inside or outside the home.
By the end of the day, Neff was scratching his head.
No motive. No forensic evidence. Very little circumstantial evidence.
“We had nothing,” Neff observed, “besides a feeling.”
Michael Roseboro
appeared
to be guilty. But a feeling or instinct was not going to get an arrest warrant signed.
Opportunity was another thing. Roseboro said he was sleeping when Jan was murdered. That meant he had an opportunity to kill her. So Neff and his team knew they had to see if anyone had seen or heard what had happened in the Roseboros’ backyard between 10:00 and 11:02
P.M.
Neighbors. It was time to canvass the neighborhood and see what people had to say about the night of July 22, 2008.
There was a house directly across the street from the Roseboro pool, on Creek Road. A raised ranch-type house with two floors, it was set back about an acre from West Main Street and faced the Roseboro pool, looking
south. If a person stood on the upper floor, the second story, and peered through a window, he had a straight shot directly into the Roseboro pool area.
This was as good a place as any to start.
For the past fifteen years, September Malamon lived in the house with her husband and three Siberian huskies. September had a schedule, or routine, with the dogs. The last call to go outside and do their thing was at 9:00
P.M.,
September told the ECTPD. She took them herself every night. This worked out well, because September worked third shift at a local Denver Pepperidge Farm plant. She took the dogs out, got her lunch ready, and generally left the house by 10:15
P.M.
Her car was parked in the garage. When she left, she’d have to drive out of her driveway and, facing the side of the Roseboros’ house the pool was on, look directly at the Roseboros’ as she pulled onto Creek Road and headed into downtown Denver.
That night, September said later, the Roseboro residence was “pitch black.” There were no cars in the driveway, nor were there any lights on outside.
She was sure of it.
This scene was oddly unfamiliar to September, because the Roseboros
always
had the backyard lit up like a high-school football field—which was one of the main reasons why she noticed the darkness.
As September was changing that night, getting ready to go to work, she recalled standing in an upstairs room, looking out at the Roseboros’ backyard. This would have been, September remembered, around ten, a little after. Roseboro had said he left Jan outside at that time and all the lights were on.
Supposedly, Jan was enjoying the night sky, but with the lights on?
September said she looked across the street and had not seen anybody, admitting, “There are parts [of the
yard] blocked from my view. But I can see the pool and the house and then the pool yard. There’s a tree, and then the pool yard beyond that I can see to the edge, but where the tree is, there’s one little section I cannot see.”
Still, September could see the tiki lights when they were on and during the daylight hours.
Yet, not one light in the backyard was on as September got ready for work in the second-story room of her home. Not even the overhead dusk-to-dawn light, which is turned off only by a breaker switch or by unplugging it, not a simple on/off switch on the side of a wall somewhere, was lit.
The ECTPD left September Malamon’s house with more questions than answers.
In the days to come, a second neighbor, who had been driving by the house at ten thirty-five
P.M.
on the night Jan was murdered, had also reported that the backyard was completely dark. Two separate witnesses—who did not know each other—making the same exact claim.
“That made a big difference to me,” DA Craig Stedman later said. “She (the second witness) also said that the front of the Roseboros’ house was dark. This stood out to her. The front of that house was normally well lit up—but
not
that night. There were only two windows in the basement [turned on].”
“Roseboro’s story to me was ‘I had gone into the house at ten o’clock and left Jan outside … with all the lights on,’” Neff said.
In fact, Roseboro said the only reason he went outside to begin with was because he saw that the tiki lights were still burning.
If an intruder had gotten into the backyard and, by some remote chance, killed Jan, why would that intruder light those tiki torches? the detective who had never investigated a murder in his career kept asking himself.
It made no sense.
“Okay,” Keith Neff said later, “maybe you can say that
Jan turned off all those lights so she could look at the stars and planes, as some had told us. But then you’d have to have a killer walk around and relight torchlights manually….”
Not a chance in hell.
21
Detective Keith Neff was back at the ECTPD on July 24, 2008, when he received a call from Allan Sodomsky. Working out of the office of Sodomsky and Nigrini in nearby Reading, Pennsylvania, Allan Sodomsky had a reputation as a no-nonsense lawyer who defended those he believed had been wrongly accused and prosecuted, as his choice of profession would make you assume. Part of Sodomsky’s reputation had to do with the fees he charged. None of that made much difference to Michael Roseboro, who made upward of $500,000 a year as the funeral director, owner/operator of Roseboro Funeral Home.
“Hi, yeah, I am now representing Michael Roseboro,” Sodomsky explained to Neff, “so you cannot speak to him anymore.”
This was fairly good timing for Craig Stedman and the DA’s office. By then, Stedman later said, “I would have wanted to leave Mr. Roseboro alone, anyway, and begin to interview everyone around him, instead.”
The idea was to make Roseboro sweat a little bit. Ratchet up the pressure valve a notch.
Neff said okay. If the ECTPD needed Roseboro for anything, someone from the DA’s office or the ECTPD would call Sodomsky first.
Then another call came in—and everything changed.
“I think there might be something going on between Michael Roseboro and Angela Funk,” the caller explained.
Angela Funk? Who is that?
It was the first time the ECTPD had heard the name. With a quick check, it was determined that Angela—or Angie—Funk, a married working mother of two daughters (three and five years old), lived a block away from the Roseboro Funeral Home.
How convenient.
Larry Martin called the LCDA’s Office and told Kelly Sekula about the call.
“We’ll send someone over there to interview her.”
The oldest motive for murder in the book had just exposed itself.
County detectives arrived at Angie Funk’s downtown home, which literally looked out on the Roseboro Funeral Home’s Walnut Street sign, employee entrance, and garage—where Michael Roseboro, in other words, came and went, and where he brought the bodies into the funeral home. Angie could sit on her porch, throw a stone, and hit the side of the building.
To boot, Michael Roseboro’s parents lived right next door to Angie.
Small town, indeed.
Angie Funk was rather plain-looking, maybe even tomboyish in her own cute way. Short-cropped hair (Peter Pan–like), which was straight and sandy brown, an average figure, glaring eyes, fair skin, and a bubbly, yet peaceful (some said) demeanor. She seemed to dress conservatively with long skirts and heavy blouses, probably a habit carried over from her days as a Mennonite. By outside appearances, Angie had a homey June Cleaver way about her, and seemed to be nothing more than the ordinary housewife and mother she portrayed herself as. Angie had been a claims adjuster for a local
insurance agency, and before that, she had worked in the same industry in various positions.
“Hey,” one of the county detectives said as Angie opened the door and, realizing quickly who was at her door, closed it behind her back. “We’re here about an affair you possibly had with Michael Roseboro—and we were wondering when that might have ended?”
The only way to put it was directly on the table.
“I wasn’t aware that it ended,” Angie said right away. Her face was pinched. She looked uncomfortable and scared. Her eyes told the detectives that she didn’t want to talk too loud about this subject here on the porch, the door behind her, her children and husband on the opposite side. Apparently, Angie’s husband didn’t know about this affair that was, by Angie’s admission, still going on.
The detectives looked at each other. “Well, we’re going to need to talk to you about this,” one of them said.
Angie explained that she and her husband, Randall “Randy” Funk, along with their two daughters, were heading down to Ocean City, New Jersey, for a family vacation. Just so happened, they were packing to leave that night.
“We’ll be in touch, then.”
The detectives didn’t tell Angie, but they would be sending a couple of investigators down to Ocean City to talk to her. This situation couldn’t wait. It was too important to the investigation into Jan Roseboro’s murder.
When Keith Neff heard about this new development, he could, but then couldn’t, believe it. “Why hadn’t this woman come forward and told us?” Neff wondered. She must have seen that her lover’s wife had drowned in her own pool. Why hadn’t she stepped up and called?
It was a good (obvious) question. If she was still having an affair with a man whose wife had been murdered, a story well covered in the local press, why hadn’t Angie called the ECTPD and told them about the affair? More
than that, Angie would soon tell the police that she and Roseboro had planned on getting married. And there was one more surprise that would soon emerge. A bombshell, in fact.
At the least, the appearance of this affair between Angie Funk and Michael Roseboro looked awfully suspicious. Had Angie Funk played a part in Jan’s murder? Had she helped Roseboro? Was Roseboro covering for his girlfriend?
These were all fair questions investigators were now asking themselves as they prepared to head east into Ocean City, New Jersey, to interview Angie more in depth about this supposed affair.
BOOK TWO
T
HE
M
ISTRESS AND THE
M
ORTICIAN
22
It was a family get-together. One of those parties where everyone smiles and says
hello
and
how ya doin’
and acts cordial and friendly. Yet inside, the insults and judgments are buzzing like bats.
Even though he carried the name, Shawn Roseboro had always considered himself an outcast inside the dynamics of the Roseboro clan. Not because twenty-five-year-old Shawn had no interest in the family business (he didn’t), or his mother, Michael Roseboro’s cousin, was the black sheep (she definitely was). But Shawn Roseboro harbored a secret. And it was at one of those family shindigs that Jan Roseboro pulled the young man aside and asked, “Are you gay, Shawn?” Jan was the only one in the family Shawn felt comfortable confiding in or talking to, not to mention the only family member he viewed as having enough compassion to help him through what were some tough times these days.
As if she didn’t know already. Then again, it wasn’t necessarily a question, more like an observation. (“Jan wasn’t stupid,” Shawn said later, “she knew.”) “Of course,” Shawn said, answering Jan. There, he’d gone and said it. The weight of the world. Gone. In an instant.
Well, not really. Didn’t work like that.
But it felt good, nonetheless, to admit to someone in the family that he was a homosexual, proud of it, and wanted to live openly
within
the family. No more running from who he was. No more trying to camouflage the obvious. No more lies and stories. No more denials.
Jan shot Shawn a look of compassion that day, acknowledging the eight-hundred-pound gorilla—then gave Shawn a twist of the head and pinch of the face that said,
Come on, how naive do I look? I knew that!
Everybody
knew it.
They probably did. Still, now it was “official.” Shawn could take pride in knowing that Jan knew for certain. Jan had sat down with Shawn and his then-boyfriend not too long after and talked. Shawn was nervous and scared what the family was going to think. What would everyone say?