Authors: M. William Phelps
Jan reassured him. “It’s okay, honey,” she said. “It’s who you are.” She squeezed Shawn on the arm gingerly. “You cannot change who you are. It will only hurt you more to hide it.”
“Thank you,” Shawn said with tears. It had been a rough road: the excessive drinking, partying all night long, stuffing those feelings with booze. He called himself an alcoholic
—ahem,
that is, recovering alcoholic. Shawn was off the sauce now. Getting his life back in order.
“Look,” Jan said, “I will always be here for you. Anytime you need to talk, just call me.”
Shawn knew that already. In the past, he had picked up the phone from time to time and called Jan and talked to her as though she were his mother. He knew Jan cared. He knew she listened. She was concerned about him. Shawn had always lived under a cloud of disgrace that coming out would somehow tarnish the Roseboro family name. Cause scandal. Not to mention bring up more friction inside the family for him.
Watercoolers would buzz:
Psst… there’s that Roseboro kid, the gay one.
“Even now, three years from that day I confided in Jan,” Shawn later explained, “when I think about the person that I want to be, I think of Jan.”
To Shawn, a certified nurse’s aide (CNA) by trade, Jan was the one bright light in his life at a time when coming out seemed to him as though he were committing a grave family sin. But he could confide anything in Jan.
“Jan and I,” Shawn said, “we, well, we shared something that I didn’t share with anyone else in my family—that being, of course, my lifestyle. My family, I—I could not tell them. They are very unaccepting, in my opinion. Jan was the one person in the family that I could talk to and trust.”
Jan was that beacon in Shawn’s life who was always willing to sit down and talk about his life, ask how he was doing. There was one day when Shawn shared with Jan the thought that even though he was gay, he still wanted a family. Kids. Lots of them. There would come a time when he settled down with a man. But what would the Roseboros think? Shawn was terrified of the notion that someday he would live as an openly gay man with a family and have the Roseboro surname on his mailbox. Would he have to change his name? Move? Fight insults? These were all things that Shawn was concerned about and had to consider, he later said.
“I’ll be here to support you, Shawn,” Jan said, placing her arm around Shawn’s shoulder, giving him a love squeeze, “and help you with adoption, or even finding someone to help out.”
For Shawn, that was a day that truly showed him how deeply devoted Jan was to his life and, moreover, the struggles he faced in the days ahead.
One family member had suggested psychiatric therapy after learning that Shawn had admitted being a homosexual.
Like Shawn, Jan was appalled by this. She couldn’t believe it.
It was on days like those, when Shawn would hear “chatter” within the family about his “lifestyle,” and how everyone was going to fix him and make him “normal” again, that he’d run to Jan and she’d comfort him. Just the thought that there were open arms there for him changed everything for Shawn.
“Me and the Roseboro side of the family never saw things the same,” Shawn said. “Their view of life is based on image.” Status too, he added. “Money! Success! Keeping up a good family name. And that stuff never really mattered to me. Being happy mattered to me more than anything else.”
Shawn said Jan believed in the same principles. She was a mother of four with a big house. Wife to
the
Michael Roseboro. She had nice things, and could buy just about anything she wanted. But Jan was not the type to let you know that about her, Shawn shared. He envied that about her. She was just as content to walk around town in sweatpants, sneakers, her hair up in a butterfly hairclip, and wearing very little makeup. She didn’t talk down to people. Jan understood that life was about relationships and love, compassion and grace—not what money could buy, or what you thought of a person because of who they were. Shawn wasn’t saying that all Roseboros were the antithesis of this, but in his opinion a majority were.
“She was an all-around phenomenal woman and mother,” Shawn said. “If she had a last dollar in hand, she’d give it to you. Her life was her children, making sure they had what they needed without spoiling them. To me, Jan was more of a friend than family, if that makes sense. I could talk to her as a friend, unlike anyone else in the family.”
Jan carried a sense and aura about her that regardless of how much money she and Michael Roseboro had in
the bank, and the fact that she didn’t need to work, she was a simple person. Someone who believed and valued the plain things in life.
“She didn’t care about stuff, like many of the other Roseboros did,” Shawn remembered. “I’d run into her in Walmart. She’d be wearing a hoodie.”
Michael Roseboro wasn’t into flaunting his success as much as other members of the extended family, Shawn claimed. Roseboro was a plain man, in many ways, and although he liked expensive vacations, expensive clothes, and those husky, luxurious SUVs that rule the road, it wasn’t Rolex watches for the guy. Roseboro was more into himself: what others—mainly females—could supply him with. He liked to drink. He liked to smoke cigarettes and weed. He loved his job as a mortician. And, of course, his favorite pastime was chasing women. The rule of thumb inside the family was that Michael Roseboro had had a string of mistresses throughout his and Jan’s marriage, but, Shawn said, it was never talked about. You kept your mouth shut and curried favor.
Dirty little secrets. Every family has them.
It was even said that Michael Roseboro’s father confronted him a few times and told the heir to the throne to back off where those women were concerned, or run the risk of losing his status in the family business, and all the money that came with it. This while another family member, several sources said, would confront Jan from time to time, after she found out Michael had cheated on her again, and tell her to suck it up. “It is the Roseboro way!”
You take it on the right cheek, offer the left, and move on.
“At one time, I actually didn’t think that Mike was cheating on Jan,” Shawn maintained. But someone, a “very reliable source,” Shawn said, “schooled me on what was truly going on.” Shawn was told that his cousin Michael Roseboro was known in and around Denver to
have scores of girlfriends throughout the years. In fact, he once “had an affair with [a cousin] of his,” Shawn was told by that same family member.
“They all know who it is,” Shawn said. “[By not the most] reliable source, I have been told that Mike is my father. That was hard. I do resemble Mike a lot. But after twenty-five years of knowing [that source], I don’t think it’s true. And I don’t
want
to know at this point.”
There was one afternoon in early June 2008 when Shawn Roseboro got a call to head over to see eighty-nine-year-old E. Louis Roseboro, his ailing great-grandfather. Shawn was told to tell Louie whatever it was he wanted to tell him, because he might not get another chance. Louie was on his deathbed. That white light fast approaching. He was at the Denver Nursing Home, just outside downtown Denver, in Stevens, on Lancaster Avenue. Shawn adored the old man; he was torn up over his imminent death.
“Grandpa Louie was an amazing person,” Shawn said. “I called him ‘Pa.’ I never told him about my lifestyle, but I did introduce him to my partner at the time. He thought the world of [my partner]. In fact, one of the last things he ever said to me was ‘You have a good friend there. I think a lot of him.’ I was very close to Pa…. He was very understanding and was always willing to listen and never judge. I look at my life now that it’s somewhat together and I often wish that he could see me.”
Pa had lived a long, prosperous life. Everyone in the family was waiting and wondering when that call would come in the middle of the night.
Shawn found the door to the Denver Nursing Home, let himself in, walked down the hallway toward Pa’s room. He was energized and saddened. This was going
to be it: Shawn had it all planned out—the last words he’d ever get to say to Pa.
He turned the corner and—oh, my goodness—entered Pa’s room to a big surprise.
His cousin Mike was standing there, bedside.
Shawn stopped. Not because seeing cousin Mike was a bad thing, or unwelcome. It was the other person in the room with him. Shawn had never seen her before.
There was a woman, she had short-cropped, dark sandy-colored hair, a familiar look, and an awkward presence, as though she didn’t belong there. The way she stood next to cousin Mike was as if they were a couple.
Roseboro looked shell-shocked. After all, it was after visiting hours; he had not expected anyone to be stopping by.
“Shawn,” he said, “this is, um, ah … a neighbor of Pa’s.”
Mike,
Shawn thought as he walked toward Pa’s bed,
brought his
girlfriend
up here to see Pa? The freakin’ nerve of the guy!
Indeed, Michael Roseboro stood next to his dying grandfather, with his current mistress, Angela Funk, standing there beside him.
Shawn got on his knees next to Pa’s bed and held the old man’s hand as Pa’s labored breathing grew deeper, slower.
In tears, Shawn told Pa he loved him.
Shawn then turned to see Michael walking backward, pulling Angie out of the room.
“I will never forget,” Shawn said later, “how she was just watching me say my good-byes to Pa.”
Shawn felt violated. As though someone had snatched that last moment with Pa away from him.
When Shawn left, he saw his cousin again in the hallway.
Angie Funk was gone.
Shawn said good-bye to his cousin.
“It left a sour feeling in me,” Shawn said of seeing his
Pa there on that last night with Michael Roseboro’s latest girlfriend basically standing over his back. “I still, to this day, will slow down and glare at [Angie] when I pass her house and she’s outside. I have a hate for her like no other. Because of her presence on that day, I didn’t say a lot of the things I should’ve said to my great-grandfather.”
Shawn never saw Pa alive again.
23
Although many would later dispute her version, according to thirty-eight-year-old Angie Lynn Funk, her extramarital affair with Michael Roseboro began with an innocent smile and a chance meeting near the coffee counter inside a local Turkey Hill convenience store in Denver. Neither she nor Roseboro ever conspired to embark on this adulterous relationship. To Angie (and Roseboro), neither was feeling particularly wanted, important, or loved at home. So when opportunity knocked, they were caught in a weak moment and decided,
What the hell, let’s go for it.
Before that day, Angie and Michael had known each other “as acquaintances,” Angie later said, “for five years.
“He worked down the street and his parents lived on the same block—well, the next block over,” Angie said.
Acquaintance is an open-ended term. Anyone who lived in the same town as Michael Roseboro could call him an acquaintance.
“We’d say hi,” Angie said later, maybe hoping to clarify. “You know, small talk here and there.”
Prior to their relationship becoming obsessive and overtly sexual, Angie admitted that she knew Michael Roseboro was married and had kids. As it could be safely
said that Michael knew the same about Angie, having worked almost directly across the street from the house she lived in with her husband and kids. Randall Funk didn’t like to talk much, according to what Angie told police: “Randy is quiet and this causes most of [our] problems.” Later, Angie said she always considered Michael Roseboro to be “attractive and … nice.”
“Angie would sit on her porch,” one source told me, “and point at Michael as he was walking into the funeral home or getting out of his car, and say, ‘He’ll be mine someday.’” This was long before they supposedly bumped into each other at the Turkey Hill.
Angie was a woman who had staked her claim to a man. It was not the first time, other sources said, Angie Funk had done this: stealthily watched a man for a time, baited him, then went after him. Although she framed the scenario as some sort of a joke, Angie herself later said that she and her girlfriend would walk their children down Walnut Street and make note of how “cute” Michael Roseboro was whenever they saw him. “There’s your future father-in-law,” Angie’s friend said one day as Mike’s father, Ralph, who lived with Michael Roseboro’s mother on the same block, came out of his house and got into his car.
Angie laughed.
One time, about two years before Angie and Michael “hooked up,” Angie said to her friend as they were walking, “I would like to be married to him.” They were passing the Roseboro Funeral Home. Michael was getting out of his car, waving at the ladies.
It was those times, when they just happened to bump into each other or smile and stare, Angie Funk later suggested, that made the two of them comfortable enough to initiate short conversations. And it was those brief encounters at the local Turkey Hill store, she added, that turned into phone calls, e-mails, text messages, and secret meetings,
which were all about the sex and delusional promises of a future that would never be.
On May 29, 2008, after running into each other at the convenience store on several occasions during those mornings leading up to that day—having brief conversations about the weather and the neighborhood regular small talk we all seem to have with our neighbors—Michael Roseboro, according to Angie Funk, called her “out of the blue” for the first time. She was at her house. He was across the street at the funeral home, working. He must have known that Randall, Angie’s husband, had left for work.
“Hey,” Michael said. He sounded cheery, a hint of adolescent embarrassment in his voice.
“Hi,” Angie said. She knew who it was. One would guess by what happened next that Angie was even excited and thrilled about this “surprise” call.
“I cannot stop thinking about you,” Michael said, apparently putting it out there to see how she was going to react.
By that time, Roseboro said later, he was officially obsessed with Angie Funk to the point where he literally couldn’t do anything without thinking about her.