Authors: M. William Phelps
“Oh,” Angie said, casually staggered by the comment, perhaps as part of a strategy.
“Would you like to go to lunch with me?”
It was a strange time for Roseboro to initiate an affair, thus cheating on a wife who had, fewer than two weeks before, lost her mother, Evelyn Binkley. Jan was in the throes of depression and grieving—and here was her husband beginning a relationship with a married mother of two children.
What a guy!
The way Angie later talked about this moment, as if it were
the
moment when things between her and
Roseboro went to the next level, it was as if Roseboro had engineered the entire affair. He was the hunter, she his prey. Yet, when all of the facts were later in, it was absolutely clear that Angie Funk had set a trap for a guy who was, generally speaking, always on the prowl, anyway.
Angie later explained to police that it was only after she had started a new job and began stopping at the Turkey Hill convenience store for her morning coffee that Michael Roseboro found out she was going in there every day and began making himself available.
He was the aggressor, in other words.
Nonetheless, they began to “chitchat,” as Angie later put it, during those early mornings before the start of their day. This was in late April, early May. (As with many things, Angie could not recall when, exactly.) They fixed their coffee and talked about work and things going on around town. Michael was all smiles, a glow about him that Angie had never seen before.
A man in his element.
Angie was soon looking forward to those morning meetings, she said, as much as Roseboro.
The call therefore surprised her, Angie explained to police. “Sort of…. I wasn’t expecting him to call me.”
To that request for a lunch date, Angie said, “Yes!”
Ruminating on it after they hung up, however, Angie didn’t think it was such a good idea that they “were seen in public” out at lunch around town, or even in a neighboring town. They were adults. Both smart people, in some respects. They knew by making the date that the lunch wasn’t going to run along the lines of discussing town budgets and Neighborhood Watch programs. It was, certainly, the beginning of something intimate and sexual.
That next week after Memorial Day, Angie and Michael saw each other at Turkey Hill and discussed the idea that eating lunch in public together probably wasn’t
a smart move. They needed to make other arrangements to get together.
Roseboro handed Angie his cell phone number. “Call me whenever you like.”
She smiled. Stuffed the number into her purse.
In the days that followed, Angie sat outside her house on the postage-stamp front lawn or wraparound porch (while Randall was at work), and she and Michael talked via cell phone. Michael routinely said he could not stop thinking about her, and she reciprocated by saying, “Me too.” Lunch out in public was off-limits, they agreed again. But the conversations by phone were not going to be enough. They needed to be together. Alone. Somewhere else.
On a typical day, they talked about how much they enjoyed each other’s company and how badly they wanted to be together. Not just sexually, but
together,
together. Inside just a week, mind you, they were discussing leaving their spouses and taking their kids and beginning life together anew somewhere else. This was a fantasy, really (like most extramarital affairs), but both were entirely wrapped up in it. Michael Roseboro was starting another affair, one of two that would later be publicly documented by investigators, but, conservatively speaking, another one of perhaps a dozen over the years that Roseboro was married to Jan. According to one minor, then a fifteen-year-old girl, “Yes,” she told me, “Michael and I had more of a sexual relationship than anything….” Roseboro was said to have paid the young girl for sex. Then there was a casual affair he had with a young adult whom he reportedly smoked marijuana with a few times while he rambled on and on about “how he wasn’t happy in his marriage….” Although the source never participated in it with him, she confirmed that Roseboro liked to dip marijuana joints in formaldehyde (embalming fluid—angel dust, they call it, “dustin’”) before smoking them. And although he never offered her
money for sex, and they never slept together, he made it clear to her that he “wanted to have sexual relations.” So Michael Roseboro might have
told
Angie he was in love with her, and she was all he ever thought about, but the affair with Angie went right along with who Michael Roseboro was. Lust controlled this man’s thinking. Now, apparently, with a bit of obsession sprinkled on for good measure.
“I mean,” Angie said later as she talked about those early phone calls with Roseboro as she sat on her porch or lawn like a schoolgirl falling in love for the first time, “we just got to know each other. I mean, as anybody [would]. Like, I didn’t know him real well. So we would just talk about how, you know, about things—family, what we liked to do. That kind of thing.”
Phone calls quickly turned into text messages—hundreds of them. And e-mails. Again, hundreds. How many per day?
“Forty, fifty … I don’t know,” Angie later said.
For Angie, the first few days after that first phone call from Michael Roseboro in late May—when they were arguably courting—were “just like dating him…. It was just like anybody dating somebody—that’s how it progressed.”
“Anybody dating somebody….”
Well, perhaps if you take into account the man was married and had four kids, and Angie the same, with two kids. Otherwise, this was not a relationship that most people with morals choose to get involved in, or would refer to as “normal.”
E-mails as early as June 2, 2008, sent from Michael to Angie, and e-mails she sent back to his account, tell the story of how aggressive and sexual this affair was from the moment it began. It was not anywhere close to “anybody dating somebody.” On June 2, for example, at 7:29
P.M.,
Roseboro sent Angie an e-mail under the subject “Daydreaming.” This only a few days, mind you, after that supposed first call. In that e-mail, Michael talked about
watching his new target as she walked around on the front porch of her home, and how turned-on he was by the jeans she was wearing earlier that day. He said the “pants should be outlawed.” It was clear that Roseboro was infatuated, feeding off the thrill and mystery of not yet bedding Angie down. He said he went “right back to dreaming” after seeing her in the pants, just stopping short of perhaps admitting he had decided to do something nasty that might grow hair on his palms. He told her he couldn’t wait to “be alone” with her “and to see you dance for me.”
For Angie, with that first e-mail, she started a file at work. After printing each e-mail out on her work computer, she saved all of those e-mails from Roseboro that
were special to
her,
so she would be able to look back at them at a later time,
according to a later police interview transcript.
Reminisce.
Moreover, at the end of every workday, Angie deleted all the e-mails Michael Roseboro had sent her—and just those—on that day.
“I would also empty those files from my ‘deleted folder’ or ‘trash’ mail,” Angie told police. Police called this “double deleting.” She never forwarded any of the e-mails to her home computer and would not give Roseboro her home e-mail address.
“Anybody dating somebody….”
The next morning, June 3, no sooner had Angie got behind her desk at seven fifty-four, did she write back to Roseboro, saying how she didn’t think the pants would have that much of an effect, but she’d be more than willing to wear them again. Farther along in the note, she admitted—we’re talking fewer than five days
after
the initial call to go out to lunch—that she was having “fantasies” about him and she could not “get them out of” her head, adding that she felt as if she had “known [Roseboro] forever….”
The idea that secrecy was going to become a major
part of the affair was obvious in the way they communicated and the words they chose. Angie explained that her mother was supposed to be “dropping in” later on that afternoon. So if her new lover called her at that time and she “sounded funny,” he’d know why. It had nothing to do with him, she went on to say, only that they needed to think about things more thoroughly now and hide everything they did.
Roseboro answered Angie’s response e-mail at eleven forty-four that same morning, writing that he didn’t want to “pressure” her in any way. He talked about how he hoped her fantasies were “as good as” his. Those fantasies he’d been having left him “weak and smiling.” In fact, he dreamt of kissing Angie and holding her and running his “fingers through [her] hair and touching [her] face and lips.” Roseboro sounded like a junior-high-school kid who had been promised his first piece of ass. There was desperation and surrealism in the tone of his e-mails. Almost an effeminate quality to them.
Ending that brief note, Roseboro said he was “surprised and flattered” to hear from Angie that she felt the same way about him. He thanked her for making him smile.
They talked about having sex. They talked about passion. They talked about how the romance they both adored and needed, but had been—surprise!—lost in the tedium and boringness of their marriages was now back in full swing—and they loved it. The lust between them grew daily. They viewed it as love and called themselves soul mates. Yet, the expeditious progression and secretive nature of the affair spoke to how it was structured and fueled more by the thrill of
not
being caught and the freshness and contagiousness of it all more than a true love and a desperate need to be with each other. Love at first sight, in other words, was not what this affair was based on; for if that were the case, both would have gone to their spouses and admitted that nothing would stand in the way of this love. But this affair, energized by
the sexual charge between them, went from zero to one hundred, it seemed, overnight: from the local Turkey Hill store by the coffeepots to phone calls and e-mails, to meetings and nights of tossing and turning, thinking about each other while lying next to their spouses.
Michael Roseboro soon forgot all about life as he knew it. Everything he did, every thought he had, centered on Angie Funk—and what he was going to do to her once he got her alone, in bed, her clothes scattered about the floor. The guy got up in the morning and e-mailed Angie. Then he texted her. They met at the Turkey Hill store. They looked at each other from across the street, that secret lust hovering there between them, disguising itself as sparks and chemistry. He told Angie repeatedly—in e-mails and calls and texts numbering upward of fifty a day—that he was a simple guy falling in love all over again. That he was grateful for her having shown him how to rediscover love as he had never known it.
But this was a game to Michael Roseboro, one he had played with several other women at various times throughout his marriage. This was an unadulterated obsession like he had never experienced, a deep-seated desire to bed this woman, to be with her. Angie Funk had done something to Michael Roseboro no other woman had. And yet, studying his behavior, one might gander a speculative thought that Roseboro had turned a corner with his compulsive nature. Because while Roseboro was drooling over Angie in those e-mails and phone calls and text messages, his hormones jumping through the computer screen, he was back at home making surprise plans for Jan to renew their wedding vows during an Outer Banks ceremony. He had gone on the Internet and set up a pastor. Looked into rental cottages. Places to have a reception. He had talked to friends and family he thought Jan would want there. In addition, Jan and Michael Roseboro were also planning a family trip to Niagara Falls. It was business as usual for Roseboro back at home. That,
or the guy was so infatuated with this new flame and had become so engrossed in the idea of having her, maybe having fixated on her over the years as she walked in and out of her home and sauntered by the funeral home with her friends and children, that everything he did after getting her attention and beginning the affair would now revolve around a master—sinister—plan to be with her. And now he would cancel all plans with Jan. He wouldn’t care about causing an uproar inside the Roseboro family dynamic and possibly losing all he, his father, and his grandfather had worked for. There was one source who later said that after Jan found out about an affair Michael had years before Angie had come into the picture, Jan had told her husband that she had no trouble walking out the door with half of everything—
and
the children. Thus, it was clear to Michael Roseboro by the feelings he had for Angie, one would think, that this was not going to be just a fling in the backseat of his SUV, or a few nights at a sleazy hotel. The way he felt about Angie was something more.
Much more.
“You’ve got a guy,” DA Craig Stedman said later, “obsessed with his new girlfriend, thinking about nothing else
but
being with her.
Gotta
be with her! ‘We’ve
got
to be together! We’ve
gotta
be together
soon!
’ … But there’s a little problem—the man is married and has four kids—and an even bigger problem.
“His wife is alive.”
24
On June 5, 2008, Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk met at Turkey Hill that morning as usual. Roseboro gave his new girlfriend a letter he’d written during another of what he said were sleepless nights he’d been having lately, thinking about her. When she got to work a short while later, at 7:50
A.M.,
Angie sat down at her desk and sent her lover an e-mail. She explained how she had read the letter three times already; it had not been twenty minutes since they had seen each other. She said she “ached” for her new married boyfriend’s embrace. His touch. To hear his voice. In the letter, Michael had laid out one of the oldest lines from the
Cheating Husbands Manual,
telling Angie, although he might not be alone at home, it didn’t mean he wasn’t lonely.