Authors: M. William Phelps
Poor guy.
In her response, Angie said the same back. She ended the short e-mail on an exciting note, saying that “next week” could not “come soon enough.”
Their first planned meeting—alone.
My goodness, it was almost here.
In response, nine minutes later, as if he had been sitting at the funeral home behind his desk waiting for
Angie’s e-mail, Michael answered, saying how “smitten” and “in love” he was, but “also very confused.”
Confused?
Not, mind you, because of the enigmatic situation between them. Or how they would have to carry on in secret, as though they were terrorists, during the coming weeks and months.
Nope.
Instead, Michael was befuddled over what color pants he wanted Angie to wear next.
Decisions, decisions.
Moments later, in another e-mail, Angie said she liked to “hear” that he was in love with her, but longed to, as an alternative, hear him say “it in person,” when he could hold her in his arms, cuddle, and whisper in her ear. She concluded this very brief e-mail by saying how she had taken a walk in the rain the previous night and dreamt of “dancing in the rain” with her new married lover.
Michael answered right away, telling Angie how he fell asleep at night thinking of her, then dreaming about her throughout the night, waking in the morning with only—you guessed it—Angie on his mind. His life, he had decided, because of Angie’s presence, was now filled with “so much happiness.”
According to what Angie later told police, during this early stage of the affair, she laid the law down for Michael Roseboro as it pertained to the price of that
happiness
he had so much enjoyed and believed she could offer him. There were some lifestyle changes in the future for Michael if he wanted to stay with Angie, she insisted. Number one, the cigarette smoking. Angie hated it. She told Michael he’d have to go on the patch and quit.
Or else.
And guess what? Michael went out and bought the patch.
There was one day when Michael told Angie, “Both Jan’s side and my side of the family like to drink.”
“I don’t like someone who drinks all the time,” Angie responded.
“I’ll drink less,” he said.
Yet, the goatee, which wasn’t something Roseboro had always worn, Angie said, “she liked.”
So Michael Roseboro kept it.
Later that same night, June 5, 2008, the correspondence between them got to an adolescent point, where Roseboro was quoting Bon Jovi songs.
Angie said she loved it, before explaining that she would “always love” him, too, admonishing their current situation, upset at not being able to tell the world how she felt about her man. You know, scream it from the rooftops in Denver. And yet there was nothing, essentially, stopping either of them from leaving their spouses and holding a press conference to announce their undeniable love for each other.
Michael answered tersely by saying how glad he was that she felt that way, how warm and fuzzy it made him feel inside. Then, in an e-mail two minutes later, perhaps rethinking his position on the matter, Michael said Angie had made him “feel more loved” than he had ever felt in his life. Such a bold statement coming from a guy who had stayed married for nearly twenty years to a woman who had given him four kids.
As the e-mails indicated quite candidly, page after page after page (so many, the DA would later refer to the stack as “the e-mail book”), Angie Funk and Michael Roseboro displayed a certain sexual energy and euphoria leading up to what was going to be their first sexual encounter. The buildup was intense and fanatical, almost hypnotic. Their heads were buzzing with fancy and expectation. Yet looking back, one would have to say that, at best, it was more pomp than actual circumstance.
These people didn’t know each other, after all. They were locked in some sort of cyber fairy tale that—as competent, intelligent adults, they had to realize—would conclude on a painful, sour note someday. There was no pot of gold here. There was only overblown purple prose saturated in the flight of the imagination between a man, who obviously hated himself and the life he had made, and a woman, who was looking for a way out of a marriage she was obviously unhappy in, but not tough enough to walk away from. So much so, in fact, that one night Angie told Michael, “I want my marriage to dissolve naturally so as not to cause bad feelings with Randy.” Later, she said that when she began the affair with Michael Roseboro, “Based on my home life, it was a vulnerable time for me to have an affair…. Michael was progressing with the relationship faster than I was,” Angie claimed. “I was not ready to leave Randy because my affairs were not in order. I had not figured out everything regarding the custody of my kids, or if Randy would contest the divorce.”
But she still played along with Michael Roseboro, not once trying to slow him down. And, some later claimed, it was Angie’s plan from the beginning, a continuation of a pattern she’d shown for years. This relationship was much more than a chance encounter that Michael was pushing along at full steam. There was an underlying cause and effect on Angie Funk’s part. And that plan, as any solid plan by “the other woman” would have to be, needed to start with the best sex this guy ever had. Angie needed to deliver. Big-time. The buildup had been too intense and heated. The guy was expecting to see stars afterward.
Meanwhile, what was Michael Roseboro planning for the two of them during that first special moment, with all the money the guy had? A day in the Poconos? A five-star hotel in Harrisburg, with rose petals on the floor, champagne on ice, a warm Jacuzzi bubbling away?
Maybe he’d even gone out and bought Angie an expensive red-and-black negligee? Or five dozen red roses? A diamond necklace or bracelet? How would Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk launch their supposed love for each other into a sexual realm?
The first time they slept together, Angie later explained, was in a vacant apartment in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, about a forty-minute drive east of Denver, heading in the direction of Elizabethtown and Harrisburg. Angie’s family owned an apartment complex in town, and Angie managed one of the units, showing the apartments to prospective renters, keeping it clean, etc. It was June 8, 2008, just under ten days before that first call Roseboro had made to Angie, this after scores of e-mails and phone calls, text messages and meetings at Turkey Hill. This wasn’t some sort of spontaneous moment of passion. They had planned the rendezvous inside apartment 66. They were together, alone, many miles from home, no chance of anyone catching them. Roseboro made his move. He had even asked Angie a few days before, she later said, if sex was in their immediate future. Not with a Casanova-inspired love poem, or a few lines he had borrowed from Shakespeare.
Uh-uh.
Instead, Michael called Angie on the phone, she explained, and said, “Let’s have sex.”
Like,
Let’s go shopping.
Or,
Let’s have chicken salad.
“Let’s have sex.”
Angie said she balked at first. “No … Mike … no.” She didn’t want their relationship to be about the sex.
But, well, it was, now, wasn’t it?
And after Michael kissed Angie inside that unfurnished apartment, just a rug and empty rooms and the dank smell of must and past tenants encircling them like a weather front, she gave in to her passions and allowed Roseboro to enter her.
That affair they had been having through cyberspace,
over the phone, and standing next to each other at the Turkey Hill coffee counter each morning had officially moved to the next stage.
Which would only drive Michael Roseboro, mentally, into a sexually obsessive frenzy.
25
After that first time, when they had sex on the floor of the empty apartment on June 8, committing what would become one of many transgressive acts throughout a short period of time, Angie Funk started to meet her lover inside the funeral home.
“I’d go in the back door,” she explained.
Sneak in was probably more like it. Angie Funk’s house was down the street from the back of the funeral home—and, wouldn’t you know it—Michael Roseboro’s parents’ house was next door to the Funk house. There can be no doubt that Angie looked both ways before walking into the back door of the funeral home, making certain she was not being seen by anyone.
They’d sit in the office and chat, Angie explained to police.
“It would be nice to have a child together,” Angie later said Michael told her during one of those conversations. Regarding the young children he had at home and the state of the affair post Jan finding out: “He said he didn’t want to lose his children,” Angie reported.
After talking in the office, Angie said, they’d sometimes head into the parlor and continue the conversations as Roseboro did paperwork or perhaps spit-shined a coffin
or two. And “once,” Angie later admitted,
just one time,
she had sex with Michael Roseboro there in the parlor. Just the undertaker, his Mennonite mistress, and a few dead bodies below. How romantic that must have been. The smell of embalming fluid and rotting flesh wafting up from everywhere, permeating the air. The scent of old flowers mixing with perfume that Angie probably sprayed on herself before heading over. The somber lighting and eerie silence of death balanced pleasantly around them. Everyone can attest to the absolute stale stench of a funeral home. Now, how arousing that must have been for these two lovebirds. Considering what Angie later said, you’d have to believe they couldn’t contain their desires. Roseboro
had
to have this woman.
There.
Inside the place where his family had served the dead of Lancaster County for over one hundred years. A funeral home, for crying out loud. What the families of the dead would have thought had they known that while suffering and mourning was taking place inside their hearts, the undertaker—a guy they respected, the same guy who had consoled them and told them he would show their deceased the utmost respect—was having sex with his mistress in the same building where he was preparing their loved ones for viewing and burial.
The other place they met was the Ephrata Cloister, a monastery outside Denver that was founded in 1732 as a Protestant monastic community of celibate brothers and sisters. The order was supported by a married congregation who lived near the settlement. The mostly German immigrant members were in search of spiritual goals rather than earthly rewards.
Not necessarily the most morally correct location to continue an adulterous affair that would gravely affect six kids and two deeply devoted spouses, one of whom ended up in the bottom of a swimming pool, which her husband recently had built for her and their children.
They would walk around the grounds, holding hands,
her head on his shoulder, discussing the future, Angie told one source. Maybe cuddle on one of the benches. Or just sit in one of their vehicles and contemplate the future.
It was during one of those times, right after they had had sex, that Michael Roseboro said, “I love you, Angie.”
“I love you, too,” Angie reciprocated, admitting this in a later police interview.
Granted, they had not said this term of endearment, according to Angie Funk, until that day.
Ten days together, and they were madly in love.
“Angela said she absolutely never pressured Michael to get married,” Detective Keith Neff later said, explaining one interview he conducted with Angie. “Angela stated that she told Michael that he had to leave Jan first, before she left Randy, because she would have no house to go to.” When Neff asked Angie how she truly felt about Roseboro, Angie replied, “I liked the attention from Michael, but also loved him.” Furthermore, Angie said, she “had lived in the area [Denver] for ten years and had never heard anything about Michael’s [previous] affairs….” That is, until the police knocked on her door that day after Jan’s murder and began telling her things about the man she
thought
she knew.
As the middle of June approached and the sex became as routine as Michael Roseboro hiding his drinking and smoking from his new girlfriend, the question kept coming up between them:
What are we going to do?
They were both talking about having found the love of their lives, Roseboro already mentioning that he wanted to marry Angie. But they had spouses to contend with every night at home, spouses to hide this affair from, kids to take care of, and lives away from this fantasy to answer to. This was something they needed to talk about. Angie Funk said she considered this, day
after day. They needed to come up with a plan. Soon. This running around when they were clearly in love was not going to cut it much longer.
Yet, Roseboro had other things on his mind.
“Michael told me,” Angie said later, “that he wanted me to wear a linen dress and he was looking up dresses online.”
Roseboro’s idea for their wedding was for them to say their vows on the beach in California. “Or on Turtle Island in Fiji,” Angie said. “We were looking into other places, too, like Disney, due to the children—and we expected
all
of our children to be there. This was one of our dreams.”
Talk was cheap, as they say. Although she had participated shamelessly in these fairy-tale conversations with Roseboro, Angie later said she had serious problems with all of it.
“Your friends and family, Michael?” Angie mentioned one day. She wondered what they would think of her and asked her lover about it.
The home wrecker. The slut. The
other
woman. These were names no woman wanted to be branded.
“My friends will
love
you!” Roseboro said in response, not mentioning what his family would think.
“I tried to bring him back down to earth,” Angie told Keith Neff, “by telling him the kids might not accept me right away.” Angie said something about Sam, the oldest, who she claimed knew about the affair after having seen a text from Angie on his father’s phone one day while they were out at the pool. “Michael had unrealistic expectations about how easy it would be for us to start a life together. I tried to anchor him down.”