Authors: M. William Phelps
“It’s going to take some time for your friends to accept me, Michael,” Angie said on the night they first talked about getting married.
“My friends are
my
friends—they will like you because of
me,
not Jan!” Roseboro said.
Whatever the case might have been, the plan Michael Roseboro and his new lover made was to be married inside of the next twelve months. If that was the case, their spouses would have to be told. They’d have to break the news that they were in love and their marriages were over. There seemed to be no way around that uncomfortable part of the affair.
Or was there?
26
Although she broke from the traditional teachings of the church later on in life, Angie Funk grew up in a conservative Mennonite family in Quarryville, south of Lancaster, about a four-or five-hour ride by horse and buggy from Denver. Incidentally, Quarryville is the same town popular Olympic figure skater and world champion Johnny Weir was raised in. There is a strong Amish/Mennonite/Pennsylvania Dutch hold in the Quarryville area, as there has been in Lancaster County, some reports claim, since the late 1700s. Outsiders and interlopers might confuse the Amish and Mennonites. Rhoda Janzen, author of
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress,
once cleared up this confusion during an interview. The author was asked what the biggest misconception about the Mennonite community and its people was. “That they are the Amish,” Janzen told
USA Today,
adding, “Mennonites look and act and dress like most Americans, although they tend to be conservative in some lifestyle choices.”
Angie grew up in a family of hard-line Mennonites; her grandparents, in fact, wore coverings and drove horse and buggy. Her parents did not. Mennonites have Christian values, beliefs, and roots based firmly in what one source said are the “radical wing of the sixteenth-century
Protestant Reformation.” One estimate puts Mennonite numbers worldwide at 1 million. You ask ten people what the Mennonites in Pennsylvania believe and you get ten versions of nearly the same truth:
Sola scriptura,
Latin for “by scripture alone.”
The Bible is
the
Word.
“The Mennonites and Amish,” one local told me, “believe the Earth is ten thousand years old, because that’s what the Bible says.”
Yet, a good portion of the Pennsylvania Mennonites, unlike the Amish, hold firm to earthly values.
“For example,” that same man said, “you go up to the [local supermarket] on a Sunday evening and all you see is minivans in the parking lot and Mennonite families swapping kids.”
In other words, divorced Mennonite families use the parking lot as a meeting point to exchange their kids after weekend visits. And indeed, the common vehicle for the Mennonites is the soccer mom–approved minivan.
So Angie grew up in a household that, apparently, was grounded in the Bible’s Scripture, but was also plagued by an Americanized culture of excess and divorce and ways that are opposite of the Bible’s core teachings.
One source in Angie’s extended family explained that as a kid, Angie took care of her siblings to a large extent. Angie’s father was an over-the-road trucker. Angie’s maiden name, the family name, is Rudy. The father was always gone: out and about, on the road. Doing whatever truckers do.
“Angie’s mom was well kept,” one ex-family member claimed, “and she was always buying things for the kids.” Meaning Angie and her two siblings. “Angie ended up a lot of times taking care of [her siblings].”
Looking at Angie’s later behavior, one might take a leap and understand that she, like anyone who partakes in the same adulterous lifestyle, learned it somewhere.
For those who cheat on their spouses, something in their lives has made this behavior okay for them, any psychologist will say.
One source said that a roaming eye and adulterous nature was part of the bloodline in Angie’s family, which eventually ended up in her veins.
“Angie,” said a source inside the family, “and I know this by the stories I heard [from the family
and
from Angie herself], ended up marrying her high-school sweetheart right out of school and they ended up living in Quarryville.”
Angie’s mother and father ultimately divorced, and her mother remarried. Angie and her first husband lived with her mother and stepfather until it was mutually agreed upon that Angie and her stepfather did not get along well enough to endure life in the same household.
On her own with her new husband, Angie’s marriage dissolved. Several people claimed Angie could not stay committed to one man—and took no initiative to end one relationship before she started another.
Her husband divorced Angie. According to those who were around her at the time, Angie got everything—or, at least enough to buy herself a townhome first, then that home in Denver on Walnut Street near the Roseboro Funeral Home. It was next door to the house she later lived in—with Randall Funk—when she began the affair with Roseboro.
Living in Denver, Angie met Michael Roseboro for the first time in 2003 at a town parade. They introduced themselves, seeing that they were, in a sense, neighbors. Michael told Angie that he had seen her around the block. She smiled. Said nice to meet you.
They parted ways.
Not long after that, Michael started driving by Angie’s “on a regular basis,” waving at her. “On occasion, he would stop and talk,” Angie later said. She didn’t think
then that his behavior was obsessive. Perhaps he was just being a friendly neighbor. (Mind you, Roseboro didn’t need to drive by Angie’s house to get to work.)
“Michael told me he liked me ever since meeting me at the Denver parade,” Angie later told police. “My friend … thought he was obsessed with me” from that point on.
With the local undertaker arguably obsessed with her, not long after she had moved into the neighborhood, Angela Lynn Rudy soon met Randall Funk.
“Angie used to visit a local club called Low Places,” a former friend said, chuckling mildly at the name of the bar in association with Angie and her behavior. Low Places Country Night Club is located inside the Quality Inn in Lancaster across from the Dutch Wonderland. “She would go dancing there, … and she would brag about the fact that she met a forty-year-old [man] at the club and could train him, shape and mold him, into whatever she wanted.”
The man in question, Randall Funk, an architect, had money, too, Angie soon found out.
One family member believed that Angie liked married men with money.
In one family member’s opinion, part of the thrill for Angie was setting her hooks into these men, and then once she landed them, boredom set in and she moved on. Hence, the wandering eye she’d shown throughout her life.
The other subject Angie often talked about around family was babies.
“She was a master at conception,” a former friend and family member both said. “Fertility, the timing, she knows the whole deal on when it’s the time to get pregnant.”
It was something Angie bragged about over the dinner table.
“She’d know from the
day,
the
night
she had sex even,
how long it would take her…. She knew when to go to bed with the guy, when it would happen….”
Family planning. Wasn’t hard once a woman knew her body.
There were other women in the family trying to get pregnant, but they couldn’t, for whatever reason. Angie would be right there, in their face, family members claimed, doling out advice: “You do this and this and this, and you’ll conceive.” She made sure whatever the family event—Thanksgiving, Christmas, a kid’s birthday party—had to be about her. She was the focus of it all. And generally speaking, one of the main topics of conversation she routinely partook in was her knowledge and know-how of conception.
There came a time shortly before she hooked up with Michael Roseboro and had sex with him when Angie stopped bringing Randall to those family gatherings. She just didn’t see the point anymore, she told family.
During those family functions, or maybe just during a normal day at work or at home, after she and Roseboro were an item, Angie would step outside by herself and call her new lover.
“In the past,” Angie told police, “I have left Michael phone messages, easily longer than two minutes, on his cell phone. I would say things like, ‘I love you…. I want to be with you.’”
And now she was.
27
During the second week of June, the affair Angie Funk and Michael Roseboro had initiated on May 29, 2008, was in overdrive. The calls, the e-mails, and the text messages were riddled with adolescent puppy love and schmaltzy diatribes that both would probably look back on some day and wonder what in the heck they were thinking. They were meeting at various places and having sex. They were still seeing each other each weekday morning at the Turkey Hill. And yet, throughout it all, Roseboro maintained his family life back home as loving father and husband. Granted, he and Jan were not taking sunset walks, holding hands, or hitting the town for candlelight dinners. But they were a married couple in a brand-new house, spending time together poolside, playing cards with the kids, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, and all the suburban perks and accessories to go along with it. Contrary to what he was telling Angie, Michael was not trying to find a way to let Jan down easy. Instead, Roseboro was working hard at planning their marriage vows renewal vacation in the Outer Banks as a surprise to Jan
and
a weekend trip to Niagara Falls, New York, with the kids and a few
friends of the family, to celebrate Sam’s high-school graduation.
“The entire family went to Niagara Falls,” DA Craig Stedman later told me. “As did some extended family. Angie was not happy about this…. It was my position that Angie would
not
have tolerated the upcoming North Carolina trip. Thus, he never told her. Thus, his time window to juggle both women was closing fast.”
Angie knew about Niagara, but Roseboro never told her about the Outer Banks.
A vise, as it were, was closing in on Michael Roseboro. In letting Angie know about the trip to Niagara—and the fallout he endured after revealing that information—Roseboro had learned a lesson.
There were plenty of e-mail exchanges between Angie and Michael during the first few weeks of June. But a later computer forensic search could only come up with bits and pieces of those e-mails, fragments of text, if you will. An
I love you
here. A
your body
there. Maybe a line or two from a gushy love poem. Or a
how beautiful you are
and a
why would you love me
type of exchange. Angie later said that although she printed out “some of the e-mails,” she deleted the original e-mails into her trash bin and emptied her trash bin on occasion (when she was actually doing this on a daily basis for the most part). Law enforcement, however, could not find any trace of those same e-mails in Michael Roseboro’s work computer.
“Remember,” Craig Stedman later observed, “many of the e-mails [Angie] printed out were deleted and not recoverable from the computers for whatever reason, but she voluntarily
gave
those to us—many of which we would never have had but for her choosing to turn them over. Mr. Roseboro gave us nothing and cleaned his computer [out] as much as he could.”
The first complete e-mail that law enforcement picked up on, again following those e-mails in the early
part of June, was written under the subject “YOU.” As it turned out, it was the beginning of an exchange that would bring about the first major problem of the affair, positioning a dark cloud over Michael Roseboro’s forthcoming trip to Niagara with his wife, children, and friends.
Roseboro’s e-mail address, beginning with
morty,
was an obvious play on his job as a mortician. Angie said she and her lover never gave each other nicknames. But on June 17, a Tuesday,
afunk
wrote to
morty,
at 10:20
A.M.,
reminding him that he was leaving at the end of the week for that Niagara trip. After an opening address of “sweetheart” and “I love you so much,” Angie said she had totally forgotten about his leaving that Friday. It had slipped her mind that this was the week he was going away with Jan and the kids. She encouraged him—although not before acknowledging that it was going to “hurt” to say it—to have a good time, pointing out that she meant “with the kids
only.”
She said it would feel like an “eternity” while he was gone, despite it being just a three-day weekend. She gave Roseboro some advice about sightseeing, having gone to Niagara herself in the past, ending with what had become a familiar sign-off between them: that she would be missing him and thinking of him always.
Michael wasted little time responding, darting off a short e-mail, noting that his “good times” would be only with the kids, certainly not with Jan. Beyond telling Angie he was staying one hundred yards away from Horseshoe Falls, at the Embassy Suites, Michael ended the e-mail, assuring his lover that he was going on the trip only out of obligation to his kids.
Angie must have been waiting for the reply, because she answered right away, laying what was the first guilt trip of the relationship on her boyfriend. She mentioned that her biggest fear was that Roseboro was going up north, into the romance capital of the
northeast, to “rekindle” his “relationship” with Jan, noting how great a place Niagara Falls would be to do that. She said how much she loved Michael and that she was “scared to death of losing” him back to Jan, before admitting that anxiety was the likely cause of her insecurities—that it was nothing Roseboro had done or said. It’s clear Angie was jealous of Jan going on the trip, and quite upset that he was going to be alone with Jan. Wasn’t he supposed to be breaking it off with her? Instead, it seemed as though Michael was doing the opposite.
Angie concluded her e-mail by saying that perhaps all she needed to do was close her eyes and dream of her lover holding her, telling her that everything would be okay. Maybe that was all she needed, a picture in her mind of Michael Roseboro coming to the rescue, wearing his love on his sleeve.