Authors: M. William Phelps
Because of this new life he had with Angie, Michael admitted, he had found himself stopping to take in the simple things in life: singing birds, the rising and setting of the sun, the stars, flowers. Those godly creations he had taken for granted all these years. He was a changed man, Roseboro said. Yet the “sweetest thing” in the universe to Roseboro now, despite all that newfound bliss, was the sound of Angie’s voice. He said he “lived” for Angie’s telephone calls, along with her messages, texts, and e-mails. Yes, indeed, by July 14, 2008, Roseboro was “living each day and not simply existing” any longer. He knew what life was about. The secret. He felt alive and joyous. The sky was bluer. The air smelled fresher. Each song on the radio sounded better.
All because of Angie Funk.
A few hours after sending each other several additional e-mails (which have been lost or destroyed), Roseboro wrote Angie a poem and e-mailed it. He called it “My Heaven.” The woman had inspired him to begin writing poetry. He was truly caught now in the daze of desire and—one could argue after reading the poem—humiliation. The poem was something you’d likely see from a tenth-grade English class. It is full of lines such as the following:
I feel your need against my thigh.
July 15, 2008
Seven days before Jan Roseboro’s murder
34
Michael Roseboro was still locked in that drunken sexual smog he had obsessively mistaken for love. The urgent nature of being with Angie Funk all the time, replete in the e-mails he sent to her all morning long, energized each sentence. You can feel the anxiety and need Roseboro had to be with this woman sexually anytime he desired. He couldn’t get enough of what she was giving him. He talked about never having been a “cuddler” in all the years he was married. But that was all he thought about now: cuddling night after night with his future wife. He admitted that the affair had “ignited a flame” that had “burned inside of him” for Angie over the past five years as he stealthily watched her from afar after meeting at the parade. That “flame” became the metaphor that he so embarrassingly used throughout the remainder of the e-mail to explain how much he loved Angie. That flame, Roseboro said, had now met “oxygen,” and had begun to burn “out of control”; it was a flame, in fact, that was “consuming” him. After seeing her for the first time, after the initial phone call on May 29, he realized that as the flame grew, he could one day “internally combust.” He said he needed to make Angie his wife.
That “fire,” he explained, “will never, never go out….” Angie was, Roseboro concluded, his “eternal flame.” Again, although she later handed over to police several of these e-mails from Roseboro, Angie’s responses for that day do not exist.
July 17, 2008
Five days before Jan Roseboro’s murder
35
On Thursday, two days after the so-called flame died down, Angie Funk was back to being “baby” in Michael Roseboro’s “good morning” e-mail. He had seen her at Turkey Hill. He said his days were complete before they actually started because he was able to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved. On this day, he told Angie how “hot” she looked while standing inside the convenience store. He said that while he was scoping her out, he had wanted her “soooooooo badly.”
Next, Roseboro explained a party idea he had for Angie’s fortieth birthday, which was over five months away (Angie was a Christmas Eve baby). It was something special. Something extravagant. An event to end all events. There was plenty enough time, Roseboro explained, considering that he knew when Angie’s birthday was; he had that covered, anyway, he added, because he didn’t want to give the love of his life a birthday party on or near her actual birthday—that would be too typical. Instead, he wanted it to be a surprise, at a time when she “least expected it.” He laid out the scenario he saw himself actively involved in as though he was some sort of party planner. He told Angie how he would call
her mother so she could give him all the names and numbers of Angie’s friends and family. He had sat and mused, he said, about what type of food to serve, adding that he “loved thinking about the future” because it was going to be their “reality soon.”
He said all this, however, without giving Angie—at least in any of the e-mails left behind—a carefully scripted plan for how and when he was going to divorce Jan.
Looking at the immense amount of communication between Angie and Michael, considering what he wrote and how often, it was as if to Michael Roseboro (and this is a very important point), Jan was already gone. The mother of his children, his wife for two decades, did not exist. He had entirely cropped Jan out of his life. In Michael’s world, Jan Roseboro was a memory.
Already dead.
Next, Michael told Angie how he would “love to teach” her girls “how to swim,” along with Angie, too, of course. He said this while describing the image of bringing them all to the park one day so they could take a walk and play on the jungle gym sets, like a normal family out for a day of fun. Afterward, they could stop by Turkey Hill and get Slushies, “extra large.”
In the next series of e-mails, Michael sent Angie to several websites—JCPenney and a Hawaiian shop among them—to look at wedding dresses that he was thinking about buying for her. He made it clear that he was paying for the gown. No matter what it cost.
“This was nothing new—he had sent a few of his
other
mistresses to those same websites,” a source in the family later told me.
Only fragments of Angie’s e-mail responses to the wedding dress questions remain. In one, Angie said how it flattered her that Michael was browsing the Internet, looking for a wedding gown, but she should be the one doing those sorts of things. Nonetheless, she told Michael
he was an “amazing” man for going to such extremes. With him looking into wedding dresses, she sensed now this was not bedroom talk, a pipe dream, or figment of his incredible imagination. The guy was actually hunting down wedding dresses and sending her the links.
He was serious.
Michael wrote and told Angie to forget about JCPenney; the dresses he saw on the site paled in comparison to those on the Hawaiian site.
They discussed how a long dress with a train wasn’t going to suit their needs because it would drag along the beach and get ruined by the sand and surf.
Touché, touché.
In another fragmented e-mail later uncovered by a computer forensic search, Angie agreed that the dresses on that Hawaiian website were far superior to JCPenney’s.
The fact that Roseboro was going to all this trouble fed into Angie’s belief that he was planning on leaving Jan, a sentiment implicit in the way she answered. “It means so much to me …,” she said, talking about him “looking.” She said there was no way they could go out together—or she alone, for that matter—in or around Denver, shopping for dresses. How would she ever explain searching for a wedding dress when she was married already?
Michael ignored her fear of getting caught shopping and instead came back with an e-mail affirming his dreams of marrying her and how he could not wait to make her his wife.
For the next few e-mails they talked about how Angie Funk would wear her hair—Michael Roseboro suggesting it would be great if the sea breeze could dry it as they waited to say their vows on the beach—and how he would wear his. Like a pair of twentysomethings getting married for the first time, they grappled over the idea that their hair needed to be perfect, but that none of it
mattered as long as they were together, holding hands, reciting their vows.
By 11:00
A.M.,
they were anticipating seeing each other within the hour, a near daily meeting by this point in the relationship that included a quickie, if they could fit it in.
July 21, 2008
Twenty-seven hours before Jan Roseboro’s murder
36
The day before Jan Roseboro was beaten, strangled, and drowned, Michael Roseboro was in his element. In the e-mails extracted from his computer, it seemed as though Michael was experiencing a euphoric high, maybe like a runner after a marathon. An endorphin rush. There was a sense of ease in his writing style and narrative voice. Urgency too. He needed to be with Angie Funk all the time. And nothing, it appeared, was going to stop him or get in his way.
Every morning that he saw Angie walk into the convenience store, Michael wrote at 7:53
A.M.,
was like seeing her for the first time. The absolute compulsive nature of Roseboro not being able to get a handle on his emotions—constantly thinking about this woman, constantly fantasizing about having sex with her and one day marrying her—had overtaken him by this point. He could no longer contain his desires, separate reality from fantasy, or restrain himself with the slightest bit of maturity in what he was writing. This conclusion is based not only on the words Roseboro chose to use over the next twenty-four hours, but in the fact that he repeated phrases over and over, as if the redundancy would somehow make what he had to say more
genuine, meaningful, and important. Because the truth of the matter remained: Michael Roseboro was scared to death of losing everything he had worked so hard for. There was no way he was going to allow his wife to take his four kids, that massive addition they had put on Jan’s childhood home, and certainly not part of a business his late grandfather and father had built from the ground up. And yet inside of that fantastic bubble of wanting it all, there was Angie Funk, a woman he had no intention of walking away from. Michael Roseboro needed desperately to have everything: status, lifestyle, money, kids—
and
his lover. The only person not in his skewed image of a world he so much wanted was Jan.
“When you see … the e-mails,” Craig Stedman later said, speaking about those days leading up to Jan’s murder, “just the e-mails that we have—and we don’t have them all—you’ll see from the content that it is clear to this man that losing his girlfriend is
not
an option.”
The Roseboro Funeral Home, for which Michael Roseboro was now 95 percent owner, had been estimated at over $3 million. Michael had joined the business as a formal partner in June 1990, when the local press rolled out the red carpet for the family, proclaiming to its Lancaster County audience the handing off of the torch. Michael was the great-grandson of the founder of the business, Harry Mellinger. He was the only son of Ralph Roseboro and, of course, the grandson of Louis “Pa” Roseboro, who owned the business from 1959 to 1972, when Ralph had taken over. So engrained in the culture and societal hierarchy of Denver, the headline on June 4, 1990, announcing that another Roseboro was stepping in to fill the shoes of his forefathers, said it all:
ROSEBORO FUNERAL HOME EXTENDS THE FAMILY TRADE.
The subhead elaborated:
FOURTH GENERATION BEGINS WORK AT PROSPEROUS DENVER BUSINESS.
Three years
after this headline ran, in March 1993, Roseboro was elected president of the Lancaster County Funeral Directors Association.
The man’s star was on the rise.
On top of losing such a profitable family business, a staple in Denver, Michael Roseboro had just moved into that new home with nearly three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of additions and renovations.
There was a lot at stake here.
“He likes being rich,” Stedman added. “He likes nice things. This man … is kind of a big deal in his town, in his area.”
Michael Roseboro was well aware of the risks he was taking bedding down Angie Funk.
“In an attempt,” Stedman concluded, “to keep all this and keep both worlds”—Angie Funk and his home—“together, I guess, for him to keep it all up … [he] lies. He lies, essentially, to everyone in the summer of 2008. He lives a life of lies. He lies to his friends. He lies to his girlfriend…. He lies to his family. And, of course, he
lies
to his wife.”
Yet, in looking at Michael Roseboro’s e-mails to Angie Funk on this day, he sounded as if he had the world at his fingertips, and everything under complete control. When, in reality, his life was nothing but a house of cards, about to collapse, leaving Roseboro backed into the corner of even more lies.
On that morning, July 21, 2008, the day before Jan Roseboro was murdered, her husband told his lover he wanted to be with her every minute of every day.
Angie’s response to this and any other e-mail both of them sent throughout that day were never recovered. The fact that Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk talked on the phone thirty-four different times throughout this day, sent thirty text messages to each other and four e-mails, which are known of, certainly shows that the relationship was heading into a different realm, a different
stratosphere, with different needs and far different expectations on Michael’s part.
To say the pressure was on Michael Roseboro—and being turned up as each moment passed—would be the understatement of the relationship.
July 22, 2008
The morning before Jan Roseboro’s murder
37
The day Michael Roseboro murdered his wife dawned as a gorgeous midsummer morning. At six fifty-three, it was 70 degrees, humid as a sauna at 97 percent, clear, a 5.9mph WNW wind grazing the ridge of mountains surrounding downtown Denver, no doubt gently blowing the midseason crops from side to side like algae. The roads running in throughout the Denver/Reinholds region of Lancaster County are wispy and winding. There is farmland for as far as the eye can see. In the fall, on these same roads, you can drive for miles through what is a literal maze of cornfields, at times not knowing where you are or what’s around the corner, due to the ten-foot-high stalks walled all around you. On certain sections of the road, one encounters a muddle of “road apples”—some squished by hooves and car tires, others fully intact—from the Amish and Mennonite horse and buggies that travel along these parts all day (and sometimes night) long. The bridges spanning the creeks and rivers around town—most of them, anyway—can fit only one car (or a horse and buggy) at a time. Motorists, both locals and those passing through, are tolerant and patient of one another and of the Amish, who never look you in the eye. With their blue shirts, black pants and
suspenders, straw hats, straight as ribbon hair cropped bowl-shaped around the ears and forehead, an alarming number with the same piercing glacier-blue eyes, the Amish go about their business as if only they exist, not talking or gesturing to anyone outside the sect. It is a simple way of life: one that the locals don’t pay much attention to anymore; one where forgiveness is the key to living in God’s wondrous world.