Authors: M. William Phelps
Michael had spent more time with his lover that afternoon than he ever had. They ate lunch together. Had sex all afternoon. Talked marriage and wedding dresses and beaches and all things Mike and Angie. But now, as the strain of Jan at home wore on him, Roseboro was feeling it somewhere near 9:00
P.M.
Jan was outside at the pool. Roseboro was, undoubtedly, wondering what he was going to do about a wife he was certain would take him to the cleaners in a divorce.
Tell her and lose everything?
Or kill Jan and try to make it look like an accident?
Regarding this so-called wedding, Angie Funk told Michael Roseboro one day when they were discussing getting married, she wanted him to “grow his hair longer for the wedding.”
“It’ll become curly,” Roseboro said.
“Do it now,” she demanded, “so I can see what it will look like for the wedding.”
Like listening to country music now—when before meeting Angie, he had despised it. Roseboro agreed to grow his locks out.
The wedding was scheduled “soon,” Angie later said during a police interview. They had never set a particular
date other than, she agreed, within a year’s time. Yet, Angie would later refute her own words, saying, “I’m not denying that I said that, but I don’t—there’s no way we could have been married within a year.” She went on to say she didn’t think she could have divorced Randy and resolved all of her personal affairs in twelve months. “I’m just saying it would not be possible for me to be married within a year….”
As they talked some more about being married and their life together, the subject of affairs came up. Angie was obviously worried about Michael continuing to do in the future what he was doing to Jan.
Roseboro said he’d never had an affair before Angie. But the conversation had somehow sparked a memory in Roseboro, which he shared. And this was where Roseboro utilized his best manipulation skills: dodge the hardball questions by dredging up some sympathy. Get Angie to focus on something else.
“What is it?” she asked. Roseboro looked dismayed.
Roseboro explained that someone close to him “has had affairs.” He paused. “I don’t want to be like [that person].”
In recalling this conversation to police, Angie said, “I was fooled by Michael. If I confronted him about things, he would just explain them away.
“He was a good liar.”
Those last two phone calls Angie Funk made to Michael Roseboro on the night of July 22, 2008, must have been important. For two people who had communicated throughout a day with what Craig Stedman later called “an extremely unusual amount of contact,” back and forth, the final calls of that long day of communication would have been significant. Between 9:37 and 10:14
P.M.,
cutting it close to the time that Jan Roseboro was murdered, Angie called her man three
times and sent one text message. At 9:37
P.M.,
Angie called Roseboro’s cell phone and left him a five-minute voice mail, something she later noted that, besides the time on that night, was not unusual for her to do. Then at 9:43
P.M.,
a minute after hanging up from the previous call, she left a three-minute voice mail; then, at 10:08
P.M.,
another five-minute voice mail. Finally, on her last communication of that busy day, Angie Funk sent Michael Roseboro a text message at 10:14
P.M.
He never responded to any of the calls or the text.
When asked later what she had said, and why she kept calling back, Angie could not recall.
“I just don’t know.”
Had Angie Funk told her lover that she was carrying his child—and had that information sent Michael Roseboro over the edge, to the point that he did not want to talk to her? According to Roseboro, he was wide awake during those times, save for maybe that last text at 10:14
P.M.
In fact, Roseboro was inside the house with the young kids, he claimed, while Jan was still outside. Couldn’t he have slipped away from the children (like he had so many times before) and, at the least, answered the text, or walked to another part of that large house and called Angie back?
If you asked Angie, she’d say, no way. She had not told him she was pregnant during any of those voice mails. Craig Stedman posed this question to Angie: “When did you find out that you were pregnant?”
“July,” Angie answered without hesitation. But then she seemed to think about it and said: “Or no! August first.”
“Was it July or August?” Stedman wondered.
“It was August first.”
July 22, 2008
The night Jan Roseboro was murdered
40
What happened in the hours after that last phone call between Angie Funk and Michael Roseboro? What were Jan Roseboro’s final moments like?
Only Michael Roseboro knows for sure—and he refuses to admit that he had anything to do with the murder of his wife.
From the evidence left behind, however, including all the testimony and the interviews conducted by the ECTPD, the pathologist’s report and the autopsy, those initial reports from the hospital where Jan was taken, the findings and experience of several of the detectives and the Lancaster County DA’s thoughts, all indicators point to the murder having taken place near the Roseboros’ inground pool. All the lights were out—several neighbors reported this. Michael might have told Jan he wanted to look at the stars with her (“Like the creepy schmoozer he was,” someone in law enforcement told me), which would allow him the excuse to go around and turn off all the lights. Roseboro even made mention of this in his first statement to police and to some of his family members who came to the house that night and the next day.
The evidence the pathologist uncovered pointed to
Jan’s murderer having begun by putting her in a carotid neck choke hold. In cutting off blood and oxygen to the brain via Jan’s carotid arteries, those two main veins on each side of the neck that throb under stressful conditions or from a tight necktie, Jan would have passed out quickly. This would have allowed Jan’s killer to fake the drowning then, which everyone agreed was Roseboro’s plan from the start.
Likely, as Jan struggled with her killer inside the pool, she scratched him on the face by reaching behind herself as he continued to strangle her. (This theory lines up with the scream Cassandra Pope heard that night, which, she said, came from that area of the yard at about this time, ten-thirty.)
The scream indicated Jan was confronted and murdered outside the home, as opposed to down in the basement, or in a section of the house near the pool deck. No one could have heard her scream if Michael Roseboro accosted his wife in the basement. On top of that, the deep gash on Jan’s head behind her ear was likely caused by her head hitting the corner of one of the large planters next to the pool as she struggled and/or fell backward, or was simply bashed over the head with some sort of weapon never recovered.
With Jan bleeding and perhaps unconscious, Michael needed to get her into the pool so he could call 911 and put that accident theory into motion. As Jan was tossed into the water, there’s an indication she “came to” while in the water. She was definitely alive and breathing while in the water; the soapy liquid released from her lungs during the autopsy proved that.
The question became, then: did Jan Roseboro wake up entirely, or was she partially awake and unable to fight off her attacker?
The minor bruising found all over Jan’s body indicated a struggle. Or at least a partial fight on Jan’s part.
No doubt about it: Jan Roseboro wanted to live.
She fought for her life until the end.
With blood all over the deck of the pool, one would have to ask why no blood was found when the CSI Unit sprayed luminol, or when the first responders took a walk around and looked for evidence of an accident or a struggle.
How had Michael Roseboro gotten rid of all the blood?
Being a funeral director, a person who dealt with blood on a daily basis while embalming bodies, Roseboro was well schooled in how to clean up blood.
Why weren’t any traces of chemicals found, the same chemicals he had access to at the funeral home? All that rain, and a crime scene that the ECTPD didn’t get to until nearly a day after Jan Roseboro was murdered.
41
Angie Funk was worried when she didn’t hear from Michael Roseboro on the morning of July 23, 2008. Roseboro had always called, every morning during the week, near five forty-five, as soon as Randall Funk left for work.
Not hearing from him, Angie dialed Michael’s cell phone.
It went straight to voice mail. Michael had his phone turned off.
As the morning wore on, and a hazy sun burned off the cloud cover, Angie called her lover twice, she admitted, between nine-thirty and ten forty-five.
She was unable to reach him.
“I hadn’t heard anything [from him],” Angie later testified, “and I was starting to get a little worried, ‘cause it wasn’t like him not to call me.”
Interestingly enough, Angie got into her car and drove by the Roseboro home out on West Main Street. Moving slowly by the house, looking at all the cars and people roaming around, Angie became even more concerned, she later said.
“I was trying to get in touch with Michael,” Angie told police, “because I knew something was wrong.”
She drove back home and called the funeral home. When he wasn’t at the funeral home, Roseboro would roll the calls over to his home phone.
“Hello?” Michael said, picking up the phone call at his home.
“What’s going on?” Angie asked breathlessly.
“I cannot talk. Jan died. It was a drowning,” he said. Angie was “in shock.” She had never heard Roseboro sound so static, flatlined. The guy was generally upbeat and drooling when they spoke, making jokes about what she would wear, how she smelled, what time they were going to meet up.
But not today. Michael Roseboro had his hands full.
During an interview with Detective Keith Neff, Angie said her first thought, after hearing that Jan had (conveniently) died, was,
“Oh, crap!”
Then: “I did not want to be a full-time mother of six children. I did not want any more children.”
At the time that she was thinking about having just been saddled with Jan’s kids, Angie Funk was carrying Roseboro’s fifth child.
“What happened?” Angie asked Michael, wondering how Jan had died.
Roseboro gave Angie that familiar mantra he had been repeating to everyone in law enforcement, along with anyone else who asked: “I woke up,” he told Angie on that morning, “saw a light on, went outside, and saw Jan in the pool.”
“He did not go into detail,” Angie explained during that interview with Neff. “He was never ‘broken up’ about what happened, but he sounded upset when I first talked to him.”
Speaking to Michael during those days right after the murder, Angie said that she just assumed he had told police about their affair (and that’s why, she seemed to suggest, she never came forward). And yet as the ECTPD and Detective Jan Walters, of the LCDA’s Office, split up
and began interviewing friends and family connected to Jan and Michael Roseboro, not one person reported the affair. Even after Angie Funk’s name was brought into the discourse of the case, Roseboro still held firm and told people that any suggestion of an affair was a lie. A terrible misunderstanding. Roseboro had told family and friends that Angie was nothing more than a woman helping him plan the renewal of his marital vows to the woman he truly loved, Jan.
Later on that day after Jan’s murder, Michael called Angie.
“Hey …”
“Michael.”
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I need more time,” he stated.
Angie presumed he was saying this because Jan had died such a tragic death—and he needed to be with his family. She completely understood. No pressure.
“Yes,” Angie responded.
“I just need to be in your arms,” Roseboro said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Michael.”
42
Shawn Roseboro had just lost his house and his job. Times were tough on the kid. Much of it, Shawn later said, he had brought on himself with his drinking. But still, there seemed to be a “bad luck” vibe all around him during the summer of 2008. He could feel it, and it was making his own selfish behavior worse.
On the day after Jan Roseboro was murdered, Shawn was alone. His sister and her family had gone to the beach. He was staying at her house. The phone rang. It was his dad.
“Mike found Jan in the pool, and she’s dead.”
Was there really any other way to put it?
Shawn recalled that he “hit the floor before the phone did—I lost it at that point.”
After picking himself up off the ground, Shawn let his anger go and punched a hole through the door.
“I didn’t know what to do with my emotions at that point.”
With no one to lean on, Shawn said, he logged onto Lancaster Online, a local blog, that afternoon, just to see what was being said about Jan’s death. While reading and thinking and reminiscing about Jan, Shawn started drinking.
Heavily.
It was one of the only ways to deaden all the pain. Shawn lost Pa just a month prior, he said, which was devastating enough, even though the guy had lived a long life. Now the only person in the family who “totally got” who he was and understood his feelings was gone.
What am I going to do?
“When Pa died, it was at the peak of everything going on in my life, and I was, like, completely
numb.
Jan dying on top of that—well, everything just clicked in at once.”
In his heart, Shawn said, he questioned it a little: Jan’s death, that is—the way she had died. Over and over, he asked himself:
How could Jan drown?
It seemed so illogical. So impossible. So … unreal.
“But I never thought anything else.”
No one did—at least in those early days when Michael Roseboro was being questioned by Keith Neff, Larry Martin, and now Jan Walters—and the secret of Angie Funk was still being kept under wraps.