Authors: M. William Phelps
This was very disturbing to Robert. Michael Roseboro had lost his wife hours earlier and here he was, sitting yards from where she had died, telling a racist joke.
How peculiar.
45
The next day, a Thursday morning, July 24, Angie Funk “found out from the media,” she later claimed in a police interview, that Jan Roseboro’s death was being classified a homicide. The local newspapers were calling it the first murder in West Cocalico Township history. One article said:
A 45-year-old Reinholds woman was severely beaten before she drowned in her own swimming pool….
Another, this in the form of a headline, tried to push the case into the overhyped and salacious television talk show–tank that crime TV media sharks routinely swim in:
MURDER HOUSE YIELDS EVIDENCE: BLOODY TISSUES, DISINFECTANT SEIZED.
Online, message boards fed the media-frenzy flame as comments speculated that Jan and Michael’s son Sam was behind the murder, and Michael Roseboro had helped the boy cover it up.
Nonsense. All of it.
That disinfectant, in fact, was from the cleaning bucket sitting near the screen door. Keith Neff later said that Suzie Van Zant had told the ECTPD that she had been cleaning the screens with the bucket. That bloody tissue was a mere snot rag with a spot of blood on it that could have come from a child’s cut, a bloody
nose, or perhaps a couple of oozing scratches on someone’s face.
Still, DA Craig Stedman came out swinging in the morning’s newspapers, his opinions particularly lucid, explaining to residents of Lancaster County that there was “no possibility” of Jan’s death being “accidental.” Stedman said Jan suffered a “significant beating,” telling reporters that “someone murdered her, and that person is at large in the community.”
Sobering words of alarm from a man who was, behind the scenes, going after Michael Roseboro with all of the law enforcement and investigatory muscle he had at his disposal, Stedman had his man in his sights. He was willing, though, to give Roseboro the benefit of the doubt. At least publicly, for the time being.
A retrospective look at the crime scene showed that the Roseboros’ house and the pool patio, where Jan was murdered, were so spotless that that was one of the reasons why law enforcement was focused on Michael Roseboro.
“There should have been a lot of blood with Jan’s head injury,” Detective Keith Neff told me later, “and we found none—and with the amount of trauma Jan’s body sustained, it is likely there was a struggle. So this goes along with there being
no
signs of a struggle.”
If you’re a cop, you have to take a serious look at this information and ask yourself why.
Nonetheless, whether she got the homicide information
after
or before sending an e-mail to Michael that morning, the first e-mail of the day that Angie wrote to her lover would later tell law enforcement a lot about the affair.
Angie began the e-mail—this one written in italics—by telling her lover how sorry she was for what had happened. She said her “thoughts and prayers” were with Roseboro and his kids. (Kind of ironic that murder would bring such sentiments out of the same woman
who, fewer than forty-eight hours before, was having sex with this dead woman’s husband, the father of those same kids she was now praying for and thinking about.)
Next, Angie told Michael she would do everything in her power to help. Whatever it was. Just ask. She understood her man needed “time,” and she “totally” got the fact that they were going to be apart for some time. It was going to “hurt like hell,” she explained, meaning that when the death of his wife hit him, Michael was going to whither and cave in emotionally (or at least one would think that onslaught of grief was coming), regardless of what had been going on. Angie said she was prepared to give Michael “all the time” he needed to work through this obvious painful period of his life. She told Michael he was still the love of her life, and she was willing to “go to the ends of the earth” for him—and that was her “promise.” She said she would also be there for his kids, whom she said she loved already without even knowing them.
Michael’s response to this e-mail—if he sent one—does not exist.
“I went in to talk with police,” Michael told Angie during a phone call near this time. Angie, who admitted to “a lot of phone calls” with Roseboro after Jan’s murder, could not recall when, exactly, this particular call took place. “Gary Frees came with me,” he said. Then: “We’ll still be together, baby—I still believe in our dreams.”
“I love you,” Angie said.
There was a phone call later that day Michael made from his sister’s house to Angie. He mentioned that the police were accusing him of the murder, adding in defiance, “I did not do this!”
“If anyone needed to believe you,” Angie responded, “it would have to be me.”
Apparently, in making such a bold statement, Angie was stating that she was standing behind her man and
did not believe he was capable of murdering his wife, nor did she think he did it.
Sentiments that, in due time, were about to change for Angie.
Then there was the little surprise Angie Funk had for her lover.
The baby.
BOOK THREE
M
ORBID
C
URIOSITY
46
Putting it simply, death was a part of his life, Michael Roseboro, then a twenty-six-year-old, full of piss and vinegar, said back in 1993. And death, on any level, terrified him. The eager-to-please, newly married mortician was interviewed by Doug Wenrich for a business article in the
Lancaster New Era
not long after he took over the family business. The future for Michael then was paved in gold. Here he was in his midtwenties and he had total control over the family business, which was already turning hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual profits.
Michael began his mortician career in high school, he explained to Wenrich—the hubris he would exude like vapor in the years to come not anywhere present in his tone. His chores were “mainly washing the hearse, setting up folding chairs, and doing other odd jobs.” Michael Roseboro graduated from Cocalico High School. From there, the heir to the undertaker’s throne studied mortuary science at Northampton County Area Community College, where he earned his associate’s, finally passing the state and national boards in 1989.
Before the murder of his wife became a burdensome
narrative playing out in his daily life, putting the kibosh on the family business for the moment, Michael Roseboro had not been in trouble with law enforcement.
In that 1993 interview, Michael said he had always been frightened of death. “The whole idea of it,” he told Wenrich, “just scared me. The finality of it scared me.”
It wasn’t until he began talking to families in mourning that Michael said he realized his job as a funeral director wasn’t about embalming, putting makeup on corpses, or even burying or cremating the dead; it was about consoling the living. Making sure those who had lost loved ones were not taken advantage of, or made to feel worse by an undertaker out to sell them the most expensive burial package in his catalogue. The art of dealing with mourning families was in taking care of every detail for them, being certain they did not have to deal with anything other than grief and tears.
The funeral itself was “not really about mourning the dead,” Michael had said to Wenrich, but more “… about celebrating that person and [his or her] life.”
In total contrast to the way he was acting since his wife had been beaten, strangled, and drowned, Michael Roseboro, married to Jan by then, added, “I honestly believe people are helped by getting it out, by talking about it and letting their emotions go.”
So far, no one in Michael Roseboro’s family or circle of friends had reported that he had shown any sort of serious emotional reaction to Jan’s death. Instead of wiping tears and walking around with drooped shoulders and a sullen, withdrawn look on his face, Michael was bouncing from friends to family, selling that same story he had told police. It was a story that law enforcement, at the moment, was punching holes in.
Investigators were anxious, for one, to speak with Angie Funk in a more official capacity, maybe in a more
comfortable space. That short talk on her front porch—Angie shielding her kids and husband from the conversation with a closed door to her back—was a warning, per se, letting Angie know that she still had some explaining to do. Her life with Michael was, quite possibly, the key to solving Jan Roseboro’s murder. She was not going to be able to walk away from this without telling the cops all she knew. Angie had said she, her husband, and her kids were going on a little vacation, and that would give her time to explain to Randall what was going on.
Law enforcement had given her that space—two days ago.
Now it was time to own up to her responsibilities.
While investigators were on their way to Ocean City, New Jersey, Angie took a phone call from Michael on her cell. She must have spied the number on the LCD screen, grabbed the phone, and snuck away from Randy Funk and their kids.
The noose was tightening. Michael could sense it. His voice indicated as much. There was a certain tone in what he said, indicating that the heat of the investigation was being ratcheted up a few notches and possibly getting to him.
“Things are not going so good,” the embattled mortician, now the sole suspect in his wife’s murder, told Angie, according to an interview Angie gave a few weeks after the call. “They think I did it.”
“If you did not do anything, Michael, you have
nothing
to worry about,” Angie responded.
“She was not able to remember anything else about this conversation,” Detective Keith Neff’s report of the interview said. Neff had asked Angie if she confronted Roseboro with “why the police” had felt he had done it.
She said no, she never asked him that.
It was here, Angie said later, that she began to think “about how their dreams of being together were gone, and how Michael threw [them] away.”
The matter of her lover being accused of murdering his wife wasn’t much on Angie’s mind as Roseboro faced a tough road in the days ahead.
“Those issues of his,” she said, “were the least of my worries because I [had] my
own
issues to deal with.”
Boy, did she ever.
47
Ocean City, New Jersey, is a 130-mile, two-hour-plus ride from Denver, Pennsylvania. If you’re a cop in a cruiser, lights spinning, siren blaring, probably a little less.
Investigators met Angie Funk at the Ocean City, New Jersey, Police Department on Central Avenue, downtown. Angie appeared tired, a bit nervous, and quite defiant in her own way. She was definitely a bit shell-shocked by all of this, no doubt pondering the notion that all those e-mails she and Michael Roseboro had shared were going to become public knowledge sooner or later. Yet, as soon as Angie started talking, out came what would become
her
signature response: that uncooperative tone in her voice that would drive law enforcement crazy over the course of the next year. Many in law enforcement who spoke to Angie said, in not so many words, that getting straightforward information from her—just the facts—was harder than sucking peanut butter through a straw. The more you pushed Angie, the more she resisted, or beat around the bush, leaning heavily on the phrase I don’t recall/remember.
“Another interesting thing with Angie,” one law enforcement source said, “is, things that possibly no person could forget, she would
conveniently
forget.”
This was the first time law enforcement had the chance to talk to Angie in a professional manner. She wore a tank top and shorts. She sat in an interrogation room, with two detectives, one on each side.
At first, they asked Angie questions about the affair: how she and Roseboro met, where they met, how they communicated, how the relationship progressed, did her husband and Jan know about the affair, details about the sex.
Softballs, you could say. All questions Angie could answer in any way she wanted to, perhaps.
For whatever the reason, getting Angie to dole out information with any profundity was indeed like the two sides were speaking different languages. Angie was all about holding her cards close.
Were she and Roseboro in love? “Yes.”
Did they have sex? “Yes.”
Did she know he was married? “Yes.”
Did he ever mention harming Jan? “No.”
Did he ever say anything about being scared that Jan was murdered? “No.”
Was he in fear for his children’s lives since Jan’s death? “No.”
It seemed that if Roseboro had not murdered Jan, then someone had walked onto the property—an intruder, in other words—and not only had murdered Jan by beating and drowning her, but had cleaned up the crime scene and turned all the lights on before leaving. If that insanely ridiculous theory had actually played out, a murderer was roaming around Denver—and one would think Michael Roseboro would be standing in front of his kids with a shotgun, protecting them from the same fate his wife had suffered. Remarkable as it sounded, however, Michael’s kids were spread out at various family residences. He wasn’t even with them most of the time.
“Yes,” she answered. He was still telling Angie that
he loved her, and they were going to ride off into the sunset once this situation settled down.
At some point, investigators told Angie that the man she had fallen in love with, Michael Alan Roseboro, her knight in shining armor, the love of her life, was, in fact, a serial adulterer—that he’d had many affairs throughout his marriage and was perhaps involved with other women while sleeping with Angie.
Indeed, Roseboro was a “playa,” in every sense of the urban word.
Angie’s demeanor changed after law enforcement gave her that news. Her face dropped. She was particularly shaken by this information. No doubt she had thought she knew Michael better than anyone, and now she realized that perhaps what they had was nothing more than another one of Michael Roseboro’s conquests. She was one more in a line of mistresses. A mark. A lick of his thumb, turn of the page. Someone for whom he had tossed the charm on, like rose petals, lied to, and taken for quite the ride—in more ways than one.