Authors: M. William Phelps
Or, was Michael Roseboro lying to Allan Sodomsky?
One of the investigators told Sodomsky they needed photographs of the jewelry, if any were available. Receipts too, if Roseboro could produce them. If he was claiming the jewelry had been stolen, an official report needed to be filed.
The following day, Roseboro’s brother-in-law showed up at the ECTPD with photographs of Jan wearing the jewelry. Roseboro was telling his lawyer that anyone who knew Jan could testify to the fact that she loved to wear jewelry and was hardly seen without it.
The investigator at the ECTPD told Roseboro’s brother-in-law that they needed Michael himself to come down and report the jewelry missing. “We’ll need to ask him a few questions.”
The brother-in-law left.
Michael would never walk into the station house or call to report the jewelry missing.
The tipping point here was that Michael Roseboro had not reported Jan wearing any jewelry on the night he pulled her out of the pool. And he never mentioned it at any time after. Why now? Why come forward
now
and say that she had been wearing expensive jewelry and that it was gone?
51
Laurie Sauder had known Jan Roseboro since their days in high school together. They had been friends ever since. Sauder had also worked for Fulton Bank, which Jan’s family had been connected to professionally up until Jan’s dad sold his business—Denver National Bank—to Fulton. Sauder was one of Fulton’s assistant managers. She worked at both the Cocalico and Reinholds offices, splitting her time. On July 22, 2008, Sauder had been working at the Reinholds branch.
Jan had happened to do some banking on that day and Laurie ran into her inside the building.
When Laurie saw Jan at one of the teller’s booths, she walked over.
“There was a conversation between the teller … and me and Jan,” Sauder said later. “She (Jan) made a deposit or payment or something.”
Laurie stood within breathing distance of her high-school friend. Laurie adored Jan. Had nothing but great things to say about her. And there was Jan, dressed down, as usual, in a sweatshirt—the same one she would later be found dead in—and flip-flops and black shorts.
“She was not wearing any jewelry,” Laurie Sauder later said. Laurie knew this because it was more than a
chance meeting. They spoke for ten to fifteen minutes. Laurie knew Jan well enough, and like many other friends of Jan’s later recalled, she was not about flaunting what she had and wearing flashy clothes and pricey jewelry around town. Okay, she drove a Range Rover, but that was about where it ended for Jan. It just wasn’t part of her DNA to wear what was later reported to be $40,000 worth of jewelry to the bank at lunchtime to take care of her financials. Same as it wasn’t part of who she was to go home after an afternoon of errands and dress up like Cleopatra in bulky jewelry to hang out at her pool. If anything, she would have taken the jewelry
off
before she got settled outside. Chlorine wreaks havoc on jewelry.
If Sauder’s memory wasn’t good enough, however, she called Keith Neff and explained that the bank took surveillance video daily of its customers coming and going. It would have video of Jan at the counter and walking into the bank.
Neff interviewed Laurie Sauder.
“She was the first person I interviewed who actually broke down and cried for Jan,” Neff said later.
Nevertheless, that information had to give Keith Neff a warm feeling. Here might be proof, beyond witness testimony, of what Jan Roseboro was wearing on the day of her murder.
Cassandra Pope was in her apartment tending to her baby. Richard, her husband, was at work. Cassie was alone.
And terrified.
“Mom,” she said, calling her mother, Marcia Evanick, Jan and Mike’s old neighbors, “I see his [SUV] over there.” She was referring to Michael Roseboro’s vehicle. “What do I do?”
“What …,” Marcia said. “He’s not going to do anything to you.”
“Mom!”
“Is your door locked? Look, if you don’t want to say hi to him, don’t go outside while he’s there.”
Cassie probably knew this, but hearing it from her mom felt good. It wasn’t that she was concerned Michael was going to barge into her apartment and try to kill her—that was a bit absurd and an overreaction.
Nonetheless, she was “creeped out,” Cassie said, “by his mere presence.”
Cassie watched her neighbor, along with the ebb and flow of the house, as the days went on and Michael was still a free man. Sometimes she’d look out the window and see Michael Roseboro sitting by the pool, alone, staring into the water, chain-smoking, drinking beers.
“He just sat there and stared at that water.”
And that, she said, was horrifying to watch.
52
All she had to do was walk across the street. It was not hard to see when his big black Denali was parked out back. The cops had told Angie Funk to stay away from Michael Roseboro. She herself, maybe without realizing it, by asking him certain questions, was beginning to have second thoughts about their love and their future. But Angie couldn’t stay away. She still loved the guy. She had met him once already behind the funeral home—what could one more time hurt?
Strange that he would be at work when there was a maelstrom of criminal difficulties spiraling around him. But Michael was in his office. He had explained to Angie during a phone call that he never went to Pittsburgh because his family members had asked him to stick around town.
“I’m talking to the police and telling them everything,” Angie said, embracing her lover, kissing him inside that same back alcove.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too, Michael.”
They had to be quick. No one could see them together.
“I never felt threatened,” Angie later explained,
describing this second meeting with Michael, “when I met him. And if I did, I would have never met him.”
Investigators had asked Angie not to tell Michael that she was talking to them. During that second week after Jan Roseboro’s murder, Angie and Michael communicated daily, often multiple times. They met, too. Angie never said if she continued to sleep with Michael after learning Jan was murdered. One would guess that sex was the last thing on her mind. But then again, Michael was cut from a different cloth. A narcissist by clinical definition, there’s no doubt he would have slept with Angie in a New York minute, had she initiated sex.
Regarding why she continued talking to and meeting with her lover, the only suspect in his wife’s murder, after learning Jan had been brutally beaten and drowned, Angie said, “I did not feel that Michael was lying to me, and I did not believe that he did the murder.”
What about all those other women? Didn’t the fact that Michael Roseboro turned out to be a serial cheater put a damper on future plans?
“I believed,” Angie said, “that [the one woman] was stalking Michael. I believed him when he said he was the one being harassed, and I had no reason to fear him…. [But] if he did [murder Jan], I would be afraid.”
Ignorance truly is bliss (and blind).
During one phone call during that second week, after Angie had been told by investigators that Jan and Michael Roseboro had been planning a trip to the Outer Banks, and he had made rather extensive arrangements to renew their marital vows, she confronted Michael. She asked the man whom she thought she would one day marry about this North Carolina trip.
“I canceled it,” Roseboro said, meaning the vow-renewal celebration. “The plans were made before we [started our affair].”
Angie was asked if she had ever placed a phone call for Michael to a reverend in the Outer Banks, acting, so
to speak, as the Roseboros’ wedding planner, strange as that might have sounded. They had solid information, investigators told Angie, that she had called, and they wanted to know if she knew anyone in North Carolina. There was a reverend in the Outer Banks who claimed to have “remembered possibly getting a message from Angela Funk,” Keith Neff explained when he spoke to Angie about this.
“Well, that freaks me out,” she responded to Neff. “I do not know if I should be worried about this.”
No, she had never called anyone in North Carolina, Angie said. It concerned her, though, that someone had her name and was saying she had made the call.
The question then became: had Michael Roseboro had someone else call North Carolina and disguise herself as Angie Funk?
Neff wanted to know why Angie had spoken to Michael when they had specifically asked her not to do so. It seemed strange that she would emphatically defy a request by law enforcement.
She never gave him an answer.
Angie explained how Michael reacted when she told him she was talking to the police. “The police contacted me,” she told him, “and I told them everything. I am not going to lie, Michael.”
Silence for a moment. Michael Roseboro never asked what she had told the police or how many times she had spoken to them. It was as if he didn’t care. As if he had expected it. Still, he was more upset with her, she said later, for telling law enforcement about the affair than anything else.
In another conversation, near the same day (Angie wasn’t sure when), she asked Michael about the bruising on Jan, which was reported by investigators. She wanted to know, again, if he had ever touched Jan. Ever got physical with her.
He never addressed any of the “bruising” specifically,
Angie later said. Instead, Michael offered: “If that’s what police are saying … but you have to believe me when I say that I never touched Jan…. I love you, Angie.”
“I love you, too, Michael.”
During another call, Michael said, “I wish you hadn’t told police about our affair.” He sounded disappointed, desperate. “But you need to cooperate with them.”
“I won’t lie, Michael.”
Angie couldn’t remember who brought it up, but they discussed the jewelry again as the second week came to an end. It was near August 1.
“Me and Brian [Binkley] are looking into it” was all Michael said about the jewelry.
There was a familiar tone to Michael’s voice as the conversations with Angie carried on during the latter part of that second week. He never expressed “shock,” Angie later said, “that this turned out to be a murder and not a drowning, as he had told me.”
Michael had given Angie that familiar story about waking up, going to the bathroom, finding the tiki lights still on, seeing Jan in the pool. The fact that police had ruled Jan’s death a homicide had not, apparently, had any effect whatsoever on Michael Roseboro’s demeanor or his relationship with Angie Funk. According to Angie, Michael never mentioned to her that Jan’s death was classified a murder. He said he was going to look for her killer, but he didn’t express any anger or sorrow that she had been murdered. What’s more, he never displayed any bitterness toward the police that they were accusing him of murder and were not out searching for the “real killer.”
Business as usual for Michael Roseboro. Jan’s death, if anything, had become a disruption in his plans with Angie. A nuisance. Some sort of hindrance.
A complication.
Yet, as August 1 brought hazy, hot, and humid temperatures, Angie and Michael’s lives were about to
change once again. Not because he was facing perhaps the rest of his life in prison, if he was tried and found guilty. But Angie had learned—so she claimed—on the morning of August 1 that she was carrying Michael Roseboro’s love child, a baby they had made together during one of their many sexual encounters.
How would she tell him? More important, how would she tell the police? If Angie thought the media had been unkind to her thus far—her being the “other woman”—what was going to happen when they got ahold of this piece of salacious information? In addition, what would family members think? Michael Roseboro wouldn’t be able to write Angie Funk off as a simple distraction any longer. And Angie’s husband, whom she was still living with, what was Randall Funk going to do?
53
There was probably only one way to put it.
“I’m pregnant!” Angie Funk said after calling her lover on August 1.
Was there any other way? Could things get any more complicated?
“Disbelief, shock,” Angie later said Michael Roseboro conveyed in those first moments after she broke the news. He had to be baffled, confused, and, almost certainly, a little angry. They had used birth control: condoms. Angie would later talk about a condom malfunctioning, breaking, or coming off; again, she could not recall what exactly happened.
“Well,” Michael responded after getting his breath back, “at any other time this would have been, you know, good news. But right now … it’s not. It’s just not the right time.”
The timing, actually, could not have been any worse.
They talked about what had happened, Angie said. Then Roseboro mentioned that maybe she should have an abortion.
“I’m against it,” he told her, “but, you know, considering what’s going on…. Well … I’m against it … but in this case, it might be a good idea.”
“No! That’s not an option,” Angie snapped. There was no changing her mind. She was going to have Michael Roseboro’s baby. There was nothing he could say or do to change that. He had better start accepting and dealing with it—because in nine months, Angie Funk was going to give birth to another successor to the Roseboro throne.
Angie said later that she had taken a home pregnancy test that morning. She claimed to have purchased the test at a local Lancaster County CVS with a debit card that had subsequently expired from a bank that had changed names. She was asked about the account number she had used to make the purchase.
“I don’t remember,” Angie said.
Craig Stedman was with ECTPD detective Kerry Sweigart on Saturday, August 2, 2008. They were sitting in Stedman’s downtown Lancaster office, finishing up a search warrant. Larry Martin, Keith Neff, and Jan Walters had nearly finished Michael Roseboro’s arrest warrant and were preparing to have a judge sign it.
Sweigart’s cell phone buzzed. He looked down.
Angela Funk …
The two lawmen looked at each other.