Authors: M. William Phelps
What does she want?
It wasn’t like Angie to call. If anything, detectives were resigned to have to call
her.
Sweigart flipped open his cell. “Yeah?”
Stedman stared at the detective, watching his reaction to what Angie was saying. Sweigart was “turning all sorts of shades of red,” Stedman recalled. Whatever Angie had to offer, Stedman could tell, was big news.
After a few moments, Sweigart said, “Okay, Angie …” and hung up.
Stedman waited.
“Well? …”
“I got some news for ya. Angie says she’s pregnant with Mike’s baby.”
“Are you
kidding
me?” Stedman leaned back in his chair.
“I am not kidding you.”
They both sat, shaking their heads.
“Yeah, she made a point of saying that she just found out, you know, after everything.” Meaning she didn’t know she was pregnant when Jan Roseboro was murdered.
“She said,” Sweigart continued, “that she had told Mike, and now she wanted to tell us.”
Stedman called the ECTPD to let them know.
Michael Roseboro was biding his time. He must have known this. Law enforcement was not going away. If anything, they were closing in. One more piece of the puzzle—which was actually a familiar one, but from a second impartial witness—came in just before Craig Stedman and Kelly Sekula finished writing Roseboro’s arrest warrant, which ultimately helped Stedman make the call that they now had enough to arrest the undertaker.
Jill Showalter, a senior educator for the North Museum of Natural History & Science in Lancaster, came forward and explained what she thought was a significant piece of information.
During the summer of 2008, Jill’s father, Luke, owned a house about four lots from the Roseboros’ home on West Main, heading west, away from Creek Road. Jill often stopped at her parents’ house after work to visit with them. She recalled something about the night of July 22, 2008.
Driving to and then leaving her parents’ home, Jill had taken the same route for as long as she could remember. West Main Street to Creek Road. Jill had been busy all day at the Northern Lancaster County Fish and Game, conducting what she called “a reptile program
for the Youth Conservation School.” It had run into the night and Jill didn’t arrive at her parents’ house until “probably about ten or after ten,” she told police.
She stayed about “twenty minutes.” Then left. Out of the driveway, a right onto West Main, past the front of the Roseboro home, a right onto Creek Road, and past the side of the Roseboro house where the pool and backyard was. Jill was certain it was dark, pitch dark.
Beyond that, what was more striking to Jill was that the Roseboro home, the inside of the house, “seemed unusually dark that night, the house, the lighting inside the house.”
She was talking about the front of the house, the section facing West Main.
The only light she saw that was on—when looking at the house from the front—was in the basement. Odd, she thought, that the basement light would be the only light in the entire house left on.
Turning onto Creek Road, driving south, you cannot really see from the road the pool area because of the grade in the landscaping on that side of the house. The pool sits up on a mound, with shrubbery around it for privacy and the land grade sloping downward from the pool patio. However, it’s not hard to see the tiki lights, that black fence, and the pool area itself, which are sort of up on a stage of land.
Driving by the poolside of the house on Creek Road, Jill looked over and saw that there were no lights on: the tiki torches or any other lights.
“I have seen the tiki torches lit at nighttime,” she recalled, “on other nights.” In addition, she didn’t see anybody outside, no one walking around, any strange cars, or anything else that caught her attention.
Just blackness.
When they heard this new information for the first time, it was clear to police now that there were no lights on in the backyard of the Roseboro home. Two separate
witnesses had come forward and relayed this information—people who had not known each other, had never spoken to each other, and didn’t know that the other was speaking to the police.
Impartial, corroborating evidence.
54
Craig Stedman and his team were getting nervous that Michael Roseboro might do something to endanger the lives of family and friends—and, maybe worse, take another life. It was time to put the cuffs on, drag him in, see if he wanted to talk, then put him in a cell until his lawyer could figure out what to do.
At 10:31
P.M.
on August 2, 2008, ECTPD officers and detectives moved in on the six-foot, two-hundred-pound undertaker as he was inside his parents’ house on Walnut Street, down the block from the funeral home, next door to Angie and Randall Funk’s house. The bench warrant for Roseboro’s arrest stated “criminal homicide” as the complaint. They wanted DNA from Roseboro, too, along with fingerprints. According to the warrant, Michael Roseboro had
intentionally, knowingly, recklessly or negligently
caused
the death of another human being: To wit: the defendant did cause the death of Jan E. Roseboro…. The defendant did cause her death by substantial physical contact to include multiple blunt force trauma, strangulation and drowning, thereby causing her death.
This charge (criminal homicide) carries a no-bail
initiative, which residents voted for in the state of Pennsylvania.
Detective Kerry Sweigart knocked on the door. He explained to Ralph Roseboro that they had come for his son.
Michael Roseboro walked out onto the porch and closed the door behind him.
“What’s up?” Michael said. He looked tired and pale, but not in the least bit worried. With all the cops and cars out there in the front of his parents’ house, Michael must have known that his time on the street—at least for now—had come to an end.
“You’re under arrest …,” Sweigart said.
Michael had no reaction.
“Michael Roseboro was arrested without incident,” Keith Neff later said. “It was pretty fast. He was cooperative and did not give us any problems. We were in and out, fast.”
The hope for Neff was that when they got Roseboro back to the station house, he would open up. Break down. Make this as easy as possible on himself, his kids, and everyone else involved.
Be a man.
After getting him out of the car and allowing him to get comfortable, Michael Roseboro was placed in the interview room at the ECTPD.
Keith Neff and Jan Walters walked in.
“I’m not going to talk to you,” he said. “I want to speak to my lawyer.”
End of interview.
Roseboro would not spend a long time at the ECTPD. That night, per the law, he was brought before the magisterial justice to be arraigned on charges of criminal homicide and then, right after, locked up in Lancaster County Prison.
On the same day the arrest warrant was served, and Michael Roseboro was being processed, a second search
warrant was executed at the Roseboro residence. This time, the warrant asserted that investigators were looking to
examine
[and]
test… all electrical switches and controls and circuit breakers at the residence to determine the location and operation of controls and breakers which correspond to any and all outside lighting to include but not limited to dusk-to-dawn lighting.
The idea was to go into the house and find out how to turn on and off all the lights. Witnesses claimed the lights were off. If an outside attacker had killed Jan—for example, someone who wanted to steal her jewelry—he (or she) would’ve had to turn on all the lights before leaving the premises. In order to do that, you’d have to know where the switches were (and have a lighter for the tiki torches on you).
The ECTPD thought this to be a ludicrous theory, but yet one that Michael Roseboro would no doubt try to propagate once he and his lawyer got to talking.
What other choice did he have, essentially?
55
On Monday morning, August 4, Craig Stedman sat behind a mahogany conference table in the county commissioner’s room, just around the corner from the DA’s office, on the fifth floor of 50 North Duke Street, downtown Lancaster. There were several microphones, propped up like
Wizard of Oz
Munchkin lollipops, positioned in front of Stedman’s face. Next to him sat Larry Martin, a serious and ominous aura about him. The room was jam-packed with media.
Stedman wore a dark blue suit, gold tie, white shirt. He appeared tired and beaten down, his eyes staring at the paper in front of him. Every once in a while, he looked up at reporters and around the room. He knew most of these people. He had a fairly decent relationship with the press. They were doing their jobs, on hand to get any new details surrounding Michael Roseboro’s arrest, which had been the news of the past weekend. The black half-moons under Stedman’s eyes were an indication of how taxing the case had been thus far. He and other members of law enforcement had worked around the clock on several nights, putting in twenty-hour days right up until the time Michael was placed in cuffs.
This was it: the fall of Denver’s reigning royal family.
Or, as one source later called Michael Roseboro, “The king, so to speak, of the community.” Perhaps some liked to see the mighty fall: the poor rob the rich; the rich become destitute; the powerful reduced to mere mortals. If so, this was their day. Many had considered Roseboro infallible, even untouchable. Stedman had seen him as just another murderer who would be found guilty by the evidence.
Craig Stedman liked to deal in facts. He spoke straightforwardly, thought long and hard about what he said, and tried to make sure the community that had appointed him top lawman had as much information as he could give. Here he was, eleven days after Jan Roseboro had been found dead in her pool, announcing that two days prior, on August 2, her husband had been arrested on charges of “one criminal complaint of homicide….”
Fixing his tie every so often, perhaps a nervous tic, Stedman explained the charges in their dramatic, violent detail. The guy had strangled and beaten and drowned his wife. There was no way to put a passive bow on that.
“He’s being held in Lancaster County Prison,” Stedman added, a ten-minute ride, several blocks southeast of the DA’s office, “without bail, pending a preliminary hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.”
Trying to head off questions before they came at him like darts, Stedman said, “We have no evidence that there were any other participants in this crime, and no further arrests are expected at this point.” This was perhaps a way to put out there—without saying—that charges were not going to be filed against Angie Funk, nor was the DA’s office looking into the possibility that she had provoked her lover in any way, or that perhaps Michael Roseboro had hired someone to do his dirty work.
The lanky DA explained that he had not yet looked at the consideration of seeking the death penalty against
Roseboro (which, under Pennsylvania law, was not an option for the DA’s office). He was focused, instead, on building his case and working with law enforcement to see that they were ready for the preliminary hearing. There was still a lot of work to do. Information was still filing in.
He thanked everyone. Talked about all the hours his officers and the various departments helping out had put in the entire previous weekend and the one before it. The long nights. The teamwork. It had all paid off. Jan Roseboro’s killer was behind bars.
Stedman, who appeared sad and solemn, the weight of such a violent death hanging over him, called the case “very serious.” It was “a terrible tragedy,” he said. He added that on top of everything—the murder, the dad being arrested, the enormous burden on the community to bear such a tremendous load of shame and disillusionment—there were four children, “three of whom are minors,” who had lost their mother. That was the true tragedy here, Stedman vocalized. These kids had no mother “because,” Stedman said, “of the choices of their father.”
The newspapers and a few of the local websites and chat rooms had not been kind to Angie Funk over the past week. She was being billed as a tramp, whore, home wrecker, and just about every other contentious name one could come up with to describe a woman who had participated in an accelerated, sexual affair with a man who had allegedly murdered his wife. One headline, screaming in bold type across the front page of the paper, said that Angie and Michael had had sex on the afternoon Jan Roseboro was murdered. Words Angie had written to Michael in confidence, those private thoughts and embarrassing emotions of love and lust, had been reprinted and talked about online, with various rumors and innuendo tossed into the mix to make what were scandalous behaviors even more salacious.
This, mind you, while Angie was carrying Roseboro’s baby.
“I want to remind … the media,” Stedman said, a bit of empathy and mild discontent in his cracking voice, “that she is a real person.” He tapped his fingers on the table, looked at his notes, then at everyone around him, knowing that he was reaching out here, maybe stepping over a line to put the brakes, hopefully, on what had turned into, fundamentally, a vitriolic media frenzy, feeding on the conduct of a woman who had simply acted on urges and had had an affair. How many women in the world had had adulterous liaisons and went through life without all this attention? Angie hadn’t murdered anyone—she was, one could rightfully argue, another of Michael Roseboro’s many victims. “She’s going through a very difficult time,” Stedman continued, “and you can do what you will, but I would ask you to respect her privacy in this and allow her to continue to cooperate with law enforcement….”
Although the newspapers had splashed it across front pages and on the Internet, Stedman never used Angie’s name.
After questions were tossed at Stedman in a mishmash of words, one reporter asked about the Roseboro family’s cooperation in the investigation, and if anything had changed in their behavior.
Stedman took a deep breath. “Umm …” He looked straight ahead, at nothing and no one, as if daydreaming, then down at the table. He thought his answer through, and replied with the best politically correct statement he could muster on the spot: “In this case, as I said before, with any murder case, when you have someone murdered in their residence, for us to solve it, it is
vital
that we have access and honesty…. We made efforts to communicate with those people in this case, and some were more cooperative than others, and …
umm … I think I’ll—I will defer any further comment on that at this time.”