Authors: M. William Phelps
The DA continues to sport a marathon runner’s body. His style is rather laid-back and conversational when speaking with reporters and those people he encounters throughout his day; but inside a courtroom, standing or sitting in front of a judge, Stedman is all business. He knows what it takes to prosecute and win: guts, grit, integrity to the truth.
His problem in going after Roseboro was that his opponent, Allan Sodomsky, was every bit the trial lawyer he had become, if not more seasoned and schooled in knowing the ins and outs of a courtroom. It was going to be a battle. No two ways about it.
The preliminary hearing the first round.
* * *
At the end of this first day, Craig Stedman and the state came out winners. There was enough evidence to send Michael Roseboro to face a jury of his peers. There were no dramatics or showboating in the courtroom: simple facts presented in a way that spoke to Roseboro’s guilt. And in truth, the odds of the case
not
going forward to trial were about the same as Roseboro’s intruder theory holding water.
A gazillion to one.
This was not a time to high-five one another and jump for joy inside the LCDA’s Office, however. There would be no champagne moments of victory, laughs, or celebration. Stedman was facing trial, which could come as early as the spring or summer of 2009—and he had no forensic evidence.
Allan Sodomsky had said already that the state’s prosecution was seriously flawed. “You can’t build a case on guesswork,” the slick attorney told one reporter, “conjecture and suspicion…. And that’s all the prosecution has.”
Smoke and mirrors.
There was some truth in the statement. Juries want that flashy,
CSI
-on-CBS-inspired, forensic evidence. The type of stuff that will blow their minds and give their conscience the authority and comfort to vote a definite yes required for a conviction. They want science on top of circumstantial evidence. They want DNA. They want experts to explain swabs of this, swabs of that, fibers found here, fibers uncovered there. They want computer graphics akin to
Star Trek.
They want theatrics.
Yet, as of this moment in time, two months after Jan’s death, although he could claim victory for the time being, DA Craig Stedman didn’t have any forensic/DNA evidence other than a (hopeful) positive result on the test for the child Angie was carrying, a test that had not been completed.
Beyond all that, the DA’s office had to hurry: Craig Stedman was concerned that Angie Funk was going to give the baby up and they’d never get a chance to test paternity. Then they’d never be able to prove the baby was Michael Roseboro’s.
BOOK FOUR
W
HERE
I’
M
C
ALLING
F
ROM
59
The suggestion that Jan Roseboro had an affair five months before her death was something Michael felt the need to bullhorn from his concrete-walled, steel-barred prison cell as autumn moved into Lancaster County. It was late October, eleven days before Halloween. A time for pumpkin patch rides. Thriller houses. Fairs. Squash. Mums. Purple, orange, red, yellow, and brown leaves falling from trees like drifting kites. Crisp, cool air. And the comforting feeling—for some—that the holiday season was just around the corner, a new year now in sight.
Francis and Karen Tobias had known Jan and Mike Roseboro for about six years. Their boys went to school together and played lacrosse on the same team. The Tobias family lived about a quarter mile down the road from the Roseboros. Francis, who had coached lacrosse with Michael, had stopped by the house during the construction project almost every day, he later said, to check on things, where he frequently saw Jan always doing
something.
Many later called Francis and Michael best friends—and perhaps they were.
Karen saw Jan on the Sunday before she was murdered. It was a normal get-together. They had taken up
yoga together and worked out on Sundays. It was Jan’s friend Rebecca Donahue who called Karen early in the morning on July 23 and told her that Jan had been found dead. Karen and Francis went to pick up their children, who were staying at a friend’s house, then drove straight to the Roseboro home.
With the preliminary hearing behind him and the media frenzy surrounding Roseboro’s arrest and upcoming trial now a memory, during the third week of October, Francis and Karen received a letter from Michael. They had written to him in prison many weeks before, but they had not received a response—that is, until now.
In opening his missive, Roseboro apologized for not writing sooner, citing for an excuse that “… between eating and sleeping …” life for him on the inside was “really busy.”
Next, he said he was just being sarcastic. It was “depressing” in prison, he added, without his “daily doses” of Sam and the other children.
Go figure. The guy was facing the rest of his life in prison for murdering his wife and he found it within himself to have a sense of humor.
Roseboro had lost twenty-five pounds, he explained, a consequence of his new life that was “on the bright side,” all considering. He had not smoked in three months. Another plus! He said he was constantly thinking about everyone—“the gang,” he called them. For the first time in any type of documentation connected to his case, Roseboro brought up God, saying that the Lord “would see” him through it all and “I’ll be home….”
He was writing, Roseboro said, mainly because he felt the need to “clarify some things.” (Damage control, in other words.) It was important, he added, that Karen and Francis pass along to the rest of “the gang” what he
had to say next. It was time everyone knew the truth. Friends deserved as much.
Michael claimed he and Jan had endured a marriage “with its ups and downs….” Like any long-term union, he said, he and Jan had fought and made up and weathered the storms of being in each other’s face every day for two decades. Theirs was the typical marriage, Roseboro seemed to force on Francis and Karen. And they might have bought that.
But then came the actual reason behind the letter.
Jan had confided to him in March 2008, Roseboro said, that “she had an affair [that] November through February.” Michael blamed himself for Jan’s affair, saying he wasn’t home much between working on the house, sitting with Grandpa Louie, on his deathbed, every night, and holding down the family business. Roseboro never mentioned, of course, that he was also running around the county, having sex with Angie Funk whenever he could, or spending a majority of his time calling, texting, and e-mailing her.
He left that out.
Quite strikingly, he said that as he and Jan talked through
her
affair, they decided the best thing to do was to “end the marriage.” Michael insisted that he’d talked it over with Jan and “convinced her” to wait until their youngest graduated high school.
And guess what? She agreed!
How ‘bout that?
The chances.
There was that little question of the Outer Banks trip that Michael Roseboro needed to cover, if convincing his friends that Jan had instigated adultery, not him. Responding to that, Roseboro said he went ahead with his plans for renewing their vows because he wouldn’t give up on nineteen years of their lives together. He was going to fight for his marriage the same way he would fight for anything else in life he deemed worthy. Regardless of what Jan had wanted.
It was near the end of May, Roseboro wrote, that he met
this girl, Angie … and one thing led to another.
He
let things get out of hand.
His emotions took over from there. He must have assumed those e-mails he wrote would never surface, because next he wrote:
But I had every intention of ending things with Angie …
and working
things out with Jan.
He added, perhaps for effect, that his biggest regret was never having the opportunity to apologize to Jan. That “pain and remorse” would be with him, he maintained, for the rest of his life. He asked for forgiveness from his friends, scolding himself for not telling “the gang” about the affair with Angie before the newspapers made it public. He said he loved all of them like brothers and sisters. Speaking specifically about Jan, he wrote,
I miss her so badly….
He added how he couldn’t wrap his mind around the notion that
anyone would want to hurt her.
He thanked everyone for their friendship and belief in him. Facing each new day, he added, would not be possible without knowing they were all back home rallying behind him. He wanted Francis and Karen to pass along his thanks to all of those who were at the preliminary hearing, ending with a pledge of sincerity:
I love you all.
The end result of the letter, or, rather, what Roseboro suggested in his choice of words and phrases, felt as if he was asking his friends to tell everyone they knew Jan had been cheating on
him
for six months before her murder. Jan was the instigator here, Roseboro seemed to suggest. He had gone out and had an affair himself with this Angie person (as he made her sound), only because he was vulnerable and Jan had done it first.
Tit for tat, apparently.
Perhaps he believed no one in his circle of friends knew about all those other women.
“One thing led to another….”
The idea that Jan was having an affair struck Karen and Francis Tobias as a bit overwhelming, if not extraordinary.
It was, for one, impossible to believe, based simply on opportunity alone. Not that Jan was a saint by any means, but she just didn’t have that type of unfaithful bone in her body. Jan valued the sanctity of marriage, regardless of how she was being treated. Two wrongs, in Jan’s world, never equalized the playing field. Beyond that, Francis Tobias said later in court, “Jan was accountable.”
Great point.
“She was a stay-at-home mom,” Francis continued, “four kids, different ages, two boys, two girls. They were all involved in a number of activities. She was involved in all of them! She was always with the kids and even volunteered for a lot of activities. She was involved with the church. She had a close relationship with her sister. I know they saw each other all the time. I just cannot believe that, rationally, she would have the
time
and, personally, as I knew Jan, I don’t think she could
ever
do that to her kids.”
As they thought the entire Jan and Mike Roseboro situation through, Francis and Karen Tobias had to see straight through what was, in essence, a full-blown cock- and-bull story Roseboro was trying to pass off on them. Thinking back to those days after the murder, when they were with Michael, consoling him during what they assumed was the most trying time of his life, what these good people knew now was that even after the ECTPD had instructed Roseboro that his wife had been murdered, he was still telling everyone—“the gang”—it was an accident. Not one of Michael Roseboro’s posse would later report that he talked about Jan being murdered. Or was sickened by it. And yet on top of all his nonsense, everyone was now supposed to swallow the notion that Jan had had an affair?
On face value, what Roseboro implied was ludicrous.
What’s more, the timing of the letter—October 20, 2008—was viably suspect. Roseboro’s preliminary hearing had been only three weeks before (he had held off, in
fact, in responding to the letter Francis and Karen had sent, possibly to put a bit of time between him and the facts the hearing had made public). He could no longer deny to anyone that he’d had an affair with Angie, because she had testified to it. He had to play catch-up, so to speak. Backpedal. He needed to put a shine on his terribly tarnished reputation and get all those people back on his side.
Even if you don’t want to believe this, and make the claim that this letter was a mere coincidence, you’d still have to ask yourself one
central
question: Why was there no mention by Michael Roseboro to the police at
anytime
of Jan and this alleged affair? He had never said a word about it to anyone before now. One would think this would have been the first statement out of Michael’s mouth after learning that his wife had been brutally murdered:
Her angry lover did it!
The notion that Roseboro was trash-talking his wife from prison was offensive to many who would soon learn about this letter.
“You give no name (of her supposed lover) and you just throw this out there, from nowhere,” Keith Neff observed, speaking about the alleged affair Jan had. “It never comes up
before
this letter. There’s no evidence of it—we had spoken to all of her friends. On her phone records, we had identified every single number she had ever called between the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. There’s nothing there. Just one more lie—like the jewelry. ‘Drowning’s not working, um … let’s try stolen jewelry. That’s not working, okay…. Let’s toss out there that she’s had an affair.’”
Pathetic.
All it did was make Michael Roseboro look guiltier.
60
Tubes of “venous blood” were drawn from Michael Roseboro by court order on November 20, 2008, as Detective Kerry Sweigart looked on. When medic Ross Deck finished, Sweigart watched as the six tubes, 9cc’s each, were packaged, sealed, and handed over to Brett Vallicello, a worker for Ravgen Diagnostics. Testing by Ravgen would be completed that same day.
The affidavit accompanying the order revealed the additional evidence the state had uncovered as Thanksgiving 2008 came to pass in Lancaster County. For one, that search warrant for the Roseboro home back on August 2 yielded an important discovery. A walk through the home proved that the only way to turn on or off the dusk-to-dawn light (without simulating darkness) on the small garage outside by the pool was to shut the breaker off downstairs in the basement of the Roseboro home, or unplug the actual light from inside the garage. The point was: would an intruder go to this length, or even know how or where to do it?