Authors: M. William Phelps
The witness said he didn’t have the slightest idea of what had happened the previous night. He didn’t know the Roseboro family that well.
Craig Stedman had him point to a map and describe exactly where he was walking that morning, and where he saw Roseboro.
After a few more questions, Stedman said he had nothing further.
Allan Sodomsky pointed out for the jury that they were not hearing the testimony of a man, as such, but a seventeen-year-old kid. With his questioning, Sodomsky seemed to suggest, by ending his cross with the question of the witness’s age, that perhaps because of his age, what the witness had to say shouldn’t be taken all that seriously.
Richard Pope came in next and gave a description of the landscape around the Roseboros’ yard as if he were both a land surveyor and host of
Man vs. Wild.
Richard spared no detail. There was an organic sincerity about Richard Pope, a community native’s viewpoint. It stood out. He was funny. At ease. Entirely believable. The way Richard saw it, there was not a chance someone had roamed onto the Roseboros’ property that night through the woods.
After that, he talked about Jan Roseboro, calling her his landlord and his friend, noting how homey and unassuming she was.
“She struck me [as] a casual dresser…. I never noticed any jewelry. I’m not saying she never wore jewelry,
but it seemed the way she dressed, she normally looked like she was a down dresser to me when she was home.”
Sweats. T-shirts. Sneakers. Flip-flops. Bare feet.
Without realizing it, Richard humanized Jan Roseboro, describing anyone, and everyone. She was the woman next door. Laid-back. Humble. Friendly. A kind-hearted person.
Allan Sodomsky questioned Richard about the junglelike terrain around the Roseboros’ house in the back. Not much came of it, other than Pope’s rehashing and reaffirmation of what he had said already. You’d have to be wearing a bomb squad Kevlar suit to get through the brush and pricker bushes unscathed, Richard made clear.
Cassandra Evanick Pope was next. Cassie talked about that scream she heard, giving the trial its first real taste of high drama, with perhaps a vision of violence. Cassie came across as cute and cuddly, warm and innocent. She spoke with a slight country twang, same as her husband, and was there to tell the jury what she saw and heard, nothing more.
The payoff statement from Cassie came a few minutes into Craig Stedman’s direct: “I heard a female scream from the back area,” she said, “the pool area of the Roseboros.”
There was a good chance everyone in that courtroom was picturing Michael Roseboro with his hands around his wife’s neck.
“Was it loud?” Stedman pressed.
Cassie came back with the perfect response: “Loud enough for me to hear it in my living room.”
“Were your windows open?”
“No.”
Another collective gasp.
“Was it long?”
“No.”
After that, was there really much more Cassie could offer?
Craig Stedman didn’t think so.
It took Allan Sodomsky some time, but he eased his way into talking about the scream, at one point asking, “Am I correct, Mrs. Pope, that you told the police that you heard a scream, but you did not know where the scream came from, [that] it was very short, and it was a female’s scream? Did you say that?”
“I don’t recall saying that.”
“Now, four days later, you had a chance to speak to the police again—is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“… And that time,
four
days later, did you know where the scream came from? Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Now, you didn’t read the newspapers in those four days, did you, ma’am?”
“I don’t believe so, no.”
Sodomsky suggested with his next line of questioning that Jan Roseboro’s death was a media event in Lancaster County. That many in the neighborhood were talking about it—some of them enjoying their “fifteen minutes” while being interviewed by local news stations. And this may have influenced what Cassie Pope had heard.
They talked about the interviews Cassie had given to police.
Concluding, Sodomsky made the inference that Cassie had no idea where the scream had come from
until
that second interview, four days later,
after
she had spoken to neighbors and saw various news reports of Jan’s death.
Cassie disagreed. Never backing down from her testimony.
It would be up to the jury to decide if Cassie was
remembering things correctly, because Sodomsky let it go there.
Corporal James Strosser, an eighteen-year PSP veteran, now a computer forensic specialist for the state police, testified about Angie Funk’s and Michael Roseboro’s computers, and how the PSP was able to locate all the e-mails. Strosser was no novice to the profession of computer forensics; he had been on the job for eleven years. In total, his team took a look at four computers.
Strosser explained how he had taken a duplicate image—an electronic photocopy, essentially—of the hard drives on each computer. An important fact Strosser made clear was the sheer volume of e-mails he had uncovered in Angie’s deleted box that were
not
between her and Michael Roseboro.
“Two hundred and fifteen that were deleted between June 3 and August 4, 2008,” Strosser told Kelly Sekula. None of these were from Michael Roseboro. None to Michael from Angie. In effect, Angie had “double deleted” all the e-mails between her and Michael. But left the others alone.
On the surface, this seemed sketchy. It was evidence of Angie hiding evidence of the relationship.
Or maybe evidence of something else.
Strosser said he was able to recover them, anyway, along with fragments of additional e-mails between the lovers.
Strosser was here to read a selection of those e-mails in their entirety. Sekula submitted over two hundred e-mails, a stack of paper about two inches thick. Nearly the entire correspondence between Angie Funk and Michael Roseboro, throughout the time of their affair. It was now in the hands of the jury. Every syrupy promise and electric line of purple prose. Every wish for marriage
and desire to touch and feel and rub oil on each other. Every word of lust and obsession on Michael Roseboro’s part.
All there in black and white.
While many of the more sexy and revealing e-mails were read into the record, the gallery flinching and embarrassed, whispering and cringing, Michael Roseboro seemed unaffected. It was like Strosser was talking about someone else. Keith Neff was sitting behind Craig Stedman and Kelly Sekula’s table during proceedings (the lead detective in any murder case is allowed to sit in on the trial even though he is testifying). With stacked crates of documents towering above him, he watched the jury as Strosser read. Neff was looking for “glaring jurors,” those who had an emotional response to the words Strosser read into the record.
And just about all did at some point.
“I was amazed that Mike could continue the charade of innocence after these were read,” one person in the courtroom said later.
Not only did Michael Roseboro continue to act as though nothing was amiss as Corporal James Strosser read, but he tried to sell himself as the most industrious defendant ever. He flipped papers around, making it look as though he was busy and interested in something that was said. He kept whispering to Allan Sodomsky, shifting in his seat, giving the impression that he did not want to hear the content of the e-mails and perhaps disagreed with some of what was being said.
It was all an act.
Strosser had finished only with the month of June, and the hour had come for recess until the following day. There was still the month of July left to read.
The judge warned the jury not to discuss the case.
Courtroom 12 closed its July 16, 2009, session at 4:47
P.M.
71
James Strosser concluded his testimony after reading another broad selection of e-mails from the month of July, leading jurors up to Jan Roseboro’s murder. It was almost painful for some to sit and listen to this e-chat back and forth between Michael and Angie as the date of Jan’s death grew closer with each e-mail that the state cop read. Jan was staring down the barrel of death, and her husband was writing to his lover that he never believed for a moment he would “ever, ever want to go horseback riding.” Or how passionately one kiss from Angie could “arouse” him so much. Walking hand in hand along the beach. Not being able to live without her. And yet, in all of the correspondence Strosser read, not once did Michael Roseboro suggest that he had a plan to divorce his wife.
Why was this? the state had intoned.
Because his plan was to kill her, instead.
It was a pathetic display of a man’s obsessive emotions—one that jurors would find all at once appalling and cold. Sitting, watching jurors, anyone in the courtroom could see that the men and women chosen to decide Roseboro’s fate were nauseated by how he so blatantly had disgraced his nineteen-year marriage.
The defense’s cross of Corporal James Strosser was brief. The idea was to ask Strosser a few questions about his craft and shift the focus of the testimony
away
from the content of those now-devastating e-mails. Better to lick your wounds on this one and allow the state to move on.
It was near two o’clock on the afternoon of July 17, 2009, when the jury got to hear from the state’s next witness, Peter Savage Jr., a county detective working for Craig Stedman’s office, who had helped Keith Neff, Larry Martin, and Jan Walters at various stages of the investigation and, in addition, inspect the computers. Savage had almost thirty years of law enforcement experience. A true pro.
Throughout the afternoon, Kelly Sekula had Savage reiterate what James Strosser had testified to earlier. Savage explained, however, how they also conducted searches on the four computers for “key words,” such as “drowning,” “pool,” “Clorox,” “strangle,” “murder,” “suffocation,” and other words relating to Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk possibly talking about Jan’s murder and/or Michael and/or Angie searching the Internet for any of these terms.
“And am I correct, based upon your forensic examination of … those computers, nothing of any value was a result of those [search] terms?” Allan Sodomsky’s co-counsel, Jay Nigrini, asked Savage near the end of his cross-examination.
“Nothing of any value came up with those,” Savage admitted.
The next five witnesses—all friends and neighbors of Mike and Jan’s—came in one after the other and explained four important (albeit opinionated) factors for
the state: One, Jan Roseboro had no enemies. Two, Michael Roseboro, during those days immediately following his wife’s tragic, untimely death, was not overcome with grief, sorrow, or sadness. Three, Michael Roseboro either never mentioned Angie Funk or had lied about her and the role she played in his life, when faced with evidence of a connection to her. And four, Michael Roseboro never made a move to secure his house and showed no concern for himself or his children, which one could deduce a man whose wife had been murdered by a random killer probably would have done. In addition to all that, most of these witnesses made the claim that Roseboro had never said
anything
about jewelry being stolen from Jan’s person or missing from the house.
Why, the jury members had to ask themselves as each witness testified, wasn’t this man running around in a manic state of fear and confusion, crazy worried, crying over Jan’s death? Why wasn’t he asking himself and his friends,
Who could have killed my wife? Who could have done this to our family? Why haven’t they caught her killer?
The state’s contention, in putting all of these witnesses on, was that Roseboro wasn’t concerned or frightened, because
he
knew who had killed his wife.
The highlight of the following day’s testimony, Monday, July 20, was when Francis Tobias, once said to be Michael Roseboro’s best friend, took the stand.
Tobias had a wan look of concern about his face. He knew the information he was bringing into the trial had the potential to hurt his friend, and yet, at the same time, Tobias wanted nothing more than to tell the truth. He wasn’t there to protect anyone. If anything, he was there to honor his friend Jan Roseboro and her memory by sharing the information. The previous Friday, Karen Tobias had talked about that letter Michael Roseboro
had written to her and her husband in October 2008. The one in which Roseboro, pissing on the grave of his wife, accused Jan of having an affair.
The surprise Francis Tobias dropped, however, was how Michael Roseboro, after the police had told him Jan was murdered in a violent fashion, told the Tobiases that Jan had died accidentally. This was a slip on Michael’s part, the state maintained. Michael didn’t want friends to know Jan was murdered because they might point a finger at him.
Allan Sodomsky didn’t have much, other than having Tobias disagree that he said, “Mike was in shock all night” after Jan’s death. What Francis Tobias had said, he clarified, was “… Mike appeared to be in a state of shock and drained.”
The next major witness—whose testimony would draw gasps from the otherwise hushed gallery—was Karen Wagner, a research nurse from the Regional Gastroenterology Associates of Lancaster.
Wagner said she had been asked to look at records her office kept for July 22, 2008, the day of Jan Roseboro’s murder, which also happened to be the day Michael and Angie met and had sex inside that Mount Joy apartment. Roseboro had told police (and all of his friends and family) he was at a doctor’s appointment all afternoon taking a medical test.
The research nurse explained that Roseboro’s appointment was scheduled for 1:30
P.M.
He was there to participate in a study the office had been conducting. Roseboro signed the office consent form for the study at 1:07
P.M.
At 1:20
P.M.,
according to her notes, Wagner drew a tube of his blood.
“By one-thirty,” she concluded, “he should have been finished.”
“Okay. Thank you,” Stedman said.
Michael Roseboro was not at the doctor’s office all afternoon, as he had explained to police (covering up that time he spent having sex with Angie). He was at the doctor’s office for about twenty minutes.