Love Her To Death (28 page)

Either that, or he was covering for someone else.

But Craig Stedman issued a warning to everyone working the case: Don’t get ahead of yourselves. We need much more before an arrest warrant can be issued. And with Michael Roseboro lawyered-up with the likes of Allan Sodomsky—beyond motive and opportunity—obtaining hard evidence was essential.

Stedman faced another serious problem, however. Reports from his investigators were coming in regarding Michael Roseboro’s behavior. The guy was acting erratic, his actions borderline unpredictable. One source had claimed that only five days after Jan’s death, Michael came down the stairs with a rifle in his hands. He headed into the dining area of the house, where a group of family members had gathered for breakfast. “This is custom made for me,” he announced proudly, displaying the weapon. It was “unusual,” said a family member who was there. The guy’s wife had been murdered and there he was showing off a gun, for no apparent reason. Bragging about it.

Michael’s drinking was on the rise, too. He had a squirrelly, nervous look to him. Craig Stedman was concerned that if he had killed his wife and now felt the vise of law enforcement tightening, Roseboro might do what so many others had done when facing the same situation: take out his kids and then himself.

Was this what Michael was trying to say by flaunting that rifle? Was it a cry for help?

What no one in law enforcement knew then, despite all the innuendo and rumor flying around town, was that Michael Roseboro’s lawyer was about to unload a bombshell on Keith Neff, trying to close the gap of his client’s guilt, thus offering an alternative theory for the murder.

49

When investigators interviewed Angie Funk briefly on her front porch during the afternoon of July 24, they had asked her not to contact Michael Roseboro again. She said she would abide by that request. No problem. She was leaving, anyway, on that vacation—what timing—to Ocean City, New Jersey. On Sunday, July 27, as Keith Neff and Larry Martin were busy working on those new search warrants, Angie, still in Ocean City (reportedly returning to Denver later that night), was interviewed over the telephone by one of the lieutenants working with the MCU.

“At that time,” one of the investigators later said, “Funk stated that Roseboro has corresponded with her via e-mail at her place of employment in excess of twenty times from the Roseboro Funeral Home.”

Twenty times? That was probably the understatement of the investigation so far. Nonetheless, this declaration by Angie—added to mounting evidence against Roseboro—was enough to convince a judge that the Roseboro Funeral Home needed to be searched.

As investigators were getting the warrant signed, Reverend Larry Hummer fired back at Craig Stedman. The cleric said on Sunday night that he realized police
had jobs to do, but Jan Roseboro’s family was deeply disturbed by Jan’s death, as expected, and all of them were “struggling to cope with [the] loss,” concluding that both families were in “a state of shock.”

Later on, Hummer called Stedman’s fingerpointing “reprehensible,” saying that the Roseboro family wanted to “cooperate” but at this time “they can’t.”

In response, Stedman asked the Roseboro family to reconsider, “reach out to investigators” and help them find out who killed Jan. It was frustrating for the prosecutor. He could understand their pain—Stedman had dealt with murder victims’ families for years—but he also wondered if there were additional motivating factors. Why wouldn’t those who loved Jan want to see her killer behind bars as soon as possible?

On Monday, July 28, investigators confiscated several items from the Roseboro Funeral Home: computers, fax machines, four Maxwell CD-Rs with cases, some paperwork, and other potential pieces of evidence.

Throughout the day, investigators read e-mail after e-mail—those that weren’t double deleted and needed to be recovered via computer forensics. In just about every e-mail either Angie Funk or Michael Roseboro sent, that blazing, obsessive nature of their affair became evident. This gave the team a clear indication that Angie and Michael were much more than mere casual sexual partners. From the e-mails, it was apparent they were planning a life together.

Angie turned over several e-mails she had printed and stuffed in a file at work—the remainder they uncovered from her computer during a forensic search.

Meanwhile, Craig Stedman and Kelly Sekula discovered a vital piece of information that would fit congenially into the matrix of circumstantial evidence they were busy weighing. In speaking with Brian Binkley,
Jan’s brother, it was discovered Binkley had learned that Jan had been
murdered
after he arrived on scene at the house a day after Jan’s death. Brian was talking to a police officer he knew. But Jan’s brother had kept this fact to himself for a time. What struck Brian as odd as the week progressed was that his brother-in-law never—not once—mentioned this fact to anyone in the family: the idea that police believed Jan had been murdered and had not drowned accidentally. Many found out via the media. Michael Roseboro had known about it at least twenty-four hours before anyone. Why wouldn’t he go running to family members bemoaning the shocking revelation that his wife had not died accidentally but had, in fact, been murdered? Why wouldn’t Roseboro be enraged by this information?

“One of the conclusions we came to based on that information,” Stedman said later, “was that Mr. Roseboro had murdered his wife. But this was not super significant. It was one more piece of circumstantial evidence.”

Late afternoon or early evening, Monday, July 28, Angie Funk went out for a walk in the Walnut Street neighborhood near Sixth Street. As she sauntered down the block, Michael Roseboro phoned her.

“Hey.”

“Hi.” A car drove by speedily as Angie answered. She was just down the road from the funeral home.

“Was that a car in the background?” Roseboro asked. “Where are you?”

“Just a few blocks from the funeral home,” she explained.

“Can you meet me real quick out back? …”

There was an alcove in back of the funeral home, a place to slip into without being seen—perfect if you’re two people embroiled in a murder investigation and
really shouldn’t be spotted together. How would it look, after all, Michael Roseboro and his mistress embracing days after his wife had been murdered?

Angie walked toward the back parking lot of the funeral home. Roseboro was standing there in the alcove. He looked “upset,” she said, “scared.”

They hugged tightly. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

Then they kissed.

Beyond that, Angie and her selective memory could not recall what was said or what happened. All she could tell police was that the meeting between them did not last long.

That night, Angie got a call from Michael, a conversation well documented in her testimony a year later and in several interviews she gave to the ECTPD in August 2008. It was one of fifty-nine calls and 165 text messages Angie and her lover would share between July 23, the day after Jan’s murder, and August 2, 2008, a coming day that both would not forget.

“I’m leaving … going out to Pittsburgh, where Jan’s brother Brian [Binkley] is,” Michael told Angie. “I need to get away.”

Angie said later, “I just thought he wanted to get away from everything.”

Continuing, Michael added, “We’re [he and Brian] going to try and find out who really killed Jan.” Next, he said something about hiring a private investigator. “I noticed the jewelry Jan wore was missing.”

Pittsburgh was an awfully long way from Denver to go in search of a killer—a 250-mile, four-and-a-half-hour ride, to be more exact. Sounded like Michael Roseboro was running from something more than helping the investigation.

“Jewelry?” It was the first Angie had heard about this jewelry. Where was this coming from?

“Yeah, I looked for it (that jewelry),” he explained,
“where she normally kept it, and it wasn’t there after her death.” He mentioned nothing about Jan
wearing
the jewelry on the day she died. The fact of the matter: if Jan had been wearing it, why would he feel the need to look for it where it was normally kept? This statement would make no sense when placed under a microscope next to a claim Roseboro would make about this jewelry in the days to come.

“Michael, I saw in the news,” Angie asked more in the vein of a question, “that they said you had scratches on your face?”

“Oh, that,” he answered. “My youngest daughter did that while we were playing in the pool.”

They talked about other things, Angie said, but she had a hard time recalling what. At some point, she asked him again: “Did you have any prior affairs, Michael?”

“No. No.”

“What about [that woman the investigators told me about—who you claimed was stalking you and your family]?”

“No,” Michael reiterated. “That’s not true.”

The fact that Angie Funk asked this question, however, was an indication that she was beginning to look at Michael Roseboro in a different light.

Michael Roseboro spent much of Wednesday, July 30, over at his sister and brother-in-law’s spacious home in the affluent Mustang Trail neighborhood in Reinholds. He and friends and family sat poolside; they had food and drinks over conversation. Later that day, a few of them went over to one of Roseboro’s good friends’ home and continued the party in her dining room.

“And every time we always got together,” that friend recalled later, “before Jan passed away, we would always play Catch Phrase,” a board game.

As they all sat around the dining table, Michael said, “Let’s play Catch Phrase!”

They all looked at each other.

A moment later, they were playing the game (which would last about three hours).

Roseboro’s wife was dead—murdered—and the cops were breathing down his back like vampires, ready to draw first blood. According to Michael, he hadn’t killed Jan. So that meant there was a killer on the loose. He had told Angie Funk he was looking into the missing jewelry and working with Brian Binkley to find Jan’s killer. But on this day, Roseboro was more interested in sitting poolside with drinks, smoking cigarettes, and playing board games. The idea that he was worried about a killer, or was out there running around like a private eye, trying to catch a killer, flew in the face of credibility for anyone who later learned what he had been doing.

At some point, this same friend had a conversation with Michael about the investigation. Roseboro said the cops had been asking him about “a woman he was calling.”

Angie.

But he did not say her name on that night.

“Who is she?” the friend asked.

“Just the person who is planning … renewing … making plans to renew our vows.”

For Michael Roseboro’s friends and family, all of whom were eager and ready to believe whatever it was he had to say, this had been enough of an explanation for some. But for this one particular friend, who had known Jan and loved her dearly, something wasn’t quite adding up. She sensed a bit of hesitation in his voice.

As the conversation between them became more serious, Michael said he needed to say something.

Jan’s friend was all ears. What is it?

He wanted to warn her that, on the following morning, the newspapers were going to be saying that he’d
had an affair with someone named Angela Funk. It was all going to come out, Michael explained. He wanted to let Jan’s friend know ahead of time. But he also had a favor to ask of her.

“I need you to tell everyone,” Roseboro pled, “that it is
not
true. I wasn’t having an affair with her….”

“Mike, are you
having
an affair with Angela Funk?” the friend asked.

“No. You know I’ve had problems in the past, but I swear to God,” Michael said, “I’m
not
having an affair with Angela Funk.”

The friend didn’t know how to respond to such frankness and what seemed like genuine sincerity.

“Look,” Roseboro continued, “they are even going to say that I was having sex with Angela Funk on the day Jan died.”

“Well, were you?”

“No, no, no. I had a doctor’s appointment in Lancaster that day….”

“Well, then, you shouldn’t have any problem—because they can prove where you were.”

Michael Roseboro didn’t respond to that particular statement. Instead, he repeated a previous point, adding, “Just please tell everyone that I was absolutely
not
having an affair with this woman. She is this woman who walks her little kids [in the neighborhood], and I was friendly with her…. She was planning our renewal thing.”

50

Keith Neff was in his office on Thursday, July 31, when a call from Allan Sodomsky, Michael Roseboro’s attorney, came in. It was a message from the lawyer that would soon raise the stakes for investigators, a continuation of the same idea that Roseboro had planted in Angie Funk’s mind two days before.

“Listen, Jan was wearing some jewelry that night she died … valued at approximately forty thousand dollars,” Sodomsky said.

Neff was stunned by this disclosure. Jan had put on jewelry worth twice as much as the car Neff drove? Just to go out to the pool? And this was the first time the ECTPD was hearing about it, nine days after her death?

Sodomsky read from a list of what Jan had been wearing: emerald-cut diamond earrings (two carats), platinum wedding band with six diamonds, a David Yurman bracelet (silver and gold), a one-carat diamond-studded earring, and a necklace of “minimal value.”

News to Neff.

But there was more. The punch line of the call was that Sodomsky was now informing the ECTPD that when the family picked up the body after the coroner released it, Jan wasn’t wearing any of this jewelry. Nor had
anyone claimed to have returned it to them from the hospital, or anywhere else.

It was gone.

Was Roseboro providing an alternative motive for murder? Were they putting it out there—this
after
reports in the newspapers had clearly stated that the Lancaster County district attorney had repeatedly said there was no evidence of a robbery in the case of Jan’s death—to provide a second scenario and maybe take the heat off Michael Roseboro? Others wondered after the news broke, if Roseboro was reaching for those same stars that he had insisted his wife had been watching on the night of her murder.