Love Her To Death (20 page)

When the pool was officially opened on the weekend of July 4, 2008, Jan was the first one to call and tell Suzie she could use it anytime she wanted.

Jan and Michael Roseboro had invited Suzie, her fiancé, Gary Frees, and her family to North Carolina that summer, and Suzie accepted. There were other family members going, too, Suzie said later. Cousins and brothers and friends. The group, including Michael and Jan and their kids, was large.

“It was a huge house,” Suzie explained, describing the place where they were supposed to stay at the Outer Banks. “It was a very, very
huge
house. Everybody had a suite with a Jacuzzi and a fireplace….”
Her brother-in-law, Michael Roseboro, Suzie recalled, had even pulled her aside one day and mentioned his plans. Michael said he “planned on renewing his vows with Jan down there and he was making arrangements to do so….” He said it was going “to be on the beach.” Apparently, like Angie Funk, Jan was a big fan of the ocean. She adored the feeling of sand between her toes, the warm breeze and constant hum of the water crashing into the shoreline. This would have fit well into her ideal day on the beach: renewing her wedding vows, making new promises of love, hanging out with friends and family. To Jan, it might have meant that her husband was taking their life together seriously once again.

Or maybe Jan would have decided not to go through with it at all.

“That will make her very happy,” Michael told Suzie, meaning the beach setting.

Suzie agreed.

Brian Binkley, Jan’s brother, had been close to his sister throughout the years. Living in Pittsburgh, Brian, a twenty-two-year CPA by trade, enjoyed those times with Jan, his nieces, nephews, and brother-in-law. They got along well. Yet living far away from Denver, not seeing everyone as much as he would have liked, afforded Brian the opportunity to view the changes in family members perhaps more objectively than those involved on a daily basis could. Brian noticed things whenever he got together with his sister and her family.

“I think we had a great relationship,” Brian recalled. “I can tell you the first part of 2008, everybody really enjoyed moving into the new house. Everybody was happy. We had a lot of celebrations there.” And if work hadn’t called him out, Michael Roseboro was at every one of those parties and get-togethers, generally manning the bar, cracking jokes, drinking, and smoking cigarettes.

The consummate dad and husband.

It was June, Brian explained later, during a trip he took to see his sister and her family, that Brian noticed a considerable change in his brother-in-law.

“I started seeing a difference in some of the characteristics of Mike,” Brian recalled. “There were just some changes, some changes that I saw in terms of discussing things with him and Jan, and raising the children, things in terms of behaviors with the dogs.”

There was a certain “possessiveness,” Brian shared, on his brother-in-law’s part, he had noticed. It stood out. Knowing Michael Roseboro for more than twenty years, Brian said he had never seen him act that way before.

“There were changes in his personality.”

Brian Binkley recalled one instance that took place. Brian couldn’t say exactly what he had been talking to his brother-in-law about, but at some point during the conversation, Michael shouted, “This is
my
house!” in a voice Brian was unfamiliar with.

“It was a possessiveness I had never seen in Mike before.”

Pressure. Roseboro’s two lives were closing in on him and he was flying off the handle at the slightest thing.

Some in town who knew Michael Roseboro were struck when, in late June and early July, Roseboro’s SUV was seen parked at the downtown neighborhood bar. It was one of those local joints—some might call it a “dive”—that working men go to get their drunk on and talk about what’s going on in town. But there was Roseboro, the local wealthy undertaker, a new goatee, a smile from ear to ear, a cocky nervousness about him few could ever recall him exhibiting, bellied up to the bar, ordering beers, stubbing out cigarettes, mixing it up with the locals as if he belonged there.

“The type of person he was,” Richard Pope later said, “that was
not
the type of bar you’d expect Mike to go to. It was just odd. That’s all. I had never seen that before.”

“Jan walked in on him one time,” Angie Funk later told police, “when we were on the phone and Michael immediately hung up.”

Angie asked him about the incident a day later.

“Jan was not upset,” Roseboro insisted to his lover, as if it were business as usual.

Sometime later, Angie asked, “Does anyone ever hit on you?”

It was a question rooted in jealousy. The two of them were cheating on their spouses with each other, and Angie was insecure, believing that Michael might or might not be cheating on her with someone else?

“Some woman hit my leg on an airplane once,” Roseboro said, explaining that he took it as an invitation to a conversation.

“But he has never admitted to me,” Angie told police, “that he had other affairs.”

As the relationship between Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk took on this insecure dynamic near the end of June, Angie and Michael talked, she later confirmed to police, about their spouses.

“I figured Jan would find out about the affair,” Angie recalled to Keith Neff, “due to the phone records. But I never talked to Michael about what we would do when our spouses found out.”

Sneaking around, Angie admitted, was “hard on my home life.” She said she never discussed with Roseboro what would happen to the funeral home or custody of his children after he left Jan and married her.

“I assumed he would leave the house to Jan,” Angie said.

On the morning of June 30, 2008, Angie Funk sat at her work computer composing yet another string of e-mails to her lover. The first e-mail was more of the same promises to love and cherish you and your kids for the rest of my life.

Flirtatious gibberish.

Mike Roseboro responded with another one of his quirky, adolescent turns of phrase, telling Angie how there was “no ‘I’ in love.” He mentioned the shower again, before telling Angie it was becoming increasingly hard on him to be away from her for one minute. When they were together, he said, she’d be there working with him, playing, sleeping. They’d spend every second of every day together.

In return, Angie said she knew she was going to have to wait, and the thought of having him to herself one day kept her going.

Michael said in response that he didn’t want to wait any longer. Something needed to be done—and fast. He admitted that she had turned him “into a babbling and giddy teenager….”

They made plans in the next series of e-mails to meet at the Cloister later that day.

Roseboro said he was “smiling just thinking about” the rendezvous.

On July 1, Mike Roseboro e-mailed first, telling Angie how seeing her in the morning at Turkey Hill was the highlight of his day. He carried on about how beautiful she was and how he could never, at this point, “live without” her. It wasn’t going to be possible to go on without having Angie Funk by his side.

It seemed the strain weighed on Roseboro to do something in the order of moving his relationship with Angie to the next level.

Angie, in turn, ratcheted things up by telling Michael in her response that she needed to wake up next to him and go to sleep by his side. That she couldn’t “wait to be Mrs. Roseboro” and “share
everything.”

Roseboro said he would never squander an “opportunity to make love” to Angie when they were together. He
explained that she would never have to worry about him “being in the mood” because just a gentle kiss from her aroused him. Either they spent a night together—although no record of it exists—or Roseboro watched as Angie went out to get the morning newspaper, because he told Angie how gorgeous she was in her pajamas, her “hair undone, no makeup at all.” He called Angie the most “beautiful woman in the world” and professed that he was going to be her husband, no matter what stood in their way.

31

Angie Funk fell deeper and deeper for the fantasy Michael Roseboro described, both in his daily e-mail dispatches and the conversations they had in person. For Angie Lynn Funk, Roseboro represented a man out of her league. Although she had fixated on and dreamed of being with him, she thought she would never get him. She told Roseboro that “in a million years” she would have never “thought” of being with him, especially not in the capacity their relationship had grown to between June and July (talking about getting married and raising a
Brady Bunch–type
family). Still, whenever she saw Roseboro, maybe around town or during her daily walks throughout the years, Angie said she had felt there was some sort of “connection” between them, beyond a general attraction. And here she was, now writing in e-mails to the same man she had fantasized about and had viewed as a catch beyond her means.

It
was
like a dream.

Roseboro later admitted that he was intimidated by Angie Funk from the first moment they had met at the Denver Parade many years before he had made the first phone call. It was a day both Angie and Mike had gone back to in their e-mails from time to time.

*  *  *

“I’m Michael Roseboro,” the distinguished undertaker said, sticking out his hand that day of the parade. As he stared at Angie, Roseboro later admitted, he was thinking what it would feel like to kiss her and get to know her better. He had seen Angie around town. He had noticed that when they stared at each other, both had given that second look, a slight moment of hesitation in the eyes as they turned away. He said thinking about being with Angie back then (five years prior to their hooking up) was a “dream”—and he never imagined he would one day “act on” his “impulses.” From that moment, Roseboro explained, whenever he saw Angie, either walking into the Turkey Hill store alone (or with her friend), or just around the neighborhood (even with her husband), his “palms would get sweaty” and his “heart would race….”

He had to have her.

They had come so far since those days of playing games. From meeting at a parade, to “flirtatious fun,” as Angie put it, to that lunch invitation Roseboro had made on May 29, 2008, to having sex.

From motionless to mach one in just weeks.

Before Angie had kids with Randall Funk, she and her husband traveled a lot, former family members and friends said, taking cruises and visiting other touristy spots throughout the globe. Angie Funk was not a person who talked all that much about her dreams, goals, and what she wanted out of life beyond the normal material stuff most of us cling to. Instead, Angie was into talking about sports, the Pittsburgh Steelers—her favorite sports team by far—in particular. The other thing Angie never mentioned was sex. “I never heard her once talk about it,” said a former friend. It was
either something that wasn’t on her mind, or something she’d rather do than talk about. But it was clear to many around Angie as she grew up and into her early years of being married to her first husband that she was definitely into the romance part of relationships. The long walks, arm in arm. Candlelight dinners. Expensive trips to exotic locales. Naughty talk.

“Big wedding person,” said two sources. “Angie was into planning weddings and having extravagant weddings herself.” And when she planned a wedding with a friend or family member, Angie took over. “She liked being in control.”

Even demanded it.

There came a time in early July when Michael Roseboro mentioned to his lover that he was going to be gone for a week in August. He had to bring it up. Face the fact of disappearing with his wife and family. He and Jan and the gang were going. He couldn’t back out of the trip. Angie Funk needed to know.

But how much would Casanova divulge?

“We’re going for a week,” Roseboro explained. “I won’t get to talk to you or anything. It’s a family trip. It’s no big deal, really.” He further added that “everybody in his (and Jan’s) family” was going with them on the trip. He talked it down, Angie later implied, as though it wasn’t anything special. A family obligation he was being forced to fulfill. It was nothing. Same as Niagara. There would be scores of kids and others around. Angie had no need to worry about anything.

Had she known that the trip to the Outer Banks was actually being planned around her boyfriend renewing his vows with his wife, Angie later said, “I would not have got involved.” But she was involved—in a big way. The main reason, Angie said, was because Roseboro had
repeatedly told her that he and Jan were together only for the kids’ sake. Nothing else.

“There was no love there,” Angie told police.

Two ships …

A couple staying married to raise a family.

Still, the trip was on the calendar, and although “it created some anxiety” for Angie, “there was nothing,” Angie later said, “that [I] could do about it.”

The topic of what Jan would do when she found out about the affair came up between Roseboro and Angie a few times, she claimed. Angie was no dummy. She was a woman. She knew women thought about those sorts of things. Plus, with four kids on the line, a huge house, all that money, a family business. Running around with Angie and ultimately leaving Jan, Angie realized, Michael Roseboro was looking at potentially losing a lot. The question became: was he willing to risk it all?

“If she finds out about us, she’s going to take the kids and everything,” Angie told Roseboro one night, reminding her lover how much was at stake. “A woman scorned usually, you know, especially a wife, can hurt you pretty bad sometimes. Bleed you dry.”

Roseboro thought about this. He was concerned about the family business, sure. So much so, he responded to Angie, “I am going to see about putting the funeral home in my dad’s name—that way she cannot touch it.”

Five years prior to the affair with Angie Funk (and presumably many other women in between), while Michael Roseboro was having an affair with Liz Cannon (pseudonym), whom he would text and talk to by cell, same as he was with Angie, Jan found out about the affair after going through the cell phone bills one day. When Roseboro told Cannon about Jan uncovering their little ongoing tryst, he
discussed the financial consequences of getting a divorce from Jan,
a 2009 court stipulation reported. More than that, Roseboro’s father found out—and he wasn’t happy about it. “My father explained to me,” Roseboro told Cannon, “that if I continued the affair … he was going to divide the funeral business into quarters between himself, my mother, my sister, Melissa, and me!” Considering he was married to Jan and a divorce might split that quarter into an eighth, Roseboro expressed to Cannon that “one half of one fourth is
not
enough to live on.” Another woman Roseboro knew years before he met Cannon, according to a second stipulation (both of which Roseboro ultimately signed, thus inserting his stamp of validity on each document), heard him bemoan the fact that he “could not get a divorce from [Jan] because he would ‘lose his kids.’”