Love Her To Death (27 page)

If Angie had any doubt about what they were telling her, the two investigators explained how they had spoken to some of those “other women” in Michael Roseboro’s life.

If she didn’t buy that, they gave Angie a few names. Asked her if she recognized them.

After the impact of this revelation settled on Angie, they gave her various details regarding the manner of Jan Roseboro’s death, specifically that Jan had been savagely beaten. This fact was not yet made public.

Angie didn’t seem too upset by this. She was still back at the accusations of the other affairs. Later, she was asked “why it appeared she was more upset … about learning of the affairs than about Jan’s death.”

“I never met Jan …,” Angie responded to that question.

The tears for Jan would come later, she claimed,
when she sat and thought about the entire situation from Jan and Jan’s kids’ points of view.

There was a method to the investigators’ decision to give Angie exclusive details from their investigation. They wanted Angie to place a call to Michael Roseboro. Right then and there. In front of them. The interview with Angie was being videotaped. They wanted Angie to make the call and confront Michael on the phone about his other affairs. See what he had to say. They gave Angie the name of a woman with whom Michael had carried on an affair.

“Did he ever tell you that he was going to hurt Jan?” one investigator asked Angie at some point during the interview.

“No,” Angie said, shaking her head.

Angie dialed Michael’s number from her cell. She sounded subdued and preoccupied. The investigators could hear only her side of the conversation. But there was no doubt Michael had asked Angie what was wrong. Maybe even, “You okay, baby?”

There were a lot of
yeah, no, I don’t know
statements from Angie in that vein.

Then, at one point, Angie confronted her boyfriend about his affairs. She gave him the name of the woman.

“No,” Angie later said Michael told her on the phone that day. “I did not have an affair with [her]. She has been stalking me,” he said.

Angie didn’t respond right away.

“Look, I have text messages from her!” Michael said, according to Angie’s later recollection. “I have
never
sent [her] text messages—you
have
to believe me!”

Then, during the conversation, as investigators sat and listened, there was an extended pause. Michael was doing all of the talking.

What was he saying?

The only part of that long pause Angie Funk later
recalled was when Michael said, “The only time I ever touched Jan was when I pulled her out of the pool.”

Later, during an interview with the ECTPD, Angie was told, “Michael Roseboro clearly said a lot more than that [during the long pause]. What more can you tell us?”

“I cannot remember what he said,” Angie answered.

The investigation had hit another major roadblock: Roseboro’s family was tight-lipped. They were not speaking to detectives or investigators. No one, in fact.

“We tried every avenue,” one law enforcement source later told me, “to get them to speak to us—Ralph and Ann Roseboro, and Mike’s sister and brother-in-law—and we were pretty much shut down.”

There was one time outside of Michael’s sister and brother-in-law’s house, in the driveway. Keith Neff walked up to Ralph Roseboro. “We need your help, Ralph. Can you tell us anything?”

Ralph wouldn’t talk.

Neff went to Roseboro’s sister.

Same thing.

The family spokesperson, the Roseboros’ pastor, was telling Neff and his team that the family was grieving. They were in mourning. And needed to be left alone.

“Well, we understood that,” DA Craig Stedman said, “but wait a minute, if what the family believes is true—that Michael is innocent—then that means there’s a murderer on the loose—and wouldn’t you want to do everything in your power to help catch that person?”

“Yeah,” Neff reiterated. “They—the Roseboro family—would not tell us anything!”

To the contrary, Suzie Van Zant and Jan’s side of the family were suffering a terrible loss, the life sucked out of them by the murder, and they were willing to help.

“They (Jan’s family) talked more than Mike’s, but they, too, were tight-lipped. It was hard for us in the
beginning,” a law enforcement source told me, “to get any information out of
anyone.”

Getting to know Michael Roseboro through his family was going to be crucial. But even more than that, if the guy had nothing to hide, why wouldn’t his family support the idea that his name needed to be cleared so the real killer could be found?

Neff and Jan Walters were frustrated. They needed to do something to get the families to open up.

“Can you say something to the press?” Walters suggested to Craig Stedman.

“We have to solve this case … yeah. That’s a good idea.”

“Funny,” Neff said, “Roseboro’s not calling us, asking how the investigation is coming along, if we have any leads. He has not called
once.”

So a decision was made. Craig Stedman talked it over with ADA Kelly Sekula and Jan Walters, and they came to the conclusion that there was only one thing left to do at this point.

Stedman called a press conference.

The case was becoming bigger than anyone could have anticipated, judging from the amount of calls Stedman’s office was receiving. Scores of calls, at all hours, were flooding into the DA’s office.

“I don’t ever remember as many calls,” Stedman remarked later. “I said, ‘We’re going to do
one
press conference—and that’s it.’”

To his credit, Stedman didn’t want to spend half of his days talking to the press. One press conference and he could get back to investigating the case.

That’s what he had hoped, anyway.

48

A memorial service for Jan Roseboro was held on Saturday, July 26, at the Roseboro Funeral Home. This after the coroner released her body (so it could be autopsied for a second time by doctors whom Roseboro had hired). It was a large crowd. In the hundreds, the local newspapers reported. The mass of people had been expected, considering how many lives Jan had touched, and how many people felt compelled to pay their respects to a woman who seemed not to have an enemy among them. A plainclothes police officer walked around. The guy happened to be a neighbor of Jan and Michael Roseboro’s. Mixing and mingling, he made sure things stayed in order and, additionally, maybe get a feel for how Roseboro was handling what was such an enormously tragic, sad event.

For Michael, it was business as usual. He was in presentation mode. He had done this hundreds (maybe thousands) of times. Here, today, however, he allowed people to console him, rap him on the shoulder and share their condolences, maybe a kiss on the cheek from those family members who were close enough. In light of the police breathing down his back, it had to be a walking-on-eggshells moment for the undertaker. Rumors were
abounding, buzzing. People in town were like chicken hawks, swooping in, whispering about the fact that law enforcement had come out in the morning papers with some fairly scurrilous accusations. It was no secret that the one suspect the LCDA’s Office was focusing on happened to be the guy in charge of burying his wife.

Craig Stedman had said there was a possibility that a murderer was on the loose in the community, and the DA’s office needed the public’s help in finding him. Then Larry Martin told reporters outside the doors of the ECTPD that his team believed evidence had been cleaned up from the crime scene (the Roseboros’ pool and patio, perhaps inside the house) in an effort to make the murder look like an accidental drowning, adding that police noticed scratches on someone’s face during an interview that the ECTPD conducted on the night of Jan’s death.

To townsfolk, this could only mean one thing: the “person of interest” was a popular undertaker no one was naming just yet.

Reporters had gotten hold of the search warrant Larry Martin had written for the Roseboro home, which was full of incriminating speculation about Michael Roseboro.

According to what he told police, Michael wrote Jan’s obituary that appeared online, on the Roseboro Funeral Home website, and the hard copy published in the newspapers. How many times, one might consider, has a suspected murderer written an obituary for his victim and provided burial services? If Michael had killed Jan, as the ECTPD officers were now completely convinced, the creepy thought of him sitting down and penning Jan’s final biography was just one more strange occurrence in what seemed to be a murder mystery that was getting more interesting and convoluted with each passing day.

In that obituary, Roseboro wrote that his wife had
entered into rest unexpectedly.
He said Jan was a member of
the Faith United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denver. She had been treasurer of Cocalico Creek Watershed Association (where the family had asked donations be sent in lieu of flowers) and was past president of the East Cocalico Swim Team.

With the service at the Roseboro Funeral Home concluded—there was no viewing—a second service at the Swamp Evangelical Lutheran Church in Reinholds commenced. (Jan and Michael Roseboro were raised in different Lutheran churches and maintained relationships with both throughout the course of their marriage.) After that, Roseboro told police, Jan’s body would be autopsied and cremated.

Ashes to ashes.

The Reverend Larry G. Hummer, who was given the distinction of being the Roseboro family spokesperson, aptly referred to Jan’s death as an “immeasurable tragedy.” Swamp Lutheran Church pastor Dennis Trout, who had been at the Roseboro house the night before, consoling family and friends, was present for the memorial service. Trout didn’t know it yet, but Michael had lied to him about Angie the day after Jan’s death. It was somewhere around 2:00
A.M.
on July 23 when the two men spoke, merely hours after Jan’s death. Trout and Roseboro were sitting down. It seemed during those wee hours after Jan’s death, Michael made the rounds, being sure to sit and chat with everyone he could, setting in place his padded story.

“I had made arrangements,” Michael had told Trout that night, “for Jan and me to renew our marriage vows when we went on vacation. I wanted to surprise Jan. She had always wanted to be married on the beach.” Michael had framed the comment with that now-it’s-never-going-to-happen tone he was getting pretty good at feigning.

Being a pastor for some four decades, Trout was a good listener during times of what seemed to be an
unbearable heartbreak for a husband. Jan and Mike, the pastor surmised, were supposed to grow old together and bounce grandkids off their knees. Here it was, the prime of their lives, and Jan was a murder victim.

In speaking about the clergy person he had chosen to renew their vows, Michael Roseboro had told Trout, “I made arrangements with a woman down the street”—Trout learned later during the conversation that Roseboro was referring to Angie Funk—“who has a relative … who’s a minister….”

The Reverend Larry Hummer did much of the talking during the service. As he would soon become extremely vocal about DA Craig Stedman’s public outcry that the Roseboro family was not doing everything in its power to aid the investigation and cooperate with authorities.

“We grieve the all-too-short life of this wonderful woman,” Hummer told the distressed throng of mourners. “Jan was gracious and giving. She had a zest for life! Jan will be remembered for the example she set.”

There were gorgeous, fragrant white lilies on the altar. On their way in, mourners had been given remembrance cards. There was a photo of Jan on the front, the popular “Footprints in the Sand” poem on the back. To many of those there, Jan was walking with Jesus now, having lunch and dinner with Saint Peter. She was safe. At peace.

Home.

“Some family members,” Stedman had told a reporter, a statement published on the morning of the services, “have been uncooperative.”

Shawn Roseboro, Jan’s cousin, had spoken out on Talk-Back, a local online forum, after reading what Stedman and the ECTPD were saying about Michael Roseboro and
his family. Shawn believed the media had “missed some aspects of the story.” He said the papers had not covered the fact that Michael Roseboro had been there for his children:

Nobody looked at how close the family is and how difficult it is to be under a cloud of suspicion in such a close community. I just wish people would put themselves in the Roseboros’ shoes.

He concluded his comments by writing: the dramatic nature of the crime is potentially damaging to the family’s funeral business and reputation.

Shawn told me that he regretted those comments the moment after he posted them. He believes Michael Roseboro to be a rat fink murderer and philanderer, who used “and abused” his wife for most of the time they were together.

While Jan Roseboro was being formally remembered, the ECTPD was in the process of getting a warrant to go into the funeral home and conduct a search. For the most part, investigators wanted the company computers, same as those at Angie Funk’s work and home. It was important to get into the computers and take a look at the electronic trail the affair left behind. By now, the investigation had yielded many interesting bits and pieces of that night Jan was murdered—the most promising being, according to several of Jan and Michael’s neighbors who had been interviewed, no lights were on in the backyard on the night Jan was murdered. This was in stark contrast to Roseboro’s story:
“I got up, went to the bathroom, saw the lights on outside, went to shut them off, saw Jan in the pool.”

Now the investigation had unearthed opposing views of what was going on in the backyard that night.

More evidence that Michael Roseboro was lying.

Michael’s story, as Larry Martin, Jan Walters, and Keith Neff had suspected all along, was crumbling.

Motive (the affair) and opportunity (he was home and the lights were
off
) are the two biggest factors in determining if a suspect could have committed a crime. In this case, as Neff and Martin exchanged information with investigators from the LCDA’s Office and members of the Major Crimes Unit, it appeared that Michael Roseboro was the only person who could have murdered his wife.