Love Her To Death (38 page)

Michael Roseboro had a grim look to him that many presumed was his natural state—the glum deportment of an undertaker: dark, cold, baleful. Yet beyond those
beady eyes (one that appeared larger than the other), there had to be a serious sense of dread and fear weighing on the forty-two-year-old, whispering in his ear ever so softly that his life could be lost in a matrix of steel doors, concrete walls, lonely hallways, and the obedience that had become his daily routine for almost the past year while residing in Lancaster County Prison.

67

Michael Roseboro was a man who had to look a certain way before he left the house. Everything—clothes, hair, nails, anything outwardly trendy or stylish that the public would see—had to be just right. One might picture Roseboro standing in front of a mirror, straightening his cuffs, brushing a piece of lint off his suit shoulder, wetting a finger to fix a stray, out-of-place hair, flattening his eyebrows, pushing the knot of his tie up tightly. Then he would stop for a long moment to check himself out before departure. Indeed, if he wore black shoes, Michael insisted on a black belt and matching sunglasses. Regarding that sort of attention to detail, “Michael,” said one Roseboro family member, “took this to the extreme.”

On Monday, July 13, Michael Roseboro would
not
have the advantage of a dressing room and his array of ostentatious suits, chic colognes, and vanity at his disposal. Instead, he would have to rely on the suit his attorney had sent over to the prison (black, of course).

After the judge gave about an hour and a half’s worth of directives to the jury, Craig Stedman stood. He looked at Michael, who was—incredibly—wearing his wedding ring, sitting next to his attorneys with a look that said he
was going to walk away from this trial unscathed, right back into that life he had left behind.

It was 10:38
A.M.
when Judge James Cullen turned the courtroom over to Craig Stedman. The opening was something Stedman had been working on until the wee hours of the morning on most nights leading up to trial. There in the basement of his home, little notes he had written and collected throughout the case spread around him as though he had been writing a Ph.D. dissertation, the prosecutor had scribed what would be one of the most extensive openings he had ever given.

One of the main “themes” (his word) Stedman had to get across to the jury—as senseless as pointing this out to the jury seemed—was that Jan Roseboro had been murdered.

“If I can get the jury to internalize that Jan was murdered,” Stedman recalled, “then the only reasonable conclusion, based on all of this evidence, is that
Mike
did it.”

And yet, most trial attorneys knew from experience that juries recalled the opening lines, the last few, and just some of the more dramatic elements in the middle of an opening argument. The key was to keep the flow moving toward a revealing, thunderous conclusion.

Equally important to consider was the idea that Michael Roseboro did not look like your average killer, with his superficial charm, tears turned on and off when he believed he needed them, and an overall good standing in the community. Another impediment Stedman would have to overcome: the pretense that your next-door neighbor—in this case, a mild-mannered, perhaps even docile man with a laconic, seemingly nonthreatening way about him, smiling to you every morning and consoling you when your loved one died—was a violent
and vicious murderer who had beaten and strangled his wife.

“By the time of trial, Mike had lost about thirty to forty pounds,” Stedman said. “He was pretty thin. He looks a little effeminate, too. We had an image problem to contend with. But I kept thinking, ‘If I can get the jury to accept that Jan was murdered, they’re going to convict him.’”

There was a time when the DA’s office seriously looked into the idea that Michael Roseboro was a closeted homosexual. Some men double up on women and sex more than the average guy in order to prove to themselves that they can live a straight life. This breeds a suppressed, aggressive storm within a fraction of these men—one that can sometimes emerge later in life as violence against females.

“The theory (of Roseboro being a homosexual) was discussed by us,” Stedman said. “But there was no direct evidence, so we did not pursue it.”

The first few lines of Stedman’s opening put Jan’s murder into context: “This case is about lies. It’s about betrayal. It’s about some greed, of course. It’s about murder. But more than anything else, it’s about
obsession.”

The prosecutor allowed the words to hang in the room for a brief moment.

Roaming back and forth in front of the jury, wound up and passionate about what he was saying, Stedman introduced the affair, then talked about how often Michael Roseboro had called Angie Funk, no doubt the witness everyone was waiting to hear from more than any other. “Sometimes thirty, forty, even
fifty
(calls) every day…. And, of course, that doesn’t even count the times they would get together and have sex and see each other.”

There was not a single sound—beyond Stedman’s tired-sounding voice—echoing throughout that courtroom after he said those words. The speculation around
town, the rumor mill, the Internet gossip, conversations over coffee counters, at gas stations, and at watercoolers all came down to cold, hard facts now. Craig Stedman was there to present evidence; Allan Sodomsky waiting patiently to pounce on any contravention he saw.

Stedman mentioned motive, the cost of divorce, losing the family business, that obsession he had focused on, Michael’s social status, and how much he lied to everyone around him before and after the murder. He went into Jan Roseboro’s bio, her friends, how she was well revered around town. How much Jan will be missed. How people “know each other’s business” in Denver, and how evil can sometimes penetrate the veneer of good and come across in many different forms.

Yes, even as a mild-mannered undertaker who seemed to have it all.

Then the DA focused on Angie Funk. Poor Angie was going to take a tremendous hit from all sides during this trial. Neighbors had reported that Angie, unabashed by the accusations and determined not to crawl into a shell and disappear, had been spotted at times pushing the little Roseboro love child in a stroller around Denver, past the funeral home and Roseboro’s parents’ house. This woman was not going away. Scared, and yet unafraid to speak her truth, she was prepared to testify.

“Basically,” Stedman said about Angie and her feelings toward Michael Roseboro before the affair started, “he was a rock star to her.”

She had sought him out. Set her fiery eyes upon this man and—lo and behold—caught him.

Stedman talked about all those e-mails.

The phone calls.

The text messages.

The sexual trysts inside the vacant apartment.

The supposed wedding vow renewal ceremony that never was.

Niagara Falls.

Then, of course, the pregnancy—Roseboro and Funk’s child.

And for the next two hours, Stedman spoke to every possible piece of evidence the state had uncovered, leaving nothing left unsaid. He covered all the bases, as if no one piece of evidence was more crucial than the next, but all together created a carefully planned out picture of murder that each witness would reinforce.

“We’re going to show you through the evidence,” Craig Stedman concluded near the end, “… that the defendant murdered his wife because he was obsessed with his girlfriend and he needed to do what he needed to do to be with his girlfriend—so he could have it all.”

Allan Sodomsky, looking on, listening intently, was ready. It was his turn now to put on the best argument he could for his client.

68

After a break for lunch, Allan Sodomsky got right to work. In the opening few lines of his argument, Sodomsky boiled Michael Roseboro’s case down to what he described as, smartly, one crucial piece of evidence missing from the DA’s two-hour-plus condemnation of his client. “The only thing you
don’t
have to guess or speculate about when it comes to what the evidence will show is that Mike Roseboro went in to go to sleep around ten
P.M.
on July 22, 2008.” And it was that “fact” alone, Sodomsky insisted, that jurors should hold close to their vests all the way through the trial: Roseboro was sound asleep when his wife was killed.

From that point, Sodomsky turned to the lights being
on,
not off, as several neighbors had reported; the children watching TV in the Roseboro bedroom; and how Roseboro “saw his wife floating in the pool, head underwater,” a fact that had not been disclosed until this moment. The ongoing belief by just about everyone (including the description Michael gave police) was that Jan had been found somewhere near the bottom of the pool.

Then the defense attorney—who came across as believable and knowledgeable about the law, maybe
even sincere—talked about how Michael had pulled his wife from the pool near eleven o’clock, calling all of what he had to say thus far “direct evidence … and there will be
no
direct evidence to contradict that!”

Then he mentioned Sam and the other kids. How well everyone got along. How distressed Michael Roseboro was when Sam and his friend returned to find chaos abounding, and his mother on her way to the hospital, presumably fighting for her life or even dead.

He said Jan had made calls that night—at ten thirty-six and ten thirty-seven—from her cell phone. And Michael Roseboro spoke to the police without question. There was no evidence found to indicate a murder had taken place, and that their medical experts would contradict the state’s on that front.

Sodomsky admitted there was an affair, which seemed to be the first time Roseboro had indicated and submitted to this fact in public. How could he deny it, with so much evidence to the contrary?

From there, Sodomsky bit into Angie Funk, saying, “It began over a cup of coffee at a Turkey Hill.” He said this unabashedly, as if it was nothing more than a mere happenstance meeting of two souls destined to fall in love. “And on June thirteenth … exactly sixteen days later, that affair became sexual.”

Sodomsky kept saying that the “evidence time frame” would play a role in proving his client’s innocence, but he made no mention of exactly how it would play out. Money could not have been the motive here, he said, explaining that “1.63 million” was the half that Michael Roseboro would have received in a divorce settlement, which was a lot of money to walk away with
“without
killing anybody.”

In listening to this, one was jostled into hearkening back to Craig Stedman’s point that greed would be central to the state’s case. A greedy man knows no bounds. When is enough, enough? How much is enough? It’s not about the
money, one could argue, when speaking to greed as motive—it’s about all or nothing.

Moving on to the DNA, Sodomsky downplayed it. “The experts will say that DNA absolutely could have come from scratching of the back…. There was no evidence of her head hitting the ground. It is much more likely, so the medical evidence will show, that she was hit with a blunt object, presumably a fist or two or three or four. She was beaten, strangled, and drowned. And the injuries on her head and body are significant…. Mr. Stedman said the evidence will show that Jan died in hand-to-hand combat. With whom?” Sodomsky asked rhetorically. “And the evidence will show it wasn’t with Mike Roseboro.”

Quite elegantly, Allan Sodomsky made a great point as he finished his hour-long opening, relaying to the jury one major hurdle Craig Stedman’s team was going to have to make it over at some point: “Ladies and gentlemen, based on the evidence you will hear … you will have to guess or speculate as to what happened between that ten and eleven
P.M.
hour on July 22, 2008—and that, ladies and gentlemen, is something your oath just will
not
let you do.”

69

Ending the previous day, Craig Stedman had called Michael Firestone, the first cop to respond to the scene, and another, Officer Brian Dilliplaine, putting jurors right in the center of what had happened on the night of July 22, 2008. Each witness, beyond giving a detailed account of how Jan Roseboro had been worked on at the scene and taken away quickly after being found unresponsive, made a point to say that Michael had not once asked about the status of his wife’s condition, or jumped at the opportunity to ride with Jan in the ambulance. To their shock, Michael Roseboro had stayed behind.

Proceedings on Tuesday, July 14, got under way at 9:04
A.M.
ADA Kelly Sekula had been waiting on this day for some time. One of Sekula’s interests throughout the year had been the 911 call. She had focused a lot of attention on it, studying it ten ways to Sunday. Sekula, who had even argued with her father about the veracity of the call at one point, believed—same as just about everyone else in law enforcement—that the 911 call, by itself, spoke to Michael Roseboro’s guilt.

“The first thing he says on the 911 tape,” Sekula later explained, “is ‘I believe my wife just drowned….’ He
doesn’t know what happened to Jan. He could say he found her in the pool. But he shouldn’t know that she is dead. For all he knew, she had a heart attack, or tripped and fell. Why doesn’t he say, ‘Get over here now and save her!’ And then he begins stalling and stalling and stalling about doing CPR. Why?

“Because he knows she’s dead.”

The flat demeanor on the tape depicts a man calling 911 to report a dead woman in his pool—not a man who has just found his wife unconscious in his pool.

“He’s not the least bit winded,” Sekula added. “This, after supposedly dragging his wife out from the deep end, the bottom of the pool, and finding her unresponsive.”

Before any of the day’s witnesses were questioned—witnesses who would soon describe what had happened after Roseboro made the call—the DA’s office played the 911 tape to put into context what they would be talking about.

The unfolding of that night continued throughout much of the morning as those professionals (paramedics and police) on hand the night Jan died came in and told different versions of the same truth. All of them mentioned how Roseboro seemed too damn composed for a man who had just pulled his listless, breathless wife from their pool. Several of the witnesses described what Roseboro was wearing—no shirt, swimming trunks, no shoes—and how he started to tell that scripted story he would soon vocalize to anybody and everyone.