Love Her To Death (42 page)

Angie said what she had meant by that was how she didn’t want Roseboro to say something on the phone he’d later regret.

“Like what?” Stedman pried.

“Just like—” She stopped, and looked down again at her hands.

“Just like what, Mrs. Funk?” the DA pressed.

“Just like ‘I haven’t given up on us.’”

“How would he regret
that
?”

“Because that’s what you’re using as a
motive.”

Tears might have begun to form in the ducts of Angie’s eyes. The conversation was taking a turn toward an end—not in the testimony, but of the fairy tale.

Stedman asked again about the two of them being together
if
Roseboro was found not guilty.

Angie repeated that it wasn’t an option any longer.

He asked again.

“No! I’m still married,” she said.

“If you’d get a divorce, you could be together with him, right?”

Tears. “I could.”

“I mean, your marriage is terrible, and you said that, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not like you’re giving up something that’s wonderful. You’re living in a house with a husband you cheated
on, and every day you [and Randall] have to see the baby of the man who you cheated with, right?”

More tears. Angie wasn’t looking anywhere but down. That comment hurt like a burn. “Right …,” she finally admitted.

“I mean, you guys [Randall and Angie] aren’t speaking to each other, other than about the children, right?”

“Pretty much,” she said, collecting her composure.

“And you stayed with [Randall] for insurance purposes for the baby, right?”

“No!”

“That’s not true?”

“No.”

It was near 3:30
P.M.
Stedman asked Angie a few more questions about the content of an e-mail (dated the day of Jan’s death), in which she had said she and Roseboro weren’t going to have to wait too much longer to be together. Angie said the statement was a mere coincidence and had nothing whatsoever to do with Jan’s murder. She didn’t know anything about the murder prior to it happening.

Craig Stedman asked if she was certain about that.

“Yes,” Angie Funk answered.

The prosecutor said he had nothing further.

Allan Sodomsky shifted in his chair. The question one had to ask as Angie took a sip of water and prepared herself for Sodomsky: how was the defense attorney going to handle the state’s motive for his client’s guilt—with kid gloves or a jackhammer?

73

Allan Sodomsky had about an hour left to the day. Sixty minutes, the seasoned defense attorney knew, was more than enough time to get jurors thinking about Angie Funk’s intentions for scoring herself a catch like Mr. Michael Roseboro—not to mention the role she had played in this horribly tragic drama.

Sodomsky made it clear from his first questions that he had not spoken to Angie in almost a year, besides questioning her at the preliminary hearing the previous fall. He told Angie how important it was for her to tell the truth, as if saying this implied she had good reason to lie.

They established off the bat that Michael had not once indicated to her in any form or fashion that he was planning (or going) to kill Jan Roseboro. He had never given Angie any indication, as a matter of fact, that Jan was going to become a problem he had to dispose of. And through this line of questioning, Sodomsky’s point was well taken: although Angie and Michael had talked and e-mailed about getting married and being together for the rest of their lives, Roseboro had never referred to killing his wife as a means to that end.

Sodomsky asked Angie about her home life.

“I told my husband I would try to work it out with him,” she said. Then, referring to the contrast of this statement outlined in that April phone call, Angie responded, “Well, I mean, I wasn’t at
that
point of working it out with my husband
yet,
no.”

“But now you
are
at that point?”

“Yes.” Angie started to cry again. Sodomsky offered tissues to her. “No,” she said defiantly. “I’m okay.”

Get this over. The sooner, the better.

“I believe you said on direct examination—I don’t want to put words in your mouth—but you said ‘he is not my future anymore,’ when you were talking about Mr. Roseboro. Were those your words?”

“No, that was Mr. Stedman’s words.”

“Mr. Roseboro is
not
your future anymore in terms of a husband. Is that a fair statement?”

“Yes.”

Sodomsky did his best to minimize the phone calls, trying to sell the jury, in the form of a question, that 1,400 calls over a seven-week period really weren’t that numerous when one took into account how many hangups there would have been, how many times they said “hi” and “bye” quickly, or left messages on each other’s voice mail.

Angie agreed.

Some in the courtroom wondered what in the world this guy was talking about. Fourteen hundred calls in forty-nine days was more than what most teenagers made, an exorbitant amount. Trying to downplay it—well, it simply made the calls stand out all that much more.

“… Did you tell the police,” Sodomsky asked Angie, “on July twenty-fourth, that a week or two before that date, Mike Roseboro said to you that he would be willing to give up the funeral home for you, if it came to that?”

“Yes.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what he said to you?”

“Yes.”

Several questions later, “The two of you got fairly deeply sexually involved in thirty-nine days—fair statement?”

“Yes.”

As the questioning went on throughout the latter part of the afternoon, the jury was already exhausted from a day’s worth of testimony. Mostly, it was a “yes/no” back-and-forth tennis match that didn’t shed too much light on anything that could help or hurt Roseboro. Angie verified that she loved Michael. She said she didn’t know he was going to kill Jan—if he indeed did. She talked about their relationship being in a “dream stage” most of the time, as if it weren’t real.

Craig Stedman objected a few times, asking the court if the questions were relevant. The judge told Sodomsky to continue, but to move things forward.

The jury looked tired, bored.

“Mrs. Funk, at any time, did you ever tell anyone, including the police, that Mr. Roseboro told you that July 22, 2008, was going to be significant because he was going to tell his wife about you?”

This was probably the most emphatic question of Sodomsky’s entire cross-exam.

“No,” Angie stated, clearly sick of answering questions.

From there, Sodomsky had Angie discuss how she and Roseboro had talked about leaving their spouses. Most of this had been covered already to a great degree. It was beyond redundant.

“Look,” one legal professional in the courtroom told me later, “Sodomsky had his hands tied. What did he really have to work with?”

“Sodomsky is an excellent lawyer and has a tremendous courtroom presence, but had very little to work
with in this case,” Stedman explained. “The defendant was guilty, and the evidence was overwhelming.”

True, Stedman had all but quashed the intruder theory with several of the neighbor witnesses, along with lengthy testimony about the lights being off and then Michael Roseboro claiming they were on. The only real defense Roseboro had left was to get up on the stand himself and claim he snapped—that it was an accident. Clinical narcissists, however, rarely cave and admit any culpability simply because they believe they’re smarter than everyone else. It’s all or nothing. In addition, Sodomsky had indicated in his voir dire questioning of potential jurors that Roseboro was not going to take the stand, somewhat showing his cards, when the lawyer asked potential jurors if they would be biased against a defendant who chose
not
to testify.

Sodomsky ended by going through several of the e-mails. Angie once more agreed that she had written them, making the point that she had never discussed (and neither had her lover) killing Jan in any of the e-mails.

The day was over.

Finally.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009, a year to the day that Jan Roseboro was murdered, began with a blast of hot and humid weather. Proceedings began promptly at 9:00
A.M.
as Angie Funk was reminded that she was under oath.

As if she could forget.

The tone was different this morning. Allan Sodomsky started by having Angie talk about how ambivalent Michael Roseboro was regarding their affair being made public. He didn’t care one way or the other, Angie suggested. He didn’t express concern.

That was a reach. Angie had told police he did care.

Craig Stedman was eager to get another crack at Angie. The only thing that mattered, from where the prosecutor sat, was the content of those e-mails, not what Angie
thought
about Roseboro’s demeanor or his
feelings
about telling Jan. Those e-mails portrayed a man who was fixated on a woman and would have done anything—including murder—to be with her. He had made that clear in just about every e-mail. This talk about
not
getting divorce attorneys and
not
taking real steps to end their marriages was significant: Roseboro was going to fix all that, Stedman wanted to clarify, by strangling and drowning his wife.

After a half hour or so, Sodomsky concluded.

Craig Stedman had that stack of e-mails sitting on the table in front of him. “Mr. Sodomsky,” he said with passion, “asked you some questions yesterday about your communications with the defendant … and I think you ended up saying to him and agreeing with him … that they were ‘lustful banter,’ is that right?”

“Yeah.”

Stedman held up the stack of e-mails. He told Angie Funk she could see them if she needed to refresh her memory.

“No!” Angie said, looking away.

“There’s actually not a lot about sex in there. There’s a few comments here and there, but there’s not much in there about just lust and sex, is there?”

“I—I—I,” Angie said, stumbling now, tired and dazed by all these questions, “I wanted it clean for work, so I didn’t—yeah, there’s not a whole lot about sex, no.”

Stedman pointed out that Angie and Roseboro had made
specific
wedding plans.

“They were not specific,” she said. “I mean, those were dreaming….”

As Stedman’s redirect continued, he sounded like he
was beating up on Angie by continually raising his voice and calling her on many of the vague responses she had given Allan Sodomsky.

Angie appeared to be ready to break down. She was kept on the stand until 10:30
A.M.,
an hour and a half, answering more questions from Sodomsky on recross, before being cut loose. Sodomsky, in concluding his recross, apologized to Angie for having to put her through such a taxing experience.

Craig Stedman brought in a few more neighbors to expand on his “the lights were off” argument. Then Sabine Panzer-Kaelin came in and schooled the jury on DNA. It was time to get into that whole skin-under-the-fingernails/scratches-on-Roseboro’s-face part of the saga.

Panzer-Kaelin clarified that the DNA found underneath Jan’s three fingernails was, indeed, from her husband. All the technical mumbo jumbo she talked about—explaining in detail the minutia involved in DNA collecting and testing—led to one conclusion that the jury was certain to grasp. In Panzer-Kaelin’s perfectly crafted layman’s way of talking about such complicated matters, it became obvious that Michael Roseboro “donated” that DNA under the fingernails, but there was no test available that would tell how it got there.

That was a piece of the puzzle left up to Gary Frees to explain.

Frees, a senior planner for a local concrete company, had known Jan and Michael Roseboro about a year, he said. Frees had driven Michael to the ECTPD on that night of Jan’s death. When they got to the station house, Frees testified, he noticed something about his friend.

“He was wiping his upper lip. Just … there was
oozing [of blood and pus] coming out of his upper lip. He was wiping that.”

As Frees left the stand after cross, redirect, and recross, Judge James Cullen banged his gavel. It was 5:02
P.M.
Another day in the books.

74

It is, in the end, those subtle pieces of evidence that ultimately put the proverbial nail in the lying killer’s coffin. You know, those “things” most killers never think of. It’s generally not DNA, eyewitness testimony, or phone records that put a person away. No. Some of that helps, sure. But if killing is an art, then every brushstroke one ponders and labors over must add to the picture, not contort it, or toss confusion into the psychology behind its meaning.

For example, on July 23, 2009, Craig Stedman brought in several witnesses to talk about what Michael Roseboro was wearing on the night he “found” his wife in the family pool. It was thought that Roseboro had been wearing the same swimming trunks he had said he swam in earlier that night.

If that was the case, Roseboro had gone to bed wearing wet swimming trunks.

No one would do that.

But this was something he probably overlooked when planning a way out of killing his wife.

Then, at one point, witnesses talked about Jan Roseboro’s dogs. Jan loved her dogs, maybe even more than her philandering husband. Wherever Jan went outside
on the Roseboro property, she generally had those dogs by her side, especially if she was out at the pool at night by herself.

Just so happened on the night of her murder, Jan’s dogs had been caged in the basement of the house.

One had to ask, why? Or, better yet, by whom?

Then there were the kids. Besides Sam, who had left to go swimming with friends, the three other children—a thirteen-year-old among them—were in bed sleeping by 9:30 to 9:45
P.M.
A thirteen-year-old during summer break sleeping by 9:45
P.M.?
It seemed impossible. Neighbors had said the kids were awake—on most nights—until eleven or twelve. The family had just opened this new pool. More than that, the kids—all of them—slept through the entire episode until late the following morning. Dozens of people inside the house. The cops walking into their rooms at one point, and they were all out.