After that first time, when they had sex on the floor of the empty apartment on June 8, committing what would become one of many transgressive acts throughout a short period of time, Angie Funk started to meet her lover inside the funeral home.
“I’d go in the back door,” she explained.
Sneak in was probably more like it. Angie Funk’s house was down the street from the back of the funeral home—and, wouldn’t you know it—Michael Roseboro’s parents’ house was next door to the Funk house. There can be no doubt that Angie looked both ways before walking into the back door of the funeral home, making certain she was not being seen by anyone.
They’d sit in the office and chat, Angie explained to police.
“It would be nice to have a child together,” Angie later said Michael told her during one of those conversations. Regarding the young children he had at home and the state of the affair post Jan finding out: “He said he didn’t want to lose his children,” Angie reported.
After talking in the office, Angie said, they’d sometimes head into the parlor and continue the conversations as Roseboro did paperwork or perhaps spit-shined a coffin or two. And “once,” Angie later admitted, just one time, she had sex with Michael Roseboro there in the parlor. Just the undertaker, his Mennonite mistress, and a few dead bodies below. How romantic that must have been. The smell of embalming fluid and rotting flesh wafting up from everywhere, permeating the air. The scent of old flowers mixing with perfume that Angie probably sprayed on herself before heading over. The somber lighting and eerie silence of death balanced pleasantly around them. Everyone can attest to the absolute stale stench of a funeral home. Now, how arousing that must have been for these two lovebirds. Considering what Angie later said, you’d have to believe they couldn’t contain their desires. Roseboro had to have this woman. There. Inside the place where his family had served the dead of Lancaster County for over one hundred years. A funeral home, for crying out loud. What the families of the dead would have thought had they known that while suffering and mourning was taking place inside their hearts, the undertaker—a guy they respected, the same guy who had consoled them and told them he would show their deceased the utmost respect—was having sex with his mistress in the same building where he was preparing their loved ones for viewing and burial.
The other place they met was the Ephrata Cloister, a monastery outside Denver that was founded in 1732 as a Protestant monastic community of celibate brothers and sisters. The order was supported by a married congregation who lived near the settlement. The mostly German immigrant members were in search of spiritual goals rather than earthly rewards.
Not necessarily the most morally correct location to continue an adulterous affair that would gravely affect six kids and two deeply devoted spouses, one of whom ended up in the bottom of a swimming pool, which her husband recently had built for her and their children.
They would walk around the grounds, holding hands, her head on his shoulder, discussing the future, Angie told one source. Maybe cuddle on one of the benches. Or just sit in one of their vehicles and contemplate the future.
It was during one of those times, right after they had had sex, that Michael Roseboro said, “I love you, Angie.”
“I love you, too,” Angie reciprocated, admitting this in a later police interview.
Granted, they had not said this term of endearment, according to Angie Funk, until that day.
Ten days together, and they were madly in love.
“Angela said she absolutely never pressured Michael to get married,” Detective Keith Neff later said, explaining one interview he conducted with Angie. “Angela stated that she told Michael that he had to leave Jan first, before she left Randy, because she would have no house to go to.” When Neff asked Angie how she truly felt about Roseboro, Angie replied, “I liked the attention from Michael, but also loved him.” Furthermore, Angie said, she “had lived in the area [Denver] for ten years and had never heard anything about Michael’s [previous] affairs….” That is, until the police knocked on her door that day after Jan’s murder and began telling her things about the man she thought she knew.
As the middle of June approached and the sex became as routine as Michael Roseboro hiding his drinking and smoking from his new girlfriend, the question kept coming up between them: What are we going to do? They were both talking about having found the love of their lives, Roseboro already mentioning that he wanted to marry Angie. But they had spouses to contend with every night at home, spouses to hide this affair from, kids to take care of, and lives away from this fantasy to answer to. This was something they needed to talk about. Angie Funk said she considered this, day after day. They needed to come up with a plan. Soon. This running around when they were clearly in love was not going to cut it much longer.
Yet, Roseboro had other things on his mind.
“Michael told me,” Angie said later, “that he wanted me to wear a linen dress and he was looking up dresses online.”
Roseboro’s idea for their wedding was for them to say their vows on the beach in California. “Or on Turtle Island in Fiji,” Angie said. “We were looking into other places, too, like Disney, due to the children—and we expected all of our children to be there. This was one of our dreams.”
Talk was cheap, as they say. Although she had participated shamelessly in these fairy-tale conversations with Roseboro, Angie later said she had serious problems with all of it.
“Your friends and family, Michael?” Angie mentioned one day. She wondered what they would think of her and asked her lover about it.
The home wrecker. The slut. The other woman. These were names no woman wanted to be branded.
“My friends will love you!” Roseboro said in response, not mentioning what his family would think.
“I tried to bring him back down to earth,” Angie told Keith Neff, “by telling him the kids might not accept me right away.” Angie said something about Sam, the oldest, who she claimed knew about the affair after having seen a text from Angie on his father’s phone one day while they were out at the pool. “Michael had unrealistic expectations about how easy it would be for us to start a life together. I tried to anchor him down.”
“It’s going to take some time for your friends to accept me, Michael,” Angie said on the night they first talked about getting married.
“My friends are my friends—they will like you because of me, not Jan!” Roseboro said.
Whatever the case might have been, the plan Michael Roseboro and his new lover made was to be married inside of the next twelve months. If that was the case, their spouses would have to be told. They’d have to break the news that they were in love and their marriages were over. There seemed to be no way around that uncomfortable part of the affair.
Or was there?