Every problem that came between Michael Roseboro and Angie Funk, the undertaker quickly learned, could be resolved with another overstated, oversexed e-mail, perhaps opening with a scene of them holding hands and running into the sunset along the shoreline while dolphins crested on the horizon. Michael kept sketching the image of the dream Angie now believed in, without letting up. On July 7, for instance, the obsession of the day became Angie’s face. It was “so beautiful,” Michael said in the beginning of his first e-mail. He felt the love she had for him in every smile, adding that her “eyes sparkle,” even though, he said, he could “see the naughty side coming out” of that surprisingly subtle twinkle. Angie was “magnificent” this morning. His “dream come true.” She was “every tear that” he shed. Just a simple touch by this woman sent a shiver down Roseboro’s spine.
Angie never documented or later talked about why she wanted to see her lover so urgently that morning. Maybe she just wanted to be with him. Or perhaps ask Michael Roseboro what was going on at home: was he making any progress with that little problem of having a wife and four kids?
But the following morning, July 8, a day both Angie and Roseboro would have trouble forgetting in the weeks, months, and even years to come, Roseboro had sex on his mind. When he saw Angie at Turkey Hill, he said an hour later in an e-mail, he had pictured her not wearing any panties. He felt so lucky, he claimed, standing there, mixing his coffee, chatting with townies, watching Angie waltz in, knowing that someday she was going to be his wife—and that later on that afternoon, she was going to be servicing him with that killer body.
Michael kept feeding Angie little nuggets to keep her going. Here, this morning, he said that when the time was “right, my love for you will be a secret to nobody.” Beyond telling Angie that every kiss was something born out of a deep passion he had never felt in life before meeting her, he said it made him “weak in the knees” to touch her lips with his—“literally.” He was speechless, he added, but obviously that was just a turn of phrase, because Roseboro couldn’t stop writing, texting, or talking on the phone to Angie. He couldn’t wait, he said, until their lives became “one life.” Near the end of that over-the-top e-mail, he said pointedly, “I am going to marry you….”
Angie bought it all.
Hook. Line. Sinker.
Any worry or fear she had could always be wiped away by a few morning e-mails from her lover. Michael Roseboro, the accomplished cheater, had a way of making everything sound so perfect.
Angie wrote back explaining how she had “read that e-mail you sent several times….” She called it “beautiful,” same as the love they shared for each other. There were times, Angie Funk continued, when it was overwhelming to believe that “you are so in love with me.” Here, in this e-mail, she admitted to having been “attracted” to Michael Roseboro “for years.”
With words alone, Roseboro had turned Angie back around and kept her focused not on the future, the next day, next hour, or the Outer Banks, but now.
The moment.
Writing back at 8:29 A.M., Michael Roseboro broke into a diatribe about what the term “soul mates” meant to him. It was so exaggerated, he must have felt a pang of childish volatility in him as he wrote it. He used every cliché associated with love imaginable, not sparing a word.
They made plans to meet for sex that afternoon.
“Yeah,” Angie later said, “July eighth, somewhere in that time frame,” speaking of an afternoon sexual romp she would be forced to remember.
How was it that Angie Funk was so sure it was that day she had gotten pregnant with Michael Roseboro’s child?
“Because that’s the only time when the condom broke,” she later said in court.
Broke?
Well, she added next, “Yeah. Or came off.”
Angie wasn’t sure which. She explained that when that mistake happened, she and Michael discussed it, but she could not recall any details about their conversation.
Others later speculated, based on knowing Angie, that she became impatient and made sure the condom didn’t work the way that it should have. Or told Michael to forget about the condom altogether.
A source close to Angie believed that Angie “needed this baby.”
Before the affair with Michael started, Angie would give subtle hints within the family that she had her eye on someone in particular—this, mind you, while still married to Randall Funk. “There’s this guy,” she said once to a family member. “We’ve had coffee…. He’s really nice.”
That same source later observed, “I never put two and two together until later. It was the way she said it. She made it seem like they were ‘friends.’”
It was right around the time that the affair with Michael Roseboro started, some friends and family later speculated, when Angie began to say things like, “I want him (Randy) out! I cannot take him anymore. I want a divorce!” These were things Angie had never said in the past during family get-togethers. All of a sudden, without warning, she stopped bringing Randy around, and she spoke as if she hated him.
“This was all a setup on her part. There were neighbors in that vacant apartment Angie and Michael met in that said it would get a little loud in there at times, if you know what I mean.”
If there was the least bit of concern about the condom malfunction, and the slightest chance Angie Funk was going to become pregnant, neither Michael Roseboro nor his mistress expressed any fear in the e-mails they wrote after that particular sexual event. In fact, quite to the contrary, the e-mails post–July 8 were even more foolish and slapstick lovey-dovey nonsense than anything either had written previously. It was not a simple “good morning” any longer for her lover. Instead, “my love” was plastered on everything Angie wrote after that condom malfunction, with a “madly and deeply” tossed in from time to time.
By now, they were meeting just about every day at lunchtime.
“I can’t get enough of you …,” Angie said, repeating the same phrase in all caps at the end of the same e-mail.
Michael expressed his own amount of redundancy in his next e-mail by repeating the word “sexy” (in describing Angie) eight times—that is, before calling her an “angel sent from heaven.” He talked about how Angie had been placed here, on earth, apparently, to “rescue” him from the life he had been living with Jan.
Was he insinuating that being with Jan and the kids was his version of hell? It would seem so, considering how the overly dramatized romance was becoming so natural for Michael Roseboro. It seemed every hour of every day was dedicated to Angie Funk.
Still, neither of them had the one thing Angie was beginning to get a little impatient with: freedom from their spouses.
Thus, the countdown started.