Author explores ultimate betrayal in ‘Love Her to Death’

A wealthy wife and mother is found unconscious in her swimming pool.

Her husband finds her, pulls her out of the pool and calls 911. Arriving police officers notice that the man is remarkably calm and unconcerned as emergency workers try to revive his wife of 20 years. Perhaps the seeming detachment is due to his profession, officers reason — he’s a funeral director, and possibly numbed to scenes of tragedy.

But then the husband doesn’t climb into the ambulance, or hurry to his car to follow on the frantic race to the emergency room. He doesn’t call the hospital to see if his loved one survived. He displays levels of incuriosity and unfeeling that are jaw-dropping, even to officers who’ve seen a lot. He starts telling family and friends his wife has died. How would he know?

The 2008 murder of 45-year-old Pennsylvanian Jan Roseboro is the subject of "Love Her to Death" by crime writer M. William Phelps.

It doesn’t take long for police suspicion to fall on husband Michael Roseboro.The story he tells police seems memorized, mechanical, and, they quickly realize, made up. It also doesn’t match with neighbors’ observations of the evening.

What’s more, within hours of the killing, police begin to get phone calls. The husband was cheating, they’re told — and the girlfriend lives right across the street from the funeral home.

The beating, choking and drowning of Jan Roseboro wasn’t a mystery for long — a couple of days after her killing, husband Michael sat in a Lancaster, Pa., jail charged with murder.

Investigators soon found a treasure trove of, according to the author, hundreds of emails and text messages and itemized records showing thousands of cell phone calls between Roseboro and his also-married girlfriend, Angela Funk. A jury convicted Roseboro after a trial in which Funk testified at length, and on Sept. 25, 2009, he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for murdering his wife. He has continued to maintain that he is innocent.

But why would a wealthy man with a pretty, apparently loving wife, great children, prosperous business and all the perks that go with being a big fish in a small town, throw it all away? That is the question Phelps takes up in "Love Her to Death."

Since the mystery in this murder is short-lived, the ‘‘why’’ becomes the point of the story. Unfortunately, Phelps can’t seem to make up his mind: Roseboro, while conducting the latest in a number of affairs during his marriage unaccountably decides to murder a wife who had overlooked or forgiven past infidelities.

Or the undertaker becomes infatuated by a most unusual femme fatale — in the author’s words, a  flirtatious but tomboyish, plain-looking, average-figured, conservative-dressing ex-Mennonite, and decides to kill his wife so the star-struck couple can be together.

Or, Phelps suggests, Roseboro kills his wife because she’s about to open a cell phone bill that will show hundreds of calls between the lovers.

Since the guilty man won’t say, readers will have to decide for themselves, all the while wading through another distracting feature of this book. Phelps can’t help himself. He lards chapter after chapter with arch and sarcastic comments about Roseboro and Funk. Excerpts of emails between the lovers become the framework for this tawdry tapestry. Rather than letting Roseboro’s and Funk’s sophomoric, sexually explicit gushings speak for themselves, Phelps provides a running commentary.

Suggestion to the author, who has written at least 16 books: Trust your readers. Stay out of the way of the story. We’re adults, we understand. We don’t need you to point out the glaringly obvious.

Should a reader spend valuable time on this book? Sure. It will irritate you. Irritate you with its indeterminate conclusions, irritate you as you trip over the author’s gratuitous asides, and vex you indeed as you wonder how many more times the old, tired, awful, sordid human plot will play out — that a spouse, or a partner chooses, instead of a divorce, or a simple ‘‘I’m leaving,’’ to murder.