The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (24 page)

Now, Rowan owed money to impatient people. He tried to lie low, but in January, a group of men beat him up behind Shopko, leaving him with two black eyes, broken ribs, and blood on his baseball cap, he told friends at the time.

Rowan was desperate. Then, while he was watching TV at his girlfriend's house, a show caught his attention. It was on the Investigation Discovery channel, something about a guy who staged his own death so he could start his life anew.

 

A Way Out

 

Rowan had felt as if he were drowning for a while now. He owed money to drug dealers. He couldn't keep a job. His hobby was getting beaten up in public. Now this fake-death scheme landed like a life preserver.

If people thought he was dead, he and his girlfriend, Rosa Martinez, could move far from Michigan. Maybe New Mexico. They could begin again.

“I wanted a fresh start,” he said in one of a series of interviews conducted both in person and over the phone. “To pick up and start someplace new where no one knew us.”

The phone calls were the first step—Rowan said he was there when Martinez called DiPonio, the fight promoter, to announce the car crash. She later called his mother. Rowan said it broke his heart to think of his mother picturing him dead, but he saw no other way. He could hear Martinez as she made the calls, and he said that first step of the hoax “almost killed me.”

When Martinez called back two days later to say Rowan was dead, he said, he choked up and had to leave the room.

 

In Memory of Charlie

 

The mourners gathered at Martinez's home to remember Charles H. Rowan, father, son, friend, and cage fighter. The guests walked up a wooden ramp leading to the front door, past a sprinkling of cigarette butts that dotted the yard's patchy snow.

Inside the small living room, lined with brown carpet and wood-paneled walls, sat two young children, along with Rowan's mother, who was sobbing.

Martinez looked grief-stricken. She brushed off questions about funeral arrangements and other practical matters, making clear she was not yet ready.

As the group sat quietly in the living room, she stepped away to collect a bag that she said had been retrieved from the accident.

She pulled out a white baseball cap that was stained with blood. A young boy began to cry.

They mourned Rowan as a lost soul gone too soon. But he had not gone anywhere. Rowan was upstairs throughout the memorial, he said, hiding in a child's bedroom until the guests left. While his mother cried and his girlfriend accepted condolences, Rowan worked hard not to make a sound.

He said he thought about walking downstairs to interrupt the grieving, ending the ruse right there. But he decided not to.

From upstairs, he said, he could hear the sobs coming from the living room, sounds that took him by surprise. “For people to care about me,” he said, “it meant something.”

But now, he needed to play dead, which meant he needed to block all that out. He looked out the bedroom's small window, past the lawn and out toward the Rite Aid. He tried not to break his gaze.

 

Trapped

 

If this was the afterlife, Rowan didn't much care for it.

He spent most of the next six weeks hiding out in his girlfriend's home, watching TV and working out in a small makeshift gym. He said he closed his bank account and disabled his Facebook page. He made late-night trips to Rite Aid and even kept Martinez company for a meeting at her children's school. The couple said they were possibly moving to New Mexico, a school official later told the police.

“I went stir-crazy,” Rowan said. “I couldn't call any of my friends; I couldn't go anywhere. I love Rosa more than life itself, but it's just too much to be around the same person all of the time.”

Despite his efforts, the hoax began to fray. Skeptics took to Facebook, where they peppered the fight promoters with questions about death certificates and obituaries.

The promoters took offense. “I said: ‘How dare you question this? The dude is dead! Have some respect,'” the promoter Joe Shaw said.

Rowan's family wanted to know what happened to his body. Scott Gardner, his stepfather, called local hospitals but didn't find anyone who could help. “We felt like we didn't have any facts,” Gardner said. Sympathy cards began to arrive, some of them with checks included, but the family set them aside.

Rumors about Rowan were bound to reach the people he owed money, and by mid-March, they apparently had. While his loved ones still thought he was dead, he sneaked away to meet with Michael Gomez in Gladwin—the circumstances remain murky. Gomez and his lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

At the meeting, Gomez threatened to hurt Martinez and her kids, Rowan said.

The walls were closing in. But Charlie Rowan, still presumed dead, had one last idea.

 

An Opportunity to Strike

 

On a cold March afternoon, Roxie Robinette served lunch to her husband, Richard. The bell rang next door in their store, Guns and Stuff: a new customer.

Richard got up, leaving Roxie behind to fold laundry in front of the TV.

Guns and Stuff was a mom-and-pop shop that sold revolvers, pistols, and shotguns, along with hunting jackets and Skittles. Mounted buck heads eyed customers from the wall. A sign read,
NO PISSY ATTITUDES
.

The gun store played the role a diner might in another town—the place where neighbors gossip about the weather and one another. All of Gladwin knew Richard Robinette, a retired plumber and banjo player who'd been in poor health. Even Rowan knew Robinette: he had recently sold Robinette a rifle he stole from a relative, Rowan said.

On the afternoon of March 18, the sheriff said, Michael Bowman drove Rowan and his girlfriend to the store in a maroon Chevrolet Blazer. Bowman was among Rowan's closest friends, a lanky, baby-faced man in his early twenties with a criminal history of his own. A lawyer for Martinez did not respond to multiple requests for interviews. Bowman's lawyer declined to comment.

Rowan sat in the backseat, wearing a trench coat and sneakers. He smeared black dollar-store makeup around his eyes and tied a red bandanna around his mouth. The finishing touch was a Batman mask he said he took from his girlfriend's son.

Rowan was going to rob Guns and Stuff—“hit a lick” was his term. His girlfriend would be the decoy.

The police said she walked into the store first, carrying an iPhone in her pocket that was on an open call to Rowan, waiting down the road. That way, he could listen in and find the right moment to strike.

After a few minutes, Rowan got out of the car and headed toward the neon
OPEN
sign. But on the way, he realized he had made a mistake: he forgot the weapon, a pink canister of pepper spray. He had left it in the car.

He was carrying a hammer from his toolbox—he was going to use it to break into the cases holding the guns. But now, the hammer would take on a starring role.

He pushed open the door and swung the hammer at Robinette's head, knocking him from his stool. Rowan later said he had been aiming for Robinette's shoulder and missed.

The blow opened up the side of Robinette's head, spilling a pool of blood. The sheriff's report called the wound a “jagged hole approximately the size of a quarter, which appeared to go through his skull.” The bloodstain soaking the carpet was, a county detective wrote, the “size of a dinner plate.”

Even Rowan was shaken. “There was a lot of blood,” he said. “Enough to scare me. I'm a man used to seeing a lot of blood, but that was a lot of blood.”

Rowan kicked his girlfriend in the arm, hoping to make her seem like a second victim. He shoved eight handguns into his red- and-black duffel bag and then, on his way out, noticed Robinette's wallet sticking out of his pocket. He grabbed that too, and tore off through the woods, toward a church parking lot where Bowman was waiting.

In the car, the two hardly spoke.

“I was in shock with what had just happened,” Rowan said. “I thought I had just killed somebody.”

Martinez kept to her part of the plan and called 911 from Guns and Stuff. Within minutes, Detective Sergeant James Cuddie and Officer Eric Killian were en route. They stopped 100 yards from the store, on the shoulder of the road, to put on bulletproof vests.

They approached on foot, and inside found Rowan's girlfriend cowered in the back. Robinette sat on a stool, holding the left side of his head. Cuddie asked him what happened, and he replied slowly, “I don't know, Jim.”

Cuddie then turned to interview Martinez. She hadn't herself been in trouble before, but her social circle sometimes overlapped with Cuddie's investigations. Martinez told him she had been there to sell some of her family's guns when a masked robber burst through the door.

Meanwhile, Bowman later told the police, he and Rowan drove toward a vacant home where the mother of Rowan's girlfriend had recently lived.

Rowan stashed the robbery evidence around the house—two pistols in the dining room vent, the duffel bag behind the refrigerator, the sneakers in the garage attic. He stuffed the Batman mask above the kitchen sink, still filled with dirty dishes and an empty bottle of Diet Pepsi Wild Cherry.

Rowan paced the house, waiting for news, waiting for his girlfriend. He smoked an entire pack of Newports.

Finally, Rowan called the phone his girlfriend had carried during the robbery. Cuddie answered and identified himself as Jim. He asked who was calling. Rowan, flustered, gave his cousin's name.

He could tell that Cuddie was suspicious. The life preserver had begun to feel like a noose.

 

Connecting the Pieces

 

With a thick mustache, his hair cut short, and a no-nonsense demeanor, James Cuddie would have a hard time passing as anything other than a cop. Not that he would try—everyone in Gladwin County knew him as Jim, the county detective, including many of the people he arrested. Sometimes, as Cuddie eased suspects into the back of his police car, they apologized to him by name.

It didn't take long for Cuddie and his colleagues to connect Rowan with the Guns and Stuff robbery. When officers dropped off Martinez, they saw his ID in her home.

Then Bowman visited the sheriff's office and said that Rowan might have been involved in the robbery. That was also a roundabout way of saying that Rowan might not be quite as dead as people had thought.

For weeks, Cuddie had heard rumors about Rowan's death, but he didn't think much about them one way or the other. “I didn't know it to be true or untrue,” he said. “At that point it wasn't an issue. I'm working on other cases.”

But now, with Richard Robinette in intensive care, Cuddie's interest was piqued.

It should have been the most straightforward of questions: is Charlie Rowan dead or alive? But it had become bizarrely muddled.

The day after the robbery, Cuddie called the Saginaw County medical examiner's office, which housed records for the county's deceased. Officials there confirmed that there was no death certificate for Charles Howard Rowan. The medical examiner declared it “unlikely” that Rowan had died.

That was enough for Cuddie to surmise that Rowan was out there on the run. “Rowan and Martinez were people of interest that needed to be located,” he wrote in his report.

On March 19, the sheriff's office released Rowan's mug shot to the local news media.

 

“I Know That Guy!”

 

Big John Yeubanks, a fight promoter, was smoking a cigarette in his home office, half-listening to the TV news. The story of the day was a robbery of Guns and Stuff.

The suspect's mug shot flashed across the screen, and Yeubanks snapped to attention.

There was no mistaking it, yet it could not be.

“I know that guy!” he shouted. “He's not supposed to be alive!”

Yeubanks called the sheriff to say there must have been a mistake—they were looking for a dead man.

Word quickly spread through the cage fighting world. DiPonio's girlfriend pulled up the mug shot on her phone. Goatee, square jaw, pursed lips—it was Charlie Rowan.

“She showed it to me,” DiPonio said, “and I nearly threw up right there.”

At the Gladwin County Sheriff's Office, the phone had been ringing steadily since the mug shots were released. The officers kept hearing the same strange thing: the suspect, Charlie Rowan, was already dead.

Weeks later, sitting in his cluttered basement office, Cuddie laughed at the deluge of calls. He described the one he received from DiPonio, so sure that Rowan was dead.

“I told him that I had reason to believe,” Cuddie said, “that Mr. Rowan was very much alive.”

 

Voice from the Beyond

 

Rowan's vision of starting a new life, in New Mexico or anywhere else, was turning to dust.

He and his girlfriend were hiding out from the local police, from federal agents working the case, from the people Rowan owed money, and from the fight promoters he tricked.

The Guns and Stuff robbery and the manhunt had put the town on edge. Rowan's mother, still grieving for her son, was at the Chappel Dam Grocery when she heard about the attack. “I thought,
At least I know my son didn't do it
,” she said.

Her relief wouldn't last long. Soon, her phone rang. It was her son, Charlie, no longer dead.

For six weeks, she thought she'd lost him, at age 25. She never said good-bye. Now, here he was, on the phone. He had one question for her: could she give him a ride?

His mother drove in a fog, past the familiar barns, churches, and homes that lined the road. Finally, on the right, she saw her son, waving his arms to flag her down.

Still confused, she asked where he'd been for so long. This was all a lie? They both started crying. Rowan mumbled something about being “out of state.” He got out of the car at his girlfriend's home, the same place his mother had cried during his memorial the month before.