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.