The Best American Sports Writing 2014(40)

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.