This book owes a primary debt to three people without whose support it would not have been possible. Foremost and always to my wife, Elizabeth Mehren, herself an accomplished journalist and author and more recently professor of journalism at Boston University, who provided advice, good cheer and extraordinary patience, especially when our son, Sam Butterfield, passed away unexpectedly midway through the writing. Second, to my editor at Knopf, Jon Segal, who persevered in supporting the book long after most editors would have canceled the project. His suggestions on how to make a difficult subject more readable were always on target. And third, but certainly not least, I am deeply grateful to Linda Bogle, Rooster’s second wife, who opened a door to the Bogle family when many other members were skeptical, or even hostile, not seeing any benefit to making their story public.
In the end, most Bogle family members agreed to participate in interviews and even share letters, photographs and school and medical records. Of particular help were Rooster’s brother Charlie, and Rooster’s sons Tony, Bobby, Tracey and Tim, as well as his niece Tammie and her husband, Steve Silver. In turn, Tim’s daughter Ashley, who became the first Bogle to graduate from college, was an inspiration. Kathy Bogle, Rooster’s first wife, also was a good source of information when she was willing to talk. In addition, Kathy’s older sister, Bertha Wilson, who served time in prison herself, was a reliable informant about their side of the family. To all of them, and all the many other Bogles who talked with me, too numerous to name here, I express my deep thanks.
I must also acknowledge the critical role played by Steve Ickes, who first identified the Bogles as a family with a significant number of members in prison. At the time, Steve was an assistant director of the Oregon Department of Corrections and I was a correspondent for The New York Times covering criminal justice. Steve generously helped arrange for me to interview some of these Bogle family members in the Oregon prisons where they were incarcerated. Later Steve moved to Arizona, where he became deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections and made it possible for me to interview Tony Bogle, who was serving a life sentence in prison in Tucson for a murder he committed there. Similarly, I want to thank a former spokesman for the Oregon Department of Corrections, Perrin Damon, for helping track down some of the Bogles’ criminal records.
For the origins of the Bogle family in Tennessee I thank the late Mae Smotherman of Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, who as the daughter of Louis Bogle’s older sister, Lula, grew up in the same log cabin in Daylight, Tennessee, as Louis. Similarly, I am grateful for the research on the Bogles done by Cassandra Czarneski of Arkansas, also a descendant of Lula. James Dillon Jr., a historian in McMinnville, Tennessee, generously showed me around Daylight and shared his knowledge of the hamlet where Louis Bogle lived until he moved to Texas.
For Elvie Bogle’s formative years in the tiny crossroads village of Sherry, in northeast Texas, I am indebted to a local historian and genealogical researcher, Johnie Lee, who tracked down old land-ownership and tax records, as well as school reports and criminal files. I was also aided by the memories of a longtime resident of Sherry, Pat Westfall, who knew Elvie when she was a young girl. Two descendants of Elvie’s grandmother’s family, Betty Morris Dodd of Texas and Diane Norton of Snowmass, Colorado, shared their memories and research with me, helping put pieces of the family jigsaw puzzle together.
For the Bogles’ time in Amarillo, I thank their longtime neighbor Margaritte Garcia, who still recalled Louis and Elvie and their boys with remarkable clarity. For details of Rooster’s fight with Jimmy Wilson, I am indebted to Jimmy Wilson himself and to Rooster’s second, Pat Dunavin. For information on the family’s burglary of the grocery store in Amarillo, I thank Tom Scivally, the store’s then owner, and Detective E. N. Smith, who solved the case and arrested most of the family.
On the murder of Sandra Jackson of Peeltown, Texas, by Corey Lee Wilson, a nephew of Kathy Bogle’s, I am grateful to Kenneth Garvin, a sheriff’s deputy who helped solve the crime, and to Mark Calabria, Corey’s defense attorney, as well as to Corey himself for agreeing to several extended interviews in prison.
In Tucson, where Tony Bogle and his then wife, Paula Bogle, were convicted of the murder of the man referred to as Chief, I wish to express appreciation to David Sherman, who was assigned the task of defending Tony; to Barbara LaWall, for many years the Pima County Attorney; to John Leavitt, then a deputy police chief in Tucson; and to Kenneth Peasley, the assistant county attorney who prosecuted Tony and Paula. I also owe a significant debt to Linda Beck, a clerk in the Pima County Courthouse, who fully transcribed both trials, a text that ran to about three thousand pages.
For expert academic advice on criminology, I am particularly grateful to John Laub, a distinguished university professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, and to Terrie Moffitt, the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. For help understanding the patterns of marriage and divorce in the rural nineteenth-century South, I want to thank Nancy Cott, a professor of history at Harvard University. And for information on the predominance of Southerners among the early settlers of Oregon, I thank Scott Daniels, an Oregon historian.
I must also offer tribute to my literary agent, Carol Mann, who was both patient and firm in guiding this whole enterprise. Finally, I need to say a special thanks to Judge Albin Norblad of Marion County Circuit Court in Salem, who opened the door to his courtroom and to his private chambers so I could hear parts of the trials of multiple members of the Bogle family and benefit from his wisdom. When Judge Norblad died, in 2014, he was Oregon’s longest sitting judge.