After Charlie got out of prison in Washington and Dude came home from prison in Kansas in 1952, Louis and Elvie were united with their children for the first time in years. They were all living in adjacent houses in Amarillo in the flat, dry, windswept Texas Panhandle, where the Great Plains to the north merge into the southwestern desert. The relentless wind was what people remembered about the place. “There is nothing between us and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence” was the local saying. The Bogles were as poor as ever—Louis earned a mere thirty dollars a week working in the automobile junkyard, and the shack of a house he had built out of used battery crates was stained with leaking acid. At least the acid kept out the roaches, the family joked. The house had no running water, no indoor plumbing and no electricity. Elvie had given up riding her motorcycle in the carnival because of her advancing age and ever-increasing family. Their youngest child, Rooster, had arrived unplanned in 1941, when Elvie was already forty. Their neighbors in “The Flats,” the poorest section of Amarillo, puzzled over how Louis and Elvie had been able to buy four plots of land on Spruce Street for one thousand dollars apiece from a local postal worker.
If Paris looked like the Old South, with its sharecroppers handpicking cotton on their hands and knees, Amarillo was the modern western Texas of popular imagination, with wide open spaces flat to the horizon in all directions, the views broken only by new grain elevators and rapidly spreading oil derricks. There were good jobs for men willing to work hard. Amarillo was the center of a thriving beef-cattle industry, with ranches of thousands of acres, and there were enormous irrigated fields of wheat, sorghum and cotton that were all now harvested by machines. The Army Air Corps had built a large airfield in Amarillo during World War II to take advantage of its dry climate and flat, hard terrain to prepare crews to fly B-17 bombers to pound the Germans and, later in the war, to man the big B-29s that firebombed Tokyo. The Defense Department also built a major factory in Amarillo to make artillery shells and bombs, the Pantex Army Ordnance Plant. In the 1950s, with the advent of the Cold War, the Air Force expanded the air base to accommodate the Strategic Air Command’s giant new B-52 bombers that were ready to strike the Soviet Union. And the Pantex plant was retooled by the Atomic Energy Commission to manufacture nuclear weapons. Route 66, then the main highway between Chicago and Los Angeles, cut through the center of Amarillo, and trucks roared by day and night. There were truck stops at either end of the city, and motels and steak houses for hungry travelers. Amarillo, in fact, was the fastest-growing city in the fastest-growing state at the time. So it offered opportunity. But something was holding the Bogles back again.
The Bogles’ closest neighbors when they arrived in Amarillo in 1944 were Margaritte Garcia, her husband and their two young sons. They lived in a tiny, low-ceilinged home directly across the street. Mrs. Garcia was a descendant of the early Mexican elite, Spanish by blood, who had trekked up from Mexico City to found Santa Fe in what is now New Mexico before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. She took an immediate liking to Louis, whom she found to be decent, quiet and hardworking, “without a bad bone in his body,” she said. But Elvie, in her words, was “mean” and “plain spoken,” or tough and vulgar.
One time Elvie confided in her, “Unless I want something real bad, I keep my husband at bay,” meaning no sex. “He knows where his bread and butter is coming from. After I keep him away long enough, he will do anything I want.” In Mrs. Garcia’s view, “Elvie was real bossy. She managed the money and was in charge of everything.”
The Bogles’ source of income was an enigma to the Garcias. Mr. Garcia had a steady if low-paying job in a warehouse for forty-five years, and he volunteered at the Maverick Club for Boys while Mrs. Garcia cleaned houses and babysat. All they knew about Elvie was that before coming to Amarillo she had ridden a motorcycle in the carnival and wore a helmet and riding breeches. “She never worked a day the entire time she was in Amarillo,” Mrs. Garcia said. “She was always at home during the day, and you should see the way they ate. Big roasts and coffee all the time. They set a real good table.”
One day Mrs. Garcia saw Elvie pulling piles of brand-new girdles out of boxes. “I said, ‘Elvie, where in the world did you get all those girdles?’ ” Mrs. Garcia remembered. “Elvie said, ‘Oh, that’s one of my lawsuits,’ and she just about died laughing.” Elvie said she and a friend would go to work in a store for three or four days, maybe a week, “then we’d pop something and claim our backs was hurt and get a settlement.” Elvie said they were helped “by a shyster lawyer.” In this case, the store had paid off the resulting court settlement in merchandise, the girdles. Elvie was continuing the scams she and Louis had been doing since soon after they first met. Only now they were doing them on a serial basis. Elvie had become a grifter.
When Louis built the battery crate house, Elvie was initially thrilled. “This is the first actual house I’ve ever had that is mine,” she told her neighbor. But soon she was complaining about it all the time, Mrs. Garcia said. “It just isn’t nice enough for me,” Elvie kept saying, according to Mrs. Garcia. So Louis built a larger house in the adjacent lot out of wood he salvaged from the junkyard. The roof was tar paper and the sides were gray vinyl and it too had an outhouse. But it had four bedrooms, practically a mansion in their neighborhood.
Rooster was only three years old when the Bogles settled in Amarillo, and it was clear to the Garcias that Elvie held out much hope for him, her youngest child, whom she called “the pick of the litter.” Officially, Rooster was born without a name. His Texas birth certificate shows that Louis and Elvie had a son born at 8:50 a.m. on October 12, 1941, in Wichita Falls. The space marked for “Full Name of Child” was left blank. This was not so unusual. But when Rooster found out about the omission, he believed either that Elvie was not his mother or that his parents were trying to hide something. As Rooster got older his doubts about his legitimacy got worse, and he became obsessed by that empty space, family members recalled. They thought this perceived slight may have started a brooding suspiciousness in Rooster that could turn into instant anger, rage and violence. It was not until fifteen years later, on November 22, 1956, that Elvie herself went back to Wichita Falls and petitioned the county clerk to give her youngest child an official name, Bobby Vincent Bogle.
In the meantime, he had decided to give himself a name, Dale, which he used at school. Within the family, he was always called Rooster because from infancy “he got up before the chickens wanting his bottle and so woke up his older brothers who had to babysit him,” according to his first wife, Kathy.
Later Rooster would boast to boys in his neighborhood that the nickname had another meaning. “They call me Rooster because I get all puffed up when I get in a fight,” he told one boy with whom he would have a fight that almost killed him.
The earliest surviving school record for Rooster is his second-grade report card from Mrs. Heinemann’s class at Garland Elementary School in Amarillo. It shows he earned a Satisfactory in art, physical education and music—perhaps partly a product of his proficiency on the guitar, which his father had helped teach him. He was given an Unsatisfactory in arithmetic, study habits and promptness. For his full second-grade year, in 1950–51, Rooster missed almost half of the school days and was tardy for about a third of the classes he did attend. It was an early indication of Rooster’s lack of interest in education.
As was true for his older brothers, Rooster’s parents did not make him go to Sunday school or church, nor did the family belong to any community organization such as the Maverick Club for Boys, where Mr. Garcia sent his two sons to help keep them out of trouble.
As he grew up, Rooster was always slight and short, and at age seventeen was only five feet eight inches tall and weighed a mere 120 pounds, this in a place where men grew tall and strong. Rooster was sensitive about his size. Charlie and Dude, of course, were big, and he liked to listen to their stories of going into bars and knocking other patrons out cold with their fists. “He wanted to be a Bogle,” Charlie recalled years later. “He wanted to be like us, only tougher, and begged us to teach him to fight,” Charlie said. Charlie and Dude gave him lessons. Always hit first, they counseled him, to keep the element of surprise, and since you are smaller, carry a weapon you can conceal. This led Rooster to walk around with a three-inch-long piece of pipe cased in adhesive tape to make his fist stronger and increase the chance of a knockout punch. It was his homemade version of brass knuckles.
By the time Rooster was in seventh grade, at James Bowie Junior High, Mrs. Garcia’s two boys began to keep their distance from their neighbor, though they had played together when they were younger. Phillip Garcia, who was two years older than Rooster, recalled that he had become “wild,” or violent, and liked to fight. “It got so bad that I wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Phillip said. “In fact, I wouldn’t have been caught dead with him. If I did meet up with him, I was afraid I might have been killed.”
Dennis Lindvay, another boy in the neighborhood who was in Rooster’s seventh-grade class, decided “to play with him as little as possible because he always got in fights.” Lindvay, the son of a salesman for Llano Cemetery, only a block down the street from the Bogles’ homes, was slight himself and was as shy, polite and cautious as Rooster was pugnacious. “I never in my life saw anybody as tough as Dale, and I never saw Dale lose a fight,” Lindvay said. “Dale was like a professional boxer, the way he fought with his fists. He was very skilled and aggressive.” Lindvay began to think of Rooster as “the world’s youngest professional fighter. Nobody ever lasted long with him. When the younger boys went down, their older brothers would come out and fight Dale, and they would lose too.”
Having Rooster in the neighborhood and in his class had unexpected benefits, Lindvay added. “The hoodlums from the other side of town had always beat up on us, but with Dale around, even though he was so skinny, as soon as they insulted him, he knocked them out,” Lindvay remembered.
When it came time to elect a class president in seventh grade, “Dale said we should keep out the popular kids and make sure we got a boy from our side of town for a change,” Lindvay said. Lindvay had never been a class leader, but he was Dale’s pick to be class president. “In the end,” Lindvay said, “even some of the good kids joined in, out of fear of Dale and of getting beaten, and so I was elected. I was shocked. It showed how much power and influence Dale had.”
Rooster had been getting into trouble with the law by the time he turned fifteen. He broke into vending machines to steal soda and candy. He also carried a .22-caliber pistol, which he used to shoot out the numbers on pay telephones, turning them into slot machines that disgorged their coins. One time the police caught him breaking into a store downtown, and Rooster said, “You can’t do anything to me,” according to another classmate, Jimmy Wilson, who was with him. “You can’t take me to jail, I’m too young,” Wilson recalled Rooster saying. “The cops said, ‘Sure we can,’ and they put him in jail for a few hours.”
By that time, Rooster had become well known to the police. E. N. Smith, a former Amarillo detective, said Rooster had a juvenile record that ran to a dozen pages for thefts, fighting, assaults and driving a stolen car. Rooster’s first wife, Kathy, who grew up in the same impoverished Amarillo neighborhood, said he had once forced a girl into a car he had stolen, effectively kidnapping her. Even though the girl reported it to the police, Rooster managed to get off without being charged with a crime, Kathy recalled. Rooster himself claimed that another time, when he had been drinking heavily, a teenager kicked him in the head over and over until Rooster beat him to death. In Rooster’s telling of the episode, the police found the body but he was not arrested because people were too scared of him to snitch.
Mrs. Garcia, observing from across the street, saw a pattern of behavior emerging. “Rooster was always in trouble, but Elvie actively defended him and denied he did anything bad,” she said. She thought Elvie was actually encouraging Rooster’s growing delinquency. His mother may have identified with her son because she too was short, five feet three inches tall, Mrs. Garcia said. In any case, Elvie “spoiled him rotten. She bought him fancy leather cowboy boots with pointed toes and black leather pants.” The more Rooster stole and the more he got in fights, the greater the gifts, Mrs. Garcia said. When Rooster wanted an expensive new Cushman Eagle motorcycle, Elvie went to a store and bought it for him.
His mother “only pretended to discipline Rooster,” according to his second wife, Linda. One day he broke another neighbor’s window, and when the woman complained to Elvie, she said, “I’ll take care of him.” His mother then went inside and took out a book, saying, “I’m going to hit my hand real loud, and when I do you scream.”
“Rooster was her pride and joy; whatever he wanted, he got,” Linda said. She believed Elvie was indulgent and permissive. Today such behavior would be recognized as enabling, reinforcing negative behavior by making it possible and then explaining it away. Elvie was almost a textbook example of an enabler.
To compound the problem, Rooster’s father “never opened his mouth” about the mounting number of delinquent acts, Mrs. Garcia said. But one time, when Elvie went on a long car trip to California, apparently to sell moonshine—one of many such trips family members said she made—Louis lost his patience and took out his belt and whipped Rooster. When Elvie returned home and discovered what had happened, “it almost caused a divorce, she was so angry,” Linda said.
The poor supervision exercised by Elvie and Louis over Rooster and their lack of consistent discipline fit in with the findings of another major school of criminology, what is known as “social control theory.” This school grew out of work done by sociologists at the University of Chicago as they watched crime rates soar in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s with an influx of Eastern European immigrants, the growth of bootlegging during Prohibition and the rise of urban gangs led by the Mafia. Chicago itself became their laboratory. To them, social control meant social bonds, the informal ties that can produce conformity to society’s rules. Good parents, a good education, religious beliefs and stable jobs all help create what these criminologists called “social capital,” which holds society together. The more a person is involved in conventional activities and the greater his or her ties are to their parents and spouses, the less likely a person is to break the law, the theory held. It was a valuable supplement to social learning theory, the notion that young criminals are made by imitating the behavior of their parents or older siblings.
A more recent and comprehensive iteration of social control theory, by Robert J. Sampson of Harvard and John H. Laub of the University of Maryland, offers an eerie explanation of much of what was happening in the Bogle family. The two criminologists reexamined the pioneering work by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck in Boston. In analyzing the Gluecks’ data, the professors found that “the largest predictor of delinquency” was the mother’s supervision. Poor supervision by both the mother and the father, inconsistent discipline by parents, and alcoholism and criminality among parents all turned out to be important factors in the origin of juvenile delinquency and later adult crime, the professors concluded in their book, Crime in the Making. Both alcoholism and family criminality were critical because they made it harder for fathers and mothers to properly supervise and discipline their children. Instead of focusing on race or neighborhoods, or poverty and prisons as a cause of criminality, Professors Sampson and Laub wrote, “our research suggests that family life is far more important in understanding persistent criminal behavior in the early adolescent years.” For their research, Sampson and Laub were awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2011. It is the highest international honor in the field of criminology.
Elvie and Louis’s lack of supervision and erratic discipline also affected John, Dude and Charlie. They had grown up in an even more chaotic family environment, while their mother and father were working in the carnival. They lived in trailers when the show season was on, traveling from city to city, or in rented houses for a few months in the winter and later in a tent that they pitched whenever they moved. Their mother was often absent, busy riding her motorcycle. Their living conditions were crowded. The Boston study found that frequent moves and crowded housing also made it harder for parents to provide good supervision and discipline for their children. The Bogles were hardly an organized crime family; they were more of a disorganized crime family, a dysfunctional family, even if the boys were close to their mother and father. The boys all ended up with criminal records, and in Amarillo, Dude and Charlie themselves directly contributed to Rooster’s first criminal conviction.
At the beginning of his ninth-grade year, in September 1957, Rooster already had a number of girlfriends. They were attracted by his combination of charm and toughness, a persona that reminded some of the girls of James Dean, the brooding young actor whose film Rebel Without a Cause had been an enormous hit two years earlier. Rooster was not an athlete—he didn’t even like sports, which required teamwork—but he was quick with his fists and also his feet, which he used to kick opponents in the groin. He often practiced his kicking by dropping a can from his hand, then trying to kick it before it hit the ground and propelling it as high as possible.
Rooster began going out with Kathy when she was only eleven years old. He made her feel good by giving her attention, something she got little of from her alcoholic, impoverished parents. One night Rooster snuck her out of her bedroom window and took her for a ride in a Ford his mother had bought for him. Kathy never forgot that Rooster drove while hanging on the outside of the door, below the window, to escape detection by the police, who he said were looking for him. She was impressed that he smelled of leather, the black pants that Elvie had purchased for him.
At the time, Rooster had another girlfriend, Margaret Presley, but he got tired of her and dumped her, and she became the girlfriend of Rooster’s friend and chief rival in their class, Jimmy Wilson. Both boys were born in Wichita Falls before moving to Amarillo, and both of their families were “dirt poor,” Wilson recalled years later. On the evening of September 5, 1957, a rainy night, Presley had a party at her house to which Rooster was not invited. Rooster learned about it and thought she was betraying him by taking up with Wilson, so Rooster broke into the house while the party was going on. “He slammed her up against the wall and grabbed her by the neck and choked her, and tore off the chain I had given her and slapped her in the head,” Wilson recalled. Wilson challenged Rooster to “take the fight outside.” They agreed to meet at an abandoned house nearby where bootleggers made moonshine. Each boy named his second. Rooster’s was another school friend, Pat Dunavin.
Rooster arrived for the fight on his new Cushman Eagle motorcycle. Wilson was walking. Wilson was several inches taller than Rooster and at least twenty-five pounds heavier. In keeping with his habit, Rooster hit Wilson first, Wilson later told the police, with the short metal pipe concealed in his hand. The blow opened a big cut over Wilson’s right eye that required a number of stitches to close. Wilson meanwhile had picked up what he claimed was a stick, but that the police said was a two-by-four piece of lumber that was four feet long. He cracked Rooster on the side of his head, instantly knocking him unconscious. That ended the fight.
Dunavin thought Rooster had just passed out. “So I picked him up and put him on my motor scooter and drove him to my house,” Dunavin remembered. He then got a wet rag from his family’s bathroom and tried to bring Rooster to. “It was my mother who figured out it was a much worse injury,” Dunavin added. “She called an ambulance, which took him to the hospital.”
Rooster arrived at the Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo in critical condition with a fractured skull. The next morning he underwent surgery that lasted four hours. He remained unconscious for three days, and even after he regained consciousness he was partially paralyzed on his right side and was unable to speak for a month.
Jimmy Wilson was arrested as a juvenile, put in jail for several days and initially feared he might face execution. When Rooster was finally released from the hospital and regained much of his ability to speak, Wilson was sentenced to eight years’ probation.
The fight had long-term consequences for Rooster. He had a hole the size of a silver dollar in his skull and would need more brain surgery. He suffered from epilepsy and for years into the future took a combination of phenobarbital, used for treatment of seizures, and Sodium Dilaudid, a narcotic painkiller. Dilaudid is highly addictive, and its effects may intensify with alcohol. Rooster’s speech remained impaired, and he never went back to school after the fight, so his education stopped at eighth grade.
His personality changed too. He became even more impulsive and more paranoid, according to Kathy, and he began drinking even more, though he was only fifteen at the time of the fight. Long after Rooster was injured, doctors and other researchers would find that traumatic brain injuries can cause precisely these types of changes in personality and behavior, making people who suffer them more impulsive, more paranoid and, in some cases, more prone to violence. One group of people who have suffered these effects are professional football players with repeated concussions. They have developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease that can lead to impulsivity, disinhibition and poor judgment. This condition can be confirmed only by posthumous exams of their brains, and CTE was not known about in Rooster’s day. Nor did doctors at the time have the sophisticated brain scans and magnetic resonance imaging tests, MRIs, that exist today. So how much of Rooster’s later behavior can be attributed to the brain damage he incurred in the fight must remain conjecture.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the brain injury, Rooster was ready for more adventure only a year later. Charlie and Dude had just the ticket. Dude wanted to try out the burglar skills he had learned in prison in Kansas, and he came up with a plan to break into the safe inside the Bogles’ neighborhood grocery store, Scivally’s Affiliated Food Store. The store was a plain-looking cinder block building with a large eight-hundred-pound Mosler safe sitting on a raised, enclosed platform three steps above the main floor. Tom Scivally, the owner and manager, used the platform as his office; it was also a good vantage point to keep track of what was going on in the store. Dude knew from shopping there that most of the customers cashed their weekly paychecks in the grocery on Fridays or Saturdays, since few of these working-class people had bank accounts. They worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, whose tracks ran nearby, or did construction jobs or worked for the city. Tom Scivally was happy to cash their checks because they bought their food from him; cashing payroll checks was good for business.
Dude invited Charlie to help with the burglary, but Charlie turned him down. He was married now, with a wife and four young children to consider, and he was trying to be an ironworker. Dude instead enlisted two other men with petty criminal records, Fred Box and Donald Ray Branham. At eleven p.m. on the night of Sunday, December 7, 1958, Box broke a window in the back door of the store and crawled inside. He then unlocked the door and let in Dude and Branham. When Dude and his friends tried to lift the steel and concrete safe, they realized it was too heavy to get down the steps and out the back door, which faced a dirt alley. Dude decided to go fetch Charlie, who was both strong and handy. If anybody could wrestle the safe down the steps, it was him.
This time Charlie agreed. He brought some two-by-fours, and he figured they could work the safe down the steps. Charlie also offered his old Mercury sedan. After the four men got the safe down to the main floor, they used a dolly they found in the store to roll it to Charlie’s car, which he had parked in the alley. They drove it to Llano Cemetery, less than a block from where the Bogles lived, and put it in an area where workmen had dumped dirt they had recently dug up while creating new grave sites. Then, in their excitement, the four men got drunk. They started singing and shouting so loudly that the police heard them and arrested them for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. The men were put in jail for the night. The police didn’t yet know about the burglary and had not seen the safe in the graveyard.
The story of the missing safe was played at the top of the front page in both of the city’s newspapers for several days. Scivally estimated the burglars had made off with close to $20,000 in cash and checks. The detective assigned to lead the police investigation, E. N. Smith, said it was one of the biggest burglaries in the city’s history. It also made for a “miserable Christmas” for Scivally and his family. “It could have bankrupted us,” he said later. “It was a big blow. We were sleepless for a few nights.” But they soon figured out that they had enough receipts and other documentation to make an insurance claim for some of the cash and checks.
The police were skeptical at first that the burglars would be savvy enough to get the safe open, unless they were part of a gang of professional burglars from Dallas. Lieutenant Eli Leflar told The Amarillo Globe Times that the type of safe was one of the toughest to crack. It had what the Mosler company called an internal burglar-resistant chest, with a tube of double-thick steel encased in concrete, and it was also equipped with a self-locking device that would activate if someone tampered with the safe. “If the burglars don’t know what they are doing, or can’t find a safe-man who does, they may never get that thing open,” Leflar told the paper.
When the Bogles got out of jail the next day, they decided to move the safe to a more discreet spot. They needed a bigger vehicle for the safe, which had caused Charlie’s car to sag badly, so they borrowed a truck from Rooster’s older sister, Peggy, and then stopped by their parents’ house, where Rooster lived. As soon as he saw the safe, Rooster announced, “I’m coming with you.” It was a fateful decision, made, as was often the case, on impulse. Rooster had just made himself a criminal.
The newly enlarged group drove fifteen miles northwest of Amarillo to an isolated, middle-of-nowhere place up a draw on some sandy ranchland. There were low bushes and hills that made good cover. The men worked on opening the safe for three days, using an acetylene torch they stole from a Santa Fe Railroad workshop to cut through the top. They rigged a canvas cover and several tarps to hide the flame just in case anyone came by. It took so long to burn through the Mosler’s protective walls that the metal looked like it was burning, so the men poured water on the safe to keep the money inside from catching fire. When the burglars finally broke through, they discovered that the water had soaked the cash. More important, they found that bits of molten metal had dripped inside burning pinhole-sized openings in a number of the bills.
The five men then drove back to Louis and Elvie’s house in Amarillo and hung the wet bills to dry on clotheslines they strung inside the small house. This sight did not escape Elvie’s attention. “The boys weren’t smart enough to figure out how to divide up the money, so they gave the task to Elvie,” according to A. B. Towery, who was married to Rooster’s sister, Peggy.
Elvie first sat down at the kitchen table and counted the money. The cash portion came to $5,700. She gave each of the five men, including Rooster, $900, and she dealt herself $500, all that was left of the bills that were not too badly burned.
At this point the police still didn’t know who the burglars were. Over the next few weeks, however, bills with pinholes in them began surfacing in bars and stores around Amarillo. The big break in the case came when a young woman bought a fake fur coat with some of these telltale holes, Detective Smith said. The police picked her up and interrogated her. Faced with arrest and going to prison as an accomplice, she said the money had come from Dude.
Seven weeks after the robbery, the police arrested Charlie, Dude and Rooster and the two men who had helped them. Smith also arrested Elvie and took her to police headquarters for questioning. “She was hard as nails,” Smith said, “a tough old woman, and she never told us a thing.” In fact, Elvie insisted the police had it all wrong. “My boys would never do something like that,” she told the detective.
Given Elvie’s denials, Smith brought Charlie, Dude and Rooster into the room and announced that there was enough evidence to charge their mother and their sister, Peggy, as accessories. Elvie would have to go to trial and faced a prison sentence. Smith was an imposing figure, a tall, dark-haired man with big hands who spoke with the twang of the small farming town in the Texas Panhandle where he was born. His parents and neighbors were “all God-fearing Christians, who believed in hard work and an honest living,” he liked to say. So the Bogles’ behavior offended him. He was also astute enough to see that the Bogle sons loved their mother. His threat to charge Elvie and Peggy worked. The three Bogle men quickly agreed to plead guilty if the charges against their mother and sister were dropped.
On April 3, 1959, Dude was sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary, as the principal in the burglary; Charlie received two years as an accessory; and Rooster was initially handed a much more lenient punishment of five years of probation. He would need to be careful, however. If he violated the terms of his probation, the judge warned him, it could be revoked and he would also be sent to prison. For Smith the case was a career booster. He later rose to be chief of detectives in Amarillo and then became a police captain. A. B. Towery, Peggy’s husband, began calling Elvie “Ma Barker,” after the legendary leader of a gang that consisted of her four criminal sons. They committed a series of robberies and murders in Missouri and Oklahoma from 1910 to the 1930s. Peggy did not appreciate the comparison. She later divorced Towery.
Rooster did not heed the warning. Less than a year later he left Texas without permission from his probation officer and went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. He compounded his trouble by getting caught shoplifting by the New Orleans police. They shipped him back to Amarillo, where he was arrested and put back in front of a judge, who sentenced him to five years in the penitentiary.
A report by a psychologist for the Texas Department of Corrections soon after Rooster arrived at the penitentiary at Huntsville, in April 1960, found that Rooster had an IQ of only seventy-seven. He was still suffering from epilepsy incurred in the fight with Jimmy Wilson, his speech was still impaired and the psychologist “was impressed that he is mentally defective, mentally dull at best.” A separate report by a prison psychiatrist said Rooster showed no hallucinations, thought disorder or psychosis. “His general information is poor and his calculations are poor, even considering his eighth grade education,” the psychiatrist wrote. Moreover, he cautioned that Rooster’s police record showed he had a pattern of “anti-social behavior which began some years before his skull injury.” As if to confirm Rooster’s propensities, within a week of being admitted to Huntsville he was sent to solitary confinement for fighting with another inmate.
A few weeks later, a medical exam revealed that Rooster had indeed suffered a skull fracture “with a defect in the left parietal area.” Damage to the left parietal lobe can result in difficulty writing, or trouble with math or language. It can also cause an inability to perceive things normally, including people, objects, shapes or sounds and smells. Dr. M. D. Hanson, the medical director of the Texas Department of Corrections, reported this news in a letter to Elvie on May 16, 1960. But he also had some good news for her. As a result of Rooster’s physical and mental condition, he had been classified “Third Class,” which in Texas prison terms meant that Rooster would be exempt from being sent to one of the state’s notorious prison farms and would remain at the main prison at Huntsville.
Charlie was not so fortunate. He was assigned to Eastham, the most brutal and terrifying of all the state’s prison farms, where inmates clad in white uniforms worked on thirteen thousand acres of swampy river bottomland near Houston. They labored raising cotton under the supervision of guards mounted on horseback and armed with shotguns, Charlie remembered. “You had to call them ‘Boss,’ ” Charlie said. “You couldn’t fall behind in picking cotton or they would whoop you.” At night the Eastham inmates were housed in crowded dorms with double and triple bunks that were run by building tenders, usually the biggest and strongest convicts with reputations for cruelty. Clyde Barrow, the outlaw, had helped give Eastham its reputation. It was at Eastham in 1931 that Barrow killed a building tender who had repeatedly raped him. A year later, still at Eastham, Barrow cut off his own left big toe and part of another toe, leaving him with a permanent limp, in an attempt to get out of the punishing fieldwork under the hot Texas sun.
Charlie spent eighteen months confined at Eastham. After that, Charlie said in his laconic fashion, “I changed. I couldn’t do it no more. They showed me something.”