Getting released from prison was becoming a familiar ritual for the Bogles, like celebrating a birthday or graduating from high school in many families, except, of course, that the Bogles were seldom able to enjoy such happy passages of ordinary American life. So after Charlie, Dude and Rooster served their time in three separate Texas prisons, the Bogle brothers once again looked forward to coming home to Amarillo and being together with their extended family. The question was, Could they escape their family’s already building heritage of scams and crime, what some of them were beginning to sense was a family curse that ensnared them?
Charlie was intent on going straight. In his first week at home in 1960, though, he realized it would not be easy. He got pulled over almost every day by police in cruisers who knew his car by sight. “If there was any kind of break-in, the law was always looking at me,” Charlie said. It happened so often that Charlie and his brothers imagined the police had created a new category of crime, “Driving while Bogle,” they called it. It was an early form of what today would be called profiling. Charlie was also easy for the police to recognize, a big man with dark curly hair, a high forehead, his family’s characteristic protuberant ears and heavy eyebrows that gave him a passing resemblance to Bela Lugosi.
One night at a dance hall a man accused Charlie of sticking him up while Charlie was riding on a motorcycle. “But I can’t even drive a motorcycle,” Charlie protested to the police. They took him to the city jail anyway and held him for three days on suspicion of robbery.
That was it for Charlie. “It was time for me to get out of there and make a fresh start,” he decided, even though he wanted to be near his parents and brothers. He had a destination in mind—the fertile, green Willamette Valley in western Oregon, nestled between the Cascade Mountains with their snow-covered volcanoes and the Pacific Ocean. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Willamette Valley had been the hoped-for destination of many of the pioneers on the Oregon Trail. They had heard it described as the Promised Land, or as a New Eden, in the words of Hall Jackson Kelley, the Harvard-educated promoter of settlement in what was then known as the Oregon Country, claimed by both the United States and Great Britain. After reading the journals of Lewis and Clark, who had made that first, epochal journey down the Columbia River to the Pacific in 1805, Kelley wrote to newspapers across the East Coast, “The word came expressly to me to go and labor in the field of philanthropic enterprise and promote the propagation of Christianity in the dark and cruel places about the shores of the Pacific.” The Oregon Country, Kelley wrote, was a land with “sublime and conspicuous” mountains, a “salubrious” climate, a place “well watered, nourished by a rich soil and warmed by a congenial heat.”
Charlie knew about the Willamette Valley because he had already wandered through Oregon several times in earlier years of bumming around and committing petty crimes. Once, on his way home to Texas, he ran out of gas and out of money just north of Salem. He earned some cash there by signing up to pick strawberries during the harvest. He stayed in a migrant farmworkers’ camp on the northeast edge of Salem called Labish Village. It was a collection of cheap, unpainted barracks with wooden platforms for beds and only scratchy old blankets to sleep under, with no sheets or pillows. Charlie liked the big fields around the camp with their rich, black volcanic soil and ripening crops of mint, onions and strawberries. He heard tales of catching enormous salmon and plentiful trout in the Columbia River. Charlie, of course, loved to fish. Charlie met a welder in a workingman’s bar outside Salem, and he invited Charlie to come along for lessons. Charlie quickly showed an aptitude for welding, and his new friend said he could make good money as an ironworker. Charlie made a mental note of the place. It might make a good new home someday.
With the police in Amarillo repeatedly picking him up, Charlie packed his wife and four young children into the family car, an old two-tone, brown-and-black Ford, and headed back to Salem. It was a 1,700-mile drive from Amarillo, almost the same distance as the 2,000-mile route of the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley. The last section of the drive for Charlie, in fact, was nearly identical to the original Oregon Trail, following the newly completed Interstate 84 across southern Idaho past Boise, then heading north in Idaho before crossing the Snake River into eastern Oregon and cutting northwest through the Blue Mountains until reaching the mighty Columbia.
As a teenager Charlie had hopped freight trains all across the West, from Texas to California and up to Washington, but he had never seen anything like the three-thousand-foot-deep canyon of the Columbia as he turned his family’s car west and headed downstream, toward Portland, one hundred miles away. It was a vast, desolate stretch of dun-colored cliffs, marked by multiple long, dark horizontal bands, or striations. They had been left by enormous flows of molten basalt lava that coursed down the Columbia River bed fifteen million years ago.
An early emigrant on the Oregon Trail, Harvey Kimball Hines, first glimpsed the Columbia on September 13, 1853, at a point near where Charlie, driving his family, saw it. Hines was struck by how some force of nature “had worn and ground” the basaltic rock away, leaving a smooth path down to the river. “It was our first view of the mighty river toward which we had been looking and journeying so long. We stood and gazed upon it, and felt the thrill of the successful explorer in our hearts as when the goal of hopes attained rises to the vision.”
Looking down the Columbia, with his wife and four children, Charlie too had a vision, like the pioneers: make a new life in the Willamette Valley, free of his family’s troubles.
Rooster was a different case. Prison had not chastened him or made him less defiant or pugnacious. When he was released from the state penitentiary at Huntsville on May 26, 1961, he was given a bus ticket back to Amarillo and told that he would be on parole for three years. The conditions of his parole were clear: he needed to get a job, stay out of trouble and report regularly to his new parole officer in Amarillo, Roy Crumley. Rooster went back to living with his mother and father as if he had never been sentenced to prison, and he showed no interest in finding a job or checking in with his parole officer. In Crumley’s first “Progress Report” on Rooster, dated June 26, 1961, he noted that Rooster was not working and that “his mother seems to be over protective of him.” Elvie was trying to check in with Crumley on Rooster’s behalf, despite the officer’s warning that “Bogle must do the parole, himself, contact this office, instead of her trying to telephone, make arrangements for various permissions and making excuses for her son.” In Rooster’s first month out, Crumley also reported, he had already been arrested for driving a stolen car and on suspicion of taking part in several burglaries. Rooster was back in the comfort zone of his family, and his mother was again enabling him, not supervising or disciplining him. It was not an auspicious start for Rooster’s parole.
At the same time, Rooster had gotten back together with Kathy Curtis, one of his girlfriends before the burglary. That August, Crumley gave Rooster permission to marry Kathy. He was nineteen. She was fourteen.
Kathy’s family was even poorer than the Bogles. Her father was an alcoholic house painter and musician who played the steel guitar at neighborhood house parties in exchange for liquor. Her mother, who had only finished third grade, was a part-time bartender and drugstore counter clerk who supplemented her meager income by cleaning houses. When Kathy went to fill out an application for a marriage license, her mother had to sign it on her behalf.
Kathy married Rooster on September 2, 1961, at the Pentecostal church where she had been baptized. She was wearing a fuchsia satin evening gown, really a repurposed prom dress that belonged to her aunt Lucille Curtis, the most prosperous member of the family, whose father was a car salesman. When the preacher reached the part of the ceremony where he asked Kathy, “Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?,” she stammered out, “I take this man to be my awful husband.” The preacher laughed and said, “Katherine, it’s lawful.” But Kathy’s words were an omen of things to come in her life with Rooster, slapstick-funny before it became sad, violent and destructive.
Rooster and Kathy moved into the tiny house made from old battery crates that Louis had built next door to the Bogles’ main house. Crumley reported all that fall that Rooster still did not have a job, and judging by everything Crumley could see, was not even looking for work. “Doubtful that subject will ever hold a steady job,” the parole officer wrote on December 5, 1961. So Elvie made a decision for the family. She and Louis would move to Oregon to live near Charlie, who had gotten his first good job as an ironworker, and Rooster and Kathy would go with them. Elvie dipped into the cash reserves she had accumulated from her scams and bought an old yellow school bus. The family piled all their possessions inside it, and those that didn’t fit they tied on the top or lashed to the sides. “They looked like a bunch of hillbillies,” remarked Margaritte Garcia, their neighbor.
In January 1962, Rooster found a job as a mushroom processor at West Foods, Inc., in Salem. He worked for thirteen days, wrote his new Oregon parole officer, Leonard McHargue, “at which point he slipped and purportedly injured his back.” Elvie filed an insurance claim on Rooster’s behalf, the latest of her scams, and nine months later Rooster received a settlement of $928 from the food company’s insurance firm. Rooster immediately used all the money to purchase a used 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air. His parole officer ordered him not to drive it, because he didn’t have the money to buy insurance.
In the spring of 1962, with Rooster still not working and Kathy seven months pregnant and homesick for Texas, the family drove back to Amarillo for a few weeks. On their way back to Oregon, Elvie hatched another scheme. As their car was passing through Boise, Idaho, they drove very close to a truck and then deliberately sideswiped it. Kathy was not injured, but Elvie told her, “Lie down and say you’re pregnant and having a miscarriage.” “What is a miscarriage?” she asked. Elvie explained it to her. They drove to a nearby hospital to establish a record and then filed an insurance claim with the trucking company. The case eventually went to trial, and the Bogles pocketed a $10,000 settlement negotiated just before the jury reached a verdict. Kathy and Rooster’s first child, Melody, was born a month after the accident, in good health.
Throughout Rooster’s three years on parole, his parole officers in Amarillo and Salem grew increasingly frustrated by his lack of effort to find a job. A few days after Melody was born, for example, McHargue wrote that “subject states that most of his free time is spent at home playing records and practicing on his guitar. He wants to start a band in this area and hopes to have his friends from Texas come here so they can start the band and play in Salem. The subject’s major problem remains steady employment.”
A few months later, in October, McHargue toughened his language, though he had no real leverage. “Subject has no prospects for employment. Writer is doubtful he would work if he had a job. Appears all the subject wants to do is to play the guitar.” His hobbies are “loafing, fishing and playing the guitar.” His mother “watches over him and makes excuses for him” by letting him, his wife and the baby live at home with her, rent-free, McHargue reported.
Equally annoying to the parole officers was that Rooster was drawing county welfare money in Salem for himself, Kathy and their baby even though he was unwilling to do the work legally required to earn it. “Too lazy to work for welfare,” McHargue fumed. In December 1963, McHargue reported that Rooster went to the Oregon State Medical School in Portland and had a free operation to place a plastic plate in his skull to cover the hole still left from his fight with Jimmy Wilson. One of the last entries in Rooster’s parole file noted the birth of his second child, Tony, on February 7, 1964. Then, given the limited power of parole officers, McHargue had to close Rooster’s file when the state of Texas officially declared he had finished his parole that June. He was still unemployed.
The failure of the parole officers, in Texas and Oregon, to make Rooster get a job and try to make him a better citizen reflects both a weakness in the criminal justice system and a lack of understanding about the role families can play in perpetuating crime. Parole officers tend to have caseloads that are too big to allow them to spend more than a few minutes a week or month to supervise, no less investigate, the newly released offenders they are charged with monitoring. They are the poor stepchildren of the criminal justice system, with the bulk of the money going to build and run the most expensive part, prisons. Moreover, at that time the little academic research that had been done on how crime tends to run in families had received scant attention outside of some universities’ criminology departments. So Rooster’s parole officers had never looked into the rest of his family and were unaware that his father and mother, as well as his older brothers and sister, had themselves been arrested for crimes and that Rooster was at risk of being infected by their behavior.
Rooster himself had found other things to do. Less than four months after being released from parole, he was arrested for having sex with a fourteen-year-old African American girl in Salem. He was still married to Kathy and by now had three infant children. Exactly what happened between Rooster and the girl is unclear because most of the records in the case were destroyed in a fire in the Marion County Courthouse. Rooster told his second wife, Linda, a friend of the girl, that he had snuck her out of a window in her family’s house and taken her to a party where they got drunk and had sex. Initially, Rooster was charged with statutory rape when the girl’s mother went to the police. But after he was arrested, on October 7, 1964, he agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The one document that survives, the sentencing document, records that in January 1965 Rooster was sentenced by Judge George Duncan of Marion County to a year in jail, with the sentence to be suspended.
Rooster’s sexual proclivities would leave a deep stamp on the lives of his first and second wives and all his children.
It was around Christmas that same year, 1965, when Rooster met Linda, then Linda White, another young woman who took his fancy, the sixteen-year-old offspring of two migrant farmworkers who had moved to California during the Depression from their homes in small towns in Arkansas and Oklahoma. They were Okie fruit tramps, by their own description. In the 1960s they heard about the bountiful fruit pickings in Oregon, so they had moved north to the Willamette Valley. Their son, Tommy, was scheduled to get out of the Oregon State Penitentiary at the end of December after serving a sentence for stealing a money-order machine, and they wanted to celebrate his release. So Linda’s father planned a party and hired two young men from the neighborhood who played the guitar to provide the music—Rooster and his cousin, Michael Bogle, the son of Rooster’s uncle John, who years earlier had been sent to the Gatesville School for Boys in Texas. They all lived in Labish Village, the migrant farmworkers camp where by then Rooster’s parents had somehow managed to buy two houses. Tommy White, when he emerged from prison, had the same small blue tattoo under his left eye that identified him as a convict.
Linda was pretty, very shy and smart even though she had dropped out of school after the ninth grade, largely because her parents could not afford decent clothes for her and she was ashamed to be seen in school with her worn-out, hand-me-down outfits. Her father had put Linda to work in the fields at the age of three, along with her five siblings, and every sunset she had to turn in the tickets she earned from picking flats of strawberries or pounds of beans, fifty cents for a flat of berries, made up of twelve boxes.
Her father, who had ascended to the job of row boss, took the cash earned by each of his children “and bought him a gallon of wine every night,” Linda remembered. The Whites lived in the workers’ wood shacks or, during some winters, in chicken coops a farmer lent them. They never had running water or electricity, and the only toilets were outdoor latrines. Linda’s mother cooked the same meal every day: biscuits made from baking powder, flour, salt and water. She put water on the biscuits for gravy. Linda didn’t remember ever having milk, and they seldom enjoyed even a small helping of meat.
When Linda first met Rooster at the party, she “couldn’t stand him,” she recalled. “He was a real show-off and thought he was God’s gift to women.” Rooster was still very thin, only 125 pounds, and wore his fancy shirts unbuttoned to the waist, an Elvis Presley look. Rooster kept coming by her house and invited her to parties with him where there was live music, dancing and a lot of drinking. This was excitement Linda had never enjoyed before. She was still a virgin. Rooster was now making an impression on Linda. “He had a deep, strong, commanding voice and a persuasive way about him,” she recalled. He was also the smartest man she ever met, even though he could barely read and never picked up a book or newspaper.
Her parents opposed her spending so much time with Rooster, who seemed to have no skills or prospects of a decent-paying job, so Rooster came up with a plan. He told her to sneak out of her house at night after her parents were asleep, and he picked her up in his car and drove her fifty miles north to Portland to the house of a woman he knew. They stayed there for four days while the police in Oregon launched a large manhunt for Linda, who was presumed to have been kidnapped. Her parents appeared on television to appeal for information, and Linda had the odd sensation of seeing her photograph shown on television. Rooster decided she had to go home to her parents, but he told her she should call them first to extract a condition for her return: that she could continue to see Rooster. Her parents reluctantly agreed.
After Linda and Rooster got back to Salem, she met his cousin Michael Bogle, who dropped a bombshell. Did Linda know that Rooster was married to Kathy, with three children and a fourth on the way? “I didn’t like it, but I was a stupid kid,” Linda said. “So I kept on seeing him.”
Rooster and Kathy were living in a small house next to his parents that they had bought for him. Melody was four years old, Tony was two and Bobby was one. Linda’s father now threatened to press charges against Rooster. So Rooster piled Linda and Kathy into his Chevy Bel Air, the car he had bought with the insurance money for his phony back injury. They headed the 1,700 miles southeast to Amarillo, where Rooster promised Linda he would divorce Kathy and marry her. “I was so young and ignorant, I believed him,” Linda said. Kathy was so naïve that she seemed oblivious to what was going on.
After five days of partying and drinking in Amarillo, and no sign that Rooster was taking the necessary legal steps to get a divorce or marry Linda, they all got in Rooster’s car and headed back to Salem. “It was just a big con job,” Linda later realized. “Rooster never had any intention of divorcing her or marrying me.”
When they returned to Salem, Kathy surprised Linda by inviting her to move in with her and Rooster and their children. “That way I’ll see more of Rooster,” Kathy explained, “because he won’t be out so much at night chasing after you.” Elvie gave her approval of the novel arrangement. “To his mother, Rooster could do no wrong, so whatever Rooster wanted, she gave him,” Linda said. Elvie would put fresh money for gas on the hood of Rooster’s car almost every day, and there were new clothes, food for his family and lots of beer and wine to drink. Rooster still wasn’t working and both Louis and Elvie were effectively retired, but a puzzled Linda didn’t ask where the money came from.
Linda did not stay long, however. “It was horrible,” she said. The house had three bedrooms, one for Rooster and Kathy, one for Linda and one for Rooster’s three children. Rooster would go back and forth at night between Kathy and Linda, drinking heavily until he passed out drunk. Some nights he wanted to have sex with both women at once, and on many nights he got so drunk he started beating them with his fists, leaving them with swollen black-and-blue eyes. Linda moved back to her parents’ place after four months of this treatment.
Yet she kept seeing Rooster. She was in love with him. Their first child, Debbie, arrived in April 1970; their second child, Tim, was born in April 1972. In the meantime, Rooster and Kathy kept having more children too: Michael in August 1966, Vickey in September 1967, Glen in December 1968 and Tracey in November 1972.
Family life was becoming chaotic to the point of being dysfunctional, or worse. The drunken beatings continued. Linda suffered three broken noses as well as assorted cracked ribs and chipped teeth.
“When he was drinking, he’d get mean,” Linda said. “One night he pushed me down on the floor and stood on my back. He said, ‘I’m going to take you to the edge of death. If I stand on your heart, I can make it stop.’
“He started bouncing up and down on me till I couldn’t hardly breathe,” Linda recalled. “I was passing out.”
Rooster finally got off her and said, “How does that feel to almost die and then be brought back?”
Rooster was a strict, if volatile and unconventional, father to the boys, whipping them with his belt or switches he cut from trees in the yard. Tim recalled that there were days he could not go to school because the whippings left large welts and cuts on his arms, legs and back, and he was ashamed to take off his shirt in gym class. Rooster forbade the children to play with any kids outside the family, either at their own house or at their friends’ houses. Later the boys decided Rooster did not want anyone outside the family to learn about his drinking. Whatever the reason, the boys did not have to find a gang at school to learn deviant behavior; their deviant peers were right there in their own home, their own family.
When Rooster caught any of the boys with a cigarette, he made them all smoke a pack or two of cigarettes, one right after another, until the boys threw up and their noses and throats burned. “Are you ever going to smoke again?” Rooster then asked them.
Rooster had each of his boys learn to box and even built a ring near their house where he staged tournaments and bet on his boys. Rooster kept the money when they won. He thought he was making them tough, as he had been, and instilling discipline.
He gave them wine to drink when they were as young as six or seven years old. One time he made Tony get drunk and then ordered him to box his much larger father. Rooster forced Tracey, the youngest boy, to drink such large amounts of beer that he became an alcoholic as a teenager, an addiction that contributed to his criminal proclivities.
There were no birthday parties or celebrations of Christmas that any of the brothers could recall. “Rooster thought presents and toys were stupid,” Tracey said. Perhaps because Rooster did not read very well, there were no books or newspapers in the house, and he did not go to parents’ nights at the schools his children attended or help with his boys’ homework.
Rooster talked all the time about his criminal exploits, all the fights he had won, how he thought he had killed a man in a fight in Amarillo, and particularly about the burglary and his time in prison at Huntsville. He made himself sound like a really big-time criminal, like Clyde Barrow or John Dillinger, the boys thought.
“Those talks really impressed me,” Tony remembered years later, sitting in a prison in Arizona where he is serving a life sentence without parole for murder. “They made him important in my mind. It made me want to do something to impress him. Maybe that’s what made me a criminal”—the social learning theory of criminology in action.
Rooster showed six-year-old Tony how to steal bicycles and took him to a shop that would buy the stolen bikes without asking any questions. Rooster also went with Tony to steal cows from a farmer’s pasture and then sold them.
As the children got older, Rooster began taking the whole gang of them, often with Kathy and Linda along too, to burglarize a neighbor’s house or garage for items to sell for cash. The family’s biggest caper was their break-in at the salmon hatchery at the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River east of Portland.
Rooster needed the cash he made from these crimes because he was still not working full-time. At Charlie’s encouragement, Rooster learned to weld, spending time on job sites with Charlie and Dude, who had already gotten their ironworker union cards. Charlie had done so well as an ironworker that he was hired to work on the construction of the World Trade Center in New York in the late 1960s, and he kept a black-and-white photo of himself on top of one of the towers in his Salem trailer home. Eventually, Rooster learned enough to pass the state test and get his own ironworker certificate.
Rooster took a special, if unorthodox, interest in his boys’ sexual education. Despite having Kathy and Linda in his house, Rooster often cruised the local bars looking for women to pick up and take to a motel for the night. When Tony was about thirteen, Rooster started the practice of bringing one of his sons to join him and the woman he had picked up at the motel to initiate them into sex. Rooster went first and then told Tony to climb up on the woman while he watched. A couple of years later, when Bobby was thirteen, it was his turn, and his father brought him to a motel to have sex with a redhead named Ginger. The next year it was Michael, who was in the seventh grade. It was in a motel in Reedsport, on the Oregon coast, where Rooster was working at the time, and he had rented the motel room and already had picked up a woman, Daisy Mae, who owned a nearby bar. When Michael walked in at four a.m. as instructed, Rooster was having sex with her. He got off the woman and ordered Michael to climb right on in his place. “I was scared and embarrassed, and I cried,” Michael said. “The woman was fifty or sixty years old, older than my mother, and very heavy. It was disgusting. And my father was there watching. It was also a school night, so I had to leave the motel early in the morning and go straight to school.” A few years later, Michael was arrested and sent to prison for having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. He claimed he didn’t know her age and thought she was eighteen. It was statutory rape, nonetheless, and the crime made Michael a registered sex offender, an unhappy legal status that followed him wherever he moved for years to come.
Rooster was also giving his boys sex lessons at home, unknowingly. Bobby had drilled a small hole in his father’s bedroom wall so he could observe what was going on. At night he could often hear a lot of moaning and crying and shouting coming from the bedroom, and sometimes he could see his father having sex with his mother, or Linda, and sometimes he watched as his father beat one or both of the women. “Watching all that, it kind of stimulated me, but it also messed me up,” Bobby said. “I had seen my dad beat them up all the time and I had watched him having sex with them, sometimes both at once, so I thought sex was part of their punishment.” One day Rooster caught him peeking through the wall and made Bobby wear women’s panties around the house for everyone to see.
Tracey, the most articulate and thoughtful of the boys, tried to sum up what had happened in his family. “We really didn’t have a childhood,” he said. “Rooster tormented us, he tortured us, and we were the product of that.” Since he has been in prison for most of his life, Tracey has had a chance to read. “I’ve learned about the importance of nurturing,” Tracey said. “But there was no nurturing going on in the Bogle family.” His dad, Tracey said, “had a heart of stone. He never told me he loved me, or cared for me. Not once. He was always beating me or criticizing me.” This is the power an abuser holds. He exerts such dominance that those under his sway feel powerless to resist. Rooster had anointed himself to this position, a master manipulator, oblivious to the law and living in an empire of his own making.
The boys did not have toys, because Rooster didn’t like toys, and they didn’t play sports, since Rooster did not like sports. “So our only game was stealing,” Tracey said. “Rooster taught us to steal stuff, and it was for him. That was the fun thing in our lives, stealing. It had a very powerful effect on us, and there was a domino effect. It started with Tony, and then it was passed on to Bobby, and next to Michael, Glen and me and even to Tim. We copied each other.”
Perhaps because Tony was the eldest, or more likely because Elvie had taken a liking to him, making him her new pet in place of his father, Rooster was particularly hard on Tony. When Tony was around the age of six, Rooster taught him to drive a motorcycle. Later, he lined up a series of automobile tires back-to-back and made Tony jump the motorcycle over them. When Tony mastered that trick, Rooster put fifty-gallon oil drums under the tires and made Tony jump the double height. He didn’t always succeed; when he failed, Rooster would cut out a switch and whip him.
Rooster had a .30-30 rifle, and he ordered Tony to stand sideways with matches between his teeth as he shot the wooden sticks out. Sometimes Rooster did this trick when he was drunk, and Tony got scared. Other times, Rooster put the matches in his own mouth and ordered Tony to shoot them out. That made Tony even more terrified. “What if I missed and killed my dad?” he once said. But while sitting in his prison cell in Arizona, years later, Tony came to believe he would have made all their lives easier if he had just shot his father. It was an astonishing insight into how tortured and tormented Tony was.
Where Rooster was a harsh and inconsistent disciplinarian, Kathy was lax, a parody of permissive parenting. Linda said later she thought that Kathy had married so young that she never really grew up. She was like a child with her own children.
In Tracey’s memory, “My mother wasn’t very responsible. She was going through her hippie phase, sitting around smoking marijuana or doing acid. The house was always full of other young people, friends of hers who were younger than her, and they called me the bartender. My job was to pass out pills and drinks. I didn’t like it.”
In academic terms, the Bogles had created a family where there was both social learning—imitation of criminal behavior—and almost no social control, the learned values and bonds that could inoculate a family against deviant behavior.
To make matters worse, in 1972, when Tony was eight, Linda gave birth to her own second child with Rooster, Tim Bogle, and at Kathy’s invitation Linda and her two children moved back in full-time with Rooster, Kathy and their seven children. Rooster and Kathy now had one bedroom, Linda and her two children had the second bedroom, and Rooster and Kathy’s seven kids slept in the third bedroom.
Not surprisingly, Tony, as the eldest, was the first to get in trouble—in first grade. Rooster had been taking karate lessons and began teaching Tony, age six, some of his new moves. That first year, Tony often brought a pet rat to school, named Charlie, whom he had found in a big mound of garbage that accumulated behind the Bogles’ house that they called “Mount Bogle.” One day the teacher noticed something that appeared to be crawling up Tony’s chest inside his shirt. “Take that thing out and put it in a trash can,” she ordered him. Tony said, “No way, I’m keeping him on me.”
Then he got down in his karate stance and kicked the teacher “real hard in the leg,” just like his dad had shown him, Tony said.
The school called the police. The principal told Rooster that Tony could not come back to school until Rooster took him for counseling. Rooster refused. “My boy did nothing wrong,” he told the principal. Eventually the school relented and let Tony come back to class.
Meanwhile, at home, Tony was exhibiting other signs of troubling behavior. One day he told his younger brother Glen to sit on the family’s push lawnmower, holding on to the wheels with his hands. Suddenly, Tony swerved the lawnmower sideways and Glen lost his grip, with the fingers of one hand getting caught in the cutting blades. Four of his fingers were cut off. Rooster came out and found the severed fingers and drove Glen to the hospital. A doctor was able to sew several of the fingers back together, but he never fully recovered the use of that hand.
Tony had also begun to set cats and dogs in the neighborhood on fire, one day setting so many of them on fire that the field they were playing in caught fire. Tony laughed uncontrollably.
If Rooster had taken Tony for counseling he might have learned that cruelty to animals, particularly setting cats and dogs on fire, is a classic sign of childhood antisocial behavior, which in turn can lead to psychopathic behavior or adult antisocial personality disorder. That is a big step toward criminality. Such behavior is also a sign of a child having been abused.
Tony’s cousin, Tammie Bogle, the daughter of Rooster’s older brother, Babe, remembered the incident with Glen on the lawnmower for years. When Tammie grew up, she became the religious member of the family and worked as a counselor with newly released prison inmates. The behavior exhibited by Tony and his brothers bothered her. “I remember Tony pushing Glen on the lawnmower and thought he was not all there,” Tammie said. “Those boys didn’t play normal. They talked real loud and were abusive to each other, picking on each other and always hitting each other or putting one boy in a headlock,” Tammie said. “It was as if Rooster had trained them to live out his childhood fantasies. It was how they learned to get attention. It was typical of a dysfunctional family.”
In sixth and seventh grades, Tony became hyperactive in school, unable to sit still, what would be called attention deficit disorder today, and a doctor put him on Ritalin. He didn’t do much homework and had failing grades. One of his teachers in seventh grade reported he had told her his father had two wives in their house, “My mother and my other mother,” as Tony explained it.
Tony was taken to Juvenile Court in Salem and sent to a foster home in seventh grade. He soon escaped. After his return home he was caught burglarizing houses in the neighborhood, taking after his father. He was taken back to juvenile court in front of Judge Albin Norblad. Norblad, a gray-haired man with a square jaw, silver-rimmed glasses and a deep, raspy voice, was a former prosecutor who thought of himself as a no-nonsense, law-and-order Republican. Appearances, however, could be deceiving with Norblad, because under his black robe he usually wore blue jeans and when he went home he paddled his canoe or fished on a stream near his house—a typical Oregonian who loved the outdoors.
Judge Norblad was already getting to know the Bogles. He had first had Rooster in his courtroom for bringing a woman from a bar to a motel to have sex with one of his boys. Years later Norblad didn’t remember which boy it was, but the very nature of the case made a deep impression on him. He never heard of anything like it, before or afterward, and in his career he handled more than one hundred thousand cases. His experience had worn away some of his crusty conservatism, making him more mellow, flexible and pragmatic.
The Bogles were one of four families whose trials he had presided over in which there were four generations of defendants. He had tried Rooster, and now here was Tony, and he instinctively knew there would be more Bogles before him in court, which there were. “With a family like that, I’ve become convinced that whatever we do has little effect, because the adults have permeated their kids with their values through their everyday example. It’s like an infection,” Norblad said. “With these families, we always lose.” Just locking up members of families like these would only be a waste of taxpayer money, he had concluded. It wouldn’t change them. That would require something else, maybe finding a way to separate them from all their relatives so they could not infect one another.
Unfortunately, Judge Norblad didn’t know how to do that; it wasn’t on the menu of the criminal justice system at the time. The normal tools used by probation and parole officers or by prison officials to try to change offenders’ criminal habits, like mandatory drug testing, parenting classes and job training, had little effect on the Bogles, and forcibly separating family members from one another after they had served their time in prison would be unconstitutional. In recent years, however, Norblad’s suggestion, of finding a way to separate families like the Bogles, has now been put into practice in several widely scattered programs, with good results.
The first of these came about by accident, after Hurricane Katrina pulverized New Orleans in 2005 and destroyed large chunks of the city’s housing, especially in poorer areas. A young criminologist then at the University of Texas, David Kirk, observed that Katrina offered a surprise opportunity, what he called a natural experiment. Because a significant proportion of state prisoners in Louisiana came from New Orleans, and because many of them were black and poor and had their housing destroyed by Katrina, many inmates had nowhere to go after their release. Kirk interviewed some of the inmates from New Orleans and compared them with a sample who could and did go back to their old homes. Those who did not return to their homes were 15 percent less likely to be rearrested and sent back to prison over a period of one to three years after their release than those who did go home, Kirk found. Eight years after Katrina, he looked at these men again, and while the differences between the two groups narrowed, those who stayed away were still rearrested less, especially those who had been sent to prison only once. “Those that moved away were making a break from all their social networks, providing new opportunities for supervision and social support and creating a turning point in their lives,” said Kirk, who is now an associate professor of sociology at Oxford University in England. One man who succeeded by moving away from New Orleans after Katrina had been a “big-time drug dealer and gang leader who was sent to prison for murder but after his release moved to Texas,” Kirk said. He has now married and has a whole new social network. He has reversed his life course and has stayed out of prison.
Kirk was so struck by the results that in 2015 he started an experimental demonstration program in Maryland to see if state prison inmates from Baltimore who volunteered to move to a suburban county after their release showed evidence of lower rates of recidivism—committing new crimes and being sent back to prison—than those who returned home to Baltimore. Getting inmates to agree not to go home after their release presents many problems, in particular because of constitutional protections. Unless they are sex offenders, subject to strict legal restrictions, no one can dictate where newly released inmates go to live.
Kirk ultimately devised a financial incentive for newly released offenders who volunteered to move out of Baltimore—housing subsidies provided by the state of Maryland. With the cooperation of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Kirk recruited volunteers from four Maryland prisons and offered them housing subsidies. Half were assigned to move to Prince George’s County, Maryland, a suburban area forty miles from Baltimore, and the other half were a control group who went back to Baltimore, where they had lived prior to being incarcerated. Kirk called it the MOVE program, the Maryland Opportunities through Vouchers Experiment. Ultimately, thirty inmates were included in a pilot program. Those who consented to move to Prince George’s County received $1,230 a month for six months, a figure pegged to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s established fair-market rent for private housing in the area. Kirk thought the cost a bargain, considering that the national average daily expense for an inmate in prison is $100.
Kirk acknowledges that both the small sample size and the short passage of time do not allow statistically valid conclusions yet. He is very encouraged, however, that none of the participants who moved away from Baltimore has been rearrested or sent back to prison, while half of those who stayed in Baltimore have been rearrested. He is now preparing to expand the program in size and duration.
A similar effort was launched in Reggio Calabria, in the southern toe of Italy, a stronghold for a branch of the Mafia known as the ’Ndrangheta, where children as young as eleven or twelve have served as lookouts during murders, or taken part in drug deals and mob strategy sessions and received training in how to handle Kalashnikov assault rifles. The Mafia has recruited children for these tasks because if they are caught, they are subject to much less serious punishment than adults. After watching this go on for years, Robert Di Bella, the local magistrate and president of the area’s children’s court, decided to take a drastic step. He has separated children from parents convicted of mob affiliation and moved them to different parts of Italy into foster families to break the intergenerational cycle of criminality.
“Sons follow their fathers,” Di Bella told The New York Times. “But the state can’t allow that children are educated to be criminals,” he said. Since 2012, Di Bella has sent about forty boys and girls, from twelve to sixteen years old, into this sort of witness-protection program. About a quarter of the time, mothers looking to flee the Mafia’s grip have ended up going with their children. So far, Di Bella said, none of the children he has separated from their families has committed another crime. In 2017, the Italian Justice Ministry codified laws so that Di Bella’s program can be applied nationwide to combat the Mafia.
In a country where close-knit families are still the norm, some Italians have expressed outrage at the program, with critics calling it “Nazi-like.” Yet some fathers have written to Di Bella, he said, to thank him for his innovation. Many children have told him they finally feel free. Some mothers have even asked him to send their children into foster care to save them from a life of crime or risk being killed.
When Judge Norblad had Tony in front of him, though, these programs were still far in the future. So after hearing the facts of Tony’s life, as much as anyone outside the family knew, he ordered Tony to be sent to the Oregon State Hospital in January 1978, at the age of thirteen.
It is important to point out that virtually all the boys who came before Judge Norblad, and all the members of the four families he dealt with that had four generations of criminals, were white. Oregon is one of the whitest states, with blacks making up only 2.l percent of its population. This was because of a quirk of history. Many of the early pioneers on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and 1850s came from slave states, including Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky, near the start of the trail, in Independence, Missouri. Pro-slavery politicians dominated the state’s early legislature, and there was some sentiment to secede when Abraham Lincoln was elected president. However, because it was far away and isolated, Oregon needed federal government help, particularly against Native Americans. So when the state constitution was passed in 1857, a proposal to allow slavery was defeated, but the voters also overwhelmingly approved a clause to exclude free blacks from living in Oregon. The provision remained in the Oregon constitution until 1926.
The Oregon State Hospital, like the many other mental hospitals, or “asylums,” as they were called, built in the 1800s, was a peculiarly American institution, founded on a progressive, utopian vision. It was thought that America could find a more humane way to treat the problems of stashing the aged and the poor and the mentally sick in the almshouses and jails that dated to medieval times—crowded, dark and desperate places that offered no treatment and no hope. For a few decades starting in the 1830s, the first American psychiatrists, known as “medical superintendents,” were really architects more than doctors. They were in charge of building enormous new institutions in bucolic settings outside cities where, they confidently predicted, they could cure almost all kinds of troubled minds. Their supposed secret was the design of the institution itself, where a new environment would be created that corrected the unusual mobility and uncertainty of life in America that it was believed led to emotional difficulties. Curing insanity, in their view, was a “moral treatment.” No surgery or medicine was required. This thinking reached Oregon soon after its statehood.
The design of the buildings was the key, as Thomas Kirkbride, the medical superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, wrote in his widely printed book, On the Construction, Organization and General Arrangement of Hospitals for the Insane. Every detail was critical: the size and location of the buildings, the right construction materials, the location of the water closets, the placing of the ducts and pipes. The philosophy was simple and straightforward, as David J. Rothman put it in his masterly book The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic.
“Create a different kind of environment, which methodically corrected the deficiencies of the community, and a cure for insanity was at hand,” Rothman wrote about the work of the medical superintendents. The new asylums would “arrange and administer a disciplined routine that would curb uncontrolled impulses without cruelty or unnecessary punishment. It would re-create fixity and stability to compensate for the irregularities of society.”
The first reported results from these new asylums were seemingly miraculous. The superintendent of the new Massachusetts asylum at Worcester reported in 1834 that “in recent cases of insanity, under judicious treatment, eighty-two percent of the patients recovered.” In 1843, Dr. William Awl, of the Ohio Asylum, declared that 100 percent of his patients were cured. Of course, on closer examination, many patients seemed to be cured multiple times, improving the statistics.
The Oregon State Insane Asylum, completed in 1883, was carefully copied from Kirkbride’s Pennsylvania Hospital. It was built on a grassy campus of 140 acres in the new city of Salem only a few blocks from Oregon’s state capitol building and also near the new Oregon State Penitentiary. The hospital would eventually have thirty-one major Italianate buildings plus twenty-eight smaller cottages that housed a total of 3,474 patients.
Later in the nineteenth century, new treatments were devised as the architecture of the buildings themselves proved unable to deliver on the early optimistic promises. So the Oregon State Hospital, as it came to be called, performed lobotomies, electroshock treatments and, under the influence of the eugenics movement early in the twentieth century, more than 2,400 sterilizations for sexual deviance.
By the 1960s, these enormous state mental hospitals were passing out of favor, derided for their cruel treatments and warehousing patients for too many years far from their families—some of the same criticisms that the founders of the big state asylums had directed at the almshouses and jails that preceded them.
Promising new psychotropic drugs were suddenly seen as cures for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and major depression, the major mental illnesses, and advocates for people suffering from mental illness began calling for shutting down the big state institutions and replacing them with smaller, more humane community-based facilities. Politicians, looking to cut state budgets, found closing the state hospitals a convenient target, and their number soon shrank rapidly. New community facilities were seldom built as replacements.
In the midst of this shift, the increasingly decrepit Oregon State Hospital allowed the filming of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, staring Jack Nicholson, inside its buildings, with some real doctors and patients appearing in minor roles. The movie was a huge popular success and won all five major Academy Awards in 1976, for Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Tony Bogle found himself a patient there just two years later.
Tony was assigned to what was called the Forty Ward, or the Adolescent and Youth Treatment Program, housed in McKenzie Hall, a two-story brick structure. The youngest twenty children lived on the first floor, and the oldest twenty lived on the second floor. In his first three weeks there, Tony managed to set fire to the building and smash a greenhouse next door. As a result, he was transferred to a security unit in a smaller cottage. He was testing the authority of the staff, as he had tested his father, to see if they were strong enough to deal with him. If not, he would show them he was in control. After two weeks in the special security unit, Tony was “not improved,” according to the hospital’s records, and he was discharged. His final diagnosis was “adjustment reaction of adolescence.” This was a catchall diagnosis that basically meant Tony was a teenager having a hard time going through his growing pains. It could indicate Tony felt stress or sadness or a sense of hopelessness. Essentially the Oregon State Hospital just dumped Tony because he was too difficult.
Tony later explained to me that when his mother came to visit him on his thirteenth birthday, she brought a cake, and as soon as he blew out the candles on it the guards said it was time for her to leave. “I was angry,” Tony said in an interview in prison in Tucson. “I felt abandoned.”
A few months after the hospital let him go, Tony was arrested by the police in Salem for several burglaries. He was sent back to a medium-security juvenile facility in Salem called Hillcrest. While there, Tony often started fights and kicked and bit guards, and threatened to kill one guard.
That was too much for the facility. They took Tony back to Judge Norblad, who ordered him committed again to the Oregon State Hospital, in February 1979, at the age of fifteen. More of Tony’s troubled history came out in records submitted to Norblad. They showed that Tony had a history of setting fires to kill animals, and that he had been described as “an extremely anxious child obsessed with a number of issues, particularly regarding his father.” His father was described in the court documents as “coming from a carnival background,” which was partly true, though Rooster was born after his parents had quit being in the carnival. Tony’s father was also reported to have a prison record, a dependence on welfare and a history of alcohol abuse. Tony himself, according to a psychological evaluation by the Oregon State Hospital, suffered from “anxiety neurosis,” meaning he had strong feelings of anxiety or fear. Tony made little progress at the hospital, his record shows, and after five months he escaped.
Tony was soon caught during another burglary and was sent back to Hillcrest, which did not want him. Judge Norblad returned him to the Oregon State Hospital, in theory to finish the program he had just run away from. That all these authorities were not strong enough to corral Tony only fed his growing sense of power.
Back at the Oregon State Hospital for the third time, in late 1979, Tony “showed no interest in working on his problems or relating to his treatment team,” the hospital reported. This time his diagnosis was more specific and bleak. It was “anxiety neurosis with depressive features, and unsocialized, aggressive reaction of adolescence.” In layman’s terms, Tony was anxious, fearful and depressed, but also had an aggressive personality with a tendency to fight, and he might suffer from antisocial personality disorder as he grew to be an adult. This was tantamount to saying he was likely to become an adult criminal. After a mere two weeks, he was discharged again. “Unimproved,” the hospital said.
When Tony went home this time, the family situation had changed. Rooster, often paranoid, had come to believe that Kathy was cheating on him with other men and had initiated divorce proceedings—ironic, to say the least. In the divorce, Rooster won custody of all the children except the youngest, Tracey, whom Kathy kept. Divorce in hand, Rooster packed Linda and the children into his car and drove to Reno, Nevada, where he and Linda got married in the Starlite Chapel.
After the divorce, Tony decided to spend a night at his mother’s new house with his brother, Tracey, just like old times. Rooster unexpectedly showed up the next morning and found Tony arguing with Kathy. Rooster lost his temper, grabbed Tony and hauled him down to the Marion County courthouse to Judge Norblad, who was practically becoming a member of the Bogle family. “I can’t keep him,” Rooster said to the judge. “I’m done with him. I’m not taking him home.”
As it happened, the police had been looking for Tony because he had been observed stealing mail from the neighbors’ mailboxes, another trick Rooster had taught him. The best letters to steal, Rooster said, were those containing Social Security or pension checks, which could be cashed, or cards at Christmas, which often contained cash. This was a federal offense, so Norblad sentenced Tony to the MacLaren School for Boys, the toughest sanction he could impose.
MacLaren, as everyone called it, was Oregon’s maximum-security facility for youthful offenders, set behind tall evergreens on a large 270-acre estate of grass fields and farmland close to Interstate 5, in Woodburn, seventeen miles north of Salem. Its campus was made up largely of small cottages designed to give its young residents a welcoming family feel. It was surrounded, though, by high fences of barbed wire with their tops facing inward and down to make escape harder. MacLaren had a reputation for brutality by its guards—and by fellow inmates—with boys often locked up in chains in cold and isolated conditions and subject to beatings. MacLaren’s most famous inmate had been Gary Gilmore, a Portland native, who murdered two men in Utah and was executed there in 1977 after demanding his own execution by firing squad. Norman Mailer’s best seller The Executioner’s Song chronicled Gilmore’s life, and his younger brother, Mikal Gilmore, wrote a poignant book, Shot in the Heart, that traced much of Gilmore’s murderous rage to his stay at MacLaren. When Tony was sent there, MacLaren was in the middle of a class-action lawsuit that dragged on for ten years before the Oregon Youth Authority agreed to a number of reforms.
“When I arrived at MacLaren,” Tony recalled, “it was totally out of control.” Tony saw a boy who was in chains beaten by a burly guard for what seemed like an hour during his first day there. That night, Tony was assigned an upper bunk, unaware of what was about to happen. The first thing he knew was that something warm and wet hit him in the face, and then his blankets and sheets were pulled off and he was covered in a hot, milky substance. “The other boys were jerking off and spraying me,” Tony said. “Some boys had saved up their cum in bottles and were tossing it all over me.” It was Tony’s introduction to MacLaren’s tradition of “cum fights.”
“The guards didn’t do anything,” Tony said. “They just left us alone. It happened to every new boy when they arrived.” There were also guards having sex with the boys, sometimes in exchange for passes or for cigarettes, Tony said, and a few of the medical staff and a cook in the kitchen also had sex with the boys.
Tony got into trouble for hitting one guard over the head with a glass ashtray. The guard called for backup and a group of guards took turns beating Tony. “They sent me to the hole for a week for that,” Tony said, using the prison argot for solitary confinement. He frequently ran away, only to be recaptured and put back in solitary.
Tony was discharged sometime in 1981 and went to live with his mother, Kathy, who by this time had moved to Kennewick, part of the Tri-Cities area of southeast Washington, a two-hundred-mile drive up the Columbia River from Salem. Tracey was living there too, as was their other brother, Bobby. Tony and Bobby went on a spree of forty or fifty burglaries, Tony said. The total is certainly an exaggeration, but the police eventually caught the brothers and Tony was sent back to MacLaren.
It was there in April 1982 that Tony was charged with the sodomy of a younger boy. Tony was surprised because he had only had oral sex with a boy who often had sex with other inmates. It was no different, in Tony’s mind, than what went on every day at MacLaren, with the authorities turning a blind eye. But in this case, the boy, named Lee, had a steady boyfriend who took offense at Tony’s interference in their relationship and reported Tony to the guards. Tony was taken to Salem, and because he had turned eighteen just two months before, he was put on trial in adult court. By coincidence, Judge Norblad had just been promoted from juvenile to adult court, and the case was assigned to him. “He tossed the book at me,” Tony said. “I’ve seen you too many times before,” Norblad told him. “I’m through with you. I’m sending you to the big boys’ house.” Tony was convicted of sodomy in the second degree, meaning deviant sexual intercourse where the victim was under fourteen, and he was sentenced to ten years in the Oregon State Penitentiary, Oregon’s maximum-security prison. Tony had arrived on the big stage.