Since Kathy had insisted in the divorce agreement that Tracey must live with her, in 1980 he moved into her small apartment in Kennewick. Kathy would go out to bars every night to pick up strangers to bring home, smoking marijuana and popping pills. Kathy, now thirty-four, still had a little girl’s face, was slight and only four feet eleven inches tall, so she could pass for being ten years younger. Perhaps because of this, some of the men Kathy brought home were only a few years older than Tracey, who was eight. Kathy gave Tracey strict instructions never to call her “Mom” or “Mother” when any of these men were around.
One of Kathy’s new acquaintances was a leader of a local motorcycle gang. Another locked Tracey in the trunk of his car, so he and Kathy would not be disturbed while having sex. A third tried to drown Tracey in a swimming pool.
Kathy was changing houses every few months, when she ran out of money and could not make the rent. As Rooster soon discovered, this was in part because Kathy was cashing his court-ordered child-support checks at local liquor stores. The frequent changes in residence meant that Tracey often had to switch schools. “One day my mother dropped me off at a new school, but it was a holiday and the school was closed,” Tracey said. “She had forgotten and drove off leaving me standing there. My mom was pretty irresponsible.” Tracey did not remember the address of his latest apartment, so he walked around aimlessly, hoping for a clue. Finally a police cruiser stopped him and asked what he was doing. After he explained, the policeman took him to police headquarters and he was placed in temporary foster care.
After Rooster saw that his checks were being cashed at liquor stores, he and Linda began telephoning Tracey to find out what was happening. Tracey told them about his life, including how he had stepped on some glass and cut his foot, which was now swollen by a bad infection. When he asked his mother to take him to a doctor, Kathy said it would get better by itself.
Rooster and Linda sent Kathy a plane ticket to fly Tracey from Kennewick back to Portland, a short flight. “When we saw him get off the plane, he was like an orphan,” Linda said. “The stewardess had him by the hand, and all he had was a paper bag with all his possessions. He was wearing a cheap plastic raincoat with nothing under it: no shirt, no pants, no underwear and no socks or shoes.”
Rooster took Tracey to Judge Norblad, who awarded custody back to Rooster.
Looking from the outside, at this moment in time, one might be tempted to think that something like normalcy had settled into the Bogle household. Rooster, with his ironworkers’ certification, had more frequent jobs. All the children except Tony, who was in prison, were living under one roof, at least most of the time. But in reality life for the Bogles was not only sometimes crazy and cartoonish; it was often violent or criminal.
Later that same year, 1980, Bobby wanted to visit his mother for his sixteenth birthday. She was now back living in Amarillo, her birthplace, and Kathy took him to a strip club, the Crystal Pistol. “Out came this stripper, who I didn’t recognize at first,” Bobby said. “Then my mom said, ‘That’s your sister, Melody,’ and Mom nudged me. ‘That’s your birthday present.’ Everybody thought it was very funny and they were laughing.”
Bobby was embarrassed and offended. “I had never seen my sister nude,” Bobby said. “And they had played a trick on me. I wondered why in the world would they want me to see my sister nude, and what kind of birthday present did they think it was.”
On the drive back to Salem, Bobby and his mother quarreled in the car, and a few miles outside Salem, Kathy dropped Bobby off in the small town of Turner, without any money or way to get back to his home with Rooster. Bobby did the only thing he knew to do, what his father and older brother Tony had taught him—he burglarized a house. When that did not produce any cash, he broke into a local amusement park, the Enchanted Forest. That did get him some money—but the police caught him. Bobby soon found himself in front of Judge Norblad, who was becoming more and more convinced that the courts needed a new extralegal sanction to deal with families like the Bogles, something that could treat the whole family. But a program of that kind was still years away, so he sentenced Bobby to the MacLaren School for Boys, at the age of sixteen.
Over the past two decades, some psychiatrists and psychologists have, in fact, developed a new set of therapy programs to deal with families like the Bogles in much the way Judge Norblad envisioned, what might be called intensive in-home supervision for high-risk families. The programs act like probation, in that probation officers attached to a court offer programs to youthful offenders instead of a sentence to a reformatory or prison. In this major innovation, a highly trained team of clinicians goes to the family’s home for three to five months to provide in-home counseling for both the parents and their children, or any other relatives who may be involved, including grandparents and siblings.
One of these innovative programs, called Multisystemic Therapy, was developed by Scott Henggeler, who recently retired as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Medical College of the University of South Carolina in Charleston. While he was getting his Ph.D. he was hired by the state of Virginia’s Department of Pediatrics to work with antisocial children and was given some of the most difficult cases. After working with them for a while, and making little progress, Henggeler decided to visit the adolescents in their homes. “It took me fifteen to twenty seconds to realize how incredibly stupid my brilliant treatment plans were,” he said. He realized that he needed to treat the children in the full context of their lives, to see them where they lived, with their families—their parents and siblings—and where they went to school. His central insight was to take therapy to the adolescents instead of taking the adolescents to therapy. “This meant our clinicians needed to go to their homes and families, to treat the whole family, and also to go to their schools, teachers, friends and any other close relatives they were in contact with,” Henggeler said. Siblings can be particularly important because they may know things the parents don’t, or may be starting to exhibit the same risky behavior and need to be treated too.
This is especially true for families like the Bogles, given how insular and clannish they are, Henggeler said. They are like a giant rogue iceberg, with most of the dangers hidden out of sight below the waterline, and only a small portion showing to outsiders. Getting inside their secret patrimony, their family myths, with their endless history of abuse, violence and disappointments, would be key to understanding why any of the individual Bogles had such difficulty making good choices, he said.
“Where you get the biggest bang for the buck,” Henggeler added, “is when you decrease the activity of the most antisocial member or members of the family. And if you focus on the most troublesome member, the parents are usually involved. The key to getting good outcomes, to stopping the most chronic and violent offenders, is to get the parents to be more effective parents.”
In most families Henggeler has worked with, “you sell the family to accept the therapy by persuading them it is a way to get their kids out of trouble and to stay out of prison,” he said. “The parents usually love their kids, and we teach the parents how to make the therapy work to help their kids.” In some very troubled families, Henggeler said, the clinical teams may take a different path. “In those families we try to identify the most pro-social member of the family, even if it is a grandparent not living in the home, and then try to forge a bond between them and the kid to make the therapy work.”
Multisystemic Therapy, or MST, as it is often called, now has 535 locations in thirty-four states and fifteen countries. The clinicians that MST employs work in teams of two to four people per case and are specially trained social workers or psychologists. Henggeler estimated that they have worked with two hundred thousand families since the program began in 1996. Randomized clinical trials have found that when measured three years after MST therapy, the adolescents who have undergone the program have an average decrease in arrests of 42 percent, Henggeler said, a very high figure in the criminal justice system. The therapy can also produce big cost savings. Although the price tag of MST treatment varies by state, the average is $8,000 per juvenile, according to Henggeler. By contrast, court-ordered placements in a reformatory or prison can run from $50,000 to $100,000 for a youth.
Henggeler acknowledged that families like the Bogles presented a very difficult challenge even for his innovative therapy. “The single most powerful predictor of antisocial activity is the adolescent’s association with deviant peers, who are usually in school or the neighborhood,” he said. The Bogles’ own family is their deviant peer group. For a Bogle, Henggeler suggested, “the best alternative might be to move away.”
A few months after Bobby was sentenced to MacLaren, Rooster took Tracey, who was still only eight years old, to visit Bobby there. No one recognized at the time, as some criminologists did later, that taking a child to visit his older brother or father in prison could be endangering the child, making him think that life in prison is normal, or even glamorous, not dangerous and frightening. That kind of response could undermine the whole basis of the criminal justice system, which is deterrence, the notion that going to prison should scare people out of committing crime. That is precisely what happened with Tracey that day. “I was very impressed how tough Bobby looked with all those other big teenage inmates,” Tracey said. “It made him look heroic, and I wanted to grow up to be as bad as him.”
Soon Tracey was thinking about the meaning of what was happening to his family. “Our father had raised us to be outlaws, to steal, and I began to realize that what you are raised with is very hard to escape,” Tracey said later. “I began to think we lived under a family curse of crime, like it was something contagious.”
Tracey managed to stay out of trouble until he was fifteen, when his older brother Glen came by their house one day in a Mazda RX-7 that he had just stolen. Glen proposed driving to visit their mother, who was then living in the Central Valley of California in a little town called Santa Nella. Later, Tracey wondered what impelled him to jump into the stolen car and make himself an accessory to automobile theft. All he could remember was that “it was not about stealing that particular car; it was just that stealing was what we did as a family, so it was just another day in our lives.” The boys got arrested by the police in Santa Nella a few days later and were returned to Salem. Judge Norblad sent Tracey, as a first-time juvenile offender, to Hillcrest, the medium-security juvenile facility in Salem.
Things now suddenly sped up for Tracey, and he really was living under the family curse of crime. The next year, 1988, when he was sixteen, he and Bobby stole a big-rig tractor trailer in downtown Salem and crashed it into the wall of Anderson’s Sporting Goods, a gun store. Whether they meant to crash right through the wall and steal some guns or whether they just drove badly depends on whose version you believe. But the crash was as far as they got, and Norblad sentenced Tracey to MacLaren. He sentenced Bobby, who was now an adult, to a short term in the Oregon State Correctional Institution, a medium-security facility.
Six months later, both boys were back out and living at home when they saw another big-rig tractor trailer in a truck parking lot in downtown Salem. It was loaded with $100,000 worth of liquid sugar, though the boys were unaware of that. They decided to drive the truck east on Interstate 84 all the way across Oregon and then through southern Washington to Moscow, Idaho, a distance of more than 350 miles. Their brother Michael was living there, in a residential neighborhood, and when they got close, Bobby saw some girls on the sidewalk and invited them to jump up in the cab with him and Tracey. “It was very crowded, with the girls jammed against the dashboard and the doors,” Tracey said. A police car spotted the crowded truck driven by teenagers and followed it right to Michael Bogle’s door. Bobby and Tracey were flown back to Portland to stand trial.
Tracey was still only sixteen, so he was sentenced to eighteen more months at MacLaren. Bobby got eighteen more months in the adult Oregon State Correctional Institution.
Tony, who was doing his time in the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, only a few miles away but a maximum-security facility, wrote Bobby a letter challenging him to do something crazy so the prison authorities would have no choice but to increase his security classification and send him to join Tony in the penitentiary. The brothers were in a perpetual competition to see who could be the baddest, or in their minds the greatest, outlaw. Bobby immediately started a fire and smashed some fire extinguishers and got his wish: Tony and Bobby were now together. Tracey was in MacLaren, on the glide path for adult prison himself.
The Oregon State Penitentiary loomed like a medieval fortress, a cluster of big, boxy yellow buildings with metal bars in their narrow windows set behind a twenty-five-foot-high gray concrete wall topped by towers with guards armed with rifles. Its design was classic American prison style, which dated to the prison built at Auburn, New York, in the 1820s. Inside the main building of the Oregon Penitentiary were five tiers, or layers of cells, stacked one atop another, with heavy steel doors that clanged open and then shut with a loud metallic sound, a somber note of finality that echoed through the whole building. The interior of the cellblock was derived from the design of the first warden at Auburn, William Brittin. There were walkways on either side of the honeycomb of cells, with the floors kept freshly washed and polished. Each cell was furnished simply with two steel bunks, one atop the other, plus a steel toilet and sink and several shelves with hooks for clothes. The tiers of cells were a prison within a prison: if a convict managed to break out of his cellblock, he still had to find a way to get over the high outer wall of the prison to escape.
The first American prisons in the 1820s, like the first insane asylums, were believed to signal a progressive reform to replace the medieval forms of punishment then in use in the United States as well as Europe. The most popular traditional sanctions included whippings, the stocks, heavy fines, banishment and the gallows for the most serious offenses. The goal of these penalties was not rehabilitation but deterrence, to frighten the offender. The only jails at the time were small, meant to hold prisoners for very short periods pending trial, and they were expensive for a nation that had low taxes and an agricultural economy.
No one before the 1820s had thought building big prisons that would house offenders over long periods of time would accomplish anything more than waste a lot of the government’s money. But in that decade, as befitting the new American nation with its democratic ideals, a fresh idea was put forward: criminals could be rehabilitated through newly designed prisons that kept inmates isolated from the vices of society—negligent parents, taverns, gambling halls and houses of prostitution. Given those supposed origins of crime, the reformers were convinced that malefactors could be rehabilitated by perfect isolation in this new form of jail. To realize this plan, Auburn’s architects made their new inmates sleep alone in their cells at night and forbade them to talk with fellow convicts when at work, at meals and in their cellblocks. This plan, which came to be known as the silence system, left a profound impression on European visitors who came to study Auburn. In 1831, after an inspection, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Everything passes in the most profound silence, and nothing is heard in the whole prison but the steps of those who march, or sounds proceeding from the workshops.” After the prisoners were brought back to their cells at night, “the silence within these vast walls…is that of death. There were a thousand living beings, and yet it was a desert solitude.” Given the reformers’ aspirations that inmates could be rehabilitated, the prisons were called “penitentiaries” and the prison departments of state governments were called “departments of correction.”
The early prisons were all built in the plentiful American countryside, away from the cities, where vices were believed to flourish. When the Oregon State Penitentiary was built, for example, Salem was a tiny town surrounded by farm fields and forests. Today the prison sits only a few blocks from the state’s shining white marble capitol building topped by the gold-clad figure of an Oregon Trail pioneer wielding an ax.
The silence system eventually fell into disuse, though you could find remnants of it as late as the 1960s in some of the older prisons, like Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institution. Inmates there were still forbidden to talk in the hallways and workshops, and no banter was allowed in the large central dining room. Even today you can travel all across America, from Sing Sing in New York to Leavenworth in Kansas and on to the Oregon State Penitentiary, and all the older prisons look as if they had been built by the same man using the same set of building blocks.
Crime has long been known to run in families. Richard Louis Dugdale was a merchant and self-taught sociologist in New York City who became a member of the Prison Association of New York. In 1874 he was assigned to inspect thirteen county jails in upstate New York. Many of the inmates, he discovered, were related by blood or marriage, and Dugdale, to protect their confidentiality, gave these inmates a name, “the Jukes.” They represented an amalgam of 42 families with 709 offenders. Dugdale’s research in Ulster County led to a widely read and controversial book, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity. Using local records and family trees that he created, along with extensive interviews, Dugdale attempted to determine whether it was nature or nurture that accounted for the large number of criminal offenders among the Jukes. Dugdale himself believed human behavior was a product of both heredity and the environment. A number of scholars, however, believed Dugdale was espousing support for eugenics, which was rapidly growing in popularity at the time, and his work was later tarnished by that.
Another relatively early investigation of crime in families was conducted by Thomas Ferguson, of 1,349 boys in Glasgow, Scotland, in the late 1940s. Ferguson matched a group of delinquent boys against a nondelinquent group from similar social and economic backgrounds and found that 12 percent of the boys who left school at the age of fourteen were convicted in court by the age of eighteen, mostly for theft and burglary. Much more interesting, Ferguson demonstrated that the percentage of boys who were convicted increased dramatically with the number of other members of their family who were convicted. Only 9 percent of the boys convicted had no other family member who had been convicted. If one other family member had been convicted, the percentage rose to 15; if two other family members had been convicted, the percentage was 30; if three or more other family members were convicted, the percentage was 44. The probability of conviction was especially high among boys who had a father or brother convicted.
Ferguson was also able to show that having a convicted family member predicted a boy’s likelihood of becoming a delinquent regardless of other known risk factors for crime, such as poor grades in school, bad housing or an overcrowded household where supervision and discipline were difficult. Ferguson concluded that “the influence of another convicted member of the family is at least as great as that of any of the other adverse factors that have been studied.” This is a remarkably accurate description of what happened in the Bogle family.
The first study of the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior in the United States, as mentioned earlier, was done by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a husband-and-wife team of researchers at Harvard Law School. Using a sample of five hundred boys committed to juvenile reformatories in the Boston area in the 1940s and comparing them with another sample of five hundred Boston boys from similar households who were not committed, the Gluecks found that two-thirds of the boys sent by the court to a reformatory had a father who had been arrested. In addition, half of the boys committed to a reformatory had a grandfather who had been arrested, and 45 percent had a mother who had been arrested. The Gluecks’ data is particularly striking because all the boys in their sample were white. This was at a time when most crime in the United States was still committed by whites. The Bogles were a carryover from this older tradition. Whatever was happening in their family had nothing to do with race, or with the myriad difficulties faced by African Americans because of the effects of discrimination in housing, education and the criminal justice system.
Perhaps the gold standard for the study of how crime runs in families, also mentioned earlier, was conducted using a group of 411 boys from South London, following them from the age of eight to forty-six. This study, as mentioned in the Prologue, carried out from 1961 to 2001, was done by a team led by David Farrington of the University of Cambridge, the leading criminologist in the United Kingdom, and is known as the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. It found that half of all the convictions of the boys were accounted for by a mere 6 percent of the families in the sample, and that two-thirds of all the convictions were accounted for by only 10 percent of the families. The study also found that having a father, a mother or an older brother or sister who had been convicted was a good predictor of a boy’s later criminal activities. Having a parent who had been sent to prison was an even stronger predictor of a boy’s later criminal life.
A number of other studies done in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Denver also reported similar results, that roughly 5 percent of the families of the boys in their samples accounted for half of all the crime, and about 10 percent of the families of the boys accounted for two-thirds of all crime. This would mean that some families, like the Bogles, have large numbers of offenders.
Trying to unravel what the impact is of growing up in a criminal family is a vital question since there are now 2.3 million people in prison or jail on any given day in the United States, a fourfold increase since the 1970s. More than 50 percent of these inmates are parents, and the number of children with a parent in prison reached 1.7 million a day in 2007, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That is not counting the hundreds of thousands of children with a parent in jail or on probation or parole, all of which can be just as disruptive to a child’s care, supervision, education and economic support. The number of children with a parent behind bars at some point in their lives is more than five million, according to an authoritative estimate by Patrick McCarthy, the president and chief executive officer of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping disadvantaged children. Some criminologists have called these children the invisible victims of our policy of mass incarceration, or its collateral damage.
What often gets overlooked in any discussion of these baleful figures is that, as the Bogles show, the more people we send to prison, the more new candidates we are creating among their children, who may later end up committing crimes and be put behind bars themselves. Mass incarceration thus becomes a vicious cycle.
Until very recently, there has been little public attention to the growing body of research showing that crime tends to run in families. One reason is that statistics on the effects of parental arrest and incarceration are difficult to come by, since no one in the criminal justice system is charged with keeping them. When the police make an arrest, they do not ask how many children the suspect has or how many members of his or her family have previously been incarcerated. In making an arrest, the police’s interest is in apprehending the suspect—a public safety role, not a research role. Similarly, when a prosecutor prepares an indictment against a suspect, the suspect is not asked about how many children he or she has, whether any of them have been arrested or whether the suspect had other family members who have been to prison. The only point in the whole criminal justice process when an official might ask a defendant whether he or she had a parent who had been incarcerated is when a judge is preparing to sentence the defendant and the court’s probation department prepares a presentence report to assist the judge in gauging the defendant’s criminal background. Presentence reports can be lengthy, as they record all the defendant’s previous crimes and prison sentences, along with any psychiatric evaluations. But these reports often contain little information on the criminal record of the defendant’s family.
Once a convict reaches prison, his or her family background again seldom gets asked about by prison officials. They are in the business of keeping their inmates locked up, safely, and are not concerned with the number of children they have or how many members of their families have preceded them behind bars.
The research that does exist on parental incarceration has generated studies with widely divergent results. A number of reputable scholars or advocates for the children of incarcerated parents have published articles concluding that the children of prisoners are six times more likely than other children to be convicted or incarcerated. That is a stark finding and might explain something about the Bogles. The figure has come to be widely used in public discussions of parental incarceration. But in a recent book surveying ten other studies on the effects of parental incarceration on children, Joseph Murray, a researcher at Cambridge University, concluded more modestly that “taken together” these studies merely show that parental incarceration predicts some increased risk of antisocial behavior or mental health problems for children.
Obviously, it is tricky to disentangle the exact influences of incarceration on any given member of a family. In fact, it might just be the family itself that is the primary engine of dysfunction, though putting members of the family in prison may increase that dysfunction, and the more members who are incarcerated the greater the dysfunction, as Ferguson found in Glasgow.
Bobby wanted to look like a businessman when he finally got out of prison in June 1993. His release had been delayed because of multiple escapes and also because he violated a number of earlier paroles. Now Bobby had a plan to go legitimate and show his father, at last, that he could amount to something. During his time in prison, Bobby had run a protection racket for a number of gay and straight inmates who feared being raped, including fifty-year-old David Fijalka, who had himself been serving a sentence for rape. Fijalka owned a small auto-detailing shop in Salem in an old gas station downtown across the street from the hulking Oregon State Hospital. According to Bobby, and later court testimony, he extracted a promise from Fijalka that Fijalka would turn over half the ownership of the detailing business to Bobby in return for Bobby’s protection while Fijalka was in prison. Bobby was so confident that he had a half ownership in the business that when he filled out the paperwork for his release from prison he listed the shop as his residence. Bobby also gave that address to his new parole officer, who checked with Dave Fijalka, who had been released before Bobby, and received a confirmation. Given all that, Bobby wanted to make a good impression when he went to Fijalka’s house in Salem on July 1, only five days after being released. They were supposed to discuss plans for the new joint management of the detailing shop. Bobby’s half sister, Debbie Bogle, had bought him a tan sport jacket, a button-down shirt, a new pair of trousers and good shoes for the occasion, and in a nice touch, she also lent Bobby her pager to make him appear very professional. Then she drove Bobby and their brother Tracey to Fijalka’s house.
Fijalka had bad news for Bobby. He said that two of his employees in the auto-detailing shop, David Poole and Ray Rankins, ex-cons who had been in prison with Fijalka and Bobby, had pressured him into letting them take over the business. Fijalka suggested Bobby could get the business back either by “muscling” them or by killing them, according to later court testimony. Bobby and Tracey headed back to the shop a second time, now armed with a .38-caliber revolver they had stolen from the house of their half brother, Tim Bogle. They had fortified themselves with two forty-ounce bottles of beer, and Tracey, who had suffered from bouts of alcoholism ever since Rooster made him drink large quantities of beer and wine as a boy, got drunk and belligerent.
When they arrived at the detailing shop, Poole invited them in and poured them glasses of bourbon. Bobby and Tracey said they had come to take over the shop and that Poole and Rankins had to leave, immediately. Then “things got nutso, crazy,” Poole said later in court testimony. “Bobby and Tracey had it in mind that they owned half the detailing shop with Dave Fijalka,” Poole testified. But Fijalka had “squandered” his ownership, Poole said in court, without elaborating on whether Poole and Rankins had forced Fijalka into selling them the business or had just purchased it from him legitimately.
“Bobby and Tracey were talking nonsense, as far as I was concerned,” Poole testified. “They were trying to make me understand that they owned the business. But to me it was crazy. They were firing me from a business that I owned. I couldn’t get it through their heads that they had been conned.”
Tracey took out the .38-caliber revolver and fired a round into a table next to where Poole was sitting.
To calm things down, Poole took out all his business records, including his license for the shop and the telephone bills, in his name. “With that, they finally realized that Dave Fijalka had blown his interest in the business,” Poole later testified. The confrontation ended when Poole called Fijalka on the phone and he admitted he had somehow turned over the shop to Poole and Rankins. The Bogles, who had practiced conning people for a living, had just been conned.
Before they left, Bobby went up to Rankins and put his arm around him. “You’re sure there’s no way I can invest my money in your shop? Because this was really my chance,” Bobby said, according to Rankins’s court testimony. “This was a chance for me to show my daddy that we could really do something.” Rankins said no, and Tracey and Bobby left.
Debbie, who picked them up later, testified that Bobby and Tracey had only wanted to run the auto-detailing shop as a way to become legitimate. “They didn’t want any trouble,” she testified. “The whole reason they wanted the business was so that they could straighten out.”
At 11:30 p.m. on July 1, only five days after Bobby got out of prison, and with Tracey still on juvenile parole from the MacLaren School for Boys, the brothers barged into the house Fijalka shared with his girlfriend, Sandra Jackson. The brothers had been there earlier in the day without incident, but now Tracey had the .38-caliber revolver and was waving it around. “We’re going to kill you,” Tracey shouted to Dave and Sandra, she later testified. To make his point, Tracey fired a shot into the couple’s stereo speaker, and Bobby pulled the living-room curtains closed.
“They were yelling for us to get down on the floor,” Sandra testified, “and then Tracey hit Dave in the forehead with the gun and knocked him to the floor. Bobby went into the bedroom and found a set of handcuffs and proceeded to put them on me, with my hands cuffed behind my back. Then they took extension cords and tied Dave’s hands up.”
Next, Bobby went into the bedroom and found a shirt, which he ripped into pieces and stuffed in Dave and Sandra’s mouths as gags. To complete their helplessness, Bobby pulled the telephone out of the wall and used the cord to hog-tie both victims from their necks to their feet. If they tried to move their legs, it would choke them.
Bobby and Tracey were pulling open every drawer in the house, “trashing the place,” Sandra testified. “They wanted money.” Since Sandra had just sold some of her furniture, she happened to have $600 in her pocketbook. The brothers took it along with some of Sandra’s jewelry, a few rings and a necklace.
“They were acting wild and sweating like they were on drugs and just cussing and yelling,” Sandra said.
Tracey was still holding his gun and repeatedly hit both Dave and Sandra in the head with its butt, opening a number of wounds that oozed blood. Bobby found a baseball bat and hit Dave in the head with it too, causing him to pass out. Sandra was trying to force herself to stay conscious.
Bobby then found a butcher knife in the kitchen and said to Sandra, “We’re going to cut your face up.”
“They wanted to kill us,” Sandra later testified. “They just didn’t want to give up.”
Bobby found a small Kodak camera and stuck it in his pocket. “We’re going to kill you and take pictures of you after you are dead.”
At this point, Tracey walked into the bedroom and pushed Sandra, who was still hog-tied, down on the bed, with her head sticking over the edge. “Tracey looked at me, and he said, ‘You’re going to suck my dick, bitch.’ ”
“He had the gun cocked at my head, and he told me, ‘If you bite, bitch, you’re dead.’ ”
Tracey unzipped his pants and put his penis in her mouth, but he apparently was so drunk that he could not get an erection, Sandra testified. “After a while, he got distracted and went into the other room to see what Bobby was doing.” A police swab later found no semen in her mouth.
When Tracey came back into the bedroom, Sandra pretended to be unconscious, so Tracey said, “She’s out.” The brothers decided then to leave, though not without discussing which brother would kill the couple, Sandra testified. “In the end, however, they decided they weren’t going to kill us. They just figured that we were bound and gagged and we would just lay there and starve to death. Who’s going to find us, you know?” Sandra said.
When the brothers went out the front door, taking with them the keys to Sandra’s car, it was 1:30 a.m.
The Bogles had committed the kind of casual, senseless physical and sexual abuse that Bobby and Tracey had been exposed to since they were little children. Now they were reenacting it with other people as victims.
It took Dave Fijalka several hours to get himself loose and then free Sandra. Bobby had destroyed the telephone line, so they had to drive his car to a nearby Dairy Queen to call the police from a pay phone. Sandra described her car, which the brothers had stolen, and gave her license-plate number. From Salem, which sits right on Interstate 5, the Bogles could have fled north to Washington, east to Idaho, anywhere in Oregon or south to California. The Salem police department worked overnight, faxing prison photos of both Bobby and Tracey and information about the car—a red Volkswagen Rabbit—to police departments in four states.
At 3:30 p.m. that same day, a farmworker named Julio Morales in Willits, California, a town of five thousand in Mendocino County near the entrance to Redwood Country, called the California Highway Patrol to inquire whether a red Volkswagen Rabbit with Oregon license plates might be a stolen car. He was suspicious because a man he had never seen before had stopped him in Willits and given him the car and its keys after a chance encounter on the street. Morales noticed that the key ring contained several other keys that were not car keys and asked the man if he wanted them back. No, the man said, he didn’t even know what they were for. The California Highway Patrol instantly confirmed that the license plates belonged to Sandra Jackson’s stolen car and sent a tow truck to pick up the Volkswagen. The Bogles were making amateur mistakes. They would have been better off just abandoning the car on a lonely country road where it would have taken longer to find.
Two Salem police officers set off immediately for Willits, a ten-and-a-half-hour drive south of Salem on Highway 101, the coastal route that goes over some rugged mountainous terrain. In the meantime, Blaine Johnson, a Willits police officer, studied the faxed photos of Bobby and Tracey and, at seven o’clock that evening, distributed copies to other Willits officers who were patrolling Recreation Grove, the town park, where Fourth of July festivities were under way, with concession stands and fireworks. A few hours later, at one a.m. on July 3, a police officer spotted a man who looked like one of the Bogle brothers. Officer Johnson sped to the scene, along with other local policemen, and in minutes they had arrested Bobby. He was with a teenage boy who had the .38-caliber revolver in his waistband. The teenager said he was Scott Mayo and had been hitchhiking when Bobby picked him up near the Oregon border with California.
Before the officers even wondered where Tracey was, Bobby blurted out that Tracey was at the Pepperwood Motel, a few blocks away. Mayo conveniently had the room key in his pocket. It was almost as if Bobby wanted to be caught, or perhaps was convinced that the police could not make a case against him and Tracey.
Johnson and two other Willits officers went to the door of Tracey’s room, with still others stationed out back just in case. They knocked, but Tracey was asleep, so they let themselves in and found Tracey on the bed. He surrendered without a fight. In the motel room the police found Sandra’s stolen jewelry and the $600 in cash. They also found a long black raincoat that Bobby had worn during the attack in Salem. It had large splotches of blood on it, which later testing showed belonged to Fijalka. The police had all the evidence they needed. It had been just a little over twenty-four hours since Bobby and Tracey terrified Fijalka and Jackson at their home in Salem.
Bobby and Tracey were both indicted on eleven charges, including burglary, robbery, kidnapping, assault, automobile theft and being a felon in possession of a gun. Tracey was given an additional charge of sodomy, meaning deviate sexual intercourse under Oregon law. A conviction on the sodomy charge would make Tracey a sexual offender, according to Oregon law, and require him to register as a sex offender when he was eventually released from prison. The kidnapping charge carried the longest penalty, which might seem odd because Bobby and Tracey had never abducted Fijalka and Jackson and taken them out of their house. But it reflected Oregon law at the time.
At the opening of their trial in Salem that November, Tracey told his lawyer, Steven Krasik, to make a motion. “Mr. Bogle asks that we have only Christian jurors on the jury panel, though I’ve told him that can’t be done under the Oregon constitution,” Krasik told the judge, Jamese Rhoades. While in jail awaiting trial, Tracey had begun reading the Bible and had developed an interest in religion.
The brothers were enjoying their day in court. “Mr. Bogle also wants psychiatric evaluations of all the witnesses and drug tests of the victims to show they are drug dependent,” Krasik said to Judge Rhoades.
“And Tracey wants Judge Rhoades to recuse herself since she was a former prosecutor,” Krasik told the judge.
Finally, Krasik said, “Tracey feels there is a biblical proscription against females sitting in judgment on males, probably, I guess, First Timothy.” He was referring to 1 Timothy 2:11, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over man, but to be in silence.” Tracey and Bobby were sitting in their seats at the defense table laughing loudly. Even being in court, with all these charges, their situation still didn’t seem serious to them, perhaps a carryover from their childhood outings with their father and mother.
Judge Rhoades promptly denied all of Tracey’s motions, without explanation.
The trial then moved smoothly and swiftly, from the prosecution’s point of view. There were no defense witnesses of consequence, and the only argument was about the meaning of Oregon’s law on kidnapping. Judge Rhoades quickly ruled that secretly confining someone in their own house constituted kidnapping.
At the end of the trial, after Bobby and Tracey were found guilty on all counts but before sentencing, Tim Bogle asked to make a statement to Judge Rhoades on behalf of his half brothers. “I told her that none of this would have happened if these two brothers didn’t get together. In our family, it’s always been about who is the baddest, who is the meanest. Tracey wanted to show he’s worthy, that he is as bad as his older brother.”
This was the terrible dynamic of the cycles of family crime.
Tracey was sentenced to sixteen years in prison, Bobby to thirty. Bobby got the longer sentence because he already had eight previous felony convictions as an adult and had been out of prison only five days when this crime took place. For Tracey, it was his first conviction as an adult. He was also now a certified sex offender.