Ashley was born into a marriage that remains illegal to this day. As is the Bogle tradition, the wedding of her underage parents, Tim Bogle and Chris Kanne, was a scam, a con job dreamed up by Tim’s father, Rooster, to fool the authorities.
The union of her parents could not have been more unlikely. Tim was loud and disruptive, like many members of his family. Chris was quiet and shy to the point that she could be in a room full of people for hours and no one would notice her presence.
There was also the awkward fact that Tim had already been arrested and locked up, like his father and his six brothers. Chris’s father was a former police detective who had become a prison guard and rose to be captain of the guard at the Oregon State Correctional Institution. As Tim would later say, “He practically raised my brothers. I was his worst nightmare come to life, and it took him seven years to speak to me.” When Captain Kanne finally did speak to Tim, he told him, “Do you know what I was going to do to you? I was going to arrange to put you in the middle of a murder scene and send you to prison.” Tim gave his father-in-law an incredulous look. “You couldn’t have done that,” Tim blurted out. Without hesitation, Captain Kanne shot back, “Oh, yes, I could.”
Chris introduced a strain of stability into Tim’s life, and together they produced a daughter, Ashley, who would be one of the very few Bogles to finish high school; then she became the first Bogle in 150 years to graduate from college.
Tim and Chris met in the summer of 1988 at a ramshackle dance club for teenagers called Streets in a run-down section of Salem. It had a bar that served only nonalcoholic beverages, a dimly lit dance floor and a disc jockey who played light rock tunes. Tim kept eyeing a pretty brown-haired girl sitting at a table with her friends until he got the nerve to go over and get her name and phone number.
Tim, fifteen, already had a girlfriend, but given the chaos in his home life, he was determined to get married and start his own family, away from his father. “I didn’t want to be ruled by my father anymore,” Tim later recalled thinking. He had just told his half brother and closest friend, Tracey, “The next girl I meet I’m going to marry.” Tim said it was a serious decision, not a whim.
It was a tricky situation for Tim, even without knowing who Chris’s father was, because he was already on juvenile probation for stealing two bicycles and had to report to a juvenile facility in Salem to chop wood every weekday and go to a special school for four hours each evening. On his free nights, Tim began dating Chris, keeping her out late, until her parents grew suspicious and learned Tim’s last name. Captain Kanne was furious. He already knew Tim’s brothers Tony and Bobby too well, from having them in his prison, and sometimes having to send them to solitary confinement for fights or attempted escapes. So he went to court and got a restraining order prohibiting contact between Tim and his daughter.
Tim eventually persuaded Chris to go with him to a little town near San Jose, California, where Rooster’s first wife, Kathy, had a small house. Tim was driving an old car, which broke down along the way, so they had to hitchhike. When they arrived, they found the house was badly burned, because Kathy had accidentally set the house on fire while cooking. They decided to stay there anyway, until Kathy arrived unexpectedly and told them, in a surprise fit of morality, that she would not allow Tim to sleep with Chris in her house. Kathy also handed Tim $10 in food stamps, saying, “You’re a man now. Survive like a man.”
To try to keep Chris’s father from sending out an alarm, Tim told Chris to call her grandmother in Salem, who was a nurse. When Chris reached her and said she was safe, her grandmother responded, “There are all these charges against Tim now: kidnapping, a probation violation for leaving the county without permission, and violating the no-contact order.” When Tim took the phone, Chris’s grandmother added, “The police are after you now. They will catch you. And when they do you’ll be gone forever.” To which Tim responded, with more bravado than good sense, “Tell them I wish them luck.”
Tim and Chris decided to hitchhike back to Oregon’s central coast, where Tim’s older half sister, Vickey, had a house. Vickey’s husband at the time liked young girls, which worried Tim, and the husband mixed up a drink full of alcohol that he called “jungle juice” and pretty soon they were all drunk. Vickey eventually called the police, who arrived in several cruisers. Tim hid under a bridge, but when the police found Chris and Vickey and questioned them, Tim decided he had to act, and he walked over to a detective’s car, trying to divert attention from Chris. “When the detective saw me, he asked who I was, and he found the charges against me and figured the whole thing out pretty quick,” Tim recounted. “I got myself caught.”
Tim was put in a local jail. Chris’s father drove down from Salem to bring her home. Then Tim was extradited back to Salem and sentenced to three more months in the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center for another probation violation, leaving Oregon without permission. He was lucky not to be charged with kidnapping.
After Tim finished his short sentence, Rooster asked him, “Do you want to marry that girl, son?” When Tim said yes, Rooster quickly responded, “Then I’m going to get you married.”
“Dad knew this was the only way to get me off the track I was on, because his rule was, you marry someone, you have to take care of her,” Tim recalled. “He wanted me on the family track, not the crime track.” This was another side of Rooster, the conventional father, which had been missing for years.
Rooster worked for a month on an elaborate, secret plan to pull off a marriage between Tim, who had just turned sixteen and was still on probation, and Chris, who was fifteen, in a state where the legal age of marriage was eighteen. They began by making phone calls to find out what was required to get married. They would need to create false birth certificates. They would have to create disguises to make themselves look older as well as find a minister willing to marry them. Finally, they would have to figure out how they could get a marriage license signed by both parties, in the county courthouse, and have a wedding with witnesses, when by court order Tim and Chris could not be together.
They went to work to forge new birth certificates. Tim made about fifteen photocopies of both his and Chris’s original Oregon birth certificates. Then, using an X-Acto knife, they cut-and-pasted numbers and letters taken from other copies to create new ages for Tim and Chris, making him appear to be eighteen and Chris to be twenty-two. “When we were finished, it looked real,” Tim said.
Next, Rooster instructed Tim to go to a magic store that sold fake mustaches made out of real hair so he could glue a mustache on when he went before a judge to get the normal three-day waiting period waived, and later when he appeared before a clerk in the marriage-license section of the county courthouse. They also borrowed a dark suit for Tim to wear over his thin frame.
Then they persuaded a woman in her early thirties from the neighborhood where Tim lived to stand in for Chris. Tim pasted on his fake mustache and dressed in his borrowed suit and set out with the older woman for the Marion County Courthouse. The judge didn’t notice the obvious discrepancy in their ages when he agreed to waive the three-day waiting period. “He just asked, ‘So you want to get married?,’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ ” Tim recalled. When the judge signed the license, he smiled and said, “Good luck.” The other woman signed Chris’s name on the marriage-license application.
Tim hustled over to the local Burger King where Chris was working. He explained that his father had already arranged for a minister from the Baptist church near where the Bogles lived, the Reverend Art Cooper, to perform the wedding ceremony. The minister married the couple on March 4, 1989, according to the marriage certificate later filed with the Marion County clerk.
When they came out of the church, Rooster said to the newlyweds, “You’ve got to consummate your marriage or it’s not final. I’ve got a motel room for you.” Later that evening Rooster drove Chris home to her family, as if nothing had happened, Tim said.
The scam worked, but only for exactly one day. “There was one thing we didn’t think of,” Tim recalled. “When you get married, it comes out in the newspaper,” in this case the Salem Statesman Journal.
“The next morning I got a call from my probation officer,” Tim said. “He asked, ‘So you got married?’ I said, ‘What makes you think that?’ He said, ‘It’s right here in the paper, Mr. Bogle. This time you’ve really got yourself in trouble.’ ”
Tim and Chris were both arrested. Tim was charged with “Unsworn falsification” in Marion County juvenile court, meaning, “Said child did unlawfully and knowingly make a false written statement to a public servant, to-wit, an employee of the Marion County Clerk’s Office in connection with an application for a benefit, to-wit, a marriage license.”
Tim and Chris were taken to juvenile court on March 22, 1989, where both were sentenced to fines of $100 and three days in juvenile lockup. Judge Connie Hass, who was presiding, told Tim, “Congratulations, you have made history in this juvenile department. In all the years I’ve been a judge, I’ve never seen anyone attempt such a thing, much less succeed.”
Captain Kanne wanted Judge Hass to order the marriage annulled. After all, both Tim and Chris were under eighteen, he pointed out. But because Tim was already on juvenile probation before the sham marriage, he was a ward of the state and therefore Judge Hass had authority over him. Hass did not realize that it was not Chris who signed her name on the marriage application, which would have automatically made the marriage null and void. So after hearing arguments, the judge ordered Tim and Chris to undergo six months of marriage counseling, during which time they could not live together. After that period, Hass said, she would rule on whether the marriage could continue.
In the meantime, she also ordered Tim to remain in school or hold a full-time job. Before the scam was discovered, Tim had planned to hide out at his uncle Dude’s house in Montana until he and Chris both turned eighteen and could legally be married. Tim didn’t really want to go back to school, so Rooster came up with another scheme. “You need a job, a trade, to support your new wife,” Rooster told Tim. Rooster said he could get Tim into the ironworkers union so he could work as a welder, but that meant another set of lies, because to join the ironworkers’ union Tim again had to be eighteen and also had to be able to pass a series of welding tests. Tim was vaguely familiar with welding from spending time around his father on some jobs, but Rooster insisted to the union instructor that Tim was ready to take his ironworker’s apprentice test immediately.
“Okay,” the instructor said, as Tim remembered it. “We’ll find out about that right now. We’ll give him a test.”
“Oh, no,” Tim thought.
The instructor gave Tim a welding hood. “In some way, shape or form, I don’t know how, I got it half right,” Tim said. The instructor was clearly skeptical, but said Tim had done well enough to qualify to enter an advanced welding class, and could join the union. But for that he needed a valid identification card showing he was at least eighteen. Rooster helped Tim create a forged Washington State driver’s license that gave his age as nineteen.
“This was Dad’s one shot for one of his boys out of seven to take up his trade and maybe make something of himself, to take the work road instead of the jail road,” Tim said, “so I really wanted to succeed.” By this time, the six months of marriage counseling was finished, and Judge Hass determined that Tim and Chris could stay married. The judge never discovered the deception about Chris’s signature on the marriage-license application.
Chris now was able to move in with Tim, who was getting regular welding jobs. He eventually worked on some major projects, helping in the construction of Safeco Field, in Seattle, where the Mariners play baseball, and what is now the Moda Center in Portland, where the Trail Blazers play basketball.
Ashley was born during this time, in February 1992. Tim was acutely conscious that this was the moment to change at least one Bogle’s destiny. “When Ashley was born, my dad and I were sitting in the hospital, and I told him, ‘This is where the chain breaks. Ashley will be raised differently,’ ” Tim recalled. Indeed, for Ashley, life was almost normal from the beginning. Tim was busy during the week, working on welding jobs. Chris was a kind, devoted mother, first to Ashley, and later to another daughter, Britney, and then a son, Little Tim, as he was called in the family. Chris was quiet, calm and unflappable, qualities she may have inherited from her father, who also spoke little. Tim and Chris were determined to set a good example for the children. There were regular mealtimes and bedtimes, with a rule against sleepovers outside their own house. There was benevolent, nonviolent discipline and well-monitored supervision of their activities, and none of the beatings or open displays of sex that Rooster had made his children endure. “It was a turning point in my life,” Tim said.
What was happening was what Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck had discovered in their pioneering study of five hundred delinquent boys and five hundred nondelinquent boys. The boys who started out as delinquents could be weaned from their criminal paths by strong social and emotional ties—a close, lasting marriage, a steady job, regular attendance at school, deep religious faith or military service. These ties created social controls for the boys that turned them away from trouble. There was also the fact that Chris’s father was a former police detective turned senior corrections official and her grandmother was a nurse, providing another layer of stability.
Although Tim and Chris did not keep any books in their house, or enroll Ashley in preschool enrichment programs, she proved to be an excellent student from the start, bringing home straight A’s. “I always loved going to school; the schoolwork was easy for me,” Ashley recalled.
Chris’s mother-in-law, Linda Bogle, noticed that Ashley was intensely motivated and didn’t want to fail any class, so she always got her homework done on time, whatever the distractions. “I think that determination came from inside her,” Linda said. “She always had it.”
Ashley’s motivation also showed up in the way she handled the household chores she was assigned, doing the family’s laundry and keeping her room clean. When she was only three or four years old, her favorite television show was Barney and Friends, the children’s series on PBS, and her favorite character was Barney, the purple dinosaur. One day, in a minor act of rebellion, Ashley started throwing some of the clothes she had just washed, dried and folded onto the floor, until Tim saw what was happening and said, “You’re in trouble now.” What Tim always remembered, years later, was that when he said that, Ashley immediately started putting the clothes back into their basket neatly and chided herself, singing a Barney song:
Clean up, clean up, everybody, everywhere.
Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share.
Keeping up her success, in a family filled with relatives who became drug addicts or criminals, was sometimes difficult for Ashley. “I didn’t want to stand out and make my family think I felt special,” Ashley said.
It was also hard for Ashley that her father moved the family often, at least once a year. At first this was to follow construction sites for Tim’s work, and later, after Rooster died from cancer in 1998, it was because Tim became very depressed and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had to quit his job and was on medication, and the family moved from town to town around the Willamette Valley in search of cheaper housing because they had to live on Tim’s Social Security disability payments plus a small pension from the ironworkers’ union. This meant a new school each year for Ashley until she reached high school and they settled in Salem. “I was very shy, and it was difficult for me to have to make new friends all the time,” she recalled. “Some days I would be terrified of going to another new school with new classmates, and I would beg my mom and dad to let me stay home,” Ashley said. “And some days I would be so terrified it made me physically sick.” Eventually, a school psychologist determined that Ashley suffered from a panic disorder, and she was put on medication. To help her get through these anxieties, some days Chris would go to school with her; other days it was Linda.
But the A’s kept on coming. By the summer after her junior year at North Salem High School, Ashley had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average. Ashley was interested in attending a college with a nursing school. Western Oregon University, a branch of the University of Oregon in Monmouth, had a nursing school and was only seventeen miles southwest of Salem. Given Ashley’s grades, they offered her a scholarship.
That summer Ashley also received a letter from the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine, which said she had been selected to attend a program the year after she graduated from high school studying at Harvard Medical School or the UCLA’s School of Medicine, where she would be given the chance to work with doctors in a hospital or laboratory. “Fewer than one percent of all high-achieving high school students are presented with this opportunity, and many alumni of the program report that it is a life-changing experience,” said the letter, written by Dr. Shashin Doshi, who was the director of the program.
Tim, Chris and Ashley hardly knew what to make of the invitation. With the failed exception of Tracey, no one in the entire Bogle clan had ever been to college. They weren’t even familiar with the College Board or the SAT or all the other complexities of applying to college. I purchased one of the standard guides to studying for the SAT and gave it to Ashley. But as best I could determine, no one in the family ever read it. The invitation from the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine went unanswered. It was all too overwhelming and foreign for Ashley and her parents.
Ashley herself, at seventeen, was still tiny, not quite five feet tall and perhaps eighty-five pounds, with a small button nose and long brown hair, which she kept pulled up in a top knot. Her skin was very pale, porcelain in hue, which added to her doll-like appearance.
There was always a fine line that her father had to walk in making Ashley part of the Bogle family and not placing her on a pedestal while also protecting her against the Bogle contagion that had ruined so many members of the family. Tim talked to her openly about his brother Tracey and the crimes that had sent him to prison, and he even took Ashley to visit Tracey in prison a few times. Similar visits to see family members in prison had proved disastrous for other Bogles, for Tracey and Bobby, for example, who felt the attraction of being a tough outlaw like their father and brothers. Ashley, though, was her own person. “The whole Bogle stigma didn’t apply to me,” Ashley said. “I don’t think about it, honestly. I just figure that everybody in the family has the opportunity to make their own choices. If they make bad choices, that’s up to them. I chose not to make bad choices.” Ashley had discovered a mechanism to detach, to protect herself from the family contagion.
In Ashley’s senior year of high school, however, she hit a few bumps. She unexpectedly found some of her classes to be harder, and her GPA dropped to 3.73. That was still high enough to allow her to graduate with honors, finishing thirty-third in a class of 350 students, according to her final high school transcript, a huge accomplishment for anyone in the Bogle family.
Ashley now also had a steady boyfriend, and she was spending more time with him. She was growing nervous about leaving home to go to nursing school, even if it was close by. The size of the school—4,800 students—concerned her, and it felt like a big financial commitment, though with her scholarship and student grants and loans it would be far less than the regular in-state tuition of $8,000. There was also her father’s first brush with the “laws,” using his term, since before Ashley was born. Tim had been caught speeding at ninety miles per hour, with Britney and son Tim Jr. in the car. His mother said he was distracted by his kids’ arguing over the music on the car radio. Nonetheless, he was still sentenced for negligent driving and reckless endangerment and given thirty days in the Marion County jail.
Ultimately, Ashley decided that going away to college would be overwhelming. She took a semester off, then, in January 2011, enrolled in Chemeketa Community College, near where her family lived in Salem. Instead of studying nursing, her major would be health-management services. When she graduated she would be a medical technologist working in a hospital or a doctor’s office.
Normally, earning an associate’s degree from this program would take a student two years, meaning Ashley would graduate in December 2012. But there were more bumps. To earn enough money to pay what her scholarship, government grants and student loans didn’t cover, she began working part-time in a Chipotle fast-food restaurant at the big mall near the Chemeketa campus. She soon discovered she was pregnant. She and her longtime boyfriend had broken up, so in October 2014 she became a single mom with a daughter named Aubrey.
Meanwhile, more members of her family were getting in trouble. Her younger sister, Britney, with whom she had been very close, got pregnant and had a child, and also developed a drug habit and was arrested and put in jail for drug possession and child neglect.
For a period of time, to save money, Ashley moved in with Tim’s older sister, Debbie, who also lived in Salem. Debbie was another of the handful of Bogles who had managed to graduate from high school, and then, at the command of Rooster, she had enlisted in the Air Force at the age of seventeen, in 1987. After basic training, Debbie was sent to a U.S. Air Force base in England as a member of the Air Force Security Forces, the equivalent of being in the Army Military Police. Debbie, though, was soon diagnosed with bipolar disorder, just as Tim would be a few years later, and she was transferred back to the United States and discharged from the Air Force.
At home in Salem, and emotionally unstable, Debbie became addicted to meth and let a gang of other drug users move in with her. They were growing marijuana plants in her closet. She gave birth to two young boys. When the police raided her house one day, they found the marijuana plants and charged Debbie with the manufacture of a controlled substance and with child endangerment. Because she had no previous criminal record, she was kept in jail for only one night and then sentenced to probation.
This was the beginning of a prolonged period of chaos for Debbie. When she stayed on her meds, she was lucid and highly intelligent. When she went off her meds, which happened often, she could be psychotic—depressed and angry one moment, then suddenly full of enormous energy the next, like a tornado.
As her two sons, Jorden and Kaleb, grew older, they were in and out of prison themselves. Jorden was first sent to prison at sixteen for the new crime of sexting. He had sex with a sixteen-year-old girl who came to visit him when he was staying at a mutual friend’s apartment, and then another boy used Jorden’s cell phone to take a video of them on the bed and sent the video to their friends at high school. The video went viral. More recently, Jorden was sent to prison for a second time for four years for the attempted strangulation of his new wife. Kaleb was sentenced to prison for six years for taking part in beating and robbing a man at a Salem convenience store. He had just turned eighteen when he was convicted.
A psychiatrist in Salem who has treated Debbie for the Veterans Administration, Dr. Satyanarayana Chandragiri, asked her if she or other members of her family had ever had genetic tests to see if anything could be learned about their propensity for developing mental illness and committing crime. Dr. Chandragiri, originally from Bangalore, India, said he had seen mental illness and criminality co-occurring in families in both India and the United States over three and four generations. “As a result of practicing psychiatry in two countries for more than twenty years,” he said, “I have come to the conclusion that the old, binary way of looking at people as criminals or noncriminals is too simple. I have come to think of it as something more than that. There is something genetic, moderating or aggravating, that is going on,” he said. Doctors now must take epigenetics, the interplay of the environment and genes, into consideration in dealing with mental illness and other diseases, he said. “So why not with crime?” Dr. Chandragiri asked. It was much the same idea as the research done by Professor Terrie Moffitt at Duke University. None of the Bogles, though, have ever been tested for any genetic markers, and virtually all such testing is illegal inside America’s prisons. This is partly the result of revulsion against the terrible genetic experiments performed by the Nazis on concentration-camp inmates, and partly a fear that genetic tests on American prisoners could be misused to stigmatize African Americans.
Despite all the chaos in her family, Ashley managed to persevere in her studies, but it took her four years to earn her associate’s degree, twice as long as she had projected, though she did it with honors. A photograph taken at her graduation, with Ashley dressed in her academic black gown and mortarboard hat, shows her with a broad smile, as if she was profoundly relieved at her accomplishment in graduating. “She is still pretty shy, and she was very happy that it was all over,” her father observed.
Ashley has gotten a job as a medical-records technician at Santiam Hospital in Stayton, Oregon, a small town a few miles southeast of Salem. She is doing coding of patients’ medical records. Eventually, when she has saved some money, she wants to go back to college to earn a full bachelor’s degree.
In the meantime, she has found a duplex apartment for herself and her now three-year-old daughter. Ashley has entered mainstream America in a rapidly growing profession. Her daily commute from her apartment to the hospital takes her directly by the big Oregon State Correctional Institution, where her grandfather long was captain of the guard and many members of her extended family served prison sentences, including at present her cousin Jorden. But Ashley does not dwell on this curious coincidence. She has broken the Bogle family curse, free to live without crime, violence or prison.