The bulk of the primary sources for this book come from interviews I conducted over a ten-year period with members of the Bogle family. Some of these interviews were done inside prisons in Oregon, Arizona and Texas; other interviews were conducted in their homes, mostly around Salem, Oregon, but some as far away as Helena, Montana; Tucson, Arizona; Paris and Amarillo, Texas; and Nashville and McMinnville, Tennessee. In the interest of space, I have cited specific sources for my information in the notes that follow rather than attempt to list all of them here.
But some particular items deserve mention. Foremost among these are the two murder trial transcripts of Tony and Paula Bogle from Arizona, which run to about three thousand pages, and the joint-trial transcript of Bobby and Tracey Bogle from Salem, Oregon, which is almost one thousand pages. I have also benefited from hundreds of letters sent to me by Tony, Bobby and Tracey Bogle while they were in prison, answering questions I asked them. For the earliest history of the Bogle family, the lengthy reports by the Bureau of Pensions of the Department of the Interior on Narcissa Harding’s claim for a Union Army pension, which run from 1880 to 1914, contain wonderfully rich details and depositions by neighbors and members of what would become the Bogle family. State prison records from Washington State on Charlie Bogle, from Kansas on Dude, and from Texas on Rooster as well as his sister-in-law Lana Luna and her son, Corey Lee Wilson, all provided invaluable information. Texas state death certificates confirmed that the mothers of both Louis Bogle and his wife, Elvie Bogle, died at the North Texas State Mental Hospital. The tax and school records of Paris, Texas, show how impoverished Louis and Elvie Bogle were in the 1920s and 1930s as they began to raise their growing family, having to move every year when they couldn’t pay the rent and having so little income they did not have to pay taxes.
As indicated in the notes, I have benefited greatly from the work of many criminologists and other experts. Two books were especially valuable and need mention. They are both by John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson: Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life and Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. These volumes described the two criminologists’ rediscovery and analysis of a classic set of data on five hundred delinquent boys from Boston in the mid-twentieth century by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. Taken together they showed how crime could be passed on in families. I am also indebted to the rich work by David P. Farrington, of the University of Cambridge, in particular his study of 411 boys from London whom he and a team of researchers followed from age eight to forty-six and found that a mere 6 percent of their families accounted for half of all crime and that 10 percent of the families accounted for two-thirds of all crime.
All the dialogue and thoughts attributed to people in the book are real, based on either interviews or letters from Bogle family members or from courtroom transcripts. Each time a person is speaking, I have tried to indicate the source in a note, unless it is repetitious in the same chapter.