In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  At this point the police still didn’t know who the burglars were. Over the next few weeks, however, bills with pinholes in them began surfacing in bars and stores around Amarillo. The big break in the case came when a young woman bought a fake fur coat with some of these telltale holes, Detective Smith said. The police picked her up and interrogated her. Faced with arrest and going to prison as an accomplice, she said the money had come from Dude.

  Seven weeks after the robbery, the police arrested Charlie, Dude and Rooster and the two men who had helped them. Smith also arrested Elvie and took her to police headquarters for questioning. “She was hard as nails,” Smith said, “a tough old woman, and she never told us a thing.” In fact, Elvie insisted the police had it all wrong. “My boys would never do something like that,” she told the detective.

  Given Elvie’s denials, Smith brought Charlie, Dude and Rooster into the room and announced that there was enough evidence to charge their mother and their sister, Peggy, as accessories. Elvie would have to go to trial and faced a prison sentence. Smith was an imposing figure, a tall, dark-haired man with big hands who spoke with the twang of the small farming town in the Texas Panhandle where he was born. His parents and neighbors were “all God-fearing Christians, who believed in hard work and an honest living,” he liked to say. So the Bogles’ behavior offended him. He was also astute enough to see that the Bogle sons loved their mother. His threat to charge Elvie and Peggy worked. The three Bogle men quickly agreed to plead guilty if the charges against their mother and sister were dropped.

  On April 3, 1959, Dude was sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary, as the principal in the burglary; Charlie received two years as an accessory; and Rooster was initially handed a much more lenient punishment of five years of probation. He would need to be careful, however. If he violated the terms of his probation, the judge warned him, it could be revoked and he would also be sent to prison. For Smith the case was a career booster. He later rose to be chief of detectives in Amarillo and then became a police captain. A. B. Towery, Peggy’s husband, began calling Elvie “Ma Barker,” after the legendary leader of a gang that consisted of her four criminal sons. They committed a series of robberies and murders in Missouri and Oklahoma from 1910 to the 1930s. Peggy did not appreciate the comparison. She later divorced Towery.

  Rooster did not heed the warning. Less than a year later he left Texas without permission from his probation officer and went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. He compounded his trouble by getting caught shoplifting by the New Orleans police. They shipped him back to Amarillo, where he was arrested and put back in front of a judge, who sentenced him to five years in the penitentiary.

  A report by a psychologist for the Texas Department of Corrections soon after Rooster arrived at the penitentiary at Huntsville, in April 1960, found that Rooster had an IQ of only seventy-seven. He was still suffering from epilepsy incurred in the fight with Jimmy Wilson, his speech was still impaired and the psychologist “was impressed that he is mentally defective, mentally dull at best.” A separate report by a prison psychiatrist said Rooster showed no hallucinations, thought disorder or psychosis. “His general information is poor and his calculations are poor, even considering his eighth grade education,” the psychiatrist wrote. Moreover, he cautioned that Rooster’s police record showed he had a pattern of “anti-social behavior which began some years before his skull injury.” As if to confirm Rooster’s propensities, within a week of being admitted to Huntsville he was sent to solitary confinement for fighting with another inmate.

  A few weeks later, a medical exam revealed that Rooster had indeed suffered a skull fracture “with a defect in the left parietal area.” Damage to the left parietal lobe can result in difficulty writing, or trouble with math or language. It can also cause an inability to perceive things normally, including people, objects, shapes or sounds and smells. Dr. M. D. Hanson, the medical director of the Texas Department of Corrections, reported this news in a letter to Elvie on May 16, 1960. But he also had some good news for her. As a result of Rooster’s physical and mental condition, he had been classified “Third Class,” which in Texas prison terms meant that Rooster would be exempt from being sent to one of the state’s notorious prison farms and would remain at the main prison at Huntsville.

  Charlie was not so fortunate. He was assigned to Eastham, the most brutal and terrifying of all the state’s prison farms, where inmates clad in white uniforms worked on thirteen thousand acres of swampy river bottomland near Houston. They labored raising cotton under the supervision of guards mounted on horseback and armed with shotguns, Charlie remembered. “You had to call them ‘Boss,’ ” Charlie said. “You couldn’t fall behind in picking cotton or they would whoop you.” At night the Eastham inmates were housed in crowded dorms with double and triple bunks that were run by building tenders, usually the biggest and strongest convicts with reputations for cruelty. Clyde Barrow, the outlaw, had helped give Eastham its reputation. It was at Eastham in 1931 that Barrow killed a building tender who had repeatedly raped him. A year later, still at Eastham, Barrow cut off his own left big toe and part of another toe, leaving him with a permanent limp, in an attempt to get out of the punishing fieldwork under the hot Texas sun.

  Charlie spent eighteen months confined at Eastham. After that, Charlie said in his laconic fashion, “I changed. I couldn’t do it no more. They showed me something.”

  [ II ]

  AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM

  So that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord your God.

  —Deuteronomy 6:2

  [ 4 ]

  Rooster and His Boys

  On to Oregon

  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 j
ourney 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 ve
rdict. 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.