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.”
Pe
rhaps 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.
In My Father's House Page 9
