John Laub, the University of Maryland criminologist who analyzed the Gluecks’ data on delinquents in Boston in the 1940s, believes Moffitt’s research on the gene-environment interplay offers a possible explanation. When some people get both the gene and the bad environment, like growing up in the Bogle family, it is “a double insult,” Laub said. It is this interaction that makes it very difficult for newly released inmates to stop committing crime. “It is just too hard and no fun.”
Tracey had probably suffered from this “double insult.”
[ 8 ]
Tony
A Murder in Tucson
It was February 1990 and Tony Bogle could not remember ever being so happy, even though he was locked up yet again, much as he had been since he was twelve years old, this time in the county jail in Kennewick, Washington. The local authorities had just allowed him to marry his longtime girlfriend, Paula Christian, in a ceremony performed inside the old jail.
Paula was a tall, voluptuous twenty-year-old with a sultry expression and bangs that swept low over her brow, almost tickling the bridge of her nose. She wore her dark hair long and had bright blue eyes that she accentuated with heavy blue eye shadow. Perhaps because she had been sexually abused as a girl by her grandfather, her uncle and a friend of her family in her hometown of Anaconda, Montana, an old copper-mining town, Paula had a strong need for affection and flirted easily with Tony when they first met, according to two of her closest girlfriends.
If the jail officials had looked more carefully at Tony’s and Paula’s psychological profiles, they might have had second thoughts about allowing them to marry. During the time they were dating, in fact, a psychologist for the Oregon Parole Board found that Tony suffered from antisocial personality disorder, a medical term for having a criminal personality. He was particularly likely to “decompensate under stress,” the psychologist reported, or deteriorate into his criminal mode under pressure. Further, the psychologist said, Tony had a “psychological profile that was extremely alarming.” And soon after they were married, with Tony in another Washington jail, a psychiatrist there found that Tony had a personality disorder with “schizotypal features,” meaning that he exhibited severe social anxiety, paranoia and sometimes unconventional beliefs. Nevertheless, Tony was released from jail in Washington on August 30, 1991, and immediately absconded, leaving town without permission from his parole officer.
Tony and Paula had decided their best chance at a life together was to get far away, so they were hitchhiking to Tucson, Arizona, where his aunt Bert had been running a children’s day-care center and had told them jobs were as plentiful as the Arizona sunshine. “We came to Arizona to start a new life,” Paula later said. “Tony was going to get a job, and we were going to try to start a family.”
As hitchhikers, they had no luggage. Tony had only the blue shirt and black pants and dark sneakers he was wearing. They had no cash, no driver’s license and no credit cards. Tony had a counterfeit Arizona identification card and a fake birth certificate in the name of Kevin Austin, an alias he used. Their lack of possessions was a good snapshot of where they were in their haphazard lives. They had no property of any kind, no car, no job skills or résumés beyond Tony’s long criminal rap sheet and no social capital like membership in a church or other community organization. Neither one had graduated from high school, though Tony had managed to finish eleventh grade while locked up at the MacLaren School for Boys.
On September 3, 1991, they arrived in Tucson, where the driver who had picked them up now dropped them off. Tony went straight to a 7-Eleven store to look at the classified ads in a local paper. Then he walked over to a pickup truck splattered with paint and asked the driver if he had any work available. The driver said yes, doing stucco for a home construction company. Tony accepted the offer. “It made me feel pretty good. I was finally going to make something of myself and show my father.” His words were almost the same as those his brother Bobby had used describing how happy he would be to take over a car-detailing business in Salem. In their fraught, complex relationship with Rooster, sometimes pleasing him meant getting away with a crime, sometimes getting a legitimate job.
On their first few nights in Tucson, Tony and Paula stayed at a cheap motel using money Aunt Bert had given Tony to start his new life. They soon moved out to a small, one-bedroom apartment in a transient neighborhood rife with crime and drug trafficking. The apartment was in a courtyard of low pink duplexes with scruffy palm trees out front and a tiny, dirt-filled swimming pool in the middle. It was rented to a man named Joe Brennan, who insisted on being called “Chief” because he claimed he was descended from a famous Indian chief, though his father, in Louisiana, said that was just a story. Chief, who was forty-nine years old, was six feet tall but weighed only a gaunt ninety-eight pounds and suffered from both epilepsy and schizophrenia, according to his health records. Tony and Paula met Chief in a neighbor’s apartment, and he promptly invited them to move into his unit, rent-free. He needed someone to look after him, he explained, because he was prone to seizures, and he also needed help with cooking. Chief would let Tony and Paula sleep in the bedroom, and he would sleep on the couch in the living room. The offer was a godsend to the couple because Tony had changed jobs and was now working for a landscaping company that installed drip irrigation pipes for people’s lawns, but he would not be paid for several weeks.
From the beginning, Tony was suspicious that Chief was really after Paula. After all, she was very easy to look at, and Chief increased Tony’s misgivings by announcing soon after they moved in that in keeping with Indian custom, they were now living in his teepee and therefore Paula was his squaw to do with whatever he wished. Chief could be “very unusual,” Tony said later. “He would do powwow dances for me, and he was like, ‘Don’t argue with me,’ because if you argued with him you’d be up all night.”
Tony and Paula weren’t the only people in the complex who thought Chief was eccentric. A neighbor, Robert Trimble, said that Chief was “like a hermit, kind of spacey, and you’d see him riding his bike in the middle of the street talking to himself, telling stories about what somebody taught him back in the eighteen hundreds about what happens on full moons.” Chief also liked to shout at people and pick fights, Trimble said.
But it was Chief’s continuing to ogle Paula and his attempts to touch her that had Tony most on guard. “What I diagnosed was this guy might hurt my wife, or me,” Tony said. As a precaution, Tony began taking Paula to work with him, until his boss told him that was too disruptive.
On the morning of October 29, 1991, Tony was getting picked up by a truck for his landscaping job, and he cautioned Paula to stay in the bedroom and not come out, no matter what Chief wanted. Tony also said he was going to see his boss to finally get paid so they could move out of Chief’s place. As the day wore on, Chief kept knocking on the door and shouting for Paula to come out, to prepare a meal for him and to be with him, Paula said later. About the time Tony would be coming home from work, Chief managed to break into the bedroom. “He got on top of me, trying to hold me down,” Paula said. “He was telling me that I was going to be his squaw and that Tony didn’t love me and that I didn’t mean anything to my husband and that I was nothing but a no-good whore. This really frightened me. I had been raped before, and I had told Tony that if anybody ever tried to do that to me again that I would fight back. I would not let them hurt me no more.
“I was fighting Chief, trying to get him off of me,” Paula said. “I finally did get him off of me and ran. And he followed me and he ripped my blouse. I ran into the living room. Then he grabbed me again and I seen a rock by the coffee table and I grabbed it.” It was a rock Chief kept there to prop the door or the window open, Paula explained. “It was like his pet rock,” about the size of a softball. “I grabbed the rock and I hit him in the head with it so he would leave me alone. It didn’t stop him at first, and I kept on hitting him and he kept o
n coming towards me. I hit him a number of times. I don’t know how many times I hit him. He fell and he got back up and he’d come back at me and I hit him again.”
At that moment, Tony returned home “and he seen us struggling,” Paula said. “He seen me hitting Chief with the rock. And then Tony came up behind him and grabbed him in, like, a choke hold, and pulled him away from me. I don’t know if Chief was dead or if he was dying. But by the time Chief hit the floor, he was not conscious and he looked like he was dead. And he wasn’t breathing. And I seen a knife in his hand.”
Tony asked Paula to check Chief’s pulse, since she had worked as a nurse’s aide. “I kept on checking his pulse and he wasn’t alive,” Paula said. “I used my two fingers and I pressed on his forearm. I also checked on his neck. But I couldn’t feel a pulse.”
Chief was lying motionless on the floor for twenty or thirty minutes with a lot of blood coming out of his head, Paula said. The couple finally put him in the shower to see if he would wake up, in case he was just knocked out, Paula said. Eventually, the couple put a blanket down on the floor and put Chief on it. “And then we sat on the couch and thought about what we should do. If we should call the police or if we should bury him, ’cause we didn’t know what to do,” Paula said.
“Tony wanted to call the police, but I wouldn’t let him. He was on the run for probation from Kennewick, Washington, for something,” Paula said, and she was worried that he would automatically be put back in jail and they would be separated, maybe forever, given what had just happened, no matter whether Chief had tried to rape her.
“So we wrapped the body up in blankets and put him in the closet,” Paula said. “It was kind of hard to think with him laying there in front of us.
“Tony then put some small plastic grocery bags over the Chief’s head and tied them closed, to stop the blood from seeping onto the floor.”
With Chief’s body wrapped in blankets and safely out of their sight in the hall closet, Tony and Paula counted their money to see if they could afford to leave Tucson. They had less than $100 saved from Tony’s two months of landscaping work. That was not enough to get to where they wanted to flee to—Reno, Nevada, where Kathy was staying. So Paula suggested they sell the home entertainment system Chief had rented, a combination of a television set, a stereo and a VCR.
Paula tried calling some people who had placed wanted ads in the newspaper, but there were no takers for the rented set. Eventually the couple went outside and began walking, stopping cars to ask if anyone wanted an entertainment center. A couple driving in a pickup truck bought it for $180 in cash.
“I went back in the house and I told Tony it was done and that we had enough, we could go,” Paula said. “Tony didn’t feel right about it, but I said, we can’t depend on what’s right or wrong right now. We got each other and if we call the police, they’ll take us away from each other. And he said, Okay.”
Tony also called his mother and sister Vickey in Reno, letting them know there had been a violent incident with Chief and they had to leave Tucson. Tony didn’t realize this would leave an electronic copy of his mother’s phone number on Chief’s next phone bill that was sitting in his mailbox when the police were eventually called in to investigate a foul odor coming from Chief’s apartment in the Arizona fall heat.
As Tony and Paula packed their meager possessions, they heard a helicopter overhead. “It was circling the apartment,” Paula said. “We thought somebody had heard something and called the police, so we went out the window and we ran.”
Tony and Paula then went to the Greyhound bus station and tried to get tickets on the late-night bus to Las Vegas, but it was full, so they went to a motel for the night and took the next day’s bus to Las Vegas, as close to Reno as their money would allow. On the way they talked over what they would say to the police if they were arrested. “Tony told me to blame it all on him, that he didn’t want me to go to prison or have to suffer anything for it,” Paula said. “And I told him that I would, because I was afraid. And he is always very protective over me. So I agreed with him.”
Tony had hoped his mother would drive down to Las Vegas from Reno to pick him up, but Kathy demurred, citing her poor health. In a lifetime of disappointments, this was just one more. So Tony and Paula hitchhiked north to Reno. They were staying with Kathy when the Tucson police found Chief’s badly decomposed body on November 4, 1991.
A canvas of neighbors in the apartment complex quickly turned up the names of Paula and Tony Bogle, who had been staying with Chief, and at least one of the neighbors had learned about Tony’s prison record from talks with him. When the phone bill arrived, it supplied the missing link about where Tony might have gone. A call to Kathy’s number was answered by her daughter’s boyfriend, who didn’t like Tony, and he told the police where in Reno they could find him. Two Tucson homicide detectives were on the next plane to Reno, on November 13.
Paula was arrested a few hours after the detectives’ arrival when they saw a woman matching her description walking down the street near Kathy’s apartment. Tony, when he realized the police had found Paula, went to a rental-car agency that evening, broke in and stole a Lincoln Town Car, a safe containing $2,000 and a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun presumably for protection against a robbery. His plan was to use the shotgun and money to somehow break Paula out of jail. Soon the Reno police and the Nevada Highway Patrol were alerted that Tony was driving on a highway outside the city at speeds in excess of 110 miles per hour, and they set a trap for him by scattering metal spikes across the road to slash his tires. At nine o’clock on the evening of November 16, Tony too was under arrest.
At his core, Tony was a grifter, a con artist. It was his inheritance from Rooster, from his grandmother Elvie, stretching back in time to his great-grandmother Narcissa, who sought that Union Army pension for decades, and to his great-grandfather Carpenter Harding, who passed himself off as an unmarried Union Army veteran in rural Tennessee after the Civil War. Tony could not make the murder of Chief disappear. But he could not resist trying to scam the detectives who were investigating the case, and later the prosecutor and the judge. “Tony would not trust anybody unless he could con them,” said the lawyer eventually appointed to defend him in the murder case, David Sherman. This was the impossible task Tony now set himself after he was arrested for the murder of Joe Brennan.
The effort began the day after his arrest, at ten o’clock on the morning of November 17, when he was interrogated by Detective Tony Miller, one of the officers who had flown in from Tucson. Tony Bogle said he was actually Kevin Dale Austin, the name on his fake birth certificate. He insisted he was surprised to be arrested because he did not know the police were looking for him. Apprised of Chief’s death, Tony acknowledged he had stayed at the same apartment complex there but believed Chief had been killed by gunfire from a police helicopter that flew overhead on the night he fled the building. Detective Miller said that was not possible, so Tony had a second version ready. He claimed that Chet Hopper, another occupant of the building, who had given Tony his first job in Tucson, had beaten Chief to death using the porcelain lid on the toilet bowl, with the lid shattering into pieces on the bathroom floor as a result of repeated heavy blows. When Detective Miller rejected that version, Tony came up with yet another story—that Chet choked Chief to death with a chain.
After Detective Miller rebutted that story too, Tony tried to create a diversion. He said he had information about a murder he committed in Las Vegas while he was at the bus station there. A black man named “Leon” had given Tony a ride in his old red Oldsmobile, “a crap piece of car,” Tony said. “Leon” had offered to sell Tony some drugs, they got in a fight over the price and Tony stabbed “Leon” to death, leaving his body in the desert outside the city. “There is a lot more to this story and it’s not simple,” Tony seemed to confide. “Murder is never simple,” the detective responded.
Tony did have
one consistent point. He said he wanted to make sure his wife, who he said was Paula Bogle, was safe, and he wanted to talk to her. “Then why is your name Austin?” the detective asked him.
“I got to see her one more time before everything goes down,” Tony said, suggesting he knew something more and that he might now be willing to talk. “My life is over with.
“I was real proud of myself in Tucson because I found a job and would have kept it except for that nutcase, Chief,” Tony went on. “For the first time in my life I was earning money to pay the rent and buy the groceries.” By mentioning Chief, Tony had opened a line of inquiry for the detective, who had just been letting Tony talk and get comfortable.
“Yeah, we knew about that,” the detective said. “We knew Chief had mental problems. We knew he was violent.”
Actually, the Tucson police didn’t yet know that, but it was good police work to keep Tony talking. “Are you willing to talk to us about it?” he asked Tony.
“Yeah, the whole story, but only if I can see Paula and tell her ‘I love you,’ ” Tony replied.
“We’ve already talked with Paula,” Miller said. “We believe her that she was not involved in Chief’s death, that she was in the bedroom when you and Chief began to argue in the living room, and afterward, when she came out of the bedroom, you had already put Chief in the closet.”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “My wife, man, did not murder anybody. Even in her mind, she didn’t even know what was going on.” Tony was carefully sticking to the script he and Paula had agreed on during the long bus ride from Tucson to Las Vegas, that he would take all the blame.
“I don’t want my wife, man, to go down for something that she hasn’t done,” Tony repeated fifteen minutes later, under further questioning.
In My Father's House Page 17
