In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  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 do
n’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.