ALSO BY FOX BUTTERFIELD
All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
China: Alive in the Bitter Sea
The Pentagon Papers
(with Neil Sheehan, Hedrick Smith and E. W. Kenworthy)
American Missionaries in China
(edited by Kwang-Ching Liu)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2018 by Fox Butterfield
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Butterfield, Fox, author.
Title: In my father’s house : a new view of how crime runs in the family / Fox Butterfield.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058454 | ISBN 9781400041022 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525521631 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bogle, Bobby. | Criminals—Oregon—Case studies. | Criminals—Family relationships—Oregon—Case studies. | Families—Oregon—Case studies. | Crime—Sociological aspects—Case studies. | Criminal behavior, Prediction of—Case studies.
Classification: LCC HV6785 .B87 2018 | DDC 364.3092/2795—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058454
Ebook ISBN 9780525521631
Cover photograph by fStop/Getty Images
Cover design by Tyler Comrie
v5.3.2
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In memory of Sam Butterfield, beloved son,
gifted journalist, who died much too young
I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation.
—Deuteronomy 5:9
Contents
Cover
Also by Fox Butterfield
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note on Terminology
Prologue: It Takes a Family to Raise a Criminal
I ORIGINAL SIN
1. Louis and Elvie: The Carnival
2. Charlie and Dude: Growing Up Criminal
3. A Burglary by the Whole Family
II AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM
4. Rooster and His Boys: On to Oregon
5. Bobby and Tracey: The Family Curse
6. Kathy: "Trailer Trash"
7. Tracey: A Fateful Compulsion
8. Tony: A Murder in Tucson
III BREAKING THE FAMILY CURSE
9. Tammie: Walking with Jesus
10. Ashley: The First to College
Epilogue
A Family Guide
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
A Note on Terminology
Many Americans use the terms “jail” and “prison” interchangeably, as they do with the words “parole” and “probation.” This is often true of politicians, journalists and academic specialists, who should know better, as well as many ordinary people. But in the criminal justice system, the words have precise meanings and real differences, and misuse can create confusion. Jails are penal institutions run by cities and counties, normally for offenders who have either yet to be tried and convicted or for inmates sentenced to terms of a year or less. Prisons are run by states or the federal government and hold inmates already sentenced to terms of longer than one year. There is a much greater turnover of the inmate population in jails than in prisons, and inmates in prisons tend to have committed more serious crimes.
Probation is generally a less serious alternative to jail or prison, allowing the offender to remain in his or her home community under certain conditions, and is handed down by judges in courts. Parole usually means the offender has served a mandated portion of his or her sentence while incarcerated and has been released under specified conditions. The term “parole” derives from the French word parole, meaning the inmate has given his word or promise to behave in a law-abiding fashion. Offenders themselves often contribute to the confusion between parole and probation because, in speaking of their parole or probation officers, they refer to both by the shorthand “P.O.”
The public confusion obscures the fact that while most Americans tend to focus on offenders in jail or prison, who now total 2.3 million, there are actually many more offenders on parole and probation, numbering 5.1 million, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the research arm of the Justice Department.
Finally, because two-thirds of offenders on parole or probation commit new crimes within a few years, they are constantly being sent back to jail or prison, creating an enormous churn. Hence in practical terms, for the offenders themselves and their spouses and children, the effects of being sent to jail or prison as opposed to being placed on probation or parole tend to be similar: the disruptions in their lives—the difficulty of staying in school and the loss of jobs and income—not to mention for the communities in which they all live, surrounded by other offenders or relatives who are offenders. These isolated, emotionally and economically strained communities also help explain why crime often runs in families.
Prologue
It Takes a Family to Raise a Criminal
The Oregon State Penitentiary sits incongruously in the middle of Salem, the state capital, next to a large park with fields for children’s soccer games and rows of residential streets. Armed guards patrol the twenty-five-foot-high concrete walls of the maximum-security prison. When the penitentiary was first constructed, in 1851, Oregon was not yet a state and Salem had only a handful of settlers who had trekked on foot over the Oregon Trail, so as the population of Salem increased, the city grew around the prison, making it a familiar sight. The neighborhood came to be known as Felony Flats.
For Bobby Bogle, who had been locked up most of the time since childhood, the location of the penitentiary seemed an apt metaphor for his life. For him and his brothers, prison and life ran together. Sitting on the steel bunk in his cell and thinking back on his childhood, Bobby could remember only one Christmas when his father gave him a present—a heavy metal wrench in a plain brown paper bag presented with no explanation. Bobby was just four years old at the time and for a moment was puzzled by the gift. But he knew from listening to excited conversations around the dinner table that his father, known to everyone by the nickname Rooster, had served hard time in a Texas prison for burglary and took pride in his criminal record. So Bobby figured his father had given him a burglar’s tool. Before dawn on Christmas day he snuck out of the house with his older brother, and they broke into the V & V Market, the little grocery store in the former migrant farmworkers camp where they lived on the edge of Salem. In the back of the store there were stacks of Coca-Cola bottles locked in a caged-in area. The wrench was big for Bobby’s small hands, so he worked awkwardly as he used his present to break open the lock on the cage. Then the boys carried home their sodas for a Christmas celebration.
Rooster was elated. “Yeah, that’s my sons,” Bobby could still recall his father sayi
ng, years later, as if celebrating a school report card with straight A’s or a Little League home run. “My father had been encouraging us to steal practically since I was born,” Bobby told me. We were seated face-to-face in the penitentiary’s visitors’ room, where I was interviewing Bobby for an article I was writing for The New York Times as part of my beat covering criminal justice. “He taught us stealing was good, as long as we didn’t get caught,” Bobby added. “If we got caught, he would use the knife he always carried to cut off a tree branch to make a switch and then whup us till we were cut and bleeding.” Bobby took the lesson to heart. In the Bogle family, crime brought respect. “So I wanted to go to prison from the time I was a young boy,” Bobby explained, “to uphold our family honor and earn my stripes.”
Bobby was wearing the standard-issue uniform for all Oregon inmates: dark blue denim pants and a lighter blue work shirt, both emblazoned in fierce orange letters with the label “Inmate, Oregon Department of Corrections.” Bobby had been locked up almost continuously since he was around twelve years old, first in juvenile reformatories and later in a series of prisons. With all that incarceration, he had the cold-eyed convict look down. Bobby was short, five feet nine inches, but all the weight lifting he had done in prison yards for so many years made him look taller. His broad shoulders and thick chest seemed to belong to a much bigger man. His jaw was square, and his green eyes were always alert, on the lookout, as he had to be for self-preservation in prison. His salt-and-pepper hair was brushed back from his forehead and cut short on the sides. The gunfighter mustache drooping down around the corners of his mouth lent him an air of menace.
For Bobby and his five brothers and three sisters, childhood often meant accompanying their father, and their mother, Kathy, whenever Rooster selected targets for them to rob or burglarize. There were neighbors’ houses to break into, chickens and cows to steal for food, gardens to loot for tomatoes and corn, and construction sites where they could pluck valuable lumber or metal that Rooster resold for cash to supplement his on-again, off-again job as an ironworker. One night Rooster led them to the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, ninety miles northeast of Salem, where they broke into the government-run fish hatchery and helped themselves to as many coho and Chinook salmon as they could load into Rooster’s truck, later eating as much as they could and selling the rest to neighbors. Their mother served as the lookout, remaining in the truck while they were inside the fence, and then she drove the getaway vehicle.
One of Bobby’s younger brothers, Tracey, recalled this period as a good time of madcap family adventure. Tracey Bogle was seven years younger than Bobby and was also locked up in the Oregon State Penitentiary. “We did it all as a family,” Tracey said in a separate interview in the visitors’ room. “We had pride in our family doing these robberies, so it was fun. We were a crime family.”
Perhaps with more insight than he was aware of, Tracey observed, “What you are raised with, you grow to become.” Despite a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, Tracey was often the most articulate and analytical member of his family. “If I’d been raised in a family of doctors, I’d probably be a doctor. But I was raised in a family of outlaws who hated the law.” His words made him sound like he was pronouncing an epitaph for his family. “The only law I knew was cops coming to arrest me or my brothers, breaking down our doors and taking me to court.”
One of the happiest moments of his life occurred when Tracey was eight years old. He and Bobby managed to sneak into the attic of a bar one evening. They hid there until after closing time, then climbed back down the stairs into the deserted, darkened barroom and helped themselves to all the money in the cash register. They walked home to the trailer they were sharing with their mother at the time and dumped a sack of bills on her head. That woke her up and made her shriek with joy. Just telling the story made Tracey happy. He laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks and his body shook with pleasure. It was as if he had somehow been transported beyond the high prison walls and the barbed-wire fence surrounding them and also transported back in time to that very moment in his mother’s mobile home. This was his childhood, the only one he knew, so it was fun even when it was painful.
As the boys grew older, they all dropped out of school. Bobby left in the seventh grade, and Tracey in the eighth grade. Instead of attending conventional commencement ceremonies, they graduated to more serious crimes. Their favorite was stealing big-rig trucks, eighteen-wheelers running south from Salem in the Willamette Valley to California on Interstate 5, a drive of 300 miles, or from Salem east to Boise, Idaho, on Interstate 84, a distance of 475 miles. When they started these capers, Tracey was so young and short that he could barely see over the steering wheel and his feet hardly reached the pedals. Semis were more valuable than cars, the boys calculated, because they carried much more gas and could go farther. One time they stole a semi from a truck parking lot in Salem and rammed it into the side of a gun store, right through the wall, and made off with a haul of guns. Another semi they stole was loaded with $100,000 worth of liquid sugar. That landed them in court, and they were both sent to the MacLaren School for Boys, Oregon’s most secure juvenile facility, just off the highway between Salem and Portland. The brothers like to think they must have stolen three hundred semis altogether. Even allowing for youthful braggadocio, the number was probably large.
I first heard about the Bogles in 2002 from Steve Ickes, then an assistant director of the Oregon Department of Corrections. At the time, his office thought there were six members of the Bogle family who were in prison or had earlier been incarcerated. Steve arranged for me to interview a few of them behind bars, including Bobby and Tracey. I had previously written a book about four generations of outlaws, thieves and murderers in a black family, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, and I was struck by a recent series of studies showing that crime seemed to run in certain families. I hoped to find a white family with a sizable number of inmates to illustrate this perverse legacy while removing race as a factor in the discussion. The Bogles seemed like a candidate.
Now, after ten years of research, I have found sixty Bogles who have been sentenced to either prison, jail or a juvenile reformatory, or placed on probation or parole—in other words, put under the supervision of the criminal justice system. These are only the ones for whom I could find official court, prison or police records. More than likely, the actual total is higher. Over the passage of years, court files often get lost or stored in some forgotten warehouse: in other cases, Bogle family women who went to jail may have used their married names and therefore are untraceable. Or, they may have had children who were sentenced to prison under the name of a husband or boyfriend whom I could not identify.
The figure of sixty might appear to be an outlier, some oddity out of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. But the Bogles are something much more important, and commonplace—a dramatic example of findings by criminologists from around the United States and other countries that as little as 5 percent of families account for half of all crime, and that 10 percent of families account for two-thirds of all crime. Perhaps the most important of these studies was conducted on a group of 411 boys from South London, England, following them from 1961 to 2001, by a team of British criminologists led by David Farrington of the University of Cambridge. Half of all the convictions of these boys were accounted for by a mere 6 percent of the families in the sample; 10 percent of the families accounted for two-thirds of all convictions. The longitudinal study, known as the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, also showed that having a father or mother who had been convicted, or an older brother or sister who had been convicted, was a good predictor of a boy’s later criminal activity. Having a parent who had not only been convicted but was then sent to prison was an even stronger predictor of a boy’s later criminal life.
A similar concentration of criminality was found in large, multiyear studies of delinqu
ent boys in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Rochester by American criminologists. Another measure of how strongly crime runs in families comes from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. It has reported that roughly half of the 2.3 million Americans in jail or prison have a father, mother or other close family member, like a brother, sister or uncle, who has previously been incarcerated.
What criminologists call the intergenerational transmission of violence was first documented in a pioneering longitudinal study of five hundred delinquent boys in the Boston area in the 1940s by a husband-and-wife team of researchers at the Harvard Law School, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. The Gluecks found that two-thirds of the boys sent by a court to a reformatory had a father who had been arrested and half had a grandfather who had been arrested. Forty-five percent also had a mother who had been arrested.
Equally striking, all the delinquent boys in the Gluecks’ study were white. In part, this racial makeup is a reminder that until the 1960s, at least, until the Second Great Migration of blacks from the South after World War II, most crime, including violent crime, was committed by whites. Our best-known outlaws until then were white: Jesse James in Missouri in the nineteenth century, Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago and Bonnie and Clyde in Texas during the Depression. They tended to be rural, white and poor, or ethnic white immigrants: Irish, Italians or Poles who belonged to gangs in this country’s big cities. The common American stereotype today of young black predators with guns dealing drugs was a creation of more recent years, starting in the 1960s.
Michael Harrington, the social worker and Socialist Party leader, captured the spirit of the Southern rural, white poor who had moved into the big cities during the Depression or in World War II in search of jobs in his 1962 best seller, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. He called them “urban hillbillies,” at a time before political correctness. “They are in the slums,” Harrington wrote, using another term that has fallen out of favor. “They came up from the Appalachians to Detroit for war jobs, and stayed on….They can be identified by their ninth-generation Anglo-Saxon faces, by their accents, and by the ubiquity of country music….One could read the fates written on some of the children’s faces. It was relatively easy to guess which boys might end up in a penitentiary, which girls would become pregnant before they were out of grade school.”
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