In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  Having Rooster in the neighborhood and in his class had unexpected benefits, Lindvay added. “The hoodlums from the other side of town had always beat up on us, but with Dale around, even though he was so skinny, as soon as they insulted him, he knocked them out,” Lindvay remembered.

  When it came time to elect a class president in seventh grade, “Dale said we should keep out the popular kids and make sure we got a boy from our side of town for a change,” Lindvay said. Lindvay had never been a class leader, but he was Dale’s pick to be class president. “In the end,” Lindvay said, “even some of the good kids joined in, out of fear of Dale and of getting beaten, and so I was elected. I was shocked. It showed how much power and influence Dale had.”

  Rooster had been getting into trouble with the law by the time he turned fifteen. He broke into vending machines to steal soda and candy. He also carried a .22-caliber pistol, which he used to shoot out the numbers on pay telephones, turning them into slot machines that disgorged their coins. One time the police caught him breaking into a store downtown, and Rooster said, “You can’t do anything to me,” according to another classmate, Jimmy Wilson, who was with him. “You can’t take me to jail, I’m too young,” Wilson recalled Rooster saying. “The cops said, ‘Sure we can,’ and they put him in jail for a few hours.”

  By that time, Rooster had become well known to the police. E. N. Smith, a former Amarillo detective, said Rooster had a juvenile record that ran to a dozen pages for thefts, fighting, assaults and driving a stolen car. Rooster’s first wife, Kathy, who grew up in the same impoverished Amarillo neighborhood, said he had once forced a girl into a car he had stolen, effectively kidnapping her. Even though the girl reported it to the police, Rooster managed to get off without being charged with a crime, Kathy recalled. Rooster himself claimed that another time, when he had been drinking heavily, a teenager kicked him in the head over and over until Rooster beat him to death. In Rooster’s telling of the episode, the police found the body but he was not arrested because people were too scared of him to snitch.

  Mrs. Garcia, observing from across the street, saw a pattern of behavior emerging. “Rooster was always in trouble, but Elvie actively defended him and denied he did anything bad,” she said. She thought Elvie was actually encouraging Rooster’s growing delinquency. His mother may have identified with her son because she too was short, five feet three inches tall, Mrs. Garcia said. In any case, Elvie “spoiled him rotten. She bought him fancy leather cowboy boots with pointed toes and black leather pants.” The more Rooster stole and the more he got in fights, the greater the gifts, Mrs. Garcia said. When Rooster wanted an expensive new Cushman Eagle motorcycle, Elvie went to a store and bought it for him.

  His mother “only pretended to discipline Rooster,” according to his second wife, Linda. One day he broke another neighbor’s window, and when the woman complained to Elvie, she said, “I’ll take care of him.” His mother then went inside and took out a book, saying, “I’m going to hit my hand real loud, and when I do you scream.”

  “Rooster was her pride and joy; whatever he wanted, he got,” Linda said. She believed Elvie was indulgent and permissive. Today such behavior would be recognized as enabling, reinforcing negative behavior by making it possible and then explaining it away. Elvie was almost a textbook example of an enabler.

  To compound the problem, Rooster’s father “never opened his mouth” about the mounting number of delinquent acts, Mrs. Garcia said. But one time, when Elvie went on a long car trip to California, apparently to sell moonshine—one of many such trips family members said she made—Louis lost his patience and took out his belt and whipped Rooster. When Elvie returned home and discovered what had happened, “it almost caused a divorce, she was so angry,” Linda said.

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  The poor supervision exercised by Elvie and Louis over Rooster and their lack of consistent discipline fit in with the findings of another major school of criminology, what is known as “social control theory.” This school grew out of work done by sociologists at the University of Chicago as they watched crime rates soar in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s with an influx of Eastern European immigrants, the growth of bootlegging during Prohibition and the rise of urban gangs led by the Mafia. Chicago itself became their laboratory. To them, social control meant social bonds, the informal ties that can produce conformity to society’s rules. Good parents, a good education, religious beliefs and stable jobs all help create what these criminologists called “social capital,” which holds society together. The more a person is involved in conventional activities and the greater his or her ties are to their parents and spouses, the less likely a person is to break the law, the theory held. It was a valuable supplement to social learning theory, the notion that young criminals are made by imitating the behavior of their parents or older siblings.

  A more recent and comprehensive iteration of social control theory, by Robert J. Sampson of Harvard and John H. Laub of the University of Maryland, offers an eerie explanation of much of what was happening in the Bogle family. The two criminologists reexamined the pioneering work by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck in Boston. In analyzing the Gluecks’ data, the professors found that “the largest predictor of delinquency” was the mother’s supervision. Poor supervision by both the mother and the father, inconsistent discipline by parents, and alcoholism and criminality among parents all turned out to be important factors in the origin of juvenile delinquency and later adult crime, the professors concluded in their book, Crime in the Making. Both alcoholism and family criminality were critical because they made it harder for fathers and mothers to properly supervise and discipline their children. Instead of focusing on race or neighborhoods, or poverty and prisons as a cause of criminality, Professors Sampson and Laub wrote, “our research suggests that family life is far more important in understanding persistent criminal behavior in the early adolescent years.” For their research, Sampson and Laub were awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2011. It is the highest international honor in the field of criminology.

  Elvie and Louis’s lack of supervision and erratic discipline also affected John, Dude and Charlie. They had grown up in an even more chaotic family environment, while their mother and father were working in the carnival. They lived in trailers when the show season was on, traveling from city to city, or in rented houses for a few months in the winter and later in a tent that they pitched whenever they moved. Their mother was often absent, busy riding her motorcycle. Their living conditions were crowded. The Boston study found that frequent moves and crowded housing also made it harder for parents to provide good supervision and discipline for their children. The Bogles were hardly an organized crime family; they were more of a disorganized crime family, a dysfunctional family, even if the boys were close to their mother and father. The boys all ended up with criminal records, and in Amarillo, Dude and Charlie themselves directly contributed to Rooster’s first criminal conviction.

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  At the beginning of his ninth-grade year, in September 1957, Rooster already had a number of girlfriends. They were attracted by his combination of charm and toughness, a persona that reminded some of the girls of James Dean, the brooding young actor whose film Rebel Without a Cause had been an enormous hit two years earlier. Rooster was not an athlete—he didn’t even like sports, which required teamwork—but he was quick with his fists and also his feet, which he used to kick opponents in the groin. He often practiced his kicking by dropping a can from his hand, then trying to kick it before it hit the ground and propelling it as high as possible.

  Rooster began going out with Kathy when she was only eleven years old. He made her feel good by giving her attention, something she got little of from her alcoholic, impoverished parents. One night Rooster snuck her out of her bedroom window and took her for a ride in a Ford his mother had bought for him. Kathy never forgot that Rooster dr
ove while hanging on the outside of the door, below the window, to escape detection by the police, who he said were looking for him. She was impressed that he smelled of leather, the black pants that Elvie had purchased for him.

  At the time, Rooster had another girlfriend, Margaret Presley, but he got tired of her and dumped her, and she became the girlfriend of Rooster’s friend and chief rival in their class, Jimmy Wilson. Both boys were born in Wichita Falls before moving to Amarillo, and both of their families were “dirt poor,” Wilson recalled years later. On the evening of September 5, 1957, a rainy night, Presley had a party at her house to which Rooster was not invited. Rooster learned about it and thought she was betraying him by taking up with Wilson, so Rooster broke into the house while the party was going on. “He slammed her up against the wall and grabbed her by the neck and choked her, and tore off the chain I had given her and slapped her in the head,” Wilson recalled. Wilson challenged Rooster to “take the fight outside.” They agreed to meet at an abandoned house nearby where bootleggers made moonshine. Each boy named his second. Rooster’s was another school friend, Pat Dunavin.

  Rooster arrived for the fight on his new Cushman Eagle motorcycle. Wilson was walking. Wilson was several inches taller than Rooster and at least twenty-five pounds heavier. In keeping with his habit, Rooster hit Wilson first, Wilson later told the police, with the short metal pipe concealed in his hand. The blow opened a big cut over Wilson’s right eye that required a number of stitches to close. Wilson meanwhile had picked up what he claimed was a stick, but that the police said was a two-by-four piece of lumber that was four feet long. He cracked Rooster on the side of his head, instantly knocking him unconscious. That ended the fight.

  Dunavin thought Rooster had just passed out. “So I picked him up and put him on my motor scooter and drove him to my house,” Dunavin remembered. He then got a wet rag from his family’s bathroom and tried to bring Rooster to. “It was my mother who figured out it was a much worse injury,” Dunavin added. “She called an ambulance, which took him to the hospital.”

  Rooster arrived at the Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo in critical condition with a fractured skull. The next morning he underwent surgery that lasted four hours. He remained unconscious for three days, and even after he regained consciousness he was partially paralyzed on his right side and was unable to speak for a month.

  Jimmy Wilson was arrested as a juvenile, put in jail for several days and initially feared he might face execution. When Rooster was finally released from the hospital and regained much of his ability to speak, Wilson was sentenced to eight years’ probation.

  The fight had long-term consequences for Rooster. He had a hole the size of a silver dollar in his skull and would need more brain surgery. He suffered from epilepsy and for years into the future took a combination of phenobarbital, used for treatment of seizures, and Sodium Dilaudid, a narcotic painkiller. Dilaudid is highly addictive, and its effects may intensify with alcohol. Rooster’s speech remained impaired, and he never went back to school after the fight, so his education stopped at eighth grade.

  His personality changed too. He became even more impulsive and more paranoid, according to Kathy, and he began drinking even more, though he was only fifteen at the time of the fight. Long after Rooster was injured, doctors and other researchers would find that traumatic brain injuries can cause precisely these types of changes in personality and behavior, making people who suffer them more impulsive, more paranoid and, in some cases, more prone to violence. One group of people who have suffered these effects are professional football players with repeated concussions. They have developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease that can lead to impulsivity, disinhibition and poor judgment. This condition can be confirmed only by posthumous exams of their brains, and CTE was not known about in Rooster’s day. Nor did doctors at the time have the sophisticated brain scans and magnetic resonance imaging tests, MRIs, that exist today. So how much of Rooster’s later behavior can be attributed to the brain damage he incurred in the fight must remain conjecture.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the brain injury, Rooster was ready for more adventure only a year later. Charlie and Dude had just the ticket. Dude wanted to try out the burglar skills he had learned in prison in Kansas, and he came up with a plan to break into the safe inside the Bogles’ neighborhood grocery store, Scivally’s Affiliated Food Store. The store was a plain-looking cinder block building with a large eight-hundred-pound Mosler safe sitting on a raised, enclosed platform three steps above the main floor. Tom Scivally, the owner and manager, used the platform as his office; it was also a good vantage point to keep track of what was going on in the store. Dude knew from shopping there that most of the customers cashed their weekly paychecks in the grocery on Fridays or Saturdays, since few of these working-class people had bank accounts. They worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, whose tracks ran nearby, or did construction jobs or worked for the city. Tom Scivally was happy to cash their checks because they bought their food from him; cashing payroll checks was good for business.

  Dude invited Charlie to help with the burglary, but Charlie turned him down. He was married now, with a wife and four young children to consider, and he was trying to be an ironworker. Dude instead enlisted two other men with petty criminal records, Fred Box and Donald Ray Branham. At eleven p.m. on the night of Sunday, December 7, 1958, Box broke a window in the back door of the store and crawled inside. He then unlocked the door and let in Dude and Branham. When Dude and his friends tried to lift the steel and concrete safe, they realized it was too heavy to get down the steps and out the back door, which faced a dirt alley. Dude decided to go fetch Charlie, who was both strong and handy. If anybody could wrestle the safe down the steps, it was him.

  This time Charlie agreed. He brought some two-by-fours, and he figured they could work the safe down the steps. Charlie also offered his old Mercury sedan. After the four men got the safe down to the main floor, they used a dolly they found in the store to roll it to Charlie’s car, which he had parked in the alley. They drove it to Llano Cemetery, less than a block from where the Bogles lived, and put it in an area where workmen had dumped dirt they had recently dug up while creating new grave sites. Then, in their excitement, the four men got drunk. They started singing and shouting so loudly that the police heard them and arrested them for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. The men were put in jail for the night. The police didn’t yet know about the burglary and had not seen the safe in the graveyard.

  The story of the missing safe was played at the top of the front page in both of the city’s newspapers for several days. Scivally estimated the burglars had made off with close to $20,000 in cash and checks. The detective assigned to lead the police investigation, E. N. Smith, said it was one of the biggest burglaries in the city’s history. It also made for a “miserable Christmas” for Scivally and his family. “It could have bankrupted us,” he said later. “It was a big blow. We were sleepless for a few nights.” But they soon figured out that they had enough receipts and other documentation to make an insurance claim for some of the cash and checks.

  The police were skeptical at first that the burglars would be savvy enough to get the safe open, unless they were part of a gang of professional burglars from Dallas. Lieutenant Eli Leflar told The Amarillo Globe Times that the type of safe was one of the toughest to crack. It had what the Mosler company called an internal burglar-resistant chest, with a tube of double-thick steel encased in concrete, and it was also equipped with a self-locking device that would activate if someone tampered with the safe. “If the burglars don’t know what they are doing, or can’t find a safe-man who does, they may never get that thing open,” Leflar told the paper.

  When the Bogles got out of jail the next day, they decided to move the safe to a more discreet spot. They needed a bigger vehicle for the safe, which had caused Charlie’s car to sag badly, so the
y borrowed a truck from Rooster’s older sister, Peggy, and then stopped by their parents’ house, where Rooster lived. As soon as he saw the safe, Rooster announced, “I’m coming with you.” It was a fateful decision, made, as was often the case, on impulse. Rooster had just made himself a criminal.

  The newly enlarged group drove fifteen miles northwest of Amarillo to an isolated, middle-of-nowhere place up a draw on some sandy ranchland. There were low bushes and hills that made good cover. The men worked on opening the safe for three days, using an acetylene torch they stole from a Santa Fe Railroad workshop to cut through the top. They rigged a canvas cover and several tarps to hide the flame just in case anyone came by. It took so long to burn through the Mosler’s protective walls that the metal looked like it was burning, so the men poured water on the safe to keep the money inside from catching fire. When the burglars finally broke through, they discovered that the water had soaked the cash. More important, they found that bits of molten metal had dripped inside burning pinhole-sized openings in a number of the bills.

  The five men then drove back to Louis and Elvie’s house in Amarillo and hung the wet bills to dry on clotheslines they strung inside the small house. This sight did not escape Elvie’s attention. “The boys weren’t smart enough to figure out how to divide up the money, so they gave the task to Elvie,” according to A. B. Towery, who was married to Rooster’s sister, Peggy.

  Elvie first sat down at the kitchen table and counted the money. The cash portion came to $5,700. She gave each of the five men, including Rooster, $900, and she dealt herself $500, all that was left of the bills that were not too badly burned.