Tony later explained to me that when his mother came to visit him on his thirteenth birthday, she brought a cake, and as soon as he blew out the candles on it the guards said it was time for her to leave. “I was angry,” Tony said in an interview in prison in Tucson. “I felt abandoned.”
A few months after the hospital let him go, Tony was arrested by the police in Salem for several burglaries. He was sent back to a medium-security juvenile facility in Salem called Hillcrest. While there, Tony often started fights and kicked and bit guards, and threatened to kill one guard.
That was too much for the facility. They took Tony back to Judge Norblad, who ordered him committed again to the Oregon State Hospital, in February 1979, at the age of fifteen. More of Tony’s troubled history came out in records submitted to Norblad. They showed that Tony had a history of setting fires to kill animals, and that he had been described as “an extremely anxious child obsessed with a number of issues, particularly regarding his father.” His father was described in the court documents as “coming from a carnival background,” which was partly true, though Rooster was born after his parents had quit being in the carnival. Tony’s father was also reported to have a prison record, a dependence on welfare and a history of alcohol abuse. Tony himself, according to a psychological evaluation by the Oregon State Hospital, suffered from “anxiety neurosis,” meaning he had strong feelings of anxiety or fear. Tony made little progress at the hospital, his record shows, and after five months he escaped.
Tony was soon caught during another burglary and was sent back to Hillcrest, which did not want him. Judge Norblad returned him to the Oregon State Hospital, in theory to finish the program he had just run away from. That all these authorities were not strong enough to corral Tony only fed his growing sense of power.
Back at the Oregon State Hospital for the third time, in late 1979, Tony “showed no interest in working on his problems or relating to his treatment team,” the hospital reported. This time his diagnosis was more specific and bleak. It was “anxiety neurosis with depressive features, and unsocialized, aggressive reaction of adolescence.” In layman’s terms, Tony was anxious, fearful and depressed, but also had an aggressive personality with a tendency to fight, and he might suffer from antisocial personality disorder as he grew to be an adult. This was tantamount to saying he was likely to become an adult criminal. After a mere two weeks, he was discharged again. “Unimproved,” the hospital said.
When Tony went home this time, the family situation had changed. Rooster, often paranoid, had come to believe that Kathy was cheating on him with other men and had initiated divorce proceedings—ironic, to say the least. In the divorce, Rooster won custody of all the children except the youngest, Tracey, whom Kathy kept. Divorce in hand, Rooster packed Linda and the children into his car and drove to Reno, Nevada, where he and Linda got married in the Starlite Chapel.
After the divorce, Tony decided to spend a night at his mother’s new house with his brother, Tracey, just like old times. Rooster unexpectedly showed up the next morning and found Tony arguing with Kathy. Rooster lost his temper, grabbed Tony and hauled him down to the Marion County courthouse to Judge Norblad, who was practically becoming a member of the Bogle family. “I can’t keep him,” Rooster said to the judge. “I’m done with him. I’m not taking him home.”
As it happened, the police had been looking for Tony because he had been observed stealing mail from the neighbors’ mailboxes, another trick Rooster had taught him. The best letters to steal, Rooster said, were those containing Social Security or pension checks, which could be cashed, or cards at Christmas, which often contained cash. This was a federal offense, so Norblad sentenced Tony to the MacLaren School for Boys, the toughest sanction he could impose.
MacLaren, as everyone called it, was Oregon’s maximum-security facility for youthful offenders, set behind tall evergreens on a large 270-acre estate of grass fields and farmland close to Interstate 5, in Woodburn, seventeen miles north of Salem. Its campus was made up largely of small cottages designed to give its young residents a welcoming family feel. It was surrounded, though, by high fences of barbed wire with their tops facing inward and down to make escape harder. MacLaren had a reputation for brutality by its guards—and by fellow inmates—with boys often locked up in chains in cold and isolated conditions and subject to beatings. MacLaren’s most famous inmate had been Gary Gilmore, a Portland native, who murdered two men in Utah and was executed there in 1977 after demanding his own execution by firing squad. Norman Mailer’s best seller The Executioner’s Song chronicled Gilmore’s life, and his younger brother, Mikal Gilmore, wrote a poignant book, Shot in the Heart, that traced much of Gilmore’s murderous rage to his stay at MacLaren. When Tony was sent there, MacLaren was in the middle of a class-action lawsuit that dragged on for ten years before the Oregon Youth Authority agreed to a number of reforms.
“When I arrived at MacLaren,” Tony recalled, “it was totally out of control.” Tony saw a boy who was in chains beaten by a burly guard for what seemed like an hour during his first day there. That night, Tony was assigned an upper bunk, unaware of what was about to happen. The first thing he knew was that something warm and wet hit him in the face, and then his blankets and sheets were pulled off and he was covered in a hot, milky substance. “The other boys were jerking off and spraying me,” Tony said. “Some boys had saved up their cum in bottles and were tossing it all over me.” It was Tony’s introduction to MacLaren’s tradition of “cum fights.”
“The guards didn’t do anything,” Tony said. “They just left us alone. It happened to every new boy when they arrived.” There were also guards having sex with the boys, sometimes in exchange for passes or for cigarettes, Tony said, and a few of the medical staff and a cook in the kitchen also had sex with the boys.
Tony got into trouble for hitting one guard over the head with a glass ashtray. The guard called for backup and a group of guards took turns beating Tony. “They sent me to the hole for a week for that,” Tony said, using the prison argot for solitary confinement. He frequently ran away, only to be recaptured and put back in solitary.
Tony was discharged sometime in 1981 and went to live with his mother, Kathy, who by this time had moved to Kennewick, part of the Tri-Cities area of southeast Washington, a two-hundred-mile drive up the Columbia River from Salem. Tracey was living there too, as was their other brother, Bobby. Tony and Bobby went on a spree of forty or fifty burglaries, Tony said. The total is certainly an exaggeration, but the police eventually caught the brothers and Tony was sent back to MacLaren.
It was there in April 1982 that Tony was charged with the sodomy of a younger boy. Tony was surprised because he had only had oral sex with a boy who often had sex with other inmates. It was no different, in Tony’s mind, than what went on every day at MacLaren, with the authorities turning a blind eye. But in this case, the boy, named Lee, had a steady boyfriend who took offense at Tony’s interference in their relationship and reported Tony to the guards. Tony was taken to Salem, and because he had turned eighteen just two months before, he was put on trial in adult court. By coincidence, Judge Norblad had just been promoted from juvenile to adult court, and the case was assigned to him. “He tossed the book at me,” Tony said. “I’ve seen you too many times before,” Norblad told him. “I’m through with you. I’m sending you to the big boys’ house.” Tony was convicted of sodomy in the second degree, meaning deviant sexual intercourse where the victim was under fourteen, and he was sentenced to ten years in the Oregon State Penitentiary, Oregon’s maximum-security prison. Tony had arrived on the big stage.
[ 5 ]
Bobby and Tracey
The Family Curse
Since Kathy had insisted in the divorce agreement that Tracey must live with her, in 1980 he moved into her small apartment in Kennewick. Kathy would go out to bars every night to pick up strangers to bring home, smoking marijuana and popping pills. Ka
thy, now thirty-four, still had a little girl’s face, was slight and only four feet eleven inches tall, so she could pass for being ten years younger. Perhaps because of this, some of the men Kathy brought home were only a few years older than Tracey, who was eight. Kathy gave Tracey strict instructions never to call her “Mom” or “Mother” when any of these men were around.
One of Kathy’s new acquaintances was a leader of a local motorcycle gang. Another locked Tracey in the trunk of his car, so he and Kathy would not be disturbed while having sex. A third tried to drown Tracey in a swimming pool.
Kathy was changing houses every few months, when she ran out of money and could not make the rent. As Rooster soon discovered, this was in part because Kathy was cashing his court-ordered child-support checks at local liquor stores. The frequent changes in residence meant that Tracey often had to switch schools. “One day my mother dropped me off at a new school, but it was a holiday and the school was closed,” Tracey said. “She had forgotten and drove off leaving me standing there. My mom was pretty irresponsible.” Tracey did not remember the address of his latest apartment, so he walked around aimlessly, hoping for a clue. Finally a police cruiser stopped him and asked what he was doing. After he explained, the policeman took him to police headquarters and he was placed in temporary foster care.
After Rooster saw that his checks were being cashed at liquor stores, he and Linda began telephoning Tracey to find out what was happening. Tracey told them about his life, including how he had stepped on some glass and cut his foot, which was now swollen by a bad infection. When he asked his mother to take him to a doctor, Kathy said it would get better by itself.
Rooster and Linda sent Kathy a plane ticket to fly Tracey from Kennewick back to Portland, a short flight. “When we saw him get off the plane, he was like an orphan,” Linda said. “The stewardess had him by the hand, and all he had was a paper bag with all his possessions. He was wearing a cheap plastic raincoat with nothing under it: no shirt, no pants, no underwear and no socks or shoes.”
Rooster took Tracey to Judge Norblad, who awarded custody back to Rooster.
* * *
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Looking from the outside, at this moment in time, one might be tempted to think that something like normalcy had settled into the Bogle household. Rooster, with his ironworkers’ certification, had more frequent jobs. All the children except Tony, who was in prison, were living under one roof, at least most of the time. But in reality life for the Bogles was not only sometimes crazy and cartoonish; it was often violent or criminal.
Later that same year, 1980, Bobby wanted to visit his mother for his sixteenth birthday. She was now back living in Amarillo, her birthplace, and Kathy took him to a strip club, the Crystal Pistol. “Out came this stripper, who I didn’t recognize at first,” Bobby said. “Then my mom said, ‘That’s your sister, Melody,’ and Mom nudged me. ‘That’s your birthday present.’ Everybody thought it was very funny and they were laughing.”
Bobby was embarrassed and offended. “I had never seen my sister nude,” Bobby said. “And they had played a trick on me. I wondered why in the world would they want me to see my sister nude, and what kind of birthday present did they think it was.”
On the drive back to Salem, Bobby and his mother quarreled in the car, and a few miles outside Salem, Kathy dropped Bobby off in the small town of Turner, without any money or way to get back to his home with Rooster. Bobby did the only thing he knew to do, what his father and older brother Tony had taught him—he burglarized a house. When that did not produce any cash, he broke into a local amusement park, the Enchanted Forest. That did get him some money—but the police caught him. Bobby soon found himself in front of Judge Norblad, who was becoming more and more convinced that the courts needed a new extralegal sanction to deal with families like the Bogles, something that could treat the whole family. But a program of that kind was still years away, so he sentenced Bobby to the MacLaren School for Boys, at the age of sixteen.
* * *
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Over the past two decades, some psychiatrists and psychologists have, in fact, developed a new set of therapy programs to deal with families like the Bogles in much the way Judge Norblad envisioned, what might be called intensive in-home supervision for high-risk families. The programs act like probation, in that probation officers attached to a court offer programs to youthful offenders instead of a sentence to a reformatory or prison. In this major innovation, a highly trained team of clinicians goes to the family’s home for three to five months to provide in-home counseling for both the parents and their children, or any other relatives who may be involved, including grandparents and siblings.
One of these innovative programs, called Multisystemic Therapy, was developed by Scott Henggeler, who recently retired as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Medical College of the University of South Carolina in Charleston. While he was getting his Ph.D. he was hired by the state of Virginia’s Department of Pediatrics to work with antisocial children and was given some of the most difficult cases. After working with them for a while, and making little progress, Henggeler decided to visit the adolescents in their homes. “It took me fifteen to twenty seconds to realize how incredibly stupid my brilliant treatment plans were,” he said. He realized that he needed to treat the children in the full context of their lives, to see them where they lived, with their families—their parents and siblings—and where they went to school. His central insight was to take therapy to the adolescents instead of taking the adolescents to therapy. “This meant our clinicians needed to go to their homes and families, to treat the whole family, and also to go to their schools, teachers, friends and any other close relatives they were in contact with,” Henggeler said. Siblings can be particularly important because they may know things the parents don’t, or may be starting to exhibit the same risky behavior and need to be treated too.
This is especially true for families like the Bogles, given how insular and clannish they are, Henggeler said. They are like a giant rogue iceberg, with most of the dangers hidden out of sight below the waterline, and only a small portion showing to outsiders. Getting inside their secret patrimony, their family myths, with their endless history of abuse, violence and disappointments, would be key to understanding why any of the individual Bogles had such difficulty making good choices, he said.
“Where you get the biggest bang for the buck,” Henggeler added, “is when you decrease the activity of the most antisocial member or members of the family. And if you focus on the most troublesome member, the parents are usually involved. The key to getting good outcomes, to stopping the most chronic and violent offenders, is to get the parents to be more effective parents.”
In most families Henggeler has worked with, “you sell the family to accept the therapy by persuading them it is a way to get their kids out of trouble and to stay out of prison,” he said. “The parents usually love their kids, and we teach the parents how to make the therapy work to help their kids.” In some very troubled families, Henggeler said, the clinical teams may take a different path. “In those families we try to identify the most pro-social member of the family, even if it is a grandparent not living in the home, and then try to forge a bond between them and the kid to make the therapy work.”
Multisystemic Therapy, or MST, as it is often called, now has 535 locations in thirty-four states and fifteen countries. The clinicians that MST employs work in teams of two to four people per case and are specially trained social workers or psychologists. Henggeler estimated that they have worked with two hundred thousand families since the program began in 1996. Randomized clinical trials have found that when measured three years after MST therapy, the adolescents who have undergone the program have an average decrease in arrests of 42 percent, Henggeler said, a very high figure in the criminal justice system. The therapy can also produce big cost savings. Although the price tag of MST treatment va
ries by state, the average is $8,000 per juvenile, according to Henggeler. By contrast, court-ordered placements in a reformatory or prison can run from $50,000 to $100,000 for a youth.
Henggeler acknowledged that families like the Bogles presented a very difficult challenge even for his innovative therapy. “The single most powerful predictor of antisocial activity is the adolescent’s association with deviant peers, who are usually in school or the neighborhood,” he said. The Bogles’ own family is their deviant peer group. For a Bogle, Henggeler suggested, “the best alternative might be to move away.”
* * *
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A few months after Bobby was sentenced to MacLaren, Rooster took Tracey, who was still only eight years old, to visit Bobby there. No one recognized at the time, as some criminologists did later, that taking a child to visit his older brother or father in prison could be endangering the child, making him think that life in prison is normal, or even glamorous, not dangerous and frightening. That kind of response could undermine the whole basis of the criminal justice system, which is deterrence, the notion that going to prison should scare people out of committing crime. That is precisely what happened with Tracey that day. “I was very impressed how tough Bobby looked with all those other big teenage inmates,” Tracey said. “It made him look heroic, and I wanted to grow up to be as bad as him.”
Soon Tracey was thinking about the meaning of what was happening to his family. “Our father had raised us to be outlaws, to steal, and I began to realize that what you are raised with is very hard to escape,” Tracey said later. “I began to think we lived under a family curse of crime, like it was something contagious.”
In My Father's House Page 11