When they arrived at the detailing shop, Poole invited them in and poured them glasses of bourbon. Bobby and Tracey said they had come to take over the shop and that Poole and Rankins had to leave, immediately. Then “things got nutso, crazy,” Poole said later in court testimony. “Bobby and Tracey had it in mind that they owned half the detailing shop with Dave Fijalka,” Poole testified. But Fijalka had “squandered” his ownership, Poole said in court, without elaborating on whether Poole and Rankins had forced Fijalka into selling them the business or had just purchased it from him legitimately.
“Bobby and Tracey were talking nonsense, as far as I was concerned,” Poole testified. “They were trying to make me understand that they owned the business. But to me it was crazy. They were firing me from a business that I owned. I couldn’t get it through their heads that they had been conned.”
Tracey took out the .38-caliber revolver and fired a round into a table next to where Poole was sitting.
To calm things down, Poole took out all his business records, including his license for the shop and the telephone bills, in his name. “With that, they finally realized that Dave Fijalka had blown his interest in the business,” Poole later testified. The confrontation ended when Poole called Fijalka on the phone and he admitted he had somehow turned over the shop to Poole and Rankins. The Bogles, who had practiced conning people for a living, had just been conned.
Before they left, Bobby went up to Rankins and put his arm around him. “You’re sure there’s no way I can invest my money in your shop? Because this was really my chance,” Bobby said, according to Rankins’s court testimony. “This was a chance for me to show my daddy that we could really do something.” Rankins said no, and Tracey and Bobby left.
Debbie, who picked them up later, testified that Bobby and Tracey had only wanted to run the auto-detailing shop as a way to become legitimate. “They didn’t want any trouble,” she testified. “The whole reason they wanted the business was so that they could straighten out.”
At 11:30 p.m. on July 1, only five days after Bobby got out of prison, and with Tracey still on juvenile parole from the MacLaren School for Boys, the brothers barged into the house Fijalka shared with his girlfriend, Sandra Jackson. The brothers had been there earlier in the day without incident, but now Tracey had the .38-caliber revolver and was waving it around. “We’re going to kill you,” Tracey shouted to Dave and Sandra, she later testified. To make his point, Tracey fired a shot into the couple’s stereo speaker, and Bobby pulled the living-room curtains closed.
“They were yelling for us to get down on the floor,” Sandra testified, “and then Tracey hit Dave in the forehead with the gun and knocked him to the floor. Bobby went into the bedroom and found a set of handcuffs and proceeded to put them on me, with my hands cuffed behind my back. Then they took extension cords and tied Dave’s hands up.”
Next, Bobby went into the bedroom and found a shirt, which he ripped into pieces and stuffed in Dave and Sandra’s mouths as gags. To complete their helplessness, Bobby pulled the telephone out of the wall and used the cord to hog-tie both victims from their necks to their feet. If they tried to move their legs, it would choke them.
Bobby and Tracey were pulling open every drawer in the house, “trashing the place,” Sandra testified. “They wanted money.” Since Sandra had just sold some of her furniture, she happened to have $600 in her pocketbook. The brothers took it along with some of Sandra’s jewelry, a few rings and a necklace.
“They were acting wild and sweating like they were on drugs and just cussing and yelling,” Sandra said.
Tracey was still holding his gun and repeatedly hit both Dave and Sandra in the head with its butt, opening a number of wounds that oozed blood. Bobby found a baseball bat and hit Dave in the head with it too, causing him to pass out. Sandra was trying to force herself to stay conscious.
Bobby then found a butcher knife in the kitchen and said to Sandra, “We’re going to cut your face up.”
“They wanted to kill us,” Sandra later testified. “They just didn’t want to give up.”
Bobby found a small Kodak camera and stuck it in his pocket. “We’re going to kill you and take pictures of you after you are dead.”
At this point, Tracey walked into the bedroom and pushed Sandra, who was still hog-tied, down on the bed, with her head sticking over the edge. “Tracey looked at me, and he said, ‘You’re going to suck my dick, bitch.’ ”
“He had the gun cocked at my head, and he told me, ‘If you bite, bitch, you’re dead.’ ”
Tracey unzipped his pants and put his penis in her mouth, but he apparently was so drunk that he could not get an erection, Sandra testified. “After a while, he got distracted and went into the other room to see what Bobby was doing.” A police swab later found no semen in her mouth.
When Tracey came back into the bedroom, Sandra pretended to be unconscious, so Tracey said, “She’s out.” The brothers decided then to leave, though not without discussing which brother would kill the couple, Sandra testified. “In the end, however, they decided they weren’t going to kill us. They just figured that we were bound and gagged and we would just lay there and starve to death. Who’s going to find us, you know?” Sandra said.
When the brothers went out the front door, taking with them the keys to Sandra’s car, it was 1:30 a.m.
The Bogles had committed the kind of casual, senseless physical and sexual abuse that Bobby and Tracey had been exposed to since they were little children. Now they were reenacting it with other people as victims.
It took Dave Fijalka several hours to get himself loose and then free Sandra. Bobby had destroyed the telephone line, so they had to drive his car to a nearby Dairy Queen to call the police from a pay phone. Sandra described her car, which the brothers had stolen, and gave her license-plate number. From Salem, which sits right on Interstate 5, the Bogles could have fled north to Washington, east to Idaho, anywhere in Oregon or south to California. The Salem police department worked overnight, faxing prison photos of both Bobby and Tracey and information about the car—a red Volkswagen Rabbit—to police departments in four states.
At 3:30 p.m. that same day, a farmworker named Julio Morales in Willits, California, a town of five thousand in Mendocino County near the entrance to Redwood Country, called the California Highway Patrol to inquire whether a red Volkswagen Rabbit with Oregon license plates might be a stolen car. He was suspicious because a man he had never seen before had stopped him in Willits and given him the car and its keys after a chance encounter on the street. Morales noticed that the key ring contained several other keys that were not car keys and asked the man if he wanted them back. No, the man said, he didn’t even know what they were for. The California Highway Patrol instantly confirmed that the license plates belonged to Sandra Jackson’s stolen car and sent a tow truck to pick up the Volkswagen. The Bogles were making amateur mistakes. They would have been better off just abandoning the car on a lonely country road where it would have taken longer to find.
Two Salem police officers set off immediately for Willits, a ten-and-a-half-hour drive south of Salem on Highway 101, the coastal route that goes over some rugged mountainous terrain. In the meantime, Blaine Johnson, a Willits police officer, studied the faxed photos of Bobby and Tracey and, at seven o’clock that evening, distributed copies to other Willits officers who were patrolling Recreation Grove, the town park, where Fourth of July festivities were under way, with concession stands and fireworks. A few hours later, at one a.m. on July 3, a police officer spotted a man who looked like one of the Bogle brothers. Officer Johnson sped to the scene, along with other local policemen, and in minutes they had arrested Bobby. He was with a teenage boy who had the .38-caliber revolver in his waistband. The teenager said he was Scott Mayo and had been hitchhiking when Bobby picked him up near the Oregon border with California.
Before the officers ev
en wondered where Tracey was, Bobby blurted out that Tracey was at the Pepperwood Motel, a few blocks away. Mayo conveniently had the room key in his pocket. It was almost as if Bobby wanted to be caught, or perhaps was convinced that the police could not make a case against him and Tracey.
Johnson and two other Willits officers went to the door of Tracey’s room, with still others stationed out back just in case. They knocked, but Tracey was asleep, so they let themselves in and found Tracey on the bed. He surrendered without a fight. In the motel room the police found Sandra’s stolen jewelry and the $600 in cash. They also found a long black raincoat that Bobby had worn during the attack in Salem. It had large splotches of blood on it, which later testing showed belonged to Fijalka. The police had all the evidence they needed. It had been just a little over twenty-four hours since Bobby and Tracey terrified Fijalka and Jackson at their home in Salem.
Bobby and Tracey were both indicted on eleven charges, including burglary, robbery, kidnapping, assault, automobile theft and being a felon in possession of a gun. Tracey was given an additional charge of sodomy, meaning deviate sexual intercourse under Oregon law. A conviction on the sodomy charge would make Tracey a sexual offender, according to Oregon law, and require him to register as a sex offender when he was eventually released from prison. The kidnapping charge carried the longest penalty, which might seem odd because Bobby and Tracey had never abducted Fijalka and Jackson and taken them out of their house. But it reflected Oregon law at the time.
At the opening of their trial in Salem that November, Tracey told his lawyer, Steven Krasik, to make a motion. “Mr. Bogle asks that we have only Christian jurors on the jury panel, though I’ve told him that can’t be done under the Oregon constitution,” Krasik told the judge, Jamese Rhoades. While in jail awaiting trial, Tracey had begun reading the Bible and had developed an interest in religion.
The brothers were enjoying their day in court. “Mr. Bogle also wants psychiatric evaluations of all the witnesses and drug tests of the victims to show they are drug dependent,” Krasik said to Judge Rhoades.
“And Tracey wants Judge Rhoades to recuse herself since she was a former prosecutor,” Krasik told the judge.
Finally, Krasik said, “Tracey feels there is a biblical proscription against females sitting in judgment on males, probably, I guess, First Timothy.” He was referring to 1 Timothy 2:11, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over man, but to be in silence.” Tracey and Bobby were sitting in their seats at the defense table laughing loudly. Even being in court, with all these charges, their situation still didn’t seem serious to them, perhaps a carryover from their childhood outings with their father and mother.
Judge Rhoades promptly denied all of Tracey’s motions, without explanation.
The trial then moved smoothly and swiftly, from the prosecution’s point of view. There were no defense witnesses of consequence, and the only argument was about the meaning of Oregon’s law on kidnapping. Judge Rhoades quickly ruled that secretly confining someone in their own house constituted kidnapping.
At the end of the trial, after Bobby and Tracey were found guilty on all counts but before sentencing, Tim Bogle asked to make a statement to Judge Rhoades on behalf of his half brothers. “I told her that none of this would have happened if these two brothers didn’t get together. In our family, it’s always been about who is the baddest, who is the meanest. Tracey wanted to show he’s worthy, that he is as bad as his older brother.”
This was the terrible dynamic of the cycles of family crime.
Tracey was sentenced to sixteen years in prison, Bobby to thirty. Bobby got the longer sentence because he already had eight previous felony convictions as an adult and had been out of prison only five days when this crime took place. For Tracey, it was his first conviction as an adult. He was also now a certified sex offender.
[ 6 ]
Kathy
“Trailer Trash”
It was Mother’s Day 2006, a bright, sunny day in Salem after the long rains that mark western Oregon’s winters, but Kathy Bogle, now mother of eight grown children, was sad and lonely. None of her children could visit her, and she could not go see them. Her six sons were all in prison or jail. Her two daughters were living semi-clandestine lives, off the grid, doing drugs and hiding from bill collectors and the law.
Kathy could not visit her sons behind bars because she had become a felon. In 2002, her youngest child, Matthew Austin, had been arrested for burglary and drug possession but had fled. Kathy was hiding him in her house in Klamath Falls, a small rural city of twenty thousand people set in the mountains of southern Oregon. When the police found him there, she was charged and then convicted for hindering prosecution and custodial interference. Matthew was not a Bogle. His father was Dick Austin, a leader of the Gypsy Jokers Motorcycle Club in the Tri Cities area of southeastern Washington. Dick Austin had fourteen convictions over the previous decade for assault, domestic violence, drunk driving and speeding, according to his Washington State Department of Corrections file.
At her trial, Kathy received a sentence of probation, but she would be on probation for five years and, under Oregon law, had to pay her own supervision fee of thirty-five dollars a month. Kathy, however, regarded bills as mere annoyances and never paid them, so by the summer of 2006 she owed the Klamath County Probation Department $1,475. By then she had moved back to Salem, without receiving permission from her probation officer. A deputy sheriff from Klamath Falls made the five-hour drive north to collect the overdue bill. Kathy had no money, but she did have an old Bank of America checkbook from when she was still married to Rooster. She wrote out a check for the full amount to the deputy sheriff. Of course, the account had long been closed. It didn’t take long for the sheriff’s department to detect the fraud and file another criminal charge against Kathy. “Kathy was not a master criminal,” said Perrin Damon, a spokeswoman at the time for the Oregon Department of Corrections.
Two probation officers from Salem were then called in to Kathy’s small garden apartment in Salem to conduct a full investigation. They found marijuana and field-tested her for drugs. She was dirty for both marijuana and meth, Damon said. These were further violations of Kathy’s probation.
But the authorities didn’t really want to add to Kathy’s sentence and cost the taxpayers more money. She was sixty years old, and her sentence was about to expire. “She is a chronic drug user, but she isn’t going to do anyone else any harm,” Damon reasoned. The probation department took away Kathy’s rent-subsidized apartment, paid for by the county because she was partially disabled. This left Kathy to find a low-cost trailer in a trailer park in a rundown section of Salem next door to some other drug users. “This was not a good situation,” Damon said. “I didn’t like it. But honestly, what can you do? Kathy doesn’t want to change. And we have bigger fish to fry.” This is a dilemma the criminal justice system faces thousands of times a day, a troubling calculus of weighing whether to let chronic, low-level offenders essentially go free instead of locking them up. With each step Kathy took, she was sliding further down the socioeconomic pole, descending to depths from which it was hard to escape.
Kathy’s appearance alone bore testimony to the toll of her way of life and its endless defeats and disappointments. She had ballooned to 170 pounds, according to the Marion County jail records. Her face had been transformed from that of a pretty little girl to an aged and angry woman, with puffy skin, a bulbous nose and green eyes almost hidden by the fatty folds of her cheeks. Her hair had turned gray and was unkempt. Her teeth were rotting from all the meth she had smoked. When I visited her that Mother’s Day in 2006, she said, “I am recuperating from a long life.”
She had unsuccessfully tried to visit her three sons who were in prison around Salem: Bobby and Tracey at the Oregon State Penitentiary and Matthew, the youngest, at Coffee Creek, a facility where newly admitted inmates were processed
a few miles north on Interstate 5. She received more probation violations for trying to visit them.
Tony, the oldest son, was in prison in Arizona for life. Glen, who was on parole from prison in California, had tried to come visit his mother, but by leaving California without permission from his parole officer he violated his parole and was arrested in Salem and put in the Marion County jail. By coincidence, Michael, the other son, was there because when he last returned to Oregon he’d failed to register as a sex offender. By the end of Mother’s Day, Kathy would be there as well, for all those probation violations. So Kathy got to spend Mother’s Day night in the same building as her two sons Glen and Michael, though she just could not see or talk to them.
“This is an old story in the Bogle family,” said Tim Bogle, Rooster’s youngest son, by Linda. “Kathy is locked up, and every one of her sons is too.”
Prison was a family affair for Kathy on her own side of the family as well, the Curtis family from Amarillo. Her older sister, Bert, got married to her first husband in the Walla Walla State Prison in Washington while he was incarcerated there, and she herself was later arrested and sent to prison in Nebraska for selling money orders that he had stolen. While in a women’s prison in Nebraska, Bert was locked up with Caril Fugate, the fourteen-year-old girlfriend of Charles Starkweather, a teenager who achieved national notoriety for murdering eleven people in a killing spree in December 1957 and January 1958 in Nebraska and Wyoming. Kathy’s younger sister, Lana, lived in Kaufman County, Texas, east of Dallas, where Clyde Barrow broke his girlfriend, Bonnie Parker, out of jail in 1932. Lana became a local celebrity too, in 1990, when she slashed her boyfriend with a butcher knife after they stopped at a gas station and she sent him in to buy them beer. “When he came out with the wrong kind, she reached into her pickup and grabbed her knife,” said Deputy Kenneth Garvin, of the Kaufman County sheriff’s office. “She had a real quick temper.” Lana was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to four years in state prison. Both of Kathy’s brothers also were sent to jail, in their cases for selling cocaine and meth.
In My Father's House Page 13