Tony struggled to reply. “Yes, I did, sir, but—”
“And you were angry when you were doing it, weren’t you, sir?” Peasley asked.
“No, I was not angry,” Tony said.
“And you took Chief down to the floor?”
“Yes, I did,” Tony said, trying to find a break in the line of questioning.
“Okay. And on the floor, did you continue squeezing him as hard as you could around the neck, sir?” Peasley pressed his advantage.
“I don’t remember how long I held the Chief,” Tony said, looking over at his own lawyer, sheepishly, as if acknowledging he had made a mistake in taking the stand. The transcript of Peasley’s cross-examination continues for forty-two pages, more than enough to make Tony look very bad.
When it came time for closing arguments, on the fifth day of the trial, Sherman tried to repair the damage Tony had done to his own defense. “We may never know what really happened,” Sherman told the jury. “But your job is just to determine whether the State has met its burden of proof.” He said Peasley was “an expert lawyer and a very convincing man, the way he puts little facts together. But think about it. Where is the investigation in this case? Where is the evidence? If you leave out Tony’s initial statement to the police in Reno that he killed Chief, where is the evidence? Paula confessed to hitting the Chief with the rock too. And then there’s the autopsy. Dr. Hartsough testified that the blows to the head did not cause fractures, that they were consistent with a woman like Paula Bogle striking them, not a man in a violent rage. Why weren’t there skull fractures?”
Even Judge Veliz was struck by the contradictory nature of the evidence. Before asking the jury for its verdict, the judge said that what set this case apart, what made it difficult to decide, was that “there have been many lies and many different stories.”
The jury quickly found Tony guilty of first-degree murder.
David Sherman now had a new task—to try to present sufficient mitigating evidence to keep Tony from receiving the death penalty. He brought Tony’s aunt Bert in to testify about how Rooster had raised Tony. She had gone out with Rooster in Amarillo, before Kathy did, and she had lived in Salem for a period of time after the Bogles moved there, so she had known Tony since birth. She had also run her own children’s day-care center in Tucson for the past fifteen years, giving her a measure of expertise in the formation of character. As for Rooster, Bert called him “the most evil human being that’s ever been born.”
Rooster had brought another woman into the house where Kathy and the children lived, meaning Linda, Bert testified, and he forced the children from the age of seven or eight to watch him have sex with both their mother and Linda. Rooster also beat both women “to a bloody pulp,” Bert said, and he whipped his children for any infraction of his strict and capricious rules. One of these was that Rooster demanded the boys have sex with older women from the age of about eleven or twelve, she added. Rooster also forbade his children to play with other boys and girls. “They had no friends. It was clannish,” Bert said. The children were so terrified of their father that they were all bed wetters, which subjected them to more beatings. “You just don’t do that to little children,” said Bert. As a result, “when Tony laughs he really wants to cry,” Bert said, “but he believes he has to hide his feelings. So nobody knows the pain he is feeling.” It was a terrifying if honest synopsis of Tony’s childhood.
Sherman introduced a memorandum prepared by a court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Levy, who interviewed Tony and read all the psychological and psychiatric reports on him going back to his stays in the Oregon State Hospital as a boy. “This man had an unusually disturbing childhood, marked by victimization which was well beyond his control,” Dr. Levy concluded. “It appears that Mr. Bogle never had a chance to be a normal person and has spent most of his life institutionalized.”
This fit with Sherman’s own conclusions after spending months with Tony. “If you were going to go out and create the perfect criminal, this is how you do it,” he told me in an interview. “It’s the Bogle blueprint. You take young children and mentally and psychologically torture them. Take away all their dignity as a human being. So they have no sense of empathy for others. Then they become perfect psychopaths.”
Together, Bert’s personal observations, Dr. Levy’s psychiatric evaluation and Sherman’s interviews with Tony come as close as anyone had yet gotten to understanding the role the Bogle family played in causing one of its members to become a criminal, in this case a murderer. Sherman was frustrated that the criminal justice system, as currently set up, did not allow for a deeper dive into more information on Tony and his family. He was sure that if police forces could share more information with probation and parole officers, or if hospitals, including mental hospitals, could share more information with the police and prison authorities about dangerous offenders, people like Tony would be detected earlier and separated from other family members, like Rooster, who exerted such a malevolent influence over his children, and be given more help to divert them from a life of crime. In other fields, this kind of data mining is now an everyday event, penetrating every level of society, with companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook able to harvest huge amounts of information useful in selling products and keeping people in instant touch with their friends. But there was no way for Sherman or anyone outside the Bogle family to know, for example, that both of Rooster’s grandmothers had died in state mental hospitals, and that three of Tony’s siblings had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Nor was anyone aware that sixty members of the extended Bogle clan had been sentenced to prison, jail or probation and parole.
Sherman’s wish for more information-sharing in the criminal justice system reminded me of a highly innovative program for youthful offenders in Jacksonville, Florida. There, the local state attorney, or prosecutor, Harry Shorstein, developed a program of meetings in his office for agencies that would not normally share records, including representatives from the police, the school board, the state children’s protective service organization and the local hospital. Once a week, under the leadership of a psychologist Shorstein had hired, the different parties would meet to discuss information they each had on three young people, from age six to fifteen, who had committed a crime or had serious behavior problems at school.
One case involved a seven-year-old boy named Freddie who had hit a young girl in the head with a brick. Normally, Freddie would have been taken before a juvenile court judge a few times and then shuffled through the overburdened juvenile justice system, and whatever had made him so violent so young would simmer until the next in perhaps a lifetime of violent outbursts. But with Freddie’s arrest in Jacksonville on charges of aggravated assault, the group sitting in Shorstein’s office looked through his records to try to understand what made him do it. They discovered that he had been born addicted to drugs and with congenital syphilis, to a mother who was a cocaine addict. His mother and father, who were not married, had both been reported for abusing Freddie. His difficulty learning and trouble staying still had already required him to repeat kindergarten. With such a troubled background, the group decided, Freddie was likely to continue being delinquent. So the prosecutor’s office decided that instead of trying him in juvenile court and sending him to a reformatory, they would persuade Freddie’s mother to sign a civil contract placing the boy under its supervision for a year, with a requirement that Freddie attend school under the guidance of a mentor. The mentor would make sure Freddie got up on time every morning and had breakfast. The mentor would take him to school and would be there again in the afternoon to bring Freddie home and help him with his homework. Jacksonville was a good place to find volunteers to serve as mentors because it had big Navy and Air Force bases and a large population of retired career military families. Making use of unpaid volunteers made the program inexpensive, something important in a conservative city whose vot
ers wanted to keep taxes low. In exchange for participating in the program successfully, Freddie would have his juvenile record expunged. He was never arrested again. Unfortunately, the Florida legislature has since stopped funding the program as a cost-saving measure.
* * *
—
In the end, in Tony Bogle’s trial, Sherman did not have to introduce Bert’s mitigating evidence or Dr. Levy’s report. Judge Veliz decided that Tony’s actions were not heinous enough to merit the death penalty. The judge still sentenced Tony to twenty-six years to life in prison. Today he remains in prison in Arizona.
But the case was not over. Kenneth Peasley was furious that Paula had changed her testimony in Tony’s trial to say that she had hit Chief repeatedly with the rock. During Tony’s trial, Peasley had Paula secretly indicted by a grand jury for the murder too. In February 1994 Paula was back on trial in Tucson for murder. Peasley now argued that Tony was not solely responsible for Chief’s death. “The truth is they worked together” and were equally responsible, Peasley told the new jury. The jurors found Paula more sympathetic than Tony and convicted her of second-degree murder. She has since been released from prison.
Looking back on the case, Sherman said, “I found it to be ethically troubling.” After all, Peasley had first argued that Tony alone murdered Chief, and the jury convicted him for that, beyond a reasonable doubt. “That establishes a fact,” Sherman said. “You can’t then come back and try someone else for the same crime.”
Unknown to Sherman at the time, Peasley was about to have his own legal career ruined by his tendency to decide for himself who was innocent and who was guilty. In a 1992 triple murder in Tucson, Peasley introduced testimony by one of the homicide detectives—who also worked on Tony Bogle’s case—that Peasley knew to be false. The Arizona Bar Association conducted an investigation, and in 2004 Peasley was disbarred. That earned him the distinction of being the first American prosecutor to be disbarred for intentionally presenting false evidence in a death-penalty case.
When I asked Tony which version of Chief’s killing was true, he grinned. “Flip a coin,” he said. “Take your pick.”
[ III ]
BREAKING THE FAMILY CURSE
Death and life are in the power of the tongue.
—Proverbs 18:21
[ 9 ]
Tammie
Walking with Jesus
On the wall of her modest trailer home next to a grove of hazelnut trees in the western Willamette Valley, Tammie Bogle kept a fading black-and-white photo of herself at the age of five, back in the early 1960s, with her father, mother and one of her brothers, Louis. Tammie was a towhead at the time, with a round face and a warm smile full of freckles. The photo is a rare souvenir of a happy time before her own branch of the Bogle clan was consumed by alcohol, drugs, violence and too much time locked up behind bars. Twenty-one members of her immediate family, starting with her father, an older brother of Rooster’s known as Babe, have been sentenced to jail or prison. Tammie’s brother, known as young Louis, himself was incarcerated forty times, by his own count, before eventually being injected by his drug dealer with a hot shot of liquid Drano, instead of what he thought was meth. The injection left him in a coma, and when he unexpectedly regained consciousness, he was a quadriplegic; he was bedridden for the last eighteen years of his life. “Too mean to die,” he liked to joke. The weekend before he passed away, Tammie went to visit him and heard Louis talking with someone. “I asked him who it was, and he said, ‘Tammie, I’ve been talking to an angel. I’ll see you with God.’ ”
A deep religious faith, in fact, was what kept Tammie from succumbing to the perils and pitfalls of the kind that destroyed so many of her relatives. Religion for Tammie was not only her personal salvation, but also a shield against the temptations and the contagions that consumed the Bogles and made the family itself a cause of crime.
Inside her trailer, painted beige with red trim, there were photos of Tammie’s three children. One, Jason, went to prison for eight years but then became director of a Christian-based halfway house for inmates leaving prison. The other two, Shannon and Amy, married former prisoners and now work as counselors—one in a drug rehab program and the other as the head of a preschool program. On the trailer’s narrow walls there are also pictures of Tammie’s fourteen grandchildren, along with photos of some of the three hundred foster children the local courts have entrusted to her over the years. As a young girl, Tammie picked up her interest in religion from her mother, Lola, herself a devout Southern Baptist who was part Native American from Oklahoma, where missionaries drilled Christianity into her on the reservation. Faith was a refuge for Tammie from the time when her father would preach on Sunday mornings and then get drunk on the way home from church and beat his wife until her face was bloodied. Tammie would then direct her brother Louis, who was a fast runner, to take off across a farm field to distract her father and make him give chase. “Those beatings used to really hurt me too,” Tammie said.
The natural world outside the trailer was also a haven for Tammie, a place where she found God. Tammie had gardens planted with wisteria, honeysuckle and clematis. In one section sat an old bathtub filled with butterfly bushes in bright lavender, yellow, pink and purple. Early each morning Tammie walked through a grove of young fir trees being grown for sale at Christmas, and she prayed in the soft dawn light coming through the green branches. There were rabbits, pheasants, skunks and foxes moving among the trees.
“I am walking with Jesus out here,” Tammie liked to say. “It is as close to heaven as I can get. I am talking to Jesus, praying to him, listening to the birds. It is a healing place for me. Some of my grandkids say they have seen angels out here.”
Tammie had a small sculpture of a bronze angel in a fountain sitting on an old wooden whiskey barrel someone gave her. “When I hear the fountain and the water, I think about the Lord’s peace.”
For her, Tammie said, “Jesus is as real to me as anyone in our family. The factor in our family that differentiates people is the ones who choose God, to keep them out of crime. I look at the Lord as my spiritual daddy because I didn’t have a real strong relationship with my dad.”
From all her years of watching her fellow Bogle family members, and raising so many foster children, Tammie developed her own philosophy of what makes children into criminals. “Throughout our family, the boys always said, ‘I am such a screwup; I am going to turn out like my dad,’ ” Tammie said. “They believed they were cursed and could not change their destiny. We called it the Bogle curse.”
Tammie found a passage in the Bible, Proverbs 18:21, which seemed to fit her family precisely: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
“So when someone in the family said, ‘You are going to turn out just like your dad,’ it was as if the power of death was spoken over us,” Tammie said. “This created a link among our family members.”
It was another way of stating the social learning theory of becoming a criminal.
* * *
—
Tammie was born in Amarillo two years before the Bogles moved up to Oregon. Her father, Babe, had been a young ironworker trying to connect some bolts on a forty-foot-high oil-refining tower owned by Phillips Petroleum in June 1960 in Borger, Texas, when he slipped and fell face-first into a pit of carbon black. Both his arms and wrists and both legs were broken, along with his back, and carbon black penetrated the bones of his face. A doctor who examined him wrote, “This patient will, in my opinion, be totally disabled for at least a year, and I doubt if he will ever be able to return to heavy labor.” Babe was placed on a morphine drip to relieve his acute pain, and that led him to alcohol. As predicted, he could never find full-time employment after that, so the family lived off his $300 a month in Social Security disability payments, along with whatever he could earn as what Tammie called a “shade-tree mechanic,” someone who “
could fix anything with an engine, a car, a motorcycle or a truck, if you pulled it under a tree.”
Over time, Babe’s drinking got worse, and when he was drunk he’d beat his wife until her lips were split and her glasses were broken, Tammie said. “One time he got so drunk, he passed out and we tied him up and wanted to set him on fire,” Tammie recalled. “We begged our mother to let us burn him, but she said no.
“This happened so often and was so widespread in our family that we thought of it as normal family stuff, with the men violent or criminal or drunk and the women codependent,” Tammie said.
When she turned sixteen and was of legal age to marry, to get away from the troubles plaguing her family she decided to marry a young man she had met, Durrell Burden, whose own family were migrant farmworkers. As her father led her down the aisle of the local Baptist church, he had a sudden clarity of vision and said to Tammie, “Take off and run.”
“My dad really meant it,” Tammie said years later. “It was not a joke. He knew what that family was like and that I would just be repeating the same mistakes as the Bogles. It wasn’t a good omen.”
In fact, Tammie moved in with her husband’s family, and they were just like her own, except now it was Tammie’s new husband getting drunk most nights and she was the one taking the beatings. He was eventually sent to jail for being drunk and disorderly. By then Tammie was pregnant, and soon she was worried that her husband, when released, would beat her in the stomach and might injure their baby in the womb. After their son, Jason, was born, her husband became uncontrollably suspicious that the baby wasn’t his child and so increased the beatings, leaving Tammie unable to walk some days. When Jason was three months old, her husband beat Tammie and the baby she was holding in her arms, sending them crashing to the concrete floor.
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