In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  LORI BOGLE, MARK’S WIFE—Prison, for manufacture of meth and for identity theft

  FLORY BOGLE BLACK, TAMMIE’S SISTER—Prison, for drug possession and stabbing a friend

  GARY BLACK, FLORY’S FIRST HUSBAND—Jail, for drunk driving

  ROBERT WAYNE COOPER, FLORY’S SECOND HUSBAND—Prison, for drug possession

  ROBERT WAYNE COOPER JR., FLORY’S SON—Prison, for auto theft and drug possession

  Acknowledgments

  This book owes a primary debt to three people without whose support it would not have been possible. Foremost and always to my wife, Elizabeth Mehren, herself an accomplished journalist and author and more recently professor of journalism at Boston University, who provided advice, good cheer and extraordinary patience, especially when our son, Sam Butterfield, passed away unexpectedly midway through the writing. Second, to my editor at Knopf, Jon Segal, who persevered in supporting the book long after most editors would have canceled the project. His suggestions on how to make a difficult subject more readable were always on target. And third, but certainly not least, I am deeply grateful to Linda Bogle, Rooster’s second wife, who opened a door to the Bogle family when many other members were skeptical, or even hostile, not seeing any benefit to making their story public.

  In the end, most Bogle family members agreed to participate in interviews and even share letters, photographs and school and medical records. Of particular help were Rooster’s brother Charlie, and Rooster’s sons Tony, Bobby, Tracey and Tim, as well as his niece Tammie and her husband, Steve Silver. In turn, Tim’s daughter Ashley, who became the first Bogle to graduate from college, was an inspiration. Kathy Bogle, Rooster’s first wife, also was a good source of information when she was willing to talk. In addition, Kathy’s older sister, Bertha Wilson, who served time in prison herself, was a reliable informant about their side of the family. To all of them, and all the many other Bogles who talked with me, too numerous to name here, I express my deep thanks.

  I must also acknowledge the critical role played by Steve Ickes, who first identified the Bogles as a family with a significant number of members in prison. At the time, Steve was an assistant director of the Oregon Department of Corrections and I was a correspondent for The New York Times covering criminal justice. Steve generously helped arrange for me to interview some of these Bogle family members in the Oregon prisons where they were incarcerated. Later Steve moved to Arizona, where he became deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections and made it possible for me to interview Tony Bogle, who was serving a life sentence in prison in Tucson for a murder he committed there. Similarly, I want to thank a former spokesman for the Oregon Department of Corrections, Perrin Damon, for helping track down some of the Bogles’ criminal records.

  For the origins of the Bogle family in Tennessee I thank the late Mae Smotherman of Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, who as the daughter of Louis Bogle’s older sister, Lula, grew up in the same log cabin in Daylight, Tennessee, as Louis. Similarly, I am grateful for the research on the Bogles done by Cassandra Czarneski of Arkansas, also a descendant of Lula. James Dillon Jr., a historian in McMinnville, Tennessee, generously showed me around Daylight and shared his knowledge of the hamlet where Louis Bogle lived until he moved to Texas.

  For Elvie Bogle’s formative years in the tiny crossroads village of Sherry, in northeast Texas, I am indebted to a local historian and genealogical researcher, Johnie Lee, who tracked down old land-ownership and tax records, as well as school reports and criminal files. I was also aided by the memories of a longtime resident of Sherry, Pat Westfall, who knew Elvie when she was a young girl. Two descendants of Elvie’s grandmother’s family, Betty Morris Dodd of Texas and Diane Norton of Snowmass, Colorado, shared their memories and research with me, helping put pieces of the family jigsaw puzzle together.

  For the Bogles’ time in Amarillo, I thank their longtime neighbor Margaritte Garcia, who still recalled Louis and Elvie and their boys with remarkable clarity. For details of Rooster’s fight with Jimmy Wilson, I am indebted to Jimmy Wilson himself and to Rooster’s second, Pat Dunavin. For information on the family’s burglary of the grocery store in Amarillo, I thank Tom Scivally, the store’s then owner, and Detective E. N. Smith, who solved the case and arrested most of the family.

  On the murder of Sandra Jackson of Peeltown, Texas, by Corey Lee Wilson, a nephew of Kathy Bogle’s, I am grateful to Kenneth Garvin, a sheriff’s deputy who helped solve the crime, and to Mark Calabria, Corey’s defense attorney, as well as to Corey himself for agreeing to several extended interviews in prison.

  In Tucson, where Tony Bogle and his then wife, Paula Bogle, were convicted of the murder of the man referred to as Chief, I wish to express appreciation to David Sherman, who was assigned the task of defending Tony; to Barbara LaWall, for many years the Pima County Attorney; to John Leavitt, then a deputy police chief in Tucson; and to Kenneth Peasley, the assistant county attorney who prosecuted Tony and Paula. I also owe a significant debt to Linda Beck, a clerk in the Pima County Courthouse, who fully transcribed both trials, a text that ran to about three thousand pages.

  For expert academic advice on criminology, I am particularly grateful to John Laub, a distinguished university professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, and to Terrie Moffitt, the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. For help understanding the patterns of marriage and divorce in the rural nineteenth-century South, I want to thank Nancy Cott, a professor of history at Harvard University. And for information on the predominance of Southerners among the early settlers of Oregon, I thank Scott Daniels, an Oregon historian.

  I must also offer tribute to my literary agent, Carol Mann, who was both patient and firm in guiding this whole enterprise. Finally, I need to say a special thanks to Judge Albin Norblad of Marion County Circuit Court in Salem, who opened the door to his courtroom and to his private chambers so I could hear parts of the trials of multiple members of the Bogle family and benefit from his wisdom. When Judge Norblad died, in 2014, he was Oregon’s longest sitting judge.

  A Note on Sources

  The bulk of the primary sources for this book come from interviews I conducted over a ten-year period with members of the Bogle family. Some of these interviews were done inside prisons in Oregon, Arizona and Texas; other interviews were conducted in their homes, mostly around Salem, Oregon, but some as far away as Helena, Montana; Tucson, Arizona; Paris and Amarillo, Texas; and Nashville and McMinnville, Tennessee. In the interest of space, I have cited specific sources for my information in the notes that follow rather than attempt to list all of them here.

  But some particular items deserve mention. Foremost among these are the two murder trial transcripts of Tony and Paula Bogle from Arizona, which run to about three thousand pages, and the joint-trial transcript of Bobby and Tracey Bogle from Salem, Oregon, which is almost one thousand pages. I have also benefited from hundreds of letters sent to me by Tony, Bobby and Tracey Bogle while they were in prison, answering questions I asked them. For the earliest history of the Bogle family, the lengthy reports by the Bureau of Pensions of the Department of the Interior on Narcissa Harding’s claim for a Union Army pension, which run from 1880 to 1914, contain wonderfully rich details and depositions by neighbors and members of what would become the Bogle family. State prison records from Washington State on Charlie Bogle, from Kansas on Dude, and from Texas on Rooster as well as his sister-in-law Lana Luna and her son, Corey Lee Wilson, all provided invaluable information. Texas state death certificates confirmed that the mothers of both Louis Bogle and his wife, Elvie Bogle, died at the North Texas State Mental Hospital. The tax and school records of Paris, Texas, show how impoverished Louis and Elvie Bogle were in the 1920s and 1930s as they began to raise their growing family, having to move every year when they couldn’t pay the rent and havin
g so little income they did not have to pay taxes.

  As indicated in the notes, I have benefited greatly from the work of many criminologists and other experts. Two books were especially valuable and need mention. They are both by John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson: Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life and Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. These volumes described the two criminologists’ rediscovery and analysis of a classic set of data on five hundred delinquent boys from Boston in the mid-twentieth century by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. Taken together they showed how crime could be passed on in families. I am also indebted to the rich work by David P. Farrington, of the University of Cambridge, in particular his study of 411 boys from London whom he and a team of researchers followed from age eight to forty-six and found that a mere 6 percent of their families accounted for half of all crime and that 10 percent of the families accounted for two-thirds of all crime.

  All the dialogue and thoughts attributed to people in the book are real, based on either interviews or letters from Bogle family members or from courtroom transcripts. Each time a person is speaking, I have tried to indicate the source in a note, unless it is repetitious in the same chapter.

  Notes

  Prologue: It Takes a Family to Raise a Criminal

  Bobby could remember only one: Interview with Bobby Bogle.

  One night Rooster led them: Interviews with Bobby and Tracey Bogle.

  “What you are raised with”: Interview with Tracey Bogle.

  One of the happiest moments: Interviews with Tracey and Bobby Bogle.

  stealing big-rig trucks: Ibid.

  as little as 5 percent of families: See David Farrington et al., “The Concentration of Offenders in Families, and Family Criminality in the Prediction of Boys’ Delinquency,” Journal of Adolescence 24, no. 5 (2001): 579–96.

  The Gluecks found that two-thirds of the boys: Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, Unravelling Juvenile Delinquency (New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1950), pp. 98–101. For a later, brilliant analysis of the Gluecks’ data, see the two books by John L. Laub and Robert J. Sampson: Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  Michael Harrington: See Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Scribner, 1962), pp. 96–101.

  a quadrupling of the U.S. prison population: The New York Times, April 11, 2006.

  John Laub: Interview with John Laub, professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, and see his book Crime in the Making, pp. 97–116.

  “Once you get in it”: Interview with Tracey Bogle.

  “Look carefully”: Interview with Tony Bogle.

  “The past was kept back from us”: Interview with Tracey Bogle.

  blue dots on their left cheeks were a mark: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 35.

  1 Louis and Elvie: The Carnival

  In June 1920: This account of where Louis Bogle was born and why he moved to Paris, Texas, is based on several sources, including the version he himself passed on to his children, as well as an interview with a nephew of Louis, Lloyd Harding, who was born in Paris just after Louis arrived there, and also separate interviews with Murray Harding, a cousin of Louis’s, and Mae Smotherman, a niece. The dates are confirmed by the censuses of 1910, 1920 and 1930 and by Louis’s later Social Security file.

  In every decade: For a good account of this large-scale migration from the Old South to Texas after the Civil War, see Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 325.

  Louis Bogle was infatuated: For a detailed account of what life was like in Paris, Texas, at the time, see the two memoirs by William A. Owens: This Stubborn Soil: A Frontier Boyhood (New York: Nick Lyons Books, 1966) and A Season of Weathering: The Autobiography of a Texas Country Boy Making His Way Toward an Education in the Hard Times of the Twenties (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).

  Ervin and Herman Arthur: Skipper Steely, 1920 Lynching Stunned, Sobered City’s Leaders and Paris’ Reputation Suffers (Paris, TX: Privately published, 2001), and Walter L. Buenger, The Path to a Modern South: Northeast Texas Between Reconstruction and the Great Depression (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 167–69.

  Louis’s uncle and his son, Charlie Harding: Interview with Lloyd Harding.

  Louis’s favorite place: Interviews with Lloyd Harding and Skipper Steely, a local historian in Paris, Texas.

  Elvie Morris: Her date of birth is listed in the census of 1910 for Red River County, Texas. Her father’s status as a poor, landless sharecropper can be seen in the tax records of Red River County for the years from 1895 to 1918. Details about her early life and the death of her father in the big influenza epidemic of 1918 come from an interview with a then neighbor of Elvie’s family in the hamlet of Sherry, Pat Westfall.

  This embellishing: The details about Narcissa Harding, Louis’s grandmother, and her marriage to Carpenter Harding, a former Union Army soldier, are contained in the extensive file compiled by the Bureau of Pensions of the Department of the Interior when Narcissa repeatedly applied, unsuccessfully, for Carpenter’s Union Army pension from 1890 to 1914. Narcissa can also be found in the censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900 and 1910.

  Union Army pensions were like a golden ticket: For a full explanation of the importance of Union Army pensions in late-nineteenth-century America, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 1–62.

  Louis and Elvie had grown up: Owens, This Stubborn Soil, pp. 21–25.

  Louis offered to show Elvie how to drive: Interview with Tony Bogle, her oldest son.

  Once a week it was his duty: On the Sherry postmaster fetching the mail once a week, interview with Pat Westfall, a longtime resident of Sherry who had known Elvie when she was young.

  By now, Louis and Elvie were in love: Marriage of Louis and Elvie on April 2, 1921, found in the Lamar County, Texas, courthouse records.

  hit song made popular by Bing Crosby: Printed text of funeral service for Elvie, 1987, courtesy of Linda Bogle.

  northeast Texas had just fallen into a sharp economic recession: Buenger, The Path to a Modern South, pp. 143–49.

  Harding decided to move back to Tennessee: Interview with Lloyd Harding, a nephew of Louis Bogle’s, who was born in Paris in 1920 and lived in the house with Louis Bogle. The Lamar County deed book shows that Louis Harding, the uncle of Louis Bogle, sold his home in Paris for $200 in 1921.

  Their first child: John Bogle was born on December 8, 1921, according to the Texas Birth Index for the period from 1905 to 1997.

  Her earliest memories as a child: Interview with Pat Westfall.

  Elvie’s father, James Morris: His appearance is taken from the description on James Morris’s World War I draft-registration card. His status as a sharecropper is also taken from that draft card and from an interview with Pat Westfall. That Morris owned no land and paid very little in taxes comes from the Red River County tax records.

  her mother, Florence: Biographical details on Florence are from the census of 1880 for Pope County, Arkansas.

  whom she had married in 1894: Florence’s marriage to Jim Morris in 1894 is recorded in the Red River County marriage records.

  Florence deserted her husband: See the census of 1910, which records that Florence was then living in a boardinghouse in Wichita Falls, Texas, and said she was not married and had no children. On Jim Morris divorcing Florence on the grounds of desertion, see the divorce records from the Red River County district court from May 1910.

 
“Florence was a loose woman”: Interview with Betty Morris Dodd, a daughter of Jim Morris’s older brother, Charles Morris, who lived next door to Florence and Jim Morris in Sherry. Dodd said her mother was the source of her information on Florence.

  Sarah Morris Hardin: For biographical information on Sarah Morris Hardin, I am indebted to a descendant of her large family, Diane Norton, of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Snowmass, Colorado, who has compiled a comprehensive genealogical history of the family.

  Recent historical research: Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 29–33. Also, an interview with Cott, who is a professor of history at Harvard.

  In Arkansas: For the size of Sarah Hardin’s family, see the census of 1880 for Jackson County, Arkansas.

  an ending like something out of a Jane Austen novel: For the judge’s ruling that Sarah’s marriage was not legal, see James Hardin’s 1891 probate file in the records of Independence County, Arkansas. Also, Diane Norton has an 1897 letter from one of James Hardin’s children describing the court case.

  Sarah loved to dance: Interview with Betty Morris Dodd, her granddaughter.

  There were trained lions and elephants: Description of the carnival is from the Paris Morning News, October 14, 1921. For a description of the early motordrome that Elvie rode in, I am indebted to Lowell Stapf, a longtime operator of carnivals in Texas who was based in Amarillo.

  As it happened: Description of Elvie’s job driving a motorcycle in the carnival motordrome is from interviews with her son Charlie Bogle and her daughter-in-law Linda Bogle.

  a young woman who was found murdered: The Clarksville Times, July 28, 1919.