TAMMIE AND ASHLEY
It was a mystery to most of the Bogles how to break free of the family curse of crime, but a few did find a way out. Tammie Bogle, a towhead as a girl with a smile full of freckles, suffered from many of same troubles as her relatives. Her father, an older brother of Rooster, was often drunk and regularly beat her mother, leaving her with fractured bones in her face and broken glasses. One of her brothers was incarcerated forty times, before one of his drug dealers injected him with liquid Drano, leaving him paralyzed for the rest of his life.
Tammie with Tracey
Her first two husbands had both been in jail and both beat her and were alcoholics or drug addicts. But Tammie's mother was a devout Southern Baptist, and Tammie found that a deep religious faith in God could keep her from succumbing to the pitfalls of the kind that destroyed so many of her relatives. In time, Tammie married a third husband, who had also been in prison, but he had become a minister and together they founded a Christian-based half-way house for sex offenders who had been released from prison and had nowhere else to live. Tammie and her husband found a home for themselves in a trailer on a farm, with gardens planted with wisteria and honeysuckle, and each morning she walked through a grove of young fir trees being grown for sale at Christmas. "Out here I am walking with Jesus," Tammie liked to say. "Jesus is as real to me as anyone in our family."
Ashley Bogle, a grand daughter of Rooster and his second wife, Linda, found a different path out, through education and being a good student. Ashley's success was even more surprising because she was born into a sham marriage, arranged by Rooster as a con job, since both her parents were underage and her own grandfather was captain of the guard at the Oregon State Correctional Institution where most of her father's brothers had been in prison. Her father, Captain Kanne, was so opposed to the marriage that he tried to have it annulled, and when he finally met her new husband, Tim Bogle, he told Tim that he had intended to place Tim "in the middle of a murder scene and send you to prison."
But Tim became an iron worker and a good father, and Ashley earned straight A's in school and had a perfect 4.0 grade point average entering her senior year of high school. There was always a fine line she had to watch, being a Bogle and a prize student. But Ashley early on discovered a coping mechanism, how to detach herself from the Bogle curse. "The whole Bogle stigma didn't apply to me," she said. "I just figure that everyone in the family has the opportunity to make their own choices, and I chose not make bad choices." In the end, Ashley became the first Bogle ever
to graduate from college and is now working as a medical-records technician at a local hospital, coding patients charts. She has entered mainstream America.
Ashley