TONY
Tony Bogle was Rooster's oldest son, and perhaps for this reason, the biggest target of his father's abuse. Tony did not have toys, because Rooster didn't like toys. Tony was not allowed to play sports because Rooster thought sports were silly. "Instead Rooster taught us to steal stuff, and that was the fun thing in our lives, stealing," Tony said. At the age of five, his father took Tony to a neighbor's farm and told him to steal a cow. Later he instructed Tony how to steal letters from people's mailboxes, letters with Social Security checks and Christmas cards with cash in them were the best, his father told him, though this was a Federal crime. Rooster had a .30-30 rifle, and he ordered Tony to stand sideways with with matches between his teeth as he shot the wooden sticks out. Sometimes Rooster did this trick when he was drunk, and Tony got scared. If he complained, Rooster used a knife to cut a tree branch and whipped him until his back and legs were covered with blood.
When Tony started school, he began reacting to this abuse by setting dogs and cats on fire, a frequent precursor of delinquency and adult crime. Rooster was taking karate lessons and taught some of it to Tony, who used a karate kick to take down one of his teachers. Eventually Tony became so hard to control that Rooster took him to juvenile court. A judge ordered him to the big, decaying Oregon State Hospital near his home in Salem, Oregon. But Tony set fire to the wing where he was housed, smashed the windows and escaped. A psychiatrist predicted Tony was likely to become a criminal when he grew older, but the hospital simply discharged him, terming him "Unimproved." Tony spent most of his youth and twenties locked up in juvenile reformatories or adult prisons, until at age 29 he and his wife, Paula, whom he had married in jail, were convicted of murdering their landlord when he tried to molest her. Tony is serving a life sentence in prison without parole.
