By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
The Seattle TImes reports the real life Drugstore Cowboy died yesterday [1] at the Monroe prison.
James Fogle, 75, spent a summer in the Lewis County Jail, towards the end of a life lived mostly behind bars, a life the Seattle Times describes as inspiration for his autobiographical novel [2] made into a movie of the same name – the 1989 film [3] that featured actor Matt Dillon.
It was June 28, 1995, when Fogle was arrested in Centralia. He was sitting in a car with glass on his hair, shoulders and in his coat pockets after he broke into the Centralia Pharmacy at 212 N. Tower Ave. with a crowbar and carried out a tray of bottles of prescription narcotics, according to court documents.
When Centralia’s detective Fitzgerald advised him of his rights for an interview the following day, his response was short.
“I think I’m pretty well screwed here, I better talk to my attorney,” court documents relate.
He added he’d been on a binge after his wife died a week earlier. The address in his file was in Tacoma.
At 58, his nine listed past convictions which included robbery, burglary and drugs stretched back to a 1957 crime of taking a motor vehicle without permission.
Fogle’s handwritten motion in the court file a month later asked a judge to appoint him adequate counsel.
“So far I have seen no one I recognize as counsel, spoke with nothing but a voice over the telephone briefly and have been shuffled through this system like a pig led to slaughter,” Fogle wrote.
He complained that after his initial appearance in court, instead of the lawyer he was led to believe he was to see, he was presented with a reporter.
Still, it was court-appointed Centralia attorney Don McConnell who told the court Fogle’s defense to second-degree burglary would be general denial.
However, he pleaded guilty as charged and on Aug. 30, was sentenced by Lewis County Superior Court Judge H. John Hall to five years plus eight months in prison. Deputy Prosecutor Ruth Vogel – working for then elected Lewis County Prosecutor Nelson Hunt – signed the document.
According to his court file, Fogle was released from prison and by the end of 1999 was granted his request to a probation officer to reside in Palm Desert, California, as he was a writer and would be closer to his publicist
His Washington probation officer lost track of him shortly before his term of active supervision ended, but noted Fogle, or someone on his behalf, continued to make payments on his court ordered legal obligations.
In the summer of 2001, Fogle was brought from a Snohomish County corrections facility back to Lewis County, for a probation violation: failing to notify DOC of his changed address.
Judge David Draper gave him 60 days in jail.
Seattlepi.com’s Scott Sunde writes that Fogle’s convictions that followed [4] his Centralia Pharmacy incarceration were in 2001 for a Snohomish County burglary, in 2004 for a burglary in Kent in which he was found asleep inside a drugstore near paper bags filled with $10,000 worth of pills and his final felony in May 2010 when he and a partner robbed a pharmacy in Redmond.
Seattle Times news reporter Jennifer Sullivan writes Fogle’s death yesterday following a battle with lung ailments occurred during his 16 year sentence.
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For more, read:
• ” ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ author James Fogle dies at 75″ from The Seattle Times on Thursday August 23, 2012 at 8:04 p.m., here [5]
• “The real ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ dies in state prison” from Seattlepi.com on Friday August 24, 2012 at 10:08 a.m., here [4]