Perfect Victim (45 page)

A few technical matters were considered, then Hooker’s sentencing was at hand.

According to state law, the victim has an opportunity to make a statement, and Colleen asked her attorney to read one on her behalf Barrett stood and read a long, eloquent plea, asking that Hooker be locked away as long as possible, so that what happened to Colleen Stan would never happen to anyone else.

When she resumed her seat, all turned toward the judge expecting that he would pronounce the sentence.

Judge Knight obliged: “I consider this defendant the most dangerous psychopath that I have ever dealt with, in that he is the opposite of what he seems. He will be a danger to women as long as he is alive, and I intend to sentence the maximum possible.”

Citing Hooker’s “pattern of violent conduct,” and “high degree of cruelty and callousness,” Judge Knight sentenced him to consecutive sentences for the sex crimes, totalling sixty years. He then imposed indeterminate sentences of one to twenty-five years for the kidnap, plus a five-to-ten-year sentence for the use of a knife.

If the California Board of Corrections chose to apply the full terms, Hooker would serve a maximum sentence of one hundred four years.

Hooker was expressionless, except for a slight smile when the judge also fined him fifty thousand dollars.

(At the end of the hearing, Hooker turned to Papendick and said: “I want you to thank the judge for me. I have a library, a gym, and time to enjoy them, and it’s better than living with those two women.”)

Court adjourned, and Mcguire announced that Colleen wished to personally thank the jurors, asking them to step out into the hall. She requested that the press wait, promising that Colleen would come back in to make a statement.

After listening to her testify for days on the stand, the juror’s now met the woman whose ordeal had occupied their thoughts for so many weeks. They clustered around her in the hallway in an almost protective fashion. Colleen beamed, her cheeks matching her pink suit, her eyes moist. The jurors seemed equally emotional.

They’d scarcely met, yet in some ways they were already bonded, having been drawn together by this draining and exhausting trial.

They shared a rush of questions, words of support, and a few shy hugs, but soon reporters and photographers, eager for their chance with Colleen, were spilling out into the hall. The sheer crush of expectation forced an end to their meeting.

Colleen took a seat at the prosecution’s table, a battery of microphones before her. She seemed both nervous and happy as she told the crowd that she was “very glad that [Cameron] won’t ever be able to hurt me or anyone else again.”

Colleen was asked what kept her going while she was confined in the box.

“It was very hard,” she said. “At times, I’d come to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, and I’d just want to let go.”

The gathering learned that Hooker had phoned Colleen from jail just three days after his conviction. At first, she didn’t recognize his voice. Then he said, “This is Cameron, and I just called so that you can chew my butt out or say whatever you want to me.”

Colleen replied: “I have nothing to say to you,” and hung up. (Upset, she then called Mcguire, who contacted the San Mateo County Jail, asking that they prevent Hooker from placing any more calls to Colleen.)

Asked about her plans for the future, she said, “Just to go on with my life.”

“What was the first thing you did when you got back home?”

Colleen smiled. “I went shopping and bought some clothes,” she said, and everyone laughed.

With a few final comments, she concluded her statement to the press, said goodbye, and escaped into the hall. Several jurors followed to wish her well, and after a few more hugs and tears, Colleen Stan turned and walked away.

The jurors for People v. Hooker, united by their emotional ing, eight of them met for dinner with Judge Knight and Gordon Campbell, the bailiff. They still have occasional get-togethers.

(The judge, by the way, reported that he received nothing but positive feedback about his unorthodox castigation of the defense’s expert witness Dr. Lunde.)

It seems somehow poetic justice that Cameron Hooker, the sex criminal, was prosecuted by an attractive young woman. But this case took its toll on Deputy DA Mcguire. By the trial’s conclusion she had lost eight pounds, and her hair was touched with gray.

Perhaps the Hooker case took its toll on her private life as well. She and Jim Lang divorced.

Now remarried, Christine Mcguire lives in Santa Cruz County with her husband, Richard. She works in the District Attorney’s office, heading up a special task force on the prosecution of rapes and homicides.

She found prosecuting the Hooker case the most involving and most challenging case of her career — rewarding, but also wearing. Once was enough. With a half-smile she says, “I hope I never have to prosecute a case like that again.”

Though she was only there a fraction of the time, the trial wasn’t easy on Colleen Stan. Following the proceedings in the news, then nervously awaiting the verdict, she lost fourteen pounds from sheer anxiety.

Colleen will carry the taint of those seven years forever. Her physical health may never be the same. She has poor teeth, and it will be a long time before her hair grows back — if it ever does.

She has chronic back problems and can’t sit up straight for long without support. The scars on her body have healed and faded; it will take longer for the scars on her memory to fade.

Some effects are less noticeable — a fear of going out alone, for instance, a fear of crowds. And she dislikes going out to dinner because, she says, after all those years of eating just one meal a day, never knowing when she would eat again, she feels compelled to finish everything on her plate.

Colleen remains close to her family and continues to work and reside in Riverside. She is religious — still more inclined to go to church than to therapy — subdued, passive, and fairly private.

(At this writing, she may have already changed her name.)

Colleen is determined to live a full and rich life, despite what has happened to her. “I just decided that I’m going to do my best to put it behind me,” she has vowed to herself. “I’m not going to let them keep me from doing what I want with my life.”

Money will surely help, and Colleen has sought and found some financial compensation. California’s Victim Witness program awarded Colleen more than $20,000, and her civil suit against Cameron Hooker reached an out-of-court settlement with the Puritan Insurance Company (the insurers of Hooker’s mobile home), who agreed to pay her a total of about $150,000.

Having children has been Colleen’s long-held desire, and on April 23, 1987, after a risky and difficult pregnancy, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. “She has a little worried look,” Colleen says, “like me.”

Janice Hooker filed for divorce on January 28, 1986, and has taken back her maiden name. Today she is a much stronger, more independent woman than the one who gave statements to police in the fall of 1984. She is more sure of her own decisions and has gone back to school.

Janice dotes on her children — who are, indeed, lovely daughters.

(People often asked why the state hadn’t taken the girls away from Janice, but Mcguire observed her to be an excellent mother. The daughters had been shielded from the unsavory truths at home, and anyone could see that they were well-adjusted, healthy, polite, and delightful girls.)

Jan goes to counseling and thinks deeply about how she ended up in such a strange and toxic situation. She believes she and Colleen were both brainwashed. “It can be done to anyone,” she says.

Still, she feels Colleen’s personality made it easier for Cameron to dominate her. He is very perceptive, Janice believes, and he picked a victim who was submissive, compliant, someone who tended toward destructive relationships.

Reflecting on the changes she has made, Janice says, “I chose not to be a victim. I hope Colleen makes that choice. Not to just walk out but to make a total change, to become an unvictim, to take charge.”

The grapevine around the San Mateo County Jail has it that Cameron Hooker told Jan that his big mistake was that he didn’t kill Colleen while he had the chance.

After sentencing, Hooker was shipped to California Diagnostic Center at Vacaville for evaluation. Now he is serving time in Folsom Penitentiary.

Rolland Papendick, who has given up smoking, filed an appeal. It was denied on March 8, 1988.

What quirk of nature results in a Cameron Hooker? It would be easy if we could simply say that he was abused, therefore he abused others. It’s often the case, for example, that victims of child abuse become child abusers themselves or that sons of wife-beating fathers become wife-beaters, too. But Hooker took great pains to shield his daughters from the darker side of his personality, and no evidence of familial abuse during Cameron’s childhood emerged. If there was domestic violence, it was kept very quiet.

If anything, people who knew them were in remarkable agreement that the Hooker family was a fine, upstanding, and welcome addition to the Red Bluff community. “Honest” and “hardworking” were the adjectives almost unanimously used to describe Cameron’s parents. They were salt-of-the-earth types, and no one had anything but good things to say about them. The investigation turned up no evidence of a violent homelife, only that Harold and Lorena Hooker were devastated by the charges against their firstborn son.

More likely, Cameron Hooker is, himself, an aberration, not the product of an aberrant childhood.

Why? The question reverberates…and remains, always, unanswered. Cameron Hooker doesn’t know, and science can’t tell us — beyond speculating about infinitesimal chemical exchanges within the brain. Lawyers, mere public servants, handle the legal questions, but evil is left, ultimately, for philosophers to weigh and debate. Whatever the verdict, the complete truth lies always beyond our grasp, outside the courtroom, unknowable.

One person close to the case who wished to remain anonymous made perhaps the most enlightening comment not just on Cameron Hooker but on certain types of criminals in general: “People like to believe in an Einstein or a Beethoven, geniuses — but they hate to believe in their opposites. A genius is a mutant, something unnatural. But just as some people are born with extra intelligence, others are born without much intelligence or without fingers or limbs or consciences.

“The human body is phenomenally complex, with trillions of cells, and trillions of things can go wrong. Cameron Hooker is a fluke, an accident of internal wiring. His instincts are simply the opposite of yours and mine.”