Perfect Victim (6 page)

She examined his words for some key to his psyche, but he spoke little and she stayed bewildered. Whenever she asked when he would let her go, he still replied: “Pretty soon.” It was maddening. Months had passed already.

She despaired…and finally stopped asking.

Eventually, Colleen managed a small victory: She learned her captor’s name. She thought she’d heard the woman calling him Cameron, and now she had it absolutely confirmed. One evening when she was out of the box, spying out the tiny slice of light at the bottom of her blindfold, he’d turned his back to her at just such an angle that she could see “Cameron” engraved on the back of his belt. So, he had a name. And when she heard him call his wife Jan, so did she.

learning the names of her captors was the first news she’d had in months. Locked in that double-walled wooden box, she lay suspended in an informational vacuum. It shut out all light and deadened all sound so that Colleen’s world was perpetually dark and silent — as if she’d been struck blind and deaf.

Just as she hadn’t known that Janice had left, Colleen didn’t know that after a few lonely months of commuting home on weekends, of missing the husband she believed she loved, and of getting over the shock of having a captive in the basement, Janice had had enough of that long, hot drive up Interstate 5, and had moved back home.

By now the seasons were changing, and this was news Colleen could discern even from within the box. The amber hills around Red Bluff, which the summer had parched to within a spark of spontaneous combustion, were dampened by the first rains of autumn. And as the temperatures fell outside, Colleen, still naked and chained within the box, felt the change. When the mornings turned cold she finally had to ask for something to wear, and Cameron gave her the Pendleton shirt that she’d had with her when she was kidnapped.

The weather wasn’t all that was changing. In November, six months into her captivity, Colleen was about to be put to work.

Cameron Hooker’s first experiment with making his captive useful required some elaborate rigging on his part. The head box Colleen had been kidnapped with was actually one of two head boxes Hooker had built. The other was larger and so heavy that it would be difficult for Colleen to wear while standing.

But now Hooker wanted her to wear this second, heavier contraption, and he wanted her to wear it while she was doing a job for him. So, with a system of ropes and pulleys rigged to the ceiling, Hooker managed to counterweight the box with a gallon jug of water so that it was usable. With the jug swinging in the air, he placed the cumbersome box on Colleen’s head. Her instructions were to sand a redwood burl that Hooker had brought downstairs. Sightless, the weight of the bulky box only partially offset by the jug of water, she did the work clumsily, by touch.

After such a long Period of inactivity the work was physically exhausting, but over several days she managed to complete the job.

Now Hooker busied himself with a new project, more construction within a basement already crowded with his strange assemblages. He designed it to fit beneath the staircase, and so it was triangular in shape and small. It had a door, a ceiling, and even a light-similar to an oddly shaped closet. He gave it a concrete floor to add stability and carpeted the walls for soundproofing. He dubbed this new little room “the workshop.”

Hooker got Colleen out of the box and put her inside it, unshackled but still blindfolded. He left a large sack of walnuts at her feet, and once the door was bolted shut, instructed her to remove the blindfold and shell the nuts.

For the first time since the kidnap — six full months — the blindfold came off and Colleen could see. Something so simple.

Yet after half a year of near-blindness, simply looking about with unobscured vision was surely close to phenomenal. Everything was so bright.

The workshop wasn’t much bigger than the box, but at least it was vertical. And not only could she see, she had some freedom of movement. There was even a chair!

She examined this place — what had he called it? — and realized she was completely enclosed within a tiny area beneath the stairs, locked in with the walnuts and a bare lightbulb. She had heard him slide a board across the door, but now tested it, pushing as hard as she could. It didn’t budge.

With nothing else to do she settled down to work — cracking the nuts, neatly separating the meats from the shells, eating some of them — working through the night as she’d been told.

In the morning before going to work, Hooker came down to get her out. He told her to put the blindfold back on before he opened the door (looking at his face was still forbidden). Then he chained her again and put her back in the box.

With an alternate place for keeping his captive, Hooker established a new routine. Colleen still spent all day locked in the box, but at night, after she’d been let out to sit on the rack and eat her meal, and sometimes hung from the beam or staked out on the rack, she was usually locked inside the workshop. She often worked all night on some project that either Cameron or Janice gave her to do, frequently macrame or crochet.

Though this new arrangement was more trouble and a bit riskier, it was already paying off. The Hookers loaded up the fruits of Colleen’s labor and sold them at a big flea market down in San Jose. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it helped.

And so the secret circumstances in the basement of 1140 Oak Street underwent a significant shift. It’s unclear whether the Hookers fully appreciated the ramifications of putting Colleen to work for them. More than just giving her something to do with her hands, it changed Colleen’s status within the household. Now she was more than a kidnap victim, a captive, an object of abuse.

Now, quite clearly, Colleen Stan had become their slave.

November 19-December 6, 1984

When you are held captive, people somehow expect you to spit in your captor’s face and get killed. -Patty Hearst

it’s not a through street, the approach to Diamond Lands Corporation south of Red Bluff. The road is heavily trafficked by big trucks carrying lumber in and out and by the many pickups of Diamond’s employees. It winds past huge piles of sawdust, mountainous stacks of logs, signs exhorting safety, and finally ends at dusty parking lots. Workers climb out of their vehicles, put on their hard hats, and disappear into cavernous buildings, where the roar of heavy equipment makes protective earmuffs mandatory and talking absurd.

Peeling the bark off huge logs, carving them into boards and then drying them in massive kilns demands strong equipment and lots of power. Carbide-tipped saws are changed for sharpening every four hours, and Diamond runs up more than two million dollars a year in electricity bills. Doing roughly forty-five million dollars in business every year, turning out half a million feet of lumber a day, Diamond Lands Corporation is just about Red Bluff’s largest employer. Everyone calls it, simply, Diamond.

Cameron Hooker worked in this complex of buildings, including the adjacent pulp plant that Diamond sold off in 1982, a total of twelve years. For the last few years, Hooker’s job was to make sure six massive conveyors — deep trenches which carried useless wood to be chopped up for fiber in the “chipper” — were running freely. Most of the time it wasn’t a demanding job; he just had to keep moving, checking one conveyor and then another.

But if one got jammed, perhaps by a large board sticking up, it was critical that he “Immediately climb down and wrench the obstruction free.” Overall, it was a low-skill job, but Hooker showed no inclination to take on more responsibility. He had the reputation of being a clock watcher, and as soon as his shift was over, he was out the door.

The single road exiting the compound happens to wind past the building that houses the Red Bluff Daily News. In all the years he wound to and from work past that newspaper office, Cameron Hooker surely never thought he would be the object of so much speculation within its walls.

On November 19, 1984, the day after Hooker’s arrest, Police Chief John Faulkner released the first scraps of information to the press. Declining to give full details, he disclosed only the essentials: that Cameron Hooker had been booked for kidnapping, rape, sodomy, and assorted other charges. A short article, headlined “Police Arrest Suspect in Kidnap-Sex Crimes,” was the first glimmer of a story that would prove to be the Daily News’s biggest scoop ever, not only dominating the local paper’s front page many times throughout the year but drawing media attention from around the world.

By the next day, more details had emerged, and a picture of Cameron Hooker accompanied the front-page article: “Police: Sex Victim Held 7 Years.” The article described the events preceding Hooker’s arrest: the kidnap, various crimes, and, most astonishingly, the box. It explained that an unidentified 27-year-old woman who had been working recently as a motel maid, had been held captive for seven years as a sex slave.

With sensational elements like sex slavery, a seven-year captivity, and a box beneath the master’s waterbed, Red Bluff promptly found itself the focus of unprecedented media attention. In wire service offices, radio and television stations, and big-city newsrooms, editors consulted maps and dispatched reporters to the scene of the crime.

Newspeople rushed into town seeking to fill column-inches or allotted time slots, searching for fresh angles. They queried law enforcement officers, questioned the district attorney’s office, and pestered neighbors — who became so exasperated with sightseers and the press that one finally put up a Private Road sign to try to deter them. The Red Bluff Daily News even ran a story complaining that “reporters, photographers and newscasters have swarmed into town, taken it by the throat and shaken it for every possible last bit of information.”

Somewhere along the line, this peculiar story was tagged first The Girl in the Box Case and then The Sex Slave Case. In no time it was making headlines across the country, through Europe, to Tokyo, and back.

Meanwhile, the story broke around the local people with an unintelligible clatter. It was inconceivable that a man and his wife could kidnap a woman and secretly hold her captive for more than seven years, especially in a town as small and a community as tightly interwoven as Red Bluff’s. None of it made sense. Here was a woman who had been going to work and returning home every day; how could it be that she was held against her will?

Why didn’t she just run away? And who could believe that a fullgrown woman could be kept for years in a coffin-size box?

“You’d think that if something like that happened to someone they would have stuttered a lot or would have been malnourished, but she was very outgoing. She always had rosy cheeks,” Doris Miron, Colleen’s former employer at the King’s Lodge told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mr. and Mrs. Leddy, the little old couple who’d rented 1140 Oak Street to the Hookers years earlier, politely answered reporters’ questions but still felt the whole wild story couldn’t possibly be true. “I don’t understand this,” Mrs. Leddy said. “She had freedom — shopping and all that.” Reflecting on her former tenant, Mrs. Leddy said of Cameron: “Quiet as he was and everything, it’s hard to believe he’d do those things.”

That seemed to be the consensus among most of Hooker’s more recent neighbors as well. One neighbor told local reporters, “I knew the girl and I knew Cameron, and they were so normal. If you’d line up ten men you knew in a row for something like this, Cameron would be the last one you’d pick.”

Neighbors described Hooker as “nice,” “courteous…quiet,” “friendly,” and “a really nice guy,” but no one, it seemed, could claim to know him well. He was called “good-tempered” and “easy to get along with,” but his very mildness seemed to be what characterized him most. He kept his distance, as if he didn’t want to attract attention to himself.

But at night, yes, there was quite a bit of activity over at the Hooker place-lights on at all hours, noises.

“At night you could hear his electric saw going in his shed,”

a neighbor said. “He was always busy doing something.”

Another neighbor remembered sitting on his porch in the dark, watching Hooker carry buckets of dirt out of the shed and then dumping them on a mound, over and over again.

No one recalled any incidents of abuse or perversion, not the slightest hint of anything sinister in connection with the lone, single-wide trailer at the end of the short dirt road where the Hookers lived. The family seemed not to have much money, but there’s nothing dishonorable about being a bit shaggy, and they weren’t much different from other families in the area.

Neighbors remembered the woman they knew as “Kay” taking the Hooker girls for walks, riding past on her bike, and jogging around the neighborhood. To most, she’d seemed sweet, friendly, and apparently free to come and go at will.

“Everything seemed normal to us,” one neighbor told an outof-town reporter. “She seemed real friendly. She would slow down, wave, and smile. We didn’t pick up on anything wrong.”

Cameron Hooker’s coworkers at Diamond responded to the news of his arrest with almost universal skepticism. During the twelve years he’d worked there, Hooker had proven himself a dependable worker — mechanically inclined, clever, and even having some artistic talent, with those carvings and sculptures he was always working on. Although some of the women who worked at Diamond regarded this tall, gangly fellow as “a nerd,” Hooker was generally well liked.

Hooker’s locker at work was broken into shortly after his arrest. There are conflicting opinions about the significance of this. No one admits to having done it, and it’s impossible to know what was taken.

The police, who were at first unaware of a locker at Diamond, wouldn’t get around to searching it for more than a month. They assume that a friend or friends of Hooker’s “moved incriminating items. “It just goes to show how well liked Hooker was, Lt. Jerry Brown believes.

Others say this was simple curiosity on the part of Hooker’s coworkers — they wanted to see what he had — but nothing was taken.