Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  The Hookers decided to move to a more secluded place. He bought a trailer on some land beyond the city limits, and underneath a large waterbed, constructed a kind of rabbit hutch, which was to be Colleen’s home. Colleen was moved in—blindfolded and handcuffed—one afternoon, and immediately confined in her new quarters.

  Life became a little freer. She was let out for an hour or so every day to perform her ablutions and help with the chores. She made no attempt to escape—Hooker had told her all kinds of horror stories about what happened to “Company” slaves who tried to run away: having their fingers chopped off one by one was the least of them. To remind her that she was his slave he periodically hung her from the ceiling and flogged her with a whip. He also burned her breasts with lighted matches.

  There were compensations. In the autumn, Hooker went up into the mountains to cut wood on the land of the company that employed him; he took his slave with him. He made her work; he also made her swim in a pond and run along a dirt road. When she was “disobedient,” he tied her down on a kind of mediaeval rack and “stretched” her. This excited him so much that he stripped naked and made her perform oral sex. On another occasion he raped her on the “rack.” Janice was not told of these sexual episodes. Soon after this, the slave was made to drink most of a bottle of wine, then perform oral sex on Janice; it made her sick.

  Colleen was also allowed more freedom—she was allowed to go out and jog on her own. Incredibly, she still made no attempt to escape—Hooker had brainwashed her into seeing herself as a well-behaved and loyal slave. As a reward for obedience, she was allowed to write to her sister—without, of course, including a return address—and even, on one occasion, to telephone her family, with Hooker standing beside her monitoring everything she said. She told them she was living with a couple who were “looking after her.” When they wanted to know more, her Master made her hang up. Soon after that he took her on a visit to his own family, on their ranch outside town. This passed off so well that he decided to take the ultimate risk, and allow her to go and see her own parents, who lived in Riverside, California. In March 1981, he drove her to Sacramento, and ordered her to wait in the car while he went into an office block that belonged to the sinister Company who owned her. When he came back, he told her that they had granted permission to visit her family. The visit to Riverside was brief, but went off perfectly. Hooker was introduced as her fiancé Mike, who was on his way to a computer seminar. Colleen Stan spent the night in her father’s home, and then visited her mother—who lived elsewhere—without divulging where she had been for four years, or why she had failed to keep in touch. The following day, her Master rang her and announced that he would be arriving in ten minutes to take her home. Colleen was upset that Hooker had broken his promise to allow her to spend a full weekend with her family, and sulked all the way back to Red Bluff. When they got back, the Master decided that enough was enough. The slave’s period of liberty came to an end, and she was put back into the box.

  This period lasted another three years, from 1981 until 1984. The relationship between Hooker and his wife was becoming increasingly tense—she disliked being tied up and whipped. At one point she left him for a few days and went to stay with her brother. When she came back, she and Cameron had a long, honest talk; she confessed her two affairs—her husband seemed indifferent—while he admitted that he had been having sex with Colleen. (This deeply upset Janice.) Then, in an attempt to repair their marriage, they began reading the Bible together. Colleen had already found refuge in the religion of her childhood, and now she joined in the prayer sessions. Cameron, meanwhile, worked on a kind of underground bunker that would be a dungeon for the slave. It was completed in November 1983, and Colleen was installed inside. When the winter rains came, however, the dungeon began to fill with water, and they had to take her out again and let her back indoors.

  Janice and Colleen, whose relationship in the past had often been stormy—Janice was inclined to boss Colleen around—had now become close friends as well as fellow Bible students. Cameron still flogged his slave—on “Company orders”—but was also treating her better, giving her more food, and allowing her to babysit his two daughters. And in May 1984, seven years after her abduction, he sent her out to find a job. She was hired at a local motel as a maid, and proved to be such a hard worker that she soon received a promotion.

  Colleen believed implicitly that she was the slave of “the Company”; she often mentioned it to Janice, and Janice felt increasingly guilty and uncomfortable at having to support her husband’s lies. Her new religious faith made it difficult. It became harder still when she and Colleen—with Cameron’s permission—began to go to the local church together. Cameron tried to turn the Bible to his own advantage, quoting the passage from Genesis in which Abraham went to bed with his wife’s maid, Hagar, and suggesting that Janice should take the same liberal attitude towards Colleen. As usual, he finally got his way; he even persuaded Janice to share the bed, and entertain him with lesbian acts with Colleen. Janice was so upset by the new situation that she asked Cameron to strangle her—something he did frequently, but only to the point of unconsciousness. He agreed, but either lost courage, or was suddenly struck by the thought of the inconvenience of disposing of the body; at all events, Janice woke up to find herself still alive.

  On August 9, 1984, Janice made her decision. She went to speak to Colleen at work, and told her the truth: that there was no “Company,” that she was not a slave, that Cameron was merely a pervert. Colleen was stunned. Her first reaction was to quit her job. Then she and Janice called on the pastor of their church, and gave him a confused outline of the story. He advised them to leave Cameron. But it was too late in the day for Colleen to take a bus to her family in Riverside. Instead, they picked Cameron up from work as usual, and went back to the mobile home. That night Janice pleaded that she felt ill, and she and Colleen slept on the floor together. As soon as Cameron had gone to work at 5 a.m., they began packing, and fled to the home of Janice’s parents. Then Colleen went home, told her parents the whole story but—after a phone conversation with a tearful Cameron, agreed not to go to the police.

  In a sense, the story was now over. Cameron Hooker was not arrested immediately; it took some time for Janice to make up her mind to turn him in. And when she eventually did so, what she had to tell the police was not simply the story of Colleen Stan’s seven-year ordeal. She had been keeping a more sinister secret. In January 1976, more than a year before Colleen had been abducted, they had offered a lift to a young woman in the nearby town of Chico. She told them her name was Marliz Spannhake, and that she was eighteen years old. When the time came to drop her off at her apartment, Hooker had grabbed her and driven off to a lonely spot, where the young woman had been tied up, and her head clamped in the “head-box.” Back at home, Hooker stripped off her clothes and hung her from the ceiling. Then, perhaps to stop her screams, he cut her vocal cords with a knife. He tortured her by shooting her in the abdomen with a pellet gun, and finally strangled her. In the early hours of the morning, they drove into the mountains, and Hooker buried Marliz Spannhake in a shallow grave.

  The police were able to verify that a young woman named Marie Elizabeth Spannhake had indeed vanished one evening in January 1976; but although Janice accompanied them up into the mountains, they were unable to locate the grave. That meant that there was not enough evidence to charge Cameron Hooker with murder. Two detectives flew down to Riverside to interview Colleen Stan, and as they listened to the story of her seven years in a box, they soon realized that they had enough evidence to guarantee Cameron Hooker at least several years in jail. Hooker was arrested on November 18, 1984.

  The trial, which began on September 24, 1985, caused a nationwide sensation; the “Sex Slave” case seemed specially designed to sell newspapers. The jurors learned that Hooker was to be tried on sixteen counts, including kidnapping, rape, sodomy, forced oral copulation, and penetration with a foreign object. The prosecutor, Christ
ine McGuire, had hoped to be able to introduce the Spannhake murder as corroborative evidence of Hooker’s propensity to torture, but had finally agreed to drop it if Hooker would plead guilty to kidnapping. On October 28, 1985, the jury retired; on October 31—Halloween—they filed in to deliver their verdict. Cameron Hooker had been found guilty on ten counts, including kidnapping, rape, and torture. On November 22, Judge Clarence B. Knight delivered the sentence. After describing Cameron Hooker as “the most dangerous psychopath that I have ever dealt with,” he sentenced him to several terms of imprisonment amounting to 104 years.

  One question remains unanswered—the question that Christine McGuire raises on the last page of her book about the case, Perfect Victim: how did Cameron Hooker develop his peculiar taste for torturing women? She has an interesting comment from someone on the case who wished to remain anonymous:

  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.

  But is it as simple as that? Surely this element of conquest is present in all male sexuality? If it were absent, the male would find the female totally undesirable. In “normal” relationships, protectiveness and affection outweigh the desire for conquest, but it does not replace it.

  In a fantasist such as Cameron Hooker—and, like Brudos, he had been a shy and introspective child—the dominance fantasy had been cultivated until it had grown out of all proportion, producing a grotesque, lopsided monster.

  The world learned of the existence of another such monster—perhaps the worst serial killer since Pee Wee Gaskins—in early June 1985, after a group of detectives from the San Francisco Missing Persons Department drove out to a remote cabin near Wilseyville, Calaveras Country, together with Claralyn (“Cricket”) Balasz, the ex-wife of its deceased owner, Leonard Lake. In the master bedroom the bed had electric cords attached to its posts. Hooks in the ceiling and walls suggested that it was some kind of torture chamber, while a box full of chains and shackles could have only one use: to immobilize someone on the bed. A wardrobe proved to contain numerous women’s undergarments and some filmy nightgowns. In a dresser drawer was an assortment of women’s lingerie, some of it soiled with dark red stains. The mattress was stained dark brown.

  Next to the cabin there was a concrete building that ran back into the hillside. When Balasz refused to give them access, the police obtained a search warrant.

  At first sight the interior looked harmless enough—a workshop with power tools. But closer inspection revealed that some of these were encrusted with a dark substance that looked like dried blood. The shelves of the tool rack at the rear proved to cover a secret door that led into a small room with a bed and reading lamp. A wooden plaque was inscribed with “The Warrior’s Code,” and above it, in red ink, the words “Operation Miranda.” The wall contained twenty-one “candid” photographs of girls in various stages of undress. (Further investigation would reveal that these had been taken by Lake, whose lifelong hobby was photography, and that all the girls were still alive.)

  Again, a bookcase proved to be a false front that led into the next room, which was little more than a deep closet, and which contained a narrow bed. A one-way mirror on the wall meant that someone in the next room could survey it. Under the bed they found a book that proved to be the diary of Leonard Lake. It was this that provided the evidence that Leonard Lake and his close associate, Charles Ng, were serial killers.

  This story had begun two days earlier, on Sunday, June 2, when a shop assistant at the South City lumberyard in San Francisco noticed that a young man was leaving without paying for a $75 vise. The assistant hurried outside to speak to Police Officer Daniel Wright, and by the time the young man—who looked Asian—was putting the vise in the trunk of a car, the officer was right behind him. When he realized he was being followed, the man fled. Wright gave chase, but the skinny youth was too fast for him, and vanished across a main road.

  When Wright returned to the car—a Honda Prelude—a bearded, bald-headed man was standing by it. “It was a mistake,” he explained, “He thought I’d paid already. But I have paid now.” He held out a sales receipt.

  That should have ended the incident—except for the fact that the young Asian had fled, ruling out the possibility that it was merely an honest mistake. Wright wondered if anything else in the car might be stolen. “What’s in there?” he asked, pointing at a green holdall.

  “I don’t know. It belongs to him.”

  Wright found that it contained a .22 revolver, with a silencer on the barrel. Americans have a right to own handguns, but not with silencers—such attachments being unlikely to have an innocent purpose.

  The bearded man explained that he hardly knew the youth who had run away—he had just been about to hire him to do some work.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to come down to headquarters to explain this.”

  At the police station, the man handed over a driver’s license to establish his identity; it indicated that he was Robin Scott Stapley. But when asked various simple questions, such as his birthdate, he was unable to answer. Clearly, the license was someone else’s, and he had failed to memorize the details.

  “We’ll have to do a computer check on the car. But you’ll probably have to post bond before you can be released.”

  “Stapley” asked if he could have some paper and a pencil, and a glass of water. When the policeman returned with these items, he scribbled a few words on the sheet of paper, tossed two capsules into his mouth, and swallowed it down with water. Moments later, he slumped forward on the tabletop.

  Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor hold their son, Lonnie Bond Jr. All three are believed to have been murdered by Charles Ng and his accomplice Leonard Lake. One of California’s longest and costliest homicide cases started in 1998, more than thirteen years after Charles Ng’s arrest for shoplifting led to his prosecution for serial murder. (Associated Press/Detroit Free Press)

  Assuming it was a heart attack, the police called an ambulance. The hospital rang them later to say that the man had been brain-dead on arrival, but had been placed on a life-support system.

  The medic added that he was fairly certain the man had not suffered a heart attack; it was more likely that he had swallowed some form of poison. In fact, the poison was soon identified as cyanide. The note “Stapley” had scribbled had been an apology to his wife for what he was about to do. Four days later, removed from the life-support system, the man died without recovering consciousness.

  By this time, the police had determined that he was not Robin Stapley. The real Robin Stapley had been reported missing in February. But soon after, there had been a curious incident involving his camper, which had been in collision with a pickup truck. The young Chinese man who had been driving the camper had accepted responsibility and asked the other driver not to report it. But since it was a company vehicle, the driver was obliged to report the accident.

  The Honda the two had been driving proved to be registered in the name of Paul Cosner. And Cosner had also been reported missing. He had told his girlfriend that he had sold the car to a “weird-looking man” who would pay cash, and driven off to deliver it; no one had seen him since. The Honda was handed over to the forensic experts for examination; they discovered two bullet holes in the front seat, two spent slugs, and some human bloodstains.

  If the bearded man was not Robin Stapley, who was he? Some papers found in the Honda bore the name Charles Gunnar, with an address near Wilseyville, in Calaveras County, 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. Inspector Tom Eisenmann was assigned the task of heading to Wilseyville to check on Gunnar. The
re he spoke to Sheriff Claude Ballard, and learned that Ballard already had his suspicions about Gunnar, and about the slightly built Chinese youth, Charles Ng (pronounced “Ing”), with whom he lived. They had been advertising various items for sale, such as television sets, videos, and articles of furniture, and Ballard suspected that they were stolen. Nonetheless, checks on serial numbers had come to nothing. What was more ominous was that Gunnar had offered for sale furniture belonging to a young couple, Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor, who had lived next door, explaining that they had moved to Los Angeles with their baby and had given him the furniture to pay a debt. No one had heard from them since. And at a nearby campsite at Schaad Lake, another couple had simply vanished, leaving behind their tent and a coffee pot on the stove.

  By now, a check on the dead man’s fingerprints had revealed that he had a criminal record—for burglary and grand larceny in Mendocino County—and had jumped bail there. His real name was Leonard Lake.

  Eisenmann’s investigation into Lake’s background convinced the detective that this man seemed to be associated with numerous disappearances. His younger brother, Donald, had been reported missing in July 1983 after setting out to visit Lake in a “survivalist commune” in Humboldt County. Charles Gunnar, whose identity Lake had borrowed, had been best man at Lake’s wedding, but had also vanished in 1985. Together with Stapley and Cosner and the Bond couple and their baby, that made seven unexplained disappearances.