by Colin Wilson
Janice and Colleen, whose relationship in the past had often been stormy—Janice was inclined to boss her 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 9 August 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 18 years old. When the time came to drop her off at her apartment, Cameron 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 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 realised that they had enough evidence to guarantee Cameron Hooker several years in jail. Hooker was arrested on 18 November 1984.
The trial, which began on 24 September 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 16 counts, including kidnapping, rape, sodomy, forced oral copulation, and penetration with a foreign object. The prosecutor, Christine 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 28 October 1985, the jury retired; on 31 October—Halloween—they filed in to deliver their verdict. Cameron Hooker had been found guilty on ten counts, including kidnapping, rape, and torture. On 22 November, 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 like 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 might be some kind of torture chamber, while a box full of chains and shackles could have only one use: to immobilise someone on the bed. A wardrobe proved to contain many 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 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 21 ‘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 2 June, when a shop assistant at the South Ci
ty lumberyard in San Francisco noticed that a young man was leaving without paying for a $75 vice. 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 realised 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, baldheaded 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 licence to establish his identity; it indicated that he was Robin Scott Stapley. But when asked various simple questions, such as his birth date, he was unable to answer. Clearly, the licence was someone else’s, and he had omitted to memorise 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.
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 north-east of San Francisco. Inspector Tom Eisenmann was assigned to go and check on Gunnar. In Wilseyville 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 had suspected that they might be 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 many 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.
Police also found some expensive video equipment. This led Eisenmann’s assistant, Sergeant Irene Brunn, to speculate whether it might be connected with a case she had investigated in San Francisco. A couple called Harvey and Deborah Dubs had vanished from their apartment, together with their 16-month-old baby son, and neighbours had seen a young Chinese man removing the contents of their apartment—including an expensive video recorder. She had the serial numbers in her notebook. Her check confirmed her suspicion: this was the missing equipment.
Deputies came in to report that they had been scouring the hillside at the back of the house, and had found burnt bones that looked ominously human. Ballard noted a trench that seemed to have been intended for a telephone cable; he ordered the deputies to dig it up.
A filing cabinet in the cabin proved to be full of videotapes. Eisenmann read the inscription on one of these—‘M. Ladies, Kathy/Brenda’—and slipped it into the recorder. A moment later, they were looking at a recording of a frightened young woman handcuffed to a chair, with a young Asian man—obviously Charles Ng—holding a knife beside her. A large, balding man with a beard enters the frame and proceeds to remove the young woman’s handcuffs, then unshackles her ankles, and orders her to undress. Her reluctance is obvious, particularly when she comes to her panties. The bearded man tells her: ‘You’ll wash for us, clean for us, fuck for us.’ After this, she is made to go into the shower with the Asian man. A later scene showed her strapped naked to a bed, while the bearded man tells her that her boyfriend Mike is dead.
After ‘Kathy’ the video showed ‘Brenda’—identified by Sheriff Ballard as the missing Brenda O’Connor from next door—handcuffed to a chair, while Ng cuts off her clothes. She asks after her baby, and Lake tells her that it has been placed with a family in Fresno. She asks: ‘Why do you guys do this?’ and he tells her: ‘We don’t like you. Do you want me to put it in writing?’ ‘Don’t cut my bra off.’ ‘Nothing is yours now.’ ‘Give my baby back to me. I’ll do anything you want.’ ‘You’re going to do anything we want anyway.’
Another tape showed a woman Sergeant Brunn recognised as Deborah Dubs, who had vanished from her San Francisco apartment with her husband, Harvey, and baby, Sean.
Lake’s accomplice, Charles Ng, was now one of the most wanted men in America, but had not been seen since his disappearance from the South City parking lot. Police had discovered that he had fled back to his apartment, been driven out to San Francisco International Airport by Cricket Balasz, and there bought himself a ticket to Chicago under the name ‘Mike Kimoto’. Four days later, a San Francisco gun dealer notified the police that Ng had telephoned him from Chicago. The man had been repairing Ng’s automatic pistol, and Ng wanted to know if he could send him the gun by mail, addressing it to him at the Chateau Hotel under the name Mike K
imoto. When the gun dealer had explained that it would be illegal to send handguns across state lines, Ng had cursed and threatened him with violence if he went to the police.
By the time Chicago police arrived at the Chateau Hotel, the fugitive had fled. From there on, the trail went dead.
Meanwhile, the team excavating the trench had discovered enormous quantities of bones, chopped up and partly burnt. Tracker dogs were brought in to sniff for other bodies. They soon located a grave that proved to contain the remains of a man, a woman and a baby. These could be either the Dubs family or the Lonnie Bond family—they were too decomposed for immediate recognition. A bulldozer removed the top layer of earth to make digging easier.
The discovery of the cabinet of videos was followed by one that was in some ways even more disturbing: Lake’s detailed diaries covering the same two-year period. The first one, for 1984, began: ‘Leonard Lake, a name not seen or used much these days in my second year as a fugitive. Mostly dull day-to-day routine—still with death in my pocket and fantasy my goal.’
The diaries made it clear that his career of murder had started before he moved into the ranch on Blue Mountain Road. He had been a member of many communes, and in one at a place called Mother Lode, in Humboldt County, he had murdered his younger brother, Donald. A crude map of Northern California, with crosses labelled ‘buried treasure’, suggested the possibility that these were the sites of more murders; but the map was too inaccurate to guide searchers to the actual locations.