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.
PART TWO
THE CHORUS OF DISBELIEF
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
CHAPTER 6
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 full-grown 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 out-of-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.1
Moreover, he’d never given the smallest indication of anything awry at home. He rarely talked of his family life, hardly ever brought up sex, and in complete contradiction to stereotypical visions of burly, brutal rapists, Hooker was generally mild, quiet, and good-humored. The rumor even began to spread that Jan and this other woman were in cahoots together—maybe they were lesbians—and they’d cooked up the whole story just to fix him.
The townspeople read the newspaper accounts and wondered.
But to one local family, the press coverage was more than just startling, it was painful. For more than a decade, Harold and Lorena Hooker had quietly owned a twenty-acre ranch off of Highway 99, south of Red Bluff, near the town of Gerber. Now the peace of these wide open spaces was shattered, and their elder son was being held on $500,000 bail. Mrs. Hooker, a tall, dignified woman with sad eyes, declined to talk to reporters except to state that the media had “been having a field day with this.”
Mr. Hooker, looking gaunt and worn, told reporters, “We’re almost sick over the situation.”
However, he took the time to try to defend his boy. “We thought we had the greatest son in the world,” he said. “He was a good, easy kid to raise, no trouble at all. He never, ever let his temper get away with him.”
The Hookers found it impossible to believe that “Kay” had been kept against her will. She’d come over with Jan and Cameron a number of times, and they’d seen no evidence that she’d been kept by force—nothing strange, no bruises, no scars, not the slightest indication that she was anything but a babysitter. It seemed to them that she got along well with the girls, with their son and daughter-in-law, and that she was free to come and go as she pleased.
Asked about his daughter-in-law, Janice, whose allegations had led to Cameron’s arrest, Mr. Hooker said, “She won’t say anything that makes sense. She’s really upset.”
Now, Mr. Hooker worried, “it seems like the publicity’s got him guilty before they even get him to trial.”
Some of the loveliest buildings in the area are located in the heart of Red Bluff. These handsome old Victorians bespeak a more elegant past—when the railroad and the river were the main arteries of transportation, long before Interstate 5 would pull commerce to the other side of the river, spawning graceless housing developments and shopping centers surrounded by asphalt.
There’s little time or money today for the craftsmanship that went into these old Victorians, and few can even afford to heat their spacious, high-ceilinged rooms. Many are becoming shops and law offices—like the large and impressive office of Rolland Papendick, on the corner of Washington and Hickory Streets.
Papendick, like his office, commands respect. Tall, good-looking, and almost inevitably dressed in a suit—not so common in this rural area—Papendick looks the part of the prosperous, capable attorney. He can be charming and smooth, but he’s not all refinement and solemnity. There’s an athletic quality to him, a youthfulness that goes beyond simply having a full head of dark hair going into middle age. His quick movements reveal a restrained energy that sometimes makes him seem about to spring out of his chair—less like an attorney than a basketball player waiting to be called into the game.
But perhaps it’s more tension than athleticism that fuels Papendick’s energy, for it’s surely not clean living that has left Mr. Papendick so apparently fit: He smokes, he drinks, and a brooding temper lurks behind those snappy blue eyes. In court or out, his words can be curt, abrasive, and sarcastic. He’s not a man you’d want to cross, and he’s definitely someone you’d want on your side.
Shortly after Cameron’s arrest, his younger brother, Dexter, hailed Mr. Papendick on a street corner and asked how much he charged as a retainer for a criminal case. Papendick mentioned a figure, and Dexter had the check waiting on his desk that afternoon.
“Then I found out what I’d gotten myself into,” Papendick recalls.
Papendick spoke with the Hooker family at length. After learning some background and the charges against Cameron, he was inclined to accept the case, but he told them that the final decision was ultimately up to the actual client. “First,” he said, “I’ll have to talk to Cameron.”
But before Papendick even had a chance to approach Cameron Hooker, he was visited by Hooker’s wife.
Perhaps the only way to understand Janice Hooker’s actions during this period is to imagine her on an emotional see-saw. She had turned Cameron in, but now she was shaken by the resulting commotion. The father of her children was in jail, she felt guilty for putting him there, and when he phoned her making various requests, she did her best to comply.
Janice also talked with her in-laws. Perhaps as a way of deflecting responsibility for Cameron’s arrest away from herself, she said some rather astonishing things, including that she knew “for a fact that Colleen wasn’t raped.” Mr. and Mrs. Hooker suggested she tell this to Papendick.
And so, to Papendick’s surprise, he found Janice standing in his office saying she could “destroy Colleen’s story” and indicating that she wanted to talk about the case.
From the start, it was clear to Papendick that if he accepted this case, Janice Hooker would be testifying for the prosecution. He took mental notes of what she said but cautiously advised her that, since he was probably going to be representing Cameron, she would need to seek separate counsel. Then he referred this woman, whom he found “very, very, very emotionally distraught and confused,” to Ron McIver, another respected criminal attorney in the area.
Shortly thereafter, Rolland Papendick seated himself across from Cameron Hooker in the attorney visiting room at the county jail, a pane of glass separating them across a shared table. A slot at the bottom of the glass allows the attorney to pass papers back and forth to the prisoner, but other than this, there can be no physical contact between the two.
When Hooker was brought in, clad in his blue inmate’s uniform, Papendick appraised the lanky, six-foot-four-inch fellow, introduced himself, and started asking questions. . . .
Papendick came away from this first meeting with the opinion that his new client was “totally and completely honest.” What impressed him most was that when he asked, “How did you meet Colleen Stan?” Cameron unhesitatingly replied, “I kidnapped her.”
CHAPTER 7
Most crimes are over in a matter of moments—a trigger pulled, blood spilled, the law broken in a snap—but here was a succession of crimes spanning more than seven years, a pattern of abuse that had become a way of life. And as soon as Deputy District Attorney Christine McGuire heard about the “sex slave” case, she knew it belonged to her.
She’d been on an out-of-town trip when the case broke. Her first day back in the office, she heard all about it—weird evidence like a “stretcher” and a “head box” and something akin to a coffin. This was the wildest case ever to hit Tehama County, and the details only strengthened McGuire’s conviction that of all the attorneys in the office, she ought to be the one to prosecute Cameron Hooker. She was the office “sexpert,” the specialist on pros
ecuting sex offenses, and Hooker was due to be charged with at least a dozen felony sex crimes.
The problem was that no one else in the office seemed to be making what she thought was an obvious connection.
She’d come into the office early that morning, half expecting the Hooker file to be on her desk. But not only was the file absent, by mid-morning no one had even consulted her about the case. Offended, she sat hunched over a stack of papers at her desk, her dark hair shrouding her face, a cup of coffee in hand. She and the coffee were both steaming.
Voices were discussing the case just outside her door. She put down her pen and listened.
“I can give you a report on what the victim had to say. I interviewed Colleen Stan last week.” The voice was familiar: Detective Al Shamblin.
“Fine. Bring that by, and let’s go over everything we’ve got against Hooker.” McGuire recognized the other voice as Assistant District Attorney Ed King.
So, she thought, King was getting the Hooker case.
Dammit, he’d paid her dues. She’d been prosecuting sex crimes for four years, practically since the first day she’d walked in the door. Everyone was delighted to have her handle those messy interviews with rape and child molest victims, but now, when a really big case came along, it was passed along to someone higher up.
How many times since she’d come to work as the only female attorney in the office—in fact, in the whole county—had she come up against that feeling of being passed over and shut out?
When she’d accepted the job in 1980, McGuire knew it wasn’t going to be easy being the only woman lawyer in a county so red-neck, so dominated by cattlemen, that the Tehama County emblem was the head of a steer. But at twenty-eight, she’d been excited by the prospect of trying felony cases—feasible in a small DA’s office, whereas in a big-city office she would have spent years working her way through infractions and misdemeanor cases. Here, she was trying felonies her first year.
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