Not long after she was hired, McGuire learned that, because she was a woman, many of her peers thought she’d been employed for reasons other than her professional skills. Indignant, she just dug in and worked harder.
McGuire might have come in a little green, but she won cases. After encountering her in court, her colleagues began to get the message that she was not to be underestimated because of her size or her sex; she was feminine and petite, but not fragile.
But in the process of sharpening her prosecutorial skills, McGuire also managed to alienate a few people. While obliterating that first impression of being “tiny” and “delicate,” McGuire tended to come across as pushy, overly serious, and combative. She didn’t mean to be that way, but that’s how her crossed arms and compressed lips were interpreted. She’d even had jurors come up to her after trials (which she’d won) to advise her to smile more.
McGuire didn’t see herself as especially somber, and she was puzzled when people told her to “lighten up.” That unsmiling manner was just her style.
“I don’t joke around in court,” she said. “Some attorneys do that, but I think it undermines the jury’s confidence in you—not to mention the victim’s—if you’re seen laughing it up with the defense counsel and the judge. In chambers or outside of the courtroom, I’m as easy-going as anyone else, but I am serious in court. I guess that’s why people keep calling me ‘intense.’”
McGuire’s background probably accounts for much of that intensity. Her Irish-Catholic upbringing didn’t leave much room for coddling. The second girl in a family of three daughters and one son, McGuire grew up in a working-class suburb of Cleveland. At an early age she learned to be ultraresponsible, very serious, and self-reliant.
Realizing that she was bright but no genius, she threw herself into her studies and, out of sheer tenacity, graduated from high school at sixteen. Then she went to work.
Holding down a full-time job as a secretary, she put herself through night school and, in 1972, became the first person in her family to finish college, even managing to graduate cum laude.
Though she hadn’t been shy about setting unexpectedly high educational goals, Christine hadn’t completely abandoned the conventions of home and family. Just out of college, she married handsome Steven Takacs, a chemical engineer whom she’d known for about three years. He was not Irish, but like Christine, he was Catholic. They were wed in a small outdoor ceremony on a hot summer day in August, 1972.
McGuire’s desire for a warm and secure homelife, however, was due to clash with her desire for a career. She and her husband moved to Southern California, where she put so much into speeding through Southwestern University Law School in two years rather than three that her marriage died from neglect. In 1978, Christine and Steven were divorced—a fate to which no good Catholic girl is easily reconciled, but particularly upsetting for Christine, who was the first in her family to get divorced.
Still reeling from her failed marriage, Christine spent one lonesome year in private practice in Orange County before becoming disenchanted with the flash and fast-lane frivolity of sprawling Southern California. Yearning to do something socially responsible and personally fulfilling, she tried a stint with VISTA, working with Nevada Indian Legal Services.
At the end of her commitment, she started putting resumes in the mail, landing an interview with Tehama County District Attorney Bill Scott and then a job in Red Bluff—a “hick town,” in her estimation, but not a bad place to learn the fine art of prosecution.
She’d come to Red Bluff recognizing that, being a rural area, it wouldn’t be as progressive as L.A. But some of the attitudes she encountered among police officers and her colleagues made her stop and swallow. She was offended by their insensitivity toward victims of sex crimes, especially their “didn’t-she-enjoy-it?” attitudes about rape.
It seemed that either no one wanted to handle these cases, or no one took them seriously, because a lot of them were being plea bargained away—meaning that rapists, child molesters, and wife beaters were back on the streets in a relatively short time. McGuire raised a stink about it, the cases started ending up on her desk, and more or less by default, she became the office specialist on the prosecution of sex crimes.
And she got convictions. By the end of 1984, her conviction rate was running at 90 percent.
So why hadn’t she been given the Hooker case?
By the end of the day she was privately fuming. She went home to her six-month-old daughter, Nicole, and relieved Rose, the grandmotherly nanny. Still angry, she fed the baby while mentally reviewing all the reasons she should be the one to try Cameron Hooker.
When her husband got home, she could finally keep it in no longer. She broke the unspoken rule of not discussing work at home.
Her husband, James Lang, was the District Attorney. They’d been dating in 1982 when he ran against her boss, Bill Scott, for Tehama County DA. He won, they married, and now she found herself in the frequently awkward position of working for her husband.
Except for their profession, James Lang and Christine McGuire seemed an unlikely pair. Her manner was quick, his was methodical. Her voice was keen, with a distinct Midwestern twang, his was deep and resonant. She was just a few years out of law school; he’d spent 20 years as a cop, some years as a judge, and was about 30 years her senior.
But in their conservative politics and law-and-order ethics, Lang and McGuire stood as matched as bookends. They were a career-oriented couple. In fact, their relationship had sprung from Christine’s deep respect for Jim’s professionalism.
McGuire had noticed Lang’s deftness in the courtroom soon after arriving in Tehama County in 1980. She had marveled at his ability to take a case apart from several different perspectives, admired his sharp legal mind, his easy rapport with the jury, his skillful presentations in the courtroom. He tried a case “with such effortlessness,” she said, “he could have been shopping for groceries.”
Her first years in Red Bluff, McGuire had often sought out his advice, and in some senses, he’d become her mentor. But once they married, they determined not to mix their professional and private lives. Christine basically agreed with this, but sometimes felt exasperated by Jim’s secretiveness. From his point of view, he was being protective of her by insulating her from conflicts with the Board of Supervisors or judges or whomever, but she felt shut out and jealous of his easy camaraderie with the others in the office. At work, they maintained an uneasy distance.
So McGuire had kept her desire to try Hooker bottled up, resisting the urge to approach District Attorney Lang on the subject, believing that, eventually, he would come to her. But by nightfall she was so thoroughly convinced the case was rightfully hers that when Jim came home she let him know she was angry at not having been assigned it.
“Why did you give the sex slave case to King? I’m supposed to be handling the sex cases, Jim. Why shouldn’t I be the one to prosecute Hooker?”
Lang, who didn’t feel anyone had been assigned the case yet, didn’t see what she was so perturbed about. “The only reason he’s been looking into it is that he tries the homicides and we’ve been trying to connect Hooker with a 187 charge. But since there isn’t enough evidence for a murder charge, we’ll have to go with the Stan case.”
He gave her a level gaze and added, with characteristic gruffness, “If you think you can handle it, by god, handle it!”
Reviewing the evidence and plowing through stacks of police reports, McGuire tried to parcel this wild amalgamation of information into the legal segments that make a case. The circumstances were so bizarre and the time-span so phenomenal that it was difficult to digest.
It didn’t make sense that Colleen Stan claimed to have been held against her will, yet had ample opportunity to flee. When she finally went home in August of 1984, she hadn’t even contacted the police! But the most glaring flaw in this case, the incident that made McGuire cringe, was that inexplicable trip to Riverside in March of 1981. How could
she possibly explain that to a jury? For that matter, how could she explain it to herself?
She sighed with frustration. They had big statute of limitations problems, particularly in terms of the kidnap. It had taken such a long time for these crimes to come to light that Hooker could get away with many of them even if he confessed.
Burdened with a full case load, her regular office duties, and a colicky baby at home, McGuire scarcely had time to prepare for the preliminary hearing, set for little more than a week away. The preliminary hearing would determine exactly what Hooker could be charged with. The judge would hear testimony, then arguments from the prosecution and the defense, and decide whether there was enough evidence to bring Hooker to trial. But before she could present evidence against Hooker, McGuire had to familiarize herself with seven years of events, and if she overlooked something during the prelim, there would be no second chance to bring it in later.
Her task was complicated by the fact that she had only bare-bones summaries, not transcripts, of police interviews with Janice and Colleen that had transpired over several hours. But the good news was that one of her favorite detectives, Al Shamblin, had conducted the interviews.
In McGuire’s estimation, Shamblin was one of the most reliable investigative officers on the force. Though you couldn’t tell it from his slow manner, his lame grammar, or his shaggy-dog looks, Shamblin was no dummy. He got all the details, and he knew how to investigate a case. McGuire and Shamblin had teamed up on a number of cases, and she knew from experience that she could count on him to get his facts straight.
Knowing how dependable Shamblin was, McGuire expected that he would have answers to most of her questions about the crimes Hooker had allegedly committed. What she hadn’t expected was the bombshell of evidence that literally fell into his lap.
It was a slide, not unlike the hundreds of slides that police had confiscated from Hooker’s mobile home. But rather than being neatly marked, boxed, and stashed, this one had been hidden and forgotten, tucked between the pages of one of Hooker’s sketchbooks. By chance, Shamblin had picked up the sketchbook and thumbed through it, and the slide had dropped out.
When he showed it to McGuire, she held it up to the light, squinted, and exclaimed, “Al, we’ve got our first big break!”
According to Janice Hooker, she and Cameron had destroyed a barrelful of potential evidence, including one particular sheet of paper: the slavery contract. But while Hooker had made sure the original had gone up in smoke, he’d apparently forgotten that, ever the photographer, he’d preserved the contract on celluloid.
McGuire’s first meeting with Janice Hooker came on the heels of this exciting discovery, on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 27. The meeting was ostensibly to prepare Janice for the potentially unnerving experience of testifying at the preliminary hearing. But besides reviewing common-sense points such as speaking clearly and not guessing at answers, this preparatory interview allowed the prosecutor to get a feel for her witness—what type of character she was, how she might respond on the stand.
At first meeting, McGuire decided that as a principal witness Janice Hooker left a lot to be desired. Jan entered the coffee room at the Red Bluff Police Department (RBPD) wearing a rumpled sweatshirt and blue jeans that were too small for her stout figure. She peered out from beneath her long, frizzy hair with a wary expression, making it immediately clear that she was uncomfortable.
Detective Shamblin greeted Janice and introduced Deputy DA McGuire, who smiled and tried to put Janice at ease, but the two women seemed to have nothing in common and zero rapport. The atmosphere was strained until McGuire asked the names of Janice’s daughters and told her about her own baby girl. Soon they were sharing photographs of their children, mother to mother.
The interview got under way, McGuire leaving most of the questioning to Shamblin. “Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, and Janice talked for the next five hours, starting with the events of May 19, 1977.
She was much more coherent than the first time Shamblin had interviewed her, but her answers often came slowly, after much consideration, and she frequently claimed memory lapses. She seemed evasive, as if she were still unconvinced that the immunity she’d been granted would protect her from prosecution. Once or twice, she asked that the tape recorder be turned off so she could discuss something without being recorded.
She did better when asked to ID the evidence—the box, the head box, the whips, assorted photographs and magazines—but was visibly shaken to learn that they’d found the slavery contract. And when they asked Jan to ID slides of herself, projecting them against a screen in the back room, she was distressed by the thought of complete strangers viewing these in the courtroom.
(The prospect was disturbing to McGuire as well. The photographs were graphic depictions of Janice being hung, stretched, and bound in various ways, and she wondered what effect they might have on a jury. If the jury were offended, these photos could backfire, damaging Jan’s credibility as a witness and undermining her testimony.)
During the interview, McGuire watched Janice closely. She couldn’t help but notice that Jan had the worn and weathered hands of a much older woman and that, from behind her wire-rim glasses, her eyes spoke of pain. This was a woman who had been through a lot. But Janice Hooker was also an accomplice, worried about protecting herself, and McGuire’s legal instincts told her to be watchful for lies and contradictions.
The interview finally ended, and once Janice had gone, Shamblin and McGuire compared notes. Overall, Janice was doing well—her story was consistent, she wasn’t contradicting herself—but the prosecutor still had misgivings.
“She seems a little shaky, doesn’t she? I hope she doesn’t balk at the last minute. If I have to do the prelim without her it’s going to seem like a vendetta—Colleen against Cameron.”
And there was an even more fundamental reason for getting Janice to testify. If McGuire could get her on the stand at the preliminary hearing, Mrs. Hooker would be waiving her marital privilege not to testify against her husband, a privilege that once waived is waived forever under California law.
They’d learned from Janice that Cameron had planned to capture more slaves, that he had stalked women, taking photos of them with his telephoto lens. This was the impetus behind a search that proved pivotal to the case.
Ed King had hastily obtained the first search warrant at the time of Hooker’s arrest, and that had yielded the head box, the stretcher, and various bondage articles. Now McGuire obtained another search warrant—the second of what would ultimately be a total of five. Call her compulsive, but McGuire’s thoroughness would pay off.
Detective Shamblin and Lieutenant Brown went back to the Hooker residence and seized Hooker’s photographic equipment—a handmade enlarger, a slide rack with candid slides of women, a camera, and lenses. Also, on the bottom of a bedroom drawer, they found two undeveloped rolls of film.
Back at RBPD they took a closer look at these forgotten rolls and learned that this type of film had been discontinued in 1975. The film was so old that it would have to be sent away for special processing by the FBI in Washington, D.C.
The day before the preliminary hearing, Colleen Stan and her father drove up from Riverside together.
McGuire’s first impression was that the victim of the sex slave case didn’t look very slavelike, nor even much like a victim. Juries, McGuire knew, tended to judge people from the outside, and this woman who claimed to have been imprisoned and deprived looked normal, neat, well-fed, and pretty.
Worse, McGuire had a feeling Defense Attorney Papendick was going to try to portray Colleen as “the other woman.” Unfortunately, she looked the part. Though a year older than Janice, she looked much younger and vastly more attractive. In fact, McGuire thought she looked too sexy and cheaply dressed in her tight-fitting top, tight pastel jeans, and stiletto heels.
But there was work to do. McGuire shook hands with Colleen and then her father, a short, retiring man, and us
hered them toward Detective Shamblin’s office. She couldn’t help but notice that both Colleen and her father were distinctly bow-legged, a casual observation that would take on significance only much later.
There wasn’t time to do as in-depth an interview as they had with Janice Hooker. McGuire outlined the areas she would cover with Colleen on the stand but, beyond advising her to answer truthfully, didn’t touch on the substance of Colleen’s testimony—that would be coaching, strictly outside the rules. She gave the standard explanation of court proceedings, a few pointers on how to conduct herself on the stand, and let her know what to expect.
“Don’t be surprised if the defense attorney seems hostile, but don’t get flustered. Just answer his questions as clearly as possible. I’ll object if the questioning is improper,” McGuire told her.
Colleen sat very still, amicable and apparently alert yet with a strangely vacant look behind those pretty blue eyes, like a doll on a shelf. Colleen seemed shy, a bit apprehensive, and unnaturally passive. There seemed not an ounce of vengeance in her, which was peculiar in McGuire’s experience with victims.
The interview was over in a couple of hours, and then Colleen had an appointment for a physical examination to see if her physical condition corroborated her story.
As she bid good-bye, McGuire remembered to suggest that Colleen wear a dress in court tomorrow.
Once they’d gone, McGuire turned to Shamblin and said, “You told me to expect her to be quiet, but she and her father were both so docile, they’re like sheep!”
“Kinda spooky, isn’t it?” Shamblin agreed.
“Well, maybe they were just tired after that long drive up from Riverside. But I sure hope she’s more animated tomorrow.”
Who could believe a victim who was so dispassionate about the crimes committed against her? She’d expected outrage, tears, and instead she’d gotten something vexingly close to apathy.
Perfect Victim Page 6