Up in the mountains, they set to work, looking for lumber allowed by the permit. Then they measured, cut, and split the trees into posts, bursting the pristine mountain stillness with the nasty growl of the chain saw or the clean staccato of the splitting maul. They labored and sweated, their breaths hanging in the wintry air, and soon the wood was broken into logs that they carried over to the truck, piled into the bed, and hauled home.
For K, it was a treat just to be out in the fresh air, despite her sore muscles and the branches that scratched and tore at her clothes. And for Cameron, with his slave working obediently at his side, this was what he would later call a “perfect” time.
But the Hooker household was on the eve of yet another change.
With gasoline prices soaring, high inflation, and five mouths to feed now, money was tight, so after some discussion it was decided that Janice would look for a job. At twenty-one, Jan didn’t have many marketable skills, but she landed a job at Foster’s Freeze, a little fast-food place on Main Street.
Jan started work on April 21, 1979, dispensing milkshakes, cones, hamburgers, and sandwiches to lounging teenagers and harried families on tight budgets. The pay was low, but it was better than nothing, and the hours worked out well. While Cameron worked, she could stay home with the kids. When he got off at four, they’d have a brief overlap, and then she’d start work at five, working through the dinner hours until eight or, during the long summer nights, as late as midnight.
Once Jan had gone, Cameron opened the secret panel at the foot of the bed, got K out and brought her into the living room, where she would kneel and ask her master’s bidding. Sometimes Jan would have prepared dinner before she left, but as a rule he had K cook dinner. While he and little Cathy ate, K fed and cared for the baby, only sitting down to eat when Cameron gave her permission. Sometimes she was allowed to sit at the table, sometimes told to sit on the floor.
Since K was in the box when Jan left for work and again when she came home, Jan had only a faint idea of what went on while she was gone. Though Cameron told her that he had K cook dinner, it was Jan’s understanding that Cameron took care of the girls, and he said nothing to disabuse her of this notion. Still, he saw no reason to burp the baby, change diapers, and wipe up spilled baby food when he had his slave there to do it.
During Jan’s employment, K was regularly let out of the box for longer periods. She and Cameron were alone together more often, but Hooker didn’t talk to her much. When he did, it was usually about the Company.
His threats and stories continued. More neighbors were moving into the area now, and he told her that some of them were involved with the Company. She believed him. And when she asked about possibly seeing her parents, he told her the Company wouldn’t allow it, that no slave had ever been allowed to visit their families after signing the slavery contract and that she should forget her past and her family.
Steeped in Hooker’s lies, K remained servile and compliant during her three or four hours of limited nocturnal freedom. She was a good slave. She showered when Cameron gave his permission. She did macrame projects as Jan instructed. She continued to address them as Sir and Ma’am.
During the summer, K’s only clothing was a couple of pairs of shorts and two tank tops that the Hookers had provided, but (as stipulated in the contract) no underwear.
Hooker underscored his control over her with more drills. He started taking her out for exercise, making her run. In the evenings, after Jan had left for work, he loaded up his daughters and his slave and drove out east of town to Hogsback Road, a long, winding dirt road that stretches east, all the way to Lassen National Forest. The first part of Hogsback Road is paved, but they proceeded to a more remote area, past open pasture and neglected signs that local boys had used for target practice, signs declaring “Range Cattle,” and “This Road Is Not Maintained Beyond This Point. Proceed At Your Own Risk.”
With no one around to observe, Cameron stopped the car, told K to get out, and ordered her to run down the road. She took off at a trot, Cameron driving the car slowly alongside. On the first occasion that he did this, K was quickly winded and wanted to stop, but when she slowed he leaned out the window and barked, “You better not stop or I’ll beat the hell out of you!” She kept jogging. When he thought she’d run far enough, he topped off the exercise session by ordering her to strip off her clothes and swim laps in a pond just off the side of the road.
This was just the first incident; Hooker took her out for runs on Hogsback Road several times.
As the calendar peeled off month after month and K’s captivity stretched past its second anniversary into its third year, Cameron tackled the problem of pursuing his interests within the cramped confines of the trailer. His hobby of construction came in handy.
The ceiling of the living room, Hooker found, was too weak to support the weight of a hanging woman. He tried to hang Jan, but to his great annoyance the screws pulled out. So Cameron set to work building a sturdy, rectangular structure which he dubbed the frame.
It stood about six feet or more off the ground, with hooks at the top so that the leather cuffs could be easily affixed. The structure wasn’t completely stable, so when set up in the living room, it was supported by a rope that wrapped around the top of the frame and through a hook in the ceiling. And it was bulky and awkward, so Hooker had to keep it outside, next to the woodpile.
In the fall of 1979, as a punishment for failing to follow directions on a macrame project, K was strapped to the frame and shocked with electrical wires. She was shocked several times before Hooker was finally satisfied that she’d learned her lesson. More than traumatizing her, more than sending current ripping through her nerves, the electric shocks scorched her skin. Within hours, blisters erupted at the four points where the wires had touched, and though the marks on her breasts eventually faded, her thighs were permanently scarred.1
This was punishment, but other incidents were clearly meant simply for Cameron Hooker’s entertainment.
The day that K was introduced to the “stretcher,” for instance, Cameron took her out of the box, put leather cuffs on her wrists and ominously announced: “I’m not doing this to punish you. I’m doing this because I enjoy it.”
The stretcher was a construction of almost medieval design: two heavy boards nailed in a T-shape, with a winch affixed to the bottom and hooks at each end of the cross. He put K down on it, securing the cuffs to the hooks at the top, locking her ankles to the chain that wrapped around the winch.
When she was securely fastened, he started turning the winch, tightening the chain. It clicked metallically, stretching her tighter and tighter. When it reached a certain tension, he used a steel bar to keep the winch from unwinding, then felt the tautness of her body before tightening the chain some more.
The cuffs sliced into the tender skin of her wrists, cutting off her circulation. Her whole body ached, and the constant pull on her diaphragm made it difficult to breathe. She panted in quick, short breaths, her hands, wrists, ribs, legs and ankles screaming a message of pain.
But this wasn’t entertainment enough for Cameron Hooker. He put his hands around her neck and strangled her, choking her until she blacked out. Then he eased his grip, waited until she started to come to, and squeezed her throat again.
When K flickered back into consciousness she was seized with terror. She didn’t realize he’d relaxed his hold long enough to let her breathe, but only knew that he was choking her, strangling her, and she was facing death.
Finally he relaxed his grip and she gasped for air. He told her to beg for mercy. She tried to croak out some words, but it was difficult to speak. Hooker chided her for begging so poorly.
At some point he’d taken off his clothes; that K was in so much pain excited him. Now, before she even had a chance to recover from being strangled, he forced her to give him oral sex.
K’s entire ordeal on the stretcher lasted about an hour—sixty minutes of suffocation and pain. At one point Came
ron put so much tension on her that one of the metal hooks broke and her arm snapped free. Furious, he unlocked her from the stretcher and hung her again on the frame.
But this was just her initiation. Another day, Hooker locked her down on the stretcher and raped her. And once he stretched her so intensely and for such a long period that he cut off the circulation in her hands. When he let her up she couldn’t move them.
Seeing this, he knew he’d gone too far. He rushed her into the bathroom and put her hands under hot running water, trying to get the circulation going again. Slowly, she regained control of her hands and fingers, but he’d stretched her so severely that her sides and back continued to ache. For a week it hurt so much to lie on her sides that it made her cry, so she had to lie flat on her back in the box.
Hooker used the frame, the stretcher, and other devices on both his wife and his slave, but K never saw Jan hung or whipped. She was always kept out of the way until Hooker wanted to include her. Jan, on the other hand, saw K hung, whipped, and abused, though only a portion of the times this took place.
Cameron was meanwhile clever enough to maintain the pretense that he had no sexual involvement with K. He often got her out of the box when Jan and the kids had gone shopping or visiting relatives. If they came back early, he made them wait outside while he hustled K back into the box and got rid of the bondage and torture equipment. Jan accepted this as in keeping with their agreement and chose to believe that Cameron limited his exploits with K to hanging, whipping, and bondage. In fact, Cameron Hooker subjected his slave to many kinds of sexual abuse, including rape and sodomy.
Jan’s blindness to the sexual nature of K’s captivity seems astonishing in light of Cameron’s initiation of sexual contact between the two women.
One afternoon he took K out of the box and had her sit on the floor. He handed her a bottle of cheap wine and told her to drink. Dissatisfied with her dainty sips, he tipped the bottle up and made her guzzle it. Then he declared that as an obedience test the Company wanted her to have oral sex with Jan, whom he tied to the bed.
When K was put back in the box she was ill. And while she vomited into her bedpan, she could hear the Hookers having sex above her.
With K now being let out of the box more frequently, there was more danger of her being discovered. Janice’s parents stopped by at least once a week, and Dexter, Cameron’s brother, came by fairly often as well. So Cameron and Jan were careful about when they let her out. If they had unexpected visitors, their watchdog would bark so they had time to rush K back into the box before letting their guests inside. Usually.
One day they had gotten her out of the box to do chores, and she was down on her hands and knees in that blue terrycloth nightgown, scrubbing the floor of the hallway. Suddenly, without knocking, Cameron’s father opened the front door.
Instantly, Cameron swept K off into the bedroom, and while Jan kept up a conversation with his father, he quickly found some clothes for her to put on. He hurried K back into the living room in a ridiculous, ill-fitting outfit of checks and plaids, and introduced her to his father as “Kay,” a friend who had come over to help them out around the house. Then he announced that he’d better be taking “Kay” home and propelled her out the door.
Outside, he rushed her over to the shed, locked her inside, hurried over to his pickup, got in, and drove off. He drove around to kill ten or fifteen minutes, then casually returned to his wife and father at the trailer.
It had been a close call, but Mr. Hooker neither raised awkward questions nor seemed the least suspicious. After he left, Cameron retrieved K from the shed and put her back in the box. Life in the brown and yellow mobile home off Pershing Road went on pretty much undisturbed.
PART FOUR
DANGEROUS PRECEDENTS
December 7, 1984–January, 1985
People saw in me weaknesses in themselves that they were afraid of—like fears that they could be broken down. It’s hard for people to face that.
Patty Hearst
CHAPTER 12
Conventional wisdom among many local lawyers had it that Christine McGuire was in way over her head. With only a few years’ experience as a DA, McGuire was still considered a neophyte, and the Hooker case promised to be extremely complex. Moreover, her opponent, Rolland Papendick, was older, more experienced, and had a sterling reputation.
McGuire wasn’t aware of her colleagues’ presentiments, but she was fully conscious of Papendick’s high standing in the legal community. One of her peers once commented with obvious admiration that “Papendick is always way ahead of the rest of us. He’s doing things we’ve never even thought of.”
Before going into private practice, Papendick had worked in the district attorney’s office in neighboring Shasta County, where he’d not only mastered prosecution but had established a reputation for superior professional acumen. Now, working on the side of the defense, he wasn’t intimidated by district attorneys and could often anticipate their moves.
But this wasn’t McGuire’s first face-off with Papendick. During past trials she’d found him resourceful, adroit, and shrewd. He’d outmaneuvered her at times, but she had yet to lose a case to him.
Faced with a difficult case and a skilled opponent, McGuire’s strategy was, as always, simply to work harder.
With the preliminary hearing just days behind her, she was already planning for the trial, sitting at the kitchen table with papers spread about as if she were studying for a law school exam. She sifted through the facts gleaned from the preliminary hearing, reviewed lists of evidence, and had a gut feeling she needed more.
The box, by itself, was fairly convincing evidence. But it was difficult to imagine anyone actually staying in it, sleeping in it, living in it, and hard to picture it set within a pedestal beneath a waterbed. The idea was too outlandish. McGuire didn’t want a jury of twelve unknown men and women having to strain to imagine the scene; she wanted them to see it, to climb into the box and lie in it. If they had questions about whether it was possible to keep a woman in a box beneath a bed, let them try it out for themselves.
She decided on another search warrant; she wanted that bed.
It was a Friday night, and officers Al Shamblin and Mack McCall may have begrudged the prosecutor her interruption of their personal lives, but they obliged her request: The officers went back to the Hookers’ trailer, let the water out of the mattress, unbolted the frame, and brought the whole bulky set-up to police headquarters to be logged in as evidence.
As the investigation advanced, parts of Colleen’s and Jan’s stories received outside corroboration. But while police continued with interviews and the footwork of building the case, McGuire struggled with legal foundations and technicalities. What she found was discouraging.
With so many crimes occurring over such a long period of time, the Hooker case had major statute of limitations problems. And in searching for legal precedents, McGuire found nothing comparable. Kidnapping, enslavement, prolonged captivity, and sado-masochism—Colleen Stan had endured a singularly brutal ordeal. There was simply no precedent for it.
But while the duration and combination of crimes was highly unusual, taken singly, they weren’t so rare. McGuire therefore rolled up her sleeves and researched the crimes one at a time.
First, the kidnapping. From the start, she’d been wrestling with the problem that the statute of limitations for kidnapping is only three years. Since Colleen’s kidnap had occurred in 1977 and Hooker hadn’t been charged until 1984, the three-year statute had lapsed. On the face of it, Hooker could not be convicted on that count.
But when filing the Information,1 some distant recollection had rumbled in the back of McGuire’s mind, making her think she could get the kidnap charge to stick. Now something clicked into place, and that persistent rumbling suddenly came out as one clear word: Parnell.
She pulled out the Annotated California Penal Code, and flipped through its pages until she found Parnell v. Superior Court, a precedent-s
etting case in which the defendant was charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, and miscellaneous sex offenses. The facts of the case were as follows:
On December 4, 1972, a seven-year-old boy, Steven, was abducted by two men as he was walking home from school in Merced, California. The men, Kenneth Parnell and Ervin Murphy, held the boy in a cabin for a short time, Parnell telling the child that he’d gone to court to obtain custody of him. He changed the boy’s hair color, gave Steven sleeping pills when he would be left unattended and after three weeks left Murphy behind, taking the child with him to Santa Rosa, California.
Over the next several years, Parnell and the boy moved from town to town, Steven attending school as Dennis Parnell. Parnell committed sodomy on the boy and involved him in acts of oral copulation. Beyond threats of spankings, however, there was little actual physical restraint or punishment.
Seven years passed. Though it was mandatory that Steven obtain Parnell’s permission before leaving his presence, the boy was frequently unsupervised and apparently free to come and go. He rode bicycles, stayed overnight at the homes of friends, and went on school outings. In high school, he joined the football team and participated in out-of-town games.
On February 14, 1980, Steven came home to find that Parnell had abducted another boy, a five-year-old by the name of Timmy. Two weeks later, while Parnell was at work, the two boys hitchhiked from Parnell’s cabin in Manchester to the nearby town of Ukiah, where Steven led Timmy to the door of the police station and instructed the younger boy on how to turn himself in. When Steven turned to go, Timmy got frightened and ran after him, attracting the attention of the police, who then stopped and questioned both of them. Though it took some coaxing, Steven finally disclosed that he, too, had been abducted.2
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