Sometimes the Hookers’ two little girls would wander over to visit, and when K came to retrieve them, Dorothy would take the opportunity to talk with her for a few minutes (though K was always careful about what she said—gardening, the children, and religion were safe topics). For a while, Dorothy tried to get “Kay” to come to church with her, but “Kay” seemed oddly hesitant to go and reluctant even to discuss it.
With K’s new freedom she was even allowed to go jogging, unsupervised and on a regular basis, though she had to ask permission each time, of course, and Cameron delineated the route she should take. He even timed her, so he knew it took fifteen minutes for her to jog the mile-long course.
K usually ran in the evening, while the Hookers were eating dinner. She jogged down the dirt road and turned right at the end of the lane, savoring the fresh air and the company of the Hookers’ little dog, Misty, who trotted along beside her. More than just a healthy work-out, this was private time, a brief interlude of independence, a respite from the demands the Hookers put on her, and something she did just for herself. For a few minutes, she felt free.
But to keep the specter of the Company ever-present, Cameron told K that neighborhood members would be watching. And one evening she had this confirmed.
Cameron had told her that he was planning to go to a Company meeting in Sacramento on Sunday. It happened that as she jogged past the home of one of the neighbors, Mr. George, he was standing outside talking to his father, who also lived nearby, and she overheard them mention plans to go to Sacramento the next day, too.
Pure coincidence, but this chance encounter reinforced K’s belief that members of the Company were actually in the neighborhood spying on her. She was sure now that Mr. George and his father were involved with the Company. She imagined that Mr. George looked down on her because she was a slave, and when his dog chased after her as she jogged by, she believed he had sicced it on her.
One day Al Coppa hailed K as she was jogging past. She stopped, and it turned out that Al just wanted to chat. He couldn’t have known how distressing this idle conversation was to K, who was acutely aware that Cameron was timing her. She’d never been late before, and she was afraid of what might happen if she was. Though she was anxious to get back, she didn’t want to be rude to Al, so she spoke with him a few minutes before hurrying back to the trailer.
She came in fifteen minutes late. Both Jan and Cameron were furious. They said they’d just put in a call to someone in the Company to chase her down and implied gruesome consequences if she’d been caught. “It’s lucky that you got back in when you did,” they told her.
She didn’t get to go jogging much after that.
Jan’s summer return to the job market precipitated a major turn in K’s captivity. Jan’s new job at the Pac-Out, a fast-food place in Redding, required that she be away from home during the day, when Cameron was working, so in the mornings Jan and Cameron rode to work together, leaving K at home to babysit the girls. For the first time, K was now out of the box with neither Jan nor Cameron there to supervise.
She did not run screaming to the neighbors. She did not call the police. She did nothing that might provoke the ire of the Company. Rather, K did her chores, minded the children, and did as she was told. She was not a troublemaker.
Around this time Cameron initiated an important change in K’s sleeping quarters: instead of being locked in the box every night, she slept on a sleeping bag on the floor of the back bathroom. Most of the time she was chained to the toilet.
Grim as it sounds, the five-foot chain around her neck at least allowed her to stand and move around. After more than three years of sleeping and waking encased within a space smaller than a closet, unable even to sit up and having to use the bedpan in a prone position, being shut up inside the tiny bathroom of a mobile home came as a dramatic relief.
While in some ways K’s conditions improved, the physical and sexual abuse became a regular occurrence. K was raped repeatedly: while hung on the frame, tied to the stretcher, hanging in the shed, or bound in other ways. But Cameron was always careful about shielding his daughters from this; he waited until Jan and the girls were out shopping or visiting someone before he got out his bondage and torture equipment.
Though the girls were still very young and the Hookers tried to protect them from the unsavory side of K’s role, raising them with a slave around the house was sometimes problematic.
One morning Cathy got up before her parents. Knowing that K was in the bathroom, she opened the door and asked her to fix her some cereal.
“I’m sorry, honey, I can’t,” K told her.
At age three, Cathy couldn’t understand the chain around K’s neck, or why K, who usually made her breakfast, wouldn’t come to the kitchen to do so. She asked again.
“Well, maybe if you go ask your daddy, he’ll let K make your breakfast,” she finally suggested.
That’s what Cathy did, and she got her breakfast. But Cameron wasn’t happy about what K had said to his daughter or that Cathy had seen her chained to the toilet. From then on, K was to lock the bathroom door from the inside in case one of the girls tried to get in.
Working at the Pac-Out meant that Jan was having to commute about thirty miles to Redding and back every day. After a couple of months, she quit and found a new job in Red Bluff with a small electronics firm called JLA. Jan worked “prepping” parts, or cutting out parts to fit onto assembly boards.
JLA was then doing such a brisk business that they were having trouble keeping up with demand. Hearing opportunity knocking, Jan got her boss’s permission to bring work home. When Cameron came by to pick her up in the evening, they would load the small machine that cut the parts into the car and bring it with them. K would do the work that night, and then Jan returned the next morning with both the machine and the newly cut parts.
This arrangement worked out well at first, but Jan’s boss disliked paying time-and-a-half for the extra work. He suggested that she fill in another job application so the work could be paid at a straight time wage. Jan brought home an application and Cameron told K to fill it out with her maiden name, Colleen Martin. JLA was soon issuing checks to her, which she signed over to the Hookers so they could deposit the money into their checking account.
During this time of unparalleled freedom, K resumed asking to see her family, and Hooker took a softer position, perhaps because he was now so confident of his control. On three occasions he allowed her to write to her sister, though she had to limit the contents to vague and mundane matters. She told her sister that she was living with a family, taking care of the kids, and learning to can fruit (she even enclosed some recipes). But, of course, she wasn’t allowed to give a return address.
Cameron checked the letters carefully, making her rewrite some sections before he posted them from a nearby town.
Still, these unanswerable letters did little to allay her yearning to see or hear from her family, and she kept pestering Cameron for the chance to contact them. Now, for the first time, he relented and let her phone home.
He took her and his daughters to a pay phone in Chico, a small college town about forty miles southeast of Red Bluff. With many admonitions about what she could and couldn’t say, he let K call.
As Cameron stood next to her, she dialed her father’s number and listened to it ring. Her younger sister, Bonnie, answered. It had been so many years since she’d heard from Colleen that she didn’t recognize her voice. “Who is this?” she asked.
The strange voice replied, “It’s your sister, Colleen.”
A brief and emotional conversation ensued. Colleen told her sister she was all right and that she missed everyone. She asked about family members and learned that everyone was well except one aunt, who had cancer. And though she’d known at the time of the kidnap that her stepmother was expecting, K learned for the first time that in September of 1977 she’d given birth to a baby girl, Leslie. Now Leslie was nearly three.
Practicing the restr
aint she’d learned over years as Hooker’s slave, K tearfully divulged only as much as Cameron would permit. But Bonnie, also in tears, peppered her sister with questions. “Where are you?” she asked.
Colleen was evasive, saying only that she was “up north.” And when her sister asked why she hadn’t written more often, Colleen simply didn’t answer.
Too soon, Cameron told her to hang up, but this fleeting contact with her sister was as precious as any gift her master could have given her. She was deeply grateful that she’d finally been allowed to call home.
In fact, K now found many reasons to be thankful. Besides being given permission to contact her family, she was out of the box and afforded numerous small freedoms. These, coupled with her growing acceptance of her slave status, affected K in ways she didn’t fully understand. During “the year out”—despite the victimization and brutalization, despite the continued hangings and abuse, despite the fact that Cameron raped her so frequently that when he told her to shower, she knew what was coming and started shaking as she washed—K started expressing love for her captor.
No hearts or flowers or valentines, this was certainly love outside the common realm and a long way from most pop-forty love songs, but K told Cameron she loved him.
Telling him this seemed to soften the edge of mistreatment. He showed a bit more leniency and granted small concessions, though she was still quite clearly the slave and he the master.
This must have come as a sublime affirmation for Cameron. The books and articles were right! All women really wanted was to be dominated, and this proved it. His vocabulary of love was one of pain and subjugation and absolute obedience; K loved and respected him because he was powerful. Now he had achieved the ultimate relationship, one of absolute domination and submission.
Difficult as it is to imagine, Cameron Hooker also professed love for his slave. He shared with her his secret fantasies for the future. The whole family would move to the Lake Tahoe area, he said, where she would have her own private cabin. At one point he told her that the gold ring in her labia, more than just identification for the Company, was a symbolic wedding ring.
Someday, he said, she would be his slave wife, and they would have children together.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Janice and K teetered on the brink of hostility. K’s perception of Jan was filtered through Cameron’s stories; K was afraid of her. And since he had told her not to talk to Jan, their contact was mostly limited to giving and taking orders. Their lives moved in parallel, but they rarely connected, and they coexisted uneasily, sporadically bickering over household matters.
Jan had mixed feelings toward this other woman in the house: She was both jealous of and sorry for her. If K put on makeup or cooked something special for dinner, Jan perceived it as an attempt to garner favor with her husband, so while she felt guilty about keeping a slave, she also felt threatened. She nagged Cameron to let her go.
Only the faintest glimmer of the ongoing tension at the Hooker residence became visible to outsiders: One day K was so upset by something Jan had said that she risked alarming the Company by doing something she was not supposed to do.
K had apparently developed an attachment to the kind and motherly Mrs. Coppa and on this day paid her the ultimate compliment of seeking her out for consolation. No one was home except the kids, and they were napping. She decided she could slip away for just a minute. To Dorothy Coppa’s surprise, K showed up at her door in tears.
Upset as she was, K wouldn’t say what was wrong except that it had something to do with Jan. This was as much as she dared risk; her fear of the Company prohibited her from saying more.
Mrs. Coppa hugged her, offering what comfort she could, and K’s tears gradually abated. Since Jan seemed to be the problem, Dorothy proposed that if K wanted to move out, she could stay with some friends of hers. But K quietly demurred. Finally, Mrs. Coppa suggested they pray.
And so they knelt, this gentle, graying woman and the younger one—a secret slave—to offer up their separate prayers. A small comfort. And perhaps the closest K had ever come to telling anyone her sad and very strange story.
The Christmas season of 1980 was unlike any that K experienced while the Hookers’ captive. Not since 1976 had she felt the special warmth of holiday preparations. In some ways, this was the pinnacle of her “year out.” It was also the grand finale.
K took pleasure in giving. Having no money to buy gifts, she made little cards and crafts that satisfied her urge to give—not artistic achievements, just simple expressions of caring. She made Christmas cards for all the members of the Hooker family.
This was an extraordinary time for K. After years of confinement, she was out to soak up the special colors, flavors, and sounds heralding Christmas. As the holidays approached, these kindled memories of home, and she begged to contact her family. On Christmas Eve, Cameron again granted the supreme favor of letting her phone home.
Cameron and Janice stood listening to every word, ready to cut her off at any time, yet she was deeply grateful to be allowed to speak to her father. Just as before, K dutifully limited herself to only the sketchiest details and the vaguest descriptions of where she was and what she was doing. When her father asked for her phone number, she couldn’t answer; when he asked when she would be coming home, she only said, “Soon, I hope.” But this was the ultimate treat: to be able to wish her family a Merry Christmas.
To top it all off, when the Hookers were opening gifts the next morning, K was shocked to hear Jan say, “There is a present for you, too, K.”
She received the large package with stunned pleasure. Opening it, she found a superbly practical gift: a new sleeping bag.
Regardless of the special favors and surprise Christmas present, a sinister and still undetectable shift was beginning, a shift within Hooker’s psyche, a shift in Colleen Stan’s captivity. Unbeknownst to K, her “year out” would shortly be coming to an abrupt end.
CHAPTER 14
Cameron had forbidden more than superficial contact between Jan and K, and he paid the price in domestic strife. Jan bossed K around, the two women quarrelled constantly, and each complained to Cameron about the other. The tensions in the house reached such heights and irritated Cameron so much that he decided to take action. He took his wife and his slave, separately, out to Hogsback Road for disciplining. With ropes and whips, he made the point that he was going to wear the pants in the family, that he was going to be the boss, and that they’d better straighten up and try to get along.
When the situation didn’t get any better, he started preparations for dramatic change.
He told his wife she would have to quit her job so she could take care of the girls. K was going back in the box, he said, and he wouldn’t allow his daughters to be raised by another babysitter.
But he decided that K would be allowed one final glimpse of freedom: He told her that she would be the first slave ever permitted to visit her family. He’d already started making arrangements, he said, but the Company would probably want to test her in advance of granting final permission.
In the meantime, there were a few “obedience tests” that he needed to perform himself, in preparation for her encounter with the Company.
Cameron’s parents were out of town, and their remote and ramshackle property offered an ideal site for one of Cameron’s “tests.” The family drove out to Cameron’s father’s twenty-acre ranch, about fifteen miles south of Red Bluff. While the girls were napping in the house, the adults went out to the cavernous, drafty barn.
Cameron found a ladder and climbed up to the rafters with some chains, which he put over a beam. He locked the leather cuffs to the chains, and K, who had been ordered to strip off her clothes, was then brought up, strapped into the cuffs and suspended high off the ground. She dangled painfully there for some time, a bizarre sight several feet above the straw-strewn floor and an assortment of farm tools, barrels, feed bags, and disinterested hogs grunting in their stalls.
&n
bsp; Cameron tied Janice up, too, but she wasn’t hung. After a while he let her go, and she went outside.
About this time, Cameron’s entertainment was interrupted by the sound of a car driving up. His parents! He grabbed the ladder and rushed up to release K.
“Go over behind the feed bags and hide,” he told her, unlocking the cuffs. They climbed down and K ran across the barn.
Outside, Janice greeted her tired, congenial, and completely unsuspecting in-laws, and proceeded up to the house with Mrs. Hooker. Having seen Janice leave the barn, Mr. Hooker assumed Cameron would be inside. He headed in that direction.
K was trying to get dressed when tall, thin Mr. Hooker entered. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed that he looked right at her.
Harold Hooker, who had expected to find his son feeding the pigs, was startled to see Kay struggling to pull up her underwear. He quickly closed the door so as not to embarrass her. Then he walked around to the back of the barn, expecting Cameron and Kay to come out. When they didn’t, he proceeded up to the house and found them already inside.
Despite the awkward undercurrents, no one said anything about the incident in the barn. Evidently feeling self-conscious, K believed that Mr. Hooker kept staring at her. Her discomfort was heightened by the fear that Mr. Hooker, who Cameron had said was a longtime member of the Company, might realize she was a slave and want to “borrow” her.
To make matters worse, Cathy, with a child’s innocence, kept pointing at K’s reddened wrists and asking, “Did you scratch yourself?”
K tried to get her to be quiet. “They’re okay, honey, don’t worry about it.”
Nothing more was said. The afternoon slipped by, they loaded the girls into the car, and returned to the mobile home. Though they’d come close to being found out, the incident passed, leaving in the mind of Mr. Harold Hooker only vague and unanswered questions.
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