With his secret habits still undetected, Cameron put the next step of his plan into action. K had become almost a standard feature in the neighborhood—taking the Hooker girls for walks, jogging down the lane or working in the garden—so now Cameron told her to say good-bye to the neighbors. He intended to take K down to Riverside himself, and he didn’t want the neighbors to get suspicious. His strategy was to make it seem that K had left that weekend for Southern California; then, a week later, he could drive her down himself. He didn’t want anyone—not even his children—to make the connection between K’s departure and his own absence.
Dorothy Coppa, who had taken an almost maternal interest in the Hookers’ companion, was especially sad to learn that K would be leaving. Characteristically, she worried about whether she would be all right. (Once she had given K a sweater; another time she guessed that she had no jacket—never having seen her wear one—and bought one for K at the local secondhand store.) Now, concerned that K didn’t have any money, she pressed ten dollars into her palm and hugged her good-bye.
Cameron also told K to say good-bye to his two daughters, Cathy and Dawn. Then, as prearranged, they went out to the truck and she waved out the window as he headed toward the bus station.
But this was all a charade. K bought no ticket and boarded no bus. Instead, Cameron had her lay down on the seat and hide while they drove back to the mobile home. Once he’d made sure that the girls had gone to bed, he smuggled K back into the house and put her in the box, where she would stay for the next week.
Putting her in the box again would be good discipline, Cameron thought. It would remind her of her position. But before he could trust his slave to behave herself in the safe haven of her own home, he had to reaffirm his control over her with yet another obedience test.
He got his shotgun, got K out of the box, and ordered her to get down on her knees.
She kneeled.
While holding onto the butt of the gun, Cameron ordered her to put her mouth over the end of the barrel.
She put her lips around the cold metal.
He told her to pull the trigger.
She didn’t know whether the gun was loaded, didn’t even know what kind of gun it was. She only knew that if she didn’t do as her master told her, there would be serious consequences.
With the barrel jutting toward her throat, she pulled the trigger.
It hit home with a metallic click.
The arrangements with the Company were nearly complete, Hooker explained. The phones of all her family members would be monitored. Their homes and cars were being bugged with listening devices sensitive enough to pick up even a whisper. Company surveillance teams would be watching her and her family at all times. These special precautions would cost a total of some $30,000, all of which was coming out of Hooker’s Company account—money he had earned by capturing runaways years ago. He was making a tremendous financial sacrifice for her.
Since K would be the first slave ever to be permitted to visit her family, they would have to stop at Company headquarters in Sacramento so she could be evaluated before being granted final permission for her visit. Cameron was unsure what sorts of tests the Company would want to put her through. They might want to hang her up. Or they might take her through a Company “museum,” showing her displays of skeletons of runaway slaves who had been tortured to death or the runaway who had been sealed in a jar of formaldehyde, “like a human pickle.”
Finally, after K had suffered through a week of stultifying, monotonous confinement in the box, the day of departure arrived.
Cameron Hooker rose early on the morning of Friday, March 20, 1981, and called in sick. Before the children were up, he got K out of the box, snuck her out to the car, and told her to lie down on the floor in the back. He covered her with something and they drove off into the soft, morning quiet.
They stopped to get gas in Corning, just a few miles south of Red Bluff, then pulled onto the freeway, Interstate 5, heading south. Now Hooker told his slave she could sit up.
It was still morning when they pulled into Sacramento. Cameron stopped outside of some tall office buildings and told K to wait in the car while he went into Company headquarters to find out what they wanted to do with her.
K waited nervously, wondering what sort of painful test the Company might subject her to.
About fifteen minutes later, Hooker exited the building and came to the car with some papers in his hand. “You’re getting off easy,” he said. “They don’t want to see you. You don’t have to go in.” The Company had granted permission for her to visit her family over the weekend.
“This will allow you to carry money,” he said, handing her a typed, official-looking card with his seal on it. It was the same seal that had been on the slavery contract. She was to carry this card with her at all times, Cameron said, because if a slave were caught carrying money without it, the punishment would be harsh.
“Oh, and the secretary said to wish you good luck,” he added.
It was a long drive to Southern California. On the way down Hooker had his slave rehearse the story she was to tell her parents. He was her boyfriend, Mike, and he was dropping her off in Riverside on his way down to San Diego, where he would be attending a computer seminar. They were engaged. And they were in the process of moving, so she couldn’t give them an address or phone number just then, but would as soon as they were settled.
They drove all afternoon and into the evening before finally reaching Riverside, K giving directions as Cameron drove. On the way, she pointed out a street with several motels where he could stay. It was about seven P.M. when Cameron pulled over to a pay phone so she could call home and tell her stunned father that she would be there soon.
On the way to her father’s house, K persuaded Cameron to stop at her grandmother’s for just a moment while she ran in to say hello. Hooker waited in the car while the two women, delighted at this unexpected reunion, made plans to go to the Seventh Day Adventist church together the next morning. Then K rushed out and Cameron drove on.
As they approached Jack Martin’s small, suburban home, Hooker pointed out that a surveillance team was stationed in a nearby trailer. He warned her again that if she said anything about the Company, they would rush in and not only take her away but also hurt or kill whoever she was with.
This was the most effective threat he could make. Knowing what she’d been put through, K couldn’t bear to think of anything similar happening to someone she loved. She promised Cameron and herself that, no matter what, she would do nothing to endanger her family.
They pulled up in front of her father’s house, and Cameron helped her carry her things to the door—a small suitcase with a few clothes and some gifts she’d made for her family. Without waiting to be introduced, he walked back to the car and drove away.
It was a whirlwind visit.
None of Colleen Stan’s family knew what to make of her sudden appearance. Of course they were thrilled to see her, but behind the excited chatter were unspoken questions. Hurt and bewildered by her long absence, they felt they must have committed some kind of offense that had estranged her from them. Now they were evidently hesitant to make too much of her protracted silences for fear they might frighten her away. They wanted to welcome her home, not make her uncomfortable, so no one dared press her for reasons. At least not yet.
Jack Martin, a man of few words, noticed that his long-lost daughter seemed happy to be home but looked pale and tired and unhealthy. And when Colleen’s younger sister, Bonnie, came home late that night and suddenly found Colleen sitting on the couch, she immediately noticed that Colleen’s once-curvaceous figure was now angular, her handmade clothes hanging on her with little style or grace. And the shiny and luxuriant mane that Colleen had once prided herself on had turned dingy and thin.
It seemed that Colleen hadn’t been taking very good care of herself, but with everyone so glad to see her and so much to talk about, no one guessed how serious her deprivation ha
d been. They stayed up late and talked well into morning, sitting on the couch and pouring over photo albums, trying to catch up on years in just a few hours.
At one point twenty-one-year-old Bonnie got up the nerve to ask: “Why haven’t you been writing to me?”
Colleen looked at her and answered simply that she couldn’t. Watching her, Bonnie got a strange feeling that Colleen was trying to tell her something with her eyes. But Bonnie’s nerve failed; she was afraid to pressure her older sister.
After a good deal of reminiscing, exhaustion finally overtook them and they had to go to bed.
Saturday started early and sped by.
Colleen was up and gone by seven-thirty, for she had phoned her mother the night before with a promise to come and see her before church. Her mother, an outgoing and talkative woman, lived just a few blocks away. Colleen walked the short distance to her house, then emotionally embraced the mother she hadn’t seen or spoken to in nearly four years.
Her daughter was unusually thin and unkempt, but Mrs. Grant had also resolved not to push Colleen about where she’d been. Instead, she filled her in on recent events and listened attentively as Colleen told about her babysitting job at a place that sounded like some sort of religious commune.
After the church service, which Colleen attended in a borrowed dress and shoes, she, her sister, and her mother embarked on a day of marathon visiting. They drove to Sunnymead to see her sick aunt and visited with her uncle and cousins, the hours melting away.
Afterward, Colleen and Bonnie dropped their mother off at her house, Colleen promising to see her again before she had to leave.
Just a short while after Colleen and Bonnie returned to their father’s, the phone rang. It was “Mike” calling for Colleen. “It’s time to go,” he said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Colleen was taken aback. She’d been promised a whole weekend at home, but barely twenty-four hours had elapsed.
The young man named “Mike” arrived and was introduced to the family. He was tall, wore glasses, and had stringy brown hair.
Someone insisted on a photograph being taken, and the two posed briefly on the couch, but “Mike” stayed only a few minutes, then said it was time to start the long drive back up to Northern California. With several parting embraces, Colleen Stan said goodbye to her family and got in the car with Cameron Hooker.
K was upset that her visit had been cut short, especially since she’d promised to say good-bye to her mother. She begged Cameron to let her stop by for just a minute, and he consented.
Evelyn Grant was surprised when Colleen appeared again that evening at about six-thirty. She met Colleen’s boyfriend, “Mike,” a computer programmer. The tall fellow spoke little before telling Colleen that it was time to go.
Saying good-bye, Colleen struggled to keep from blurting out the truth, but she held her tongue, and within minutes they were gone.
The drive back to Red Bluff pushed through the evening and deep into night, K sulking about the brevity of her visit before finally dozing off. Hooker drove steadily, and they pulled up at the mobile home early Sunday morning. K stirred, gathered her things and headed for the door, paying little attention to what would be the last dawn to meet her eyes in a very long time.
No one was home. Janice and the kids had gone to stay at her parents’. Cameron told K to take a shower. When she came out and he told her to vacuum out the box and put a blanket in it, she realized he was going to have her get back in. But after she put the vacuum cleaner away, he told her to lie down on the floor. He raped her before putting her back in the box, handing her the bedpan, and bolting the secret door shut.
* * *
K’s “year out” had come to an abrupt end. Perhaps Hooker had decided that he’d made a mistake, that he was losing control and needed to restore discipline. Perhaps he saw no other way to put an end to the bickering between his slave and his wife. And perhaps he felt it had become too dangerous, with his children getting older and more neighbors moving into the neighborhood, to keep his slave so openly. Whatever his motives, he slammed the door on K’s recent liberties. Except to eat and do Cameron’s bidding, K was scarcely let out of the box for the next three years. So complete was her isolation that relatives, neighbors, even the Hooker children who shared the same home, would not see K again until 1984.
PART SIX
THE MALLEABLE PSYCHE
January–March 1985
To a terrorized person, an open door is not an open door.
Martin Symonds, M.D.
Victimization and Rehabilitative Treatment,
the American Psychiatric Association
Task Force Report on Terrorism
CHAPTER 15
Deputy DA McGuire, who tried to immerse herself in the facts of the Hooker case, found that she could not simply file and forget what she learned. Instead, every incident lodged in her head and replayed itself, over and over, like some particularly loathsome song that she couldn’t stop hearing. Details seeped into memory and then popped out again, demanding reexamination. And as she turned them over and over again in her mind, pondering the puzzle of the pretty, beaten, yet blasé Colleen Stan, it began to seem clear that Colleen’s mental state was pivotal.
This wasn’t a welcome prospect, but with so much hinging on the issue of consent—and therefore Stan’s state of mind—Christine realized that the mind control issue was unavoidable. Worse, with that damned “year out” to explain, she scarcely had a hope of winning the case if the jury choked on the idea of brainwashing.
Legally, the argument of brainwashing was tenuous, and McGuire was concerned about the jury’s possible reaction, particularly since in the previous case where brainwashing was a crucial issue—United States v. Hearst—the jury had remained unconvinced. McGuire thought both the jury and the general public saw Patty Hearst as a rich girl trying to buy herself out of a criminal situation by the use of some heavy-handed, expensive psychiatric testimony.
And here she was, ten years later, in the same state of California.
But McGuire had to swallow her misgivings and reconcile herself to the fact that in proving the case against Hooker, she would have to prove a little-understood phenomenon which many people scoff at—that malevolent bending of the psyche commonly known as brainwashing.
But how does one research such a condition? She was going to have to start from scratch.
The local libraries were struggling just to stay open, and Red Bluff’s last bookstore was having a going-out-of-business sale. Luckily, the thirty-three-year-old prosecutor, who had little familiarity with the field of psychology, wasn’t going to have to rely on the withering resources of Tehama County for background information. Experts came to her.
Having read newspaper accounts of this extraordinary case, they began to call from across the country. They were specialists who had worked with hostages, with cult victims, with Patty Hearst and other captives, and they used psychological terms Christine had never heard: coercive persuasion, the Stockholm syndrome, involuntary conversion, post-traumatic stress disorder. Some were connected with the FBI or the military, others were psychologists or psychiatrists who had testified in relevant cases. (McGuire was even contacted by a former kidnap victim, now working as a counselor in the Southeast, who wanted to offer her help.)
Experts consulted with her during lengthy telephone conversations and sent her stacks of reading material. One even sent a videotape. They opened her eyes to a field of specialization that had evolved around the treatment of traumas suffered by these particular types of victims, demonstrating that such brutality happens more often than most of us would like to believe.1
Perusing the information she’d suddenly accumulated, McGuire was relieved to learn that brainwashing wasn’t just some fringe element of pop psychology or a stepchild of Richard Condon’s 1959 best seller, Manchurian Candidate, but a bona fide field of study. As she read these psychological papers, the logic of it all was like an opening door.
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It became evident to McGuire that the intense isolation and abuse Colleen had endured had done more than hurt her physically; it had shredded the very fabric of her personality. But while Colleen’s brainwashing, or coercion, had become startlingly apparent to McGuire, she would have to prove this unwieldy theory to twelve skeptical individuals, the jury.
It would help if she could get an expert to testify at the trial, to explain coercion and resultant captivity syndromes to the jury. Whether the judge would permit expert testimony or not was an open question. Some judges are inclined toward experts, some are not. If the judge prohibited expert testimony, McGuire would be left with having to rely on the testimonies of Janice Hooker, the truculent wife who had turned state’s evidence, and Colleen Stan, the placid woman who had apparent freedom yet claimed to be held captive—not a heartening prospect.
She decided to set up consultations with some of the experts. If one of them could testify later, great. If not, at least the investigation would be headed in the right direction.
She set up interviews with six specialists, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area: Dr. Chris Hatcher, an associate clinical psychology professor at the University of California at San Francisco; Dr. Robert T. Flint, an Oakland psychologist; Dr. Margaret Singer, a psychiatrist with the University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University; Dr. Donald Lunde, a Stanford psychiatrist who had examined Patty Hearst prior to her trial. And later in the week, she and Lt. Jerry Brown would drive down to Davis to meet Dr. Phillip Morton Hamm, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, who had been the expert witness in the Parnell case.
McGuire made careful preparations for her trip to San Francisco, but she hadn’t counted on her baby daughter’s coming down with a cold the night before her appointments. After a sleepless night and an early departure, she was already weary by the time she arrived at the Airport Executive Inn in San Francisco.
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