Jan evidently came away with new convictions. Battling with her conscience, wrestling with the wickedness within her life, she finally approached Pastor Dabney. In his large and comforting presence, she risked slightly more telling questions, though still presenting an impression more of a love triangle than of sexual slavery. The pastor told her they were living in sin and advised changes, scarcely realizing that his words were opening an irreparable crack in Cameron Hooker’s iron control over his wife.
Jan’s beleaguered spirit, wavering loyalties, confusion, and worry over the state of her soul finally reached a crescendo on Thursday, August 9, 1984. If the worst that could happen would be for Cameron to kill her, she had already faced it. She had to do something.
She arrived at King’s Lodge at about eleven-thirty A.M. and asked Mrs. Miron if she could speak with “Kay.” With the manager’s permission she went down the slope to the main building and found K at work in one of the rooms. She had arrived at the moment of truth.
Jan screwed up her courage and finally spoke the words she’d contemplated but avoided for so long: “K, I need to tell you something. Cameron lied to you about everything. The Company, the slavery contract, all that he told you about me being a slave, all that was just lies. He lied to scare you, to make you stay his slave.”
K simply crumpled. Stunned by the enormity of it, aghast that anyone could lie so constantly, so convincingly as Cameron Hooker had, she wept tears of shock and disbelief. Of bitterness. Of rage. Over seven years! A quarter of her life had been stolen from her!
Janice cried, too, saying over and over how sorry she was. “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me,” she said.
They probably held each other, shuddering together in the middle of calamity. But now K finally saw that she was free. The door was open. The lie was over.
The two women needed to get away from Cameron, to escape together, but how? They decided to ask the advice of Pastor Dabney.
They walked back to the motel office. When they came in the door, Doris Miron noticed instantly that they’d been crying heavily.
“I have to quit,” her favorite worker said, offering no explanation. Surprised, Mrs. Miron assumed it was some problem with the head maid, Heidi, but “Kay” looked so distressed that Mrs. Miron didn’t press her for more information. Instead, she said she was sorry she was quitting, but asked that “Kay” finish her day’s work first.
Jan called the pastor and set up an afternoon appointment and then left. K went back to making beds and cleaning bathrooms, tears streaming while she worked.
About two hours later, Jan came back to pick up K, who said her farewells and asked Mrs. Miron to please hold her next paycheck until she could send a new address. Cameron Hooker wouldn’t be collecting any more of her money.
When they arrived at the church, the pastor had a hard time understanding these two very upset women, but he learned that K had been held against her will, that the two had been subjected to strange sexual practices, and that both were terrified of Cameron. Dabney advised them to pack up and leave immediately, suggesting they go home and stay with their parents.
But it wasn’t that simple. It was getting close to four o’clock, Cameron’s quitting time, Janice explained, and she was supposed to pick him up after work. There wouldn’t be time to get their things before then, and they were afraid of confronting him.
The pastor suggested that they pick him up from work as usual, pretend nothing had happened, and then leave the next day, after Cameron had left for work. That’s what they decided to do.
It occurred to K that Jan’s will might falter and she might confess to Cameron what she’d done, but the cards had been dealt, and now, poker-faced, she and Jan had to play their hands.
They picked up Cameron as usual. They made and ate dinner and cleaned up afterwards. If Cameron thought it was odd that Jan didn’t want to sleep with him that night, her excuse that she wasn’t feeling well must have quelled his suspicions. Jan slept on the floor with K.
The next morning Cameron left for work at five A.M., and as soon as he was out the door, Jan and K started packing. When Cathy and Dawn got up, they were sent off to Bible school, and with no kids underfoot, the two women finished the job quickly. By noon they were done. They gathered up their belongings, picked up the girls, and fled to Jan’s parents’ home in the nearby town of Gerber.
Her parents were probably stunned to find their daughter, married now for ten years, on their doorstep with her two girls and the babysitter in tow, but they offered them a place to sleep.
Now it was up to Jan and K to figure out what to do next. They talked of staying together, of trying to make a good home for the girls. Because of her genuine affection for Cathy and Dawn, this seemed attractive to K. It also appealed to her selfless side: Oddly enough, she saw Jan as so dependent that she couldn’t picture her taking care of the children and making it on her own. They discussed going together down to Riverside and staying with K’s father or staying with Jan’s folks. But in the back of her mind, K heard a voice urging her to go: Don’t stay! it said. Jan has to make it on her own. You can’t help her anymore. Get away! Go home!
K finally made her decision and called her father. She asked him to wire her a hundred dollars for the bus fare home.
Jack Martin, who hadn’t heard from his daughter since her whirlwind visit of March, 1981, was stunned to hear Colleen’s voice and thrilled at the prospect of seeing her again. Eager to do whatever he could to get his daughter home, he generously offered larger amounts of money: “Are you sure a hundred dollars is enough? I can send more, honey. How much do you need?” But Colleen finally convinced her bewildered dad that a hundred dollars was plenty.
The next morning, after K had her ticket in hand and was certain she would be boarding the bus for home momentarily, she phoned Cameron.
It was her declaration of independence. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving, that I know you lied about everything, and you can’t keep me here anymore.”
Colleen doesn’t remember all that Cameron said, but she does recall one thing: He cried.
CHAPTER 24
Now with her parents, Jan was living several miles away from Cameron but hadn’t escaped his pull. To her amazement, he didn’t threaten her or come after her with a gun, but after sulking for a few days, he begged her to come back to him. He swore that he’d change, get counseling, give up bondage, anything if she’d just come home.
Janice wavered. She worried about how she was going to support her two daughters, about the police, and about whether she’d done the right thing in setting K free. She hadn’t been very forthcoming about the real reasons she’d left Cameron, so friends and relatives, thinking this was little more than a marital spat, urged her to forgive Cameron, go back, and give their ten-year marriage another try. After a week of vacillation, she and the girls moved back.
Cameron started going to church with Jan, and she was encouraged when he even came forth for the altar call. It seemed to her that he was making a solemn vow before the Lord that he would change.
Together and separately, the Hookers also had private talks with Pastor Dabney. As Jan grew closer to the gray-haired, avuncular clergyman, she confided that her husband was “a sadist,” and that he kept an odd assortment of handcuffs, whips, books, and photos. This was so far outside the pastor’s experience he could scarcely have imagined the full scope of Hooker’s appetites.
When Cameron came in, he impressed Dabney as “mild and likeable,” but the pastor found it difficult to tell what he was really thinking. All he could do was advise him to be true to his wife and get rid of his sexual paraphernalia. Cameron said he would.
But now Hooker’s resolve seemed to falter. He refused to go to counseling. Jan went alone. She wanted to give him a chance, give him time, but now she felt a gnawing fear that he was lying to her. And, worse, that he was lying before the Lord.
One night in September Jan awoke suddenly. She in
stantly sensed that Cameron was wide awake beside her, his muscles taut. She could almost smell the tension rising from his body.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered thickly.
He seemed so keyed-up it scared her. The lateness of the hour, her imagination, or perhaps an almost clairvoyant understanding of this man she’d known since the age of fifteen convinced Jan that he was about to do something terrible.
She had a flash of inspiration and clung to it: “Let’s get up and burn everything,” she suggested. The pornography. The bondage equipment the pastor had told him to get rid of. “Do you want to burn that stuff?”
“I don’t know.” He paused. “Well, I guess.”
It was only a distraction, but it worked. Cameron focused all his energy on gathering up sado-masochistic magazines, whips, leather cuffs, the gas mask, as well as the slavery contract, slides of K being hung and stretched and dunked, and things she had written. He heaped them all into the burn barrel in the backyard and struck a match.
The barrel flared, the contents crackled, and smoke spiraled upward into the clear night air.
Meanwhile, Colleen Stan had rejoined her family in Riverside, a city as different from Red Bluff as it is far away, with its palm trees, freeway loops, and the notorious smog that characterizes Southern California.
Returning home, Colleen had called her father’s number from Bakersfield, mid-trip, to let him know when she would be arriving, and a gathering of perplexed relatives had met her at the bus depot. Years too late, they had demanded to know where she’d been, what she’d been doing, and why she hadn’t written. Over breakfast, Colleen began to unravel the story of what she’d suffered, and during the next several days she revealed more, until her family had at least a superficial understanding of Colleen’s ordeal—though it’s doubtful any of them truly comprehended what Colleen had been through.
Outwardly, Colleen approached her new freedom with remarkable clearheadedness, moving in with her father and almost immediately setting about the task of finding work. She seriously considered taking the civil service exam but then landed a job in the housekeeping department of a hospital.
Beneath this composed exterior, “Kay Powers” struggled to regain her identity as Colleen Stan. After spending so many years as the Hookers’ slave it was difficult for her to completely sever those ties. They had formed her primary support system, even if a negative one, and Jan had been her only close friend.
These two troubled women, who shared problems no one outside the situation could possibly understand, wrote to each other sporadically but spoke on the phone almost daily—sometimes twice a day.
It was also difficult for Colleen to extricate herself from Cameron’s influence. She spoke to him on the phone, too, though it’s unclear how often or what was said. (Once, while Jan was still away, he simply called to ask how to make a tuna sandwich. In some ways, theirs was a mutual dependency.) In any case, Colleen had several phone conversations with Jan and Cameron over the next several weeks. Besides discussing mundane matters and simply touching base, the Hookers gained Colleen’s assurance that she wouldn’t go to the police.
Jan said she believed Cameron was earnest about trying to change, and she told Colleen, “We owe him that chance.”
In keeping with her almost pathological selflessness, Colleen agreed.
Though her family urged her to contact law enforcement, she resisted, saying she wanted to put it all behind her and get on with her life.
For years, Colleen had suppressed her anger, knowing that if she offended Cameron she risked a beating. Even now, she scarcely recognized the rage locked within her subconscious. She expressed it in very indirect (and thus nonthreatening) ways.
In a casual, almost chatty letter, dated August 18, that she wrote to Cameron and Jan just after they got back together, Colleen made little direct reference to her captivity, talking instead of her new life at home and sending her love and greetings to those up in Red Bluff. Yet in the midst of this letter, apropos of nothing, Colleen inserted a powerful quote from the Bible, Psalm 64, which rings with a poetry of almost eerie significance:
Hear me, O God, as I voice my complaint;
protect my life from the threat of the enemy.
Hide me from the conspiracy of the wicked,
from that noisy crowd of evildoers,
who sharpen their tongues like swords
and aim their words like deadly arrows.
They shoot from ambush at the innocent man;
they shoot at him suddenly, without fear.
They encourage each other in evil plans,
they talk about hiding their snares;
they say, “Who will see them?”
They plot injustice and say,
“We have devised a perfect plan!”
Surely the mind and heart of man are cunning.
But God will shoot them with arrows;
suddenly they will be struck down.
He will turn their own tongues against them
and bring them to ruin;
all who see them will shake their heads in scorn.
All mankind will fear;
they will proclaim the works of God
and ponder what he has done.
Let the righteous rejoice in the Lord
and take refuge in him;
let all the upright in heart praise him!
Then, with the comment, “I just love the Lord. He’s done so much for me, and I know he’s going to do so much more,” the letter goes on with its original breeziness, as if this profound nugget hadn’t been placed within the plain black and white text. Colleen found the psalm meaningful enough to quote yet inserted it abruptly, almost as if she remained unconscious, even while writing, of any special message it might contain. Interestingly, she accidentally typed one line twice—“they shoot at him suddenly, without fear”—as if her mind momentarily stuck on that idea.
Except to say, “I pray for you and Cameron that you will never again get tangled up in a life of sin,” she made only one other reference to her former enslavement. At the close of the letter, she signed with some hesitancy over her name: “Love, Colleen (Kay).”
And on September 19, Colleen wrote to Jan: “If you get any more angry phone calls from my cousins—I don’t know what to tell you except they are not forgiving. But I do not want to play God, and I forgive you and Cameron for all things—it’s done.”
Meanwhile, things weren’t proceeding smoothly at the Hooker home. Jan and Cameron had reached a stalemate. The hangings, whippings, and abuse had come to a halt but so had Cameron’s apparent efforts to change. At one point he told her he’d read in a magazine that his only problem was a hormonal imbalance, and that it had a simple cure: “The article said all I have to do is drink one beer every night.”
Jan despaired. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. And her waking hours were bedeviled by sudden panic attacks. She feared it would start all over again, that Cameron would kidnap someone else, and that his sadistic habits, now idling, would soon slip back into gear.
As summer succumbed to the first morning chill of fall, Jan took her daughters and left—finally and for good.
Unable to shake her dark anxieties, she sought solace in church. But now Pastor Dabney was on vacation, and though she tried to talk to his temporary replacement, the clouds over her head refused to dissipate.
Finally, fate put Janice Hooker in contact with someone who could help her.
Jan had driven up to Redding for a doctor’s appointment. Afterwards, she struck up a conversation with the receptionist, Connie Fleming, a plump, blond woman with a warm and open manner.
They talked for two hours. Obviously nervous, Janice asked Connie many questions—some quite personal, others vague—large questions of initiative and strength. Connie understood they were important to Jan and didn’t belittle or question. Instead, she responded with a sincerity that Jan apparently found as soot
hing to her psyche as salve to a wound.
At the end of this long conversation, Connie set up another meeting for the next week, when the doctor would be out of the office.
With Jan’s conscience a spinning whirlpool, she clung to her new confidante like a lifeline, conferring with Connie on the phone a handful of times over the next few days as she grappled with questions of right and wrong, of accountability, of fear, of guilt.
Still, she had lingering doubts. Maybe Cameron really was trying to change. She ought to give him a chance.
One afternoon, Jan went back to the mobile home and looked around. To her dismay, she found he still had a large collection of pornography—and was creating more. She found sculptures of nude women he was working on, and the footlocker in the bedroom still brimmed with hard-core magazines and bondage devices.
When Jan came in for her meeting with Connie on Wednesday, November 7, she’d done more than give her situation a lot of thought: She’d prepared a list of questions.
It was a single sheet, a short, handwritten list that reflected Jan’s inner turmoil. She gave it to Connie, and Connie read:
Did any of your fears try and take you over?
Did you ever go and cry on someone else?
Did you ever say, “I can’t”?
What made you change and where did you get the strength?*
What does religion mean to you?
Are you afraid of your husband?
What gives you strength every day to go on?
Do you get angry?
How do you let that anger out?
Did you believe in God before?
What do you feel about the enemy of your soul?
Connie held in her hand a clear and powerful cry for help. And she wasn’t one to leave such a cry unanswered.
It took hours. Jan was visibly upset, yet reluctant to reveal the cause of her problems. Connie probed gently, asking, “Jan, what is it you’re afraid of?”
Perfect Victim Page 19