“Did you believe that Colleen loved Cameron?”
“Yes.”
“When was the first time?”
“In 1980.”
“Did you still feel she loved him in 1984?”
“Yes.”
“During 1980, did you feel jealousy toward Colleen?”
“Yes.”
“When was the first time you felt jealous of her?”
“Probably May nineteenth, 1977.”
“Did you always feel jealousy toward Colleen for the next seven and a half years?”
“No.”
“When didn’t you?”
“Before and after Riverside, both.”
“Why were you jealous of Colleen?”
“I think that’s a little obvious, why a wife would be jealous of another woman in the house.”
But with Papendick hammering away at her, Janice seemed rather lame and unfathomable. McGuire could almost feel the jury’s sympathy slipping away.
Now Papendick zeroed in on another weakness: “Did you feel that Colleen liked the children?”
“Yes,” Janice answered.
“Loved them?”
“Sure.”
“Took care of them well?”
“Yes.”
“Did the children care for Colleen?”
“Yes.”
“Refer to her as Mom?”
Icily, “No.”
With at least the suggestion of a rivalry over the children established, Papendick went on to let the jury know that shortly after Cameron’s arrest, Janice had come to his office to tell him that she could “destroy Colleen’s story.” Cameron’s family, Janice explained, had told her that she should stand behind him. But Papendick dug for a deeper reason.
“In August of 1984, how did you feel about Colleen’s desire to return to Northern California?”
“I felt threatened.”
“Why?”
“That it would start all over again.”
“Didn’t you go to the police because you were afraid they’d get back together?”
“No.”
“Because you were afraid they’d take the children?”
“No.”
Suddenly, Papendick said, “No further questions, Your Honor,” and sat down.
His abrupt ending left a sudden vacuum. The direct examination had taken two and a half days; Papendick’s cross had taken just a few hours. McGuire had expected him to at least finish out the day, letting the jury go home with lingering doubts about Janice’s veracity as a witness, wondering whether jealousy might, after all, be at the core of this bizarre tale. But now McGuire had almost an hour to rehabilitate her witness under redirect examination, and beneath her relief she was stunned by what she perceived as a major strategical gaffe.
First, McGuire clarified that when Janice told Colleen she could go, Colleen still believed in the Company. “When you let Colleen out of the box to read the Bible, why didn’t she flee?”
“Because she was too afraid.”
Regarding threats Cameron made about the Company, McGuire asked what would happen if Colleen didn’t do as she was told.
“I don’t think she ever did disobey,” Janice said.
McGuire also established that Cameron had been calling and writing Janice, trying to sway her testimony. “Did he indicate to you that he loves you?”
“Yes.”
“How does that make you feel?”
Softly, Janice responded, “Guilty, guilty.”
Now McGuire came around to the “affection” between the defendant and the victim. “When Cameron was being ‘affectionate’ to Colleen that time in 1977,” McGuire asked, “was she blindfolded?”
“Yes.”
“Chained?”
“Yes.”
“Roped?”
“Yes.”
“And there was sexual intercourse?”
“Yes.”
“Was it forced?”
Papendick objected, but Judge Knight overruled the objection.
“Yes,” Jan answered.
“Is that consistent with your definition of affection?”
“No.”
McGuire also established that Colleen had to ask permission to jog, go to church, or leave the mobile home. Moreover, the court heard, Janice had asked Cameron’s permission to date those two men and to take Colleen to the bar.
McGuire moved on to conversations Jan had with Colleen about having been a slave. “Did one of those conversations involve the scars on your knees?”
“Yes. She asked me what happened to my knee. I told her I had a knee condition, that it was inherited.” Later, Janice had mentioned the conversation to Cameron and he “got very upset because that wasn’t the story that he had told her.” Cameron had told Colleen that Janice had been crucified for having run away, and that she’d been nailed through the knees.
“Did you ever tell Colleen that the story about you was a fiction?”
“She never asked.”
“Did you ever tell her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was afraid to, afraid of Cameron.”
Battered woman? Or jealous wife? The images fluxed.
Papendick only kept Janice on the stand a few minutes for the re-cross-examination. All in all, Janice was less pliant this time around, but Papendick did manage to score a few points.
Focusing again on Colleen’s freedoms, he brought out new information that she’d gone on a snow skiing trip with the Hookers in the winter of 1979.
And he dwelled on Colleen having said, “God doesn’t want me to leave yet.” Jan explained that she and Colleen were having a religious discussion when Colleen volunteered that “God was telling her that.”
By the time Janice finally stepped down from the stand, Papendick had succeeded in sowing enough seeds of distrust that opinions in the courtroom were wavering. The salient points were that Janice was jealous and that perhaps Colleen really had loved Cameron. If the charges were rape and other sex acts, didn’t that establish consent?
CHAPTER 30
The morning of Thursday, October 3, the courtroom was packed with a curious public, courtroom “groupies,” and a crush of media people, all eager to assess the woman known as the “sex slave.” Anticipation mounted, and now, as everyone hoped and expected, the prosecutor called Colleen Stan as the state’s second witness.
All watched as Colleen entered, swore to tell the truth, and gingerly seated herself in the witness stand. With her thin hair cut shoulder-length, wearing a pastel blue dress,1 Colleen looked demur, pale, and more fragile than she had at the preliminary hearing. The eyes of the courtroom crowd drank her in.
Their ears would have a harder time. Colleen spoke so softly that the hum of the fluorescent lights nearly drowned her out.
McGuire started, again, with the kidnapping. The courtroom strained to hear as Colleen Stan recounted the events of May 19, 1977.
She took the listeners up into the mountains and down the dirt road where Hooker had stopped the car, come around to the passenger’s side, and suddenly put a knife to her throat.
Her tale turned to the head box, and on cue from McGuire, a woman2 entered the court dressed much as Colleen had been on the day of the kidnap: in jeans and a T-shirt. Officer Shamblin swiftly opened the head box, and, to everyone’s surprise, shut it over the woman’s head. Whispers of “Jesus,” and “Oh, Christ” rustled among the spectators as she staggered beneath the sudden weight of the box.
When the box was removed, its efficacy proved, Colleen went on with her testimony. The court sat engrossed as she described, step by step, how she’d been stripped, hung by the wrists, and whipped; the pain and terror of spending days chained to the rack, then being locked inside the double-walled, coffin-shaped box.
If there were any lingering doubts that she knew the box’s interior intimately, she dispelled them when she gave the depth measurement as “tall enough from my elbow to the tip of
my fingers,” and held up her forearm, to illustrate.
As Colleen told of her daily routine and explained the slavery contract, she was very subdued, with sad eyes that looked up when she thought, down when she listened, but never at those of the defendant.
She explained that she was too terrified to run away and that Janice Hooker, who was a much more malevolent character in Colleen’s perception than she’d seemed on the stand, had told her “that if I ever stepped one foot out of the door, I might as well put a gun to my head and shoot myself.”3
Hooker brought her upstairs to do household chores, but, Colleen testified, “he was never pleased with the way I would clean.”
“How did you know?” McGuire asked.
“Because he would beat me and tell me.”
“Why didn’t you scream?”
“Because,” she said dully, Cameron threatened that “if I screamed or talked too much he would notify the Company and they’d remove my vocal chords.”
Besides the dual deprivations of hunger and darkness, she described being hung, whipped, sexually abused, burned with a heat lamp, nearly drowned, and having her ankles cuffed so tightly they swelled.4
Responding to a question about how she’d been marked “for identification,” Colleen said Cameron had inserted a gold earring after piercing her labia “like you would pierce an ear.” (This induced a pained gasp from the women in the courtroom.)
Throughout the day’s testimony, no matter how terrifying the events she described, she remained outwardly unruffled, showing no hint of distress or indignation. At the end of the day, when the prosecutor fielded questions out in the hallway, reporters asked about Colleen’s strangely unemotional manner.
Colleen didn’t get upset, she replied, “because she’s been through it all.” But McGuire read their questions like a barometer: If the press was bothered by Colleen’s indifference, the jury must be, too.
The next day Colleen described her time under the waterbed and specific “punishments” Hooker had subjected her to—some of the most graphic testimony the court would hear.
Colleen told of being punished in 1978 or 1979 for doing a macrame project incorrectly. She thought it had turned out fine, but Jan got angry and told Cameron. When he got home he took her out of the box and put the cuffs on her. Then, she said, “I knew something really terrible was going to happen.”
Hooker took her into the living room, hung her by the wrists on the frame, taped electrical wires to her thighs and breasts, “sat down on the couch and hit the switch.”
Every time the current hit, she yelled, so he gagged her to muffle the sound. She began to sweat, and as her skin turned damp and then wet, the tape loosened. Hooker stopped and tried to reaffix the wires, but by then the tape wouldn’t stick to her breasts at all. He gave up and settled for sending the current only through the wires taped to her thighs.
Hooker let her know she was being punished because she hadn’t done as she’d been told. “He told me I’d better start obeying and show more respect,” she said quietly.
The courtroom was solemn as McGuire took Colleen through several of the counts against Hooker, describing each in as much detail as possible. McGuire often referred to the time chart that she and Colleen had made to clarify the rather complicated sequence of events: the rape on the stretcher, the rape upon return from Riverside, the rape while hung on the frame, the sodomy occurring in September 1979. . . .5
McGuire also had Colleen identify some of Hooker’s pornography, focusing primarily on articles concerning sexual slavery. As she pointed out scenes that Hooker had duplicated on his slave, her point became clear: This was his library, his field of study, and he’d applied what he’d learned in his treatment of Colleen Stan.
The Bible had been another resource. Once, Colleen said, he’d asked her to read the entire Book of Revelations to him and mark all the sections that dealt with slavery.
McGuire asked whether Hooker had told her things about God.
Colleen thought a moment and responded: “Cameron drew a picture of a Y and said it’s like a crossroads—one path to righteousness and one to hell—and that when he found me I was going the wrong way, that he had given me another chance, and now I had to decide to go the right way.”
But when McGuire asked if she’d told Cameron, “God placed me with you to straighten out my life,” she denied this. Rather, she said, Cameron had told her that several times in 1981.
Colleen’s testimony contradicted Janice’s on several points. She denied having asked Cameron to lie beside her because she was cold. She said Janice had never told her she could go. She denied cooking special meals for Cameron and said that she had put on makeup only for her own enjoyment, even when she was just babysitting. She never told Janice she enjoyed having sex with Cameron and denied having hugged or kissed him. And, she said, she’d never considered herself Hagar.
The Deputy DA spent a great deal of time going over Colleen’s contacts with neighbors and visitors, being careful to weave Colleen’s fear of the Company in with a recounting of the apparent freedoms she enjoyed during her “year out of the box.” Colleen testified she was afraid of Cameron’s family because he’d told her his father and brother were “heavy in the Company.”
McGuire then moved to the touchy subject of Colleen’s love for Cameron. The courtroom studied the witness as she stated that in 1980 she’d told Hooker she loved him “out of fear” and “because I felt that if I made him feel that I loved him, he would treat me better.”
Had he treated her better?
“A little.”
McGuire asked if Colleen had said she wanted to have his baby. The press and spectators sat very still, afraid a cough or rustling paper might make them miss a word.
“Cameron told me that someday I would have his baby,” Colleen said. “I asked him if he was giving me a choice or if he was telling me. He said it was a choice. I said as long as I had a choice, I wouldn’t have his baby.”
Asked whether she felt love for Cameron, she paused and then responded that she “felt a kind of love, a thankfulness,” then added: “I don’t understand why I had those feelings, because now I feel that Cameron is a very terrible person.”
Papendick quickly objected but was overruled.
Now McGuire turned to that worrisome but unavoidable trip to Riverside, beginning with Hooker’s preparations.
The courtroom heard first of Colleen being hung in Cameron’s father’s barn, then of an “obedience test” with a shotgun: “He told me to get down on my knees. He was holding the gun and he told me to put my mouth over the end” and pull the trigger, Colleen said. “It clicked.”
She testified that on the way down to Riverside Cameron stopped in Sacramento, near the capitol, on the pretense that the people at Company headquarters might want to test her. She waited nervously in the car while he went into a “skyscraper.” When he came out, he told her she was lucky they didn’t want to test her and handed her a permit to carry money.
Colleen insisted that fear of the Company prevented her from making what might have seemed the obvious move of asking her family for help. She stayed with them for twenty-four hours without even hinting that she was in trouble. As she was leaving, Colleen said, “It was very hard not to break down and cry and tell [my mother] what was happening.”
Why didn’t she?
“I was afraid to.”
When they returned to the trailer, Cameron told her to shower and then raped her.
Why didn’t she resist?
“I was afraid he would beat me or torture me or even kill me,” she said softly.
“Is he strong?”
“Stronger than me.”
But at the next break, some of the public in the back of the room was heard to comment: “Tsk, what a fool.” “She should have escaped.” “She liked it.”
From day to day, reactions among the courtroom spectators varied, depending on what portion of the proceedings they’d heard. But a CNN cam
eraman, who had been there from the beginning, told a colleague: “I think he’s going to get off. She’s just not convincing enough.”
Her last full day of direct examination—with all the clocks stuck at 3:05, the air-conditioning blown out, and Judge Knight sweltering in his robes—Colleen Stan continued with her testimony.
She held the court spellbound with her perplexing tale of life with the Hookers. It was a story riddled with contradictions: love and hate, tedium and terror, autonomy and dependence, Holy Scripture and sleazy pornography, secret perversions within an apparently wholesome family. None of it seemed reconcilable, yet Colleen claimed it had all coexisted.
In a voice as flat and unemphatic as yesterday’s beer, she described varying terms of confinement—three years in the box, vast new freedoms after January of 1984, and her apparently regular job as a motel maid at King’s Lodge. Still, one part of her testimony remained constant: She said she was too afraid to try to escape.
If Colleen’s monotone testimony wasn’t totally convincing, it harmonized with the unmistakable strain of docility about her. Whenever court recess was called, for example, she hesitated even to rise from her seat to leave the witness stand until the prosecutor approached, then exited the courtroom with her. And when McGuire asked if she “had a plan or survival strategy,” Colleen’s reply was typically passive: “I figured that as long as I did what Cameron said, he wouldn’t kill me. And I put a lot of faith in God, that He’d take care of me.”
Further, Colleen said she never felt she had a choice except to do as Cameron told her, “because he told me I was a slave and slaves don’t have a choice.”
During the final summer, Colleen testified, Cameron began telling her that God wanted her to have sex with him, and Janice, feeling that she had to obey her husband, added to the pressure. They’d come to the controversial eighth rape count—controversial because Janice had testified that Colleen had asked her permission to have sex with Cameron. But in Colleen’s description, both she and Janice were tied to the bed, and penetration was forced.
At length, McGuire brought Colleen’s testimony to the time in August when Janice unexpectedly came to King’s Lodge, found her at work, and set her free. Colleen said she was very upset and crying. “I was devastated because I had believed everything he’d told me. He’d made it seem so real.”
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