Dr. Hatcher admitted that “some of the behaviors” were.
Completing his cross-examination, Papendick asked, “Do you know Dr. Donald T. Lunde?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Would you consider him an expert in forensic psychiatry?”
“Yes, I would.”
And with that, the psychologist was excused.
CHAPTER 33
Anticipation had run high before the sex slave’s testimony, then tapered off during the prosecution’s string of less spectacular witnesses. Now the halls were again packed with television cameras, for today, Friday, October 18, there would be big news: The slave master was going to speak.
After nearly a month of sitting in silence, smiling or sulking, always enigmatic, Cameron Hooker was going to testify in his own behalf.
Throughout the trial, Hooker had always made sure his hair was neatly parted and combed before entering the courtroom. Today he was particularly meticulous. Dressed in the same tweed sports jacket he’d worn from the first, a gray tie, a white shirt, and shiny shoes (Janice said they were the first dress shoes he’d ever owned), Cameron Hooker entered the packed courtroom.
The defense attorney lost no time in getting to the matter at hand. He asked Hooker about May 19, 1977, and with a small-town-boy earnestness, Hooker related his recollection of that day.
He said he’d picked up Colleen Stan on Antelope Boulevard at about three P.M.
“Did Jan know what you were going to do?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what you were doing prior to that?”
“We were going to go up into the hills and practice bondage,” Hooker said, as if this were a most ordinary afternoon activity.
In most respects, Hooker’s account of the kidnapping closely followed that of Colleen and Janice. At first it appeared that, relying on the protection of the statute of limitations, he was going to confess to the entire incident, but his version soon diverged from the one presented by the prosecution.
Though he admitted kidnapping Colleen at knifepoint, he denied having held the knife to her throat. Instead, he said, he held it to her “chest and stomach area.”
Papendick asked, “Why did you kidnap her?”
“I had a fantasy of practicing bondage on a girl who couldn’t say no.”
Hooker said he and his wife had “kicked around the idea,” and had even considered running an ad in a magazine, but he hadn’t had any particular plan. The idea had occurred to him after they’d picked up Colleen, while they were riding in the car. (He interjected that he and Jan could “communicate without words,” which explained how she knew what he was going to do when he’d only just realized it himself.)
Going back to the kidnap, Papendick asked, “What was Colleen’s demeanor?”
“What does that mean?”
“How did she act?”
“Real spacey,” Hooker said. She would jump when he spoke to her, and this, he contended, had “a great deal” to do with his decision to kidnap her. He said he thought he “wouldn’t have any trouble” doing it.
By the time he’d gotten Colleen home and into the basement, she was “plenty scared” and shaking. He hung her up only “for a little bit, till she started crying,” about five or six minutes.
Hooker admitted committing the crime yet softened it, making it less severe in its details, presenting himself as somehow boyishly mischievous, even caring.
That first night, he said, “I was beginning to feel real bad about everything I’d gotten myself into.”
He put Colleen in an old crate he and Jan had used for S/M, checking on her several times throughout the night because he was “worried about her.”
He couldn’t remember if he’d gone to work the next day. He planned to let her go, he said, but he couldn’t take her “for some reason,” and so he was stalling until the next day.
In the meantime, he built a table and moved her onto that so she could lie down.
“Did you hang her up?”
“No.”
By the third day, Hooker said, he felt it would be safe to let her go. “She was hitchhiking, on drugs, had drugs in her purse,” and he decided she was probably no threat since she didn’t know who they were or where she was. But later, when he went downstairs and unlatched the head box, she proceeded to describe almost exactly where they lived.
Hooker went back upstairs and told his wife. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said sadly.
Did he hang Colleen that day?
“No.” In fact, Hooker contended that he hardly ever hung Colleen. The bondage with her “didn’t work,” he said. And he protested that he “had no interest in having sex with her.”
Colleen was still “scared to death,” and he couldn’t let her go. “It tore me up inside to leave her secured,” he said. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”
Meanwhile, Hooker told the court, Colleen was “downright sick.” He spent several hours with her in the basement, talking with her and holding her hand. She asked him “about drugs and stuff like that,” but he knew nothing about drugs. She told him she was afraid she was going to be sick and asked for the drugs that were in her purse, but he’d already thrown them away.
She continued to get sicker over the next two weeks, sweating and shaking.
In Hooker’s story there was no bondage, Colleen was unrestrained, and he spent many hours down in the basement with her. “Sometimes we’d hug,” he said. And sometimes, after talking, she wouldn’t let go of his hand.
Hooker claimed he talked about himself very little, but Colleen was quite talkative. “She was down on everyone—her parents, her past. She talked to me about most of it—just about everything.”
But Cameron was stuck. “I was afraid to let her go. All I wanted to do was get her out, I just couldn’t figure out how,” he said, presenting his predicament with an “aw-shucks” chagrin.
After the second week, Colleen was better. By now Cameron had built the box, and she was kept in it unrestrained until he came downstairs after work and let her out. Then she would be out of the box and unbound for four to six hours, he told the court.
She slept a lot for the second and third months, and by then “me and Jan had faced the fact that we were stuck with her for a long time.” He considered sound-proofing the whole basement, but decided it was too expensive. Again, he explained, “I didn’t know how to let her go without ending up in jail.”
Did she bathe? Papendick asked.
“Not the first two weeks,” Hooker said. “After that, once or twice a week.”
“Was she still blindfolded?”
“Yes.”
After about three months, he and Janice built the workshop together so that Colleen wouldn’t be “stuck laying down during the day, and she could do what she wanted.”
He gave Colleen some. walnuts to shell because “I asked her and she said she’d like to have something to do.”
During the first three months, he hung her only twice. “Me and her’d become very close, and she asked about my interest in bondage.” He hung her up but she started crying so he let her down. She asked how long she’d been up, and when he told her only five or six minutes, she asked why it was so short. It was because of her tears, he said—just like with Jan, when she cried, he stopped.
But there was no sex. Hooker was emphatic about this; he’d promised Jan there would be none. But Colleen, he said, kept asking him: “Why?” “She just couldn’t understand that,” he said, shaking his head.
The second time, he hung her for about fifteen minutes.
Papendick asked, “What’s the longest period you would hang Jan?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Why?”
“I’d seen in a Boy Scout book or a first aid book that tourniquets are only supposed to be used a maximum of twenty minutes.”
(The press and spectators, unable to contain themselves, reacted with soft guffaws.)
Papendick plunged
ahead. When he asked the defendant about other bondage he’d performed on Colleen, Hooker described something far outside any Boy Scout manual: the dunking incident. He admitted tying her up and putting her face in the water, but, he said, “I was careful not to let her choke.”
Asked why he’d done this, Hooker matter-of-factly responded: “I’d done it to Jan before, and I just tried it.”
Just like that. Perhaps, since these were uncharged offenses and bondage between consenting adults is legal, he felt there would be no harm in openly describing these incidents. Or perhaps, having already said, “it tore me up inside to leave her secured,” he believed he’d established himself as a warm and feeling person who simply had kinky tastes.
It wasn’t long, however, until Hooker slipped badly. Papendick asked if Colleen were allowed upstairs the first six months.
“No,” he said, “except the time she took a bath.” Hooker forgot he’d testified just minutes before that she was allowed to bathe “once or twice a week.”
But no one seemed to catch this, Papendick let it drop, and Hooker continued with his narrative.
Having Colleen sign the slavery contract was Jan’s idea, he asserted. Cameron first found the article in Inside News, but when he showed it to Jan, she said, “Wow, what if something like this really existed!” and suggested that if Colleen were afraid of retaliation by a “company,” she wouldn’t go to the police.
After Colleen signed the contract, she was allowed to come upstairs every night. She did a few chores and joined them at the dinner table. It sounded quite homey.
Hooker admitted, without the slightest note of contrition, that he’d started subjecting her to “attention drills,” during which she had to strip off her clothes and stand at attention in a doorway. He began the drills one day after his brother came over unannounced, and she “didn’t move quite as quick as I wanted” when he rushed her down to the basement.
The drills, he said, were “to impress the fact that the contract wasn’t just a piece of paper by itself.”
But her attitude “started going downhill really fast” after she signed the contract, Hooker said. Unlike previous times, when she had a “sweet attitude,” now she was depressed. He blamed this partially on Jan, who “was treating her like a slave,” giving her orders and yelling at her.
Did Hooker ever punish her?
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I always talked to Colleen with a soft voice. All I had to do was raise my voice or talk to her harshly.”
Worried about the dramatic change in her attitude, Jan and Cameron came up with another plan. They decided to tell Colleen that, though it had never been done before and it was expensive, they were going to “buy her out” of the Company.
“At first she didn’t know what to think,” Hooker said. But once he told her the buy-out had been accomplished, she cheered up.
Not long after this, Cameron told her they were planning to move in a few months and asked if she would “hang around” and help. She said that would be fine.
Still, he conceded, Colleen slept in the box or the workshop, and she was treated like a slave.
But when they moved to the mobile home Cameron found putting Colleen into the box inconvenient. Except when they had visitors, she was kept unrestrained in the back bathroom, since he was “about to let her go anyway to see if she believed in the Company.”
Hooker blithely went along with his story, apparently unconcerned by the apparent contradiction that though he had told Colleen he had bought her out of the Company, he was still, as he put it, “trying to drive the Company down her throat.” He admitted telling her “little stories” to remind her of the threat of the Company, but denied having threatened her family.
Meanwhile, he and Colleen were taking regular excursions up into the mountains to cut posts, and, he claimed, Colleen’s attitude was “really happy.” During this time “everything was really perfect” in Hooker’s opinion. He was delighted to have Colleen as his slave—“what I really wanted out of Jan.” He practiced bondage with her in the woods a couple of times, and they hugged, kissed, and indulged in a little petting.
“Was this affection part of her slavery?” Papendick asked.
“No.”
“Why was there no intercourse?”
“I was still trying to keep my promise to Jan,” said Hooker.
By now, in Cameron’s narrative, he’d already agreed on a time to set Colleen free, and they were counting down the weeks. To his surprise, Colleen came into the kitchen one Sunday, sat down, and asked if her current freedom would continue if she stayed. He told her it would, and she told him she wanted to stay.
“I was kinda shocked,” he said, but he opened his arms and said: “Welcome to the family!”
Hooker testified that Colleen told him she didn’t want to get back into drugs, “plus I’d promised she could have a baby.” She only asked that he guarantee he “wouldn’t make her go home. She said every time she got close to someone, they ran her off.”
“What was Jan’s reaction?” Papendick asked.
“She wanted Colleen to leave, but I pretty much shined her on because I’d fallen in love with Colleen very deeply.”
In Hooker’s version of the next several months, Jan treated Colleen “really rough, trying everything to get her to leave.” It was Jan who usually punished Colleen; he only did on rare occasions under pressure from Jan, because, he said, “I had to live with Jan, too.”
Once when he’d hung Colleen up he left briefly to look for some straps. When he returned he found Jan had taped electrical wires to Colleen’s thighs. She held a switch in her hand. Cameron pulled out the plug, then suffered recriminations from both women: Colleen “got after me for interfering,” and Jan “told me it was none of my business,” he said. “I was stunned.”
Shortly after this episode, Jan burned Colleen with matches. But by now Cameron had learned his lesson: “I just stayed out of it.”
Jan was now working at various jobs, and “she went out drinking after work,” Hooker told the court. “She wasn’t home much.” Colleen took care of the children “all day and night,” while Jan was dating other men, drinking, and going to parties. “At first it bothered me a little,” he said, “but I was in love with Colleen, and I figured Jan would find someone else.”
He said he and Colleen were having sex and “light bondage” on a regular basis, but insisted this wasn’t forced. “She was willing to have my child, and we were talking about possibly getting married.”
The slave collar “kinda became a wedding band.” When the collar came off he pierced her labia, he said, adding casually that this is “fairly common among S/M and B and D fans, and that’s what we worked out.”
On that note, the judge declared the noon recess, and journalists, nearly jubilant over Hooker’s colorful testimony, rushed up to Defense Attorney Papendick to garner quotes. Papendick obliged, saying that Colleen “was a willing participant” in the relationship, and that a “turning point” came when Hooker had offered to take Colleen home but she’d opted to stay.
After lunch, Papendick asked Hooker whether Colleen showed him any affection after she was out of the box.
“Yes, she met me at the door with makeup on and hugged me.”
“Did she ask you to have sex with her?”
“Well, in some ways. I’d be sitting, watching TV, and she’d sit on the floor, put her hands on my knees, her head on her hands, and look up at me,” he said, smiling. “She knew what that did to me.”
“Did you talk about the Company during this period?”
“No, not unless she asked.” Still, she believed he was a strong member in the Company. He didn’t want to tell her the truth because, he said, “I was afraid I’d lose her. She looked up to powerful people.”
Hooker’s narrative continued in its same unrepentant and slightly cocky tone. McGuire meanwhile madly scribbled notes. And the jury listened impassively, betraying
nothing.
Cameron testified that about a month before the planned trip to Riverside, Janice heard their older daughter call Colleen “Mommy.” She “blew up,” quit her job, and stopped dating.
Cameron told Colleen it might be best if she left, so she went around and said good-bye to the neighbors. Then, for a week, she was in the box, “out of sight of the kids,” he said.
There was no obedience test with a shotgun, and no talk of the Company. Still, he admitted taking Colleen over to his parents’ barn to hang her up. It was “good for pictures.”
The original plan was to take Colleen home for good—spending one last night together—but on the way down, they had a change of heart and talked of Colleen coming back to Red Bluff. Once Colleen got down to Riverside and called home, she became so excited that they forgot about spending the night together, and Cameron took her directly to see her family.
He was left to kill time alone. The next night he called at about nine P.M., and Colleen said she was ready to go. He went to pick her up and was introduced to the family as “Mike” because “I had one mother-in-law enough, and I didn’t want them dropping in on me.”
After leaving, they stopped at a 7-Eleven store and Cameron explained to Colleen that Jan was really upset, and “things might get rough” because Jan didn’t want her around the kids anymore. While Colleen considered this, he went in and bought a couple of Cokes. When he came out, she put her arms around his neck, told him she loved him, and said she could handle Jan.
When they got home, Hooker testified, there was no one there. They made love on the floor and then he put her in the box while he went to get Jan and the kids, who were at her parents’.
Janice was so insistent about keeping Colleen away from the girls that they wouldn’t see her again for three years. During that time, Hooker testified, there was no sex and virtually no bondage between him and Colleen because “she wasn’t free anymore, and it just wasn’t the same.”
“Did you complain to Jan?” Papendick asked.
“Yeah, but Jan was really fixed on the idea of not letting Colleen around the kids.” It was a long time until they stopped asking about “Kay,” which made Jan only more hardened in her resolve.
Perfect Victim Page 29