“At what point would you expect to see damage occurring?”
“In a period of an hour, in terms of the limbs, the arms in particular. It takes a matter of several hours in a person, who is otherwise healthy, for cardiovascular problems to show up. That is, fluids actually accumulate in the lungs. It’s a method effected in crucifixion, simply to hold somebody still.”
“If a person were confined in a box for twenty-three to twenty-three and a half hours a day for three years, what physical problems would that person suffer?”
“Persons confined in a close space, whether it’s a box or even a hospital bed, for that amount of time, would suffer very serious muscular damage and skeletal damage,” Lunde said. “The muscles, within a matter of about six weeks, will start to lose mass—wasting of the muscles as they start to shrivel up and get smaller. There is decalcification of the bones, so that the bones become more and more brittle. A person in a matter of months, much less years, would have serious and visible muscular and bone damage. And in the period of time you speak of—years—such a person would have great difficulty walking, maintaining an upright posture, maintaining balance. There would also be some horizontal dysfunction, probably. That would be quite visible.”
“Would the person’s speech be affected?”
“Probably, yes.”
“In what way?”
“Well,” Lunde continued, “a person confined in a box for three years on end, separated from contact with other people, whether it’s in a box or an isolation cell, usually begins to hallucinate at some point, so their speech might reflect them talking to imaginary people. It might reflect the hallucinations. If they actually don’t do much talking, after a period of time, you would probably notice some speech impediment, some difficulty simply with normal speech because, like any other complex learned activity, if you go for several years without using it, you lose the skill, the complex brain-to-muscle kind of skills that are involved in simply forming words. Memory might be affected as well.”
“What is the physical effect of electric shock administered to the human body from house current attached to a person’s thighs?” Papendick asked.
McGuire objected that it hadn’t been established that it was house current Colleen was shocked with, but she was overruled. The court listened closely to learn why Papendick had questioned Colleen so rigorously on this point.
“Shock of house current can cause contraction of the muscles around the thigh area, the quadriceps or hamstring muscles, and this can be painful,” Lunde said. “It doesn’t cause permanent damage. Once a person is grounded, which in a usual house is carpeting or floor or something which doesn’t conduct electricity, it simply causes contraction of the muscles, you know, a feeling, literally, of shock. But that’s about it.”
“What exactly do you mean by contraction of muscles?”
“The muscles go into spasm, involuntary spasm.”
“What effect does whipping have on the physical body?”
“Well, people I have seen who have been subjected to actual whipping, usually on the back, have visible scars from the lacerations, usually vertical scars.”
During Lunde’s testimony, McGuire kept watching the jurors for reactions. If they believed the Stanford psychiatrist, they believed Colleen had lied. Except that they were attentive, she couldn’t read them.
Papendick took the noon recess to reframe his hypothetical. When court reconvened, he addressed the witness: “Dr. Lunde, I would like you to assume, in addition to all the facts I have previously given you, the following facts.” With that, in a slow, steady voice, Papendick added a lengthy list of various incidents—from the shotgun “obedience test,” to the water-skiing trip. At its conclusion Papendick asked the doctor to render an opinion.
As everyone expected, McGuire again objected.
A discussion ensued among both counsels, the judge, and the witness.
Looking vexed, the judge asked Dr. Lunde: “Doctor, do you really think you can answer that question from the hypothetical given you?”
“I think so.”
“Wouldn’t you have to know which time the questions referred to?”
“To my understanding, the question began sometime ago with an assumption that we were talking about the time period of the spring of 1978 to 1981.”
Still, the judge remained unconvinced that a responsible witness could answer the question as it was framed. With the judge’s permission, Papendick added several time elements to his hypothetical question.
When Papendick finished, McGuire objected, prompting another discussion.
Judge Knight turned to the witness. “Do you mean, Doctor, that you can tell this jury, based upon the hypothetical given you, whether or not, during that whole period of time, this person was subjected to coercive persuasion; or whether, during any part of that time she was subjected to coercive persuasion?
“Part of the time,” Dr. Lunde replied.
“That’s the problem,” said the judge. “It’s so broad that it’s almost meaningless. Do you understand, Mr. Papendick?”
“I understand what the court is getting at,” Papendick allowed. Still, he maintained: “The witness understands the question and is able to answer it.”
Judge Knight, looking annoyed, finally relented, overruling McGuire’s objection and allowing Dr. Lunde to give his opinion.
Dr. Lunde dove in: “My opinion is that during those periods of time when this person is not in a state of captivity as I defined it earlier—either confinement or being directly held at gunpoint or knifepoint—one of the essential conditions for coercive persuasion does not exist.
“It would be different if you were talking about a child, if you were talking about a mentally retarded person, a seriously mentally ill person, somebody continuously under the effects of certain drugs. But I believe that, when this all started, you asked me to assume a person of at least average intelligence.
“Somebody who goes jogging for fifteen minutes out on the road without the presence of an armed guard is not in [captivity]. Surely somebody who goes home to meet with her family and is not in the presence of the captor is not in a condition where they would be subject to this kind of phenomenon.
“The safest place, psychologically, for human beings, is the family,” the doctor explained. “Even if you believed in the existence of a company—which is not something that a person of normal intelligence in this society would be likely to believe—here, you are at home. You could write them a note and say: ‘Help. I am being tortured. I am being held captive.’
“I don’t know of anybody who, if given the opportunity to go home and spend twenty-four hours, would have returned to the place of captivity, whether you are talking about a prisoner in North Korea or the settlement in Guyana in Jonestown or the SLA headquarters in Berkeley. It is simply not consistent with everything we know about human behavior in psychology and behavior of people in captivity who don’t want to be there.”
Having finally succeeded in getting his expert witness to render an opinion on his hypothetical question, Papendick turned Dr. Lunde over to the prosecutor.
Deputy DA McGuire opened her cross-examination by attacking Dr. Lunde’s familiarity with the case.
“Besides interviewing the defendant, Doctor, who else did you interview?”
“I did not personally interview anybody else.”
“You have never been to Red Bluff for the purpose of this case, have you, Doctor?”
“No.”
“And you haven’t been to the basement on Oak Street?”.
“Well, I have seen the photos, but I have never been there.”
“You have never seen this box before today?” she asked, gesturing to the waterbed which still stood before the jury.
“It was disassembled when I saw it last.”
“And you have never been to the mobile home on Pershing, have you, Doctor?”
“No.”
“And you have never been inside what h
as been referred to as the ‘hole’ under one of the sheds?”
“No.”
McGuire established that when Dr. Lunde reviewed the evidence, he hadn’t bothered to open several boxes.
“I think it’s true that some boxes contained magazines and certain things we did not go through,” he said.
“Handcuffs?”
“Right.”
“You didn’t see any of those?”
“No, because there were photographs of some of them, and I looked at the photographs.”
“You haven’t seen the photographs of Janice being hung in various positions, have you, Doctor?”
“No. Mostly, they were destroyed, I understand,” he answered.
“You reviewed Dr. Hatcher’s report, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did you prepare a report?”
“No.”
McGuire had made some points, but at times she completely lost control of the witness, who went off on long narratives expounding the very theory she wished most to avoid.
In answer to a question concerning the influence of the Company in keeping Colleen from leaving, the psychiatrist said: “Based on the evidence I have seen, which includes reading Colleen Stan’s statements, listening to hours and hours of tape-recorded interviews, and seeing letters written by her, given what I know, and having read statements of Janice Hooker and Cameron Hooker as to jealousy between the two women and the attachment of the children to Colleen, I think the more likely explanation is that Colleen fell in love with Cameron Hooker, became attached to the children, and that subsequently this created your basic triangle situation where you have two women very angry at each other or vying for the attention of some man in the household, who happened to be Cameron Hooker. I think that’s why she returned to him from her family.”
“Are you telling me, Doctor, that given the hypothetical this morning, that person was not, to use the lay term, ‘broken’?” McGuire asked.
“No. I don’t know what that means,” Dr. Lunde said. “I’ve heard of horses being broken, or dishes being broken, but people . . . people may become depressed. That’s a clinical term, and maybe it’s closest to what you’re trying to describe.
“People who [believe that] their situation is hopeless—and I have seen some people who have been held prisoner for a long time—may become depressed, and the symptoms of that include certain patterns of sleep disturbance, feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, and eventually suicidal thoughts, and sometimes an actual suicide attempt.
“This person may or may not have become depressed. I don’t know of any evidence that she became suicidal or even entertained thoughts of suicide, which would tend to indicate to me that she did not become that depressed or ‘broken,’ if you want to use that term.”
McGuire was incensed. “So what you are telling us, Doctor, in a nutshell, is: Given all the torture, the isolation, and the result of the techniques employed, all we have is a depressed person. Is that what you’re telling us?”
“Oh, I don’t even know,” he answered nonchalantly. “As I say, we don’t have a lot of evidence she was profoundly depressed.”
McGuire asked if it would make a difference in his opinion if the victim were subjected to “attention drills.”
Dr. Lunde compared this to his own basic training in the Marine Corps in the fifties, saying he “would have traded places.”
“Were you stripped naked and forced to stretch your arms to the top of an archway and then whipped until you finally admitted to something you didn’t do?” she demanded to know.
“No, but just about,” he said, his chin in his hand, talking into his fingers. “Certainly there were obstacle courses and things of that sort one had to go through and underwater situations that were life-threatening. And then, in between, one had to run in pretty hot summer Virginia weather to the point of exhaustion, and then people were, in fact, struck by the drill sergeant if they stopped or fell down.”
McGuire asked if it would make a difference in the doctor’s opinion if the victim were placed in a bathtub and repeatedly had her head forced under water.
“Actually, as I say, it’s somewhat similar in terms of underwater escape training.” Dr. Lunde was intractable.
But McGuire did manage to make a little headway regarding Lunde’s testimony on the physical effects of captivity.
“Doctor, isn’t it a fact you wouldn’t expect to see [serious] damage if the person, who is being kept in the box, is mobile in the box?”
“Well, no. You would see the damage because the variable is they have to get into an upright position. The human cardiovascular system is designed to work in a vertical position with muscles moving at least a certain number of hours a day.”
“If a person is taken out to cut posts, that’s exercise?”
“Right, sure.”
“Taken out to dig out a hole underneath a shed, that’s exercise?”
“Sure.”
“You wouldn’t expect to see any permanent physical damage under those circumstances, would you, Doctor?”
“No. The opinion I gave was in response to the hypothetical question that assumed the person was in the box twenty-three plus hours a day. If they are out cutting fence posts, as I believe she was, that’s a whole different story. You wouldn’t expect the problems,” he conceded.
“Now this spasm caused by shocking you referred to—that would be painful, wouldn’t it, Doctor?”
“Sure.”
“Very painful, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“There are occasions, Doctor, when some kind of electric shock would leave burn marks, isn’t that correct?”
“Sure, if you suffered a high voltage or a certain kind of grounding,” Lunde said.
“Whipping doesn’t always leave a permanent scar, does it?”
“No. Depends upon the type of whip and how hard you use it.”
“It might leave red marks?”
“Sure.”
“And those marks will go away?”
“Sure.”
Dr. Lunde’s first day on the stand came to an end, and the cross-examination would be resumed the following day. This wouldn’t be worth noting, except that the next morning he was late.
The jury waited. The judge waited. The press and spectators waited. Both counsels waited. Cameron Hooker and the bailiffs, the court reporter and the court clerk waited. After about five minutes, people began to titter. Some of the jurors looked amused; the judge did not.
Astonishingly, when Dr. Lunde bustled in and took the stand ten minutes behind schedule, he did not apologize to anyone.
Lunde’s answers to McGuire’s first questions would surprise even Mr. Papendick. “Dr. Lunde, you are being compensated for each day that you testify in court, aren’t you?”
“Sure. All the time.”
“And at what rate, Doctor, are you being compensated?”
“A hundred dollars an hour for my time outside of the courtroom; three thousand dollars a day for testifying in court.”3
McGuire resumed her line of questioning, but Lunde steadfastly held to his views, restating that a reasonable person would never believe the story of the Company and that Colleen only stayed because she’d fallen in love with Cameron Hooker.
It began to look as if McGuire would never break free of this deadlock. Then she suddenly asked, “You wrote an article entitled ‘Brainwashing as a Defense to Criminal Liability’ in 1977, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Doctor, yesterday I used the term broke, do you recall that?”
“Yes, sure.”
“And you have indicated that was an inappropriate term?”
“Not a scientific term.”
“Didn’t you, on page 351 of your article, write: ‘The North Koreans simply broke Bucher and his men by torture and threats to the point where further resistance seemed ridiculous.’ Do you recall writing that?”
“Oh, I think the sentence
is there,” Dr. Lunde said, unfazed. “I may have used the word elsewhere in the article in that some people ‘broke’ their word. The term has a meaning similar to what we were talking about yesterday.”
McGuire continued, “The article also contains on page 349:
The control of all communication in the environment is not only an important step, it is the basis for the whole process. In other words, the captors, those that are performing the process of coercive persuasion, control everything the victim sees, feels and experiences, and the reason why this is so basic to the full process is that the victim begins himself to feel totally controlled by his captors and they become omniscient to him, that is, they become all-knowing people who understand him, who know things about him that he never dreamt of, who simply have total access to everything about him. And in that sense he begins to feel inwardly controlled. And that’s reflected in a process by which, even after he may no longer be in direct control of his captors, when they become his former captors, he still feels their presence inside of him.”
“Sure,” Lunde responded, “taken in that context, yes.”
Both counsels finally exhausted their questions of this witness, and then Judge Knight asked a few.
“You didn’t intend to equate what happened here to Marine Corps boot camp training, did you?”
“No. It was a specific aspect, namely, the attention drills, being called to attention and having to hop to a stand-up-straight position.”
“I think you also referred to it in connection with the attempted drowning of Colleen Stan. Do you equate that with Marine Corps drills?”
“No, I don’t equate the overall experience. Obviously, there are significant differences between Marine Corps training and this experience. There are some similarities, such as the indoctrination, the control of what time you go to bed and what time you get up, bodily functions, those types of things. Those are similarities. But there are differences. You are in the hands of what you know to be government, society-sanctioned agencies. You know the time in which you are getting out. Those are differences.”
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