TrueCrime: Colleen Stan

Chapter 1: The Blue Van

The first time I saw the box, it was in a photograph from the court file. It didn't look like much: a homemade plywood crate, the joints badly sanded, a lid that shut with a hasp and a padlock. Somebody had laid a ruler beside it for scale. Inside that crate, underneath a waterbed, in a mobile home in Red Bluff, California, a woman spent as much as twenty-three hours a day for nearly three straight years. Her name was Colleen Stan. She was twenty when she got into the wrong van and twenty-seven when she came home to her mother.

On May 19, 1977, Colleen left Eugene, Oregon, and started hitchhiking south on Interstate 5. She was headed for a friend's birthday party in Westwood, California. She was a careful girl: that day she waved off two cars because something about the drivers put her off. The third was a blue van. Behind the wheel sat a twenty-three-year-old who looked like he had never hurt anyone in his life: Cameron Hooker, born November 5, 1953, a sawmill worker. His wife Janice, nineteen, was beside him. And there was a baby in the back seat. Colleen would testify later that the baby was the reason she got in. Nobody traveling with a baby is going to hurt you.

They stopped for gas. Colleen went into the restroom and stayed in there longer than she needed to, turning over a feeling she couldn't name. She thought about not coming out. She thought about finding another ride. In the end she got back in the van. That detail, a three-minute decision in the restroom of an ordinary gas station, would be repeated eight years later in front of a jury by a defense attorney, over and over, as though it proved something. Twenty miles on, Cameron turned off onto a side road, stopped the van, and put a knife to her throat.

Chapter 2: The First Night

What he put over her head wasn't a bag or a hood. It was a box. Cameron Hooker had built it himself out of wood and insulation, in two halves that closed around her neck and latched underneath. It weighed about twenty pounds. It was designed to do one thing: erase her. No light, no clear sound, no clean air. With that box on, a person stops knowing where she is, what time it is, or how many people are in the room. He had it ready in the car. What follows is not journalistic reconstruction or documentary color. It is what the California Court of Appeal set down as established fact in 1988 when it reviewed the conviction, written in the flat administrative prose of a judicial opinion, which is exactly what makes it unbearable.

That first night, in the basement of the house in Red Bluff, Hooker stripped her and hung her by the arms from the rafters. When Colleen started to cry, he whipped her. He left her hanging for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he set a box under her feet so she could take some of the weight. Then he pulled the box away and left her hanging again. When he was finished he put her in a box in the basement. He chained her wrists, locked the head box on her, and tied her feet to the wood. The next day he took her out, laid her on a homemade rack, and chained her wrists and ankles to the four corners. He left her that way until the following day. The first seven to ten days went the same: naked, chained to the rack, wearing the head box. She spent the first five months in the basement naked, bound, blindfolded, and gagged.

Then came the first coffin-like box, also in the basement. She came out of it once a day to eat, drink, urinate, and defecate, always in front of Hooker. The other twenty-three hours she was inside it. The opinion lists what he did to her with the flatness of a warehouse inventory: suspending her from the rafters, constricting her breathing, whipping her, keeping her head encased in the head box, tying her to the rack, shocking her with electrical cords, burning her pubic area with a heat lamp, and holding her under in the bathtub until she couldn't breathe. Colleen told the court that in the first six months alone he hung her and whipped her ninety to a hundred times. The rack left her with shoulder and back injuries she carried for the rest of her life. In October 1977 Hooker built a second box, this one triangular, fitted into the space under the stairs. They called it the workshop. Colleen spent her days locked and chained inside it, and her nights doing handwork or submitting to her captor's sessions. She had been held for five months. She had six and a half years to go.

One fact belongs here, because it explains everything that follows: Janice Hooker was standing right there. She was not an incidental witness or a duped wife who found out at the end. She was there from the first night. She and Cameron had met as teenagers. He had very specific, very early fantasies about tying up, hanging, and dominating women, and he told her about them before they married. According to the account Janice gave police and repeated at trial, they struck a deal: he could do those things to another woman as long as he didn't have sex with her. In exchange, Janice would have a baby. That deal is why this investigation doesn't begin in 1977. It begins a year earlier.

Chapter 3: The Company

Physical violence on its own does not hold anyone for seven years. What held Colleen Stan was a lie. Cameron Hooker told her he wasn't acting alone. He told her there was an underground organization, called simply the Company, that bought and sold slaves, that had members everywhere, that watched its slaves constantly for any sign of escape, and that tortured the ones who tried. And he told her the only part that really mattered: if she ran, the Company would go after her family. Hooker didn't just tell the story. He proved it. When Janice needed knee surgery, he explained to Colleen that his wife had been a slave years earlier, that she had tried to escape, that the Company had caught her, and that those legs were what the punishment had left behind. Every single day, Colleen had a limping woman in front of her confirming the whole thing.

In January 1978 he put a contract in front of her. It was a text copied out of an underground newspaper, and it made her his slave for life and stated, in those words, that he owned her soul. Colleen balked. Hooker told her she had better sign, because a representative of the Company was waiting outside. She signed it in tears. From that point on she stopped having a name. She became "K" — the record also has it as "Kay" — she had to address him as Master or Sir and Janice as Ma'am, and she was required to kneel, lower her head, and ask permission before doing anything at all: speaking, standing up, drinking water. Hooker put a collar around her neck as a token of what she now was. When that collar wore out, he replaced it. When the second one wore out too, he replaced it with an earring he pierced through her himself, somewhere she could never show anyone. That is the logic underneath this entire case. He didn't treat her like a prisoner. He treated her like property that needed marking.

Chapter 4: Under the Waterbed

In April 1978 the family moved into a mobile home. That is where Cameron built the thing that gave this case its name. He framed a wooden pedestal to carry the waterbed he and Janice slept on, and inside that pedestal, directly beneath the mattress, he fitted a box for Colleen. By the published descriptions of it, the box ran roughly six feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet high. Double-walled, packed with insulation, hasp and padlock on the outside, a few small holes drilled for air. There was no way to open it from within. For the rest of that year Colleen spent all day and most of every night in there. They let her out late at night, for a while. She was allowed toilet paper, a bedpan, and a radio. She had to position the bedpan with her feet, because there was no room to sit up and use her hands.

There is one passage in the opinion that sums this case up better than any headline anybody wrote afterward. In September 1978, Janice Hooker gave birth to her second child at home, on the waterbed. Colleen was in the box underneath. A baby was being born on top of her, and that family's life carried on with a woman locked under the bed frame who had to be let out after midnight to wash. The rest tells itself. From March 1981 to May 1984, the court found, Colleen lived inside that box. For most of that stretch Hooker let her out only for short periods in the evening, and only on a few scattered nights was she allowed to stay out at all. Three years. In a box. Under a bed.

In February 1978, a month after the contract was signed, Hooker had sex with her for the first time, with Janice in the room. The arrangement he had made with his wife collapsed, and after that there were no limits left. Colleen testified that from March 1980 on, he raped her once or twice a week. The six rapes he was ultimately convicted of correspond to specific incidents, each one dated in the opinion. In several of them she was suspended in the air or strapped to the stretching rack. And with all of that going on, Colleen began to earn what the trial would call privileges. She came out of the box to do housework, to sew, to look after the little girls. She ate at the table. And then she climbed back in. Nobody forced her into the box at night. She got in herself. Anyone reading this from the outside is going to ask the same question the jury asked, and the reporters, and most of California in 1985. It is the question that has followed this case for forty years, and we will come back to it.

Chapter 5: Two Days Home

In March 1981, almost four years into the kidnapping, Cameron Hooker did something no criminologist would have predicted. He put Colleen in a car and drove her to Riverside to see her family. The visit lasted two days. Colleen walked into her family's house, sat down at the table, talked with her father and her sister. Cameron waited outside and then came in and introduced himself as her boyfriend. Photographs were taken. In one of them he is standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder.

Colleen said nothing at all. She stood a few feet from a telephone, surrounded by the people she loved, and said nothing, because she was certain that talking meant signing a death warrant for everyone in that room. Her family came away with the impression that she had gotten mixed up in some kind of cult. Back in Red Bluff, Hooker locked her in the box under the waterbed. That is where the worst three years began. Those two days are probably the most argued-over part of the entire case. To the prosecution they showed exactly how far the psychological control went. To the defense, they were about to show the opposite.

Chapter 6: August 1984

In May 1984 Colleen started working as a maid at the King's Lodge, a hotel in Red Bluff a few miles from the mobile home. She went out alone, drew a paycheck, talked with her coworkers. And she came back. Every day, she came back. What finally broke the arrangement wasn't Colleen, or the police, or luck. It was Janice. Cameron had started talking about taking Colleen as a second wife, and something about that idea was more than the woman who had held the whole thing together for seven years could stand. In July 1984 Janice began telling her church pastor how they had been living. By August she thought she was having a nervous breakdown. On August 9, 1984, she drove Colleen to work at the hotel and went to see the pastor. He told her both women needed to get out of that house. Janice drove back to the hotel, found Colleen, and told her, for the first time in seven years, that there was no Company. The next morning, as soon as Cameron left for work, Janice and Colleen took the girls and went to Janice's parents' house. From there Colleen called Hooker to tell him she was leaving, and got on a bus to her family.

And then she did nothing. For three months she didn't report him. She called the Hookers over and over, twenty-nine times by the count the defense would put in front of the jury; one of those calls ran more than an hour. She testified afterward that she wanted to give Cameron a chance to straighten himself out. The person who finally walked into a police station was Janice Hooker. On November 7, 1984, she sat down across from Lieutenant Jerry Brown of the Red Bluff Police Department and told him about Colleen. And then she told him something else, far worse, that nobody was expecting.

Chapter 7: The Trial

Cameron Hooker was arrested in November 1984 and tried in 1985 in Tehama County. Prosecutor Christine McGuire took the case.

The defense didn't deny the kidnapping. It did something more effective. It conceded that Colleen had been there and argued that she stayed because she wanted to. That she fell in love with him. That the sex was consensual, or that Hooker reasonably believed it was. And it laid out, one after another, the inconvenient facts: the gas station restroom, the job at the hotel, the two days with her family without saying a word, the twenty-nine phone calls after she left. It was the only strategy available, and it came close to working. So the prosecution built its case on ground that in 1985 was still close to experimental in a courtroom: psychological coercion. It called forensic psychologist Chris Hatcher, who explained to the jury how submission gets manufactured, why a person held for years stops calculating escapes and starts calculating punishments, and what is left of a will after seven years of believing your family dies if you talk. The press summed it up with the label already in circulation: Stockholm syndrome. The jury convicted him on seven of eight counts: kidnapping with use of a deadly weapon, six rapes, forcible sodomy, forcible oral copulation, and penetration with a foreign object. One rape count hung and was dismissed. The sentence, as the 1988 appellate opinion describes it, was an indeterminate term of one to twenty-five years for the kidnapping, plus five to ten years for the weapon enhancement, followed by a determinate term of sixty-nine years. The press turned that into a round number that stuck for good: 104 years. According to the reporters who covered the trial, the judge called him the worst psychopath he had ever dealt with. Janice Hooker testified against her husband in exchange for immunity. She never spent a day in prison.