Perfect Victim (16 page)

No hearts or flowers or valentines, this was certainly love outside the common realm and a long way from most pop-forty love songs, but K told Cameron she loved him.

Telling him this seemed to soften the edge of mistreatment.

He showed a bit more leniency and granted small concessions, though she was still quite clearly the slave and he the master.

This must have come as a sublime affirmation for Cameron.

The books and articles were right! All women really wanted was to be dominated, and this proved it. His vocabulary of love was one of pain and subjugation and absolute obedience; K loved and respected him because he was powerful. Now he had achieved the ultimate relationship, one of absolute domination and submission.

Difficult as it is to imagine, Cameron Hooker also professed love for his slave. He shared with her his secret fantasies for the future. The whole family would move to the Lake Tahoe area, he said, where she would have her own private cabin. At one point he told her that the gold ring in her labia, more than just identification for the Company, was a symbolic wedding ring.

Someday, he said, she would be his slave wife, and they would have children together.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Janice and K teetered on the brink of hostility. K’s perception of Jan was filtered through Cameron’s stories; K was afraid of her. And since he had told her not to talk to Jan, their contact was mostly limited to giving and taking orders. Their lives moved in parallel, but they rarely connected, and they coexisted uneasily, sporadically bickering over household matters.

Jan had mixed feelings toward this other woman in the house: She was both jealous of and sorry for her. If K put on makeup or cooked something special for dinner, Jan perceived it as an attempt to garner favor with her husband, so while she felt guilty about keeping a slave, she also felt threatened. She nagged Cameron to let her go.

Only the faintest glimmer of the ongoing tension at the Hooker residence became visible to outsiders: One day K was so upset by something Jan had said that she risked alarming the Company by doing something she was not supposed to do.

K had apparently developed an attachment to the kind and motherly Mrs. Coppa and on this day paid her the ultimate compliment of seeking her out for consolation. No one was home except the kids, and they were napping. She decided she could slip away for just a minute. To Dorothy Coppa’s surprise, K showed up at her door in tears.

Upset as she was, K wouldn’t say what was wrong except that it had something to do with Jan. This was as much as she dared risk; her fear of the Company prohibited her from saying more.

Mrs. Coppa hugged her, offering what comfort she could, and K’s tears gradually abated. Since Jan seemed to be the problem, Dorothy proposed that if K wanted to move out, she could stay with some friends of hers. But K quietly demurred. Finally, Mrs. Coppa suggested they pray.

And so they knelt, this gentle, graying woman and the younger one — a secret slave — to offer up their separate prayers. A small comfort. And perhaps the closest K had ever come to telling anyone her sad and very strange story.

The Christmas season of 1980 was unlike any that K experienced while the Hookers’ captive. Not since 1976 had she felt the special warmth of holiday preparations. In some ways, this was the pinnacle of her “year out.” It was also the grand finale.

K took pleasure in giving. Having no money to buy gifts, she made little cards and crafts that satisfied her urge to give — not artistic achievements, just simple expressions of caring. She made Christmas cards for all the members of the Hooker family.

This was an extraordinary time for K. After years of confinement, she was out to soak up the special colors, flavors, and sounds heralding Christmas. As the holidays approached, these kindled memories of home, and she begged to contact her family.

On Christmas Eve, Cameron again granted the supreme favor of letting her phone home.

Cameron and Janice stood listening to every word, ready to cut her off at any time, yet she was deeply grateful to be allowed to speak to her father. Just as before, K dutifully limited herself to only the sketchiest details and the vaguest descriptions of where she was and what she was doing. When her father asked for her phone number, she couldn’t answer; when he asked when she would be coming home, she only said, “Soon, I hope.” But this was the ultimate treat: to be able to wish her family a Merry Christmas.

To top it all off, when the Hookers were opening gifts the next morning, K was shocked to hear Jan say, “There is a present for you, too, K.”

She received the large package with stunned pleasure. Opening it, she found a superbly practical gift: a new sleeping bag.

Regardless of the special favors and surprise Christmas present, a sinister and still undetectable shift was beginning, a shift within Hooker’s psyche, a shift in Colleen Stan’s captivity.

Unbeknownst to K, her “year out” would shortly be coming to an abrupt end.

Cameron had forbidden more than superficial contact between Jan and K, and he paid the price in domestic strife. Jan bossed K around, the two women quarrelled constantly, and each complained to Cameron about the other.

The tensions in the house reached such heights and irritated Cameron so much that he decided to take action. He took his wife and his slave, separately, out to Hogsback Road for disciplining.

With ropes and whips, he made the point that he was going to wear the pants in the family, that he was going to be the boss, and that they’d better straighten up and try to get along.

When the situation didn’t get any better, he started preparations for dramatic change.

He told his wife she would have to quit her job so she could take care of the girls. K was going back in the box, he said, and he wouldn’t allow his daughters to be raised by another babysitter.

But he decided that K would be allowed one final glimpse of freedom: He told her that she would be the first slave ever permitted to visit her family. He’d already started making arrangements, he said, but the Company would probably want to test her in advance of granting final permission.

In the meantime, there were a few “obedience tests” that he needed to perform himself, in preparation for her encounter with the Company.

Cameron’s parents were out of town, and their remote and ramshackle property offered an ideal site for one of Cameron’s “tests.” The family drove out to Cameron’s father’s twenty-acre ranch, about fifteen miles south of Red Bluff. While the girls were napping in the house, the adults went out to the cavernous, drafty barn.

Cameron found a ladder and climbed up to the rafters with some chains, which he put over a beam. He locked the leather cuffs to the chains, and K, who had been ordered to strip off her clothes, was then brought up, strapped into the cuffs and suspended high off the ground. She dangled painfully there for some time, a bizarre sight several feet above the straw-strewn floor and an assortment of farm tools, barrels, feed bags, and disinterested hogs grunting in their stalls.

Cameron tied Janice up, too, but she wasn’t hung. After a while he let her go, and she went outside.

About this time, Cameron’s entertainment was interrupted by the sound of a car driving up. His parents! He grabbed the ladder and rushed up to release K.

“Go over behind the feed bags and hide,” he told her, unlocking the cuffs. They climbed down and K ran across the barn.

Outside, Janice greeted her tired, congenial, and completely unsuspecting in-laws, and proceeded up to the house with Mrs. Hooker. Having seen Janice leave the barn, Mr. Hooker assumed Cameron would be inside. He headed in that direction.

K was trying to get dressed when tall, thin Mr. Hooker entered.

She wasn’t sure, but it seemed that he looked right at her.

Harold Hooker, who had expected to find his son feeding the pigs, was startled to see Kay struggling to pull up her underwear.

He quickly closed the door so as not to embarrass her. Then he walked around to the back of the barn, expecting Cameron and Kay to come out. When they didn’t, he proceeded up to the house and found them already inside.

Despite the awkward undercurrents, no one said anything about the incident in the barn. Evidently feeling self-conscious, K believed that Mr. Hooker kept staring at her. Her discomfort was heightened by the fear that Mr. Hooker, who Cameron had said was a longtime member of the Company, might realize she was a slave and want to “borrow” her.

To make matters worse, Cathy, with a child’s innocence, kept pointing at K’s reddened wrists and asking, “Did you scratch yourself?”

K tried to get her to be quiet. “They’re okay, honey, don’t worry about it.”

Nothing more was said. The afternoon slipped by, they loaded the girls into the car, and returned to the mobile home. Though they’d come close to being found out, the incident passed, leaving in the mind of Mr. Harold Hooker only vague and unanswered questions.

With his secret habits still undetected, Cameron put the next step of his plan into action. K had become almost a standard feature in the neighborhood — taking the Hooker girls for walks, jogging down the lane or working in the garden — so now Cameron told her to say goodbye to the neighbors. He intended to take K down to Riverside himself, and he didn’t want the neighbors to get suspicious. His strategy was to make it seem that K had left that weekend for Southern California; then, a week later, he could drive her down himself. He didn’t want anyone — not even his children — to make the connection between K’s departure and his own absence.

Dorothy Coppa, who had taken an almost maternal interest in the Hookers’ companion, was especially sad to learn that K would be leaving. Characteristically, she worried about whether she would be all right. (Once she had given K a sweater; another time she guessed that she had no jacket — never having seen her wear one — and bought one for K at the local secondhand store.)

Now, concerned that K didn’t have any money, she pressed ten dollars into her palm and hugged her goodbye.

Cameron also told K to say goodbye to his two daughters, Cathy and Dawn. Then, as prearranged, they went out to the truck and she waved out the window as he headed toward the bus station.

But this was all a charade. K bought no ticket and boarded no bus. Instead, Cameron had her lay down on the seat and hide while they drove back to the mobile home. Once he’d made sure that the girls had gone to bed, he smuggled K back into the house and put her in the box, where she would stay for the next week.

Putting her in the box again would be good discipline, Cameron thought. It would remind her of her position. But before he could trust his slave to behave herself in the safe haven of her own home, he had to reaffirm his control over her with yet another obedience test.

He got his shotgun, got K out of the box, and ordered her to get down on her knees.

She kneeled.

While holding onto the butt of the gun, Cameron ordered her to put her mouth over the end of the barrel.

She put her lips around the cold metal.

He told her to pull the trigger.

She didn’t know whether the gun was loaded, didn’t even know what kind of gun it was. She only knew that if she didn’t do as her master told her, there would be serious consequences.

With the barrel jutting toward her throat, she pulled the trigger.

It hit home with a metallic click.

The arrangements with the Company were nearly complete, Hooker explained. The phones of all her family members would be monitored. Their homes and cars were being bugged with listening devices sensitive enough to pick up even a whisper.

Company surveillance teams would be watching her and her family at all times. These special precautions would cost a total of some $30,000, all of which was coming out of Hooker’s Company account — money he had earned by capturing runaways years ago.

He was making a tremendous financial sacrifice for her.

Since K would be the first slave ever to be permitted to visit her family, they would have to stop at Company headquarters in Sacramento so she could be evaluated before being granted final permission for her visit. Cameron was unsure what sorts of tests the Company would want to put her through. They might want to hang her up. Or they might take her through a Company “museum,” showing her displays of skeletons of runaway slaves who had been tortured to death or the runaway who had been sealed in a jar of formaldehyde, “like a human pickle.”

Finally, after K had suffered through a week of stultifying, monotonous confinement in the box, the day of departure arrived.

Cameron Hooker rose early on the morning of Friday, March 20, 1981, and called in sick. Before the children were up, he got K out of the box, snuck her out to the car, and told her to lie down on the floor, in the back. He covered her with something and they drove off into the soft, morning quiet.

They stopped to get gas in Coming, just a few miles south of Red Bluff, then pulled onto the freeway, Interstate 5, heading south. Now Hooker told his slave she could sit up.

It was still morning when they pulled into Sacramento. Cameron stopped outside of some tall office buildings and told K to wait in the car while he went into Company headquarters to find out what they wanted to do with her.

K waited nervously, wondering what sort of painful test the Company might subject her to.

About fifteen minutes later, Hooker exited the building and came to the car with some papers in his hand. “You’re getting off easy,” he said. “They don’t want to see you. You don’t have to go in.” The Company had granted permission for her to visit her family over the weekend.

“This will allow you to carry money,” he said, handing her a typed, official-looking card with his seal on it. It was the same seal that had been on the slavery contract. She was to carry this card with her at all times, Cameron said, because if a slave were caught carrying money without it, the punishment would be harsh.

“Oh, and the secretary said to wish you good luck,” he added.