Perfect Victim (22 page)

She liked her but also found her disquieting — at once shy, defensive, and oddly bland.

Meanwhile, the attorney in her couldn’t help but wonder how Colleen would come across to a jury. Traces of malnutrition and ill-health lingered, especially in her thin, dull hair and her discolored teeth, but these were subtle. And despite years of abuse, Colleen was a long way from emaciated; she was a bit heavy around the hips, her skin looked younger than her twenty-eight years, and her blue eyes sparkled.

When they arrived in Red Bluff, they stopped at a deli for lunch, and Mcguire had more opportunity to observe Mrs. Grant whom Colleen had described as “a people person.” By the end of the meal, Mcguire would beg to differ.

She found Colleen’s mother superficial and wondered if Grant who dominated the conversation and often answered for Colleen, was along more for the notoriety than as support for her daughter.

Lunch seemed to take ages.

When they finally arrived at the police station, Mcguire assigned Lieutenant Brown the task of interviewing the mother.

Meanwhile, Shamblin and Mcguire took Colleen across the street to the district attorney’s office.

They started at the beginning and covered areas they’d never gone into before: the events of the kidnap, the years of captivity and intermittent beatings, the escape. Colleen explained about the slavery contract, recounted stories Cameron had told her about the Company, and gave details of how she’d coped with confinement in the box.

As her story unfolded, Mcguire found it more and more bizarre.

Throughout the interview Colleen answered without hesitation or evasion, yet she always spoke with the same dull monotone.

She was so unemotional that Mcguire resorted to asking her to quantify pain, fear, and humiliation on a scale of one to ten. The pain of being hung, for example, Colleen rated a ten. And while the humiliation of soiling the box by defecation or urination rated a ten, menstruation rated only a five. (Unknown to Colleen, this rating was Dr. Hatcher’s idea. He’d cautioned Mcguire about this “lack of affect,” or emotion, and had recommended rating emotions on a descending scale.)

3. The most significant information he learned was that when Colleen came home, she told her mother only the bare minimum of what she’d suffered over the past several years. This seemed to explain, to some extent, the lack of “moral outrage” that concerned Dr. Hatcher and Deputy DA Mcguire.

Beneath her general passivity, Colleen was absolutely earnest about one thing: She had tried to be a good slave. When Cameron told her to do the dishes, for instance, she tried her best to do them quickly and well. But Hooker would time her, and hurry as she might, she couldn’t get them all washed and dried in less than twenty-five minutes. Colleen insisted that she’d tried, she really had, but dam it, she just wasn’t fast enough.

Mcguire shuddered inwardly. There was something pathetic in this, and for a moment Mcguire flashed on the image of a mistreated dog, eager for attention but afraid, wagging its tail, yet cowering.

Late that day, Mcguire finally got around to asking a troublesome question: “During any of the seven years, did you ever tell Cameron you loved him?”

Colleen didn’t flinch. “Yeah.”

Mcguire sighed. Damn. This was the major weakness in their case.

“At what point in time did you tell him that you loved him?”

“I don’t know. It was probably 1980 or ‘81.”

“Looking back at that time, what kind of feelings did you feel?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I just felt that I loved him because I was glad to be out of that box, for one thing, and because he gave me a certain amount of freedom. I suppose that was why.”

Mcguire was acutely aware of the tape recorder whirring in witness to Colleen’s words. The tape would be transcribed and passed on to Papendick, who would sift through it for information he could use in Hooker’s defense. So, for whatever it was worth, she would try to dredge up something with which to counter Papendick.

“Did you feel as though Cameron had given you back your life again?”

“Yeah, in a way.”

“Did you feel grateful that he hadn’t killed you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you feel dependent upon him?”

“Yeah, I did at that time.”

Mcguire only hoped she could get Dr. Hatcher on the stand to somehow explain Colleen’s weird “love” for Cameron Hooker.

Even then, she dreaded the jury’s reaction. This simple, four-letter word could nullify their entire case.

Mcguire made thorough use of the time she had with Colleen.

They reviewed the transcript of the preliminary hearing and came up with few surprises. They went over diagrams, Colleen making The Slavery Contract, supposedly drawn up by “The Company” corrections and offering suggestions. They viewed slides Hooker had taken of Janice in bondage positions, Colleen pointing out previously unnoticed details. And when something reminded her of an INCIDENT she’d forgotten, she went off on tangents, the tape recorder turning in dumb witness while Mcguire struggled to fit new information into set legal contexts.

They went through the boxes of photographs the police had seized — a massive collection that surprised Colleen. Hooker had taken photos of everything, but he had never shown them to her.

It took hours, but Colleen examined more than five hundred photographs. Most of the shots were of Janice in bondage positions; Colleen indicated those similar to what Cameron had done to her.

They also went through a large number of hardcore pornographic publications, the Deputy DA asking Colleen if she could identify scenes Cameron had tried to duplicate on her. But Hooker was such a pack rat (he kept everything, including magazines and clippings dating back ten or fifteen years), they got bogged down and finally elected to send Colleen photocopies of the magazines later.

At one point, Mcguire and Colleen got down on their hands and knees on the floor to make a chart. With more than seven years to cover, Mcguire wanted a time-line showing all the counts and significant incidents from the kidnap in 1977 to the escape in 1984. Using Magic Markers on three-by-five-foot poster board, they sprawled across the floor like children, inking in lines.

They also inspected Hooker’s gadgets. Colleen showed them how to reconstruct the stretcher — a good thing, since it turned out that part of it was missing. And they examined the reconstructed box and bed, Colleen pointing out the discolored area where her head had lain. None of them had been able to understand the ventilation system, so Colleen explained that it required an old-fashioned hair dryer, the type with a hose and bonnet.

Next, they wondered how the head box worked. They measured Colleen’s neck, but were reluctant to ask her to put it on.

Mcguire volunteered.

There was nothing appealing about putting on the head box — the foam and carpet insulation were decayed and still sprinkled with mouse droppings — but the prosecutor was determined to try it, make sure it fit, and learn how it worked. To keep her hair clean, she covered her head with a plastic bag with a hole cut for breathing.

With Colleen coaching, Lieutenant Brown shut the box tightly around her neck.

Colleen had said it pinched. It did.

Mcguire knew she was surrounded by people she trusted, but “a terrible, horrible, helpless feeling” went through her. Then claustrophobia struck and she started to panic, afraid they wouldn’t be able to get the box unlatched. Now she was nearly hyperventilating.

Some mouse droppings went up her nose. “Get this thing off me!” she cried.

When the head box came off the relief was so extreme, she laughed. Then Jerry Brown chuckled, her tension dissolved, and laughter spread through the room.

The morning of Thursday, March 28, Colleen and her mother were driven back to the Sacramento airport, where they boarded a plane back to Southern California. Mcguire saw them off at the airport and hugged Colleen goodbye. Later, during the long drive back to Red Bluff, she was left to ruminate on this STILL ENIGMATIC woman.

Over the past three days, Colleen had described her ordeal in blunt and specific terms. She had relived every turn in her captivity, dredging up the most painful and humiliating details of what Hooker had done to her, and through it all, she’d remained almost indifferent. She showed no real sympathy for Hooker, but little hatred, either, nor any great desire for vengeance.

Colleen seemed to perceive herself as doomed to misfortune.

At one point she’d likened herself to her father, who, she said, had been “ripped off all his life. Used, like me. We’re two of a kind.” Perhaps she felt the worst was only to be expected.

In some ways, Mcguire thought, Hooker had found the perfect victim in Colleen Stan. She was naive, pliable, and her history was tinged with tragedy — a broken home, a broken marriage, a few aimless years of young adulthood. Then, by a swift and cruel accident, she’d been standing at the side of the road when Cameron Hooker was hunting for a slave.

And she’d tried to be a good slave. She’d endured more than she’d resisted…and had survived.

However bewildering Colleen’s apathy, however BAD the details of her story, the prosecutor now felt positive that Colleen was telling the truth. She wasn’t evasive, didn’t contradict herself, take cheap shots, or try to make herself look good. And Christine Mcguire, for all her meticulousness and despite the poker face she maintained in the courtroom, harbored a hot sense of justice.

Over the past three days she’d come face-to-face with the gritty details of the crimes committed against this meek, obliging woman, and they left her outraged. They were beyond brutality, beyond reason, and they moved her to a personal vow that Cameron Hooker would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

But forces were already gathering to thwart that promise.

The cost of trying Cameron Hooker, estimated at between $100,000 to $250,000, looked to be the straw that would break the camel’s back. Toward the end of May, members of the Board had begun to grumble that if Hooker went to trial, the out-OF-COUNTY trial costs would force them to lay off between twenty and fifty county employees.

Off the record, the word went out to District Attorney James Lang that he ought to negotiate a plea for Cameron Hooker because the county simply couldn’t afford to try him. At first, Lang thought the Board was crying wolf. Moreover, he understood what the county bureaucrats did not: a lack of funds was insupportable grounds for negotiating a plea.

But ultimately the DA has to answer to the Board of Supervisors; they pull the purse strings. And they privately made it Clear that, in the county’s best interest, Lang should opt for a plea.

Meanwhile, innocent of these private exchanges between her husband and certain members of the Board, Mcguire was fishing.

She wondered if she could get Hooker to plead guilty and avoid a trial. In court on another matter, she approached Hooker’s defense attorney and asked, “What’ll it be, Papendick? Are we going to try this case, or is your CLIENT going to plead?”

Papendick grinned and unconsciously wrinkled his nose, a characteristic quirk. He could work to persuade his CLIENT to plead to the kidnap, he said, “but it’s my understanding that even though Hooker might have kidnapped her, the sex acts were consensual. All the sex charges will have to be dropped.”

“How the hell can someone be enslaved and validly consent to anything?” Mcguire snapped.

But when she came back to the office and told DA Jim Lang of the ridiculous deal Papendick had offered, she was startled to hear Jim say: “Take it!”

Before she could protest he bluntly told her: “There is no money to try Hooker.” She sat, stunned, as he explained the Board’s position. It slowly sank in: They were going to have to negotiate a plea.

Hooker was going to get the deal of his LIFE, and her hands were tied. If the county refused to pay for trying Hooker, she would have to form an offer that Papendick found ACCEPTABLE EVEN if it meant dropping all the sex counts, which carried the most severe sentences.

She phoned Papendick, offering to drop the sex charges, leaving only the kidnap, abduction to live in an illicit relationship, and false imprisonment charges.

Papendick said he’d talk to his CLIENT and get back to her.

At 5 P.m. that afternoon, he strode into the DA’s office to say that his client would accept.

The next day, while Deputy DA Mcguire was in court on another matter, Judge Watkins asked to speak to her in his chambers. He’d heard the rumors of a plea negotiation and wanted to know whether or not Hooker was going to trial.

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “We have to negotiate it because the Board says the county can’t afford to try it.”

He looked like he’d been hit in the stomach.

His first response, knowing that Mcguire had been living and breathing this case for months, was to offer his condolences.

Then he got angry. “The truly appalling thing,” he said, “is that the Board is dictating to the criminal justice system.”

Galling as this was, it seemed they were left with no alternative. If she stood up in court and gave the budget crunch as the real reason for negotiating, he would accept the plea — though with great reluctance.

The plea was scheduled to be taken the morning of June 10 in Judge Watkins’s court. Deputy DA Mcguire would drop the sex counts, and Papendick would enter Hooker’s guilty pleas to the kidnap and the remaining minor charges. The case would be referred to Tehama County Probation for a sentence recommendation, and Hooker would be incarcerated for a few years. That was all.

Originally, Mcguire had calculated that if Hooker got the maximum sentence on all counts, he’d get a hundred and fifteen years. Now Hooker would be sentenced to ten. With time off for good behavior, he could be out on parole in as little as four and a half years.

What was she going to tell Colleen?

After all those months of preparation, the case against Hooker would be decided not by a jury but by a bunch of bureaucrats who cared more for economics than for justice.

In no time, the Hooker case was making headlines again. It seemed the whole state was scandalized. If the very idea that justice could be bought was repugnant, that Tehama County wouldn’t pay for it was worse.