Perfect Victim (25 page)

Returning home, Colleen had called her father’s number from Bakersfield, mid-trip, to let him know when she would be arriving, and a gathering of perplexed relatives had met her at the bus depot. Years too late, they had demanded to know where she’d been, what she’d been doing, and why she hadn’t written. Over breakfast, Colleen began to unravel the story of what she’d suffered, and during the next several days she revealed more, until her family had at least a superficial understanding of Colleen’s ordeal — though it’s doubtful any of them truly comprehended what Colleen had been through.

Outwardly, Colleen approached her new freedom with remarkable clearheadedness, moving in with her father and almost immediately setting about the task of finding work. She seriously considered taking the civil service exam but then landed a job in the housekeeping department of a hospital.

Beneath this composed exterior, “Kay Powers” struggled to regain her identity as Colleen Stan. After spending so many years as the Hookers’ slave it was difficult for her to completely sever those ties. They had formed her primary support system, even if a negative one, and Jan had been her only close friend.

These two troubled women, who shared problems no one outside the situation could possibly understand, wrote to each other sporadically but spoke on the phone almost daily — sometimes twice a day.

It was also difficult for Colleen to extricate herself from Cameron’s influence. She spoke to him on the phone, too, though it’s unclear how often or what was said. (Once, while Jan was still away, he simply called to ask how to make a tuna sandwich. In some ways, theirs was a mutual dependency.) In any case, Colleen had several phone conversations with Jan and Cameron over the next several weeks. Besides discussing mundane matters and simply touching base, the. Hookers gained Colleen’s assurance that she wouldn’t go to the police.

Jan said she believed Cameron was earnest about trying to change, and she told Colleen, “We owe him that chance.”

In keeping with her almost pathological selflessness, Colleen agreed.

Though her family urged her to contact law enforcement, she resisted, saying she wanted to put it all behind her and get on with her life.

For years, Colleen had suppressed her anger, knowing that if she offended Cameron she risked a beating. Even now, she scarcely recognized the rage locked within her subconscious. She expressed it in very indirect (and thus nonthreatening) ways.

In a casual, almost chatty letter, dated August 18, that she wrote to Cameron and Jan just after they got back together, Colleen made little direct reference to her captivity, talking instead of her new life at home and sending her love and greetings to those up in Red Bluff. Yet in the midst of this letter, apropos of nothing, Colleen inserted a powerful quote from the Bible, Psalm 64, which rings with a poetry of almost eerie significance:

Hear me, O God, as I voice my complaint; protect my life from the threat of the enemy.

Hide me from the conspiracy of the wicked, from that noisy crowd of evildoers, who sharpen their tongues like swords and aim their words like deadly arrows.

They shoot from ambush at the innocent man; they shoot at him suddenly, without fear.

They encourage each other in evil plans, they talk about hiding their snares; they say, “Who will see them?”

They plot injustice and say, “We have devised a perfect plan!”

Surely the mind and heart of man are cunning.

But God will shoot them with arrows; suddenly they will be struck down.

He will turn their own tongues against them and bring them to ruin; all who see them will shake their heads in scorn.

All mankind will fear; they will proclaim the works of God and ponder what he has done.

Let the righteous rejoice in the Lord and take refuge in him; let all the upright in heart praise him!

Then, with the comment, “I just love the Lord. He’s done so much for me, and I know he’s going to do so much more,” the letter goes on with its original breeziness, as if this profound nugget hadn’t been placed within the plain black and white text.

Colleen found the psalm meaningful enough to quote yet inserted it abruptly, almost as if she remained unconscious, even while writing, of any special message it might contain. Interestingly, she accidentally typed one line twice-“they shoot at him suddenly, without fear”-as if her mind momentarily stuck on that idea.

Except to say, “I pray for you and Cameron that you will never again get tangled up in a life of sin,” she made only one other reference to her former enslavement. At the close of the letter, she signed with some hesitancy over her name: “Love, Colleen (Kay).”

And on September 19, Colleen wrote to Jan: “If you get any more angry phone calls from my cousins — I don’t know what to tell you except they are not forgiving. But I do not want to play God, and I forgive you and Cameron for all things — it’s done.”

Meanwhile, things weren’t proceeding smoothly at the Hooker home. Jan and Cameron had reached a stalemate. The hangings, whippings, and abuse had come to a halt but so had Cameron’s apparent efforts to change. At one point he told her he’d read in a magazine that his only problem was a hormonal imbalance, and that it had a simple cure: “The article said all I have to do is drink one beer every night.”

Jan despaired. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. And her waking hours were bedeviled by sudden panic attacks. She feared it would start all over again, that Cameron would kidnap someone else, and that his sadistic habits, now idling, would soon slip back into gear.

As summer succumbed to the first morning chill of fall, Jan took her daughters and left — finally and for good.

Unable to shake her dark anxieties, she sought solace in church. But now Pastor Dabney was on vacation, and though she tried to talk to his temporary replacement, the clouds over her head refused to dissipate.

Finally, fate put Janice Hooker in contact with someone who could help her.

Jan had driven up to Redding for a doctor’s appointment.

Afterwards, she struck up a conversation with the receptionist, Connie Fleming, a plump, blond woman with a warm and open manner.

They talked for two hours. Obviously nervous, Janice asked Connie many questions — some quite personal, others vague — large questions of initiative and strength. Connie understood they were important to Jan and didn’t belittle or question. Instead, she responded with a sincerity that Jan apparently found as soothing to her psyche as salve to a wound.

At the end of this long conversation, Connie set up another meeting for the next week, when the doctor would be out of the office.

With Jan’s conscience a spinning whirlpool, she clung to her new confidante like a lifeline, conferring with Connie on the phone a handful of times over the next few days as she grappled with questions of right and wrong, of accountability, of fear, of guilt.

Still, she had lingering doubts. Maybe Cameron really was trying to change. She ought to give him a chance.

One afternoon, Jan went back to the mobile home and looked around. To her dismay, she found he still had a large collection of pornography — and was creating more. She found sculptures of nude women he was working on, and the footlocker in the bedroom still brimmed with hardcore magazines and bondage devices.

When Jan came in for her meeting with Connie on Wednesday, November 7, she’d done more than give her situation a lot of thought: She’d prepared a list of questions.

It was a single sheet, a short, handwritten list that reflected Jan’s inner turmoil. She gave it to Connie, and Connie read: Did any of your fears try and take you over? Did you ever go and cry on someone else? Did you ever say, “I can’t”? What made you change and where did you get the strength? What does religion mean to you? Are you afraid of your husband? What gives you strength every day to go on? Do you get angry? How do you let that anger out? Did you believe in God before? What do you feel about the enemy of your soul?

Connie held in her hand a clear and powerful cry for help. And she wasn’t one to leave such a cry unanswered.

It took hours. Jan was visibly upset, yet reluctant to reveal the cause of her problems. Connie probed gently, asking, “Jan, what is it you’re afraid of?”

Gradually, Jan let the truth slip out. It was her husband.

“He’s evil,” she said. “He gets off on sex pmes, on bondage. He ties people up and takes pictures of them.” Eventually, she disclosed how they’d kidnapped Colleen Stan, locked her up, and kept her for seven years.

“Why didn’t you do anything?” Connie asked at one point.

“I did,” Jan said, “I let her go.” She explained the events of the past few months, including the fact that she’d gone back to her husband, hoping that he would change, but that he hadn’t, and now she was afraid of what he might do next.

Connie realized she was way out of her depth. She advised Jan to get counseling and go to the police.

But Jan was afraid to turn Cameron in because if he got out, he’d “get even.” On top of that, “They’ll say I’m an accomplice. I’ll be locked up. I’ll lose my daughters!”

That was the knot Connie had to untie. She tugged at Jan’s sense of decency, her feelings of responsibility, but Jan was still afraid. Finally, Connie struck a chord: “You should turn him in because he might do something to your girls.”

She could almost see a change come over Janice, as if she’d awakened to a new resolve. Connie suggested a talk with Pastor Dabney, who had recently returned from his long vacation. At a loss for alternatives, Jan agreed.

It was afternoon by the time an emotionally wrought Janice Hooker sat down in Pastor Dabney’s office and started talking.

She still harbored fears she was doing the wrong thing, but the dam had burst, and she let spill the chilling secrets that had for so long remained untold.

It was nearly four o’clock when, with Janice Hooker’s consent, Pastor Dabney picked up the phone and called the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office.

When Undersheriff Mike Blanusa arrived at the church he found Mrs. Hooker so overwrought she was almost unable to talk, so the pastor was obliged to tell Blanusa why he’d been called. As he was relating what he knew of the crime, Mrs. Hooker REGAINED her composure and began filling in details.

What they told Blanusa, however, placed the crime within the city of Red Bluff, indicating that the police, not the sheriffs office, would have jurisdiction.

Police Detective Al Shamblin was dispatched to the pastor’s office.

It was after five by the time Shamblin arrived at the church.

The detective didn’t know it, but he was going to be spending a lot of time with this woman who sat before him, red-eyed and with tissues in hand. She needed to talk, and he would be the man — more even than Pastor Dabney — to whom she would unburden herself.

More than Colleen Stan’s 1977 abduction was troubling Janice Hooker, more than Colleen’s imprisonment and enslavement, more than the possibility that Cameron Hooker would kidnap someone else. More, much more had been stalking her conscience over the past many years.

Verging on hysteria, Jan began to relate the story of a 1976 kidnapping. In late January of that year they had picked up a girl by the name of Marliz Spannhake in the nearby town of Chico. That night, she said, Cameron had murdered her.

When Shamblin clarified that Jan had been with Hooker at the time of the abduction, he decided it was time to advise her of her rights: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law….”

Already panicky, she balked. Her worst fears had been realized: She was going to be prosecuted and her daughters taken away from her. Burying her face in her hands, she moaned, “I feel like I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

Finally, she asked to see an attorney.

That put an end to Shamblin’s questions, but by now, Jan appeared on the brink of emotional collapse. She was crying hard and talking in incomplete sentences. Her mental state was so poor that Shamblin and Dabney, worried about leaving her alone, discussed sending her to the county mental health unit.

Janice volunteered that she’d been seeing a counselor, Sally Leonard, at the Tehama County Mental Health Department. They phoned Leonard at home, advised her of Jan’s condition, and put her on. Leonard spoke with Jan a few minutes and calmed her down.

Finally, with Pastor Dabney’s assurance that he knew of a couple whom Jan could stay with OVERNIGHT, Detective Shamblin returned to police headquarters to make his report.

Like a powerful locomotive groaning heavily to a start, the wheels of justice began to turn. Phone calls were made, computer files checked, reports passed. Cameron Michael Hooker’s rap sheet showed him to be absolutely clean — no arrests, scarcely so much as a traffic violation. Ditto Janice Hooker.

Detective Shamblin’s immediate superior, Lieutenant Jerry Brown, contacted the Chico Police Department, and by the next afternoon, two important points were certain: first, an eighteen-year-old by the name of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake (nicknamed Marliz) had disappeared from her Chico address on January 31, 1976; and second, investigating this dusty and forgotten case would be extraordinarily difficult without Mrs. Hooker’s cooperation.

That understood, Lieutenant Brown and Detective Shamblin walked across the street to the DA’s office, seeking immunity for Janice Hooker in exchange for her cooperation regarding the Spannhake and Stan cases.

District Attorney Lang, a man who had viewed the law both from street level as a Los Angeles cop and from the elevation of the judge’s bench, was highly skeptical of Janice Hooker’s story, particularly that unlikely business about Stan having been a slave.

It took some time, but Brown and Shamblin eventually swayed him, and Mrs. Hooker was granted immunity from prosecution. The next day, Friday, November 9, Shamblin called Janice advising her that she’d been granted immunity and asking her to come to police headquarters to make a statement, She agreed.

Jan came in appearing much calmer than she had two days before, but at first she was unresponsive. Still doubtful about conditions of her immunity, she was cautious in her answers.