Perfect Victim (3 page)

She didn’t know it then, but it was an electrical gadget designed to shock her. To his great exasperation the device failed to work, so he shut the box up again and left her there.

an As the husband and wife prepared for bed upstairs, Colleen Stan sat naked and gasping in a bizarre prison, the construction of a man with perverse obsessions and sinister habits. Her abduction had been carefully planned: the head box, the knife, the handcuffs, all the essentials of the kidnap had been placed in the car for the express purpose of capturing someone just such as she.

When she had caught a ride out of Red Bluff with this wholesomelooking couple, she had fallen into his snare.

Now she was held captive in a box in their basement, her arms chained above her head, her legs tied, a spiny device between her legs, a constrictor cinched around her ribs, a blindfold around her eyes, and a sensory-deprivation box locked around her head.

She could hear nothing but her thumping heart and her own tortured breathing. All night she thought she was going to suffocate.

He left her boxed and bound and believing she was going to die.

Few prisoners have known a confinement more solitary, more frightening, more hopeless than the one Cameron Hooker was fashioning around his newfound slave.

it was a long night for Colleen.

Intense discomfort and sheer fright kept her awake. A few times she was startled by her captor’s hands unexpectedly against her bare back — she had thought she was alone, and suddenly he was there, touching her. Was he trying to scare her? Or was he just feeling to see if she was still warm and breathing?

For Cameron Hooker, this night was surely thrilling, almost beyond belief. No wonder he could hardly keep his hands off her; his fantasy had finally become reality. He had rehearsed it so many times in his mind. He’d built the head box; he’d prepared the blindfold and the knife and the handcuffs; he’d even readied the equipment in the basement. And he’d pulled it off flawlessly: She had succumbed with nary a struggle, not even a scream.

Now he had her totally within his control. And no one knew.

He’d waited a long time for this night. Nearly two years had gone by since he’d first discussed the subject with his wife. But the idea had been brewing inside him much, much longer.

Nothing in Cameron’s upbringing would have predisposed him to unnatural or sadistic tendencies. He was raised within a traditional, warm and caring nuclear family — no child abuse, no divorce, no wife beating. He couldn’t even remember any major battles between his parents.

In fact, nothing stands out about Cameron’s childhood except impermanence.

Cameron was born in Alturas, California, on November 5, 1953, to a couple who had moved out from Arkansas in search of a better life. Harold and Lorena Hooker were simple folk, not highly skilled or well educated, and struggling to make ends meet.

While Cameron was growing up they moved every two or three years, his father pursuing work in construction or in sawmills, his mother usually staying home to take care of him and his younger brother, Dexter. The boys’ family life was secure, but they were constantly being uprooted: packing up, leaving school, and saying goodbye almost as soon as they’d made friends.

Cameron was generally quiet and kept to himself, though he was described as “a happy kid” in grammar school. He used to entertain the other children by pretending that he had a button in the middle of his back, and if anyone pressed it, he’d fall to the ground and play dead. It was a big hit during recess, especially with the giggling girls.

His sociable side seems to have taken a beating beginning about the time the Hooker family bought some property south of Red Bluff in 1969 and finally parked their mobile home at a permanent address. By now Cameron’s hormones had begun their adolescent campaign: he’d hit those horrible, awkward teens.

Used to being the tallest kid in the class, he now shot up even more, ungainly and skinny. With his heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, toothy smile, and uncoordinated limbs, Cameron was spurned by the “in” crowd and relegated to what students at Red Bluff High School called the “quad squad”-those outcasts who tended to hang out in a particular area of the grounds.

He had no close friends. He joined no organizations or teams.

He excelled at shop classes, learning about tools and machines and construction, but wasn’t much of an athlete and barely passed his academic classes. He had lots of time alone, lots of time to think.

No one would have guessed that this bland, gawky kid had anything exceptional going on in his head. But Cameron Hooker apparently had fantasies. Wild ones. Fantasies in which he had absolute power over the frightened objects of his desire. It seems that, in his imagination, this awkward, spindly adolescent whom no one seemed to notice was powerful, commanding, virile — conjuring up visions of nude, bound women. Helpless. At his mercy. And when he discovered pornography, the magazines that he stashed away in secret places evidently fueled these fantasies with images of leather and handcuffs and whips.

When he graduated from high school in 1972, Cameron Hooker went to work at the local lumbermill, Diamond Lands Corporation. It was a manly occupation, working around large, powerful, deafening machinery, ear-splitting saws, and heavy, black chains. He grew sideburns and let his hair get shaggy.

To the handful of women at the mill, Cameron was still less than attractive — quiet, easily ignored, and from the outside, so unremarkable as to be almost invisible. But Cameron’s secret daydreams of tying up and dominating women seem to have continued unabated. His mindless work apparently left him free to let his imagination run, to play back what he’d read in magazines, to concoct plans. He must have longed to realize them, to act out his fantasies; he just needed someone who would comply…

A plain, shy fifteen-year-old was the answer.

In 1973, a mutual friend introduced Cameron to Janice, a naive and insecure girl with frizzy brown hair, wirerim glasses, and a personality less mature than her figure. Being so much younger than Cameron, she was also nonthreatening and pliant.

Still a wide-eyed ninth grader, Janice must have found the attentions of this strapping nineteen-year-old flattering beyond all expectation. Unlike the other boys she’d met, he was nice to her!

She’d never been treated so well. The other boys walked all over her, but Cameron was gentlemanly, polite, and clearly a prize: well over six feet tall, congenial, with a big, warm smile. He even had a car.

They started dating — going out for drives, for burgers and fries, and to see horror movies like The Exorcist.

Perhaps they seemed an unlikely pair, but Cameron and Janice were similar in what they weren’t: Neither was attractive, well-off, or popular. Neither had much apparent interest in sports, literature, or culture. And neither was originally from Red Bluff.

Janice’s family had moved up from the San Jose area a few years earlier. They’d moved to a tiny house not very far from the Hookers’, with an orchard and not much more. Like Cameron, Janice lived in a rural setting, and grew up in a family that did not put much emphasis on education and never had much money.

She was the youngest of four children, the baby of the family.

She doesn’t remember her parents as warm or demonstrative. Her father, a bluecollar worker who worked long hours, wasn’t around much. Neither was her mother, whom she describes as a strict and reproachful woman. Janice was left to be raised, mostly, by her older sister, Lisa.

Lisa looked out for her and taught her how to sew, but Janice says she also harbored feelings of jealousy and resentment toward her older sister. She felt Lisa was always the favorite, soaking up the attention for which Jan constantly thirsted.

Jan had epilepsy as a child and somehow connected her illness with her parents’ indifference. She thought her father believed that people who had epilepsy were possessed by demons, and so he kept his distance. Whatever the cause, Jan recalls feeling rejected and disapproved of at an early age and says she was often told she was stupid but rarely told she was loved.

Janice’s submissive side emerged early on. Unattractive and insecure, her first infatuations with boys were marked by a fear of rejection: “No matter how good or rotten a guy was to me, I just kind of latched on to him.”

So a few months into her relationship with Cameron, when he proposed something peculiar, her reservations were quickly dispelled. In Janice’s own estimation, she was the “kind of person whojust gave in so somebody would love me.”

He wanted to hang her up, suspend her by the wrists from a tree without her clothes on. He told her his other girlfriends had let him do this, that lots of people did it. Not wanting to lose him, Janice went along.

He took her into the nearby mountains, strapped her into his handmade leather cuffs, and hung her up.

Jan was scared. It hurt: the leather cuffs cutting into her wrists, the pain shooting down her arms and back. But Cameron was so affectionate when he took her down — holding her, hugging her, and so obviously happy — that it was easier for her to agree the next time.

These excursions into the woods became regular events. Two or three times a month, he’d take Janice out to Tehama County’s vast woodlands to experiment. And though Janice was still little more than a child, her first sexual experiences involved a practice not many people know much about: bondage.

Cameron tied her up, staked her out on the ground, or hung her from trees. It frightened her but she endured it, waiting for it to be over because Cameron was always so sweet and tender to her afterward. It seemed worth the temporary pain. Soon he brought out the whips and beat her — not hard enough to leave permanent marks, he was careful of that, only welts. And when she’d beg to be let down, he’d let her down.

Sadism wasn’t a familiar word to Janice, nor was masochism.

She didn’t think Cameron would really hurt her, and he seemed to know what he was doing, so when he wanted to tie her up and dunk her in the creek, she agreed.

It was a singularly harrowing experience, a brush with death by drowning that Janice would never forget. Still, she was too afraid to tell her aloof and aging parents, too embarrassed and ashamed to tell anyone else what was going on. The sex, the whippings, the photographs he took of her — she knew they weren’t right. Who knew what her parents would do if they found out?

Probably punish her. Or worse, make her stop seeing the boyfriend who, except for this idiosyncratic side, was the nicest guy she’d ever met.

Jan’s emotions were jumbled. While disturbing, Cameron’s appetite for bondage seemed less important because he was always so loving toward her afterward. She couldn’t risk losing this relationship; it offered security, and no matter what the problems (which she didn’t fully understand), Cameron gave her the attention she was getting nowhere else.

And in some ways Cameron was good for her. He took her places she’d never been, and even taught her to water-ski and snow ski. Still just a young and idealistic girl, she romanticized the relationship, trying to ignore his bad points by concentrating on the good — his politeness, his easygoing manner, his sense of humor.

During a year and a half of dating, Janice decided she was in love.

But did Cameron love her? She thought she needed some kind of commitment from him. When she worked up the courage, Jan lied that she was pregnant and exacted a promise of marriage.

Janice’s sister had had to wait until age eighteen to marry; their parents weren’t thrilled about Jan getting married at such a young age, but they thought the world of Cameron, so at sixteen, Janice was given permission to wed. Instead of a big ceremony, she was given five hundred dollars for a wedding present. (In the back of her mind, Jan said later, she wondered why the rules should be different for her and her sister, and she suspected that maybe her parents just wanted to get rid of her.)

Cameron and Janice were wed on January 18, 1975, in Reno, Nevada. The young bride and groom said their vows, seemingly full of love and hope for the future — yet it was hardly a promising union, founded, as it was, on deceit.

And in fact, the two didn’t have much of a future to look forward to. Janice, not quite seventeen, dropped out of high school.

And though Cameron had noted for his senior class yearbook that he desired a career in construction, that would remain but a hobby. He continued to work as a laborer at the local mill.

They didn’t have much money, but then Cameron and Jan didn’t have high expectations. They made do, moving into a cheap row of duplexes — boxy structures with little character and a shared cement alley for a front yard.

Outwardly, Cameron and Janice Hooker were just another hopeful young couple starting a new life together. No one knew what went on behind closed doors: The sadistic experiments continued, becoming even more severe. Sometimes, Cameron choked Jan until she passed out. Not long into their marriage, when Janice and Cameron had a fight, he got so mad he put a knife to her throat and asked her if she wanted to die. Another time, Cameron showed her a scene in one of his underground newspapers, a horrific crucifixion, and told her that if he ever killed her, that’s how he would do it. It was becoming harder for Janice to ignore the possibility that her husband might actually kill her.

The first couple of years of marriage, she tried to fulfill her husband’s strange fantasies by being ever more submissive to his demands. But when Cameron produced an Army surplus gas mask, its eyes and airholes taped over, she balked. The gas mask terrified her, and Cameron had to gag her to keep her from screaming when he fitted it over her head.

Cameron’s experiments seemed to be getting more violent, more bizarre. Though she was afraid to actually stand up to him and refuse, Jan was no longer so keen on participating. It was too painful.

Perhaps Janice’s fearfulness made her a less exciting partner, or maybe Cameron was simply growing bored with her. More likely, one person was no longer enough to satisfy his cravings.