Perfect Victim (33 page)

“After he let me out of the box in 1980.”

“Why did you tell him you loved him?”

“Because he treated me better, didn’t lock me in the box, gave me more freedoms.”

“Did you believe that Cameron loved you?”

“He told me he did.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I didn’t know.”

While the defense attorney was pursuing this line of questioning, Mcguire brooded over the new evidence Papendick just dropped on her desk. This was a prosecutor’s worst fear: unexpected evidence. The state is required to fully disclose its case to the defense, but since the reverse isn’t true, there was always the danger of a sudden bombshell being exploded. And now it had. She recalled that she’d heard rumors of “love letters” months ago, but since Colleen and Janice claimed to know nothing about them, she’d put them out of her mind.

Now they lay inches from her fingertips, but she resolved not to read them until later. She didn’t want the jury to realize this information was new to her, or to see how worrying it was.

Papendick asked Colleen a range of questions — about her diet, her encounters with family and neighbors, jogging — before coming back, again, to the letters. He quoted: “I seem to be falling deeper and deeper in love with you.”

Colleen protested that Cameron had told her to write of her love for him.

Papendick, undaunted, pondered the letter in his hand and smiled, saying, “Sweet. Sounds like a teenager wrote it.”

By now Colleen’s eyes were red. She was sniffling as Papendick let loose with a barrage of questions about the eighth rape count.

Specifically, he wanted to know whether she’d asked Jan if it was okay.

Colleen said she’d asked that because they’d been telling her that she needed sex, that God had told them that Cameron was to be the one to satisfy her needs, that they’d pressured her for weeks.

Again, Papendick asked whether she recalled saying “okay?”

“I don’t recall,” she said, looking away.

Papendick questioned her rigorously on this count, having her describe again what had happened, getting her to contradict herself on a previous statement, and finally bringing her to tears.

The unemotional witness was crying.

Having made his major points, Papendick jumped around to various time periods, asking about the letters she’d mailed home, incidents of bondage she’d testified to, her relationship with Jan.

Then, abruptly, he was done.

For a second time, Mcguire was startled by the brevity of Papendick’s crossexamination. Another thirty-five minutes, and the jury would have gone home to sleep on all the doubts he’d raised. Now she had a chance to dispel these.

Letting the “love letters” sit until she’d had a chance to read them, Mcguire questioned Colleen about the damaging photograph of her hugging Cameron, giving her a chance to reassert that Cameron had told her to make it appear they were in love and that she feared letting her family know the true situation. Further, she hadn’t told her family what was going on because Cameron had said the house and cars were bugged with minute and precise listening devices.

Only a few of Mcguire’s questions were hard hitting. She let the last minutes of the day elapse, still worrying about those unread love letters.

That night, the lights were on well past midnight in Christine Mcguire’s hotel room. She went over the letters in exhaustive detail with Colleen, who, shaken by this new evidence, apologetically explained that she’d simply forgotten about writing them, it was so long ago.

Long after Colleen had gone to bed, Mcguire sat alone and read over and over the anniversary card Colleen had given to Cameron in May 1980, three years after the kidnap. The outside, decorated with a leaf and a “K,” said, “Happy Third Anniversary.”

Inside, it read: Sometimes I feel that being your slave has made me more of a woman. But then there are other times when I feel it has made me less of a woman. You know how to make me feel good about myself. And I love you so much for it. I only wish that my dreams could be fulfilled with you. Because I feel a strong love and need to be with you. I’ll always serve you with singleness of heart. K

The Christmas letter was even worse: This is my Christmas letter to express and give my love to my Master. You ask me to tell you how much I love you but I haven’t ever been able to tell you because I don’t know the right words to describe how much I love you but I seem to be falling deeper and deeper into love with you with each passing day. I find love hard for me to express with words. But you bring the passion out in me and it’s a way of expressing my love for you. You’ve also spiritually inspired me and I can’t tell you how much I love you. I really mean it. More than any words I know could ever tell. It’s not easy being a slave but your love makes it worth being your slave. I hope that your right about how things will change for the better and that I’ll have your child some day.

I promise you I’ll give you a son. I know you’ll be proud of him and I hope you’ll love him as much as you love me.

I know that you know that I have great faith in God, I read this in St. Luke: For with God nothing shall be impossible.

And I think you know how important it is to me to do everything with God in my heart, I need and want his guidance and strength. I can’t explain how happy it made me feel inside when you told me that if I ever have your child that you would take me as your spiritual wife. I pray it will be someday. That God will recognize our love and commitment and that he’ll join us to be one and that even though I’ll be your bondmaid (slave) and second wife that no one or anything will ever separate us. I wish you a Merry Merry Christmas and the best of New Years. I pray that God will always hear your prayers and always answer them.

And that the Holy Ghost will always be with you to guide you and to give you insight and understanding so that you will always do that which will make your soul feel good.

I love you more than words could ever say, K

The third and last was another card. The outside read: “Just Inside, Colleen had written: Love is not a single act, but a climate in which we live, a lifetime venture in which we are always learning, discovering, growing. It is not destroyed by a single failure, nor won by a single caress. You cannot learn to love by loving one person only, for love is a climate of the heart.

My love for you is growing with every changing day. You fill my life with happiness and love. And I pray that that happiness and love will never end.

Love, K

The next morning, Mcguire opened by confronting the “love letters” head on, one at a time.

Asked why she’d written the anniversary card, Colleen said, “I suppose it was because I wanted to have something to celebrate,” since she didn’t observe holidays or birthdays.

Then Mcguire led her through the card, line by line, noting that Colleen had referred to herself as “your slave,” and had written: “I’ll always serve you.”

The Christmas letter was written around Christmas of 1980, just prior to her trip to Riverside. Why did she write it?

“I believe Cameron told me to, because I write in the beginning that he told me to tell how much I love him,” she said, then softly added: “I don’t understand why I wrote it.”

Mcguire went through the letter highlighting each reference to slavery, noting that Colleen called Hooker “Master,” and wrote, “It’s not easy being a slave.”

And what about writing that she wanted to have his child?

“Cameron told me that over and over,” Colleen said.

Flipping through her notes, Mcguire confronted the points Papendick had raised the day before, hoping her methodical approach could counteract the witches’ brew of questions Papendick had splashed across her case. Cameron Hooker watched as she went over information as minor as that Colleen gave him the tips she made at King’s Lodge, and as major as the several felony counts against him.

All the while, the jurors studiously took notes.

Defense Attorney Papendick began his re-cross-examination with a request to put some of his own markings on the time chart the prosecutor and Colleen had created so many months before.

Mcguire objected, since she hoped to use it in her closing argument, and a ten-minute discussion ensued about whether and how Papendick might be able to unobtrusively mark up this prop for use in his argument as well. They discussed little numbers, green as opposed to red or perhaps black, and considered larger or smaller markers. The judge, a natural comedian, couldn’t help but see the humor in this, and while he joked about judicial function, the jury laughed at the spectacle of these dignified attorneys getting caught up in such trivialities.

With the details finally ironed out, Papendick had Colleen ink in the times she was out of the box, going to bars, jogging, or gardening. He quibbled with her about seasons, and she scowled but eventually the little numbers were in place.

This done, Papendick moved on to his last volley: phone records from Pacific Bell. There were a surprising number of calls placed from Colleen’s father’s residence to the Hookers’, and these he listed one at a time, being careful to include the time and duration of each call. Many were more than twenty minutes long.

Papendick read these into the record, underscoring them in the minds of the jurors, interrogating Colleen on each. He asked to whom she spoke on each occasion. For most, Colleen could only weakly reply, “Probably Jan.”

His point made, Papendick excused the witness and sat down.

With the trial into its third week and the sensational “sex slave” testimony over, the interest of the press slackened and the line-up of witnesses for the prosecution moved to those on the periphery, who had viewed the Hooker household from the outside. Mcguire would call a total of nineteen witnesses — a few important neighbors and relatives, a doctor, and the expert witness, Dr. Hatcher — putting the strongest testimony at the beginning and end.

After Janice and Colleen’s long stretches on the stand, the parade of subsequent witnesses went quickly. Neighbors and family members testified they’d known Colleen as “Kay,” the live-in babysitter. They repeatedly stated they’d met her in 1979, 1980, or 1981, indirectly confirming she’d been in the box the rest of the time, but adding little substantive evidence.

Under crossexamination by Papendick, no one could claim to have seen any bruises or injuries on “Kay,” nor to have witnessed any violent incidents. Only a few witnesses offered something fresh, a new angle, a possible insight.

On the heels of Colleen’s testimony came a witness who didn’t even have to speak to jolt the courtroom. The bailiff called Bonnie Sue Martin.

She entered looking so much like her sister it was as if Colleen had reappeared at a younger age — except for one stunning feature: her hair. Bonnie’s gorgeous long hair fell well past her waist, full and luxuriant as a red-headed Godiva’s.

The court had seen Colleen’s thinning head of dishwater wisps. Now, as Bonnie swept across the room, she seemed the living, breathing example of how God intended Colleen to look: energetic and robust, with thick, rich hair tumbling down her back in shiny waves. Whatever words Bonnie might utter, nothing said more than the simple fact of her appearance.

She took the stand, and Mcguire opened with a few questions about the three letters she had received from Colleen in 1979, then turned to the 1980 phone call from Colleen. Bonnie gave a moving narrative, her voice cracking as she described the brief, unexpected call from a sister so long missing that she couldn’t even recognize her voice. “Her voice was very shaky,” Bonnie said, “like she was being pressured.”

Bonnie then described Colleen’s short visit to Riverside in 1981. Glancing at the defendant, she said he was introduced as Mike.

Mcguire asked how Colleen had acted around Cameron Hooker.

There were no hugs or words of endearment, she explained.

And Colleen had oddly neglected even to mention “her fiance” until just minutes before she left. “I didn’t think they were boyfriend and girlfriend,” she added.

Bonnie was shocked by the dramatic change in her sister’s appearance. “I always called her Pudgy,” she said tearfully, “but she was not the ‘Pudgy’ that I knew.”

Struggling to regain her composure, she said that was the last time she saw Colleen until August, 1984.

Papendick spent very little time with this witness, probably believing it best to get her off the stand quickly. He showed her the photograph of Colleen hugging Cameron at her father’s house in 1981, but Bonnie claimed she couldn’t recall the picture being taken.

He also took this opportunity to try to work in some information about Colleen’s past, but Mcguire promptly objected, leaving the jury only with the knowledge that Colleen had been married at a young age, and that for some reason the prosecutor didn’t want this discussed.

The testimonies of Mr. and Mrs. Coppa, the Hookers’ next door neighbors, precipitated some controversial behavior on the part of Judge Knight.

Mcguire’s questioning of the matronly, retiring Mrs. Coppa uncovered little that wasn’t by now familiar to the jurors — that “Kay” babysat the Hookers’, daughters, worked “really hard” in their garden, and apparently left for an extended period and then returned.

Papendick’s questions revealed little more, but then he asked, “Did Kay appear to be a regular member of the Hooker household?” to which Mrs. Coppa stammered the response: “Uh, well, yeah, I guess you could say that.”

Judge Knight apparently felt this left an important question unanswered, so once the attorneys had wrapped up their questions he turned to Mrs. Coppa and asked: “Did it appear to you that she was like a servant?”

Seeming relieved at having been asked this, Mrs. Coppa replied, “I remember saying to a friend quite a while ago that she was like a slave.”

Her words fell across the hushed courtroom like shattering glass.

This incident did nothing for Papendick’s opinion of the judge. And following the testimony of Mr. Coppa, his smoldering displeasure with Judge Knight would spark into behind-the-scenes hostility.