Perfect Victim (35 page)

She asked the doctor if they were “accurate depictions” of Colleen’s scars, and he concurred they were generally overexposed or out of focus.

Now that the medical doctor had described Colleen’s physical scars, the state called a psychologist to describe her emotional ones.

When the prosecution called its expert witness, Dr. Christopher Hatcher, few realized it would take him about ten minutes simply to present his credentials.

Dr. Hatcher was an associate clinical professor and the Director of the Family Therapy Program at the Langley Porter Institute in San Francisco. He’d served as a consultant to universities and organizations from London to Hong Kong. His background included training programs involving hypnosis, terrorism, and victim behavior, and he’d received grants to research hostage behavior, as well as to study the People’s Temple and its members.

He belonged to a host of professional associations and had authored papers relating to hostage behavior, violent behavior within adults, and persuasive ability. He had worked with the U.S. Department of Justice, Scotland Yard, Hong Kong Police, San Francisco Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department, the U.S. Secret Service…

By the time Dr. Hatcher finished, if anyone listening remained unimpressed, they’d probably stopped breathing. His diction and demeanor added to an impression of erudition.

When Dr. Hatcher mentioned that he’d studied sadomasochism and bondage/discipline behavior, Mcguire asked that he explain what he meant by those terms. Finally, after hearing so much about the practice, the jury was to learn about the theory.

“The definition really requires that we look at a dimension,” he began. “For example, some behavior that involves a person who is dominant versus a person who is submissive would be very much within the normal range. On this end, we might see a couple shopping for groceries. One person is making decisions, another may be bringing packages. This is on one end of the dimension.

“As it moves into the sexual side, you will see, in a lot of sexual behavior, a degree of tension, a degree of excitement that’s involved; and of course, that’s a part of something we all know about. That degree of tension, when moved into what’s called bondage and discipline, means that you are magnifying that tension by physically restricting someone’s movement. In other words, you are going to tie them up or require them to do certain types of acts of submission; and for the people who are involved with that, that forms a pattern of excitement. Individuals who are generally involved in bondage and discipline in this part of the continuum are involved in consensual activity.

“We then move farther over to sadomasochism. More than just bondage and discipline, it’s actually the giving and receiving of pain that is involved in generating sexual excitement. Now, those types of individuals, again, form largely a consensual relationship. There are various types of ways of agreeing to participate in this activity.

“Then, at the far end of this continuum, way out on the other side, we see those types of individuals where their drive is so strong, the stimulation of sadomasochism is so strong, they will take an individual, imprison them, and sometimes kill them in the process of completing their various fantasies; and this category of individual is way out at this end of the stream,” he said, completing a line in the air.

With this understood, Mcguire asked about the psychologist’s professional experience in captivity, kidnappings, mind control, and coercion. Among other things, Hatcher had participated in over twenty investigations involving kidnap and hostage cases, including a handful involving the three elements addressed here: imprisonment, involuntary servitude, and sadomasochistic behavior.

Since having been retained by the Tehama County District Attorney’s office, the doctor told the court, he’d familiarized himself with the People v. Hooker case in the following ways: one face-to-face interview and several hours of telephone conversations with Colleen Stan; five hours of interview and five hours of telephone interviews with Janice Hooker; on-site visits to the Oak Street house and Pershing Road mobile home; a personal review of all evidence; a review of five ninety-minute and three sixty-minute tapes of police interviews with Colleen and Janice; a review of the preliminary hearing transcript, police reports, and interviews of approximately three thousand pages, as well as a telephone interview with Pastor Dabney.

By now, a collective “whew” was all but heard in the courtroom.

Mcguire then asked Dr. Hatcher to explain the meaning of “coercion.”

Again, he used the analogy of a continuum: “On the one hand, we might have pressure exerted to do all types of things every day. Moving somewhat farther, toward the center, we have coercion. In coercion, extraordinary pressure is being brought upon an individual to perform or do an act. This can be physical pressure, it can also be mental or psychological pressure. Of course, there can be many degrees and variations of coercion or extreme pressure.

“But, on the far side of that, keep going out on the dimension, then we have something referred to as ‘brainwashing,’ and the actual term ‘brainwashing’ comes from a journalist who published a book in 1951. It’s really not a legal term or psychological term for diagnosis.

“In brainwashing, what theoretically happens is not just that a person is pressured to do something or not to do something, but in fact their whole adult processes, their values, their way of looking at the world is changed completely. In my expenence with a wide variety of individuals, I can only report five or six cases in which you could make a pretty good objective case for a brainwash.

“So that what we are talking about here is not brainwashing, which is a relatively rare phenomenon, but simple coercion.”

Summing up, Mcguire said, “Doctor, let me see if I have this straight. We are talking about a continuum, and you have persuasion at one end, coercion in the middle, and brainwashing at the far end, is that right?”

“That’s right.” And by now the whole courtroom had surely grasped this.

Because of Judge Knight’s ruling, Mcguire could not ask the psychologist to speculate specifically about this case. Instead, she would have to base her questions on a hypothetical situation. She asked the doctor to assume certain facts, then meticulously outlined the elements of Colleen Stan’s first six months of captivity: the kidnap, hanging, whipping, imprisonment in a box, deprivation of food and light, lack of hygiene, dunking, burns, and so on.

“Now, Doctor,” she concluded, “assuming those facts, based on your experience, training and education, do you have an opinion as to whether those facts are sufficient to coerce a person?”

Papendick promptly objected to the hypothetical. He was overruled.

Dr. Hatcher said the facts “would be sufficient to coerce the majority of individuals into a desired behavior pattern and to give up any overt resistance.”

Mcguire then asked: “To ‘break’ a person-is that the same thing as coercing a person?”

Hatcher said the term, accepted within psychological literature, usually referred to “techniques initially developed by the Soviets and Chinese to establish coercion [to a degree that] you are able to extract a behavior or a confession, to the point at which a person essentially gives up their overt resistance and will do what you ask them to do.”

“Is that what we’re talking about here, given those sets of facts?”

“That’s correct.”

Mcguire then asked the doctor if there were specific steps which could be followed to break a person. Dr. Hatcher began an explanation so closely related to Hooker’s treatment of Colleen Stan, everyone in the courtroom seemed to lean forward to listen.

The first step, he said, is a sudden, unexpected abduction, followed by isolation as soon as possible. “Refuse to answer questions, place them in a cell-like environment, remove their clothes, and begin humiliation and degradation.”

1. Later, it was clarified that these were more accurately “techniquet” rather than “steps.” Dr. Hatcher pointed out that not all the techniques need be applied, and they needn’t be applied in any particular order. “The degree and intensity” of application of these techniques is “so variable that you could take three or four of them and, with particular individuals, achieve the result,” he said.

Asked to apply this first step to the hypothetical example, Dr. Hatcher said: “We have an individual who is initially in a situation in which the average person would feel somewhat comforted, in that it is a family in a car with a small child. The captor then not only displays the knife, the first point of danger, but rapidly puts a device upon the head which is beyond the realm of most people’s experience or ability to comprehend, so the degree of isolation imposed would be greater than, for example, a kidnapping in which someone puts a bag over their head or pushes them down in the seat and says, ‘Don’t look up. Don’t ask me any questions.’” Dr. Hatcher went on to explain that a cell-like environment stimulates a feeling that one’s worst fears are being realized, raising the level of fear and anxiety. Removal of clothes magnifies the feeling of vulnerability.

The second step in breaking someone, the doctor continued, is to physically or sexually abuse the person, to expose the captive’s vulnerability and shock her or him. “In other words, not only has the victim been stripped of their clothes and placed in a physically vulnerable position, but you are going to whip or abuse in some other way, specifically with sexual manipulation, to illustrate just how exposed and vulnerable they really are.”

Applying this to the hypothetical, Dr. Hatcher cited the sexual manipulation, and the exposure in terms of hanging and whippings, in which there is no perceived way of escape.

“The third step is extremely important,” he said, “and that’s to remove normal daylight patterns. All of us, both biologically and psychologically, are used to a certain day and night kind of sequence, and this has been well-documented in various types of scientific literature.” Removing this, either by placing someone in a constantly lit or constantly dark environment, “is very disorienting, and is a rather standard part of the techniques employed.”

The blindfold and boxes of the hypothetical, of course, accomplished this purpose excellently.

The fourth step, Dr. Hatcher explained, is “to control urination, defecation, menstruation, and to be present when these activities are performed. Basically, what you want to do here is destroy a person’s sense of privacy.”

He also pointed out that “if a person soils himself, and isn’t able to clean that up, the sense of shame in sitting or lying in their own waste product is really quite extraordinary, and individuals become very motivated to do what they can to get permission to clean themselves up. Most people have not had the experience since being a small infant, of sitting or lying in their waste product over a period of time. It takes you back to a period of vulnerability.”

The fifth step is to control and reduce food and water. Hatcher stated the obvious: “If you don’t get that food and water, you are going to die. So, on the one hand, they may be torturing you and preventing you from leaving, but on the other hand, they are bringing food and water.” This helps make the captive dependent upon the captor.

The sixth step is to punish for no apparent rhyme or reason.

Initially, the captive tries to figure out some rationale to the intermittent beatings but, finding none, eventually has to simply accept that punishment will occur with no reason.

The seventh step is to “require the victim to constantly ask permission for anything or any behavior. This would involve asking permission to be able to speak to someone, permission to take a tray of food. It is a type of training procedure.”

The eighth step is to establish a pattern of sexual and physical abuse. This “indicates to the person that this is what their new life is now going to be like.” It’s a way of “getting the person to realize things have changed in a permanent sense.”

The ninth step is to “continue to isolate the person. The captor has now become the source of food, water, human contact, as well. That’s important-information, as well as pain. All of us are information-hungry people. If you put us in a restricted environment without newspapers or magazines or television, that’s real nice for a while, but if it happens [that] you are totally cut off and weeks pass, all of us get a little hungry to find out what’s going on.

“Cut that off and tie it to one person. Being a source of information is extremely important. As well as human contact, the captor has a tremendous amount of power because he’s the human being that you see, he is that only point of contact.”

During his explanation, Dr. Hatcher spoke clearly, usually addressing himself to the jury. He wasn’t a man of few words, yet no one yawned.

Mcguire next asked how someone might learn the steps of breaking a person.

Dr. Hatcher listed three sources: the study of psychology; the law enforcement and military forces of “countries who have a rather low regard for human rights”; or, the most common, sadomasochistic and bondage and discipline literature.

“How are people initially attracted to this S/M and B and D literature?” Mcguire asked.

Hatcher’s answer must have been more interesting to Cameron Hooker than to anyone else in the room. He’d surely never heard himself explained so clearly.

“The consistency is rather interesting,” Hatcher said. About the time of puberty, a boy finds himself stimulated by images of people being tied up or tortured. “It’s initially extraordinarily disturbing to them. They tend to feel there’s something wrong with them.” And so this is suppressed; they don’t talk about it.

Instead, they eventually find S/M and B&D literature, which also isn’t talked about. “But the impulse and stimulation of this after a while just becomes more than they can keep to themselves,”

so, at an older age, the boy perhaps approaches girls, showing a picture and saying, “Would you like to try something like this?”

“The literature provides the stimulation, which doesn’t cause the behavior, there’s no mistake about that,” but it also shows “how you can hang someone up, how you can put them in certain types of positions of torture, how it’s been done before.”