Perfect Victim (37 page)

Hatcher wouldn’t grant those kinds of liberties with the term.

He pointed out that, while there may not have been a specific beating or incident preceding the development of a relationship, the guard or officer was nonetheless perceived as a person in authority who had the power to protect the prisoner from torture or death.

Here the defense attorney asked Dr. Hatcher if he were familiar with the term “coercive persuasion.”

The psychologist said the term had arisen in the 1950s, but had fallen from use and was no longer a common psychological term.

“Does coercive persuasion have a generally accepted definition in your field?”

“No, it does not.” Dr. Hatcher explained that it had never gained general acceptance, and that it wasn’t listed in the index of the American Psychological Association Psychological Abstract, or the Index Medicus.

(Terminology later became a sticking point. Dr. Lunde would use this term in his analysis of the Hooker case, attempting, in turn, to discredit Hatcher’s use of the term coercion.)

Overall, Papendick seemed unable to take control of this witness. He unwittingly gave Dr. Hatcher the opportunity to further assist the prosecution when he asked: “What are the effects that one would expect to see in a coercive situation?”

“There are several,” the psychologist said. “The most interesting one is a numbness of affect. You may, for example, ask someone to describe something related to their captivity, and they will describe something that is, by most objective standards, truly appalling, yet it is not expressed with a great deal of emotion. There is a flatness or blunting of affect.”

The meaning of Colleen Stan’s indifferent manner instantly clicked into place.

Hatcher explained another effect might be “intrusive images,”

something like nightmares in the daytime. Mcguire hadn’t asked if Colleen experienced this, but it seemed a reasonable guess.

A third characteristic, Hatcher said, “is that they want to try and get their lives back to normal. Before they can begin to deal with the images and impact of this, they have to put a great deal of effort into creating what is almost a veneer of a normal life. To have a job, to have some friends, to have some activities, is almost like a kind of teddy bear. It’s a security, and they will work to do that before they start to go back and, in depth, deal with the problems they have had in their captivity.”

To Mcguire’s mind, this fit Colleen perfectly. She wondered if the jury perceived this.

Papendick then switched to another line of questioning, and here he made headway. He asked Dr. Hatcher whether, in order to judge a person in a coercive situation, it would be important to know the person’s background.

Hatcher said, “It would be contributory.”

“What do you mean by ‘contributory’?”

“Helpful, useful.”

“Would that include social history?”

“All history.”

“Social, family, marital, medical, sexual?”

“It would be useful.”

Mcguire’s hackles went up. After having successfully countered Papendick’s motion to admit the victim’s prior sexual conduct, she was alarmed that Papendick might work it in. She only hoped it wasn’t as glaringly apparent to the jury as it was to her that Papendick had uncovered some evidence about Colleen’s past which he believed would help the defense.

But Papendick miscalculated when he handed a magazine to Hatcher and asked him to tell the court which of the sixteen coercive techniques it covered. He apparently remained unconvinced that Hooker’s pornography collection could be used as instruction for coercion.

The psychologist promptly responded: “Page thirty-two in Captive Maid, we have sudden unexpected abduction.”

“Which technique is that?”

“That’s number one. Sudden, unexpected abduction. The isolation is begun as soon as possible. You begin the humiliation, degradation, sensory isolation. You remove the clothes.”

“That’s number one?”

“That’s all number one. Fairly clearly, I think, both illustrated and in text. I can quote from the text if you like.”

“No. I just want to know what number techniques are included.”

Dr. Hatcher then mentioned number six, creating an atmosphere of dependency.

“How is that illustrated in that article?” Papendick protested.

“Well, it’s illustrated by saying whipping and degradation are always accompanied with sex.”

“How is that dependency? Didn’t you talk about that before as dependent for food and water?”

“You are also dependent upon the individual whether or not they are going to beat you anymore.”

This clearly wasn’t developing as Papendick had hoped. He snatched the magazine away and, to Mcguire’s amazement, continued with this line of questioning. He handed the doctor an article which was, essentially, a pornographic movie advertisement, surely believing this illustrated no coercive techniques whatsoever.

The doctor appraised the article and listed techniques eight, nine, ten, and thirteen.

Still, Papendick didn’t abandon this line of questioning. He handed Dr. Hatcher the article that accompanied the slavery contract. This was a mistake.

He’d given the prosecution’s expert full rein, and Dr. Hatcher made excellent use of it. He listed techniques ten, sixteen, eight, and six, giving detailed explanations of how these were illustrated in the article.

Papendick seemed to realize his error in trying to fight Dr. Hatcher on his own territory and concluded this line of questioning by turning it to his advantage: “Are any of those sixteen techniques used by, say, the Marine Corps in boot camp training?”

Dr. Hatcher admitted that “some of the behaviors” were.

Completing his crossexamination, Papendick asked, “Do you know Dr. Donald T. Lunde?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Would you consider him an expert in forensic psychiatry?”

“Yes, I would.”

And with that, the psychologist was excused.

Anticipation had run high before the sex slave’s testimony, then tapered off during the prosecution’s string of less spectacular witnesses. Now the halls were again packed with television cameras, for today, Friday, October 18, there would be big news: The slave master was going to speak.

After nearly a month of sitting in silence, smiling or sulking, always enigmatic, Cameron Hooker was going to testify in his own behalf. Throughout the trial, Hooker had always made sure his hair was neatly parted and combed before entering the courtroom.

Today he was particularly meticulous. Dressed in the same tweed sports jacket he’d worn from the first, a gray tie, a white shirt, and shiny shoes (Janice said they were the first dress shoes he’d ever owned), Cameron Hooker entered the packed courtroom.

The defense attorney lost no time in getting to the matter at hand. He asked Hooker about May 19, 1977, and with a smalltown-boy earnestness, Hooker related his recollection of that day.

He said he’d picked up Colleen Stan on Antelope Boulevard at about three P.m.

“Did Jan know what you were going to do?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what you were doing prior to that?”

“We were going to go up into the hills and practice bondage,” Hooker said, as if this were a most ordinary afternoon activity.

In most respects, Hooker’s account of the kidnapping closely followed that of Colleen and Janice. At first it appeared that, relying on the protection of the statute of limitations, he was going to confess to the entire incident, but his version soon diverged from the one presented by the prosecution.

Though he admitted kidnapping Colleen at knifepoint, he denied having held the knife to her throat. Instead, he said, he held it to her chest and stomach area.

Papendick asked, “Why did you kidnap her?”

“I had a fantasy of practicing bondage on a girl who couldn’t say no.”

Hooker said he and his wife had “kicked around the idea,” and had even considered running an ad in a magazine, but he hadn’t had any particular plan. The idea had occurred to him after they’d picked up Colleen, while they were riding in the car.

(He interjected that he and Jan could “communicate without words,” which explained how she knew what he was going to do when he’d only just realized it himself.)

Going back to the kidnap, Papendick asked, “What was Colleen’s demeanor?”

“What does that mean?”

“How did she act?”

“Real spacey,” Hooker said. She would jump when he spoke to her, and this, he contended, had “a great deal” to do with his decision to kidnap her. He said he thought he “wouldn’t have any trouble” doing it.

By the time he’d gotten Colleen home and into the basement, she was “plenty scared” and shaking. He hung her up only “for a little bit, till she started crying,” about five or six minutes.

Hooker admitted committing the crime yet softened it, making it less severe in its details, presenting himself as somehow boyishly mischievous, even caring.

That first night, he said, “I was beginning to feel real bad about everything I’d gotten myself into.”

He put Colleen in an old crate he and Jan had used for S/M, checking on her several times throughout the night because he was “worried about her.”

He couldn’t remember if he’d gone to work the next day.

He planned to let her go, he said, but he couldn’t take her “for some reason,” and so he was stalling until the next day.

In the meantime, he built a table and moved her onto that so she could lie down.

“Did you hang her up?”

“No.”

By the third day, Hooker said, he felt it would be safe to let her go. “She was hitchhiking, on drugs, had drugs in her purse,” and he decided she was probably no threat since she didn’t know who they were or where she was. But later, when he went downstairs and unlatched the head box, she proceeded to describe almost exactly where they lived.

Hooker went back upstairs and told his wife. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said sadly.

Did he hang Colleen that day?

“No.” In fact, Hooker contended that he hardly ever hung Colleen. The bondage with her “didn’t work,” he said. And he protested that he “had no interest in having sex with her.”

Colleen was still “scared to death,” and he couldn’t let her go. “It tore me up inside to leave her secured,” he said. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

Meanwhile, Hooker told the court, Colleen was “downright sick.” He spent several hours with her in the basement, talking with her and holding her hand. She asked him “about drugs and stuff like that,” but he knew nothing about drugs. She told him she was afraid she was going to be sick and asked for the drugs that were in her purse, but he’d already thrown them away.

She continued to get sicker over the next two weeks, sweating and shaking.

In Hooker’s story there was no bondage, Colleen was unrestrained, and he spent many hours down in the basement with her. “Sometimes we’d hug,” he said. And sometimes, after talking she wouldn’t let go of his hand.

Hooker claimed he talked about himself very little, but Colleen was quite talkative. “She was down on everyone — her parents, her past. She talked to me about most of it — just about everything.” But Cameron was stuck. “I was afraid to let her go. All I wanted to do was get her out, I just couldn’t figure out how,” he said, presenting his predicament with an “aw-shucks” chagrin.

After the second week, Colleen was better. By now Cameron had built the box, and she was kept in it unrestrained until he came downstairs after work and let her out. Then she would be out of the box and unbound for four to six hours, he told the court.

“She slept a lot for the second and third months, and me and Jan had faced the fact that we were stuck with her for a long time.” He considered soundproofing the whole basement, but decided it was too expensive. Again, he explained, “I didn’t know how to let her go without ending up in jail.”

Did she bathe? Papendick asked.

“Not the first two weeks,” Hooker said. “After that, once or twice a week.”

“Was she still blindfolded?”

“Yes.”

After about three months, he and Janice built the workshop together so that Colleen wouldn’t be “stuck laying down during the day, and she could do what she wanted.”

He gave Colleen some walnuts to shell because “I asked her and she said she’d like to have something to do.”

During the first three months, he hung her only twice. “Me and her’d become very close, and she asked about my interest in bondage.” He hung her up but she started crying so he let her down. She asked how long she’d been up, and when he told her only five or six minutes, she asked why it was so short. It was because of her tears, he said — just like with Jan, when she cried, he stopped.

But there was no sex. Hooker was emphatic about this; he’d promised Jan there would be none. But Colleen, he said, kept asking him: “Why?”

“She just couldn’t understand that,” he said, shaking his head.

The second time, he hung her for about fifteen minutes.

Papendick asked, “What’s the longest period you would hang Jan?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Why?”

“I’d seen in a Boy Scout book or a first aid book that tourniquets are only supposed to be used a maximum of twenty minutes.”

(The press and spectators, unable to contain themselves, reacted with soft guffaws.)

Papendick plunged ahead. When he asked the defendant about other bondage he’d performed on Colleen, Hooker described something far outside any Boy Scout manual: the dunking incident.

He admitted tying her up and putting her face in the water, but, he said, “I was careful not to let her choke.”

Asked why he’d done this, Hooker matter-of-factly responded: “I’d done it to Jan before, and I just tried it.”

Just like that. Perhaps, since these were uncharged offenses and bondage between consenting adults is legal, he felt there would be no harm in openly describing these incidents. Or perhaps, having already said, “it tore me up inside to leave her secured,” he believed he’d established himself as a warm and feeling person who simply had kinky tastes.

It wasn’t long, however, until Hooker slipped badly. Papendick asked if Colleen were allowed upstairs the first six months.