Perfect Victim (4 page)

In any case, Cameron began discussing a fantasy that he’d had for a long time: He wanted to bring a third person into the home, another woman who would submit to his sadomasochistic experiments, “a girl who couldn’t say no.”

He told her that this third person would take part in his more demanding practices. It would be easier on Janice, he said, if she would just go along.

And, finally, she had.

The underground papers Cameron read always had lots of listings in the back; maybe they could run an ad. Of course, most of the ads were from people in the San Francisco Bay Area. And it might be expensive — running an ad, bringing someone up. The woman might want to be paid. That was a problem. And it would only be temporary.

While Cameron fussed about the logistics of finding and keeping another woman, Janice worried that this third person would be a threat to their marriage. Despite his darker habits, Jan still felt that she loved Cameron; she’d grown so dependent on him, she could hardly imagine being without him. So, while she was relieved by the idea of Cameron focusing the more painful acts — especially the hangings — on someone else, she was insistent that there should be no sexual intercourse between her husband and this other woman. They were man and wife, and as she saw it, true intimacy should be reserved solely to them.

It’s not clear exactly when or how, but ultimately Cameron and Janice reached an understanding. It was a trade-off. He could kidnap someone if she could have someone as well. She wanted a baby.

By now they’d found a more suitable address: 1140 Oak Street. It was a small two-bedroom house with yards front and back, hardwood floors, a nice dining room, and a basement.

The basement was tiny, but it would do. With boards from the Diamond lumberyard, Cameron constructed a wide table — a platform, really — that he dubbed the rack. He affixed eyehooks at each corner so the leather cuffs he’d made could be easily attached when he wanted to stake out Janice. He put additional hooks in a beam in the ceiling, for hanging. And then he built the head box.

It was an ingenious contraption, built strong and heavy surprisingly heavy, with those big metal hinges and its dual walls.

He had Janice come down to test it, and sure enough, the neck hole was the right size and it closed just as it should.

But not everything went according to plan. Though Cameron’s preparations were ample and his plans well thought out, finding the right person wasn’t so easy. Janice got pregnant and had her baby, a girl, in the fall of 1976, but Cameron still hadn’t managed to accomplish his end of the deal. He had all the equipment ready in the car, had even stalked a few women, snapping photos with his telephoto lens, but none of them had panned out. Though he’d come within a fraction of realizing his single, driving ambition, something always went wrong.

But on May 19, 1977, Cameron Hooker’s luck changed.

At the end of his shift at Diamond, he came home from work as usual at about four o’clock. He picked up his wife and baby, and they went for a drive. They drove around for half an hour or so, and then he saw her.

Standing at the side of Antelope Boulevard, Colleen Stan wouldn’t have struck most people as distinctive. She was an average size and wore the casual attire of young people everywhere. Looking closely, one might notice her soft features and crystalline blue eyes, but from the perspective of a speeding car, she was just a young female hitchhiker.

He stopped and offered her a ride. Colleen surveyed the man, his wife, and their infant daughter, and decided they seemed innocuous enough.

The next morning Cameron Hooker came downstairs and took Colleen out of the box. He walked his exhausted captive across the basement and laid her down on the rack. He now locked the chains that were still around her wrists to the hooks at the rack’s top corners and tied her ankles to the ones at the bottom. Then he left her there, with the head box still on, for the rest of the day.

That evening, Janice and Cameron finally brought down Colleen’s first meal. Cameron let her up from the rack and removed the head box, but the blindfold stayed on. Her dinner was a bowl of potatoes au gratin and a glass of water. Sitting on the edge of the rack, she was allowed to feed herself, the chains dangling from her wrists as she blindly scooped up the food.

After she’d finished her meal, Colleen was permitted to use a bedpan, which Cameron later emptied upstairs. Then the chains on her wrists were replaced with the leather cuffs, and Cameron hung her for a while. Later, he put the head box back on, chained her down on the rack, and left her to the darkness…

Colleen remembers her second meal very well. It was a hot day, the heat exacerbated by the stuffy head box, and she had been lying on the rack, sweating. It had been another twenty-four hours since her last meal, and her captor apparently expected her to be hungry. He brought down a glass of water and a plate with two large egg sandwiches and let her up so she could eat.

But heat and anxiety had taken her appetite away. She ate half of a sandwich, drank all the water, and told him she was full.

“You should be grateful I brought this to you,” he scolded.

He told her she was wasting good food and demanded that she finish it.

Colleen replied that she was grateful, but she was just full.

Now he was furious. He slapped the leather cuffs on her wrists, hung her from the beam, then set about teaching her a lesson: He whipped her until she passed out. When she came to, she was standing on the ice chest, still hanging from the ceiling.

She felt faint, and her knees gave out from under her, but rather than take her down, Cameron pulled the ice chest out from under her again and beat her some more.

Finally Cameron took her down. He set her back on the rack, placed the egg salad sandwiches in front of her and said, “Now do you want to finish this?”

The last thing Colleen wanted to do was eat. Her back was on fire and she felt weak, but she was afraid of what Cameron might do if she refused, so she forced down the rest of the sandwiches. Then he snapped the head box back on, locked her again on the rack, and left.

Thus Colleen was initiated into what would become routine: one meal a day, extreme isolation, torturous restraints, and unexpected brutality. Time was no longer defined by the hands of a clock, but by the hands that turned the keys and unclasped the locks of her confinement. She teetered between hope and dread, yearning for those hands to release her bonds, yet fearing the pain those same hands could bring. She existed in a black, grim limbo. Helpless.

Even so, Cameron Hooker realized that keeping her chained to the rack was not the safest arrangement. True, she was secured in a cement basement with its two high windows covered and its single entrance locked, but it was just conceivable that she could alert neighbors or visitors by somehow making lots of noise. And if anyone entered, she was in plain view. No, the rack would not suffice for the long term.

While Colleen sweated on the rack in the Hooker’s basement, her roommate up in Oregon was growing concerned. Colleen had told Alice Walsh that she would be back in Eugene on Saturday, May 21. When Colleen failed to appear, Alice guessed that she might have continued down the length of California to visit her mother in Riverside. On Monday, May 23, Alice called Colleen’s mother to see if Colleen was there.

Their conversation left them both worried.

Though Alice remembered that Colleen had intended to visit Linda Smith in Westwood, she had no way to get in touch with her — Linda didn’t have a phone. On Tuesday, Alice called the Westwood police. They checked with Linda, who told them she hadn’t seen Colleen for some time, and they reported this back to Alice.

By Wednesday Alice knew it was time to contact the Eugene Police Department. A missing person report was filled out, a description given: Stan, Colleen Jean. DOB: 12-31-56. White female. 5′6″, 135 lbs. Long, light brown hair; blue eyes; freckles. Last seen wearing gray T-shirt, blue jeans, plaid jacket, brown shoes; has sleeping bag, sweater, and purse.

Like so many missing person bulletins, this one elicited no response. It was filed and forgotten.

Colleen had simply vanished.

There was no reason to assume that Colleen had been kidnapped and no evidence linked her disappearance to any particular locale between Eugene and Westwood. Cameron Hooker had left no clue that could be traced back to him.

On the surface, life at 1140 Oak Street went on as usual.

Janice focused her attention on the baby, trying her best to ignore what was going on literally beneath her feet. Only rarely did she venture down into the basement. She felt an unreasonable fear of Colleen, and the first time she went down to check on their captive, whom she could hear moaning and making noise, she took the shotgun with her, just to be on the safe side.

Meanwhile, Cameron carried on with his working-day routine at the lumberyard. And no one paid much heed when he loaded some heavy particle board into his pickup. A lot of the employees took home a little lumber. While all else seemed to proceed as usual, Colleen was on the brink of a change-not a major change, but her world had shrunk to such mean conditions that any alteration loomed large.

She endured long stretches of total immobility. Naked. Her head enclosed in the head box. Gagged, once again, and always blindfolded. A maddening stillness enveloped her, a blanket of isolation that her senses examined for the slightest fraying or variation. Finding none, her mind wandered.

How could she escape? She examined the possibilities. Her only chance would be when she was let up to eat, but then what?

She couldn’t overpower the man, he was much larger and stronger.

Perhaps her best chance was in persuading him to let her go. He must be sick. If she could somehow understand him and help him, maybe he would set her free…

The hours stretched on. Tired of puzzling over a seemingly impossible escape, Colleen dozed and daydreamed, her thoughts drifting through an imaginary future of splendid things she would do when set free, then turning to recollections of friends, of family, of times that were rapidly slipping into the distant and irretrievable past.

Colleen’s childhood virtually began with her parents’ divorce.

She was just three, the eldest of a trio of daughters, when Jack and Evelyn Martin split up. But the usual disruption that follows divorce was muted; neither of Colleen’s parents moved away after the break-up. Though Colleen was mostly raised by her mother, a sociable, chatty woman, she managed to stay close to her father, a quiet man who was an only marginally successful contractor.

(Both her parents eventually remarried, and Colleen and her two sisters, Janice and Bonnie Sue, ended up with two halfsisters and a half-brother.)

At the very least, Colleen grew up with a sense of place: Riverside, the site of California’s first navel orange tree, was always home.

In most respects Colleen’s seems to have been a pleasant and unremarkable upbringing in sunny, smoggy Southern California.

She played with her younger sisters, made average progress in school, and at some point developed a penchant for poetry. It was typical of Colleen to write and design cards, or make gifts for people as an expression of her love. She had a creative, warm, dreamy side.

While some high school students were tending their grade point averages with an eye toward higher education, Colleen seemingly lost interest in academics. It wasn’t in the cards for her to go on to college, and unfortunately she would acquire her education in that proverbial school of hard knocks.

At sixteen she dropped out of high school and married twenty-two-year-old Tom Stan.

Not much was known about Stan, a young man from out of town whom Colleen had met a few months earlier. Colleen’s father gave her permission to marry, and she and Tom were wed in Carson City, Nevada, on December 12, 1973. Colleen was just a few days shy of seventeen.

She moved with her new husband to his home state of Ohio, but they evidently started having problems as soon as they set up house. The marriage dissolved, and within a year Colleen had returned, brokenhearted and alone, to Riverside.

Back on her home turf, Colleen had the good sense to go back and pass the high school equivalency exam, but she apparently entered a restless period; nothing seems to have held her attention for long. She evidently held a smattering of jobs, moved around Riverside a bit, and had boyfriends off and on. Then she made friends with a couple from Oregon — Alice Walsh and her boyfriend, Bob.

Colleen seems to have embraced Alice, Bob, and their two-year-old son, Tomack, almost as an adopted family, as if she were searching for a place to belong. Apparently discontent with Riverside and inspired by her new friends, she moved with them up to Eugene.

They found a place together, but jobs were harder to come by, and even with the help of welfare it was difficult to make ends meet. During her few months in Oregon, Colleen earned what little cash she could by collecting and selling moss.

So, at twenty, Colleen Stan was living on the fringe, a long way from the romantic married life she must have envisioned at seventeen. Apparently having little direction or focus, she’d been blown across borders by the winds of fate. But if she wasn’t an especially dynamic or ambitious person, Colleen Stan was certainly a caring friend, loving daughter, and devoted sister-the kind of child who didn’t forget to send cards, who wrote and called home often, and who, one-spring day, tried to hitchhike to Westwood to wish a dear friend a happy birthday…

Whatever hopes and regrets occupied her thoughts as she lay spread-eagled on the rack in Cameron Hooker’s basement, Colleen’s mind returned, always, to prayer. Hers hadn’t been a strongly religious upbringing, and this was a very long way from the comfortable pews of her childhood church, but now prayers poured through her.

She prayed for freedom. She prayed for the wisdom to understand her captor, whoever he was. She prayed that she would be rescued, that she could escape. She prayed for survival.