Perfect Victim (42 page)

Mcguire asked if it would make a difference in the doctor’s opinion if the victim were placed in a bathtub and repeatedly had her head forced under water.

“Actually, as I say, it’s somewhat similar in terms of underwater escape training.” Dr. Lunde was intractable.

But Mcguire did manage to make a little headway regarding Lunde’s testimony on the physical effects of captivity.

“Doctor, isn’t it a fact you wouldn’t expect to see (serious) damage if the person, who is being kept in the box, is mobile in the box?”

“Well, no. You would see the damage because the variable is they have to get into an upright position. The human cardiovascular system is designed to work in a vertical position with muscles moving at least a certain number of hours a day.”

“If a person is taken out to cut posts, that’s exercise?”

“Right, sure.”

“Taken out to dig out a hole underneath a shed, that’s exercise?”

“Sure.”

“You wouldn’t expect to see any permanent physical damage under those circumstances, would you, Doctor?”

“No. The opinion I gave was in response to the hypothetical question that assumed the person was in the box twenty-three plus hours a day. If they are out cutting fence posts, as I believe she was, that’s a whole different story. You wouldn’t expect the problems,” he conceded.

“Now this spasm caused by shocking you referred to — that would be painful, wouldn’t it, Doctor?”

“Sure.”

“Very painful, wouldn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“There are occasions, Doctor, when some kind of electric shock would leave burn marks, isn’t that correct?”

“Sure, if you suffered a high voltage or a certain kind of grounding,” Lunde said.

“Whipping doesn’t always leave a permanent scar, does it?”

“No. Depends upon the type of whip and how hard you use it.”

“It might leave red marks?”.

“Sure.”

“And those marks will go away?”

“Sure.”

Dr. Lunde’s first day on the stand came to an end, and the crossexamination would be resumed the following day. This wouldn’t be worth noting, except that the next morning he was late.

The jury waited. The judge waited. The press and spectators waited. Both counsels waited. Cameron Hooker and the bailiffs, the court reporter and the court clerk waited. After about five minutes, people began to titter. Some of the jurors looked amused; the judge did not.

Astonishingly, when Dr. Lunde bustled in and took the stand ten minutes behind schedule, he did not apologize to anyone.

Lunde’s answers to Mcguire’s first questions would surprise even Mr. Papendick. “Dr. Lunde, you are being compensated for each day that you testify in court, aren’t you?”

“Sure. All the time.”

“And at what rate, Doctor, are you being compensated?”

“A hundred dollars an hour for my time outside of the courtroom; three thousand dollars a day for testifying in court.”

3. Papendick told Mcguire later that he hadn’t realized his expert was charging so much.

Mcguire resumed her line of questioning, but Lunde steadfastly held to his views, restating that a reasonable person would never believe the story of the Company and that Colleen only stayed because she’d fallen in love with Cameron Hooker.

It began to look as if Mcguire would never break free of this deadlock. Then she suddenly asked, “You wrote an article entitled ‘Brainwashing as a Defense to Criminal Liability’ in 1977, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Doctor, yesterday I used the term broke, do you recall that?”

“Yes, sure.”

“And you have indicated that was an inappropriate term?”

“Not a scientific term.”

“Didn’t you, on page 351 of your article, write: ‘The North Koreans simply broke Bucher and his men by torture and threats to the point where further resistance seemed ridiculous.’ Do you recall writing that?”

“Oh, I think the sentence is there,” Dr. Lunde said, unfazed. “I may have used the word elsewhere in the article in that some people ‘broke’ their word. The term has a meaning similar to what we were talking about yesterday.”

Mcguire continued, “The article also contains on page 349: The control of all communication in the environment is not only an important step, it is the basis for the whole process. In other words, the captors, those that are performing the process of coercive persuasion, control everything the victim sees, feels and experiences, and the reason why this is so basic to the full process is that the victim begins himself to feel totally controlled by his captors and they become omniscient to him, that is, they become all-knowing people who understand him, who know things about him that he never dreamt of, who simply have total access to everything about him. And in that sense he begins to feel inwardly controlled. And that’s reflected in a process by which, even after he may no longer be in direct control of his captors, when they become his former captors, he still feels their presence inside of him.”

“Sure,” Lunde responded, “taken in that context, yes.”

Both counsels finally exhausted their questions of this witness, and then Judge Knight asked a few.

“You didn’t intend to equate what happened here to Marine Corps boot camp training, did you?”

“No. It was a specific aspect, namely, the attention drills, being called to attention and having to hop to a stand-up-straight position.”

“I think you also referred to it in connection with the attempted drowning of Colleen Stan. Do you equate that with Marine Corps drills?”

“No, I don’t equate the overall experience. Obviously, there are significant differences between Marine Corps training and this experience. There are some similarities, such as the indoctrination, the control of what time you go to bed and what time you get up, bodily functions, those types of things. Those are similarities. But there are differences. You are in the hands of what you know to be government, society-sanctioned agencies. You know the time in which you are getting out. Those are differences.”

Judge Knight asked, “You do equate it to a certain degree?”

“There are similarities, sure.”

“There is one other thing I do not understand,” Judge Knight said. “In regard to this business of Riverside, is it your testimony that a captor, who imposes coercive persuasion and threats on a victim, could never, ever let that victim go home and expect to retrieve her twenty-four hours later?”

“I don’t think that’s inconceivable,” the doctor said, “depending on the reasonableness of what has been told to the person, the basis for their believing or not believing certain things —”

“Well, Doctor, what may appear to be reasonable to a person would depend a lot on what they are told, isn’t that true?”

“Yes. But if this person in the hypothetical had twenty years of experience in this society and schools and so on, versus a much lesser number of years with the captor (presumably absent the conditions I mentioned of mental illness or something), those things would stand them in good stead in terms of having some awareness that there are agencies, police and so forth, that represent the law and are here to protect me and, if I ever get a chance to tell somebody or get to a phone, I will make use of it.”

“So every rational victim would immediately call the police regardless of the threats that were made?”

“Oh, I think, if they want to get away, sure.”

“How rational would you expect a person to be after a period of torture?”

“I have seen many subjected to much more severe torture than these,” Lunde declared. “Skin and bones, scarred from head to toes, and who were still resisting and still jumped at the first chance to get away when it arose.”

“Were their families threatened?”

“No.”

Judge Knight suddenly switched gears, asking a question that went right to the heart of the matter: “What is altruistic love?”

“Altruistic love is love given with no expectation of return,” Lunde replied.

“Basically,” the judge mused, “it puts the person’s life beneath that of the person loved, is that true?”

“Sure.”

“For instance,” Knight went on, “the parent who sacrifices his life to save a child is an example of altruistic love?”

“Sure.”

“Wouldn’t it be an example of altruistic love if someone decided not to risk the lives of their family and sacrifice themselves?”

“I am saying it could be. I am saying, in the situation presented to me, I don’t think…” Dr. Lunde sputtered another long-winded answer that added very little. It didn’t matter. The judge had made his point.

The Stanford psychiatrist was excused, and the defense rested.

Before closing arguments, the prosecution has the opportunity to call rebuttal witnesses; Mcguire called only one. The jury had heard her name during Cameron Hooker’s crossexamination. The state called Elaine Coming.

Heads turned as a tall, willowy blonde entered the courtroom, and reporters buzzed with curiosity as the surprise witness settled into the witness stand.

Mcguire asked a few preliminary questions, establishing that Coming knew Cameron when she was sixteen. Then she asked”Did Cameron ever relate a fantasy to you?”

“It didn’t come up as a fantasy,” Coming replied. It was just a friendly conversation, and somehow he’d come around to telling her “either that he had, or that he wished he had a dungeon under his parents’ place.”

“Did he tell you the purpose of this dungeon?”

“To keep women there.”

This was the court’s first glimpse of Cameron’s past. Everyone expected more, but now Papendick cut Mcguire’s questions short with an objection. Both counsels approached the bench for a quick consultation with the judge, and then Mcguire abruptly turned her witness over for crossexamination. After a few quick questions by Papendick, Coming was excused.

That was that — a rather anticlimactic conclusion to the surprise witness’s testimony. Coming exited the courtroom, leaving everyone wondering what else she might have revealed about Hooker’s youth if the defense attorney hadn’t objected.

Before closing arguments, the jury was excused while a few final motions were heard. All the false imprisonment charges, counts twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, had already been dropped on technicalities. Papendick now moved to dismiss counts fifteen and sixteen, both charges of abducting to live in an illicit relationship, contending that the law, written in 1905, was unconstitutionally vague. Judge Knight agreed that in 1985 it seemed impossible to define an “illicit relationship,” and these two counts were dropped as well. Eleven felony counts remained, and five of these had to be amended. The jury was brought back in, and the press and spectators perked up: It was time for closing arguments, the grand finale, when both attorneys attempt to sway the jurors by stressing their best evidence and waxing eloquent about the iron boundaries of the law while playing upon sentiments.

The prosecution’s closing argument is first, the defense’s second, and then the prosecution gets a parting shot, a rebuttal. With this in mind, Mcguire’s strategy was to give a brief and simple summary the first time around, saving her best for last.

After a few words of thanks to the jury, she said that her mother, who had sat on a jury, told her the instructions were the most confusing part. So, though the judge would be giving them instructions later, Mcguire reviewed a few points to help make them clear. For instance, she discussed the meaning of “reasonable doubt,” saying there was a natural human reluctance to sit in judgment, yet cautioning them not to mistake a feeling of queasiness for reasonable doubt.

She mentioned that direct and circumstantial evidence were to be given equal weight, and here she gave her favorite example.

She had a fifteen-month-old daughter, she told them. Now, if she’d just frosted a chocolate cake, left it for a moment to answer the door, then returned to find a chunk of the cake gone and icing on her daughter’s mouth and fingers, that was circumstantial evidence. She hadn’t actually seen her daughter eat the cake, but it was clear what had happened.

Several jurors smiled.

1. When the charges against Hooker were filed, no one in the Tehama County DA’s office realized that the extraordinary time-span of this case presented an unusual problem: The sexual assault laws had changed in 1981.

Some of the counts against Hooker occurred before the change and so would have to be charged according to the old law. The more recent counts stayed the same. Making this case even more complex, the jurors would be given different instructions for judging sexual assaults occurring in different years.

Mcguire then emphasized that the jury must weigh the testimony and credibility of each witness and summarized the important points of several testimonies, spending a good deal of time on the two expert witnesses. She also highlighted some of the physical evidence, which the jury would later have an opportunity to review for themselves.

Finally, after detailing the legal elements of all the crimes, she held up a verdict form, explaining that one would accompany each of the eleven countS, and quickly concluded her remarks.

Thanking the jury for their time, she sat down, giving the floor over to the defense.

2. If they found the defendant guilty, the jury then needed to deliberate over “special findings” to determine whether the defendant had used force, violence, duress, menace, or threat of immediate and unlawful bodily harm in committing the crime.

Papendick also thanked the jury for their attentiveness, then began his summation with the comment: “This is the best part of the case for the attorney because it signifies the end. The attorney is done. Your job is just beginning.”

The defense attorney said the key issues were: whether there was forcible, continuous detention; whether Colleen consented to the alleged acts; and whether Cameron had a reasonable belief of consent. (This was the first time the jury heard that Hooker’s perception of consent was at all an issue.)

Resistance, Papendick pointed out, was a subissue of consent.

He explained that the legal definition of rape had changed, so that before 1981 the victim was required to resist, and her resistance had to be overcome by force or threat of great and immediate bodily harm.