Perfect Victim (5 page)

She prayed in utter blackness, mortality hovering nearby, with only God to hear. Perhaps only those who have prayed in the face of death — the sick, the dying, the deeply bereaved — can understand the fervor of the prayers emitting from that hot, claustrophobic head box.

Her long periods of sensory deprivation were broken only in the evenings, usually at about eight o’clock, when the Hookers had finished dinner. Cameron and sometimes Janice would come down with leftovers. For a brief period, Colleen would be freed from the head box and let up from the rack. She must have felt tremendous relief just to be able to change her position, to breathe some relatively fresh air (though the basement was actually rather musty), and to focus her eyes on the tiny segment of the world she could see out of the gap between the bridge of her nose and the bottom of her blindfold. As much as nourishment, that single meal was refreshment to a mouth that tasted only a gag during the day.

Her drink was always water. And she used the bedpan with the blindfold in place, without privacy. Afterwards, Cameron would frequently hang her up and whip her. This became her bleak routine.

But one particular afternoon Colleen broke this pattern. She felt her bowels chum, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to wait until the bedpan was brought down that night. To avoid the humiliation of soiling herself, she tried to attract the attention of the man or the woman, whoever was upstairs, by making as much noise as she could. She hollered past her gag, into the head box’s carpeted interior, kicked, and rattled her chains.

Too late, she realized her mistake. The man rushed downstairs, unlocked her chains and wrapped the hated leather cuffs around her wrists. She cringed, knowing she was going to be hung again. Cameron cursed her for making so much noise — no excuses.

He hooked the leather cuffs to the beam, kicked the ice chest out from beneath her feet, and then whipped her to unconsciousness.

She learned not to make noise, but to lie quietly on the rack until her captors decided to let her up. It was better to soil herself than get whipped.

But soon Colleen’s long stretches of solitude were shattered by the sounds of Cameron Hooker industriously pursuing his next project. He came downstairs in the evenings and began moving things about, sawing and hammering. He had brought down the particle board he’d gotten at Diamond, and now he was building something.

It was a big project. Working for a while every day, it took Cameron some time to complete. And though he was working within inches of Colleen, who lay uncomfortably on the rack beside him, he spoke scarcely at all.

Even at meals her captor gave her little opportunity to learn who he was or why he was keeping her here. He reacted to her attempts at conversation with anger. And when she repeatedly asked him when he would let her go, his reply was always the same: “Pretty soon.”

it took Cameron Hooker about ten days to complete his construction. It was heavy and solid and built to last. It stood about three feet tall and six and a half feet long and had a lid that opened at the top. It took up about as much space as a deep freezer, but was double-walled, so the interior was smaller, more confined, like a coffin.

Colleen was put into the box without comment. One small consolation was that Hooker removed the head box and the gag, but she was still blindfolded, still naked, as she’d been since her abduction. He made her step over the side to get in, then lie down. He had already put her sleeping bag on the floor of the box, so while it was hard, it was slightly padded.

Now Hooker brought out the long chain. He put it around her neck and locked the wrist chains to it before pulling it down to her ankles and securing them. As one final insult, he put wax earplugs in her ears. Then he shut the box and locked her inside.

Even with the earplugs, she could hear the latches close and the padlock click shut.

Chained and blindfolded inside a locked box — elaborate as a Houdini trick. But surrounding her was not an expectant audience, just the indifferent cement of the basement walls. And there wasn’t the slightest hope that Colleen could escape from within that double-walled box. She was entombed. And no matter how desperately she might pray, this was where Colleen Stan was going to stay.

Father’s Day fell exactly three weeks after the day that Alice Walsh had contacted the Eugene police about Colleen’s disappearance. In Riverside, Colleen’s father, Jack Martin, worried when no word came from his eldest daughter.

Colleen almost always remembered birthdays and other occasions with a card or a call.

As Colleen’s absence stretched to more than a month, hopes of her turning up were growing dim. Jack Martin called Colleen’s mother, and though they’d been divorced over eighteen years, suggested they drive the more than one thousand miles to Eugene to collect their missing daughter’s things. They made the drive over a weekend, and on Saturday, June 25, they contacted the Eugene police. The police could tell them nothing new, so they had no choice but to turn around and solemnly head back to Southern California with Colleen’s boxed belongings. These would be stored in some dark and quiet place, in mute and unrecognized irony.

As they drove north toward Oregon and then south back to Riverside, Colleen’s parents could never have imagined that as they sped past Red Bluff on Interstate 5, they passed within about a mile of where their daughter was being held. Nor could they have imagined, in their worst fears, the conditions under which Colleen was being kept. But if they feared their daughter was dead, they weren’t far wrong.

Colleen lay motionless, in the dark. It had been more than five weeks now since she had bathed, brushed her teeth, or washed her hair. She’d stopped menstruating.

She existed on the barest necessities: food and water.

Colleen learned to mark the flow of time by the simplest measures. If she was cool, it was morning. (Hearing one particularly loud car drive by every day affirmed this.) The box gradually warmed, the day’s heat penetrating into the basement while her body warmed the box from inside. By afternoon, the heat at its zenith, her sweat soaked into the sleeping bag. The temperature slowly eased until about eight P.m., when Hooker would come downstairs and let her out, allowing the hot air within the box to escape. When she was put back in, it would have cooled, and the temperature would continue to drop until morning. Then the cycle began again.

Cameron had installed a “blower,” a makeshift device that was really nothing more than an old hair dryer on a no-heat setting, to circulate air through two small airholes drilled in the side of the box. This may have kept the inside of the box from becoming even more stifling, but it did nothing to alter the temperature, and Colleen, meanwhile, had to listen to the motor’s constant whine.

Cameron Hooker was figuring this all out as he went along.

When it became obvious that Colleen’s weight was plunging, he decided to keep track of it. He’d bring down the scale, put it on the floor of the box and have her stand on it, noting the figures on a piece of paper. One day, she caught sight of the paper: 113 pounds.

The man’s wife generally stayed away. Once in a while, thinking only she and Cameron were in the basement, Colleen would be startled during her meal to hear Jan’s voice come from the stairs. And one hot afternoon Janice had surprised Colleen with a glass of lemonade, letting Colleen sit up in the box to drink it. But the woman remained more or less invisible, a specter hovering in the background, a disembodied voice that floated in at unexpected moments.

Colleen was sometimes locked down on the rack, but more often hung, usually by both arms and always naked and blindfolded. She was frequently whipped. On occasion she knew her captor was taking photographs of her: She heard the click of the camera, saw the flash of the lights.

No matter what else the man did to her, the pain of simply hanging was awful. The leather cuffs bit deeply into her wrists, cutting her skin, hurting those sensitive nerves that run into the body’s most important tools, the hands. But that was only one focal point; the pain pulled down her arms into her back, across her ribs, knotting under her arms. Sometimes she momentarily escaped the pain by blacking out, but when she came to, it was as if it had been saved up, doubled, and it hit with excruciating force.

Cameron Hooker was well aware that hanging someone by the hands is not only painful but dangerous. The cuffs act as a tourniquet, cutting off the circulation. If one is hung by the wrists more than twenty or thirty minutes, the tissue starts to die and gangrene sets in, requiring amputation or eventually causing death.

So Hooker was careful not to hang his victim for too long; a corpse would be terribly inconvenient.

Three months elapsed, and Cameron Hooker finally had to admit that he needed to give his captive a bath. She was filthy.

She smelled bad. She looked awful.

So one August evening, after the baby had been put to bed, Cameron got Colleen out of the box and brought her upstairs.

He walked her through the kitchen, through the dining room, and around to the bathroom, where he filled the tub.

He tied her hands behind her back. He taped over the blindfold with duct tape, taped her mouth. And he tied her legs to a broomstick. Then he put her face down in the water.

He held her down, even though her struggles were ineffectual.

She couldn’t raise herself up because the broomstick, lodged across the tub’s rim, kept her from pulling her knees up under her. He held her head under until she couldn’t hold her breath anymore.

When the bubbles ceased and she started sucking in water, Hooker pulled her up by the hair, then dunked her again.

As he dunked her over and over, he took the opportunity to focus his camera, which he’d already loaded with film and had on hand, and take some pictures. Submerged and helpless, Colleen must have seemed an interesting subject; he took several shots, dunking her at least two dozen times before finally stopping.

When she was finally allowed to sit up and catch her breath, she sucked in air with painful gasps. Her lungs ached strangely.

Now Cameron enlisted Janice’s aid for the nasty business of doing something about Colleen’s hair. It was tangled, matted and filthy, and the tape left a sticky residue in it. Regular hair conditioner had only a negligible effect, so Janice tried putting vegetable oil on it. She still couldn’t comb the knots out, so she up and got the scissors, snipping out one tangle and then another and finally cutting off about five inches.

After her bath, Colleen’s blindfold was tightened. Then she was led back downstairs and put in the box, her lungs stil aching. If the ordeal had left her cleaner, it had also underscored the terrifying control her captor had over her. He was all she knew. She existed completely at his whim. And now he had given her life: He hadn’t killed her.

So complete was Colleen’s isolation from the world above her that she didn’t even notice when the wife left late that summer.

Janice didn’t know what else to do. The sick drama unfolding in the basement left her terrified at the thought of being found out, and guilt dogged her steps as she went about her daily chores.

She tried not to think about it, but she felt so sorry for Colleen that she could scarcely put together a plate of sandwiches for her without feeling waves of shame and remorse. Yet her feelings were confused. Along with the despair came pangs of jealousy and resentment.

Despite her misgivings, Janice hadn’t the courage to completely sever her ties with Cameron. (Hadn’t he told her that if she ever left him, he would track her down and come after her?)

So, to put some distance between herself and the situation at home, she retreated to the home of the older sister on whom she’d been so dependent as a child.

Jan found a job with Exatron, an electronics firm in the Silicon Valley. Though she commuted home to Red Bluff on the weekends, she stayed with her sister during the week and had ample opportunity to let slip some hint of what was going on at 1140 Oak Street. She didn’t. She’d learned long ago to deal with frightening and unsavory truths by simply blocking them out. And she was good at keeping secrets.

So was Cameron. Despite all the time and energy he put into his private obsessions, he kept them hidden, compartmentalized from the rest of his life by doors and locks and silence.

He made whips and hid them. He stocked up on hardcore pornography and squirreled it away.

None of the hundreds of slides and photographs he took of Janice and Colleen, for example, were sent out to be developed; he did all the work at home, in his own makeshift darkroom in the basement. He’d even built his own enlarger-nothing fancy, but functional. Sometimes he’d develop film while Colleen was sitting on the rack, eating with her plate in her lap; she could hear him shut off the lights and see the red glow out of the edge of her blindfold. Yet for all any outsiders knew, Cameron Hooker was just a harmless shutterbug, snapping photos at family gatherings.

Meanwhile, within the secret box in his basement, Colleen Stan was all too intimate with Hooker’s private interests. As the days crawled by, the list of sadistic fantasies he acted out on her lengthened. Once, while he had her hanging by the wrists, he held a heat lamp next to her skin, watching her writhe in pain as it burned. Another time, he touched her with live electrical wires.

He hung her upside-down and bound her in strange ways. He made her orally copulate him. He strangled her. She was little more than his guinea pig, and he subjected her to just about anything he could imagine and devise, short of technically breaking his promise of fidelity.

Cameron Hooker remained a mystery to Colleen. She could make no sense of how he treated her; sometimes she was tortured as punishment, sometimes it was apparently just entertainment. And sometimes he was unexpectedly kind to her, like one morning when he brought down some pancakes for her; she ate twice that day. And once or twice he brought down some toast. Yet there seemed to be no connection between her behavior and these benevolent gestures.