Perfect Victim (7 page)

One Diamond worker, who asked not to be identified, reported that a couple of “nosy guys” broke into Hooker’s locker, removed some items, and threw them into “the chipper” — a piece of machinery that “looks like a vegematic” and shreds wood up “like wooden potato chips” to make fiber for paper. He didn’t know what items were destroyed but speculated that the motivation was to protect Hooker or themselves.

In any case, when the police finally got around to getting a search warrant for the locker, they found some negatives, a bag of clay, and some soft-porn molds, but nothing of profound interest.

Moreover, he’d never given the smallest indication of anything awry at home. He rarely talked of his family life, hardly ever brought up sex, and in complete contradiction to stereotypical visions of burly, brutal rapists, Hooker was generally mild, quiet, and good-humored. The rumor even began to spread that Jan and this other woman were in cahoots together — maybe they were lesbians — and they’d cooked up the whole story just to fix him.

The townspeople read the newspaper accounts and wondered.

But to one local family, the press coverage was more than just startling, it was painful. For more than a decade, Harold and Lorena Hooker had quietly owned a twenty-acre ranch off of Highway 99, south of Red Bluff, near the town of Gerber. Now the peace of these wide open spaces was shattered, and their elder son was being held on $500,000 bail. Mrs. Hooker, a tall, dignified woman with sad eyes, declined to talk to reporters except to state that the media had “been having a field day with this.”

Mr. Hooker, looking gaunt and worn, told reporters, “We’re almost sick over the situation.”

However, he took the time to try to defend his boy. “We thought we had the greatest son in the world,” he said. “He was a good, easy kid to raise, no trouble at all. He never, ever let his temper get away with him.”

The Hookers found it impossible to believe that “Kay” had been kept against her will. She’d come over with Jan and Cameron a number of times, and they’d seen no evidence that she’d been kept by force — nothing strange, no bruises, no scars, not the slightest indication that she was anything but a babysitter. It seemed to them that she got along well with the girls, with their son and daughter-in-law, and that she was free to come and go as she pleased.

Asked about his daughter-in-law, Janice, whose allegations had led to Cameron’s arrest, Mr. Hooker said, “She won’t say anything that makes sense. She’s really upset.”

Now, Mr. Hooker worried, “it seems like the publicity’s got him guilty before they even get him to trial.”

Some of the loveliest buildings in the area are located in the heart of Red Bluff. These handsome old Victorians bespeak a more elegant past — when the railroad and the river were the main arteries of transportation, long before Interstate 5 would pull commerce to the other side of the river, spawning graceless housing developments and shopping centers surrounded by asphalt.

There’s little time or money today for the craftsmanship that went into these old Victorians, and few can even afford to heat their spacious, high-ceilinged rooms. Many are becoming shops and law offices — like the large and impressive office of Rolland Papendick, on the corner of Washington and Hickory Streets.

Papendick, like his office, commands respect. Tall, good looking, and almost inevitably dressed in a suit — not so common in this rural area — Papendick looks the part of the prosperous, capable attorney. He can be charming and smooth, but he’s not all refinement and solemnity. There’s an athletic quality to him, a youthfulness that goes beyond simply having a full head of dark hair going into middle age. His quick movements reveal a strained energy that sometimes makes him seem about to spring out of his chair — less like an attorney than a basketball player waiting to be called into the game.

But perhaps it’s more tension than athleticism that fuels Papendick’s energy, for it’s surely not clean living that has left Mr. Papendick so apparently fit: He smokes, he drinks, and a brooding temper lurks behind those snappy blue eyes. In court or out, his words can be curt, abrasive, and sarcastic. He’s not a man you’d want to cross, and he’s definitely someone you’d want on your side.

Shortly after Cameron’s arrest, his younger brother, Dexter, hailed Mr. Papendick on a street corner and asked how much he charged as a retainer for a criminal case. Papendick mentioned a figure, and Dexter had the check waiting on his desk that afternoon.

“Then I found out what I’d gotten myself into,” Papendick recalls.

Papendick spoke with the Hooker family at length. After learning some background and the charges against Cameron, he was inclined to accept the case, but he told them that the final decision was ultimately up to the actual client. “First,” he said, “I’ll have to talk to Cameron.”

But before Papendick even had a chance to approach Cameron Hooker, he was visited by Hooker’s wife.

Perhaps the only way to understand Janice Hooker’s actions during this period is to imagine her on an emotional see-saw. She had turned Cameron in, but now she was shaken by the resulting commotion. The father of her children was in jail, she felt guilty for putting him there, and when he phoned her making various requests, she did her best to comply.

Janice also talked with her in-laws. Perhaps as a way of deflecting responsibility for Cameron’s arrest away from herself, she said some rather astonishing things, including that she knew “for a fact that Colleen wasn’t raped.” Mr. and Mrs. Hooker suggested she tell this to Papendick.

And so, to Papendick’s surprise, he found Janice standing in his office saying she could “destroy Colleen’s story” and indicating that she wanted to talk about the case.

From the start, it was clear to Papendick that if he accepted this case, Janice Hooker would be testifying for the prosecution.

He took mental notes of what she said but cautiously advised her that, since he was probably going to be representing Cameron, she would need to seek separate counsel. Then he referred this woman, whom he found “very, very, very emotionally distraught and confused,” to Ron Mclver, another respected criminal attorney in the area.

Shortly thereafter, Rolland Papendick seated himself across from Cameron Hooker in the attorney visiting room at the county jail, a pane of glass separating them across a shared table. A slot at the bottom of the glass allows the attorney to pass papers back and forth to the prisoner, but other than this, there can be no physical contact between the two.

When Hooker was brought in, clad in his blue inmate’s uniform, Papendick appraised the lanky, six-foot-four-inch fellow, introduced himself, and started asking questions…

Papendick came away from this first meeting with the opinion that his new client was “totally and completely honest.” What impressed him most was that when he asked, “How did you meet Colleen Stan?” Cameron unhesitatingly replied, “I kidnapped her.”

Most crimes are over in a matter of moments-a trigger pulled, blood spilled, the law broken in a snap — but here was a succession of crimes spanning more than seven years, a pattern of abuse that had become a way of life.

And as soon as Deputy District Attorney Christine Mcguire heard about the “sex slave” case, she knew it belonged to her.

She’d been on an out-of-town trip when the case broke. Her first day back in the office, she heard all about it — weird evidence like a “stretcher” and a “head box” and something akin to a coffin. This was the wildest case ever to hit Tehama County, and the details only strengthened Mcguire’s conviction that of all the attorneys in the office, she ought to be the one to prosecute Cameron Hooker. She was the office “sexpert,” the specialist on prosecuting sex offenses, and Hooker was due to be charged with at least a dozen felony sex crimes.

The problem was that no one else in the office seemed to be making what she thought was an obvious connection.

She’d come into the office early that morning, half expecting the Hooker file to be on her desk. But not only was the file absent, by mid-morning no one had even consulted her about the case.

Offended, she sat hunched over a stack of papers at her desk, her dark hair shrouding her face, a cup of coffee in hand. She and the coffee were both learning.

Voices were discussing the case just outside her door. She put down her pen and listened.

“I can give you a report on what the victim had to say. I interviewed Colleen Stan last week.” The voice was familiar: Detective Al Shamblin.

“Fine. Bring that by, and let’s go over everything we’ve got against Hooker.” Mcguire recognized the other voice as Assistant District Attorney Ed King.

So, she thought, King was getting the Hooker case.

Dammit, she’d paid her dues. She’d been prosecuting sex crimes for four years, practically since the first day she’d walked in the door. Everyone was delighted to have her handle those messy interviews with rape and child molest victims, but now, when a really big case came along, it was passed along to someone higher up.

How many times since she’d come to work as the only female attorney in the office — in fact, in the whole county — had she come up against that feeling of being passed over and shut out?

When she’d accepted the job in 1980, Mcguire knew it wasn’t going to be easy being the only woman lawyer in a county so red-neck, so dominated by cattlemen, that the Tehama County emblem was the head of a steer. But at twenty-eight, she’d been excited by the prospect of trying felony cases — feasible in a small DA’s office, whereas in a big-city office she would have spent years working her way through infractions and misdemeanor cases. Here she was trying felonies her first year.

Not long after she was hired, Mcguire learned that, because she was a woman, many of her peers thought she’d been employed for reasons other than her professional skills. Indignant, she just dug in and worked harder.

Mcguire might have come in a little green, but she won cases. After encountering her in court, her colleagues began to get the message that she was not to be underestimated because of her size or her sex; she was feminine and petite, but not fragile.

But in the process of sharpening her prosecutorial skill Mcguire also managed to alienate a few people. While obliterating that first impression of being “tiny” and “delicate,” McGuire tended to come across as pushy, overly serious, and combativ. She didn’t mean to be that way, but that’s how her crossed arms and compressed lips were interpreted. She’d even had jurors come up to her after trials (which she’d won) to advise her to smile more.

Mcguire didn’t see herself as especially somber, and she was puzzled when people told her to “lighten up.” That unsmili manner was just her style.

“I don’t joke around in court,” she said. “Some attorneys do that, but I think it undermines the jury’s confidence in you not to mention the victim’s — if you’re seen laughing it up with the defense counsel and the judge. In chambers or outside of the courtroom, I’m as easygoing as anyone else, but I am serious in court. I guess that’s why people keep calling me ‘intense.’”

Mcguire’s background probably accounts for much of that intensity. Her Irish-Catholic upbringing didn’t leave much room for coddling. The second girl in a family of three daughters and one son, Mcguire grew up in a working-class suburb of Cleveland.

At an early age she learned to be ultraresponsible, very serious, and self-reliant.

Realizing that she was bright but no genius, she threw herself into her studies and, out of sheer tenacity, graduated from high school at sixteen. Then she went to work.

Holding down a full-time job as a secretary, she put herself through night school and, in 1972, became the first person in her family to finish college, even managing to graduate cum laude.

Though she hadn’t been shy about setting unexpectedly high educational goals, Christine hadn’t completely abandoned the conventions of home and family. Just out of college, she married handsome Steven Takacs, a chemical engineer whom she’d known for about three years. He was not Irish, but like Christine, he was Catholic. They were wed in a small outdoor ceremony on a hot summer day in August 1972.

Mcguire’s desire for a warm and secure homelife, however, was due to clash with her desire for a career. She and her husband moved to Southern California, where she put so much into speeding through Southwestern University Law School in two years rather than three that her marriage died from neglect. In 1978, Christine and Steven were divorced — a fate to which no good Catholic girl is easily reconciled, but particularly upsetting for Christine, who was the first in her family to get divorced.

Still reeling from her failed marriage, Christine spent one lonesome year in private practice in Orange County before becoming disenchanted with the flash and fast-lane frivolity of sprawling Southern California. Yearning to do something socially responsible and personally fulfilling, she tried a stint with VISTA, working with Nevada Indian Legal Services.

At the end of her commitment, she started putting resumes in the mail, landing an interview with Tehama County District Attorney Bill Scott and then a job in Red Bluff-a “hick town,” in her estimation, but not a bad place to learn the fine art of prosecution.

She’d come to Red Bluff recognizing that, being a rural area, it wouldn’t be as progressive as L.A. But some of the attitudes she encountered among police officers and her colleagues made her stop and swallow. She was offended by their insensitivity toward victims of sex crimes, especially their “didn’t-she-enjoyit?” attitudes about rape.

It seemed that either no one wanted to handle these cases, or no one took them seriously, because a lot of them were being plea bargained away-meaning that rapists, child molesters, and wife beaters were back on the streets in a relatively short time.

Mcguire raised a stink about it, the cases started ending up on her desk, and more or less by default, she became the office specialist on the prosecution of sex crimes.

And she got convictions. By the end of 1984, her conviction rate was running at 90 percent.