Perfect Victim Page 2

  Colleen sat wondering where she might be and how she might get away, but the couple soon made her lie back down. The awful box was again snapped shut around her head, and the sleeping bag draped back over her. When they had finished their meal, they headed back into town.

  It was after dark when the blue Dodge Colt pulled into the alley behind their house. The man climbed out, came around to the back seat, untied Colleen’s ankles so she could walk, and took off the head box. Everything else—the blindfold, the gag, the handcuffs—stayed on. There was no danger of his hostage escaping.

  Colleen was led out of the car, up some steps, and through a kitchen. Out of a narrow gap at the bottom of her blindfold, she glimpsed the base of a stove or refrigerator. Then she was guided through a narrow door and down a steep, short flight of stairs. The basement.

  The woman didn’t come down with them. Now Colleen was alone in the basement with her kidnapper.

  “Stand up here,” he ordered. Awkwardly, he maneuvered her up on top of something. As she stepped up, she saw that it was a green and white Coleman ice chest. He unlocked one wrist, then quickly draped the handcuffs across a pipe that ran along the ceiling and locked them again. Now her arms were suspended above her head. He proceeded to strip off her jeans, tossing them onto the floor. Colleen felt a wave of sick dread. This had to mean rape.

  Suddenly, he snatched the handcuff from one wrist and locked the other to the pipe. She could feel that he was still shaking as he took off her shirt, one arm at a time.

  Next, the handcuffs were replaced by wide, stiff leather bands, tightened around one wrist, then the other. These were then hooked to the ceiling, her arms stretched wide apart.

  Colleen didn’t understand what was happening.

  At once, the support went out from beneath her. The world fell away, and there was a hot strain on her wrists, a wrenching of her shoulders. She wanted to cry out but couldn’t—the leather strap trapped her jaw. Tears burned behind the blindfold. She thrashed the air like a frantic marionette, her naked legs striking out but meeting nothing, searching for something to raise herself up on. The hard leather cuffs cut into her wrists. She struggled, throwing her legs out again and again, churning the air.

  Crack! Pain leapt across her back and wrapped around to her stomach. Crack! Another sharp line slapped around her torso. Crack! The whip struck again, and the man shouted at her to stop kicking and just relax. Colleen went limp, sobbing silently into her blindfold, and the whipping stopped.

  She hung there, stunned and trembling with panic, trying to hold herself still, afraid that the whip would bite into her again. Hot, red welts rose on her back and stomach, like screams caught in her skin.

  Now she could hear him moving about the basement. She tried to concentrate, to figure out what he was doing, but alarms were going off in her head. Taking deep breaths, she tried to calm herself. This couldn’t be real. This had to be a nightmare.

  Then, out of that slender gap at the bottom of her blindfold, Colleen spied an open magazine. She cocked her head and tried to focus on it. It was opened to a photograph, and with a slap of recognition Colleen saw that it was a picture of a naked woman hanging in much the same position as she.

  She couldn’t quite grasp the significance of this, but it magnified her fear. There it was in black and white. This was no nightmare, this was reality.

  In the back of her mind a small voice cried, Why me? Oh God, why me?

  The chilling truth was that there was no one to save her. Her family in Southern California had no reason to think she’d left Eugene; her roommates in Eugene thought she was hitchhiking to Linda’s and would be back in a few days. When would they realize she was missing? By then she might be dead.

  The man’s heavy steps came toward her and she held her breath, bracing herself for more pain. There was a dull scraping noise. The man grapped her ankles and something brushed against her toes. Just barely, on her tiptoes, she could stand, easing the weight off her wrists and shoulders.

  Moaning deeply, Colleen didn’t notice the man’s footsteps on the stairs. He left the basement, fetched his wife, and brought her back down with him.

  The small gap at the bottom of her blindfold afforded Colleen only a sliver of the scene below her. It was dimly lit, a single lightbulb casting a tentative spray of light about the room. The floor was concrete, and she could make out a low, wooden structure, something like a table.

  Then she caught an unexpected glimpse of movement. Her captors. They seemed to be . . . taking off their clothes. She watched them lie down and embrace. Then, to her horror, she realized they were having sex—copulating almost at her feet, like hedonistic worshippers before some strange erotic icon.

  She felt sick. This was too weird, too perverse.

  When they had finished, she heard the woman’s light steps on the stairs. The door shut solidly behind her. Now she was alone again with the man with the whip. She heard him approach. Perhaps he would let her down now.

  Instead, the support was again yanked out from under her, and the pain shot down her arms, pulling at her underarms, across her back and ribs. She hung there for some time, sweating, her arms wide apart, naked but for the socks that he’d left on her feet.

  The man watched her but she didn’t kick this time, so he didn’t whip her. After a satisfactory time, he pushed the ice chest back beneath her feet.

  She could stand. The weight came off her wrists and shoulders with abrupt relief, but her body felt weak and rubbery.

  Then the man unhooked her wrists from the beam and took her down. He steered her across a short distance, then forced her down into another of his strange constructions. It was a box, roughly square, standing about three feet high. One end was open, and he maneuvered her into it face first, so that her bare back faced him. Grabbing her wrists, he lifted them and replaced the leather cuffs with chains. These were locked to the roof of the box.

  She sensed the walls around her, as if she were being caged. Her position was cramped, with her arms awkwardly suspended above her and barely enough room to sit up. Then she felt the pressure on her jaw suddenly loosen and the leather gag come off. She begged him to please let her go, but her words were cut short as the awful head box was again maneuvered around her head. It snapped shut, closing tightly around her neck.

  He had somehow affixed the heavy head box to the roof of the box. Its weight was supported, but she couldn’t move her head. It was a petrifying sensation: sealed in darkness, each inhalation labored, no air, immobilized. The head box pinched her neck, choking her. She tried to yell into the box’s thick lining, but her voice came back as a hoarse, strangled wail. She gasped, tried to swallow, the terror rising in her throat. The box held her in a deadly grip. She was suffocating! In a claustrophobic panic, she kicked at the sides of the wooden crate that held her, pounding for her life with the only part of her body she could still move, kicking harder and harder.

  Suddenly he was back. He grabbed her ankles, wrapped them with cord, then tied them to the side of the box so she wouldn’t be able to kick. Then he was gone.

  Colleen suffered in the basement for what seemed a very long time. Terrorized and in pain, she was still unable to accept the truth of her situation. She cried bitterly into the head box, her breathing now a tortured panting, sweat beginning to bead and run down her skin. From time to time she would yell, not knowing even if she could be heard. She thudded against the sides of the box with her feet, fighting as best she could against the cord wrapped around her ankles. She wasn’t going to die without a struggle.

  After some time he returned. His hands fumbled with the clasps of the head box, and in an instant it was open. She sucked the air into her lungs, but before she could speak he was shouting at her. “Why the hell are you making so much noise?”

  “I can’t breathe,” she croaked. “Please, please let me out. Let my arms down. It hurts so much. I can’t breathe.”

  But his only reply was to shut the head box back up again.


  He left for a moment, found what he needed, and returned with something she couldn’t identify. He fitted it around her chest and tightened it until the straps dug into her ribs. Now she could scarcely expand her chest; it was even harder to breathe.

  And then something very odd. He put a prickly object between her bare legs. It felt similar to a hair curler, small and bristly. She didn’t know it then, but it was an electrical gadget designed to shock her. To his great exasperation the device failed to work, so he shut the box up again and left her there.

  As the husband and wife prepared for bed upstairs, Colleen Stan sat naked and gasping in a bizarre prison, the construction of a man with perverse obsessions and sinister habits. Her abduction had been carefully planned: the head box, the knife, the handcuffs, all the essentials of the kidnap had been placed in the car for the express purpose of capturing someone just such as she. When she had caught a ride out of Red Bluff with this wholesome-looking couple, she had fallen into his snare.

  Now she was held captive in a box in their basement, her arms chained above her head, her legs tied, a spiny device between her legs, a constrictor cinched around her ribs, a blindfold around her eyes, and a sensory-deprivation box locked around her head. She could hear nothing but her thumping heart and her own tortured breathing. All night she thought she was going to suffocate. He left her boxed and bound and believing she was going to die.

  Few prisoners have known a confinement more solitary, more frightening, more hopeless than the one Cameron Hooker was fashioning around his newfound slave.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was a long night for Colleen. Intense discomfort and sheer fright kept her awake. A few times she was startled by her captor’s hands unexpectedly against her bare back—she had thought she was alone, and suddenly he was there, touching her. Was he trying to scare her? Or was he just feeling to see if she was still warm and breathing?

  For Cameron Hooker this night was surely thrilling almost beyond belief. No wonder he could hardly keep his hands off her; his fantasy had finally become reality. He had rehearsed it so many times in his mind. He’d built the head box; he’d prepared the blindfold and the knife and the handcuffs; he’d even readied the equipment in the basement. And he’d pulled it off flawlessly: She had succumbed with nary a struggle, not even a scream.

  Now he had her totally within his conrol. And no one knew.

  He’d waited a long time for this night. Nearly two years had gone by since he’d first discussed the subject with his wife. But the idea had been brewing inside him much, much longer.

  Nothing in Cameron’s upbringing would have predisposed him to unnatural or sadistic tendencies. He was raised within a traditional, warm and caring nuclear family—no child abuse, no divorce, no wife beating. He couldn’t even remember any major battles between his parents.

  In fact, nothing stands out about Cameron’s childhood except impermanence.

  Cameron was born in Alturas, California, on November 5, 1953, to a couple who had moved out from Arkansas in search of a better life. Harold and Lorena Hooker were simple folk, not highly skilled or well educated, and struggling to make ends meet. While Cameron was growing up they moved every two or three years, his father pursuing work in construction or in sawmills, his mother usually staying home to take care of him and his younger brother, Dexter. The boys’ family life was secure, but they were constantly being uprooted: packing up, leaving school, and saying good-bye almost as soon as they’d made friends.

  Cameron was generally quiet and kept to himself, though he was described as “a happy kid” in grammar school. He used to entertain the other children by pretending that he had a button in the middle of his back, and if anyone pressed it, he’d fall to the ground and play dead. It was a big hit during recess, especially with the giggling girls.

  His sociable side seems to have taken a beating beginning about the time the Hooker family bought some property south of Red Bluff in 1969 and finally parked their mobile home at a permanent address. By now Cameron’s hormones had begun their adolescent campaign: he’d hit those horrible, awkward teens.

  Used to being the tallest kid in the class, he now shot up even more, ungainly and skinny. With his heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, toothy smile, and uncoordinated limbs, Cameron was spurned by the “in” crowd and relegated to what students at Red Bluff High School called the “quad squad”—those outcasts who tended to hang out in a particular area of the grounds.

  He had no close friends. He joined no organizations or teams. He excelled at shop classes, learning about tools and machines and construction, but wasn’t much of an athlete and barely passed his academic classes. He had lots of time alone, lots of time to think.

  No one would have guessed that this bland, gawky kid had anything exceptional going on in his head. But Cameron Hooker apparently had fantasies. Wild ones. Fantasies in which he had absolute power over the frightened objects of his desire. It seems that, in his imagination, this awkward, spindly adolescent whom no one seemed to notice was powerful, commanding, virile—conjuring up visions of nude, bound women. Helpless. At his mercy. And when he discovered pornography, the magazines that he stashed away in secret places evidently fueled these fantasies with images of leather and handcuffs and whips.

  When he graduated from high school in 1972, Cameron Hooker went to work at the local lumbermill, Diamond Lands Corporation. It was a manly occupation, working around large, powerful, deafening machinery, ear-splitting saws, and heavy, black chains. He grew sideburns and let his hair get shaggy.

  To the handful of women at the mill, Cameron was still less than attractive—quiet, easily ignored, and from the outside, so unremarkable as to be almost invisible. But Cameron’s secret daydreams of tying up and dominating women seem to have continued unabated. His mindless work apparently left him free to let his imagination run, to play back what he’d read in magazines, to concoct plans. He must have longed to realize them, to act out his fantasies; he just needed someone who would comply. . . .

  A plain, shy fifteen-year-old was the answer.

  In 1973, a mutual friend introduced Cameron to Janice, a naïve and insecure girl with frizzy brown hair, wire-rim glasses, and a personality less mature than her figure. Being so much younger than Cameron, she was also nonthreatening and pliant.

  Still a wide-eyed ninth grader, Janice must have found the attentions of this strapping nineteen-year-old flattering beyond all expectation. Unlike the other boys she’d met, he was nice to her! She’d never been treated so well. The other boys walked all over her, but Cameron was gentlemanly, polite, and clearly a prize: well over six feet tall, congenial, with a big, warm smile. He even had a car.

  They started dating—going out for drives, for burgers and fries, and to see horror movies like The Exorcist.

  Perhaps they seemed an unlikely pair, but Cameron and Janice were similar in what they weren’t: Neither was attractive, well-off, or popular. Neither had much apparent interest in sports, literature, or culture. And neither was originally from Red Bluff.

  Janice’s family had moved up from the San Jose area a few years earlier. They’d moved to a tiny house not very far from the Hookers’, with an orchard and not much more. Like Cameron, Janice lived in a rural setting, and grew up in a family that did not put much emphasis on education and never had much money.

  She was the youngest of four children, the baby of the family. She doesn’t remember her parents as warm or demonstrative. Her father, a blue-collar worker who worked long hours, wasn’t around much. Neither was her mother, whom she describes as a strict and reproachful woman. Janice was left to be raised, mostly, by her older sister, Lisa.

  Lisa looked out for her and taught her how to sew, but Janice says she also harbored feelings of jealousy and resentment toward her older sister. She felt Lisa was always the favorite, soaking up the attention for which Jan constantly thirsted.

  Jan had epilepsy as a child and somehow connected her illness with her parents’ indi
fference. She thought her father believed that people who had epilepsy were possessed by demons, and so he kept his distance. Whatever the cause, Jan recalls feeling rejected and disapproved of at an early age and says she was often told she was stupid but rarely told she was loved.

  Janice’s submissive side emerged early on. Unattractive and insecure, her first infatuations with boys were marked by a fear of rejection: “No matter how good or rotten a guy was to me, I just kind of latched on to him.”

  So a few months into her relationship with Cameron, when he proposed something peculiar, her reservations were quickly dispelled. In Janice’s own estimation, she was the “kind of person who just gave in so somebody would love me.”

  He wanted to hang her up, suspend her by the wrists from a tree without her clothes on. He told her his other girlfriends had let him do this, that lots of people did it. Not wanting to lose him, Janice went along.

  He took her into the nearby mountains, strapped her into his handmade leather cuffs, and hung her up.

  Jan was scared. It hurt: the leather cuffs cutting into her wrists, the pain shooting down her arms and back. But Cameron was so affectionate when he took her down—holding her, hugging her, and so obviously happy—that it was easier for her to agree the next time.

  These excursions into the woods became regular events. Two or three times a month, he’d take Janice out to Tehama County’s vast woodlands to experiment. And though Janice was still little more than a child, her first sexual experiences involved a practice not many people know much about: bondage.

  Cameron tied her up, staked her out on the ground, or hung her from trees. It frightened her but she endured it, waiting for it to be over because Cameron was always so sweet and tender to her afterward. It seemed worth the temporary pain. Soon he brought out the whips and beat her—not hard enough to leave permanent marks, he was careful of that, only welts. And when she’d beg to be let down, he’d let her down.