Perfect Victim (14 page)

Over the next several years, Parnell and the boy moved from town to town, Steven attending school as Dennis Parnell. Parnell committed sodomy on the boy and involved him in acts of oral copulation. Beyond threats of spankings, however, there was little actual physical restraint or punishment.

Seven years passed. Though it was mandatory that Steven obtain Parnell’s permission before leaving his presence, the boy was frequently unsupervised and apparently free to come and go.

He rode bicycles, stayed OVERNIGHT at the homes of friends, and went on school outings. In high school, he joined the FOOTBALL team and participated in out-of-town games.

On February 14, 1980, Steven came home to find that Parnell had abducted another boy, a five-year-old by the name of Timmy.

Two weeks later, while Parnell was at work, the two boys hitchhiked from Parnell’s cabin in Manchester to the nearby town of Ukiah, where Steven led Timmy to the door of the police station and instructed the younger boy on how to turn himself in. When Steven turned to go, Timmy got frightened and ran after him, attracting the attention of the police, who then stopped and questioned both of them. Though it took some coaxing, Steven finally disclosed that he, too, had been abducted.

Ordinarily, prosecution for the kidnapping of Steven would have been barred because no complaint had been filed within the three-year statute of limitations. But when Parnell was tried in 1981, the court held for the first time that the defendant could be prosecuted for kidnapping even though the statute of limitations had elapsed because the victim was held by the threat of force, and that as long as such detention continues, the crime of kidnap continues.

Here it was, the sole precedent for continuous kidnapping.

If Mcguire could prove that the kidnapping was continuous, she could counter a defense based on the statute of limitations argument.

But while the Parnell case helped, it differed factually from the Hooker case. In both the Parnell and the Hooker cases, the victim had been held for seven years, but the Parnell case involved a minor — a seven-year-old. Parnell was able to continue the kidnap, the court found, by exercising his “parental authority,” an argument that Mcguire certainly couldn’t use in Colleen Stan’s case.

From Papendick’s line of questioning at the preliminary hearing, it was already clear that he planned to base his defense on the issue of consent. Colleen stayed, he contended, because she’d fallen in love with her captor. And if Colleen had consented to stay, not only would the statute of limitations have elapsed on the kidnap charge, but the rape charges would be nullified as well.

What was it, then, that made Colleen stay?

Janice Hooker had already offered her own distinctly unconventional explanation: brainwashing. Police had aired the brainwashing theory to the press shortly before the preliminary hearing, and a handful of articles appeared linking this case to mind control.

But Mcguire instantly rejected this argument as ridiculously melodramatic and legally unsupportable. It was difficult enough for defense attorneys to claim that clients were not guilty due to insanity, but basing a prosecution on so unlikely an argument as it brainwashing seemed absolutely foolhardy. As far as she knew, it had never even been attempted. And while the prosecutor could accept that Colleen had stayed with the Hookers out of fear, she found it implausible that anyone as coherent and apparently normal as Colleen Stan could have been subjected to mind control.

A startling story was published in a Chico newspaper on December 20, the same day that Hooker was arraigned on eighteen felony counts. Headlined “Hooker Being Probed in Another Abduction,”

the article was the first public disclosure that Cameron Hooker was suspected of having kidnapped and murdered Marie Elizabeth Spannhake, an eighteen-year-old Chico woman, in 1976.

Sergeant Earl Summers, Chief of the Chico Police Detective Unit, told reporters that Janice Hooker had given police a detailed account of the five-foot-five-inch, 100-POUND woman’s abduction, murder, and burial.

But in Red Bluff, forty miles northwest of Chico, the story was quickly hushed up. Police Lieutenant Jerry Brown refused all comment on the Spannhake case. And when Police Chief John Faulkner was asked about the alleged murder, his answer was guarded: “The only comment we will make is that we are conducting an investigation to ascertain if Hooker had any involvement in the disappearance of Miss Spannhake.”

Despite law enforcement’s attempt to keep the investigation under wraps, other newspapers quickly picked up the story. And as the news spread that Hooker was suspected of murder, his defense attorney noticed a change in the tenor of public opinion.

Since Hooker’s arrest in November, Rolland Papendick had received several calls from irate friends, relatives, and coworkers who wished to testify on Cameron’s behalf. But after the Chico story the tenor of the calls changed. Now Papendick noted that instead of saying “No way!” people began to ask, “Do you think he really did all that?”

It was time, Papendick decided, to seriously consider a change of venue.

On January 4, Deputy DA Mcguire interviewed an amicable, heavily made-up blonde by the name of Connie Fleming, who offered new insights into Janice Hooker’s character. Janice had asked Connie for advice a few days before she contacted the police.

Fleming, a receptionist whom Janice had met by chance at a doctor’s office, revealed that Janice had come to her with serious personal questions about strength, initiative, guilt, and fear.

Connie painted Janice as a deeply troubled woman, whose struggle with her conscience finally compelled her to go to the police. This was news to Mcguire. After dealing with Jan as an extremely uncooperative witness, she felt little sympathy for Mrs. Hooker. Now she began to understand more of her complexity.

According to Fleming, Jan was close to a nervous breakdown when she finally contacted police. Jan had told her that fear was “taking over her body.” When Fleming asked what she was afraid of, Janice was at first reluctant to say but finally admitted that it was her husband. She stated that he was evil, then related some of the shocking details of their relationship.

Janice also told Fleming about the kidnapping. Jan said that Colleen had fought Cameron for a long time, but she’d been severely punished, and Cameron had scared her with stories of “the Company.” Eventually, Jan had told her, “Colleen was brainwashed.”

Brainwashed. The word came up again and again. But what did “brainwash” really mean?

After Fleming left, Mcguire flipped through her dictionary and found: “The systematic alteration of personal convictions, beliefs, habits, and attitudes by means of intensive, coercive indoctrination. She sighed. Though she knew Colleen Stan had been subjected to extremes of mental domination, she continued to feel that introducing brainwashing into her legal argument would only hurt her case. It was an almost untried issue, with virtually no legal precedent except one major and controversial trial: United States v. Hearst, 412 F.Supp. 889 (1976).

In February of 1974, nineteen-year-old Patricia Hearst was forceably kidnapped and, like Colleen, subjected to isolation, humiliation, and terror. Bound and blindfolded, Hearst was locked inside a closet and kept totally dependent on her captors. They made her eat with the blindfold still in place, controlled her bodily functions and hygiene, and sexually abused her. After about eight weeks, Patty’s captors let her out of the closet, took off her blindfold, and incorporated her into the Symbionese Liberation Army. Like Colleen, who was given the slave name K, Patty Hearst was given a new name, Tania.

Comparisons between Patty Hearst and Colleen Stan were obvious — the press had already drawn parallels — and in truth, Mcguire felt that Colleen and Patty had much in common. But Colleen had been subjected to much more severe treatment and for a much longer period of time. Patty Hearst spent about eight weeks in a closet; Colleen spent years in a box. Patty was allowed to bathe once a week; Colleen went for three months without a bath, then was nearly drowned and bathed infrequently thereafter.

Both were threatened with death, but Colleen encountered that threat in a far more painful, real way, being repeatedly whipped, hung, strangled, burned, even electrocuted.

But to a legal mind, the crux of the matter was not the kidnapping or the extent of suffering, but the fact that in February of 1976, just two years after her abduction, Patty Hearst found herself on trial for a bank robbery she participated in while under the control of the SLA. Her defense was that she had been brainwashed, or “coerced.” The court even allowed an expert to testify on this point, since it lay beyond the common experience of most jurors.

Nonetheless, Patricia Campbell Hearst was found guilty of armed robbery and of using a firearm to commit a felony. She was sentenced to seven years in prison.

This was a lesson that Deputy DA Mcguire couldn’t afford to ignore. Brainwashing was not easily proved, even by the best attorneys. Being conservative in her legal approach, she didn’t want to try to set precedents or risk comparisons between Colleen Stan and Patricia Hearst.

In Colleen’s best interest, MCGuire was inclined to shy away from any argument so untried and reckless as brainwashing.

Sometimes I feel that being your slave has made me more of a woman. But then there are other times when I feel it has made me less of a woman. You know how to make me feel good about myself. And I love you so much for it. I only wish that my dreams could be FULFILLED with you. Because I feel a strong love and need to be with you. I always serve you with singleness of heart. -K

K’s captivity spanned such a long period that single days became lost in the flood of months and seasons. Her days varied little from day to day, and simple repetition caused days and events to blur and run together. Certain occasions, especially birthdays and holidays, served as measures by which to gauge the ebb and flow of her enslavement, but even these got lost and confused in the monotonous, unrelenting push of time.

Late in 1979, for instance, Janice asked K what she would like for a gift. K thought it was to be a Christmas gift; Jan recalls that it was for K’s birthday, December 31, when K would turn twenty-three. In any case, K didn’t ask for anything at first, but after some thought got up the nerve to tell Jan she would like a Bible. Cameron and Jan bought one for her. It doesn’t really matter whether they intended it as a birthday present or as a Christmas gift, because K received nothing on either of these occasions.

The Hookers didn’t present their slave with the Bible until January 1, and this date is certain, for the front of the Holy Book was ceremoniously dated and signed. Cameron and Jan signed their real names, and Jan wrote in that the Bible belonged to “Kay Powers,” using Colleen Stan’s full slave name.

Now K had inspiration fueling the prayers that wove through her waking hours. Whenever she had the chance, she read the Bible in the light of the back bathroom. She read it hungrily, absorbing what she could to sustain her through the deprivation that was her daily routine. And when it came time to climb back into the box, God went with her into that blackness beneath the bed. She knew it.

About this time, K’s enslavement began a slow but dramatic evolution. She entered a period of relative liberty, a time that she would loosely refer to as “the year out.”

The texture of her captivity changed. She was gradually let out for longer periods and given more responsibilities with less supervision. She was allowed to work outdoors in the Hookers’ vegetable garden, which she found such a joy that she often started at the break of day, working outdoors in the fresh air with an almost maniacal zeal. Meanwhile, babysitting became totally K’s province, and she committed herself to the little girls’ care with singleminded devotion. In time, she was even permitted to go into town, to shop, to meet and talk to people — things she hadn’t experienced for three years, things that Colleen Stan used to do, but K had never done.

K had gradually come to accept that it was her lot in life to be a slave. And she tried to be a good one — even Cameron could see that. During the course of her captivity she had proved again and again that she was hardworking, subservient, and — most important — that she could be trusted not to do anything foolish.

But as a precaution Cameron continually emphasized the threat of the Company. His lies grew and twisted like well-watered weeds, and K harvested them as truth. He often attributed her treatment to Company orders. The punishments, the drills, the bizarre tortures and sex acts weren’t his idea, but the policy of cold and distant leaders.

He told her, for example, that since she was being let out of the box the Company needed further identification. Having removed the second slave collar, he now said the scars on her upper thighs wouldn’t be sufficient. So, after piercing it himself with an ordinary needle, Hooker inserted a gold earring through her right labia.

One of K’s first excursions out of the mobile home came early in 1980. The Hookers got her out of the box, told her to shower, and fixed her up with some of Jan’s clothes, a new hairdo, and a bit of makeup. To her amazement, she was told she was going to go out dancing with Janice.

Jan and K went out on the town while Cameron stayed home with the girls. It was Jan’s idea: She drove, she paid for everything; K simply went along — with Cameron’s approval.

At a local bar called The New Orleans, they drank beer, danced, and even met a couple of men, who invited them to Sambo’s for coffee afterward. From there, they accompanied the men to an apartment. Jan and her date went together into his bedroom; K and the other fellow stayed in the living room, talking very little, until the two came out. Then Jan took K back home and put her back in the box.

At twenty-two, after five years of an increasingly rocky marriage, Jan probably did this as a way of both eliciting jealousy from Cameron and of combatting her own jealousy toward K.