Perfect Victim (20 page)

To both attorneys’ satisfaction, Judge Young granted the change-of-venue motion. A new trial date would be set when the trial site was decided.

Janice Hooker called that afternoon, anxious over the Daily News article about the cost of trying her husband. She understood that the state would absorb part of the cost of trying death penalty cases and, thinking of the Spannhake case, worried that the county’s fiscal problems would push the DA’s office into going after the death penalty. Apparently, she felt guilty enough about putting Cameron behind bars, she didn’t want to feel responsible for his death.

Mcguire reassured her that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Cameron with murder, and even if there were, the possibility of a death penalty was remote.

A couple of days later, Janice called to set up an appointment.

Although emotionally stronger, she still seemed under Cameron’s sway. At times it sounded as if she were operating as his mouthpiece, passing on information for him. And she played both sides: Apparently she wanted him locked up so he couldn’t kidnap or torture anyone else, but didn’t want to feel responsible for whatever justice might be meted out. It was difficult to know how much Jan could be trusted.

At times Mcguire was appalled by Jan’s docility. She’d signed no slavery contract, she’d believed in no Company, why hadn’t she just walked out? Why had she put up with the pain and humiliation for so many years?

But today Mcguire put her head in her hands and sighed, thinking: How can I possibly criticize Janice? Am I so different? Aren’t I just as afraid to leave a bad situation?

Her relationship with Jim had steadily soured, and now Christine also found herself caught in an unhappy marriage — one she was unable to change but reluctant to leave. She tried to deny her marital troubles by losing herself in the pressing responsibilities of being a working mother, pouring her energies into her job, but the veil of activity she spun about herself couldn’t hide the anger and pain that was slowly eroding the foundation of her marriage.

“In some ways,” thought Christine, “I’m as weak and dependent as Janice.”

She rubbed her forehead and tried to put her personal life out of her mind, refocusing on Janice Hooker.

Christine couldn’t help but feel pangs of sympathy for her, despite Janice’s exasperating fence-sitting. Obviously struggling to come to terms with what had happened, Janice was going to counseling regularly, catching up on ten years of repressed emotions, grappling both with guilt and her own victimization.

Once she had shyly showed Christine a scrap of paper with a few phrases penciled on it, saying it was something she carried around with her for emotional support. It was a short list of encouraging phrases, such as, “I am not a bad person.” Christine had been touched by the disclosure, by the poignancy of Janice carrying around little reminders of her worth as a person.

When Janice came in today she chatted awhile and then indicated, as Mcguire had expected, that she wanted to make a statement. Shamblin was called in.

When he arrived, Jan explained she’d read in the newspapers that Colleen had denied wanting to have Cameron’s child. “That’s not true,” she objected. “Colleen told me that she loved Cameron and that he was going to let her have his baby.”

Further, Jan said she’d read the same thing in a “diary” that Colleen had written, but that the “diary” had been burned along with other items before Cameron’s arrest.

But Colleen had denied ever having loved Cameron or wanting to have his child. During the preliminary hearing, she had insisted that, though she wanted to have a child, she had never wanted to have Cameron Hooker’s.

So now one star witness’s version of truth had cast doubt upon the other’s.

This turn of events left Mcguire even more unsettled when she heard a rumor that Papendick had acquired some secret and potentially damaging evidence.

He was heard gloating to friends that he had “love letters” written by Colleen to Cameron. He claimed the letters demonstrated that their peculiar relationship, including the bondage and discipline, was therefore consensual.

When Mcguire checked with Colleen and Janice, neither could recall Colleen writing any letters to Cameron during her captivity. Their responses were so low-key that the prosecutor simply discounted the reported love letters as idle gossip.

Sometimes I’m not very far from utter despair. No one knows I am alive any more. I’m given up for dead by now, I’m accepted for dead. -Miranda, The Collector, by John Fowles

K’s imprisonment had come full circle. The darkness was again her intimate companion, a heavy shroud covering her days that lifted off only at night, when she was let out into the trailer’s artificial light for a precious hour or two. Then she consumed her nightly meal, usually leftovers, at the foot of the bed or in the bathroom, where she emptied her bedpan, and, if they gave her some time, did deep knee-bends and read the Bible awhile before being locked again in the darkness.

With K passing day after day in the secret compartment beneath the bed, peace was restored within the Hooker household.

As usual, Janice blocked out distasteful details, turning her full attention to the duties of being a mother and housewife.

Jan was, ironically, an expert at compartmentalization.

Spring edged into summer and local memories of “Kay Powers” evaporated like dew. If anyone asked, the word was that “Kay” was doing fine in Southern California.

Meanwhile, the searing summer heat penetrated deep into the mobile home, sliding into the box like licks from hell. Day after day, K endured the sweltering and inescapable heat.

Once Jan and Cameron left town for a weekend, leaving K to bake and sweat in the box. No food. No water. For three days she suffered through a delirium of unrelenting incarceration and nearly intolerable heat. Sweat wept from her pores till K thought she would die of dehydration. When the Hookers finally came home and let her out, she could barely stand.

This apparently made an impression; the next time they went away for the weekend, they left K with a quart of water and about a dozen chocolate chip cookies wrapped in tin foil.

Months dragged by, K suffering through the slow, flat oppressiveness of solitary confinement. At night, when it was very quiet, she put her ear to the vent hole and heard the hiss of the cars and the growl of the trucks as they passed on the freeway just a few hundred yards away. Through that hole, that pinpoint view of ground beneath the trailer, she perceived the slow brightening as dawn approached. She heard Cameron leave for work, the slam of the car door and the snarl of the ignition reaching her before the exhaust billowed beneath the mobile home and wafted into the box, filling her lungs with fumes.

The temperature left its nightly nadir and climbed steadily upward until the day warmed to full-force: the dogs barking, the girls running in and out and letting the door slam, their carefree laughter ringing through the air. K listened hard, picking up bits and pieces over the constant whir of the blower.

While that small vent was her access to the world, it served to let in more than simply sounds and smells and a patch of light. One night she had company.

It startled her with its tiny claws. Pricking and tickling, it raced across her skin, searching for an escape from the huge creature it had unexpectedly encountered. It scurried the length of her body, K writhing beneath its miniature feet as she tried to maneuver the furry intruder toward the vent hole. It balked and scampered back up her bare skin toward her face, finally fleeing out the hole, leaving her shivering in its wake.

In an existence of tedium and monotony, even the brief visit of a mouse was an event.

Prayers and dreams were K’s primary diversions. Sleep was her only escape. For a while she could lose herself in dreams and distant, almost hallucinatory images of family, of children, of freedom…

But K knew Cameron would never let her see her family again, and even these shimmering illusions crumpled beneath the weight of reality. Some nights, swept up in nightmares of slavery, torture, and pain, she’d wake with her heart pounding from dreams of her deepest fear: being sold to slave owners even crueler than Cameron Hooker.

Usually, K passively endured being locked inside that loathsome box, but once she succumbed to a fit of temper.

Cameron had left for work, Jan was in the hospital for a knee operation, and K was alone in the house. She knew there was no one to hear, and taking the opportunity to vent her frustration on the box, she began kicking at it. She stomped on the door as hard as she could, kicking with all her strength.

Suddenly, it broke out. To her astonishment, she’d kicked the particle board so hard the bolts pulled clear through.

She could have escaped. She could have climbed out of the box and run away…but K’s reaction was not of liberation, but of fear. There was nowhere to go. The Company was everywhere, watching, and she was too afraid to test them.

She knew Cameron would be furious when he saw what she’d done. He would surely beat her. He might even kill her for this, with Jan and the girls gone and no witnesses. The thought must have made her shiver, but she lay there, cowering, until that evening when he got home from work.

He looked at the broken panel and got her out of the box.

“What happened?”

She summoned her courage and confessed what she’d done.

Amazingly, Hooker wasn’t besieged by a murderous passion — he wasn’t even mad. Instead, he busied himself with repairs. In no time, he’d rigged a board across the broken section, so that instead of bolting the box shut, he slipped the board snugly into its slots, like a barn door.

That done, the box was secure once again, with K shut back inside.

For the most part, K simply endured and prayed, but during her captivity she also gained firsthand experience at a little-known craft. It was hard, demanding work, yet this training was too special to qualify her for much in any job market. Few people have labored at such a peculiar project.

The first year they moved from Oak Street, Hooker had built a small shed out behind the trailer. The second year, he built a second shed abutting the first one, with a common wall and a cement floor. He had poured the cement over the section of ground where he’d had K bury the railroad tie. When the cement had set, he had both a floor and a ceiling.

It was Cameron Hooker’s ambition to build a dungeon, and his slave would be his reluctant helper. They worked on it, off and on, for months, years.

No neighbors were near enough to worry about, but just in case, he took K out to the shed at night, under cover of darkness.

Cameron had planned ahead when pouring the cement, leaving a rectangular patch of bare ground twenty-seven by thirty-four inches. This was designed to be the entrance to his dungeon, and this was where he told K to dig.

They dug a little each week, with K shoveling the dirt into buckets that Cameron dumped outside. Over time the hole got bigger, and as K shoveled deeper into the earth, she sank with her work farther and farther below the level of the floor, until Cameron had to rig up a pulley system to lift out the buckets of dirt.

Jan helped a couple of times, but Cameron generally told her to stay in the house with the kids and the phone. He and his Slave labored together, silent and intent. A mound of earth appeared to the south of the sheds, steadily growing as the hole got deeper.

Working a couple of hours a night and as much as two or three nights a week over many months, Cameron and K enlarged the hole from the size of a footlocker to the size of a car and, finally, to the size of a small room. At last Cameron decided that, though it would only be a miniature dungeon, it was large enough.

Now it was time to put in a floor and build walls.

Cement bricks would do. Cameron borrowed a cement mixer from his father, made a mold, and poured the bricks himself. The bricks had to set for twenty-four hours or so, and he could only make ten at a time, but Hooker was a man with patience.

“You will have to cash your check at Raley’s. K has already been fed today. She doesn’t know I’m gone. Don’t tell her.”

Thus read the note that Jan left on the kitchen table. She didn’t even tell Cameron where she was going.

This was the first time she’d ever left like this, but she needed to get away from Cameron, needed some time alone. She drove south to the San Francisco Bay Area and stayed with one of her older brothers for four days of reprieve.

Cameron’s “sex slave” had done little to ease the physical hardship on Jan, though that had been the reason, initially, that he’d given for kidnapping another woman. Janice detested bondage, and Cameron knew it, but still he hung her up and whipped her on a regular basis. With the exception of the head box and the electrical shocks and burns, Cameron used on her all the devices he used on K, making her sweat and weep with pain. Jan was hung, whipped, tied in various strange ways, blindfolded, gagged, stretched on the stretcher, forced to wear the gas mask, and dunked to the point of near-drowning. And yet she felt powerless to resist.

This strange marriage was all she knew. And she believed she loved her husband, even though she feared him.

Keeping so much of her life secret from outsiders was a constant subconscious struggle, but she pushed the bad parts out of her mind, beyond the reach of even the most confidential conversations with siblings, parents, or friends. Besides having two daughters and a lot of years together, she and Cameron had a strong interest in keeping their marriage together. They were bonded by the conjugal glue of secrecy.

In 1982, in an effort to clear the air and start their marriage afresh, the Hookers had what they dubbed “a confession time.”

All the dirty secrets they’d hidden from each other were dusted off and brought out of the closet to be discussed. More glue.

Janice reached all the way back to 1974 and confessed to Cameron that she’d lied about being pregnant so that he would marry her. She even told him about two brief affairs she’d had in 1980. He was unperturbed.