Perfect Victim (26 page)

After reassurances from Shamblin, she gradually related the story — in fits and starts, with long pauses and many tears — in many respects bore a striking resemblance to the tale of what had happened to Colleen Stan.

[Note to the reader: Whatfollows is a summary of what Jan Hooker told police. This is only her version of the truth. Cameron Hooker has never been charged with this or any other murder. Little corroborative evidence was unearthed, and the investigation into the disappearance of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake remains open.]

Late in January of 1976, Jan and Cameron Hooker were driving the blue Dodge Colt in Chico, a town just forty minutes away from Red Bluff, when Hooker spotted a young woman with long, dark hair walking alongside the road. She was alone. He stopped and offered her a ride, and she got in and sat in the back seat. She told them her name was Marliz and asked them to drop her off at an apartment off of Rio Lindo Avenue. They drove in that direction.

When they arrived Jan opened the door to let her out, but as Marliz started to get out, Cameron grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back in. Jamming her head down between the car’s bucket seats, he threatened her and drove off.

With some difficulty, he restrained her. Like Stan, she was driven down a dirt road, tied up, and shut inside the head box.

Then the threesome drove on toward Red Bluff.

Before going home, Cameron and Jan stopped at Jolly Cone, a fastfood place, and got something to eat. By then it was dark, and Marliz was driven to the house at 1140 Oak Street.

Cameron parked in the garage, took the head box off Marliz, and left her with Jan for a moment while he went to unlock the house. Still tied up, Marliz pleaded desperately with Jan to let her go. Not knowing what would happen, Jan tried to reassure her, saying that everything would be okay.

Then Cameron came back, carried Marliz into the house, and took her down into the basement. Jan stayed upstairs while he stripped off his captive’s clothes and hung her up by the wrists.

For some reason, perhaps to stop her from screaming, perhaps because he wanted a silent sex slave, he decided to cut her vocal chords. He used a knife.

After this, weak and dizzy from loss of blood, Marliz indicated that she wanted a pencil and paper. She wrote a note that she was willing to call her boyfriend to get money for her captor. He refused.

As the night stretched on, Hooker shot Marliz several times in the lower abdomen with a pellet gun. Jan described this as “a torture thing.”

Finally, he strangled her to death.

Shortly afterward Cameron came upstairs and told Janice, who was sitting on the couch in a state of shock, that Marliz had been killed. She cried, and Cameron held her.

At about two A.M., Cameron and Jan wrapped the body in a blanket and loaded it into the trunk of the car. They headed north to Highway 44 and drove into the mountains. Snow was falling lightly, and a heavy whiteness already covered the ground.

They drove for some distance — Janice couldn’t be sure how far — before turning onto a muddy side road and coming to a stop.

Cameron got out and walked several yards from the car.

Using a shovel he’d brought along, he dug a shallow grave. Then he came back and they got the body out of the trunk. Together, they carried Marliz over to the freshly turned earth and buried her.

It was nearly daylight by the time they got back to Red Bluff.

Later, Hooker burned Spannhake’s identification, purse, and other personal belongings at Dog Island Park, just a couple of miles from 1140 Oak Street. The only thing he kept, Janice said, was a small gold watch, which he wore for some time before losing it on a conveyor belt at work.

Janice told police that she believes Cameron killed Marliz because he lost control of the situation.

Detective Shamblin elicited from Janice Hooker all the information he could about the alleged murder of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake, then turned her attention to other crimes. “Now,” he said, “how did you meet Colleen?”

At times Janice was unintelligible. She rambled, cried, mumbled, took long pauses and SIDESTEPPED phrasings that she thought seemed incriminating. And the subject matter was almost as confusing as her manner of speaking: bondage, hangings, the workshop, the stretcher, leather cuffs, the head box, and references to “Kay,” when Jan meant to say “Colleen.”

From time to time she went off on tangents about God and religion, about right and wrong, about guilt and fear. Clearly, these were subjects she’d given a lot of thought. At one point, she offered: “If you work on somebody’s fear, if you find their fear point, you can make them do anything.”

Given the confinement and tortures Jan described, it seemed incomprehensible that Colleen Stan hadn’t escaped at her earliest opportunity. For this, Jan offered an unusual explanation: “She was brainwashed,” she contended. They both were. “One hundred percent totally brainwashed.”

Comparing Cameron to Jim Jones, Jan described the control he had in almost SUPERNATURAL terms, saying that he used the Bible to reinforce what he told them. She said she felt powerless to oppose him, even when she thought he was wrong. “Lots of times,” she said, “I felt like killing myself.”

1. Jones was the cult leader of the People’s Temple who ordered some nine hundred followers to commit suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in

1978.

She recounted how she and Colleen finally escaped together, and then how, after going back to him, Jan finally left Cameron for good: “I do know one thing. I never had the courage in my life to convince him I was walking out. But I faced him, and for THE first time, I acted like I wasn’t afraid.”

But Janice was still fearful of her husband. When some comment triggered the realization that she might have to testify against him in court, she protested that she couldn’t, saying, “You don’t know what he does to me when I see him. Something happens to me when I see him!” Shamblin comforted her and quickly moved on to another subject.

It was an exhausting interview, covering nearly a decade and a mind-numbing combination of circumstances, but finally Shamblin reached an end to this first round of questions. Then, with some last-minute reassurances, Shamblin sent an emotionally spent Janice Hooker home to her parents, with whom she and her daughters were staying once again.

The next day Lieutenant Brown and Detective Shamblin set about verifying parts of Mrs. Hooker’s story. They met with Doris Miron at King’s Lodge, who told them about Colleen Stan, her prize worker, who had abruptly quit after only three months. Then, search warrant in hand, they went to 1140 Oak Street, where a quick search of the basement lent further corroboration to Jan’s story.

The next step would be to interview Colleen Stan.

On the afternoon of Monday, November 12, Detective Shamblin flew down to Riverside with Police Officer Mack McCall, a slim, good-humored fellow who few would guess holds a black belt in karate. They rented a car at the airport and found Jack Martin’s address, a small house in a modest suburban neighborhood.

Colleen, her father, her stepmother, and her mother were all awaiting them. After introductions, Mrs. Martin bustled about in the kitchen, apparently uncomfortable yet faultlessly hospitable, while the others settled in the living room.

Initially, most people are apprehensive about having police officers in their home, so Shamblin set about trying to put them all at ease. Born and bred in Red Bluff, he possessed an easygoing, unaffected quality that stemmed partly from the fact that he wasn’t a big city cop, and partly from training. Shamblin not only had twelve years of on-the-job experience, but had taken special courses on how to deal with victims in general and rape victims in particular.

After explaining that they would need to tape-record Colleen’s statement, he turned the machine on, and they got under way.

Again, Shamblin did the questioning, beginning with Colleen’s background, then quickly going on to the kidnap.

Answering Shamblin’s questions in a low, almost whispery voice, Colleen told about her captivity, the slavery contract, the Company, the boxes and the many devices Cameron Hooker had used to restrain and torture her. Her family listened quietly, her mother interrupting occasionally with a question that revealed gaps in her understanding of what her daughter had endured.

Shamblin found Colleen articulate, helpful, and lucid, but she had a disturbingly unemotional manner. In contrast to Janice Hooker’s tears and near-breakdown, Colleen’s responses to the officers’ questions were peculiarly matter-of-fact. She spoke almost with an air of detachment — no dramatics, no flourishes, no tears.

The interview stretched on, covering year after year.

Then Shamblin asked the obvious question: “Why didn’t you go to the police when you got back to Riverside?”

“Jan asked me not to,” she said. She explained that they both had hoped that Cameron would change, echoing almost perfectly what Jan had told them earlier.

But here Colleen’s voice cracked and her composure faltered.

This was important to her; she wanted them to understand: “I’m not doing this for revenge, but only because I don’t want it to happen to anyone else.”

Later that week, Shamblin, McCall, and a matron, Katherine Engel, took Janice up into the mountains to try to locate the grave site of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake. They drove up and down the highway, turning down various likely-looking dirt roads, but Jan’s memory was clogged by the cobwebs of time.

Nearly nine years had passed since the alleged murder. The dirt road could have been a logging road, long since overgrown, or it might now be paved. And though Jan said she remembered hearing a stream, up in these mountains, streams come and go.

Further complicating the search, it had been late at night when they’d buried the body, and the ground had been snow-covered at the time. Jan seemed to be trying in earnest, but reality and her mental picture just didn’t match up. They finally gave up and headed back to Red Bluff.

Without a body there was no evidence linking Cameron Hooker to Marliz Spannhake’s disappearance. Since Janice Hooker was an accomplice, her testimony against Cameron would only hold up in court if it could be substantiated by other evidence.

But the trail was ice-cold and, except for Janice’s statement, there was nothing to suggest murder…outside the undeniable fact that Marie Elizabeth Spannhake had disappeared.

In the case regarding Colleen Stan, however, Janice Hooker’s story was getting outside corroboration and was backed up by Stan herself.

In the meantime, Cameron Hooker was out and about, carrying on his life as usual, with no hint that the police were actively interested in him. It was difficult to say, in a town of ten thousand people, how long they could carry on an investigation without Hooker catching wind of it and perhaps fleeing. It was time for an arrest warrant.

Early on Sunday, November 18, Lieutenant Brown and Detective Shamblin drove out to the Hooker residence. They found Hooker at home and advised him of his Miranda rights. He invoked his right to remain silent, saying he wanted to talk to a lawyer.

He was handcuffed, loaded in the car, and driven to the Tehama County Jail. While booking Cameron Michael Hooker, Shamblin advised him that he had a warrant to search his property and asked for the key to his trailer. When Hooker handed it over, the detective noticed another, smaller key and asked for it as well.

He’d recognized it as a key to a set of handcuffs.

Surely the mind and heart of man are cunning.

But God will shoot them with arrows; suddenly they will be struck down.

He will turn their own tongues against them and bring them to ruin.

Psalm 64:6-8 As quoted from the Bible by Colleen Stan

Disappointed wasn’t a strong ENOUGH word to express Mcguire’s feelings over the upcoming disposition of the Hooker case. Indignant, devastated, frustrated at, these were closer.

She’d worked on this case for months. She had talked to neighbors and family and coworkers. She’d read bank statements, studied canceled checks, gone over department of motor vehicle, hospital, and work records. She’d had Hooker fingerprinted and had secured handwriting samples. She’d received late-night calls from Janice and from Colleen. She’d photographed the scenes of the crime on the ground and from the air. She’d handled every piece of evidence, even climbing into the box and having the head box shut over her. She’d charted the course of seven years of serious crimes. And through it all Christine Mcguire had developed a deep, personal loathing for Cameron Michael Hooker.

She deemed him a sadist, the most detestable criminal she’d ever come across, and now, because of a shortfall in the county budget, Hooker could walk out of prison in less than five years.

It made her sick.

On top of everything, she worried about Hooker’s potential for revenge. When he got out, would Colleen be safe? Would Janice? And what about HERSELF?

But with economics calling the shots in Tehama County, the only way Mcguire could imagine the plea bargain being derailed would be if someone from the outside stepped in.

The plea was scheduled for June 10. She had a week.

Mcguire got her information ready and placed a call to Colleen’s attorney, Marilyn Barrett. She outlined what had happened, then told her: “Hooker could get off on a minor charge simply because the county can’t afford to try him, even though this is in violation of penal code section 1192.7.”

“What?”

“The penal code. It prohibits plea bargaining serious felonies for any reason other than insufficient evidence or because testimony of a material witness can’t be obtained, or if the plea won’t result in a substantial change in the sentence.”

“It violates the penal code?”

“Right, Marilyn. In other words, having no money isn’t an acceptable basis for negotiating a plea.”

“What was that number again?” Barrett asked.

“Section 1192.7. Get a copy of the code and look it up.”

Barrett took it all down, saying she intended to call some people. That was fine with Mcguire, but she suggested that first of all, she ought to call Colleen.