The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (24 page)

Early in 1980, after nearly three years of captivity, Colleen was allowed an amazing excursion.
She was permitted to dress up in some of Janice’s clothes, make up her face, and accompany Janice to a dance.
There they met two men and went home with them.
Janice vanished into the bedroom with one of them, while Colleen stayed talking to the other.
Cameron Hooker apparently suspected nothing, and his wife’s liaison continued for the next two months, until it fizzled out.
After that, Janice, still unsuspected, had another short affair.

Colleen was also allowed more freedom – she was allowed to go out and jog on her own.
Incredibly, she still made no attempt to escape – Hooker had brainwashed her into seeing herself as a well-behaved and loyal slave.
As a reward for obedience, she was allowed to write to her sister – without, of course, including a return address – and even, on one occasion, to telephone her family, with Hooker standing beside her monitoring everything she said.
She told them she was living with a couple who were ‘looking after her’.
When they wanted to know more, her Master made her hang up.
Soon after that he took her on a visit to his own family, on their ranch outside town.
This passed off so well that he decided to take the ultimate risk, and allow her to go and see her own parents, who lived in Riverside, Southern California.
In March 1981, he drove her to Sacramento, and ordered her to wait in the car while he went into an office block that belonged to the sinister Company who owned her.
When he came back, he told her they had granted permission to visit her family.
The visit to Riverside was brief, but went off perfectly.
Hooker was introduced as her fiancé Mike, who was on his way to a computer seminar.
Colleen Stan spent the night in her father’s home, then visited her mother – who lived elsewhere – without divulging where she had been for four years, or why she had failed to keep in touch.
The following day, her Master rang her and announced he would be arriving in ten minutes to take her home.
Colleen was upset that Hooker had broken his promise to allow her to spend a full weekend with her family, and sulked all the way back to Red Bluff.
When they got back, the Master decided that enough was enough.
The slave’s period of liberty came to an end, and she was put back into the box.

This period lasted another three years, from 1981 until 1984.
On one occasion, out of sheer frustration, she kicked out the end of the box and climbed out.
She had no thought of running away – the Company would be sure to track her down.
Oddly enough, when Hooker came home from work he was not angry, as she expected, but simply repaired the box.

The relationship between Hooker and his wife was becoming increasingly tense – she disliked being tied up and whipped.
At one point she left him for a few days and went to stay with her brother.
When she came back, she and Cameron had a long, honest talk; she confessed about her two early affairs – her husband seemed indifferent – while he admitted that he had been having sex with Colleen.
(This deeply upset Janice.) Then, in an attempt to repair their marriage, they began reading the Bible together.
Colleen had already found refuge in the religion of her childhood, and now she joined in the prayer sessions.
Cameron, meanwhile, worked on a kind of underground bunker that would be a dungeon for the slave.
It was completed in November 1983, and then Colleen was installed.
When the winter rains came, howerer, the dungeon began to fill with water, and they had to take her out again and let her back indoors.

Janice and Colleen, whose relationship in the past had often been stormy – Janice was inclined to boss her around – had now become close friends as well as fellow Bible students.
Cameron Hooker still flogged his slave – on Company orders – but was also treating her better, giving her more food, and allowing her to babysit with his two daughters.
And in May 1984, seven years after her abduction, he sent her out to find a job.
She was hired at a local motel as a maid, and proved to be such a hard worker that she soon received promotion.
One day, another maid offered her a lift home, and went into the mobile home; she was puzzled when Colleen told her that a small backpack contained everything she possessed.
Cameron Hooker came home while Colleen, Janice and the maid were talking, and stared at them with such hostility that the maid felt uncomfortable and left.

Colleen believed implicitly that she was the slave of ‘the Company’; she often mentioned it to Janice, and Janice felt increasingly guilty and uncomfortable at having to support her husband’s lies.
Her new religious faith made it difficult.
It became harder still when she and Colleen – with Cameron’s permission – began to go to the local church together.
Cameron tried to turn the Bible to his own advantage, quoting the passage from Genesis in which Abraham went to bed with his wife’s maid Hagar, and suggesting that Janice should take the same liberal attitude towards Colleen.
As usual, he finally got his way; he even persuaded Janice to share the bed, and entertain him with lesbian acts with Colleen.
Janice was so upset by the new situation that she asked Cameron to strangle her – something he did frequently, but only to the point of unconsciousness.
He agreed, but either lost courage, or was suddenly struck by the thought of the inconvenience of disposing of the body; at all events, Janice woke up to find herself still alive.

On 9 August 1984 Janice made her decision.
She went to speak to Colleen at work, and told her the truth: that there was no ‘Company’, that she was not a slave, that Cameron was merely a pervert.
Colleen was stunned.
Her first reaction was to quit her job.
Then she and Janice called on the pastor of their church, and gave him a confused outline of the story.
He advised them to leave Hooker.
But it was too late in the day for Colleen to take a bus to her family in Riverside.
Instead, they picked Cameron up from work as usual, and went back to the mobile home.
That night Janice pleaded that she felt ill, and she and Colleen slept on the floor together.
As soon as Cameron had gone to work at 5 a.m, they began packing, and fled to the home of Janice’s parents.
Colleen wired her father to ask him to send her a hundred dollars.
The next day she took the bus to southern California.
Before she left, she telephoned Cameron to tell him that she knew he had always lied to her, and that she was leaving; he cried.
Then Colleen went home to begin a new life.

For Janice, there was no new life.
Cameron begged her to go back to him, promising to reform, and she gave in.
But she took him to see the pastor, who advised him to burn his pornography and bondage equipment.
He said he would.
He even kept his promise, and made a bonfire of them in the back yard, but within a short time he began building up his collection of porno magazines again.
Meanwhile, back in Riverside, Colleen had told her family about her seven-year ordeal.
She rejected the idea of going to the police.
She and Janice had talked over the telephone – they kept in touch daily – and Colleen agreed that Cameron deserved another chance.
She even talked to Cameron and agreed not to go to the police.
With his wife back at home and his former slave in Riverside, he must have felt perfectly safe.

Janice had now found another confidante – a doctor’s receptionist.
It was to her that, on 7 November 1984, she finally poured out the truth.
Her new friend sent her back to talk to the pastor.
And the pastor, when he finally heard the whole story, talked her into ringing the police.

What Janice Hooker had to tell them was not simply the story of Colleen Stan’s seven-year ordeal.
She had been keeping a more sinister secret.
In January 1976, more than a year before Colleen had been abducted, they had offered a lift to a girl in the nearby town of Chico.
She told them her name was Marliz Spannhake, and that she was eighteen years old.
When the time came to drop her off at her apartment, Cameron had grabbed her and driven off to a lonely spot, where the girl had been tied up, and her head clamped in the ‘head box’.
Back at home, Hooker stripped off her clothes and hung her from the ceiling.
Then, perhaps to stop her screams, he cut her vocal cords with a knife.
He tortured her by shooting her in the abdomen with a pellet gun, and finally strangled her.
In the early hours of the morning, they drove into the mountains, and Hooker buried Marliz Spannhake in a shallow grave.

The police were able to verify that a girl named Marie Elizabeth Spannhake had vanished one evening in January 1976; but although Janice accompanied them up into the mountains, they were unable to locate the grave.
That meant that there was not enough evidence to charge Cameron Hooker with murder.
Two detectives flew down to Riverside to interview Colleen Stan, and as they listened to the story of her seven years of torment, they soon realised that they had enough evidence to guarantee Cameron Hooker several years in jail.
Hooker was arrested on 18 November 1984.

The trial, which began on 24 September 1985, made nationwide headlines; the ‘Sex Slave’ case seemed specially designed to sell newspapers.
The jurors learned that Hooker was to be tried on sixteen counts, including kidnapping, rape, sodomy, forced oral copulation and penetration with a foreign object.
The prosecutor, Christine McGuire, had hoped to be able to introduce the Spannhake murder as corroborative evidence of Hooker’s propensity to torture, but had finally agreed to drop it if Hooker would plead guilty to kidnapping.
Hooker’s attorney, Rolland Papendick, made no attempt to deny that Colleen Stan was abducted against her will, but argred that she had soon been free to leave, and that she had stayed voluntarily.
The evidence, he said, showed that Colleen loved Cameron, and had stayed for that reason.
His argument was that Janice had regarded Colleen as a rival who would supplant her, and had therefore told her about ‘the Company’ to get rid of her.
Even after her return to Riverside, said Papendick, Colleen had frequently telephoned Cameron Hooker.
And that is why, suspecting that Cameron meant to desert her and move to Riverside, Janice had finally decided to turn him in.
In the witness box, Janice admitted that she knew Colleen was in love with Cameron, and that she wanted to have a baby.
The jury’s sympathy was obviously beginning to waver towards Cameron.
But when a doctor described the scars on Colleen’s wrists, ankles and thighs – including electric burn marks – and a psychiatrist talked about brainwashing, it began to swing in the other direction.
Even so, when the prosection and defence had presented their closing arguments, the case seemed balanced on a knife edge.
On 29 October 1985 the jury retired; on 31 October – Hallowe’en – they filed in to deliver their verdict.
Cameron Hooker had been found guilty on ten counts, including kidnapping, rape and torture.
On 22 November Judge Clarence B.
Knight delivered the sentence.
After describing Cameron Hooker as ‘the most dangerous psychopath that I have ever dealt with’, he sentenced him to several terms of imprisonment amounting to a hundred and four years.

One question remains unanswered – the question that Christine McGuire raises on the last page of her book about the case,
Perfect Victim
: how did Cameron Hooker develop his peculiar taste for torturing women?
She has an interesting comment from someone on the case who wished to remain anonymous:

‘People like to believe in an Einstein or a Beethoven – geniuses – but they hate to believe in their opposites.
A genius is a mutant, something unnatural.
But just as some people are born with extra intelligence, others are born without much intelligence or without fingers or limbs or consciences.
The human body is phenomenally complex, with trillions of cells, and trillions of things can go wrong.
Cameron Hooker is a fluke, an accident of internal wiring.
His instincts are simply the opposite of yours and mine.’

Many police officeers who have had to deal with serial killers would concur with that analysis: that however old-fashioned and unsubtle it sounds, some people are simply born bad.
Or, to put it less crudely, that some unknown hereditary factors cause some people to be naturally more vicious than others.
But while this is undoubtedly true, the Quantico interviews with thirty-six killers demonstrated that family background plays a crucial role.
The interviewers noted a ‘high degree of instability’ in the family backgrounds, hostile or poor relationship with the father, and physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood or teens.
Another study
¹
pointed out that a large proportion of criminals are ‘highly sexed’ in childhood, and have peeped in through bathroom keyholes on females undressing, or initiated sexual games – sometimes amounting to rape – with girls at school.

Equally important is the fact that, as every psychiatrist knows, sexual perversions seldom appear fully fledged; they sprout, like seeds, from small beginnings.
In his book
Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes
, James Melvin Reinhardt cites a typical case of a urophile – a man who liked to sniff and drink women’s urine – who began (as a child) simply by being sexually attracted by little girls.
One day after he had seen a little girl urinating, he lay down on the ground and sniffed the spot, masturbating at the same time.
The taste thus initiated finally developed into an obsession with female urine.
We can see clearly that it was merely a matter of association of ideas.
Reinhardt goes on to point out that the same thing applies to sadism and masochism: that they are simply a development of ‘moral and aesthetic sensitivities that are ordinarily prevalent in a reasonably well socialised man’.
He cited the case of a patient whose masochism dated from the day – when he was seven years old – when a maidservant encouraged him to fondle her feet and toes.
Then he experienced orgasm while watching a poodle licking the toes of a maid while she was reading.
One day he persuaded the maid to allow him to lick her toes, and again experienced an ejaculation.
This led to fantasies of being beaten and humiliated by women.
If the maid had asked him to bite or scratch her instead of fondling her toes, it is conceivable that he might have developed into a sadist instead.