Perfect Victim (15 page)

But try as she might, she wouldn’t be able to provoke the same jealous rumblings within Cameron that she felt within herself. He just wasn’t made that way. He cared so little that he even gave Jan permission to date other men.

For a couple of months, Jan continued to date the guy she met at the bar that night, with Cameron’s knowledge but with no apparent jealousy. The affair was short-lived. Jan had another brief interlude, but that affair also died quickly and quietly.

Her discontent and frustration evidently continued unabated.

Jan lost her job at Foster’s Freeze in January, and money was tight again at the Hooker residence, but Cameron hit on a plan to make some extra cash: He decided to put K to work.

The big excursion fell on Easter weekend. As shops around town did a brisk business in chocolate bunnies and fancy baskets, Cameron got K out of the box and told her they were going to Reno. He didn’t say why.

It was well after dark when they finally pulled onto Reno’s neon-lit streets, and though it was already late, Cameron promptly put K to work. He’d met another slave-owner, he told her, who had bragged about how much money his slave had made panhandling at a concert. Cameron had bet that his slave could do better, and so K, for about four hours, found herself walking up and down the sidewalk, asking strangers for spare change. She didn’t get much, but all the money, of course, went to Cameron.

They slept that night in the pickup, parked in the MGM Grand parking lot. The next morning, after an inexpensive breakfast, he put her to work along the main strip again. Later, he took her over to the Civic Center, where the Jehovah’s Witnesses were having a convention, and she stood outside and panhandled for some time. This was a more generous crowd.

In all, K stood out in the cold asking for money for about six hours that day, with Cameron watching, most of the time, from within the heated pickup. At the end of the day, she gave all the money to Cameron, and they finally headed back to Red Bluff, with Cameron stopping on the way home to buy an Easter Lily for Janice.

The panhandling didn’t prove especially lucrative, but after their excursion to Reno Cameron possessed the exhilarating knowledge that K would do her best to follow his orders not only at home, with the threat of the whip nearby, but unaccompanied and in public. She hated begging for money — she even complained to him about it — but she did as she was told.

In total, Cameron Hooker had K panhandle for him on four occasions: that one time in Reno; once in Red Bluff at the Raley’s supermarket parking lot, where she asked for spare change until a man from Raley’s told her to leave; and twice in the nearby town of Redding, one day at both Payless Drug Store and McDonald’s, and another day at the Mt. Shasta Mall.

It’s true that while she was out mingling with the crowds, K could have tried to run away, pleaded for help, or told somebody that she was being held captive. But from her point of view that was worse than useless, it was dangerous. No matter where she went, the Company would track her down, capture her, torture her, probably kill her. And if she went home — the only place she wanted to go — she would only be putting her family in jeopardy.

She couldn’t risk it.

People had moved into the neighborhood now, and when the neighbors came over to the mobile home at the end of the lane for a friendly visit, they were told the young woman laboring in the Hookers’ garden was “Kay,” their live-in babysitter and housekeeper.

Cameron had warned her not to speak to the neighbors unless spoken to. She could answer questions and respond politely, but wasn’t to volunteer conversation. And when others were around she should forgo the usual rules of kneeling to ask permission and of calling Janice “Ma’am” and Cameron “Sir” or “Master.” Their master/slave relationship, in short, was to remain invisible to outsiders.

And it did. None of the neighbors thought too long or hard about the menage A trois in their vicinity. The Hooker family seemed fairly ordinary, and “Kay” was pleasant enough, if a bit shy. The only hint of anything odd was “Kay’s” poverty. Day after day, she was out working in the garden or walking the kids or mowing the lawn in the same old clothes.

About two hundred feet to the east lived Dorothy and Al Coppa, the Hookers’ closest neighbors. They had moved into their single-wide trailer shortly after the Hookers. Though they didn’t know Jan and Cameron particularly well, they maintained a warm neighborliness — lending tools and assistance, chatting about weather and soil — but to a couple as secretive as the Hookers, their outgoingness could easily be mistaken for intrusion.

Al first glimpsed K working around the Hookers’ property shortly after they moved in, but wasn’t introduced to her until many months later. He was told that Cameron and Jan had picked up “Kay” while she was hitchhiking and were giving her a place to stay. It sounded temporary, yet she stayed and stayed.

Over the months, he and his wife, Dorothy, a matronly woman with graying hair and a soft voice, took a liking to the Hookers’ live-in babysitter and housekeeper. “Kay” seemed sweet, likable, and hardworking, though a bit on the quiet side and notably waifish. (Seeing that “Kay” had few clothes, they once passed on a pair of Al’s jeans, saying that he’d gotten too fat to wear them.)

Sometimes the Hookers’ two little girls would wander over to visit, and when K came to retrieve them, Dorothy would take the opportunity to talk with her for a while. “Kay” was always careful about what she said. (religion was a safe topic). Dorothy tried to get “Kay” to come to church with her, but “Kay” seemed oddly hesitant to go and reluctant even to discuss it.

With K’s new freedom she was even allowed to go jogging, unsupervised and on a regular basis, though she had to ask permission each time, of course, and Cameron delineated the route she should take. He even timed her, so he knew it took fifteen minutes for her to jog the mile-long course.

K usually ran in the evening, while the Hookers were eating dinner. She jogged down the dirt road and turned right at the end of the lane, savoring the fresh air and the company of the Hookers’ little dog, Misty, who trotted along beside her. More than just a healthy work-out, this was private time, a brief interlude of independence, a respite from the demands the Hookers put on her, and something she did just for herself. For a few minutes, she felt free.

But to keep the specter of the Company ever-present, Cameron told K that neighborhood members would be watching. And one evening she had this confirmed.

Cameron had told her that he was planning to go to a Company meeting in Sacramento on Sunday. It happened that as she jogged past the home of one of the neighbors, Mr. George, he was standing outside talking to his father, who also lived nearby, and she overheard them mention plans to go to Sacramento the next day, too.

Pure coincidence, but this chance encounter reinforced K’s belief that members of the Company were actually in the neighborhood spying on her. She was sure now that Mr. George and his father were involved with the Company. She imagined that Mr. George looked down on her because she was a slave, and when his dog chased after her as she jogged by, she believed he had sicced it on her.

One day Al Coppa hailed K as she was jogging past. She stopped, and it turned out that Al just wanted to chat. He couldn’t have known how distressing this idle conversation was to K, who was acutely aware that Cameron was timing her. She’d never been late before, and she was afraid of what might happen if she was.

Though she was anxious to get back, she didn’t want to be rude to Al, so she spoke with him a few minutes before hurrying back to the trailer.

She came in fifteen minutes late. Both Jan and Cameron were furious. They said they’d just put in a call to someone in the Company to chase her down and implied gruesome consequences if she’d been caught. “It’s lucky that you got back in when you did,” they told her.

She didn’t get to go jogging much after that.

Jan’s summer return to the job market precipitated a major turn in K’s captivity. Jan’s new job at the Pac-Out, a fastfood place in Redding, required that she be away from home during the day, when Cameron was working, so in the mornings Jan and Cameron rode to work together, leaving K at home to babysit the girls. For the first time, K was now out of the box with neither Jan nor Cameron there to supervise.

She did not run screaming to the neighbors. She did not call the police. She did nothing that might provoke the ire of the Company. Rather, K did her chores, minded the children, and did as she was told. She was not a troublemaker.

Around this time Cameron initiated an important change in K’s sleeping quarters: instead of being locked in the box every night, she slept on a sleeping bag on the floor of the back bathroom.

Most of the time she was chained to the toilet.

Grim as it sounds, the five-foot chain around her neck at least allowed her to stand and move around. After more than three years of sleeping and waking encased within a space smaller than a closet, unable even to sit up and having to use the bedpan in a prone position, being shut up inside the tiny bathroom of a mobile home came as a dramatic relief.

While in some ways K’s conditions improved, the physical and sexual abuse became a regular occurrence. K was raped repeatedly: while hung on the frame, tied to the stretcher, hanging in the shed, or bound in other ways. But Cameron was always careful about shielding his daughters from this; he waited until Jan and the girls were out shopping or visiting someone before he got out his bondage and torture equipment.

Though the girls were still very young and the Hookers tried to protect them from the unsavory side of K’s role, raising them with a slave around the house was sometimes problematic.

One morning Cathy got up before her parents. Knowing that K was in the bathroom, she opened the door and asked her to fix her some cereal.

“I’m sorry, honey, I can’t,” K told her.

At age three, Cathy couldn’t understand the chain around K’s neck, or why K, who usually made her breakfast, wouldn’t come to the kitchen to do so. She asked again.

“Well, maybe if you go ask your daddy, he’ll let K make your breakfast,” she finally suggested.

That’s what Cathy did, and she got her breakfast. But Cameron wasn’t happy about what K had said to his daughter or that Cathy had seen her chained to the toilet. From then on, K was to lock the bathroom door from the inside in case one of the girls tried to get in.

Working at the Pac-Out meant that Jan was having to commute about thirty miles to Redding and back every day. After a couple of months, she quit and found a new job in Red Bluff with a small electronics firm called JLA. Jan worked “prepping” parts, or cutting out parts to fit onto assembly boards.

JLA was then doing such a brisk business that they were having trouble keeping up with demand. Hearing opportunity knocking, Jan got her boss’s permission to bring work home.

When Cameron came by to pick her up in the evening, they would load the small machine that cut the parts into the car and bring it with them. K would do the work that night, and then Jan returned the next morning with both the machine and the newly cut parts.

This arrangement worked out well at first, but Jan’s boss disliked paying time-and-a-half for the extra work. He suggested that she fill in another job application so the work could be paid at a straight time wage. Jan brought home an application and Cameron told K to fill it out with her maiden name, Colleen Martin. JLA was soon issuing checks to her, which she signed over to the Hookers so they could deposit the money into their checking account.

During this time of unparalleled freedom, K resumed asking to see her family, and Hooker took a softer position, perhaps because he was now so confident of his control. On three occasions he allowed her to write to her sister, though she had to limit the contents to vague and mundane matters. She told her sister that she was living with a family, taking care of the kids, and learning to can fruit (she even enclosed some recipes). But, of course, she wasn’t allowed to give a return address.

Cameron checked the letters carefully, making her rewrite some sections before he posted them from a nearby town.

Still, these unanswerable letters did little to allay her yearning to see or hear from her family, and she kept pestering Cameron for the chance to contact them. Now, for the first time, he relented and let her phone home.

He took her and his daughters to a pay phone in Chico, a small college town about forty miles southeast of Red Bluff. With many admonitions about what she could and couldn’t say, he let K call.

As Cameron stood next to her, she dialed her father’s number and listened to it ring. Her younger sister, Bonnie, answered. It had been so many years since she’d heard from Colleen that she didn’t recognize her voice. “Who is this?” she asked.

The strange voice replied, “It’s your sister, Colleen.”

A brief and emotional conversation ensued. Colleen told her sister she was all right and that she missed everyone. She asked about family members and learned that everyone was well except one aunt, who had cancer. And though she’d known at the time of the kidnap that her stepmother was expecting, K learned for the first time that in September of 1977 she’d given birth to a baby girl, Leslie. Now Leslie was nearly three.

Practicing the restraint she’d learned over years as Hooker’s slave, K tearfully divulged only as much as Cameron would permit. But Bonnie, also in tears, peppered her sister with questions.

“Where are you?” she asked.

Colleen was evasive, saying only that she was “up north.”

And when her sister asked why she hadn’t written more often, Colleen simply didn’t answer.

Too soon, Cameron told her to hang up, but this fleeting contact with her sister was as precious as any gift her master could have given her. She was deeply grateful that she’d finally been allowed to call home.

In fact, K now found many reasons to be thankful. Besides being given permission to contact her family, she was out of the box and afforded numerous small freedoms. These, coupled with her growing acceptance of her slave status, affected K in ways she didn’t fully understand. During “the year out” — despite the victimization and brutalization, despite the continued hangings and abuse, despite the fact that Cameron raped her so frequently that when he told her to shower, she knew what was coming and started shaking as she washed — K started expressing love for her captor.