Perfect Victim (27 page)

When Mcguire hadn’t heard from Colleen by the afternoon of Tuesday, June 4, she phoned her. To her amazement, Colleen remained apparently unfazed in the face of all this. With uncanny passivity, she said she didn’t care about the plea negotiation, that she just wanted to get on with her life.

To Mcguire, this was as disturbing a response as if she’d shrieked and threatened suicide. Colleen was so damned acquiescent. Why?

A couple of days later, the Assistant Attorney General for the State of California, Arnold Overoye, phoned to ask: “What the hell is going on?”

Mcguire explained the county’s perilous financial situation, but Overoye was unimpressed. Courteous but brisk, he explained what Mcguire and Lang already knew — that a plea negotiation based on a lack of funds was INAPPROPRIATE. “If that’s the REASON for a negotiation,” he said, “our office will step in and try the case. And in the end, we’ll have to bill it back to Tehama County.”

Well, this was an interesting twist. A plea bargain wouldn’t save the county any money if the state used its own high-priced attorneys to try Hooker and then sent the county the tab.

With JUST a weekend between them and the scheduled plea negotiation, District Attorney Lang returned from a business trip, heard the news, and made a decision: “That’s what we needed,” he said. “The Board can’t argue with the Attorney General’s office. Hooker’s going to trial.”

The Board wouldn’t be happy, and God only knew where the money would come from, but Mcguire was elated.

By Monday the news had hit the grapevine. When Mcguire walked into Judge Watkins’s office, he looked up, smiled, and said, “Well, it looks like you’re going to get to try the Hooker case after all?”

Rolland Papendick was less enthusiastic. Minutes before the scheduled hearing, Mcguire found him and told him they weren’t going to accept the plea. He scowled but said nothing.

Cameron Hooker was meanwhile waiting in court. When Papendick told him the deal was off, Hooker seemed unconcerned.

He only shrugged.

The summer BROUGHT an abundance of awful but somehow pertinent news. In Europe, a TWA airliner was hijacked, with several people taken hostage and flown to Beirut. In New Jersey, a man was convicted of imprisoning, beating, and raping a young woman, who was held for four years, forced to sign a document acknowledging her submission, and made to work twenty-hour days. In La Jolla, near San Diego, the FBI arrested a couple on charges of subjecting several women to involuntary servitude, battery, and forced labor. And in Calavaras County, when a mysterious man by the name of Leonard Lake committed suicide after being arrested, a story of multiple murders, sexual torture, and sadistic pornography came to light, launching a massive search for bodies.

In Tehama County, Christine Mcguire watched these headlines with a kind of gruesome reassurance. The Hooker case was beginning to seem less and less farfetched — or perhaps the world was seeming more and more deranged.

Mcguire hoped the people down in San Mateo County were following the news. Because of the change of venue, some of them would end up on the jury, and she figured that any mention of hostages or sadism should leave some residue in their collective unconscious.

Moreover, Mcguire worried that she couldn’t count on Janice Hooker. Jan’s attitude flip-flopped; she revised statements, some times seeming either defensive about Cameron or upset with Colleen, on whom she began to cast blame. Exasperated, Mcguire wondered whether this was a result of Jan’s therapy or merely her way of handling her own culpability. in any case, she was unsure whether to treat Jan as a victim or a hostile witness.

Then Papendick touched a raw nerve: He filed a motion to compel psychiatric exams of both Janice and Colleen, obviously so that he could have his own specialist examine the prosecution’s two main witnesses. Further, when Papendick’s motion arrived on her desk, she was appalled that he’d attached a copy of Dr. Hatcher’s report.

The report was confidential, so she rushed over to Judge Watkins’s office and asked the court to have it sealed. At the end of the day she stopped by Papendick’s office to let him know what she’d done and to point out that he’d risked letting Hatcher’s report out to the press. Unruffled, Papendick apologized; the confidential nature of the report simply hadn’t occurred to him.

1. Dr. Hatcher’s twenty-three-page report on Janice Hooker and Colleen Stan summarized their personal histories, their perceptions of what had occurred between May of 1977 and the fall of 1984, and gave the psychologist’s evaluation of the mental status of each.

Then he remarked, “By the way, I’m going to ask for a continuance on the Hooker case.”

Mcguire’s face flushed. This would make the second continuance Papendick had asked for, and now the case would be nearly a year old by the time it went to trial.

“I decided the other night that I won’t be ready,” Papendick explained. “Dr. Hatcher’s report was late.”

“Rolland, I told you way back when that Hatcher’s report would be late. You said it wouldn’t cause you problems and that it wouldn’t cause you to ask for a continuance. I can pull the records on it.”

“Well, what can I do?” he asked innocently.

“Sure, I understand. If I oppose it and the court forces you to trial when you aren’t ready, it’s grounds for an appeal.” She was provoked. It was less than a month before trial, and she’d already sent out sixty subpoenas.

Papendick coolly went on to say that Hooker’s family had run out of funds, so he was going to ask the court to appoint him public defender for the Hooker trial. He was already so entrenched in the case, he said, a regular public defender would have a hard time catching up.

Great, Christine thought, now the county would not only have to pay for Hooker’s prosecution, but also for his defense.

2. In a bill modeled after legislation that helped another financially strapped county (then faced with the burden of trying mass-murder Juan Corona), the Tehama County Employees’ Association asked Assemblyman Stan Statham to seek special funding of $120,000 for trying the “sex slave” case.

Then, in an unexpected development, California Senator Jim Nielsen managed to slip an urgent request for $250,000 into a bill regarding the disbursement of offshore oil tax revenues. These unusual measures made funds available for trying Hooker.

Next, Papendick remarked that he was having trouble finding a psychiatrist to testify as an expert witness. She’d started her search for an expert six months ago. He’d been sitting on his hands!

She went home seething. There was no way she would be granted a continuance if she wasn’t ready to go to trial — it was a government job; she was expected to be ready. Yet if she countered Papendick’s request it would be interpreted as circumventing the defendant’s rights. Well, what about the people’s rights?

What about the victim’s rights?

Mcguire hated to tell Colleen the trial was being postponed again, but when she did, Colleen responded with great equanimity-calmly, coolly, with as much emotion as a bank teller counting bills. So the last thing Mcguire expected, when Colleen called back a few days later, was a temper tantrum.

in a plaintive tone, Colleen began enumerating all the problems this trial was causing her. She was worried about getting laid off from her new job. And if she took time OFF to come up to Red Bluff to prepare for her testimony, as Mcguire had suggested, she wouldn’t be able to make her car payments — and then her credit rating would be shot!

To Mcguire, who’d seen thirty Tehama County employees laid off and figured it would cost the county over $150,000 to bring Hooker to justice, it seemed ludicrous that Colleen was upset about missing one day’s pay. And she said as much.

But Colleen wasn’t one to be blunt with, and Mcguire paid for this lack of tact. Colleen began screaming and crying into the phone. Then, abruptly, she hung up.

Mcguire immediately called her back, but Colleen’s temper was unabated. “Everyone’s taking advantage of me,” she screamed, “You’re all using me!” And she slammed the phone down again.

Mcguire called back; no answer.

A few minutes later, she called again, got a busy signal, and dialed the operator. “This is an emergency,” she said. “Can you please cut into this call?”

Once she got through, using her most commanding voice, she said: “Colleen, don’t hang up,” and Colleen didn’t.

“Now, let’s take your problems one at a time, and we’ll see what we can work out.”

Basically, Colleen’s anxieties boiled down to two issues: her family’s support, and money. She didn’t want to come to the trial without the comfort of having a few family members close by, but was concerned about how much Tehama County would pay for, and she was concerned about losing pay from taking time off work. With that understood, Mcguire quickly worked out solutions and compromises, methodically addressing herself to each of Colleen’s concerns: who could accompany her to the trial; how they would travel; whether the county could send her money in advance.

And, since Colleen didn’t want to take time off to prepare for her testimony, the attorney would fly down to Riverside on a Sunday.

Finally, with her problems ironed out and her voice at a much more even timbre, Colleen rang off.

Colleen’s ire had been misdirected at the attorney’s office, Mcguire thought, but in retrospect, this was a red-letter day. Colleen was getting healthier. Her flat, placid exterior had finally given way to some emotion. For the first time, Colleen had shown anger.

As the trial date neared, Mcguire took a renewed interest in one aspect of Janice’s story that had been hushed up and apparently forgotten: the alleged murder of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake.

Though Janice Hooker had told police a convincing version of Spannhake’s 1976 kidnap, murder, and burial, she was an accomplice, and her testimony alone would not be legally sufficient to convict Cameron Hooker.

Some outside corroboration did, in fact, exist. Spannhake had disappeared from the location, on the day, and at the time that Janice said she had. She’d been wearing jeans and a sweater, as Jan described. She had been living in the apartment complex Jan indicated and had come from Ohio, as Jan had told police.

Jan told police that Cameron had burned Marliz’s personal belongings, but had kept her gold watch, then lost it.

One of Cameron’s coworkers told police she remembered him wearing a woman’s watch to work. She’d asked him if he’d lost his and was wearing his wife’s, and he’d said yes. Later, she recalled, Hooker lost the watch on the conveyor belt at work.

If Janice Hooker fabricated the murder story, this plain and unimpressive housewife was either clairvoyant or extravagantly crafty. For instance, when shown a “photo line up” — photographs of missing young women — her eyes immediately began to water.

She stared, then correctly identified Marie Spannhake. Asked to rate her certainty on a scale from one to ten, she said, “Nine. It’s just something you don’t forget.” Other details, such as Spannhake’s nickname, Marliz, Janice hardly could have learned without having met the eighteen-year-old.

Still, the evidence, as it stood, was slim, with most of it hinging on Jan’s believability.

Mcguire researched a corpus delicti brief, but without a body they had a flimsy case. No matter how real the murder was to Janice, no matter how convinced Deputy DA Mcguire might be of Hooker’s guilt, unless police could locate Spannhake’s body, there seemed no way to prosecute Hooker for murder.

3. Considerable effort was made to find a grave site. Not only the Red Bluff Police, but also the Redding and Chico Police, the Shasta County Sheriffs Office, and the Department of Justice participated in searches in the mountains.

Using infra-red satellite photographs to pinpoint disturbed earth, teams of as many as twelve drove up into the mountains to probe the ground and dig suspicious-looking sites. They found nothing.

Still, Mcguire perceived a way to bootstrap in the limited but incriminating findings that pointed to Hooker’s involvement in Spannhake’s disappearance. Lacking enough solid evidence to formally charge Hooker with murder, Mcguire considered a rather daring legal maneuver that would allow her to introduce the murder into the trial without actually charging Hooker with the crime.

In trial, the prosecutor must prove a defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but another, uncharged but related crime may be introduced as evidence if there is a simple preponderance of the evidence. This is done through an interesting device known as a “prior similar act motion.”

A prior similar act is just what it sounds like, a crime committed previously, at not too remote a time, upon a similarly situated person. That crime is admissible to show a common plan or scheme. In other words, it’s relevant to the limited extent that it sheds some light on the defendant’s motive, intent, preparation, or disposition to commit such acts. His criminal style, as it were his modus operandi.

In this sense, the alleged kidnap of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake was relevant because of several striking similarities to the kidnap of Colleen Jean Stan. Both were single young women, given a ride by Cameron and Janice Hooker, with Cameron driving the blue Dodge Colt. Both were taken down a dirt road, threatened, bound, and shut into the head box.

Both were then driven to the Hooker residence on Oak Street, with the Hookers stopping along the way to get a meal at a fastfood restaurant. After dark, both were smuggled into the house and taken down into the basement, where they were stripped and hung by the wrists.

Mcguire filed the motion, and the investigation into Marliz Spannhake’s disappearance, long stalled, began to move again.

It was alleged that while Hooker had Marliz down in the basement, he had shot her in the pelvis with a pellet gun. Mcguire remembered that Lieutenant Brown had mentioned seeing BBs in the basement at 1140 Oak Street, and now she asked him and Shamblin to check it out. They removed two BBs from the stairwell, then went about tracking down the pellet gun, which Hooker had apparently borrowed from his younger brother, Dexter.

They did ballistic tests on Dexter’s gun, but these were inconclusive, showing only that the BBs may have been shot from that particular gun.