Original subtitles

Cameron Hooker will stand trial

on seven counts of kidnapping, rape and sodomy.

It was a bizarre tale of sex, slavery, and torture.

I didn't understand why

he was doing this.

Unimaginable abuse that shocked

and sickened a courtroom.

He should be subjected to the same things

she was subjected to.

He should be put in solitary for the rest of his life.

But was she telling the whole story?

Was she really his slave?

Was he really her master?

Was she really a victim?

I don't think anyone can be completely

prepared for the kind of case this turned out to be.

An innocent trip hitchhiking down Interstate 5.

A married couple with a baby.

A chance meeting that took Colleen Stan

down a dark, dark, road.

These people took seven and a half years

of my life.

It's been more than 30 years since

Colleen Stan escaped Cameron Hooker's grasp

and the unspeakable acts she endured all those years.

I can talk about it now

because it's over.

And of course I have some sense of relief

because he's in prison,

so I know he can't hurt me or anyone else.

It's a remarkable story of resilience,

but the ride hasn't been easy.

That box of memories remains.

Old sins cast long shadows.

There was kind of a period

that I was angry and it kinda hit me like,

"Wow. You know, these people took seven and a half years

of my life."

Colleen was 20 when she got into that car

on Antelope Boulevard outside of Red Bluff, California.

Her life, she says, was pretty average up until then.

I grew up in Riverside, California,

and my mother was a citrus grower,

so I grew up in orange groves.

So even though I was in the city,

it was like being in the country.

I grew up with two sisters,

and my parents were actually divorced.

My mother, I thought she did the best she could

and did a good job of raising us.

And then we would go and visit

my dad on weekends.

And then, of course, they had children.

I think every sibling has a good fight

every now and then.

But we got along really good.

We just connected.

I was the kid that I always

wanted to be outside.

I was climbing a tree or I was riding my bicycle,

or I was roller-skating.

But I kind of think that maybe I didn't want to be

in the house because I didn't want to be around my step-dad.

He wasn't the nicest person. He didn't like children.

He was one of those people, you know,

like children are to be seen and not heard

type people.

At 14, she moved in with her dad.

She didn't get along with her mother too good.

She lived with me for a year or so

before the others came to live with me.

In her senior year she fell in love,

quit school and got married.

The marriage lasted a year and she ended up back at home.

That didn't last long.

A few months later, restless and itching to see the world,

she moved to Eugene, Oregon with friends from Riverside.

I was very sad that she was going,

but being younger and stuff that's the sort of thing that,

you know, Colleen would do.

She kind of had a mind of her own

and she wanted to go,

and so I said, "Okay, yeah."

She got in that car and she left

and never looked back.

I think I was a free spirit.

I didn't really have any long-term goals at that time.

I was just out exploring,

and seeing what I could see and meeting new people

and just doing what I wanted to do.

That was, after all, the 70s,

the "me" decade,

and Eugene was a favourite spot

for living the hippie life back then.

We just had our little apartment

and we had some mattresses to sleep on and whatever.

We were happy.

It was a warm spring day,

and Colleen decided to hitch-hike the 400 miles

down to Westwood, California

and surprise her friend on her birthday.

Back in the 70s,

hitchhiking was really not uncommon,

if you didn't have a car or you didn't have a ride

or whatever.

By afternoon, she'd made it to Red Bluff.

There she walked up the ramp to head east

on Highway 36.

Only 100 miles to go.

With any luck she'd make Westwood before dark.

So this is Red Bluff, part of it,

but the downtown part's over there, off the highway.

I've avoided Red Bluff like the plague

all these years.

I only stood there for maybe 20 minutes,

a half hour.

The first offer for a ride

was a carload of guys, and they were like,

"Oh, yeah, we'll take you wherever you want to go."

And I was like, "No, I don't think so."

And then a young couple stopped,

and they said, "Well, we're not going that far,"

and so I just told them, "Well, thank you for stopping."

And they went on their way.

I probably stood there another 10 minutes or so,

and here comes this little blue Dodge Colt,

and it pulls over,

and it's got a young man and a young woman

and she's holding their eight-month-old baby.

And they were like, "Oh, yeah, we're goin' up there.

We can give you a ride."

So I evaluated the situation,

and it looked like a safe ride to me.

So I hopped in.

So, yep, that, that's the overpass

right there, where I was abducted.

It's creepy.

She wasn't in the car long

before an uneasy feeling came over her.

I looked up in the rearview mirror

and I could see him, and he was like...

it just sent a cold chill down my spine.

He was like, kinda, like, checking me all out.

I just kinda told myself, um, "Just let it go.

These nice people are giving me a ride, you know?

Don't say anything, just... it's alright."

They kept asking me all these questions,

like how old I was, where was I from,

where was I going.

I really didn't ask them anything about themselves.

I didn't know their names, I didn't ask them anything.

They stopped for gas,

and Colleen went to the bathroom.

When I was in the bathroom,

I had...

this really strange encounter.

So I was at the sink and I was washing up,

and this voice spoke to me and it said,

"Jump out the window and run, and never look back."

And I was like, "What?"

My brain was like, "Why? This doesn't make any sense."

And I didn't do it.

I left the bathroom and I went and I got back in the car.

That voice would haunt her for years to come.

So when I got back in the car,

I looked on the seat next to me

and there was this strange wooden box

that wasn't there before.

I looked at it, but I just kinda chose to ignore it.

And so we went up the road and they said,

"Well, we were gonna go check out these ice caves.

Is that okay with you?"

And I was like, "Well, I guess."

I remember thinking to myself,

"Well, I didn't see any signs for any caves,"

and I just thought,

"Well, I guess they must know where they're going."

We continued on up the road,

up into the mountains, and started gettin' out where

I mean, there was nobody around.

There's no houses, no nothing.

And the man pulls over and turns the car off.

And they all bail out of the car,

and I'm like, "Okay--"

I'm still sitting in the backseat of the car,

and I'm like, "Okay, so what's..."

I don't see no caves. I don't know what's going on.

And I looked down and there was a little stream

that ran along the side of the road,

and the wife and the child were down playing

in the little stream.

And so all of a sudden

he's jumping in the back seat.

He has a big knife and he put it to my throat.

I just started panicking and I just froze.

He grabs my hands and he throws them behind my back

and handcuffs them.

Well, I was very scared.

I was just like, "Oh my God, I can't believe

this is happening to me."

It started as an innocent ride

with a young couple.

It turned into a life and death struggle

on a lonely road in the hills

outside of Red Bluff, California.

So he took the knife and he, like,

put it more in my throat,

and he said, "Are you gonna do what I tell you to do?"

So I said, "Yes."

He put this thing, this gag was, like,

it like, went over my head and then came under your chin,

and then it was like he cinched it up.

So you couldn't open your mouth and, like, yell or anything.

Then he takes me and he lays me down on the seat,

and I find out what this box was that was sitting on the seat.

And he put it over my head.

Uh, it has the padding...

It just literally goes over your head

and then closes up.

It was very claustrophobic in that box.

He had unfurled my sleeping bag and he put it over me.

I hear the wife and the child

get back in the car.

She doesn't say anything, and I'm thinking,

"Oh my God, she knew he was going to do this".

And then they just proceeded to drive back down the mountain,

back down to Red Bluff.

They drove around until dark.

Of course I was very uncomfortable.

I was very hot.

Just kind of gasping for air.

And I could hear the traffic, the cars,

so I knew we were back in the city.

I was just very scared, and I just couldn't understand

why they were doing this to me...

and what was going to happen next.

Colleen's long nightmare had only just begun.

She agreed to revisit the house on Oak Street

where it all began.

A little bit anxious...

A little bit anxious.

I don't know, it's been a long time.

I know it's just a house,

but I kind of lost my innocence in this house.

All of a sudden, the car stopped.

He took the head box off of me

and then he got me out of the car.

And he walked me up these steps and we went into the door,

which ended up being the back door of their house.

I could see out of the bottom of the blindfold

a little bit, and we went through

what looked like a washroom...

and then to a kitchen...

and then he took me and marched me

down some stairs into the basement.

Well, this is the place where I lost my freedom.

He took me and stood me up on something,

and then he took the handcuffs off one at a time,

and while he was taking the handcuffs off

he was taking my clothes off.

He put this leather, like... wrist restraint thing

on my wrist and he hooked it to a hook in the ceiling.

And then he did the other side.

He pulled whatever he had me standing on

out from under me.

And so then I was just suspended there by my wrist.

And it is one of the most painful things

I've ever in my life experienced.

All of a sudden, "crack!"

He hits me with this whip.

And I just started sobbing,

'cause I didn't understand why he was doing this.

So he told me to just shut up

and just hang there.

I think he hung me from this rafter,

from this wood beam here.

I couldn't see, you know, anything really

like I can see now,

because I was always blindfolded, um...

usually gagged and, um, restrained in some way.

The thing that I saw the most of was this floor,

'cause I could see, once in a while,

I could see out of the bottom of the blindfold,

and I could see this concrete floor.

And other than that, that's about all I could see.

Once I kinda calmed down a little bit

and I started trying to look around,

and I see over this little, like, table thing

over in the corner and there's a magazine opened up.

And the picture that it's open to is a picture

of a woman and she's naked and she's hung up.

And I see the man and his wife, and they're having sex.

And I thought, "Oh, my God. Who are these people?"

Kidnapped, blindfolded,

strung up and whipped,

Colleen Stan dangled in pain as her abductors,

23-year-old lumber mill worker, Cameron Hooker

and his 19-year-old wife, both of Red Bluff,

had sex below her.

I was 20 years old,

and I guess I was pretty naive.

I had never heard of anything...

of sadism or bondage or any of this stuff.

Even when it was happening to me,

I didn't understand what it was.

It was a living nightmare. It was crazy.

Still blindfolded, he unhooked her

from the ceiling, put the head box back on,

and shoved her into a crate from the neck down,

chaining her wrists and feet to the hooks inside.

And then he just went away.

I just started panicking and freaking out.

It was so hard to breathe with that head box on

'cause all I had was the little area where my neck was

to get air.

So I just kept gasping and gasping for air.

And my wrists started to just ache and ache

and ache from just gravity,

just pulling on those chains.

I turned to God and just started praying,

"Please help me, and please...

Please help me so I won't die."

Because I couldn't breathe.

And so I just was panicking and panicking,

and trying to get air all night.

And finally, morning came

and I was just exhausted from fighting all night,

and from just...

gasping for air all night.

Cameron Hooker returned,

removed the head box, moved her to a table,

and chained her feet and ankles to each corner.

So I was staked out on this table

and then he put my head back in the box.

And, uh, went away.

It's very difficult for me to be down here,

just because...

it just wants to take me right back

to being locked up in that box.

I'm glad that, you know,

of course things look very different right now

than what it did, because if it looked

exactly the same, I don't think I could stand it

for a minute down here.

It's hard for me to be here.

300 miles north in Eugene,

Colleen's roommates were worried.

Three days had gone by and she never made it

to her friend in Westwood.

Her family in Riverside hadn't heard from her either.

I began to get worried,

so I told my dad, "There's something wrong."

I didn't know she was hitchhiking

until they called and said she never got there

and never came back.

On the fourth day, her roommates filed

a missing persons report with the Eugene police.

Days turned into weeks, and nothing.

I was upset at that point.

Not mad, sad.

Because I'm like, my sister, there's something wrong.

After a month, Colleen's parents began

their own search.

For weeks they retraced her route from Eugene

down Interstate 5 and east on 36 to Westwood,

filing missing person's reports along the way.

Going down the road, you'd see a vacant barn

or a building or you just wondered, did...

maybe she could be, you know,

in one of them places or something.

And actually, uh, one time we stayed in a motel

right down the street from where she was at

and didn't know it.

More months went by,

and there was no trace of Colleen Stan.

It was as if she'd vanished into thin air.

I think the police did as much as they could,

considering what little clues they had.

They would contact my mother about the investigation

because she kept on 'em all the time.

So after no answers or results, she gave up.

It's a hard thing to have your kid

disappear like that.

You start thinking, well, she... she must be dead.

Imprisoned in that dank cellar

in the house on Oak Street in Red Bluff,

finding Colleen would take a miracle.

It was very hard to keep track of time.

I could tell the days because of the temperature,

because it was cooler in the mornings

and then it'd naturally warm up in the afternoons.

Pain and fear became routine.

Well, his favourite thing that he did

almost every night was he liked to suspend me.

He liked to whip me.

On a homemade torture rack,

he also liked to stretch her by pulling on huge chains.

He had me stretched so tight,

my breaths were so shallow, I couldn't get any air

in my lungs.

Always naked, she was at his mercy.

He was controlling when I got to eat and drink,

he was controlling when I got to go to the bathroom.

He was controlling everything.

He had a bedpan that sat on a chair.

So I had to sit there and urinate or defecate

in front of him.

Slowly she was learning

to survive meant to obey.

The first couple months I was there

he was torturing me in the basement.

And Hooker slithers up next to me and he says,

"Go ahead and scream. I'll cut your vocal chords."

And right away God spoke to me, and God said,

"Do not scream. He is telling you the truth."

And I didn't scream.

And I never screamed when he tortured me,

'cause I didn't want him to do that.

Tortured and locked up in a dark box

in a terrifying basement for months,

Colleen Stan was losing hope of ever escaping

her chamber of horrors and Cameron Hooker's grasp.

I would always ask him,

"When are you going to let me go?"

And every night he would always say, "Pretty soon."

So after several months of "pretty soon,"

I quit asking, and I didn't know

when I was ever going to get out of there.

After three months,

Hooker built a more permanent cage,

a room under the cellar stairs,

and put her to work.

The very first project that he had me do in there

was shell some walnuts.

He had, like, two big gunny sacks of walnuts.

And that was my job for the night.

And he called this the workshop,

and I had, like, a doorway here.

And it had one single light bulb in here.

It was the first time I'd had

the blindfold off of me since I got there.

I remember when he took it off

and that light bulb was like, oh,

my eyes were like running and squinting,

'cause it was so bright,

'cause I hadn't seen light for so long

and I don't know what it is about the darkness,

but just being locked up in a box...

it was so dark that I couldn't even see my hand

like right here, if I had it right here.

It was good to be able to do something with my hands.

It was good to have some light,

and to just... not be in total darkness.

But Colleen's imprisonment

was about to take a darker turn.

He hands me this paper and he told me,

"I want you to read this."

Hooker told her he was part of

a powerful underground slave-trading outfit

known as "The Company."

The piece of paper was a contract

making her his slave for life.

It said she must never wear undergarments,

preserve her body for his exclusive use,

and fulfill his every desire.

I said, "Well, what if I don't sign it?"

And he said, "If you don't sign it,

I will make you wish you had."

And, well, I had already been tortured for nine months, so...

I kind of knew what he meant by that.

She signed.

Her new slave name was "Kay Powers."

No longer confined to the box and the workshop,

she was given a nightgown to wear,

and allowed upstairs to do chores.

I was not to ever look into his face

or his eyes.

I was to always look down.

I was not to speak unless I was spoken to.

I had to address him as "sir" or "master,"

I had to address his wife as "ma'am."

And I just did it because if I didn't

do what he said, if I disobeyed him,

well, then, I had hell to pay.

If she ran away, he warned,

The Company would hunt her down, nail her hands to a beam

and leave her hanging for days.

They would stop at nothing,

including harming her family.

I remember Jan, his wife,

telling me one time, she said,

"You know, if you take one step out that door,

you might as well stick a gun to your head

and pull the trigger."

It was a bizarre arrangement.

With Kay upstairs, Janice was face to face

with her husband's bondage slave,

and she didn't like it.

From day one, she didn't want me to be there,

she was very jealous of me,

and she treated me like I was the other woman,

like I was there because I wanted to be there.

One month later, her ordeal

took yet a darker turn.

Blindfolded and gagged once again,

Hooker brought her upstairs.

He takes me to their bedroom,

tied me up to the bed, you know,

to all four corners of it.

So he got on the bed on one side of me

and his wife got on the bed on the other side of me.

And all of a sudden, he jumps on top of me

and starts raping me.

Oh, I just started crying and praying to God

to please help me.

'Cause I just felt so broken at that point.

He marched her back downstairs

and locked her away in the box.

His wife got really upset about

him having sex with me,

because apparently their deal was that

he could have a slave if she could have another child,

and that the sex was supposed to be reserved for her,

for his wife.

Not anymore.

He was forcing himself on Colleen on a regular basis,

but in secret when his wife wasn't home.

And he was careful to always wear a condom.

It was just kind of like Pandora's Box, you know?

Once that door was opened, then he just felt

he could do it whenever he wanted to.

And he did.

Almost a year after being held captive,

Colleen Stan was now a fixture in the Hooker home.

Fear of disobeying the secret slave organization,

The Company, sealed her fate.

I pretty much gave up on the idea

of trying to run away and accepted that I

was going to probably die being their slave.

To avoid prying eyes,

Cameron Hooker moved the family to a mobile home

a few miles outside of Red Bluff.

There was no basement so he constructed

a ventilated wooden box,

and hid it under the couple's waterbed.

That small, secret chamber was Colleen's new home.

There's sounds, there's smells,

there's whatever; there's just things

that will just take you right back there.

Like the constant hum of the fan

blowing air into the box,

the suffocating heat in the California summer,

the stench of the bedpan she was forced use inside the box.

I would have to take one foot

and I would have to scoot it up

until I could reach it with my hand

and put it under my butt and use it.

It was a degrading existence.

In the box she could hear everything the Hookers did

on their waterbed.

I knew that he was doing things to her

because I could hear it sometimes.

And I think she was under the impression

that once he got a slave

then he wouldn't be torturing her anymore.

But that wasn't the case.

There in the dark she listened as Janice

gave birth to the couple's second child.

I could hear Jan up there, like labouring.

When the baby came out I heard it cry.

He got me out and he let me look at the baby

and then he locked me back up in the box.

As time went on, Colleen had more liberties.

She was taking care of the kids,

doing work around the yard,

even allowed a 15-minute jog around the neighbourhood.

Fear of The Company, though, kept her on an invisible leash.

He told the outside people

that I was like a live-in babysitter.

So people just kind of accepted me as that.

No one suspected, not even the two girls,

that Kay was forced to sleep in a box under the couple's bed,

or that she was raped on a regular basis.

Hopeless and in despair, she turned to God.

They started letting me out of the box

and they would lock me up in one of their bathrooms,

and he would put a chain around my neck

and put the chain around--

the other end-- around the toilet.

And so I started reading the Bible

and I started learning about God.

And the good thing was...

that in all that darkness, that God was my light.

In March of 1981, a ray of light.

Her abductor let her phone home to tell them

she was coming for a visit.

He said that something that had

never happened before happened,

that The Company had approved that I could

go home and see my family.

I'm sure that Cameron felt that I was completely under

his control and that I wasn't going

to do anything to mess this up.

But I think it was a big power trip for him too,

to know that he had that kind of power over me.

He reminded her The Company would be

monitoring the visit.

One false move and she'd regret it.

He said that they had bugged

my dad's phone and he said,

"If you say anything, they will be in there like that,"

and he said, "People will get hurt,

people could be killed, and it will be your fault."

As soon as she got out of the car,

everyone was outside greeting her.

She had a nickname called "Pudge."

When I first saw her, she wasn't pudgy at all.

She didn't have her hair done,

her clothes were not the clothes

that I was used to seeing on her, oh no.

These were hand-sewn clothes.

My sister didn't wear clothes like that.

So that was, like, a red flag right there.

So was her boyfriend.

He was like a bookworm,

and she didn't go out with a guy that looked like him.

He didn't say too much.

He seemed... normal.

And he didn't stay but just a few minutes.

Cameron drove off.

For the first time in four years,

Colleen was alone with her family.

We went through all kinds of photo albums

and we talked about the times, you know,

what she missed out on and everything.

We didn't press her too much

where she had been,

and she didn't say where she'd been.

I was thinking that maybe she was in some cult

or something, you know?

I needed answers.

And my stepmom noticed that I was kind of pressuring her.

So she pulled me in the back room, and she's like,

"You can't do that, you're gonna scare her off

and we're never gonna see her again if you do this."

It's hard to understand why Colleen

didn't tell them the truth.

I probably came this close to saying something

but I just kept thinking about what he said,

and I didn't want my family to be hurt,

and I just couldn't do it.

I truly believed in The Company

and everything that he told me about them.

When Cameron picked her up the next day

she posed lovingly with him in this photo.

I was happy in all the pictures that day

because I was just so happy to be with my family.

It wasn't because I was happy I was with him.

I wanted to stand in front of that door

and wanted to say, "You know what?

He can go, but she's stayin."

But I didn't.

Oh, I should have listened to my gut feeling.

Once she walked out that door,

her family wouldn't see or hear from Colleen

for another three and a half years.

I always kicked myself for not getting

the license plate number,

'cause I coulda traced him right to Red Bluff with it.

It's a terrible thing.

After the family visit home,

Colleen thought the worst was over.

She was wrong.

Maybe Hooker thought he'd given her too much freedom

or his wife was jealous or tired of the situation.

Whatever the reason, he locked his prisoner

back in the box,

sometimes for up to 23 hours a day.

God would speak to me

when I was locked in that box,

and when I would just get to my wits' end

and just think...

I would just cry out and say, "I can't do this.

I can't do this for another second,

for another minute! I can't do it!

I'm just, I'm gonna die!

I can't do it. I'm gonna go crazy.

I can't do it."

And God would just, in that tender, sweet voice,

He would just say,

"How do you know this isn't going to be over?

How do you know tomorrow's not going to be a better day?"

And He would just... He wouldn't let me give up.

He would just give me enough hope

to get me through it and to say,

"Okay, okay, I'll do it. I'll do it for you.

I won't give up."

At 27, Colleen had been with the Hookers

for seven and a half years.

While Cameron was at work and the girls were at school,

Janice started taking her out of the box

and they read the Bible together.

The dynamics between me and her

started shifting and changing,

and I just think it was because

God was convicting her heart and telling her,

"This has to end."

In May of 1984,

after years of lying in the coffin-like box,

Cameron allows Colleen to sleep on the living room floor.

She and Jan even began going to church together

and she got a job cleaning at a motel in Red Bluff.

Now that Colleen was out of the box

and moving freely within the home,

to Janice, Colleen was more like a co-wife.

Riddled with guilt or fear or both,

Janice confides in her pastor.

She doesn't tell him the real story

but frames it more as a love triangle.

Her pastor tells her, "God would not approve,"

and she makes a decision.

She came to my work and she said,

"You need to sit down.

I need to tell you something."

She told her Cameron is not part of any Company.

The stories about runaway slaves, company meetings,

even the slave contract,

all lies for the past seven and a half years.

My whole world was just rocked.

I was like, "Oh my gosh, I cannot believe

that I have believed this lie for all these years."

And I just broke down and started crying.

I'm thinking, you know,

"Why did you let this go on for so long?"

I don't know the answer to that question.

I don't, 'cause she's never told me.

The next day, while Cameron was at work

Colleen boarded a bus for home.

In an act of defiance, before she left,

she called her slave-master.

I wanted him to know that I was in control of my life

and he wasn't anymore.

I told him, "I'm getting on a bus and I'm leaving,

and there's nothing you can do about it."

And he bawled like a baby.

And I got on the bus and I left.

After 2634 days,

finally free.

The joy was overwhelming.

Oh, my gosh.

It was like, I felt like, you know,

they say, "My cup runneth over."

That's what I felt like on the bus on the way home.

I remember I kept looking around the bus

at the other patrons on the bus and I thought,

surely they must see

the joy just radiating off of me!

Because I, that's how I felt.

I felt like I was just beaming.

My prayers were finally answered.

I was going home, I was free.

Ah... I was just so happy.

Physically she was free,

but there were dark clouds ahead

for the girl who had lived in the box.

Her journey to freedom was far from over.