Original subtitles

I didn't know evil until I came to Red Bluff.

I would always ask him,

"When are you going to let me go?"

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

A ride with strangers ended in torture,

rape and imprisonment.

I turned to God and just started praying,

"Please help me so I won't die."

A story that shocked a small American town.

There was a monster among us

and nobody knew it.

Colleen Stan's nightmare was far from over.

Cameron Hooker wasn't going away.

He had plans to kidnap other people.

He was not done with just Colleen.

Shocking testimony that uncovered secrets and lies.

He allows her to go out jogging

and she doesn't run for help?

This girl loves this guy?

What's that about?

Who was telling the truth?

I had to prove he coerced her

into a set of behaviours that gave him complete control.

I just felt like I was the one on trial.

I was going home. I was free.

My prayers were finally answered.

I felt like I was just beaming.

Ah... I was just so happy.

It's a moment few can imagine.

Colleen Stan was leaving the worst kind of hell.

Held as a sex slave, tortured and imprisoned

in a box for seven and a half years

in the California town of Red Bluff.

I felt kind of foolish, um, guilty even,

you know, that I had believed all this.

How do you explain the horror

and the isolation you endured?

Abducted at knifepoint and fooled into

signing yourself into slavery for life,

only to be told seven years later,

it was all a lie.

I found out that Colleen was coming home

from my dad.

And I couldn't wait.

Back home in Riverside,

Colleen moved in with her father.

She told her family about being abducted

and held captive, but that's it.

And she refused to go to the police.

This person has stolen

seven and a half years of your life,

and you just don't want to give them another second.

You just want to get on with your life.

I really just wanted to put it behind me,

and I just wanted to be with my family.

They pushed me to go to the police.

I didn't know if the police would believe me or not.

But I just said, "Let me handle it,"

and they said okay.

She didn't break off all ties

with her former life.

She talked regularly with Janice Hooker,

even though Janice had let her husband keep Colleen

as a slave and indulge his sadistic sexual fantasies.

Jan had begged me

to please don't go to the police,

please give him a chance to try and change

because he had promised her he would.

So I said okay. I agreed to it.

It was tough adjusting.

She was both depressed and anxious.

I felt like damaged material.

I felt like no one will ever love me

or want me because I had gone through this,

and I just didn't know how I would ever be able

to love a man again.

Colleen was just basically trying

to get to know us again.

How do you get caught up after seven years?

That's a lot of catching up, especially with a big family

like we have.

When she left, she really didn't get along with

some of them but when she got back that all changed.

She would go to work with me every day

because she didn't want to stay home.

She was trying.

By now she had a job cleaning at a local hospital,

was going to church,

and even dared to try dating again.

At last, the dust seemed to be settling.

Colleen was putting it behind her.

In Red Bluff, life for the Hookers was changing too.

Janice took her two daughters and left Cameron for good.

Colleen was about to learn...

the dust hadn't settled at all.

She called me and she was very upset.

She was crying and she said,

"Some people are coming to talk to you

and you need to talk to them,"

and then she hung up the phone.

After years of silence,

Janice turned on her husband and went to the police.

She's relaying two stories.

Two different victims that had been kidnapped

by Cameron Hooker, her husband.

One which he had kept for seven, almost eight, years

as a sex slave,

and the other Cameron had ultimately killed.

Red Bluff detective Al Shamblin

couldn't believe what he was hearing.

I'd worked a couple of homicides

and that kind of thing,

but never anything where somebody was kept as

a sex slave and tortured.

I thought, you know, this just can't be.

A call to Chico police 40 miles south

suggested it might be true.

Eight years earlier, on January 31st, 1976,

20-year old Marie Elizabeth Spannhake

disappeared off the streets of Chico

after an argument with her boyfriend

at a flea market.

She is still missing.

The story Janice told struck a chord.

She referred to her as Marliz.

She was hitchhiking one block short of her residence.

Cameron stopped the car

and asked her if she wanted a ride.

She looked and saw a young man and a young woman

in a small car and probably thought it was a safe ride.

She got in the car, and according to Janice

they drove to somewhere near Marliz's apartment

and as she was getting out of the car,

Cameron pulled Marliz back in the car,

subdued her and drove somewhere out of the area

and then put a box on her head,

tied her up and they went to Red Bluff.

It was eerily similar to Colleen Stan's abduction

16 months later.

Because it was still light out,

they couldn't go to their house,

so they stopped at the Jolly Cone Restaurant

on Antelope Boulevard in Red Bluff

and got something to eat while Marliz was tied up

in the back seat of their car with a box on her head.

His plan was to keep her as his sex slave.

And his plan was to cut her vocal cords so she couldn't

talk to anybody and she couldn't tell anybody what happened.

When he attempted to cut her vocal cords he found that

he didn't know how to do it, didn't work,

and so not knowing what to do,

he decided that he was going to have to kill her

because he couldn't keep her quiet.

About 2 o'clock, according to Janice,

Cameron came up and said that he had killed Marliz.

And so Janice went down and helped him.

Rolled her up in a carpet or a blanket or something,

and hauled her out to their car.

Janice says they then drove to Highway 44,

which is quite some distance away,

in Shasta County,

and drove down Highway 44 somewhere

until they found a side road.

He drove up and off the main area

and dug a grave and buried Marliz.

It was unnerving.

Kidnapping, torture, sexual sadism,

and allegations of murder.

A horror story that went on for years

and no one suspected a thing.

We'd never heard anything like that before.

And to have something so close...

There's a monster amongst us, and nobody knew it.

She's coiled up sitting on the chair,

she's semi-crying, extremely emotional,

um, just very, very unstable.

I ask her if she felt she could find the location

or the road that Cameron and she drove on,

and she felt that she could.

The police needed proof

and they needed Janice Hooker,

but could they rely on her?

Cameron was very controlling over Janice.

When they first met up Janice was either

15 or 16 years old.

We had one picture that Cameron had taken of her.

She was bound and submerged in a lake somewhere.

This is what she knew.

She didn't-- I don't think that she knew

what a normal sexual relationship was.

After years of silence,

Janice Hooker finally went to the police

and revealed her husband's secret life:

the kidnapping and imprisonment of Colleen Stan

and the kidnapping and murder of another young woman,

Marie Elizabeth Spannhake.

They gave her immunity.

In return, she agreed to help both Red Bluff

and Chico police find Marliz's remains

and to testify against her husband.

Janice was really cooperative with us

once she knew she wasn't going to be charged.

We took her on mini trips up to all the roads

going east of Redding.

Based on the information we had,

it was really a long shot.

But to not take that advantage and go out and look,

uh, I mean, we had to do that.

There's plenty of areas around Red Bluff,

open areas where they could have gone out

in the middle of the night and dug a grave and buried her

and she probably would never have been found.

According to Janice, uh, they took her

from Red Bluff up to somewhere off Highway 44,

in one of these areas up in here,

which is open forest area.

My only question was, why would they go so far?

I mean, it's 2 o'clock in the morning,

there's snow up here.

There's plenty of areas here or here.

I never did really believe that this is where she was buried.

She never could pinpoint a place,

and there was multiple possibilities.

It was difficult, and we were unsuccessful.

Without a body they only had Janice's word,

and that was wobbly at best.

She is our only link to what happened

to Marie Elizabeth Spannhake.

And one of the big concerns we had was

that once Cameron was arrested that she would either

change her mind about testifying,

or would bail him out or would go see him,

just because he could control her.

They turned to the other victim,

the one that escaped.

The police called me

and said that they had talked to Jan,

and they wanted to talk to me.

Because I was still of this mentality, like,

I didn't trust anybody, I didn't trust any body,

so I told my parents,

"The police are coming here tomorrow."

I said, "But I want you to be here,

because I don't know who these people are."

If Colleen thought she could erase those years

of captivity, she was in for a rude awakening.

My initial thought would be that

you know, Colleen would be some kind of a basket case,

hiding under tables or not an outgoing person,

after enduring what she had to do.

That wasn't the case.

She was just, uh, really very normal.

Very surprising for me.

Detail after detail, Colleen confirmed

Janice's story.

Finally he asked if there were any other sex slaves.

Hooker used to keep this picture,

and every time I got in and out of the box

in the little space between the pedestal

that he had built, and where the actual box was,

he always-- he kept my purse, and my personal things

that I had with me the day that he abducted me.

Propped up against my purse was this picture of this woman,

a young girl, and it looked like a school picture,

like a school portrait.

So I described her to them how I remembered she looked,

and Al Shamblin said, "Oh my God, that's Marliz."

Now she understood why she survived the whippings,

the choking, the rapes, and the hours alone

inside the dark wooden box.

And then they told me, um, what happened with her,

and how Cameron tortured her and what he did to her.

And so then I knew why God told me not to scream.

When he said, "Go ahead and scream;

I'll cut your vocal cords. I've done it before."

And seven years earlier I didn't know what that meant,

but now I knew what it meant.

In Ohio, Marliz's parents were notified

about the development in their daughter's disappearance.

While the search went on for Marliz's remains,

there was enough to arrest the quiet lumber mill worker

for Colleen's abduction, torture, and imprisonment.

We knocked on the door

and Cameron opened the door.

He didn't seem to be surprised.

There was really not any emotion.

I advised him we had a warrant for his arrest.

He was just, "Okay," and turned around

and we put his handcuffs on him, transported him to the office.

I really expected him to talk to me.

And I was very surprised when he said

he wanted an attorney and didn't want to say anything.

In the trailer police found the head box,

the stretcher, bondage material and a dungeon-like hole

in the backyard shed.

He had plans to kidnap other people.

He was not done with just Colleen.

In Red Bluff, there was shock and disbelief

that the quiet guy who worked at the local lumber yard

had been leading a double life for over seven years,

holding a young woman imprisoned as a sex slave.

Cameron Hooker will stand trial

on seven counts of kidnapping, rape and sodomy.

Late Thursday afternoon, Tehama County Judge

Dennis Murray refused to lower Hooker's

half million dollars' bail.

That effectively means he will remain in jail.

No one could believe it.

It was the biggest case to hit Tehama County,

and it ended up in the hands of

the only female attorney in the prosecutor's office.

I was also the only female attorney

in the entire county.

Christine McGuire was also ambitious,

and the 26-year-old married mother of a young child

knew she had her work cut out.

I had litigated child-molest cases,

I litigated sexual assault cases...

but nothing that I had done before

was of the magnitude that this case was.

She faced two big hurdles.

The first: was Colleen really held against her will?

Cameron Hooker's defence was,

"Yes, I kidnapped her and I kept her

for a period of time, but then I let her go,

and conveniently, the Statute of Limitations has run

so that the jury should not find me guilty."

Attorney Rowland Pappendick

wants the San Mateo County Court to hear testimony

about the woman's prior sexual history.

I think it's relevant to show why

she stayed in the relationship when she could have left.

I had to be able to prove to a jury

that she had been kidnapped, that she had been broken,

that she had been coerced into a set of behaviours

that gave him complete control.

The second hurdle, the victim herself.

There was just something about Colleen

at that time.

There was perhaps a sense of detachment.

There was no outrage,

and I didn't understand that.

Almost a year after Colleen escaped,

the trial opened in Redwood City.

By now Colleen had a new job and she was dating.

Reliving how she'd been taken in all those years

by a sexual sadist was the last thing she wanted to do.

I just wanted to get on with my life.

You know, I was happy to be with my family,

with people that loved me,

and I just really wanted to just be done with it.

McGuire's strategy was to show Colleen was coerced.

She used everything at her disposal to reinforce

the sensory deprivation used on Colleen:

the sadistic-masochistic magazines, the photos,

and the instruments of torture found in the trailer.

He had built the head box.

He had built the box for under the waterbed.

He had built the stretchers and the racks.

And we had to be able to show the jury what was in his mind.

I needed them to see it.

I needed them to understand it,

if we were going to be successful.

It was shocking because some of the stuff

I'd never seen or heard about.

It almost looks like it's from the dark ages.

When that box was laid out

in the courtroom and we saw how small it was,

it began to sink in.

This girl's life had been taken away from her.

Janice, the remorseful wife,

told the court Cameron had been acting out

his sexual fantasies on her since she was 15.

He went as far as hanging her up while she was pregnant.

Tired of the torture, she agreed to let him

kidnap a sex slave.

It became a very difficult case

for us reporters to watch her play this mousy housewife,

when all the while we knew that she was very much

a participant in this case.

Janice testified that she witnessed Colleen

being hung naked on several occasions.

She admitted Colleen was kept in the box

and only let out to eat, use the bathroom and get a drink.

She knew The Company was a hoax

and admitted Cameron threatened Colleen

that if she tried to run away, The Company would torture her

and kill her family.

The public wanted to know

why did the prosecution give up so easily

and grant Janice this immunity.

This woman, who was very much a part of

Colleen Stan's imprisonment, was simply going to walk away.

It was the testimony, however, of Colleen,

the girl who lived in the box, that everyone was waiting for.

She was direct. She was specific.

She was, if you will, unmoved.

We expected that she would break down in tears

and collapse in a heap. No.

It would have been easier for me

if Colleen had more outrage.

A jury's going to expect crying.

They're going to expect some emotion.

But what I knew by that point was that

Colleen had learned over a period of seven years

to keep that all bottled up inside her.

She couldn't let that out, so she certainly wasn't

going to let that out in front of a jury.

You know, the trial was really hard for me.

I felt that if I got really emotional then, you know,

I would get off track and I wouldn't be able

to remember things and do what I had to do.

For three days Colleen relived

her seven and a half years of torture and slavery.

Seeing Colleen up there,

I think a lot of us just really associated with her.

And we had seen this one picture behind the jury box

and it was a blown up picture of her just hanging there naked.

And I remember one of the jurors, he kept saying,

"I wish they'd just take that down."

There was a part of Colleen's testimony

that we didn't expect would affect us so much,

and it was life in the box.

She talked about when she would have to go back

into the box every night;

she would talk about being hungry,

being lonely, the prayers that she would say,

and wonder, "Does God really know I'm here?"

It was important for her

to describe to the jurors how the boxes were used.

I couldn't ask Colleen to put the head box on her.

I couldn't ask Colleen to go into the box.

So I got volunteers to do it.

You'd come out of there and you think,

"How did she do this? There's no way."

I know there were a number of male reporters

who at the end of the day would go home

and would not tell their wives what they had witnessed

out of embarrassment and shame.

This was so dark.

For three and a half days,

the court sat mesmerized as Colleen Stan calmly detailed

her life under her slave-master Cameron Hooker.

From torture, to humiliation,

to signing herself into slavery for life--

or an underground slave-trading organization, The Company,

would harm her and her family if she tried to escape.

It was just never-ending,

from shocking her to burning her

to putting a gun in her mouth.

And so you're looking at this young, beautiful girl...

How could she survive? I'd go crazy.

It looked like a slam-dunk

for the prosecution until the defence produced evidence

that painted a very different picture

of the relationship between Cameron and Colleen.

Cameron Hooker received love letters

from the woman he allegedly held captive

for seven and a half years.

These letters were written before and after

she was free.

When the love letters broke,

it was an earthquake. So many people were saying,

"Suddenly this case is different.

This is not just a kidnapping imprisonment case.

Suddenly this girl loves this guy?

This girl admires this guy? What's that about?"

I think it was a shock probably

to the people in the courtroom,

thinking that, well, maybe she did become

a willing participant.

Phone records entered into evidence show

29 calls to the Hooker home from Riverside.

Defence Attorney Rowland Pappendick

says the calls are inconsistent

with someone trying to escape.

The most interesting one,

of course, is the 12, uh, 14 calls,

two days afterwards at 12:11 AM,

which is 11 minutes after midnight,

that lasts for 76 minutes,

and if you recall Jan's testimony,

she was living in Gerber with her parents

at that time.

So the only person at home was Cameron.

It was damning evidence.

More puzzling was the amount of freedom Colleen had.

Jogging, shopping, phone calls,

visiting neighbours, and a job at a local motel

in the last three months before she left.

And you questioned in your mind

why she was staying when she had opportunity

like to go to work and work in the hotel,

and why she didn't share it with anybody else.

But the most puzzling was the trip home

to Riverside with Cameron.

He left her with her family overnight.

She said nothing, and went back to Red Bluff

with him the next day.

Even posed lovingly for a picture with him

before they left.

All the way to Riverside,

all the way back, every time that car stopped,

she had a chance to get out and run away.

Cameron Hooker's defense was in stark contrast.

He blamed Colleen and Janice,

saying this was a case of two bickering women

who plotted against him.

Cameron explained on the stand

that although he had kidnapped her,

although he had tortured her

and made her believe in The Company,

that at some point she began to enjoy

and she stayed with him.

Cameron testified the relationship between him

and Colleen changed over the years.

He was in love with her and she told him

she loved him too.

But there was more.

He claimed the two women had a sexual relationship.

He said Jan and Colleen were sleeping together

and sometimes those two practiced bondage together.

I just felt like I was the one on trial.

They were making me out to be this promiscuous

biker mama, drug addict person

that became Jan's lesbian lover

and we just made all this up

to get Cameron out of the picture.

They said all this stuff in front of the jury,

and I'm thinking, "Oh my God, what if they believe it?"

Because she had been with this man so long

that credibility was an issue,

because she was a girl hitch-hiking on the highway,

credibility issue, morality issue.

Is she a trollop that really deserved this?

Suddenly we knew that Christine herself

had a mountain to climb.

Hooker's defence says the young woman loved him,

that she even sent him a card which read,

"I'm probably a little crazy, but I love you

just the way you are".

The prosecution says, after years of captivity,

someone might be a little crazy.

Well, she loved her captor

because one time he gave her a Bible.

Because he gave her food. He gave her water.

She loved him because she got more freedom.

But none of that's truly love.

She was just grateful that she had her life every day.

McGuire had to convince the jury

that Colleen was completely under Hooker's control.

She played her most important card:

forensic psychiatrist Dr. Chris Hatcher.

There were a number of terms

that came up during the course of this litigation:

Stockholm Syndrome, brainwashing, coercion.

He was able to explain to the jury

what happens when you kidnap someone,

when you torture them,

when you commit unspeakable acts on someone,

when you break them and then you coerce them

into a set of behaviours.

And of course, what happens is that person really

is truly never free to leave.

Stockholm Syndrome is when

you fall in love with your captor.

You see your captor as your sole saviour,

your sole supplier, your soulmate.

He explained how even though

you don't have those chains on you

or you're not locked in a box,

you still are under his control.

I think the jury was looking for a way

to believe what Colleen Stan was saying,

and Chris Hatcher gave them that belief.

After five and a half weeks of testimony,

the case went to the jury.

By the time we got into the jury room,

we were just kind of numb, kind of in shock

from everything that we've just absorbed.

The case, it took a toll.

It took a toll on all of us.

But the most important person of course was Colleen.

I was stressed and anxious,

and you just have to call upon your inner strength,

and you have to get through it,

because that's your job.

I did everything I could do to present everything

to the jury that was available,

but it was going to be up to the jury.

Juries do strange things.

Does the jury believe that Colleen Stan

was telling the truth?

She had been portrayed as the tramp

who stuck her thumb out on an open highway,

was asking for it.

The girl who really did love this guy.

Did the jury really buy that?

On Halloween, after two and a half days

of deliberation, the jury had reached a verdict.

We the jury in above and titled cause

find the defendant, Cameron Hooker,

guilty of the offense of kidnapping

in violation of section 207

of the California penal code.

Guilty in 10 of 11 counts.

It seemed like Cameron did, like, a...

like an "Aw shucks," like he couldn't believe it.

He really thought he was going to get off.

I think he was kind of, like, shocked,

and just really felt like he was getting railroaded

by these two women, his wife and Colleen.

Three weeks later Colleen sat in the court

as the judge sentenced him to 104 years.

I would like to say that I consider

this defendant to be probably the most dangerous psychopath

that I've ever dealt with.

I'm just very glad that, um...

he won't be able to ever hurt me or anyone else again.

At last, some justice for Colleen.

But there was still the mystery of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake,

the girl Janice Hooker told police her husband kidnapped

and killed 16 months before abducting Colleen.

Her body, she said, is buried outside of Red Bluff.

Months of searching, though, turned up nothing.

Why didn't Janice adequately recall

where she went, when she went,

when such a horrible deed was being conducted?

It had happened so long ago that this young victim

was lost to history.

To date, no one has been charged

with Marliz's disappearance.

Last time I saw her she was 18,

headed out to California for that dream.

Marliz Spannhake's remains are out there

somewhere waiting to be found.

I don't think we ever will know.

That doesn't make me happy.

And Cameron sure is not speaking to anyone.

I suspect he'll take that secret to the grave.

Yeah, I do. I talk to her.

I look to the sky and I yell at her.

I tell her, "Damn you, why did you ever

stick your thumb out, you idiot?"

Two women who never met,

and yet their lives intertwined by a twist of fate.

I just feel a kinship to her,

and I pray for justice for her all the time,

because she deserves justice.

If anybody out there knows anything

at all about my sister Marie Spannhake,

or as we called her, Marliz, if you know anything

just please call the Chico police.

Just help us get our closure,

so we can finally put her soul to rest.

Colleen wanted closure too.

Anger and guilt about those seven and a half years

were taking an emotional toll.

She turned to Dr. Chris Hatcher from the trial for answers.

Chris was a godsend.

He said, "It really doesn't matter what you said

or what you did while you were in captivity.

You did everything right,"

and he said, "because you survived, and you lived."

And just to have him say those words was...

lifted all the guilt, all the anxiety

about what I said and what I did

and everything right off of my shoulders.

Two and half years after escaping,

Colleen gave birth to a baby girl, Danielle.

When I had my daughter,

that was the happiest day of my life.

As soon as I laid my eyes on her I started crying.

There's been no fairytale ending for Colleen.

Explaining seven years as a sex slave

is not easy.

She's on her fourth marriage.

When you meet someone and fall in love

and the guy says, "Oh, well, this, it won't be a problem."

Then it is a problem.

I have a very good husband now.

I think it's hard for him, and it's been hard for

all my husbands just because they feel,

like, helpless in the situation.

The physical damage from the torture

has taken its toll as well.

Her once beautiful hair is now thin.

I suffer pain every day.

So I'm reminded of it every day.

I am on pain medication

which just dulls the pain.

I have damage to my spine.

I had to have surgery on my left shoulder in 2008

because I couldn't use it

because it was way too painful.

Over the years she found comfort in her family,

her grandson, and above all a deep spiritual connection.

I would not be speaking to you today

if... if it were not for God.

And when I was in captivity and if he said,

"Do this," or "Don't do that,"

or "Say this" or "Don't say that,"

I listened to him; I did it,

and it was good.

In 2015 Cameron Hooker

applied for early parole.

Tehama County's DA had to make sure that didn't happen.

I didn't know evil until I came to Red Bluff

and learned about this case.

There's no better illustration of evil

than Cameron Hooker.

Colleen campaigned to keep him locked up

because things had changed in California:

Hooker could be released.

I experienced pain beyond any

earthly explanation.

Physical, mental, and emotional...

Things have kind of flipped on its head

in our great state of California.

Now they can consider the facts and circumstances

of the case, but that alone

is not enough to keep someone in.

They have to demonstrate bad conduct while they're in,

in order for them to be denied parole.

A few months before the parole hearing

I thought, "You know, maybe he's changed,

maybe I shouldn't be doing this."

Despite nightmares in the weeks leading up

to Cameron Hooker's parole hearing,

Colleen Stan found the courage to attend.

Colleen and Marliz Spannhake's sister Martha

had petitioned for months to keep him behind bars.

I had everybody and their brother

sign a petition against it.

We did it through social media and I don't know

how many signatures ended up, but he got denied parole.

Yay.

The commissioner admonished him and said,

"I cannot believe that you have wasted our time here today

and that you have wasted 30 years in prison,

that you have done nothing to find out why

you are this way or to change yourself."

He has no feelings for other people.

Probably the only thing that's haunting him

is the fact that he is in prison and is not able

to do whatever he wants to do.

It's been 40 years since Colleen Stan

innocently accepted a ride from Cameron Hooker

and his wife outside of Red Bluff.

The Colleen that I knew

is not the Colleen that I know today

and never will be, because of Cameron Hooker.

He took her youth away.

He took so much of Colleen away.

My sister is still lost.

Our efforts to contact Cameron Hooker

at Corcoran Prison went unanswered.

People always say, "Don't you wanna kill him?

Don't you wanna torture him?

Don't you wanna do to him what he did to you?"

No... I don't.

God says, "Vengeance is mine," and... I believe that.

As for Janice Hooker, she filed for divorce

from Cameron Hooker in December of 1985,

shortly after the trial ended.

She declined to be interviewed, saying:

"No matter what I would say the media would twist my words

and that would portray me as a violent person.

I am the gentlest person and I always have been."

Al Shamblin went on to be police chief

in Red Bluff. He's retired,

but some cases you can't leave behind.

Colleen Stan is one of them.

Most people, I really believe,

would have not made it through

being in a coffin-like box underneath a waterbed

for that length of time.

I don't think their mental state could handle it.

I'm not sure my mental state could handle

that kind of torture.

Christine McGuire is now in private practice

in Santa Cruz.

This case was the most challenging case

I've ever done, both before and after.

It was a one of a kind. It will never happen again.

But it taught me so much about the human spirit.

She's a strong girl

to go through all that torture,

and it's a wonder she didn't lose her mind.

Oh no, don't ride it backwards.

You'll tip over...

People always say,

"Why are you so normal after all of this?"

and it kind of ticks me off but, um...

and I always tell them, you know,

"The crazy person is the one that's in prison."

Gonna give Grandma a flower?

As for happy endings,

Colleen went through the worst kind of hell

and survived.

I'm not going to say my life's perfect.

It's not. Life happens, you know?

But the good thing is that I know that God's on my side,

and I know that no matter what happens

he's going to see me through it.

Colleen is a true survivor.

She got a job. She had a family.

She, to this day, she moves forward

as a survivor.

Look at your face.

I really hope that my story helps people

so that they can move on,

because I want to get on with my life

because I want to live life to the fullest.

I still have lots of things I want to do with my life

that I haven't accomplished yet, so...

I'm not going give up.