“Here I do get on. Nothing safer than a family, Colleen told herself as she hitchhiked. Inside the vehicle was a couple with a baby of just seven months, so nothing could go wrong. However, she was wrong. The couple had a clear objective: to wander in search of a victim to kidnap to satisfy the man’s sexual perversions.
A few minutes later, the husband stopped without warning, pulled out a knife, and threatened the young woman. After her, he forced her head into a strange wooden box, and from there, she began an insane nightmare. Cameron Hooker tortured and held Colleen as a sex slave for the next seven years. And when he wasn’t using her for his heinous fantasies, he locked her in a coffin under a bed. This is how the case of The Girl in the Box was born.
Hardly any biographical information about the life of our protagonist is known, except that he was born on November 5, 1953 in Alturas, California, and that his family moved to another town in the county, Red Bluff, when he was sixteen years old. Following his graduation, Cameron Hooker began working at a local sawmill, around which time he met Janice, his future wife.
The fifteen-year-old teenager came from a broken family, where physical and psychological abuse was the order of the day. With this background, Cameron saw in Janice a virgin, submissive, manipulable and influenceable girl to subdue in her depraved sexual fantasies.
The young man, who was already addicted to violent pornography at that time, introduced Janice to BDSM (bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism and masochism) sexual practice: he played at immobilizing her by hanging her by the wrists while he whipped her with a whip . Also, he practiced suffocating her during her intercourse, in addition to forcing her to have threesomes with other women and to carry out all kinds of sadomasochistic acts.
Janice, fed up with being her husband’s sex slave, made two requests: first, that her husband would only practice penetration with her, and second, that he would have to find another submissive to spank and whip so that she would she could get pregnant. Cameron agreed, and thus began the search for potential victims to replace Janice.
It was four in the afternoon on January 31, 1976, when the Hookers were prowling their Dodge Colt along one of the avenues in the Californian town of Chico. In the distance, they saw a young woman hitchhiking: it was Marie Elizabeth ‘Marliz’ Spannhake, a beautiful 19-year-old model.
As soon as the girl got in the car, Cameron hit her hard and hurried to her home at 1140 Oak Street in Red Bluff. The Hookers had moved there after getting married in January 1975. Over the next few years, Cameron and Janice carved out their own house of horrors without the neighbors suspecting a thing.
Marliz only lasted a few hours: Cameron stripped her naked and hung her from one of the ceiling beams, and violently raped her. After her, he shot her in the stomach, and to finish it off, he strangled her. The psychopath, helped by his wife, buried the body near the Lassen Volcanic National Park. His remains were never found.
When the Spannhake family reported him missing, authorities investigated the boyfriend as the prime suspect. But nothing is further from reality, since the author was a complete stranger. A year after the crime and after the birth of their first child, the Hookers returned to their old ways in search of their second victim.
That day, May 19, 1977, 20-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking when the couple stopped and invited her to get on. At first, she trusted them, they had a baby and they seemed normal. However, as the minutes passed, “a voice told me to run and jump and never look back,” the young woman said to herself, thinking that she was exaggerating.
Cameron then threatened her, placed a cumbersome box over her head that he had built to silence any sound, including screaming, and drove to the house. Once there, the horrifying ordeal of the victim began.
Among the depravities that Colleen suffered: being blindfolded and hung from straps to pipes or ceiling beams for hours while being raped and beaten with a whip, as well as being tied hand and foot to a torture rack made of homemade.
Added to this were burns with matches, electrocutions, suffocation and drowning with the head in the bathtub and innumerable oral sex practices and some more vaginal and anal, but using all kinds of external elements. Let’s remember that Cameron had promised Janice that there would be no penetration with her sex slave.
Likewise, the psychopath devised the best way to prevent the escape of his prey by building a wooden coffin. The confinement lasted about 23 hours a day, and the young woman only came out of there to be raped and tortured. In fact, she urinated and defecated inside her cubicle.
To make matters worse, all these abjections were witnessed by Janice, which psychologically sank the victim even more. Colleen was aware that she would never get out of here alive.
Apart from physical submission, the aggressor also exerted a strong psychological subjugation on the girl, who ended up suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Furthermore, Cameron led her to believe that a powerful and dangerous cult called The Company was watching her, and that if she resisted her, her family would suffer the same fate as her. The kidnapper had her subjected body and soul.
Meanwhile, the Stan family desperately and unsuccessfully searched for the young woman. The investigators focused the investigations on her ex-husband, Tom Smith, whom they placed on the target as a suspect. But at the time, the police had to rule it out because at the time of Colleen’s disappearance, the young man was in another state. His alibi was true.
The surprise came when in March 1981, almost five years after her disappearance, the young woman returned to her father’s house accompanied by an alleged boyfriend. He was Cameron Hooker. To do this, she Colleen managed to persuade her captor by assuring her that she loved him and that she needed to see her family one last time.
The predator, convinced of the absolute submission and obedience of his slave, accepted the proposal and they traveled to Riverside. Before this moment, Colleen had already managed to get several hours out of the coffin, but she never tried to escape. The abduction was real.
When the Stans saw Colleen they thought she had joined a cult. Her haggard appearance and her utterly helpful demeanor towards her escort gave her away, but no one did anything to hold her back when they left the next day. The only photo of the victim and her kidnapper is the one that appears in this report and was taken by one of Colleen’s sisters. At that time, the young woman claimed to feel happy.
After returning from that trip, Cameron told Janice of his intention to build new cells for other slaves, as well as his desire to have a second wife. Such was her feeling of impunity that she thought she had everything under control. It was not true.
This declaration of interests woke Janice up: she revealed what had happened to her parish pastor, who urged her to leave the house and release Colleen. The two women and the two children of the marriage fled on August 10, 1984, but it was the wife’s testimony that led to Cameron’s arrest.
While Colleen continued to maintain telephone communication with her captor from the family home, Janice sued her husband for Marliz’s murder and Colleen’s kidnapping and torture in exchange for immunity.
Cameron was arrested on November 19, 1984 accused of first degree murder of his first victim, and other charges of kidnapping, torture and rape on the second. During the trial, held in September 1985, the psychologists ratified the physical and psychological abuse exerted on Colleen and the consequent Stockholm syndrome that led her to fall in love with her kidnapper.
“I learned that I could go anywhere in my mind. I just stopped being in the situation I was experiencing and went to another more pleasant place in my head, ”said the victim on the podium. That way of compartmentalizing her mind in the face of her tortures helped her survive.
The court sentenced Cameron Hooker to 104 years in prison, a sentence with which the defendant fully agreed. He even dared to be ironic with his lawyers: “I want you to thank the judge on my behalf. I have a library, a gym and time to enjoy them. And that is much better than living with those two women.”
While the psychopath remains in the San Mateo jail, awaiting a possible parole that continues to be delayed, Janice changed her name to Lashley and works as a social worker in California, where she lives.
As for Colleen, dubbed The Girl in the Box by the media, she studied accounting, changed her last name, went through the vicarage four times and had a son.
And, although the tragedy took a toll on her self-esteem, this did not prevent her from being excited about the little things in life or from feeling happy to “be alive”. In fact, the now sixty-year-old dedicates part of her free time to helping other women victims of abuse.
