Perfect Victim by Carla Norton, Christine McGuire
Authors: Carla Norton, Christine McGuire
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enclosed within a tiny area beneath the stairs, locked in with the walnuts and a bare lightbulb. She had heard him slide a board across the door, but now tested it, pushing as hard as she could. It didn’t budge.
With nothing else to do she settled down to work — cracking the nuts, neatly separating the meats from the shells, eating some of them — working through the night as she’d been told.
In the morning before going to work, Hooker came down to get her out. He told her to put the blindfold back on before he opened the door (looking at his face was still forbidden). Then he chained her again and put her back in the box.
With an alternate place for keeping his captive, Hooker established a new routine. Colleen still spent all day locked in the box, but at night, after she’d been let out to sit on the rack and eat her meal, and sometimes hung from the beam or staked out on the rack, she was usually locked inside the workshop. She often worked all night on some project that either Cameron or Janice gave her to do, frequently macrame or crochet.
Though this new arrangement was more trouble and a bit riskier, it was already paying off. The Hookers loaded up the fruits of Colleen’s labor and sold them at a big flea market down in San Jose. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it helped.
And so the secret circumstances in the basement of 1140 Oak Street underwent a significant shift. It’s unclear whether the Hookers fully appreciated the ramifications of putting Colleen to work for them. More than just giving her something to do with her hands, it changed Colleen’s status within the household. Now she was more than a kidnap victim, a captive, an object of abuse.
Now, quite clearly, Colleen Stan had become their slave.
November 19-December 6, 1984
When you are held captive, people somehow expect you to spit in your captor’s face and get killed. -Patty Hearst
CHAPTER 6 THE CHORUS OF DISBELIEF
it’s not a through street, the approach to Diamond Lands Corporation south of Red Bluff. The road is heavily trafficked by big trucks carrying lumber in and out and by the many pickups of Diamond’s employees. It winds past huge piles of sawdust, mountainous stacks of logs, signs exhorting safety, and finally ends at dusty parking lots. Workers climb out of their vehicles, put on their hard hats, and disappear into cavernous buildings, where the roar of heavy equipment makes protective earmuffs mandatory and talking absurd.
Peeling the bark off huge logs, carving them into boards and then drying them in massive kilns demands strong equipment and lots of power. Carbide-tipped saws are changed for sharpening every four hours, and Diamond runs up more than two million dollars a year in electricity bills. Doing roughly forty-five million dollars in business every year, turning out half a million feet of lumber a day, Diamond Lands Corporation is just about Red Bluff’s largest employer. Everyone calls it, simply, Diamond.
Cameron Hooker worked in this complex of buildings, including the adjacent pulp plant that Diamond sold off in 1982, a total of twelve years. For the last few years, Hooker’s job was to make sure six massive conveyors — deep trenches which carried useless wood to be chopped up for fiber in the “chipper” — were running freely. Most of the time it wasn’t a demanding job; he just had to keep moving, checking one conveyor and then another.
But if one got jammed, perhaps by a large board sticking up, it was critical that he “Immediately climb down and wrench the obstruction free.” Overall, it was a low-skill job, but Hooker showed no inclination to take on more responsibility. He had the reputation of being a clock watcher, and as soon as his shift was over, he was out the door.
The single road exiting the compound happens to wind past the building that houses the Red Bluff Daily News. In all the years he wound to and from work past that newspaper office, Cameron Hooker surely never
With nothing else to do she settled down to work — cracking the nuts, neatly separating the meats from the shells, eating some of them — working through the night as she’d been told.
In the morning before going to work, Hooker came down to get her out. He told her to put the blindfold back on before he opened the door (looking at his face was still forbidden). Then he chained her again and put her back in the box.
With an alternate place for keeping his captive, Hooker established a new routine. Colleen still spent all day locked in the box, but at night, after she’d been let out to sit on the rack and eat her meal, and sometimes hung from the beam or staked out on the rack, she was usually locked inside the workshop. She often worked all night on some project that either Cameron or Janice gave her to do, frequently macrame or crochet.
Though this new arrangement was more trouble and a bit riskier, it was already paying off. The Hookers loaded up the fruits of Colleen’s labor and sold them at a big flea market down in San Jose. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it helped.
And so the secret circumstances in the basement of 1140 Oak Street underwent a significant shift. It’s unclear whether the Hookers fully appreciated the ramifications of putting Colleen to work for them. More than just giving her something to do with her hands, it changed Colleen’s status within the household. Now she was more than a kidnap victim, a captive, an object of abuse.
Now, quite clearly, Colleen Stan had become their slave.
November 19-December 6, 1984
When you are held captive, people somehow expect you to spit in your captor’s face and get killed. -Patty Hearst
CHAPTER 6 THE CHORUS OF DISBELIEF
it’s not a through street, the approach to Diamond Lands Corporation south of Red Bluff. The road is heavily trafficked by big trucks carrying lumber in and out and by the many pickups of Diamond’s employees. It winds past huge piles of sawdust, mountainous stacks of logs, signs exhorting safety, and finally ends at dusty parking lots. Workers climb out of their vehicles, put on their hard hats, and disappear into cavernous buildings, where the roar of heavy equipment makes protective earmuffs mandatory and talking absurd.
Peeling the bark off huge logs, carving them into boards and then drying them in massive kilns demands strong equipment and lots of power. Carbide-tipped saws are changed for sharpening every four hours, and Diamond runs up more than two million dollars a year in electricity bills. Doing roughly forty-five million dollars in business every year, turning out half a million feet of lumber a day, Diamond Lands Corporation is just about Red Bluff’s largest employer. Everyone calls it, simply, Diamond.
Cameron Hooker worked in this complex of buildings, including the adjacent pulp plant that Diamond sold off in 1982, a total of twelve years. For the last few years, Hooker’s job was to make sure six massive conveyors — deep trenches which carried useless wood to be chopped up for fiber in the “chipper” — were running freely. Most of the time it wasn’t a demanding job; he just had to keep moving, checking one conveyor and then another.
But if one got jammed, perhaps by a large board sticking up, it was critical that he “Immediately climb down and wrench the obstruction free.” Overall, it was a low-skill job, but Hooker showed no inclination to take on more responsibility. He had the reputation of being a clock watcher, and as soon as his shift was over, he was out the door.
The single road exiting the compound happens to wind past the building that houses the Red Bluff Daily News. In all the years he wound to and from work past that newspaper office, Cameron Hooker surely never
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