Perfect Victim by Carla Norton, Christine McGuire Page A
Authors: Carla Norton, Christine McGuire
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thought he would be the object of so much speculation within its walls.
On November 19, 1984, the day after Hooker’s arrest, Police Chief John Faulkner released the first scraps of information to the press. Declining to give full details, he disclosed only the essentials: that Cameron Hooker had been booked for kidnapping, rape, sodomy, and assorted other charges. A short article, headlined “Police Arrest Suspect in Kidnap-Sex Crimes,” was the first glimmer of a story that would prove to be the Daily News’s biggest scoop ever, not only dominating the local paper’s front page many times throughout the year but drawing media attention from around the world.
By the next day, more details had emerged, and a picture of Cameron Hooker accompanied the front-page article: “Police: Sex Victim Held 7 Years.” The article described the events preceding Hooker’s arrest: the kidnap, various crimes, and, most astonishingly, the box. It explained that an unidentified 27-year-old woman who had been working recently as a motel maid, had been held captive for seven years as a sex slave.
With sensational elements like sex slavery, a seven-year captivity, and a box beneath the master’s waterbed, Red Bluff promptly found itself the focus of unprecedented media attention. In wire service offices, radio and television stations, and big-city newsrooms, editors consulted maps and dispatched reporters to the scene of the crime.
Newspeople rushed into town seeking to fill column-inches or allotted time slots, searching for fresh angles. They queried law enforcement officers, questioned the district attorney’s office, and pestered neighbors — who became so exasperated with sightseers and the press that one finally put up a Private Road sign to try to deter them. The Red Bluff Daily News even ran a story complaining that “reporters, photographers and newscasters have swarmed into town, taken it by the throat and shaken it for every possible last bit of information.”
Somewhere along the line, this peculiar story was tagged first The Girl in the Box Case and then The Sex Slave Case. In no time it was making headlines across the country, through Europe, to Tokyo, and back.
Meanwhile, the story broke around the local people with an unintelligible clatter. It was inconceivable that a man and his wife could kidnap a woman and secretly hold her captive for more than seven years, especially in a town as small and a community as tightly interwoven as Red Bluff’s. None of it made sense. Here was a woman who had been going to work and returning home every day; how could it be that she was held against her will?
Why didn’t she just run away? And who could believe that a fullgrown woman could be kept for years in a coffin-size box?
“You’d think that if something like that happened to someone they would have stuttered a lot or would have been malnourished, but she was very outgoing. She always had rosy cheeks,” Doris Miron, Colleen’s former employer at the King’s Lodge told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mr. and Mrs. Leddy, the little old couple who’d rented 1140 Oak Street to the Hookers years earlier, politely answered reporters’ questions but still felt the whole wild story couldn’t possibly be true. “I don’t understand this,” Mrs. Leddy said. “She had freedom — shopping and all that.” Reflecting on her former tenant, Mrs. Leddy said of Cameron: “Quiet as he was and everything, it’s hard to believe he’d do those things.”
That seemed to be the consensus among most of Hooker’s more recent neighbors as well. One neighbor told local reporters, “I knew the girl and I knew Cameron, and they were so normal. If you’d line up ten men you knew in a row for something like this, Cameron would be the last one you’d pick.”
Neighbors described Hooker as “nice,” “courteous…quiet,” “friendly,” and “a really nice guy,” but no one, it seemed, could claim to know him well. He was
On November 19, 1984, the day after Hooker’s arrest, Police Chief John Faulkner released the first scraps of information to the press. Declining to give full details, he disclosed only the essentials: that Cameron Hooker had been booked for kidnapping, rape, sodomy, and assorted other charges. A short article, headlined “Police Arrest Suspect in Kidnap-Sex Crimes,” was the first glimmer of a story that would prove to be the Daily News’s biggest scoop ever, not only dominating the local paper’s front page many times throughout the year but drawing media attention from around the world.
By the next day, more details had emerged, and a picture of Cameron Hooker accompanied the front-page article: “Police: Sex Victim Held 7 Years.” The article described the events preceding Hooker’s arrest: the kidnap, various crimes, and, most astonishingly, the box. It explained that an unidentified 27-year-old woman who had been working recently as a motel maid, had been held captive for seven years as a sex slave.
With sensational elements like sex slavery, a seven-year captivity, and a box beneath the master’s waterbed, Red Bluff promptly found itself the focus of unprecedented media attention. In wire service offices, radio and television stations, and big-city newsrooms, editors consulted maps and dispatched reporters to the scene of the crime.
Newspeople rushed into town seeking to fill column-inches or allotted time slots, searching for fresh angles. They queried law enforcement officers, questioned the district attorney’s office, and pestered neighbors — who became so exasperated with sightseers and the press that one finally put up a Private Road sign to try to deter them. The Red Bluff Daily News even ran a story complaining that “reporters, photographers and newscasters have swarmed into town, taken it by the throat and shaken it for every possible last bit of information.”
Somewhere along the line, this peculiar story was tagged first The Girl in the Box Case and then The Sex Slave Case. In no time it was making headlines across the country, through Europe, to Tokyo, and back.
Meanwhile, the story broke around the local people with an unintelligible clatter. It was inconceivable that a man and his wife could kidnap a woman and secretly hold her captive for more than seven years, especially in a town as small and a community as tightly interwoven as Red Bluff’s. None of it made sense. Here was a woman who had been going to work and returning home every day; how could it be that she was held against her will?
Why didn’t she just run away? And who could believe that a fullgrown woman could be kept for years in a coffin-size box?
“You’d think that if something like that happened to someone they would have stuttered a lot or would have been malnourished, but she was very outgoing. She always had rosy cheeks,” Doris Miron, Colleen’s former employer at the King’s Lodge told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mr. and Mrs. Leddy, the little old couple who’d rented 1140 Oak Street to the Hookers years earlier, politely answered reporters’ questions but still felt the whole wild story couldn’t possibly be true. “I don’t understand this,” Mrs. Leddy said. “She had freedom — shopping and all that.” Reflecting on her former tenant, Mrs. Leddy said of Cameron: “Quiet as he was and everything, it’s hard to believe he’d do those things.”
That seemed to be the consensus among most of Hooker’s more recent neighbors as well. One neighbor told local reporters, “I knew the girl and I knew Cameron, and they were so normal. If you’d line up ten men you knew in a row for something like this, Cameron would be the last one you’d pick.”
Neighbors described Hooker as “nice,” “courteous…quiet,” “friendly,” and “a really nice guy,” but no one, it seemed, could claim to know him well. He was
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