Sex slave horror: The hideous truth behind this happy photo
A new documentary tells the harrowing story of Colleen Stan, whose abductors kept her under their bed for 23 hours a day – only letting her out to rape or torture her…
When Colleen
Stan visited her family with her new boyfriend four years after she’d disappeared they were so relieved, they took a photo of the apparently loved-up couple hugging. But there was a shocking secret behind this happy picture. In actual fact, the “boyfriend” was evil Cameron Hooker who had snatched terrified Colleen, then aged 20, from a street on the way to a friend’s birthday party and was keeping her as a sex slave in a coffin under his bed. Colleen was brainwashed by the monster and bizarrely didn’t try to escape or tell her family of her appalling suffering at his hands, which lasted seven years.
TOTAL DARKNESS
Hooker imprisoned Colleen – who he called his slave – and for the next seven years kept her in a wooden box under the bed he shared with his wife, Janice. He only released her for a few hours at a time, when he would torture, rape, and abuse her. Now, 40 years after she escaped, Colleen is sharing her story in a new two-hour documentary, Notorious: The Girl In The Box. Speaking in the programme, Colleen, now 64, movingly said,
“I don’t know how to explain what total darkness does to a human soul.”
Colleen had been in the car with Cameron, who worked at a lumber mill, and Janice for 30 minutes, when he pulled over and put a knife to her throat. Then he bound and gagged her, before placing a homemade wooden box over her head. “I thought I was going to die,” Colleen said.
Shockingly, Cameron and Janice had previously come to an agreement that Cameron could capture a sex slave – rather than carry out his sexual bondage fantasies on his wife. He even made Colleen sign a contract stating she had to do everything he wanted – from sex to household chores.
Cameron drove Colleen to the couple’s home in Red Bluff, California. On her first night in captivity, she was stripped naked and strung up by her hands. Colleen said, “He said, “Go ahead and scream, I’ll cut your vocal cords.” She added, “I was terrified. Janice watched as Cameron tortured me and then they had sex in front of me. I was convinced they were going to kill me.”
She was forced into a three foot by six foot wooden crate, which was too short for her to lie down, meaning she was forced to sit up 24/7. When the couple moved to a remote mobile home, he built a coffinshaped box, which went under their bed and locked Colleen in for 23 hours a day.
Over the years, Colleen was subjected to unrelenting abuse. Cameron would tie her to the ceiling by her wrists or whip, torture and rape her. Colleen said, “The routine became that he would come down in the evenings, give me something to eat, something to drink, let me use the bedpan and then he would hang me up, whip me.”
Cameron also built torture devices for her, including a stretcher. Colleen said, “It was like a medieval device... he would wind it up, stretch me out – everything hurts. I’m just praying, ‘Dear Lord... help me.’”
Colleen focused on happy memories to get through the horror. She said, “I learned I could go anywhere in my mind. You just remove yourself from the situation going on and you go somewhere else.”
As time went on, Colleen became brainwashed by Cameron. He had told her that an organisation, called ‘The Company’, would hunt her down and kill her if she escaped. She was so convinced of this powerful group that, even when, around three years after her capture, Cameron began letting her outside to jog, she never tried to flee. Colleen said, “His wife told me if you step outside the door without permission from us, you might as well put a shotgun to your head and pull the trigger.”
FORBIDDEN
In 1981, Colleen was even allowed to visit her family alone. As she hadn’t been in touch, and was wearing homemade clothes and had no money, her family thought she’d joined a cult, but not wanting to scare her away from further contact, they didn’t question her. The next day, Colleen came back, this time with Cameron who posed as her boyfriend.
The pair looked so happy, that her family even took a picture of the them together smiling.
But Cameron worried he was
giving her too much freedom and so he forced Colleen to spend almost all of her time in the wooden coffin – which still reached 38ºC in hot summers – and she was forbidden from making a noise.
Then after eight years, Cameron told Janice he wanted to make Colleen his second wife. This upset Janice so much she confessed to Colleen that The Company didn’t exist. And in August 1984, Janice drove Colleen to a bus station to let her go, before fleeing with her two daughters.
RECOVERY
Despite escaping, Colleen never reported Cameron, in the hope that he would reform. Instead, it was Janice who eventually went to the police and agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. Cameron, now 67, was handed a 104-year sentence in 1985.
Colleen went onto to study accountancy. She said that she “needed a lot of counselling” but had her “family to lean on” during recovery. She has been married four times, and is a grandparent. She added, “I have to accept the fact that it happened because it did. I don’t let it affect my life now because to me, it’s over.”
HE WOULD COME DOWN IN THE EVENINGS, GIVE ME FOOD, THEN
HANG ME UP AND WHIP ME