3 months ago
Before Jaycee Dugard or Elizabeth Smart, the case of Colleen Stan made international headlines. Stan was called "the Girl in the Box" and the subject of a best selling book called "Perfect Victim."
Colleen's decent into a seven-year nightmare started in May of 1977. Stan was hitchhiking along I-5 near Redding and accepted a ride from a young couple traveling with a 7-month-old baby.
"The husband looked dirty, like he just got off work," said Stan. "His young wife was holding their baby. They told me, 'Yeah, we'll give you a ride.' I felt this was a good ride, a safe ride after evaluating the situation."
Within hours, Stan would find herself naked and suspended by the wrists in the basement of a home in Red Bluff.
During her seven years in captivity, Stan would be beaten, raped, burned, suspended and choked to unconsciousness many times. Her captor Cameron Hooker built special torture devices, including a stretcher that caused permanent damage to her back and one shoulder.
"There were many times I thought I was going to die and many times I would think why are they keeping me alive?"
She didn't know it at the time, but Stan was a surrogate for Cameron Hooker's wife Janice. She was to take the pain that Hooker wanted to inflict on a woman.
In addition to the physical torture, Stan was forced to sign her life over to Hooker as a sex slave. Hooker had told her that a national group of sex slave owners called "the Company" protected members and punished slaves that were defiant, often to the point of death. She was told her family would be hurt and anyone she reached out to for help would be killed if she did not sign the document.
Shortly after signing her life over to Hooker, he placed her in a box under his bed, where she spent the majority of every day. She was often denied water and dehydration played a major role in her dreams.
"I would have lots of dreams about water where I'd be floating on huge bodies of water and surrounded," Stan explained. "I would dream of angels protecting me and I dreamt about my grandfather who passed on. He would tell me that everything was going to be alright because he was there with me."
With physical and mental control established, Hooker started allowing Stan to leave the box and perform chores around the house. Eventually, she was allowed to work outside the home.
"He started to give me little bits of freedom," explained Stan. "It was his way of assuring he had total control over me."
Years later, attorneys and reporters would ask Stan why she didn't run away when presented with so many opportunities.
"If you take someone and pluck them off the street and you put them in total isolation and you start incorporating torture and sexual abuse and the only person they see or speak to is you, you control what they eat, when they drink, when they go to the bathroom...you control all these things over a period of time, you will break a person's will down and you will have control over this person," Stan said.
Today, Colleen is living under another name in an undisclosed area of California.
Janice Hooker was offered immunity in return for her testimony against her husband. She is currently living in Northern California.
Cameron Hooker is currently serving his sentence at Corcoran State Prison. Hooker's release date is in 2022, but Stan has been told he will most likely be released much earlier.
Link to Cristina Mendonsa's blog about the interview with Colleen Stan:
News10/KXTV
