In 1977, Cameron Hooker seized 20-year-old Colleen Stan and held her prisoner in his Northern California home for seven years. He predominantly kept Stan in a wooden box underneath the bed he shared with his wife, Janice Hooker. Initially, Cameron only released Stan from her confinement to beat her and force her to engage in intimate relations. After extended psychological coercion, Stan became a live-in babysitter and sex slave for the couple. Stan was able to survive her horrific ordeal and escape in 1984 with the help of his wife. She returned to her family but was too terrified to report the years of abuse and assault to the police.
She became known as “the girl in the box,” and her story shocked people around the world. The true details of what happened to Stan – and the crimes of her captors – appear almost like an urban legend.
On the morning of May 19, 1977, 20-year-old Colleen Stan decided to hitchhike from her home in Eugene, OR, to Northern California to attend a friend’s birthday party. She spent most of the day accepting rides from various strangers, slowly making her way to her destination, when a young couple – Cameron, 23, and his 19-year-old, wife, Janice – picked her up.
Stan had turned down a number of rides before getting into the couple’s blue van, largely because she believed the couple, who were traveling with their 8-month-old daughter, were less dangerous than some of the other people who offered her a lift.
Just 30 minutes into the journey, the vehicle stopped in a remote area, and Cameron held a knife to Stan’s throat. He then forced a contraption on her head that was designed to isolate her from the outside world.
After capturing Stan, Cameron threatened her with a knife, gagged her, tied her up, and forced a heavy hinged box on to the 20-year-old’s head. Cameron, who was a skilled carpenter, constructed the 20-pound wooden box so that it would fit snuggly on the head of the wearer.
He also lined the contraption with soundproofing material, making it impossible for Stan to see and difficult for her to hear.
The first night he held Stan, Cameron forced her to sleep in a wooden box he constructed to keep the young woman from escaping. The box had the dimensions of a crate, so Stan was unable to lie down. Instead, she involuntarily had to sleep sitting up inside the box, bound by chains.
Eventually, the couple moved from their house to a mobile home, so they didn’t have a basement to keep their prisoner. Cameron constructed another box. Approximately the same size as a coffin, the new box allowed Stan to sleep lying down, and the couple placed this box underneath their waterbed. Despite the air holes in the box’s lid, it routinely reached over 100 degrees during the summer months inside the box.
For the first few years of captivity, the Cameron and Janice only allowed Stan an hour or two each day outside the box, often just to clean the house or babysit their children. The couple had two young daughters, and neither of the girls realized their parents held Stan against her will. In fact, the couple’s daughters didn’t even know Stan lived at their house, much less underneath their parents’ bed in a wooden box, because Cameron and Janice told them Stan went to her own home every night.
Stan’s extended confinement, coupled with the physical suffering her captor inflicted, left her with chronic medical problems, including severe back and shoulder damage.
She Was Repeatedly Assaulted
When Stan arrived at the Cameron and Janice’s home in Red Bluff, CA, they kept her in the basement where they physically harmed her and forced her to engage in intimate relations. On the night they kidnapped her, Cameron suspended Stan from the cellar’s ceiling and beat her while his wife, Janice, watched. Then, the couple had sex on a table underneath Stan, who was still hanging from the ceiling by her wrists.
During the time they held Stan captive in the Red Bluff house, the couple regularly whipped, beat, burned, and electrocuted her. They also stretched her on a rack. In addition to her making her suffer physically, the couple deprived Stan of food and engaged in ritualistic rape.
She Was Forced To Sign A “Contract” Giving Up Her Free Will
After Cameron held Stan captive for several months, he coerced her into signing a “slave contract,” which effectively forced Stan to give up her own free will and allow herself to be treated as the couple’s personal property.
Cameron also decreed that Stan’s new name was “Kay,” not Colleen, and commanded she call him “Master” and Janice “Ma’am,” an exercise that helped the couple dehumanize their captive even further. “Kay” earned the ability to go upstairs after she signed the contract.
She Was Told A Secret Organization Was Watching Her
Cameron convinced Stan it would be pointless for her to try to escape because if she ever managed to break out of captivity, a secret organization called “The Company” would find her and kill her and her family. He also told Stan that he was a member of “The Company,” an international criminal organization that enslaved women like herself.
Stan was so fearful of this fictional organization that even when she had the opportunity to escape from the couple’s home, she was too afraid to leave.
She Was Allowed To Visit Her Family – But Was So Brainwashed She Told Them She Was Fine
In March 1981, after more than three years of captivity, Cameron took Stan to Oregon to visit her parents. His threats of “The Company” frightened Stan to the extent she didn’t tell her mother and father that she had been held captive and forced to sign a slave contract.
Instead, Stan introduced Cameron as her fiancé, never letting her family know he was holding her against her will. Her parents even took a picture of the “happy couple” to document being reunited with their daughter and meeting the man they thought she intended to marry.
Stan’s parents were concerned for their daughter, mainly because they thought she had joined a cult, but they weren’t aware of the years of abuse she had suffered.
She Had Been Kidnapped To Take The Place Of Her Captor’s Wife
Janice alleges that shortly after she met Cameron, he routinely hurt her. Brainwashed, Janice agreed to let her husband kidnap a woman to keep as a sex slave. Janice maintains she allowed her husband to capture and physically harm Stan because it meant Cameron would no longer subject her to horrific beatings.
‘The Company’ Was What She Feared The Most”The Company” was a fictional organization somewhat like a cross between crime-mob slavery and Big Brother, and Cameron used it to subdue and threaten Stan. She testified after her escape that he would threaten to kill her and her family if she tried to get away. He also forced her to call him “Master,” as a subordinate to “The Company.” She couldn’t talk or move without permission, and she was expected to conform to Cameron’s graphic, erotic fantasies.When Janice eventually revealed to Stan that “The Company” was not real, it was a mental breakthrough for the seven-year victim.
She Escaped After 7 Years In Captivity
After being held captive for seven years, Stan finally felt it was safe for her to flee the couple’s home. Janice helped, in part, after she realized her husband was probably going to leave her for Stan. Janice revealed to Stan that Cameron wasn’t a member of “The Company,” the faux criminal slave organization he said was real. When Stan realized members of “The Company” wouldn’t her hunt down and kill her and her parents if she left, the young woman escaped with Janice’s help and encouragement.
In 1984, Janice dropped Stan off at a bus station. The woman who had been kept as a slave for seven years called her father and got money to buy a ticket back to her home in Oregon. Stan also called Cameron to tell him she had escaped, and he reportedly cried when she told him she’d left.
She Didn’t Tell The Police About Her Ordeal Until Much Later
After Stan returned to her family in Oregon, she didn’t tell anyone, including the police, about the years of horror she endured. Before she helped Stan escape, Janice made the young woman promise she wouldn’t go to the authorities about the terrifying ordeal because she thought her husband might be able to reform himself through counseling and prayer.
Eventually, Janice realized Cameron was unable to give up his sadistic and cruel ways, so she told her pastor about what happened. Her pastor encouraged her to contact law enforcement. On November 18, 1984, months after Stan’s escape from captivity, authorities arrested Cameron.
Janice Wasn’t Charged With Any Crimes
Even though Janice helped her husband capture Stan and keep her prisoner for seven years, she wasn’t charged with a crime. While Cameron was tried and convicted of several counts of kidnapping and sexual assault, the courts granted Janice full immunity because she agreed to testify against him.
Prosecutors believed Cameron mentally and physically abused Janice, making it nearly impossible for her to have defied her husband and stop the horrors he made Stan endure.
She May Not Have Been Cameron’s First Sex Slave
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During Cameron’s 1985 trial for capturing and abusing Stan, Janice revealed her husband captured another young woman, 19-year-old Marie Elizabeth Spannhake, on January 31, 1976. A year before they offered a ride to Stan, the couple picked up Spannhake when she was hitchhiking in Chico, CA.
According to Janice, they took the young woman to their home in Red Bluff, and Cameron physically harmed and eventually murdered Spannhake. Spannhake’s body has never been found, and authorities were not able to find enough evidence to prosecute Cameron for Spannhake’s death.
Cameron Will Be Up For Parole In 2030
Despite being convicted of multiple counts of kidnapping and assault in 1985 and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for his crimes, Cameron was given a parole hearing in 2015. The state of California has a parole program for elderly inmates that allows prisoners over the age of 60 to request parole after they serve 25 years of their sentences.
However, the parole board denied Cameron’s request, and he will not be eligible for another hearing until the year 2030 when he will be 76.
She Changed her Name And Now Helps Other Women Recovering From Trauma
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Stan, who is living under a new name, was relieved to learn her captor of seven years would not be released from prison. Stan received intensive therapy after she escaped from Cameron and Janice’s home.
She also she went on to earn an accounting degree, get married, become a mother and a grandmother, and provide help and support to other women who have been victims of abuse.
