The knife was at my throat before I could scream. I had accepted a ride from a young couple and their baby, thinking I was safe. Two men had offered me rides earlier that day in May 1977, and I had turned them both down. But when a blue van pulled over on Interstate 5 and I saw a wife holding a toddler in the passenger seat, I relaxed.
I was on my way to Westwood, California, to surprise a friend for her birthday. Hitchhiking was normal back then, a free way to travel, and I had done it before. I trusted my instincts. That trust was about to destroy me.
The driver was Cameron Hooker, a quiet man from Red Bluff who worked at a lumber mill. His wife Janice sat beside him, and their baby gurgled in her arms. For half an hour, the conversation stayed light and casual, and I convinced myself this was a good ride. Then I caught Cameron watching me in the rearview mirror.
Something cold ran through me, but I pushed it away. We stopped at a gas station so I could use the restroom. Alone inside, I thought about running. I could slip out the back door and find another ride.
But Cameron’s wife and child were right there. What harm could he possibly do with his own family in the van? I talked myself out of my fear and went back. They handed me a candy bar, and we drove on.
Twenty minutes later, Cameron pulled off the highway and said he wanted to check out some caves in the area. He drove down a dirt road until we were in the middle of nowhere. Janice got out with the baby and walked toward a nearby lake. The moment she was gone, Cameron’s whole demeanor changed.
He pulled a knife and pressed it against my throat, telling me I would do exactly what he said or I would die. I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged. Then he forced a heavy wooden box over my head, a coffin-like contraption he had built himself, lined with carpet and fitted with a small neck hole that made it nearly impossible to breathe. He covered me with a heavy blanket and started the van.
I felt us drive downhill for a long time. When the van finally stopped, I felt a flash of relief when the box was removed. That relief lasted seconds. We were at 11:40 Oak Street in Red Bluff.
Cameron pulled me into the basement and forced me onto a small ice chest. He ordered me to raise my arms, bound my wrists to a pipe overhead, and kicked the ice chest away, leaving me hanging, helpless, my toes barely touching the floor. When I tried to scream, he told me he would cut my vocal cords if I made another sound. Then he whipped me.
Even blindfolded, I could see a magazine on the floor showing a woman suspended just like me. My worst nightmare was his favorite fantasy. Cameron was so excited by his capture that he went upstairs, brought Janice down, and had sex with her while I hung above them, terrified and unable to move. Later, I learned the truth about their marriage.
Cameron had met Janice in 1973 when she was just fifteen, a vulnerable epileptic teenager desperate for attention. He coerced her into his bondage games, and by 1975 they were married. But as Janice grew older, she grew tired of being his victim. So they made an agreement: he would stop torturing her if they could capture another woman instead.
Cameron was only allowed to be intimate with his wife, but Janice could end her suffering. She had her baby, and now she had me. The first night was the worst. Cameron and Janice restrained me on a rack, put the box back on my head, and left me alone in the dark.
I could barely move or breathe. I thought I would die. I could not believe this was happening to me. I had never heard of people doing such things, and I could not understand what I had done to deserve this.
I thought about my family, about the friends who had become my adopted family in Eugene, and I cried until I had no tears left. The next morning, Cameron removed my restraints, but the relief was brief. He starved me all day before feeding me a small portion of potatoes and water. Then he hung me up and tortured me again.
My next meal was an egg salad sandwich. I felt full after the first one and tried to refuse the second, and Cameron flew into a rage. He hung me by my wrists and whipped me for my alleged defiance. When he finally took me down, I forced myself to finish the sandwich.
Days passed in the same pattern: one meal a day, constant isolation, and endless torture. My family filed a missing person report on May 23, 1977, four days after my abduction. My mother called the sheriff’s department constantly, but they had nothing to go on. They feared I was dead or trapped in a cult.
They had no idea I was trapped in a basement in Red Bluff, living a waking nightmare. In the early weeks, I saw almost nothing of Janice. I was restrained twenty-three hours a day. Cameron came frequently to torture me, sometimes photographing and filming his sessions.
He held my head underwater until I passed out. Whenever I asked when he would let me go, he said, “Soon. ” He never meant it. He realized that keeping me chained to the rack would damage me permanently, so he built a new wooden box, a coffin-like container with a sleeping bag inside and a blower for air.
This became my entire world. I grew so attuned to the temperature changes inside that box that I could tell the time of day by the heat. I was denied basic hygiene, lost twenty pounds, and stopped menstruating. But Cameron’s fantasies only grew darker.
He burned my skin with heat lamps. He electrocuted me. He strangled me and whipped me, and he became aroused by the pain he caused. After eight months, Cameron devised a new psychological weapon.
He found an article in an underground newsletter titled, “They Sell Themselves Body and Soul When They Sign the Slavery Contract. ” He created a fake legal contract and named me “K. ” He put a collar around my neck and signed the document himself using a false name, Michael Powers. He showed me the article and presented me with the contract.
“Either you sign it,” he said, “or I will sign it for you and then make you wish you had. ”
According to the contract, I was to call him “Master” and keep my body open to him at all times. If I defied him, I would be turned over to another master who was not as nice as he was. He fabricated a secret organization called “the Company,” claiming they were monitoring me constantly.
He said they had bugged my family’s homes, their cars, and their phone lines. If I tried to run, the Company would hurt my loved ones. He told me horrifying stories about other slaves who had been contracted, and he always had details to back up his lies. I believed every word.
Over time, I learned to shut down my emotions. Whenever I begged for mercy, Cameron became more violent. The more I played his game, the better it was for me. If I fought, it went on forever.
So I stopped fighting. I obeyed. Eventually, Cameron let me do household tasks. I cooked, washed dishes, and cleaned.
But whenever he yelled “Attention! ” I had to strip off my clothes, stand on my tiptoes, and reach my hands above a doorway, where he would use me for his fantasies. One night, he brought me to his bed. Janice initially tried to participate but couldn’t continue and left.
That night, he raped me for the first time. After that, the assaults became routine. As Cameron grew more confident in his control, he granted me small freedoms. The family moved to a trailer in the countryside, where there were no neighbors to see me.
Cameron built a ventilated box that fit under their waterbed. That became my new prison. I was allowed out for exactly one hour each day to brush my teeth, eat, and clean my bedpan. Janice had another daughter, and to anyone who caught a glimpse of me, I was just the in-house babysitter.
In 1980, Cameron let me go out with Janice. We went to bars, met men, and sometimes went home with them. When Janice lost her job, Cameron made me beg for money on the streets to make up for her lost wages. It was humiliating, but I did it.
When she found new work, I returned to the trailer and played the role of the babysitter. One day, Cameron handed me a gun. “This is to see if you’ll do what I say,” he said. “Put it in your mouth and pull the trigger.
” I didn’t know if it was loaded, but I did it. He was delighted by my obedience. He let me write letters to my family, though he checked every word. He even let me call home once from a payphone.
And eventually, he allowed me a visit. On March 20, 1981, Cameron drove me six hundred miles south to Riverside, California, to see my family. He introduced himself as my boyfriend and drove off. My family noticed I was thin.
They noticed something was wrong. But they were afraid to push me, afraid I might be in a cult. They just hugged me and took pictures, grateful I was there. I wanted to scream the truth, but I said nothing.
I would not risk the safety of my family for my own freedom. The next morning, I visited my mother and her relatives at church. I had hoped for at least a week with them, but after only twenty-four hours, Cameron called and said he was coming to get me. When he arrived, I told my family he was my fiancé.
My sister took a picture of us together. I smiled for the camera while my heart shattered. I got back in his van and returned to the box under the waterbed. For years, I lived in that darkness.
Cameron’s daughters grew up not knowing their nanny slept beneath their parents’ bed. He made me say goodbye to the neighbors, telling them I was moving back to Southern California. They believed me. They had no idea I never left.
In 1983, Cameron had me dig a deep hole in the yard, planning to build an underground dungeon for more women. A storm flooded it, and he abandoned the idea. Around the same time, Janice started reading the Bible regularly, and that brought her closer to me. We developed a spiritual bond born from shared suffering.
But Cameron’s assaults on Janice intensified. He tortured her while I kept his daughters away. Law enforcement would later find over five hundred photographs of Janice being tortured. I remember one night when his girls asked me why their mother was crying, and I was so filled with rage I thought I might break.
I thought, how could he do this? But I could not stop him. Cameron wanted more women. He talked about marrying me.
Janice was terrified, both for herself and for her daughters. One day, she came to where I worked. I had a job as a motel receptionist by then, another of Cameron’s schemes, this time for money. She said, “We have to get out of here.
Cameron is not in the Company. ”
I thought, my God, how could I be so stupid? How could I have believed this lie for so many years? And then I asked myself why she had waited so long to tell me the truth.
But I snapped out of it quickly. We had to come up with a plan. While Cameron was at work, I called my father and asked him to wire me money for a bus ticket. At the bus station, I called Cameron and told him I was leaving and would never come back.
He cried like a baby and begged me to return. But I got on that bus and never looked back. I went home to my parents and said nothing about my seven years in captivity. I did not go to the police.
Instead, I kept in touch with Janice, who asked me to give Cameron a chance to reform. I waited. Cameron frantically disposed of evidence. He and Janice separated briefly, then reunited, then separated for good.
Almost three months after my escape, Janice walked into a doctor’s office and told a receptionist everything. The receptionist encouraged her to go further, and Janice confessed to the local pastor as well. The pastor called the police. Detective Al Shamblin arrived at the church in November 1984 and heard the entire story.
Janice gave him a detailed account of everything, including the murder of a nineteen-year-old girl named Marie Elizabeth Spannhake, who had disappeared in 1976. According to Janice, Cameron had abducted Marie from Chico, California, and taken her to their home, where she suffered a similar ordeal. A day later, Cameron shot her in the abdomen with a pellet gun and strangled her to death. He wrapped her body in blankets and buried her in a shallow grave near Lassen Volcanic National Park.
Her remains were never found. Janice was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony. In the trailer, police found hooks mounted on the ceiling, restraints, and tools of torture. But the decisive evidence came when they discovered two rolls of undeveloped film hidden inside.
When developed by the FBI, they contained photographs of the torture sessions, the contract, and the assaults. The case against Cameron was airtight. On November 18, 1984, Cameron Hooker was arrested and charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, and related offenses. The trial began on September 24, 1985.
His defense argued that I had stayed voluntarily and that Janice had fabricated her story out of jealousy. At first, the jury was puzzled by my silence after my escape, and the defense used that to plant doubt. But the marks on my body and the photographs told the truth. On Halloween Day, 1985, the jury found Cameron guilty on ten felony counts, including kidnapping and sexual assault.
On November 22, he was sentenced to consecutive prison terms totaling 104 years. He was not charged with Marie’s murder because her body was never found. He was initially ineligible for parole until 2023, but his hearing was moved up to 2015 under California’s elderly parole program. The board denied his release, deeming him a serious risk to society.
His next hearing was scheduled for 2030, but due to pandemic-era legal adjustments, he was granted the possibility of parole in 2021. He was transferred to a state hospital for supervision and treatment. I rebuilt my life. I pursued an accounting degree, went through therapy, and had a few failed marriages before finding happiness with my husband, Glenn Ireland.
I volunteered at the Redding Women’s Refuge Center, helping women who had endured trauma like mine. Eventually, I became a registered associate social worker. In 2009, I published my memoir, The Simple Gifts of Life. I go to the beach every August 10th with my family to celebrate my escape and survival.
“Your life is kind of in limbo when you’re in captivity,” I once said. “Once you get that freedom back and you have that choice again, it’s just like the gates open and you just run for it. ”
Janice assumed a new identity and raised her two daughters in anonymity. Marie’s body was never recovered, and her case remains open.
Years later, a woman named Jody Foster moved into Marie’s old apartment in Chico and reported strange coldness and recurrent dreams about a couple abducting a girl. Her daughter claimed to have an invisible friend named Mylize, which was Marie’s nickname. Jody stayed for only a month. She later researched the case and found her dreams matched the facts of Marie’s disappearance almost perfectly.
I hope Marie’s spirit is at rest, and that one day her remains will be found so she can finally be laid to rest with dignity.
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