A 20-year-old experienced hitchhiker, Colleen Stan, let her guard down one time while seeking a ride from her home in Eugene, Oregon, to Westwood, California. What resulted was years of torture described as “unparalleled” in FBI history.
On May 19, 1977, Stan was preparing to hitchhike to attend a birthday party at a friend’s place in California. After declining two rides, she finally accepted one from a smiling young couple in a blue van. The decision seemed safe, since there was a baby and a 19-year-old woman, named Janice, in the vehicle, along with the 24-year-old driver named Cameron Hooker. However, it turned out to be a decision she’d pay heavily for the next seven years of her life.
When the vehicle stopped at a gas station along the way, Stan recalls an inner voice telling her “to run and jump out a window and never look back,” but she dismissed it as an irrational fear. Soon enough, her intuitions turned out to be true. Cameron pulled off the highway, got into the backseat, and held a knife to Stan’s throat, effectively kidnapping her.
The dark motive behind Stan’s kidnapping
As it turned out, the couple had been actively looking for a young woman to kidnap. Cameron, a lumber mill worker, had intense bondage fantasies and had been using his wife, Janice, to fulfill these fantasies until they captured Stan. The sadistic criminal then confined Stan’s head into a 20-pound “head box” and took her to a cellar in a mobile home.
What went down in the cellar then crossed all boundaries of emotional and physical torture for Stan. She was kept in a coffin-like wooden box underneath the couple’s bed for up to 23 hours a day, only ever being taken out to be sexually tortured by the hands of Cameron. Initially, the couple had an agreement that Cameron would never engage in sexual activity, but he later began raping her with equipment.
Stan was forced to sign a slavery contract in fear of a satanic organization
Even more than her torture, Stan was terrified of Cameron’s claim that he was a member of a powerful satanic organization called “The Company,” which he said was watching over her and would harm her family if she ever tried to escape. Taking advantage of her fears, the couple then forced her to sign herself into their slavery for life in Jan. 1978, and subsequently referred to her as slave K.
Ironically enough, Cameron started granting Stan some freedom as she began to comply with his orders. She was allowed to work in the garden, go for jogs, and even visit her family alone once in 1981. But her fear of The Company stopped her from saying anything to her family. She remained in the couple’s captivity for seven years from 1977 to 1984.
Stan’s escape and Cameron’s conviction
In 1984, Cameron expressed his wish to marry Stan and make her his second wife. This infuriated Janice, and she confessed to Stan that she had also been tortured and brainwashed. She also revealed to her that “The Company” does not exist and helped her to escape. However, she requested that she not report Cameron, believing that he could be rehabilitated.
Stan then phoned Hooker to inform him that she was leaving him and subsequently caught a bus home. Surprisingly enough, she never went to the police, and it was Janice who reported Cameron instead. She also revealed to the police that he had previously kidnapped, tortured, and murdered 19-year-old Marie Elizabeth Spannhake, who had disappeared on Jan. 31, 1976.
Cameron’s trial began in 1985, and Janice testified against him in exchange for full immunity. At the end, the monstrous man was sentenced to consecutive prison terms totaling 104 years for sexual assaults, kidnapping, and other crimes. Stan, on the other hand, is 68 years old and continues to reside in California with a changed name.
Published: Oct 16, 2025 04:35 pm