Kidnapping of Colleen Stan

• 1. Introduction

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  Colleen Stan was 20 years old on the 19th of May 1977, when she set out to hitchhike from her home in Eugene, Oregon. Her destination was Westwood, California, where a friend was holding a birthday party. Stan considered herself an experienced hitchhiker, and that day she turned down two rides before saying yes to a third. The third ride began along Interstate 5 near Red Bluff, California. It would keep her away from the outside world for more than seven years. How does a young woman stay captive for so long, with neighbors close by and a telephone in the house? What finally loosened the hold on her? And why would a courtroom describe her experience as unparalleled in FBI history? The answers begin with a driver who looked harmless and a car that seemed to have nothing to hide.

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• 2. The Blue Van

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  Stan later said she felt confident climbing into the blue van, because a woman and a baby were already inside. The woman was Janice Hooker, and her husband Cameron was driving. At a gas station along the way, Stan went to the restroom. She remembered hearing a voice that told her to run, jump out a window and never look back. She calmed her fears and returned to the car anyway. About 20 minutes into the drive, Cameron pulled off the highway. He said he wanted to look at some nearby caves. Janice got out with the baby and walked down to a lake, where the two played. Stan described what came next in her own words: "Cameron got into the back seat and held a knife to my throat. He tied me up and placed a box over my head." She was then locked inside a wooden headbox, built to keep out light, sound and fresh air. It was the first of several wooden boxes that would define the years ahead.

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• 3. The Agreement

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  Cameron Hooker worked at the Diamond International Lumber Mill, and the kidnapping was not a sudden impulse. Before it happened, he and Janice had struck a bargain. Until then, Cameron had used Janice to act out sexual bondage. Now he would capture a slave to take her place, and Janice agreed. One condition went with the deal: there was to be no penetrative sex with the captive. The first night showed how little the captive's welfare counted. Stan was strung up by her hands and attacked by Cameron. She was left blindfolded and suspended while the couple had sex beneath her. The condition about sex did not hold for long, and it later changed.

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• 4. The Company

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  In January 1978, after months of torture and nearly constant confinement in a box, Stan was handed a contract. She was forced to sign herself into slavery for life. Before that, she said, she spent 23 hours of every day locked in the box. From where she lay, she could see a photograph of another young woman propped against her purse under the bed. That woman, she would learn, was a previous victim whose body was never found. Cameron also gave Stan a fear to carry. He led her to believe that a large, powerful organization called "The Company" was watching her, and that it would painfully torture her and harm her family if she ran. Stan became a slave known only as "K." She had to call Cameron "Master" and could not speak without permission. The family moved to a mobile home in Red Bluff, where Stan was kept in wooden boxes under the couple's water bed. In 1978, Janice gave birth to a second child on that bed, directly above her. Stan said her faith in God and her belief in a chance of escape helped her survive. Her greatest fear, "reinforced" by Cameron daily, was The Company. She tried to obey his commandments to avoid punishment, and that obedience slowly changed what her days looked like.

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• 5. Open Doors

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  Obedience earned Stan small freedoms. She was allowed to jog, to work in the yard and to look after the family's children in the mobile home. She even helped Cameron build bigger accommodations, including an underground dungeon meant for more slaves. Yet she never ran. According to Stan, she made no attempt to escape even with an open door, neighbors nearby and a telephone available, because fear of The Company kept her from asking for help. In 1981, she was allowed to visit her family on her own, and she told them nothing. Her family thought she had joined a cult, judging by her homemade clothes, her lack of money and years without contact. They chose not to pressure her, fearing she would stay away for good. The next day Stan came back for a second visit, with Cameron posing as her boyfriend. Stan explained at trial that she was happy to see her family, so they took a photograph of her and Cameron smiling together. Cameron then worried that he had given his slave too much freedom. He took her back to the mobile home and locked her in the wooden box under his water bed. She stayed there 23 hours a day for the next three years. She used a bed pan, which she had to position with her feet, and she ate scraps. Cameron's children were told that "K" had gone home.

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• 6. Janice Turns

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  In 1983, Stan was brought back into view. She was reintroduced to the children and the neighbors, and she took a job as a maid at a motel. Then Cameron said he wanted Stan to become his second wife, and that proposal was a turning point for Janice. Janice confessed that Cameron had tortured and brainwashed her too, starting from their first date, and that he had called her a "whore" over the years. She said she had survived the relationship through denial and compartmentalization. By August 1984, Janice was struggling with herself. She went to Stan and told her that Cameron was not part of The Company, though she insisted the organization was real. In a televised interview for Girl in the Box, Stan said she went to a bus station and phoned Cameron to say she was leaving. He burst into tears. Stan then caught a bus home. Over the following months she did not go to the police. She kept phoning Cameron regularly, and at trial she said she was giving him a chance to reform, at Janice's request. Three months after Stan left, Janice reported her husband to the police. She told Lt. Jerry Brown of the Red Bluff Police that Cameron had earlier kidnapped and murdered a 19-year-old named Marie Elizabeth Spannhake. Spannhake had disappeared from Chico, California, on the 31st of January 1976, while walking home. Janice said the couple had picked her up and driven her to their house. She was held in the basement and tortured for a day before Cameron killed her. The couple wrapped her body in blankets and buried it in a shallow grave near Lassen Volcanic National Park. Authorities could not locate any remains, and without physical proof, no murder charge was brought.

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• 7. Trial and Aftermath

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  At the start of the 1985 trial, Chris Hatcher, a forensic psychologist and criminal profiler, testified for the prosecution. Janice testified against her husband in exchange for full immunity. The court sentenced Cameron to consecutive terms totaling 104 years, for sexual assaults, kidnapping and using a knife. Stan went on to study for an accounting degree. Mara Bovsun wrote in the New York Daily News on the 9th of March 2014 that Stan "tried to move on to a normal life, but misery followed her, a string of failed marriages and a troubled child, now in jail." Stan also became a volunteer at the Redding Women's Refuge Center, which helps abused women, and she changed her last name. Janice went back to her maiden name, Lashley, and became a registered associate social worker. She has worked as a mental health professional. Both women still live in California. Cameron was originally ineligible for parole until 2023. California's Elderly Parole Program moved his hearing up seven years, to 2015, and on the 16th of April 2015 his request was denied. His next hearing would come in 2030. In 2020, California officials told Stan they were considering parole for Cameron in March 2021. The president of the Tehama County Deputy Sheriff's Association speculated that the COVID-19 pandemic was the reason. Later reports clarified that Cameron was eligible because he had accumulated good credit in prison. After a hearing, a trial was ordered to decide whether he is a Sexually Violent Predator. If so, he would be sent to a mental facility indefinitely and would be ineligible for parole. The trial was delayed numerous times. Jury selection began in mid-May 2026, and the trial was expected to last about four weeks.

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• 8. Echoes in Culture

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  The 2007 documentary-style horror film The Poughkeepsie Tapes built its main plot on Stan's case. On the 10th of September 2016, Lifetime premiered a television movie called Girl in the Box. Addison Timlin played Colleen, Zane Holtz played Cameron and Zelda Williams played Janice. A two-hour documentary, Colleen Stan: Girl in the Box, followed the movie. In print, prosecutor Christine McGuire and Carla Norton wrote Perfect Victim: The True Story of the Girl in the Box, published in 1989. Kathy Reichs refers to the case in her 2004 novel Monday Mourning. Jim Green published an updated account in 2009, titled Colleen Stan, The Simple Gifts of Life. Musicians took up the story too. The band Blake Babies released "Girl in a Box" in 1990. Hole's 1993 song "Jennifer's Body" is speculated to draw on Stan's experience, mostly because of the lines "He cuts you down from the tree / He keeps you in a box by the bed." In 1996, Elysian Fields put "Jack in the Box" on their debut album, Bleed Your Cedar, with lyrics about the box under the bed. The case even named a Texas experimental noise group, Black Leather Jesus, led by Richard Ramirez. In 2012, composers Patrik Jarlestam and Jonas Bernander premiered a short opera in Stockholm called Den 4444:e dagen, or The 4444th day. Television borrowed the case's core elements: an invisible conspiracy used to coerce a victim, and long confinement. Those elements shaped episodes of Criminal Minds ("The Company," season seven), Ghost Whisperer ("Ball & Chain," season four) and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit ("Slaves," season one). Investigation Discovery profiled the case in a 2008 Wicked Attraction episode called "Kidnapped." The 2012 Paranormal Witness episode "The Apartment" told the story of Marie Spannhake's disappearance and briefly mentions Stan. Waking the Dead mentioned the case in passing in the season four episode "Fugue States." Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries profiled it as well. On the 17th of July 2021, Stan told the story in her own voice, in an episode of Snapped: Notorious.

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