by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night
I put on the latest
Lifetime “world premiere” movie, Girl in the Box. This was based on the horrific true story of
Colleen Stan (Addison Timlin), which I’d read about previously in a true-crime
paperback, who in 1977 was hitchhiking her way from Eugene, Oregon (where she
lived in a difficult relationship with her mom and stepfather) to Westwood,
California. She got as far as Red Bluff, where after turning down a couple of
would-be pickups (one from a group of guys who were all too excited at seeing a
young woman alone — though given what happened to her afterwards being
gang-raped would have definitely been the lesser of two evils! — and one from a
couple who weren’t going far enough for her to want to bother with), she got in
a car with Cameron Hooker (Zane Holtz) and his wife Janice (Zelda Williams).
Lifetime showed this and then a documentary about the same case in which
Colleen Stan agreed to participate and revisit the scenes of her humiliation
and seven-year ordeal: the home in which the Hookers lived and in which she was
imprisoned in their basement and routinely suspended from a ceiling beam by her
wrists and beaten by Cameron; later the trailer they moved into when Cameron’s
landlord started to get suspicious and told them that for insurance purposes he
was going to have to enter their basement and inspect their furnace; and the
truly horrific contraption Cameron built for her after that, since the mobile
home didn’t have a basement. Instead he built her a box, barely big enough to
accommodate her, with an air pump to let in more-or-less fresh air and a bedpan
for when she needed to use the bathroom, but not only was there no room to move
in the box, it was kept bolted shut.
At one point the Hookers decided to take a
vacation to Lake Tahoe — and they just left Colleen in the box for four days,
without any food, until they returned. For the first few months or so Cameron
treated Colleen as little more than an animate sex doll — though ironically one
of the conditions Janice had set for helping Cameron kidnap Colleen was that he
could beat her, whip her, torture her and do all the S/M (actually something of
a misnomer because genuine S/M is carefully negotiated and consensual, with
strictly observed limits and “safe words” the bottom partner can use to get out
of a scene; psychopathic perverts like Cameron Hooker all too often use the
term “S/M” to describe what they’re doing — often defending themselves in court
by saying the things they were doing to their victims were consensual S/M — and
therefore give responsible S/M practitioners a bad name) he wanted to on her as
long as they didn’t actually
have sexual contact. Indeed, Janice had yielded to Cameron’s interest in
kidnapping a young woman as his S/M slave precisely because she didn’t want him
to whip and torture her. Not
surprisingly, in writer-director Stephen Kemp’s script, Janice becomes the most
morally conflicted character, joylessly participating in her husband’s crime
but in some ways as much of a victim of him as Colleen — and Zelda Williams
turns in a magnificent acting performance that brings home the dilemma, both of
how do you explain that a basically decent person would go along with her sicko
husband’s behavior and to what
extent she was culpable and to what extent she was a victim herself.
About nine
months into her ordeal Cameron presented Colleen with a printed-out slavery
contract — he clipped it from an S/M magazine and, though neither the feature
nor the documentary went into this, when she was interviewed for the true-crime
book from which I first heard of this case Colleen said that the fact that it was printed and came from a magazine added credibility
to the cock-and-bull tale Cameron told her to keep her from resisting or trying
to escape. Cameron told her that he was part of an international secret network
of slave owners called “The Company,” and that the Company’s agents were
everywhere so even if she tried to escape, they would catch her and subject her
to even worse tortures than the ones he was administering. He also said that if
she escaped “The Company” would go after her family and kill them — and by rattling off their names and addresses he
was able to convince her that the (fictitious) “Company” knew where they lived
and could track them down and kill them if she escaped. And as if that weren’t
enough, he told the tale of one Company slave who had escaped and gone to a police officer to tell her
story — not knowing, of course, that the policeman was himself a Company
member. And finally, Cameron told Colleen that his wife Janice was a Company
slave whom he had rescued and was protecting. Judging from the documentary (and
my memories of the book) Stephen Kemp told the story relatively factually,
though with some odd changes; he has a set of marvelously kinky scenes in which
Janice gives birth to a daughter (one of her justifications for going along
with Cameron’s kidnapping of Colleen was his promise that if she did so, he’d
have normal sex with her and thereby give her the child she’d long wanted)
while Colleen hears the sounds of her labor from the box under the Hookers’
waterbed, but in real life that was the Hookers’ second child and their first had already been born and
was eight months old and in the car when Colleen was kidnapped.
The film also
builds up tension over Colleen’s demands to be allowed to go home and see her
family, which in the movie happens shortly before she’s released but in reality
happened about four years into her captivity — and the fact that she returned
to Cameron after the visit (in which she introduced Cameron to her mom,
stepfather and two sisters as her fiancé — which he was, sort of, since in the
meantime Cameron had dug up the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar from the
Bible and used that as a justification to “marry” Colleen) became a key point
in Cameron’s defense when the police finally arrested him. Girl in the Box is one of those stories that’s so incredibly
compelling even glitches in the telling can’t sap it of its interest, and one
of the points it made (along with the earlier Cleveland Abduction, which was based on a more recent case) is how
sadomasochism has been democratized. The people for whom it’s named, the Baron
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, were European landed
aristocrats who didn’t have to worry about making a living and could therefore
indulge in whatever sexual games they wanted to, with partners willing or
unwilling; now, kidnapping people and holding them as sex slaves is something
people with surprisingly proletarian backgrounds — Ariel Castro, the perpetrator
of the Cleveland abductions, was a school bus driver (until he got fired), and
Cameron Hooker worked in a lumber yard (which gave him the experience handling
wood which he used to construct the big box, a smaller box which only
encompassed the victim’s head and gave her so little air she thought she was
going to choke to death, and the other ingenious gadgets he used to torture
her) — and limited budgets can do. At one point Colleen asks Cameron, “Why are
you doing this to me?,” and he replies, “Because I can.”
The biggest area in
which I give Stephen Kemp points is that he’s able to make all three principals
genuinely interesting characters rather than cardboard heroines or villains;
Janice comes off as part-perpetrator, part-victim; Cameron shows off a real
personal charm even though we hate him for his actions (one could see why a
woman would fall in love with him and go along willingly with at least some of
his demands, and the fact that he’s a nice person on the surface and a villain
only underneath makes him scarier than if he’d been played as a typical looney-tunes movie psychopath
with no superficially positive features); and Colleen comes off as a
sympathetic victim but also an almost terminally naïve one. In the documentary
she recalls that before she was taken to the Hookers’ home and locked in their
basement, they stopped off at a gas station and allowed her to use the restroom
— and she heard a voice saying, “Get out that window and leave now,” and was
haunted for the next seven years and four months by that voice and how her life
might have been different if she’d followed it. Later on she said her faith in
God sustained her throughout her ordeal — she’d sometimes steal Janice’s copy
of the Bible, and in the film Cameron is shown using that against her, citing
one of the Bible’s many passages justifying slavery and emphasizing the slave’s
duty to obey his or her master without question — but she’s shown not only as
naïve and not especially bright, but slowly forming at least some degree of romantic
affection for her captor. Indeed she showed so much romantic affection for her
captor (in one of the later scenes she’s shown with her head on his chest, just
like a normal couple!) that that became a major issue in her trial — even after
she was set free (not by Cameron but by Janice, who let her go and took her to
a bus stop either because she was genuinely horrified by the crime she’d been
party to, she was jealous of Cameron’s growing romantic interest in Colleen or
a combination of both) she continued to write Cameron letters and they
frequently contained the words, “I love you.”
This became a major issue in Cameron’s trial — he was prosecuted by
the one woman in the D.A.’s office in Santa Clara County (indeed, the county’s
one woman lawyer, period) and his defense was that, while maybe he had
kidnapped her originally (the initial kidnapping was outside the statute of
limitations and therefore Cameron couldn’t be prosecuted for it), ultimately
she fell in love with him and decided to stay with him voluntarily and endure
all his tortures as (you guessed it) consensual S/M. At least that was his
defense when he wasn’t pinning it all on Janice — who got complete immunity for
her testimony against him — and saying that Janice and Colleen had become Lesbian
lovers and cooked up a scheme to get rid of him by framing him. One of the cops
who worked on the case called Cameron a “pure psychopath,” which for once is
technically accurate — the general definition of a psychopath is someone who
regards other people as simply objects he or she can use however he or she
likes, without any account for their needs or feelings at all — to the point
where they can kill people and not feel a shred of guilt or remorse; they were
just in the way and s/he got rid of them. The film’s casting directors,
Stephanie Gorin and Laura Durant, also deserve kudos for finding three people
to play the principals who look strikingly like the real ones — though the
Colleen Stan we see in the documentary is the one that exists today, 61 years
old, a mother (of a daughter) and a grandmother (of a grandson), veteran of
three failed marriages (though one of those both began and ended before she was
taken captive) and still going through operations to try to fix the long-term
injuries done to her by Cameron’s tortures and the chronic pain they put her
through. She’s considerably heftier (but then that’s true of most of us who
reach this age; I too am much larger than I was 40 years ago!) and her
once-beautiful hair is stringy and hard to manage, and she’s also still oddly
naïve about what happened to her, going through the old locations of her
torture for the first time since she was set free and telling us she’s horrified and traumatized that she’s
reliving it all, while the expressions on her face and her overall affect are
virtually blank and matter-of-fact.
That, she says, was a survival skill she
developed while Cameron was holding her; aware that they had murdered a
previous captive because she’d screamed as Cameron was subduing and torturing
her — he’d threatened to cut out her vocal cords but hadn’t known how to do it,
so he killed her instead — she was determined not to scream, cry out or in any
other way piss Cameron off by expressing displeasure at what he was doing to
her. She carried this emotionless affect into Cameron’s trial and it was
difficult for the A.D.A. to overcome it and get the jury to believe not only
that these terrible things had happened to her but she’d been severely damaged
by them. While I think Emma Donoghue’s novel Room and the film made from it (scripted by Donoghue
herself and directed by Lenny Abrahamson) are the best works I’ve read and seen
about the situation of a woman held in slavery and sexually tortured by an
unscrupulous man — perhaps in part because as a fiction writer Donoghue was
able to pick and choose from among the various things that could happen to
people in that situation and thereby build an even more powerful and
real-seeming tale than possible in a story at least partially based on fact — Girl
in the Box is a quite good film,
occasionally oppressive in the fantasy sequences Kemp put in to emphasize
Colleen’s spirituality and its role in getting her through her ordeal (she never seems to have encountered what theologians call
the “theodicy” problem — i.e., why an all-knowing and all-loving God would have
let that horrible thing happen to her in the first place) but mostly well
directed, well written and beautifully acted.
