Latest / True Crime California / TCC #12 Colleen Stan, The Girl in the Box

Transcript

TCC #12 Colleen Stan, The Girl in the Box · True Crime California

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Dark Cast Network. Out of the shadows come the best
• 0:07
  indie podcasts. Hey everyone, welcome to True Crime California. I'm
• 0:17
  your host, Cindy, and I'm glad you're here. Hey, everybody,
• 0:30
  welcome back to another episode of True Crime California. I
• 0:36
  am your host, Cindy, and uh yeah, I just wanted
• 0:40
  to call out that on last week's episode, you could
• 0:43
  totally hear my dog snoring for a good portion of
• 0:48
  the episode, and I'm so sorry about that. I had
• 0:51
  no idea. He was right next to me, but he
• 0:54
  was like under the covers and I could barely hear him.
• 0:57
  But this microphone absolutely picked him up well louder than
• 1:02
  I would have ever imagined. So if you hear like
• 1:04
  a slight little snoring, that is a twenty pound pug
• 1:09
  that obviously has a little bit of trouble breathing. So
• 1:12
  I apologize for the background noise. That's what you get
• 1:16
  when you listen to any podcasts. Were very we keep
• 1:19
  it very, very real. So I just want to call
• 1:21
  that out because I thought that was really funny. When
• 1:22
  I listened back, I was like, oh shit, but it
• 1:24
  was such a big part of the episode that I
• 1:27
  couldn't go back and re record it. And also I
• 1:30
  didn't really hear it until I listened like on Spotify.
• 1:33
  So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed or weren't too
• 1:37
  concerned as to what the hell was going on, but yeah,
• 1:41
  every yeah, I saw it was funny. Anyway, week's been
• 1:44
  kind of boring for me, still getting over being sick,
• 1:46
  which is insane. But I think I'm just gonna jump
• 1:50
  into this new episode. I am doing another doozy. I'm
• 1:53
  trying to go back and forth with like a shorter
• 1:56
  tail a longer tail, mixing it up. And this week
• 2:00
  I am doing the story of the Girl in the Box. Now,
• 2:05
  this is not a story of murder. It's a survival story.
• 2:10
  And sometimes I feel like survival stories are the worst
• 2:13
  ones because you get to hear all the details because
• 2:18
  the person who suffered all of these things remembers them.
• 2:23
  And I'm glad for any time that somebody survives, obviously,
• 2:26
  but it really, you know, it's hard when you know
• 2:32
  that somebody is walking around living their life having dealt
• 2:35
  with what they dealt with. So this is gonna be
• 2:38
  a pretty gnarly one. I tried to put in good
• 2:41
  detail without going so granular that we're here for three episodes.
• 2:45
  Hopefully this mix works and for those of you who
• 2:48
  know the case, I hope you enjoy my version of it.
• 2:50
  For those of you who don't know the case, sit tight,
• 2:53
  hold on, hold on to your butts. What movie is
• 2:56
  that from? Anyway, here we go. This story actually begins
• 3:01
  in Eugene, Oregon, which is another place I used to live,
• 3:04
  so I love that tie in. Colleen stan was born
• 3:08
  on New Year's Eve in nineteen fifty six, but raised
• 3:11
  at least in part in southern California. Her parents divorced
• 3:15
  when she was pretty young, and she ended up with
• 3:17
  a few half siblings as a result, as well as
• 3:19
  I believe two full blooded sisters. She was close with
• 3:23
  both parents, but seemingly a bit closer to her dad.
• 3:27
  Colleen lived a fairly tough life, though she was a
• 3:29
  very nice person. She had a really loving family, but
• 3:34
  I don't think they had a lot of money, and
• 3:35
  I think they were very working class. So Colleen maybe
• 3:39
  didn't have as much direction in her life, and so
• 3:43
  at a fairly young age she got into drugs. Not
• 3:47
  anything crazy, but she definitely had a little bit of
• 3:49
  a past there, and by the time she was sixteen.
• 3:52
  She was already married and divorced when she turned twenty,
• 3:57
  so to kind of protect the privacy of her family.
• 4:00
  And I think you can find, pardon me, her true
• 4:04
  maiden name, but most reports refer to her as Colleen
• 4:07
  Martin and that her family are the Martin family. That's
• 4:10
  not actually their true last name, but it's what most
• 4:13
  people go with. So the last name Stan was actually
• 4:16
  her first husband's last name, so even though she was divorced,
• 4:20
  she kept his last name. She was known as Colleen Stan.
• 4:25
  So after getting divorced, I think she's a little aimless,
• 4:28
  not really sure what to do. But when she was
• 4:30
  nineteen or twenty, she met a couple named Alice and Bob,
• 4:34
  and they had a young child, and they were going
• 4:36
  to move up to Eugene or move back to Eugene,
• 4:39
  and she decided to move with them. After the move,
• 4:43
  she was left, you know, a little aimless. Again, the
• 4:45
  job market wasn't great, so she was kind of struggling.
• 4:48
  I believe she did have a boyfriend and like a
• 4:50
  pretty good life, but just very kind of not a
• 4:54
  lot going on. In May of nineteen seventy seven, Colleen
• 4:58
  decided to go surprise her friend for her birthday. This friend, Linda,
• 5:04
  lived in Westwood, a tiny town in northern California. It's
• 5:07
  not in a town, it's like a designated area. It's
• 5:10
  about one hundred miles east of Red Bluff, which is
• 5:14
  about an hour north of Sacramento. So she's really like
• 5:19
  Westwood is like really just kind of out in the
• 5:21
  middle of nowhere. It's like no services, you know, no
• 5:25
  cel Like there weren't cell phones back then, but you know,
• 5:28
  even now, I doubt there's like cell service out there.
• 5:31
  You know, very very isolated, very desolate, very you know,
• 5:36
  mountain people kind of living. So she had a car,
• 5:41
  but it wasn't in any condition to drive her out
• 5:43
  of state, so she decided instead to hitchhike, which was
• 5:47
  very common at the time. Her roommates did not love
• 5:52
  this plan, but eventually agreed to drive her to the freeway,
• 5:55
  where she quickly got a few rides that brought her
• 5:58
  within about one hundred miles of her day destination. So
• 6:01
  she basically just went down the five Freeway and ended
• 6:04
  up right in Red Bluff, California. Now, while she was
• 6:08
  in Red Bluff, she turned down a couple of rides,
• 6:10
  one was from like a really creepy guy, and one
• 6:13
  was a car full of hippies that were all men,
• 6:16
  which made her nervous because she was like, I can't
• 6:18
  get into a car with a bunch of dudes, Like
• 6:20
  that's dangerous. Finally, a couple in a blue Dodge Colt
• 6:24
  stopped and this couple was a man and a woman
• 6:26
  with a small child, like maybe right around a year old.
• 6:31
  This put Colleen at ease because, like, you know, there's
• 6:34
  a mother and a baby in the car. What's the
• 6:35
  worst that could happen? And she decided to get in
• 6:38
  the back of the car. Now, while in the car,
• 6:40
  she noticed there was a wooden box about the size
• 6:42
  of like a milk crate on the seat next to her.
• 6:45
  She didn't pay a lot of attention to it. It's
• 6:46
  not really her business, mostly because you know, it's just
• 6:49
  who cares it's a box in a car? Like why
• 6:51
  would she think anything of it? But the other reason
• 6:54
  that she was sort of distracted was that she kept
• 6:56
  noticing the driver of the car looking back at her
• 6:58
  in the rear view mirror. Now, this unnerved her a bit,
• 7:02
  but not enough that she wanted to get out of
• 7:03
  the car and besides, you know, she was really close
• 7:06
  to her destination and they were, you know, they were
• 7:08
  gonna get there in like an hour or two. So
• 7:11
  she was just like stoked. She was like, I'm almost there,
• 7:13
  Like it's worth it. I'll just sit tight, like what's
• 7:16
  the worst that could happen? Famous last words. Now. At
• 7:19
  one point, they all stopped for gas and Colleen went
• 7:22
  in to use the restroom. She later said that she
• 7:24
  had a feeling of fear come over her, and a
• 7:27
  voice in her head told her to run for her life.
• 7:30
  She even thought about climbing out of the tiny window
• 7:32
  in the bathroom so she could disappear without being seen.
• 7:35
  But for whatever reason, she shook this feeling off and
• 7:38
  got back in the car with the couple and their baby.
• 7:42
  This was a mistake that would change the course of
• 7:45
  her life forever. As they drove on, the man who
• 7:51
  was driving began asking Colleen questions. Did she have a boyfriend?
• 7:55
  Where was she going? Was she expected? Colleen answered mostly truthfully,
• 8:00
  which was, in my opinion, another mistake. She even told
• 8:03
  them that her friend she was going to visit was
• 8:06
  not expecting her and didn't have a phone, so she
• 8:09
  couldn't call or be called, so even if her friend
• 8:12
  was expecting her, it would have taken a while for
• 8:14
  her to alert Colleen's family of anything being wrong. But
• 8:17
  the fact that she didn't even know Colleen was coming
• 8:19
  meant there were going to be multiple days before anybody
• 8:22
  realized anything. Now, before she left, Colleen did tell her
• 8:25
  roommates and boyfriend that she would be back on Saturday.
• 8:28
  She left on a Thursday, so she was really trying
• 8:30
  to just do a quick turnaround trip one day with
• 8:33
  her friend and come back. But with no way to
• 8:35
  check in with this friend, Linda, again, her disappearance would
• 8:38
  go unnoticed a bit longer than most. As they continued
• 8:41
  to drive, the man made a suggestion to stop and
• 8:43
  see some caves in the area. He asked Colleen if
• 8:46
  she would mind, and though she kind of did mind,
• 8:48
  she didn't want to be difficult, so she agreed to
• 8:51
  stop and at least let them get out and look.
• 8:54
  Shortly thereafter, the car pulled over near some woods and
• 8:56
  a creek, but seemingly not near any caves, which red
• 9:00
  flag and the couple got out of the car. Now
• 9:03
  Colin waited inside, and after a minute, the woman and
• 9:05
  baby disappeared into the woods, seemingly down by the creek.
• 9:09
  Coline was still kind of craning her neck to see
• 9:11
  where they went from the back seat, when suddenly the
• 9:14
  man jumped into the back seat with her and pressed
• 9:16
  a knife to her throat. He ordered Colleen to put
• 9:20
  her hands above her head, and when she hesitated, he
• 9:24
  pressed the knife harder against her throat. She did as
• 9:27
  she was told, and the man quickly put handcuffs on
• 9:30
  her after pulling her hands behind her back. He then
• 9:34
  blindfolded and gagged her, tied her ankles, and then in
• 9:39
  a horrifying move, he placed that wooden box that had
• 9:43
  been in the back seat onto her head. The box
• 9:47
  had a hole in the bottom, and when it opened,
• 9:49
  the hole split into two semicircles, so it basically hinged
• 9:52
  open and then hinged back shut onto her head and
• 9:56
  was locked with a metal lock. Now, when this box
• 9:59
  was closed, it was super tight and pinched her neck
• 10:03
  and made her feel like she couldn't breathe. This box
• 10:06
  also weighed about twenty pounds and was insulated and carpeted,
• 10:11
  which is really weird and also very disgusting. So, like
• 10:14
  I said, she was gagged, blindfolded, tied up, with this
• 10:18
  box on her head so tight that she thought she
• 10:20
  might suffocate. She was also in the pitch black the
• 10:25
  claustrophobia she must have felt like, I cannot even imagine.
• 10:28
  The man then made her lie down in the back
• 10:30
  seat and put her sleeping bag, which she had brought
• 10:33
  with her, over her body. Though the box was mostly soundproofed,
• 10:36
  she could still hear a little bit, and she heard
• 10:38
  the woman and baby get back into the car. They
• 10:41
  then started driving, though Colleen had no idea where they
• 10:44
  were going. Eventually she was able to hear other cars,
• 10:48
  meaning they were heading back into the city, likely Red
• 10:51
  Bluff or at least some city. At one point during
• 10:54
  the drive, she felt something heavy on her body and
• 10:57
  quickly realized it was the baby. They straight up put
• 11:01
  their baby on top of her, as if she was furniture.
• 11:05
  The baby began to cry, so they moved her off
• 11:08
  of Colleen and continued driving. It so fucking weird. Collein
• 11:11
  was sweating profusely this entire time. In May and northern California,
• 11:16
  it's pretty hot, and she had this insulated box on
• 11:18
  her head and a sleeping bag over her entire head
• 11:20
  and body. So she's just extremely uncomfortable, terrified. It's just horrifying.
• 11:27
  After what felt like hours, Colleen heard the car stop
• 11:32
  and heard the woman get out. A few minutes later,
• 11:35
  the woman came back and Colleen could smell food and
• 11:38
  realized the couple were sitting in their car eating burgers
• 11:42
  and fries. Which is it just feels psychotic to like
• 11:49
  have somebody in the back of your car with a
• 11:51
  box on their head, bound and gagged, and you're just
• 11:54
  having some fast food. It's so twisted. What the couple
• 11:59
  was doing was killing time, waiting for nightfall so that
• 12:02
  they could take Colleen out of the car and into
• 12:04
  their home at eleven forty Oak Street in Red Bluff. Now,
• 12:09
  I want to take a moment here to sidebar. I
• 12:12
  used to drive from Bend, Oregon, down to Los Angeles
• 12:16
  a few times a month actually for a while for work.
• 12:20
  And one time I brought my family with and we
• 12:23
  decided to stay the night somewhere so we didn't have
• 12:25
  to do like the eighteen hour drive all in one stretch.
• 12:27
  I guess it's like closer to twelve hours, but in
• 12:29
  any case, we decided to stay the night and we
• 12:32
  stayed in Red Bluff, and I knew about this case,
• 12:35
  so I looked up the address where it took place,
• 12:38
  and I went to see the house. And this house
• 12:41
  is so nondescript that people living there now have young children,
• 12:45
  which I guess is the same as this couple. There
• 12:47
  were like bicycles in the yard. It's a really cute house.
• 12:51
  You can definitely tell that there's a basement, which I'll
• 12:53
  talk about, But it's really weird because it's like a
• 12:56
  pretty modest house, and right next to it is like
• 12:59
  an old Victorian home that was like really beautiful, And
• 13:03
  anybody who knows me knows that, like I'm a thrift
• 13:05
  store and garage sale freak, and there happened to be
• 13:09
  a garage sale going on at the house next door,
• 13:12
  so I stopped and I ended up buying a Budweiser
• 13:15
  bowling ball from the eighties from this neighbor. And this
• 13:19
  neighbor they had told me that they lived in the neighborhood.
• 13:22
  It was like their parents' house. So these people almost
• 13:25
  for sure lived next to this couple while Colleen stan
• 13:30
  was their kidnap victim, hostage and as we'll see, slave.
• 13:35
  So I just wanted to call that out because it
• 13:37
  was such a crazy experience for me, and also kind
• 13:40
  of funny that I bought a bowling ball to commemorate
• 13:42
  the occasion. Yeah, anyway, so I just wanted to kind
• 13:46
  of call that out. So now they're at the house
• 13:50
  and the man unties Colleen's feet so that she can walk,
• 13:53
  and also removes the head box, but everything else stays
• 13:56
  in place, so she still gagged, blindfolded, and her hands
• 13:59
  are handcuffed behind her back. She's led down to the
• 14:02
  basement and the woman and baby go upstairs, but the
• 14:06
  man comes down with her, so she's now alone with him.
• 14:09
  This man first handcuffs her to a pipe, then undresses her,
• 14:13
  and then puts her hands into these like kind of
• 14:15
  stiff homemade leather cuffs, which he then hooks to the ceiling.
• 14:21
  Colleen was made to stand on what she later found
• 14:24
  out was an ice chest and was spread with her
• 14:27
  arms almost like in a in a y shape, almost
• 14:29
  like if she was on a crucifix. So her arms
• 14:32
  are up above her head to the sides. Pardon me,
• 14:36
  and she's standing on an ice chest. The man then
• 14:40
  kicked the ice chest out from under her feet. Colleen,
• 14:44
  still blindfolded and gagged, felt immediate intense pain in her
• 14:49
  wrists and shoulders, I mean searing, horrifying pain. So she
• 14:55
  began to struggle and kick and look for anything to
• 14:57
  put under her feet. Suddenly, the pain in her arms
• 15:01
  was accompanied by a searing pain across first her back
• 15:05
  and then her stomach as the man whipped her with
• 15:08
  a leather whip while telling her to stop moving and
• 15:11
  be still, and he sounded murderous. He was like, you stop,
• 15:16
  or I will never stop whipping you like he was relentless. Finally,
• 15:23
  somehow she is able to force herself to stop moving
• 15:28
  despite the horrific pain that she's in. She is able
• 15:32
  to just somehow calm her body and stop moving, and
• 15:37
  eventually he put the chest back under her feet. Now,
• 15:41
  to be clear, this type of hanging can suffocate you
• 15:44
  if you're left too long, and I think this man
• 15:47
  knew that and so he would always time it. So
• 15:50
  it was maximum pain, maximum suffering, but never causing death
• 15:55
  or even loss of consciousness I think due to hanging,
• 15:57
  although I do know that she lost consciousness from time
• 16:01
  to time, but maybe not from the hanging, probably from
• 16:04
  the pain. Because this is fucking horrific. The man then
• 16:08
  left Colleen alone sobbing silently into her blindfold and still
• 16:12
  with her arms over her head, and the man went upstairs.
• 16:16
  Before long, he was back with the woman, and Colleen
• 16:19
  could see through the bottom of her blindfold. She could
• 16:22
  barely see out of it, and she saw them doing
• 16:27
  something extremely disturbing. The two laid down on the ground
• 16:32
  at her feet on the floor of the basement and
• 16:36
  had sex while she remained strung up, naked and helpless.
• 16:41
  Once they were done, the woman went back upstairs and
• 16:43
  the man took Colleen down. He then put her into
• 16:46
  a box that was roughly roughly square and about three
• 16:50
  feet tall. It did have one opening on it so
• 16:53
  that he could access her, but it was otherwise enclosed
• 16:58
  and she was made to sit in there and uh,
• 17:01
  I'll explain in a second. So he removed her gag,
• 17:04
  and the moment she could speak, she began begging him
• 17:07
  to let her go. Unfortunately, this was cut short by
• 17:10
  him putting what she later learned was called the head
• 17:13
  box back on her head and snapping it shut. He
• 17:16
  then chained it and her hands to the top of
• 17:19
  the box, so she was forced to sit up with
• 17:21
  her hands above her head with this suffocating box on
• 17:24
  her head as well. The man then left her in
• 17:26
  the box, and Colleen, of course, began to panic. Her
• 17:30
  breathing was extremely labored, and she felt that she would
• 17:33
  certainly die if someone didn't help her and if she
• 17:36
  didn't get air. As a result, she began thrashing around
• 17:39
  the box, and finally, after what felt like forever, the
• 17:42
  man came back down. He angrily asked her what the
• 17:45
  problem was, and she said she couldn't breathe and it
• 17:48
  hurt so much to have her hands over her head.
• 17:51
  She begged him to let her take her hands down.
• 17:55
  In response, this horrible, horrible man not only did not
• 17:59
  remove the box, he instead decided to increase her pain
• 18:03
  and suffering by tying a strap around her ribs to
• 18:05
  the point where she felt they would break. It further
• 18:09
  restricted her breathing. So she's telling him I think I'm
• 18:12
  gonna die. I can't breathe, and he puts this around
• 18:16
  her to make it even harder. He then shut the
• 18:20
  box back up and left her for the night. So
• 18:25
  let's talk about this piece of shit. Cameron Hooker was
• 18:30
  nineteen years old when he met a very shy, fifteen
• 18:33
  year old girl named Janice. Cameron was born and raised
• 18:37
  in Red Bluff and had been a very uninteresting person
• 18:40
  in high school. He wasn't good at sports, didn't have
• 18:43
  great grades, and definitely was not very good looking. Basically,
• 18:47
  he was just a social outcast, but nobody ever said
• 18:50
  anything weird about him. He seemed like a perfectly normal person,
• 18:53
  just completely uninteresting and sort of a wallflower. He graduated,
• 19:00
  he went to work at the nearby mill, which was
• 19:02
  the biggest employer in Red Bluff, and while working at
• 19:05
  the mill, he was introduced to Janice, who was still
• 19:08
  in junior high. Mind you, the two began dating and
• 19:12
  Janie fell head over heels in love. She was essentially
• 19:16
  him as a girl, unremarkable, unimportant, unnoticed by most, so
• 19:20
  when Cameron at first lavished her with attention, it became
• 19:23
  like a drug to her, which is probably why when
• 19:26
  Cameron eventually asked her to engage in bondage with him,
• 19:30
  she agreed, even though she really didn't want to. Cameron would.
• 19:35
  He started slow, but eventually he was hanging her from trees,
• 19:41
  tying her up, hurting and scaring her. But she always
• 19:45
  allowed it because she loved him and because he would
• 19:47
  be so tender with her. Once he was done. So
• 19:50
  this went on for about a year and finally the
• 19:54
  two were married, and after that the abuse only escalated,
• 19:58
  though never as a result of anger. You see, Cameron
• 20:02
  had always been into bondage, even in high school. He
• 20:05
  would buy and obsess over bondage magazines and would replicate
• 20:08
  what he saw in them with jan After a while,
• 20:12
  Cameron seemed to grow bored of having sex with Janis
• 20:14
  in this way and began asking if she'd be open
• 20:17
  to bringing in another woman. Now, jan really did not
• 20:21
  want to do this, but she was so in love
• 20:24
  with and now somewhat afraid of Cameron, and she also
• 20:28
  didn't want to be in this pain anymore. It was unbearable,
• 20:32
  hanging by her wrists, being hit with the whip like
• 20:36
  she knew that it wasn't in anger, but it didn't matter,
• 20:40
  like it was abuse, and she didn't love it. So
• 20:43
  Cameron wanting to bring in another woman was not in
• 20:46
  the traditional sense of like, you know, a thrupple, what
• 20:49
  we call thrupple. Now, Cameron told her that he wanted
• 20:52
  a slave, and in fact a sex slave, someone who
• 20:56
  couldn't say no, someone who had no choice but to
• 20:59
  give in to all of his fantasies. At first, Janie
• 21:02
  like I said very against this that as she thought
• 21:05
  about it more, she realized it would take a lot
• 21:06
  of the abuse off of her and also she could
• 21:09
  use his request as a bargaining chip. Finally, Jane agreed,
• 21:14
  but only if Cameron would let her have a baby,
• 21:18
  because this is a great situation to bring a child into, right, Like,
• 21:21
  let's get a slave and a baby. So at this
• 21:24
  point she's either seventeen or maybe eighteen, so still very young,
• 21:28
  but even so, like talk about making bad decisions, right,
• 21:32
  Janie pretty quickly became pregnant, and meanwhile, Cameron set about
• 21:36
  preparing for his slave. He built out the aforementioned boxes,
• 21:40
  shored up the basement, and basically just got ready for
• 21:43
  an attack. But it kept not happening. He kept trying
• 21:47
  to find someone and it kept not working out. Janice
• 21:51
  gave birth, and still Cameron had not been able to
• 21:53
  find the slave. He even stalked a few women, but
• 21:56
  to no avail. Finally, on May seventeen, nineteen seventy seven,
• 22:01
  he met Colleen stan and he and jan put the
• 22:04
  plan into place. And that brings us back to Colleen
• 22:08
  in the box. Now she wasn't always in the box
• 22:12
  at first. In fact, she was most often left hanging
• 22:15
  on the wall, standing on the ice chest, so not
• 22:17
  like fully hanging still blindfolded and gagged and her head
• 22:21
  still in the box. And this would happen for about
• 22:24
  twenty three hours a day. The only time she was
• 22:27
  freed was after the Hooker family had had dinner and
• 22:30
  Cameron came down to attack her. He would beat her,
• 22:33
  whip her, otherwise abuse her, and then eventually feed her
• 22:37
  some meager scraps. She was given one meal per day,
• 22:42
  usually leftovers from the family dinner and water and nothing else.
• 22:47
  Now she was about I think five six and maybe
• 22:50
  one hundred and thirty five pounds, and eventually she got
• 22:53
  down to under one hundred pounds at one point living
• 22:56
  with this family, so that I mean she was really
• 22:59
  on like a starvation diet. She was not given enough food,
• 23:03
  enough nutrition. Colleen always had really beautiful thick hair, it
• 23:08
  ended up becoming thin and dull. Her skin was sallow,
• 23:12
  I mean, she just looked terrible. In addition to this,
• 23:17
  she was left with no access to a bathroom and
• 23:19
  would often soil herself, which angered Cameron, who would punish
• 23:23
  her with whippings and beatings. She still had no idea
• 23:27
  who these people were. But after a few weeks her
• 23:29
  situation did improve slightly as she was allowed to sleep
• 23:33
  in the box without the head box on. So she
• 23:36
  was then allowed to sleep in a three foot by
• 23:40
  three foot by three foot a three foot cube essentially,
• 23:44
  but she didn't have the headbox on, so at least
• 23:46
  there was that, and she wasn't hanging on the wall
• 23:48
  the whole time. She was still beaten, hung and I
• 23:52
  hadn't mentioned this yet, but she was also photographed extensively
• 23:54
  while in these situations, but at night she had her
• 23:58
  sleeping bag in this tiny box could actually sleep some.
• 24:02
  In fact, she now spent most of her time in
• 24:04
  this box, only coming out for food and abuse, but
• 24:08
  it was far far better than being strung up all
• 24:10
  day every day. She was still blindfolded and hadn't had
• 24:14
  use of her eyes besides to peer out of the
• 24:16
  tiny slit in the blindfold for weeks and weeks, but again,
• 24:21
  at least the head box was gone now. Colleen stopped
• 24:24
  having her period at this time because she lost so
• 24:27
  much weight, and she also had not showered since being
• 24:32
  being taken. She was in this captivity, living like this
• 24:37
  for three months before she was finally allowed to bathe,
• 24:42
  but even this turned into a form of torture by
• 24:45
  her captor. When she finally was given the opportunity to bathe,
• 24:50
  she was taken up to the bathroom blindfold still on,
• 24:53
  and Cameron, without warning, shoved her face under the water
• 24:58
  and held it there until she nearly died. When he
• 25:03
  removed her face, she gasped for air and felt pain
• 25:07
  in her lungs, probably because she had sucked in water.
• 25:11
  He then dunked her in a similar way multiple times
• 25:15
  before actually allowing her to bathe. This was just another
• 25:19
  form of torture and his way of reinforcing that he
• 25:21
  was in charge and that the only reason she was
• 25:24
  even getting to bathe was because he allowed her to
• 25:27
  and he could kill her anytime he wanted. Even after
• 25:32
  the shower, her hair was too maddened to brush out,
• 25:35
  so Jan cut over six inches off, leaving her formerly
• 25:39
  thick waist length hair just above her shoulders. She had
• 25:43
  also poured cooking oil into it to try to get
• 25:46
  the mats out, that's how bad it was, and that
• 25:49
  did not work. So now she has her hair's chopped
• 25:52
  off it's full of oil. It's just a disgusting situation. Now,
• 25:57
  this went on for months, living blindfolded in the box,
• 26:00
  no clue who her captors were tortured daily, barely fed.
• 26:05
  But I do want to note to this point she
• 26:08
  had not been actually raped, not yet anyway. Now, finally,
• 26:13
  after about six months, Cameron decided that he wanted to
• 26:16
  put Colleen to work. And this is the first time
• 26:20
  her blindfold was removed since she was taken. She lived
• 26:24
  with a blindfold on for six months straight. Whatever the reason,
• 26:29
  Cameron decided to give her her site back. She was
• 26:32
  ecstatic her first job, so she was basically he decided
• 26:37
  he's gonna let her see again because he wants to
• 26:39
  put her to work. That being said, her very first
• 26:42
  job she still wasn't able to see. She was to
• 26:46
  sand down a piece of wood that Cameron was going
• 26:48
  to fashion into either a carving or a tool, which
• 26:51
  he was then going to sell for extra money. This
• 26:54
  she actually did with another box on her head, which
• 26:56
  was larger and heavier than the first, and because of
• 26:59
  this she was able to lift her head because it's
• 27:01
  you know, the other one was twenty pounds. If this
• 27:03
  one's heavier than that, there's no way she's going to
• 27:05
  be able to hold it up without using her hands.
• 27:09
  Cameron quickly realized this, so he fashioned a pulley system
• 27:12
  for her, and she worked while still being blindfolded and
• 27:15
  in the box. Eventually, though, the box was removed and
• 27:19
  she was made to work in a tiny wood shop box,
• 27:22
  wherein she would do menial tasks like shelling nuts, crocheting
• 27:26
  items for the family to sell, and other small jobs.
• 27:29
  So basically like the definition of slave labor. But she
• 27:34
  did have more room in this workshop box, so for
• 27:37
  her her situation had once again slightly improved, which is
• 27:41
  a very sad way too at look at it, but
• 27:44
  you know, it was something she could see. She had
• 27:46
  more room to move and she had something to do.
• 27:48
  She wasn't just sitting there in isolation with her mind
• 27:52
  just being you know, just just shut in darkness all
• 27:55
  the time, which is so so bad for your mental
• 27:58
  health and like, you know, just your sense of self.
• 28:01
  I mean, it's horrifying. And I don't think it was
• 28:03
  an accident that he isolated her for so long before
• 28:07
  starting to have her do things for him. I think
• 28:09
  it was all part of his plan to manipulate and
• 28:12
  control her and to that point. The hangings, beatings, and
• 28:17
  assaults continued during this time, but again, you know, she's
• 28:21
  given a task. So now I want to take a
• 28:23
  moment to talk about the psychological effects of being in
• 28:25
  this type of deprivation for so long. Many states have
• 28:29
  limited how long a person can be in solitary confinement
• 28:32
  to between fifteen and twenty days, and have outlawed it
• 28:35
  for multiple groups of people, including children, which like, yeah, obviously,
• 28:40
  and disabled people, which is kind of another obvious one.
• 28:44
  Other states have outlawed it entirely, and unfortunately some have
• 28:47
  not outlawed it at all. But the idea that so
• 28:50
  many have, and that there's a general consensus that you
• 28:53
  can't keep people like this for you know, months and
• 28:56
  months and years at a time, just goes to show
• 28:59
  how tearle this is for your mental health. If actual
• 29:03
  prisons are like, oh yeah, that's too far, it's cruel
• 29:06
  and unusual punishment. And to be clear, solitary confinement is
• 29:11
  not even as bad as what Colleen went through. What
• 29:13
  Colleen went through was a total loss of any sort
• 29:16
  of stimulation for months on end, and the only thing
• 29:19
  that she knew was like isolation, and pain and darkness,
• 29:23
  So to say that this will mess with the person's
• 29:25
  mind is a vast understatement. To Cameron, the idea of
• 29:29
  breaking someone was beyond his wildest dreams. And I hate
• 29:32
  to say it, but he was very good at this.
• 29:35
  This was one of the only things that he was
• 29:37
  actually good at, which is not a flex in any way.
• 29:41
  The fact that Colleen later said that she felt grateful
• 29:44
  for the freedom grateful to Cameron is a prime example
• 29:48
  of how this sort of brainwashing occurs, and it's really sick.
• 29:53
  So pretty quickly after Colleen started this new pattern of
• 29:56
  working in the tiny workshop box and being able to
• 29:58
  see for most of the day, things changed again. Camen
• 30:02
  and Jan, whose names Colleen had finally learned over time,
• 30:06
  had been able to buy themselves a plot of land nearby,
• 30:08
  still in Red Bluff, but more on the outskirts, away
• 30:11
  from neighbors and prying eyes, and they put a single
• 30:14
  white trailer out there for themselves to live in. Around
• 30:18
  this time, a little bit later, like once they moved,
• 30:22
  Jan also became pregnant again, so everything is changing. They
• 30:26
  moved into the trailer and of course brought Colleen with them.
• 30:30
  Cameren did what he could remove the evidence of her
• 30:32
  captivity in the basement from the rented house, and was
• 30:34
  pretty successful as nobody asked any questions, so they sort
• 30:37
  of got away with it, at least to that point.
• 30:40
  Now they were away from their neighbors, they didn't have
• 30:42
  to be scared to whip and torture Colleen like. They
• 30:45
  could make all the noise they wanted, even though at
• 30:47
  this point she'd been trained to be quiet and also
• 30:50
  made sort of a promise to herself that she wouldn't cry.
• 30:54
  But they were definitely more free to do with her
• 30:57
  what they wanted. There was one problem, where was she
• 31:01
  going to sleep without a basement, a trailer, a double
• 31:04
  wire or a single wid I mean, does not have
• 31:06
  a basement. Cameron's answer was crazy, but it worked. He
• 31:11
  built a box that basically slid in and out from
• 31:13
  under the bed, like a pull out drawer or like
• 31:15
  a bottom freezer. This box was long enough for calling
• 31:19
  to lie down in fully and just wide enough for
• 31:22
  her to sort of move around if she needed to.
• 31:25
  She was given a bedpan, and there was an old
• 31:27
  hair dryer set on cold that would circulate the air
• 31:30
  day in and day out. It didn't cool the air,
• 31:33
  It just kind of moved it, so on hot days
• 31:35
  she would be sweating profusely, thinking she might die of
• 31:38
  heat stroke. And at this point she went back to
• 31:41
  spending about twenty three hours a day in this box
• 31:45
  fairly slowly once they I feel like everything. Every time
• 31:48
  something changed, the answer was to stick her back in
• 31:51
  the box and just torture her like kind of like
• 31:54
  ground zero again. Right. Finally, though, she was allowed out
• 31:57
  and started helping around the house, even babysit the two
• 32:01
  young girls. Now, before we get too much into that,
• 32:04
  I'm going to go back for a second here to
• 32:05
  discuss how Colleen was given this new freedom without Cameron
• 32:08
  and Jan being terrified that she would run away. The
• 32:12
  answer was simple. Cameron made Colleen a slave contract and
• 32:15
  told her a really crazy tale about an international group
• 32:19
  of super powerful men who had slaves all over the world.
• 32:23
  This group was called the Company, and according to Cameron,
• 32:28
  they were everywhere. His father and brother, who she would
• 32:31
  occasionally hear coming and out of the house, were supposedly
• 32:34
  in this group, as were many police officers and people
• 32:37
  of high ranking status, as well as people in the
• 32:40
  city of Red Bluff. Now, according to Cameron, these people
• 32:44
  were all powerful. They were able to get away with
• 32:47
  anything because they had so many police and lawyers and
• 32:51
  judges and politicians on their payroll. He told her stories
• 32:55
  of people who had attempted to escape before, like slaves
• 32:58
  that had tried to get away from the company, and
• 33:00
  the horrible things that would happen to them. He said,
• 33:03
  one woman escaped and when she was caught, first her
• 33:06
  fingers were surgically removed without anesthesia, then her hands, then
• 33:11
  her arms, then her legs. He said she was tied
• 33:16
  up by her hair and hung in her master's bedroom
• 33:20
  for a year until she finally died. He also told
• 33:24
  her that Janis was a former slave and that she
• 33:27
  had been in trouble for like again, trying to run away,
• 33:32
  so they had done something really horrible to her that
• 33:34
  resulted in her knees having terrible scars on them. In reality,
• 33:37
  Janis had had to have knee surgery, but he kind
• 33:40
  of used this to sell this lie and said that
• 33:43
  they were going to kill Janis, but he took pity
• 33:45
  on her and married her. So she was a former
• 33:48
  slave that was now his wife, and this sort of
• 33:51
  also explained why she was subjected to some of this
• 33:53
  bondage in the same way, because it just made sense.
• 33:57
  Like she was a former slave, she was used to it.
• 33:59
  That's why this worked out right. Anyway, The contract itself
• 34:03
  was horrifying on top of all else, and noted that
• 34:06
  she was only to ever call him master and never
• 34:08
  by his name. It basically said that she was his
• 34:11
  slave forever, would always obey it, would never run away
• 34:14
  or try for help, which would be dangerous anyway, according
• 34:17
  to Cameron because you know who's in the company, and
• 34:20
  was essentially give her life over to Cameron entirely. Colleen
• 34:24
  horrified at this and still not fully brainwashed at this
• 34:29
  point because it was still pretty early on, you know,
• 34:30
  she asked, like, what happens if I refused to sign?
• 34:33
  Cameron said, well, I'm just going to sign for you anyway,
• 34:35
  and I'll make you wish you had, so, basically under
• 34:38
  threat of you know, violence, she signed, and from there
• 34:42
  on out she was given a little bit more freedom,
• 34:44
  not exactly at first, but once Cameron felt the contract
• 34:48
  and the idea of the company had really soaked in,
• 34:50
  he started allowing her these freedoms that I was sort
• 34:53
  of talking about. She was also given a slave name,
• 34:57
  Ka Powers, and that's just the letter K And later
• 35:01
  on I'm going to touch on just a little bit
• 35:03
  the story of O, which is one of his favorite
• 35:06
  books and very much aligns with like what he's doing.
• 35:11
  Also on this contract, he was called Michael Powers and
• 35:14
  Janis was called Janet Powers. Even after signing, Cameron continued
• 35:19
  to terrify Colleen with tales of the company, saying their
• 35:23
  headquarters were in Sacramento, so not even far away, and
• 35:26
  that everyone was in their group and on their payroll. Now,
• 35:30
  after she signed, she was given a slave caller to
• 35:32
  wear around her neck and so began her life as
• 35:35
  Kay the house slave. Also, before their move to the trailer,
• 35:38
  Colleen experienced her first rape by Cameron. And I hadn't
• 35:42
  touched on this before, but part of the deal between
• 35:44
  Cameron and jan was that he could keep a sex slave,
• 35:47
  but he was not allowed to actually have sex with her.
• 35:50
  The sex was only for him and jan Now, weirdly,
• 35:53
  Jan is actually religious, which, like, I realize how weird
• 35:56
  that sounds, But I honestly think I had a little
• 35:59
  bit more to do with jealousy than anything, and that
• 36:02
  was sort of just her excuse because she just didn't
• 36:04
  want him having sex with other women, because in all
• 36:07
  of this, Jan is still very insecure. I mean, the
• 36:10
  things she lets him do to her are you know,
• 36:13
  a sign of that. Obviously, in any case, Cameron decided
• 36:17
  to just try it anyway. A few nights before they moved,
• 36:21
  Cameron brought Colleen up to the bedroom and had both
• 36:23
  women lay with him naked. He started kind of with
• 36:28
  Jan and then moved on to Colleen, and as he
• 36:30
  began raping Colleen, Jan got up clearly upset and went
• 36:34
  to get dressed. Cameron ended up stopping grabbing Jan and
• 36:38
  calming her down. He then kind of put an end
• 36:40
  to the whole thing and put Colleen back in the basement.
• 36:43
  Didn't try this again for the for a while, but
• 36:45
  the damage was definitely done and the relationship between Jan
• 36:49
  and Kay was changed from that moment like they had
• 36:52
  never I mean, they didn't really have much of a
• 36:54
  relationship at this point because Colleen was just being abused.
• 36:58
  But now Jan had a hatred for her, which is
• 37:02
  really frustrating because it's Cameron that she should hate, and
• 37:05
  I think in a lot of points she did, but again,
• 37:08
  she felt helpless and she was still kind of wanting
• 37:12
  his affection I think that was sort of the nature
• 37:14
  of their relationship, so the only thing she really could
• 37:16
  do was hate Colleen, and she definitely did so. Again.
• 37:20
  This is a big part of why I think she
• 37:23
  ended up back in a box twenty three hours a day,
• 37:25
  whereas she had started to get a little bit of freedom.
• 37:27
  It was sort of in reaction to Jan's response to
• 37:31
  that situation. During these first few months in the new trailer,
• 37:35
  Colleen spent these twenty three hours a day in a box.
• 37:38
  The box was actually smaller than the first one since
• 37:40
  it had to fit under the bed, and she was
• 37:42
  only allowed to shower every two or so weeks, so
• 37:45
  two to every two to three weeks she would get
• 37:47
  a shower, and she was regularly tortured, And around this
• 37:51
  time the torture really ramped up, I think as part
• 37:54
  of her having to sort of regain their trust even
• 37:58
  though she didn't do anything wrong. He would also hang
• 38:01
  her by her wrists, and he actually hadn't done this
• 38:04
  in a while, so she began writhing in pain because
• 38:08
  she was like it had been a few months since
• 38:11
  he had done this to her, and as a result,
• 38:13
  she just wasn't used to it, so to stop her
• 38:17
  from moving around. He tied something very heavy to her legs,
• 38:21
  which only made the pain worse. When Colleen continued to
• 38:26
  move basically uncontrollably, he went and got matches and burned
• 38:31
  her with them, and he burned her breasts and she
• 38:34
  had scars for the rest of her life. She still
• 38:36
  has scars to this day now. After their second little
• 38:39
  girl was born, Jan ended up going back to work
• 38:42
  because the family needed money. Cameron mostly worked nights, so
• 38:47
  during the day when Jan was gone, he would take
• 38:49
  Colleen out of the box more and more, and in
• 38:53
  part this was to do chores and watch the young girls,
• 38:55
  which Cameron definitely lied to Jan about, but it was
• 38:59
  also to torture and rape her. And this is when
• 39:02
  the rapes became more consistent because Jan was gone so
• 39:07
  Cameron could get away with it, and he obviously had
• 39:09
  no respect for her and just wanted to do whatever
• 39:11
  he wanted to do, so as long as she was
• 39:13
  out of the house he was free to fully sexually
• 39:17
  abuse Colleen in addition to the torture. This all started
• 39:21
  about nineteen seventy nine and the girls were I think
• 39:24
  about under a year and about three years old, so
• 39:28
  very young and Colleen was like a mother to them
• 39:30
  during this time. She would always disappear when jan came home,
• 39:34
  and Cameron would of course only admit to having her
• 39:36
  cook dinner. But we know later on we found out
• 39:39
  that she was basically like a mother, and in fact,
• 39:42
  sometimes the little girls would call her mommy, which is
• 39:44
  just so fucked up. About this time, Cameron also built
• 39:48
  a new torture device called the stretcher. Now, this was
• 39:51
  a fucking medieval torture device that they used to use
• 39:54
  in medieval times to tear people apart, and Cameron used
• 39:58
  this on Colleen, pulling her body tighter and tighter. He
• 40:02
  did this constantly. This was like his favorite new torture device.
• 40:06
  He even told her, I'm not doing this because I'm
• 40:08
  angry at you. I'm doing this because I like it.
• 40:12
  It's absolutely disgusting. The first time he used it, he
• 40:16
  told her so tightly that he popped her shoulder out
• 40:20
  of place. He dislocated it and also broke one of
• 40:23
  the wriststraps. At this point, Cameron forced Colleen to try
• 40:27
  to beg for mercy, but Colleen was in so much
• 40:30
  pain she could barely whimper From there. Cameron was so
• 40:34
  turned on that he forced her to give him oral
• 40:37
  sex and then threw her back into the box. So
• 40:41
  this was the type of thing that she was subjected
• 40:43
  to every single day while Jan was away at work.
• 40:48
  Things went on like this for a while, but eventually
• 40:51
  the couple started letting Colleen out of her box more
• 40:54
  and more while both of them were home, allowing her
• 40:57
  more time out to do chores and to care for
• 40:58
  the girls, which jam didn't love but was getting more
• 41:01
  used to. At one point, they even asked her what
• 41:04
  she wanted for her birthday, and having not celebrated a
• 41:08
  single thing in the three years she'd been in captivity,
• 41:11
  she asked for only a Bible, which she was granted.
• 41:15
  The reason she asked for this is she felt that
• 41:16
  the only thing she had in her life keeping her
• 41:18
  going was God, and she wanted to strengthen her relationship
• 41:22
  with him. Shortly thereafter, Jan lost her job and things
• 41:26
  were tight for the family, so Cameron was trying to
• 41:28
  figure out ways to use Colleen to make money. He
• 41:32
  took her first to Vegas, forcing her to panhandle, and
• 41:35
  then had her do it two other times, including in
• 41:38
  Red Bluff. However, this wasn't as lucrative as he had hoped,
• 41:41
  so he kind of put an end to it. Jan
• 41:45
  actually got another job after a while, and at that
• 41:48
  point Colleen was more free. She was given more freedom,
• 41:52
  so she was sort of more officially taking care of
• 41:54
  the girls and basically just like a regular part of life.
• 41:58
  The girls knew who she was. She was known as Kay,
• 42:01
  so things were starting to really form as basically she
• 42:03
  was just like a slave, like she was out most
• 42:05
  of the time, but doing cooking, cleaning, childcare, all of that. Now,
• 42:11
  as time went on, more people moved into the neighborhood
• 42:13
  and Cameron's family started coming over regularly, so Cameron decided
• 42:18
  to say that Colleen was a living babysitter who helped
• 42:20
  around the house, which was a half truth. This seemed
• 42:25
  to quell any questions neighbors had, as she now regularly
• 42:29
  worked in the garden, planting and tending to food producing plants,
• 42:32
  also cooking and cleaning, caring for the children, all the
• 42:35
  things I kind of talked about. At one point, for
• 42:37
  no reason she could come up with, Cameron even let
• 42:40
  Colleen write a letter to her sister Bonnie. Now Colleen
• 42:44
  had been asking and asking and asking, and finally he
• 42:47
  said yes, but he had told her over and over like,
• 42:50
  the company won't let you do it, the company won't
• 42:52
  let you do it. Finally he was like, yeah, the
• 42:54
  company agreed and let her write a letter. Now the letter,
• 42:57
  of course, had to be very vague and only say
• 43:00
  I'm living with the family up north. I'm okay, everything's great.
• 43:03
  But it was a huge thing because this was the
• 43:05
  first time in almost four years that her family had
• 43:08
  heard from her, and they had been looking for her
• 43:10
  the entire time. Her family thought she was dead or
• 43:14
  thought she could be, so this was a huge thing
• 43:16
  for her to be able to reach out and let
• 43:17
  them know she was in fact alive. Shortly after this, Colleen,
• 43:22
  I think, kind of sensing that she had a little
• 43:24
  bit more trust, kept pushing and was finally allowed to
• 43:28
  call and speak to her family, though again Cameron stood there,
• 43:32
  listened in and was like, you say one wrong thing,
• 43:35
  the company is going to kill your whole family. So
• 43:37
  she called in. It was her sister Bonnie who answered,
• 43:39
  and they had like a five minute conversation. Bonnie later
• 43:43
  said she sounded quiet and aloof and wouldn't give any
• 43:47
  real answers as to where she was or what she
• 43:49
  was doing. Cameron was playing a very dangerous game here,
• 43:52
  but also sort of testing the waters to see how
• 43:55
  much control he had over Colleen, and it was quite
• 43:58
  a lot. From here, Colleen sort of kept pushing and
• 44:03
  kind of asking to see her family, like can I
• 44:06
  go see my family? And at first Cameron was like,
• 44:08
  absolutely not. No slave has ever been able to do this.
• 44:12
  We're never going to let that happen. But eventually at
• 44:15
  the end of nineteen eighty he told her the company
• 44:19
  said okay, and that he could take her down to
• 44:22
  see her family in Riverside. Now. Prior to this is
• 44:25
  what Colleen later called her year out. This was a
• 44:29
  year where her life was almost normal, or at least outwardly.
• 44:34
  She was given permission to go on jogs, though Cameron
• 44:37
  and Jan timed her her job to ensure she wasn't
• 44:40
  even a minute late. Each time she was allowed to
• 44:43
  go outside, she talked to neighbors. She was basically just
• 44:47
  a part of the family, at least to outsiders. She
• 44:50
  also was not being sexually assaulted as much, like not
• 44:53
  nearly as much, and also not tortured very much. She
• 44:56
  was sort of allowed to just exist in in a
• 45:01
  service role. An unpaid sort of service role. Jan was
• 45:05
  very unhappy with this arrangement, both morally because she had
• 45:09
  always kind of had a problem with Colleen being a slave,
• 45:13
  which is like fair, you know, she should have had
• 45:15
  a much bigger problem with it, but at least she
• 45:17
  felt a little bad, but I think even more so
• 45:19
  out of jealousy. Colleen was pretty much now on the
• 45:22
  same level as Jan, except that she slept in a
• 45:25
  box under the bed and Jan was allowed to tell
• 45:27
  her what to do. They both took care of the girls,
• 45:30
  they both did suffer some amount of sexual abuse, they
• 45:33
  both did housework, and they both did whatever Cameron told
• 45:36
  them to do, so it was a very similar thing.
• 45:39
  This caused the women to bicker and fight constantly, with
• 45:43
  Colleen feeling confident enough to even complain about Jan to Cameron.
• 45:47
  The other part of this is that so Cameron was
• 45:50
  making Colleen keep record like keep a diary and write
• 45:55
  about her experiences as being his slave. Colleen attempted to
• 46:00
  sort of appease Cameron or gain favor with him, would
• 46:03
  write fantastical shit about how she loved Cameron and how
• 46:07
  she wanted to be his slave, pretending that she didn't
• 46:11
  know he was going to read it, you know, so
• 46:12
  like these are her inner thoughts and Cameron's reading them,
• 46:15
  and like, oh she loves me, Oh she thinks I'm
• 46:17
  so great. And this worked, like a lot of the
• 46:20
  torture was shorter, it was less intense, It happened less
• 46:24
  often the more she wrote about how much she loved Cameron.
• 46:27
  So this manipulation was great, except that Jan got ahold
• 46:31
  of the diary and read it and believed what Colleen
• 46:34
  was writing. So Jan believed that Colleen was in love
• 46:38
  with Cameron, and this made her very angry and very
• 46:41
  jealous and put a huge strain on their relationship. Jan
• 46:45
  also read at this time that Cameron had been raping Colleen,
• 46:49
  although Colleen, I think wrote about it in that they
• 46:52
  were having sex. So Jan had been lied to this
• 46:55
  whole time and just found this out. And again, instead
• 46:57
  of being upset with Cameron, she was upset with Colleen.
• 47:01
  So they had been fighting for like an entire year,
• 47:04
  and Cameron was like, I cannot deal with this anymore now.
• 47:08
  I don't know if he told Colleen what was going
• 47:10
  to happen, but in his mind he decided it was
• 47:12
  time for Colleen to go back in the box full time. Now,
• 47:16
  right before he decided to put her away, he told her,
• 47:19
  I'm going to take you to see your family. So
• 47:21
  what he did is he had her say goodbye to
• 47:23
  the girls, He had her say goodbye to the neighbors.
• 47:26
  He told everybody that she was going to go back
• 47:28
  down to Riverside to live with their family. She was
• 47:31
  done working for them, right, So this is how he
• 47:34
  sort of made the excuse that she was going to disappear.
• 47:38
  Before he took her to see her family, he made
• 47:40
  her do a bunch of tests to prove herself, and
• 47:44
  these tests included putting a shotgun in her mouth and
• 47:47
  pulling the trigger. Now, the shotgun wasn't loaded, but this
• 47:51
  was Cameron's way of continuing to break her down mentally
• 47:54
  and also test her loyalty. He also strung her up
• 47:57
  in the barn at her dad's house and was about
• 47:59
  to torture her when his dad came home and caught
• 48:02
  her putting her clothes back on. For whatever reason, this
• 48:05
  was never spoken about, but it was yet another test.
• 48:09
  And then he did take her down to see her family. Now,
• 48:12
  before he did this, he took her to Sacramento, where
• 48:16
  he went into the supposed headquarters of the company, and
• 48:19
  what he did he was walked into like a high
• 48:21
  rise in Sacramento, like some building, and just like probably
• 48:24
  walked around for twenty minutes and then came back. So
• 48:27
  what he was doing here was just reinforcing her fears
• 48:30
  and making sure she didn't betray him. He was also
• 48:33
  again testing to see how far he could push this
• 48:35
  without getting caught, right, So he did this, and then
• 48:39
  he took her to see her family, and he actually
• 48:41
  dropped her off and she spent just about twenty four
• 48:43
  hours with her family without Cameron. She was so happy.
• 48:48
  She told her family she loved them so many times.
• 48:51
  She just was like ecstatic, but she never told them
• 48:56
  anything about what was going on for fear of being killed.
• 49:00
  At one point, she's with her family and Cameron calls
• 49:02
  and says, I'm going to be there in fifteen minutes.
• 49:04
  When he arrived at the house, he introduced himself to
• 49:06
  her father and sisters as Mike Colleen's fiance. He said
• 49:12
  very little, only that they needed to get going and
• 49:14
  that they couldn't give an address or phone number as
• 49:16
  they were in the middle of a move, but they
• 49:18
  would reach out once they were settled. They then left
• 49:22
  and drove back to Red Bluff. During the car ride,
• 49:27
  Colleen began sobbing uncontrollably, and when Cameron asked her if
• 49:31
  she had a good time, she said, yes, it was wonderful.
• 49:34
  Thank you so much, Master for allowing me to see
• 49:38
  my family. From here began maybe the worst three years
• 49:43
  of her captivity. She spent three years being stuck inside
• 49:48
  this box, barely bigger than herself, with nothing but darkness
• 49:52
  in a tiny hole to peer out of from under
• 49:55
  the bed. Colleen suffered urinary tract in infections, She was sick,
• 50:02
  she got strep throat, and Cameron refused to do anything
• 50:06
  to help her, so she had to sweat out these
• 50:08
  infections and luckily did not die from them. But she
• 50:12
  was left in this box twenty three hours a day.
• 50:15
  When she was taken out, she was beaten and tortured severely,
• 50:19
  like worse than she had ever been. She was in
• 50:22
  the dark for so long that her skin turned nearly
• 50:25
  white and her hair started to fall out. She was
• 50:29
  only fed four or five meals per day, and at
• 50:32
  one point, once again she got down to under one
• 50:35
  hundred pounds. She was extremely sick. One weekend Cameron and
• 50:41
  jan left for the entire weekend and left her in
• 50:44
  the box with no food or water. When they came back,
• 50:47
  she was so weak she could barely stand and almost died.
• 50:51
  One time, in a fit of anger, Colleen kicked out
• 50:54
  the bottom of the box, not realizing she was strong
• 50:57
  enough to do so. She laid there in fear trem
• 51:00
  wondering what Cameron would do when he came home. She
• 51:03
  did not run away because she was afraid of what
• 51:05
  would happen to her and what the company would do
• 51:07
  to her. When Cameron got home, weirdly, he was not upset,
• 51:11
  and he just fixed the box and put her back
• 51:12
  in it. That was really it. So I think one
• 51:15
  of the craziest things about him and the way that
• 51:17
  he acted was it was completely unpredictable, and I think
• 51:21
  that was a big part of the fear and the
• 51:24
  control that he had over her. She didn't ever know
• 51:26
  what to expect now. Also, during this time, Cameron had
• 51:30
  an idea to put a dungeon under the shed outside
• 51:35
  and he and Colleen would spend hours digging this hole,
• 51:38
  and this was essentially the only thing that she could
• 51:40
  do while she was in the box to get out
• 51:43
  was to go dig this hole, which is probably very
• 51:45
  difficult for her, considering she was like slowly starving to death,
• 51:49
  so to put forward this much energy was probably pretty crazy,
• 51:53
  but at least she was out of the box now.
• 51:56
  Once the hole was large enough, they also put concrete
• 52:00
  locks in it to make it like a room. Now,
• 52:03
  Cameron said he wanted to kidnap more slaves, and Colleen
• 52:06
  knew that that meant she was gonna have to abuse
• 52:09
  those women when they came under his control. And she
• 52:12
  was terrified because she saw what jan was doing to her,
• 52:16
  and she just figured it would be sort of like
• 52:19
  top down kind of thing. Now they got this built
• 52:22
  out and Colleen was allowed to live in there, and
• 52:28
  it was a huge improvement over the box because she
• 52:30
  could stand up, she could sit down, she could move around.
• 52:33
  It was outside, but at least she was free. She
• 52:37
  was in the dark, she was underground, but she was free.
• 52:40
  Cameron had put like a you know, plywood over it
• 52:43
  and then something heavy on it so she couldn't get out,
• 52:45
  but it was far far better than the tiny little
• 52:48
  dungeon that she'd been in. Now. Unfortunately, by the time
• 52:51
  they finished building this out, it was wintertime. And the
• 52:55
  rains came, and despite Cameron's best efforts, the whole started
• 53:00
  to fill up with water, and the water got to
• 53:03
  Colleen's knees before Cameron finally let her out and brought
• 53:07
  her back inside and unfortunately put her back in the box.
• 53:11
  So I think Cameron was really upset about this because
• 53:13
  his idea was to build multiple rooms, and when they
• 53:16
  had dug out this dungeon, they started to dig out
• 53:19
  sort of like a like a walkway almost to get
• 53:23
  to the next dungeon that they were going to build
• 53:25
  so that he could fill his yard with slaves, which
• 53:28
  is absolutely fucking insane. Now, during this time, Cameron also
• 53:33
  continued to rape Colleen and Jan again, like he told her, Okay,
• 53:38
  I've been doing it for a while, I'm not going
• 53:39
  to do it anymore. And she found out again And
• 53:42
  the worst thing for Cameron about Jan finding out again
• 53:47
  was that she began to feel bad for Colleen and
• 53:50
  to blame Cameron for his actions. Finally, finally, this is
• 53:55
  all starting to boil over. And I don't know if
• 53:57
  I mentioned this, I don't believe I did, but there
• 53:59
  were least two times that Jan had left Cameron during
• 54:04
  these years because she was so upset about what was
• 54:07
  going on. Now she had gone to live with her sister,
• 54:10
  I believe both times, and you know, it didn't last
• 54:13
  more than like a weekend, maybe a week at most,
• 54:15
  but it goes to show the inner turmoil that she
• 54:18
  was facing and that she was not happy with this,
• 54:21
  even though I don't really feel super sorry for her
• 54:24
  because she let this go on, and she of course
• 54:26
  had a choice, but it just goes to show that
• 54:29
  she has something of a conscience. And so when she
• 54:33
  kind of starts to realize that Colleen, you know, she's
• 54:35
  almost dead, you know, in this box and still being
• 54:39
  sexually assaulted, I think something just sort of clicked inside
• 54:42
  of Jan and she just started to feel bad for Colleen.
• 54:45
  So now we're at the end of nineteen eighty four,
• 54:47
  Colleen is turning twenty seven years old, and it's been
• 54:50
  about two and a half almost three years that she
• 54:53
  has just been in isolation. She had a very short
• 54:56
  amount of time in the dungeon, and otherwise she's just
• 54:59
  been in the box pretty much near death. On the
• 55:02
  night of her birthday, which is New Year's Eve, Cameron
• 55:05
  and Jan bring her out of the box. They take
• 55:07
  her into the kitchen and they have a cake. They
• 55:10
  have a fucking birthday cake waiting for her, this woman
• 55:13
  that has been abused to the brink of death for
• 55:15
  years now, They're like, come into the kitchen, we're gonna
• 55:18
  see you happy birthday, and they did. They sang her
• 55:19
  Happy Birthday. They all had cake together, and from there
• 55:24
  Colleen again began to see more freedom. So the pendulum swings.
• 55:28
  You know, she was on lockdown, then she got a
• 55:32
  bunch of freedom. Back to lockdown. Now the freedom's coming
• 55:35
  back again. At first, the freedom only really came at night,
• 55:39
  but eventually she's given not just the same freedoms that
• 55:42
  she had, but far more. Cameron not only reintroduced her
• 55:46
  to his daughters, but also to the neighbors, saying like,
• 55:48
  look who's back. And Jan did the same things as
• 55:52
  though Kay, you know, had chosen to come back to
• 55:54
  work for the family once again. At this time, along
• 55:57
  with her freedom, her relationship with Jan also began to grow,
• 56:01
  and they eventually came to consider each other they're best friends.
• 56:04
  Like they were each other's best friends. They were also
• 56:06
  each other's only friends for reasons that I think we
• 56:09
  can all understand. The two of them bonded over reading
• 56:12
  the Bible, which Cameron allowed because he would then use
• 56:15
  passages as a means of control, controlling the women either
• 56:18
  by like misquoting it or by using quotes about like
• 56:21
  obeying their husband, even though you know Colleen's not married
• 56:23
  to him, but it's just all manipulation. However, allowing these
• 56:28
  women to bond was the biggest mistake that Cameron could
• 56:31
  have ever made, and one I'm very glad that he did,
• 56:34
  because he was just he had so much bravado, like
• 56:36
  he was so arrogant about this at this point that
• 56:39
  I don't think he realized what was going on. I
• 56:42
  also don't think Colleen really realized. I think she was
• 56:44
  just really happy to have a friend and sort of
• 56:47
  feel like she had a normal life. Not normal, but
• 56:50
  you know, like close to normal, like as normal as
• 56:53
  it's gonna get right now. Over the years, like we said,
• 56:56
  Colleen would write letters to Cameron and it was love
• 56:59
  letters and cards, and as you can guess later on
• 57:03
  in the trial, this was a big point of contention.
• 57:05
  But this was just one of myriad ways that Colleen
• 57:08
  chose to try to survive, like I said, by endearing
• 57:11
  herself to Cameron, Collen was attempting to humanize herself to
• 57:14
  him to gain sympathy and better treatment, and eventually some
• 57:18
  of these thoughts kind of did start to stick, like
• 57:21
  a Stockholm syndrome kind of deal. After over seven years
• 57:25
  of living this life, it made sense that in order
• 57:27
  to protect her very weak sense of self, that she
• 57:29
  would create a world in which she did love her captor.
• 57:32
  So I think, you know, we all normalize the lives
• 57:35
  we live, even if they aren't the best, and especially
• 57:37
  if we can't do anything about the situation. And I
• 57:40
  think this sort of false love for Cameron, along with
• 57:42
  this new friendship with Jan, gave Colleen a better feeling
• 57:46
  about her life. But meanwhile, Jan, who's obviously been very
• 57:50
  good about compartmentalizing things, is being torn apart inside. I just,
• 57:57
  you know, I want to feel for Jan, but I
• 57:59
  just kind of now. I don't know if I had
• 58:01
  mentioned this already, but he did make the two women
• 58:03
  have sex with each other in front of him, saying
• 58:05
  it was God's plan, and also saying that God told
• 58:08
  him that Colleen needed sex. So he's moving from having
• 58:13
  the company make decisions like every day. He's like the company,
• 58:17
  the company, the company, like drilling that into her head.
• 58:20
  And now he's seeing these two women are getting really
• 58:22
  into God, so he's using God to control them. It
• 58:25
  went from like the company says this, the company says that,
• 58:28
  to God says this, and God says that. So he's
• 58:31
  really just kind of moving along with whatever is going
• 58:35
  to control them best. And for whatever reason, I think
• 58:39
  because Cameron truly felt that he had ultimate control, he
• 58:42
  allowed Colleen to get a job. He actually let her
• 58:46
  leave the house and go to work. Of course, he
• 58:49
  kept all of the money, but this was a very
• 58:51
  risky thing. So Colleen got a job working as a
• 58:55
  maid in a nearby motel and was quickly considered the
• 58:58
  hotel's best employee due to her work and friendly nature.
• 59:01
  Where now I think, I said in nineteen eighty four,
• 59:04
  Jan and Colleen are very into the Bible and she's working,
• 59:07
  and they finally asked Cameron, hey, can we go to
• 59:09
  church together? He says they may because she's been going
• 59:13
  to work and there's no issues so far, so he's like, yeah,
• 59:16
  go ahead, go to church. This was his biggest mistake yet. Jan,
• 59:20
  full of guilt and hatred and fear, started talking to
• 59:24
  the pastor at the church sometimes with Colleen, sometimes without
• 59:28
  always asking vague but leading questions about their situation and
• 59:31
  what she should do. She always made it sound more
• 59:34
  like a case of infidelity, but even this prompted the
• 59:37
  pastor to tell her to leave Cameron. Finally, she told
• 59:41
  him a little bit more about the situation and he said, look,
• 59:44
  you are all living in sin. She basically told him like,
• 59:47
  we're a thrupple and he's like, huh uh. God is
• 59:50
  not down with that. And for whatever reason, him telling
• 59:54
  her like, hey, you're living in sin was what it took.
• 59:57
  It was a straw that broke the camel's back. So
• 1:00:00
  on Thursday, August ninth, nineteen eighty four, at eleven thirty am,
• 1:00:05
  Jan went to the hotel where Colleen worked and asked
• 1:00:08
  to talk to her. It was then that she told
• 1:00:11
  her everything She told her. The company wasn't real, Cameron
• 1:00:16
  wasn't a part of any sort of international slave group,
• 1:00:19
  his family had no idea what was going on, and
• 1:00:21
  Colleen was free to go at any time. Colleen collapsed
• 1:00:28
  to the ground, overwhelmed by this information and basically beating
• 1:00:31
  herself up for being so stupid, and Jan was like,
• 1:00:34
  it's not your fault, like you have been so traumatized
• 1:00:38
  and Jan's been traumatized. So the two women cried and
• 1:00:41
  held each other. And then, of course, because this is
• 1:00:44
  how Colleen is, she finished her last day at work.
• 1:00:47
  She told her boss, I have to quit. But she
• 1:00:49
  finished her day and then she and Jan immediately went
• 1:00:53
  back to the pastor and told him the truth and
• 1:00:55
  asked him what to do. The man said, they need
• 1:00:58
  to get as far away from Cameron as possible immediately. Now,
• 1:01:02
  the problem with this was that it was almost four
• 1:01:03
  pm because Cameron was about to get off work and
• 1:01:06
  was expecting them to pick him up, so so they
• 1:01:09
  wouldn't be safe to try to leave that night because
• 1:01:11
  he was going to be home. So the pastor said,
• 1:01:13
  you know, play it cool for the night, leave the
• 1:01:15
  following morning after he goes to work. Now Colleen of
• 1:01:19
  course saw the danger in this because Jan could change
• 1:01:21
  her mind at any moment, but they agreed and she
• 1:01:25
  just decided to take her chance. And also, as a
• 1:01:28
  side note, like why did this pastor let them leave?
• 1:01:30
  Why didn't he call the police? Like we'll never know
• 1:01:32
  what was going through his head that he didn't get involved.
• 1:01:35
  I think maybe it was that they were asking him
• 1:01:37
  not to, and he respected their wishes. But that's pretty
• 1:01:40
  fucking crazy to me if he believed a word of
• 1:01:43
  what they said, because this was seven and a half
• 1:01:44
  fucking years anyway, So they go home, they act normal.
• 1:01:48
  Jan actually said that she had a stomach ache, and
• 1:01:50
  she and Colleen slept on the floor in the living room,
• 1:01:53
  because I should tell you that they had now started
• 1:01:55
  letting Colleen sleep on the floor in her sleeping bag,
• 1:01:59
  so she wasn't even in the box anymore, like she
• 1:02:01
  was truly being integrated into their life, like a not
• 1:02:05
  an equal, definitely, but much less in the slave role
• 1:02:09
  and much more like a second wife almost. So that night, anyway,
• 1:02:13
  the two of them slept on the floor. Cameron slept
• 1:02:15
  in the bed. Interestingly, he let that happen. I don't
• 1:02:19
  know what was going on, but anyway, he left for work.
• 1:02:21
  The next morning, the women packed up their stuff, grabbed
• 1:02:25
  the girls, and went to Jan's sister's house. Now only
• 1:02:29
  about a day or so later, Colleen said that the
• 1:02:31
  voice of God came to her. This was the same
• 1:02:33
  voice that told her to run when she was in
• 1:02:35
  the bathroom, and she didn't listen then, but this time
• 1:02:37
  she did listen. He told her, you need to leave Jan,
• 1:02:40
  and you need to go home to your family in Riverside.
• 1:02:43
  You need to get out of here. So Colleen calls
• 1:02:45
  her dad and says, Hi, it's me, Sorry. I haven't
• 1:02:47
  talked to you in four fucking years. Can you send
• 1:02:49
  me one hundred dollars? And he's like, I'll send you
• 1:02:51
  however much money you want, So he sends her money.
• 1:02:53
  She gets a bus ticket to go back to Riverside,
• 1:02:56
  and before she leaves to get on the bus, she
• 1:02:58
  goes to a payphone and she calls Cameron. She says
• 1:03:01
  to him, I know everything, I'm leaving you and you
• 1:03:04
  can't stop me. She later said she didn't remember exactly
• 1:03:08
  what he said, but she remembered that he cried. Colleen
• 1:03:14
  is now free. She goes home to Riverside. She gives
• 1:03:17
  her family a really truncated version of what happened, leaving
• 1:03:20
  out a lot of bad stuff, probably for the sake
• 1:03:22
  of her own mental health, but even more so, I
• 1:03:25
  think at that moment, because Jan had asked her to,
• 1:03:28
  Jan didn't want the police to be called. She wanted
• 1:03:31
  them to give Cameron a chance to change. But even
• 1:03:34
  with the little bit that her family heard. They called
• 1:03:37
  Cameron and threatened him and basically told him what they
• 1:03:40
  thought of him, which I love. Jan, on the other hand,
• 1:03:43
  of course, ended up going back to Cameron, and with
• 1:03:46
  him got back in touch with Colleen, asking her, you know,
• 1:03:49
  please don't go to the police, you know, just checking
• 1:03:51
  in to make sure she wasn't going to Jan said
• 1:03:54
  that Cameron was trying to change, and the two had
• 1:03:56
  been going to church and counseling together, and that he
• 1:03:58
  had stopped the bond. Colleen agreed to not go to
• 1:04:02
  the police, saying she just wanted to move on with
• 1:04:04
  her life. But she would also call Jan like a
• 1:04:08
  couple times a week. And I don't know if she
• 1:04:10
  talked to Cameron as well, but I know it later
• 1:04:13
  came up in the court documents that she talked to
• 1:04:16
  Jan and she called the house a lot those first
• 1:04:19
  couple of months. She also wrote them letters that showed
• 1:04:22
  she still felt affection for them, though I believe this
• 1:04:25
  was very quickly wearing off as she was able to
• 1:04:27
  come more and more to her senses every day. And meanwhile,
• 1:04:31
  of course, Cameron stops all efforts to change, telling Jan
• 1:04:34
  that his issue stemmed from a hormonal imbalance, and all
• 1:04:37
  he had to do was drink one beer every night
• 1:04:39
  and he would be fine. Absolutely fucking ridiculous. Now. At
• 1:04:43
  one point, about two months in to Colleen's freedom, Jan
• 1:04:48
  woke up in the middle of the night and felt
• 1:04:50
  Cameron super tense next to her. She asked him what
• 1:04:53
  was wrong, and he said he didn't know. Now she
• 1:04:56
  had an intuition and kind of knew that Cameron was
• 1:05:00
  probably gonna hurt her. He was gonna do something really,
• 1:05:02
  really bad. So to stop him from doing that, she
• 1:05:04
  said to him, Hey, do you want to burn all
• 1:05:07
  of the evidence, all of the evidence that Colleen ever
• 1:05:09
  lived here? He was like, yeah, I do. So they
• 1:05:12
  got up, they got all the bondage, all the photos,
• 1:05:15
  all the diaries, all the letters, everything they could possibly find,
• 1:05:19
  and they went in the backyard and they put in
• 1:05:21
  a big drum and they lit it all on fire. Now,
• 1:05:24
  I will tell you right now, they did not get everything.
• 1:05:27
  There were photos left over, there were things that they found,
• 1:05:30
  but they got rid of like ninety five percent of
• 1:05:32
  all of the evidence. She later said she did this
• 1:05:35
  because it was the only thing she could think to
• 1:05:37
  do to keep herself from getting hurt. She thought he
• 1:05:41
  was gonna hurt her, and I'm pretty sure he would have.
• 1:05:43
  I mean, this man is capable of anything. Now, finally
• 1:05:47
  Jan found another friend, somebody that was like a receptionist
• 1:05:50
  somewhere where she worked and confided in this woman. And
• 1:05:53
  this woman was like, you need to go back to
• 1:05:55
  your pastor. You need to talk to him. You need
• 1:05:57
  to go to the police. So Jan goes back to
• 1:05:59
  this past her, and with her permission, he finally does
• 1:06:04
  call the police and alerts them to what is going
• 1:06:07
  on and what had happened over the last seven and
• 1:06:09
  a half years. When the police arrived to the church,
• 1:06:13
  Jan spilled so much information that they were completely overwhelmed.
• 1:06:18
  And one of the reasons is that the information she
• 1:06:20
  gave them included a murder that nobody even knew had happened.
• 1:06:25
  This was the nineteen seventy six abduction and murder of
• 1:06:28
  Marie Elizabeth Spanicky. I don't know how you say her
• 1:06:30
  last name, a nineteen year old who the couple had
• 1:06:32
  picked up hitchhiking and who Cameron had tortured violently before murdering.
• 1:06:37
  He had actually cut her vocal cords inside of her
• 1:06:40
  throat because she wouldn't stop screaming, and when he realized
• 1:06:43
  that she was going to bleed to death as a
• 1:06:45
  result of this like disgusting surgery that he did, he
• 1:06:49
  strangled her to death. He then made Jan help him
• 1:06:52
  dump the body. And I should tell you that before
• 1:06:54
  he strangled her to death, he spent the night shooting
• 1:06:57
  her in the abdomen with a beeby gun. This guy
• 1:07:00
  is just the fucking worst. Now. Unfortunately, I will tell
• 1:07:04
  you that he was never charged for this as they
• 1:07:06
  were not able to find her body and had no
• 1:07:08
  other evidence besides Jan's word, which is pretty weak all
• 1:07:12
  things considered, but we will. I will tell you that
• 1:07:14
  she is a missing person and has been since basically
• 1:07:18
  when Jan said she was murdered. So he did it,
• 1:07:21
  we just can't prove it anyway. Cameron is quickly arrested
• 1:07:25
  and retained a big fancy lawyer. I'm not going to
• 1:07:27
  get into too many details of the trial, but I
• 1:07:30
  will tell you that the Board of I think it
• 1:07:31
  is the Board of Trustees for Tahama County where red
• 1:07:35
  Bluff Is, tried to make the DA work a plea
• 1:07:39
  deal for Cameron, wherein he would only be charged for
• 1:07:41
  the kidnapping and given a max of ten years. They
• 1:07:45
  were pushing for this because the county didn't have the
• 1:07:47
  money to try the case. It's absolutely insane to me
• 1:07:51
  that that was ever an option. But luckily the DA's
• 1:07:54
  office pointed out that that was actually against the law.
• 1:07:56
  In a case like this, like a violent felony, you
• 1:07:59
  can't do that. So they ended up going to trial,
• 1:08:01
  but for a brief moment, Cameron believed that he might
• 1:08:04
  get away with a very light sentence considering what he did. Luckily,
• 1:08:09
  that didn't happen, and the trial did finally begin in
• 1:08:12
  nineteen eighty five. Jan and Colleen were the star witnesses,
• 1:08:15
  but that was pretty rough. Jan was like on the
• 1:08:19
  brink of a mental breakdown the entire time. She was
• 1:08:22
  almost like a hostile witness for the prosecution, which is
• 1:08:24
  who she agreed to testify for. So it was very
• 1:08:28
  like she was very, very torn, didn't know what to do. Colleen,
• 1:08:32
  it was said, was so emotionless that it hurt the
• 1:08:36
  case because she didn't seem upset. She didn't really seem
• 1:08:39
  like a victim. However, after a lot of back and
• 1:08:43
  forth with the trial, luckily they were able to find
• 1:08:46
  some really damning photographs, and Cameron straight up admitted that
• 1:08:50
  he kidnapped Colleen. He was just saying that very quickly
• 1:08:55
  after he kidnapped her, everything became consensual. He never admitted
• 1:08:59
  to law sucking her in the box for as long
• 1:09:01
  as he did. He never admitted to the rapes. He
• 1:09:03
  said she liked it. Luckily, the judge was very much
• 1:09:09
  on the side of the prosecution, which I don't love generally,
• 1:09:12
  but in this case, I think it helped because he
• 1:09:14
  wasn't putting up with any bullshit from the defense trying
• 1:09:17
  to like make Colleen look like the bad guy or
• 1:09:21
  otherwise victim blame, which I think in an instance like this,
• 1:09:23
  and especially in the eighties with rapes and things, it's
• 1:09:26
  like pretty easy to make the woman the bad guy.
• 1:09:29
  I think it's something we still do to this day.
• 1:09:31
  So the fact that the judge was like absolutely not
• 1:09:33
  was pretty awesome. Now, eventually Cameron was found guilty. He
• 1:09:39
  was given one hundred and four years I believe for
• 1:09:44
  like all of the crimes, kidnappings, the rapes, the beatings, like,
• 1:09:47
  there were so many things that he was charged with
• 1:09:51
  and convicted of, and he is actually this is the
• 1:09:55
  craziest thing. I was looking up this case like a
• 1:09:58
  week or ago when I was researching, and he is
• 1:10:01
  up for like parole, and not even like parole, I guess,
• 1:10:04
  but to go live in a fucking halfway house. So
• 1:10:07
  they're trying to classify him as a sexually violent predator
• 1:10:11
  because if they do that, then he'll have to remain
• 1:10:14
  in like the prison hospital where he is currently. He's
• 1:10:17
  in his seventies now. But if they decide that they
• 1:10:20
  don't think he's a danger anymore, this motherfucker's gonna get
• 1:10:23
  out and he's gonna live in a halfway house. And
• 1:10:25
  we're talking like his trials next month or his hearing.
• 1:10:28
  It's not even really a trial, it's a hearing. So
• 1:10:31
  this man could fucking get out, which like terrifies me,
• 1:10:35
  and I'm sure terrifies Colleen. Now, as far as Colleen goes,
• 1:10:39
  she's written a few or only one book, I guess,
• 1:10:41
  but she's done a lot of interviews, and you know,
• 1:10:44
  has a lot to say about her experience. I think
• 1:10:46
  it took her a while to kind of heal and
• 1:10:48
  get over it. I think during the trial she was
• 1:10:50
  still very much in the midst of her trauma. And
• 1:10:53
  now you know, she's a bit older, she got married,
• 1:10:57
  she had kids, Like, she's just like a happy person.
• 1:11:01
  I didn't get to read very much of her book.
• 1:11:02
  I actually read a book written by the prosecutor on
• 1:11:05
  this case. That was where I got the majority of
• 1:11:07
  my information. But her book is a much more uplifting
• 1:11:11
  kind of message, even though it's like pretty gnarly. I
• 1:11:14
  recommend everybody look her up. She's like a very motivational person.
• 1:11:19
  She's really great. She talks about, you know, overcoming the
• 1:11:22
  traumas that occurred in her life. It's pretty inspirational. I
• 1:11:27
  have no idea what happened to Jan. I do know
• 1:11:30
  that Colleen tried to see her after the trial, and
• 1:11:35
  Jan refused to see her and blamed her for ruining
• 1:11:38
  her life. So this woman just never could never get
• 1:11:42
  her shit together, and she got off. You know, she
• 1:11:45
  was given immunity in return for her testimony, but I
• 1:11:49
  think she should have gone to prison for a very
• 1:11:51
  long time. Even though I know she was a victim,
• 1:11:53
  she was also a willing participant in any case, so
• 1:11:56
  that's the case. Sorry I'm a day late, you guys.
• 1:11:59
  I got overwhelmed with work this week and just had
• 1:12:02
  no time, but I got a tarot reading last night
• 1:12:05
  and the cards that he pld. He basically said, if
• 1:12:09
  you do something, and he had no idea. I'd never
• 1:12:11
  met him. I just walked up. He said, if you
• 1:12:13
  do something like a YouTube channel that you release something
• 1:12:15
  every week, it's more important that you're consistent than you
• 1:12:19
  put out a perfect product every time. He said, if
• 1:12:22
  it takes you six months to put out a perfect
• 1:12:24
  product or one week to put out a product that
• 1:12:26
  you like, that people will want do it every week.
• 1:12:30
  So I forced myself to finish recording this even though
• 1:12:33
  I don't have time. I'm going out of town this
• 1:12:35
  weekend because a guy with some tarot cards told me to.
• 1:12:39
  So I apologize if it's not as perfect as some
• 1:12:44
  of my other ones, because you know my other ones
• 1:12:45
  are definitely perfect. And also, this one's a little bit longer.
• 1:12:48
  I consider doing a two parter, but we've done too
• 1:12:49
  many of those lately, so we're just going to keep
• 1:12:52
  it to one long episode. Hopefully you guys enjoy it.
• 1:12:55
  I left a lot out. I could talk about this
• 1:12:57
  case for like ten episodes. It could be its own
• 1:12:59
  mini series for sure, but I wanted to cover it.
• 1:13:02
  Because it's such a fucking crazy case, like there's not
• 1:13:05
  really any other case out there like this, and so
• 1:13:09
  I really wanted to talk about it because it's absolutely
• 1:13:12
  wild and thinking about the psychology of it is absolutely wild.
• 1:13:15
  So I hope you guys enjoyed my version of this.
• 1:13:18
  I'll be back next week with another case, of course.
• 1:13:22
  Thanks everybody for listening. Please like, rate review, share with
• 1:13:25
  your friends and family, and until next week, stay safe.