Perfect Victim: The True Story of the Girl in the Box
by Carla Norton, Christine McGuire
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Book Summary Information
Author: Carla Norton, Christine McGuireEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1989-07-01
ISBN: 0440204429
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Dell
Book Reviews of Perfect Victim: The True Story of the Girl in the Box
Book Review: Good book, though I don't like the author or the Dugard comparison
Summary: 4 Stars
Cameron Hooker appeared to the outside world as a quiet, hard-working, mild-mannered young man with a nice, quiet wife. But inside, Cameron was driven by sadistic fantasies of having a dungeon of female slaves totally under his control, to torture, have sex with, and order about as he wished. Cameron put many hours into studying up on psychological dominance and constructing appropriate places and devices to keep and torture a slave, before he put his plan into action to actually grab one. His mousy wife, not wanting to be tortured herself and not wanting to lose her husband, went along with the plan. Cameron's first attempt was a failure in that he went too far and actually killed his victim. His second attempt, in which he kidnapped Colleen Stan, was more successful in that he managed to keep her around for years, after breaking her psychologically through torture, deprivation and isolation. As part of his coercion, he showed her an official-looking "slave contract" saying that if she escaped, she would be hunted down and killed by a national network of slave masters, and her loved ones would also be killed.
Colleen Stan was fortunate in that she managed to survive Cameron's tortures, including being hung by her arms for extended periods, burned, electrically shocked, and kept in a coffinlike box under the Hooker's bed in a sweltering trailer for several days with almost no water. Eventually she was able to forge a bond with Cameron's neglected and fearful wife, who helped her escape and also helped the authorities bring Cameron to justice. Colleen was not so fortunate in that the prosecutor in her case, Christine McGuire, apparently wrote this book about her experiences and did not share the profits with Colleen, which is pretty sleazy in my opinion. The book delves into a bit of McGuire's private life and frankly, even before I heard about her running off with the profits of Colleen's story, she came off like an unstable, egomaniacal person. I am just glad she didn't somehow mess up Colleen's case and let Cameron go free.
Colleen is also unfortunate in that many people who read this book will not understand how psychological control, threats and physical torture can break a person's spirit to the point where they do not try to run away when given the chance. Everybody always thinks they will run away if put in that situation, but the truth is that we don't know what we will really do until we're the victim. It's clear that Cameron Hooker did his homework; he paid attention to and enjoyed all the painstaking details of torturing and breaking a woman. Perhaps Colleen was a bit less assertive than many other women, but at the same time, when you have been tortured for days it would seem like it's pretty easy to believe that you might be hunted down and killed if you try to run away in an unfamiliar area. And of course, there is the well-documented phenomenon of "Stockholm syndrome." In short, there are many reasons why a kidnap/ torture victim might not try to escape, and this book provides an excellent exploration of many of them.
Although this is a worthwhile book to read, I don't like the comparison to Jaycee Dugard being made in the advertising of this book. First of all, Colleen Stan was not a snatched child like Jaycee Dugard (or Elizabeth Smart or other child sex-slave kidnap victims). Colleen was a young adult hitch-hiker in her early 20s when she was taken, although her personality seems to have been shy and perhaps child-like in some ways. Second, the events in this book took place, and the book was written, many years before Jaycee Dugard's case entered the public eye, and it seems grossly exploitative to use Jaycee's name to try and sell additional copies of this book. Because of that exploitation and the situation with the prosecutor, I cannot recommend that people buy this book new and put money in corrupt pockets. It's a good read, though, so buy a used copy like I did.
Summary of Perfect Victim: The True Story of the Girl in the Box
Called the "sex slave," and "the girl in the box" case, this is the story behind Colleen Stan's terrifying, seven-year-long imprisonment by Cameron Hooker as told by the district attorney who tried the case. Too bizarre to be anythin g but true, it is a tale of riveting intensity and gripping courtroom drama. 8 page photo insert. Soon to be a TV miniseries. HC: Arbor House.Some may find it unbelievable that a 20-year-old Oregon woman could be enslaved by a sexual sadist for seven years--that even after being able to move freely during the day, she would allow him to lock her into a wooden box every night. Perhaps it's a minor failing of this book that the authors do not elaborate on the psychology that made her such a "perfect victim." In other respects, though, the story is well told, with an impressive accumulation of details: the woman's capture, the tortures she endured, the brainwashing techniques, the fiendish contraptions her captor constructed, the slave contract he made her sign, and the increasingly strained relations within the peculiar family that included master, slave, wife, and child, all inside a single-wide trailer. As well-known attorney and author Vincent Bugliosi writes, "A gripping and disturbing story of the secret life of apparently normal people. At once, horrific and engrossing."
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