REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- A minister testified Friday that he advised an alleged sex-slave victim to flee after she and her tormentor's wife told him about the divorcee's seven years of bondage.
'I advised that she pack up and leave at the earliest opportunity,' the Rev. Frank Dabney, pastor of the Church of Nazarene in Red Bluff, Calif., told a San Mateo County Superior Court jury.
Dabney said he gave Colleen Stan the advice after she and Janice Hooker met with him in August 1984.
Hooker's husband, Cameron, 31, a lumber mill worker, was charged with 16 counts of kidnapping, rape and false imprisonment. He was accused of abducting Stan, 28, in 1977 as she hitchhiked near Red Bluff and holding her as his sex slave until she fled from him as a result of the meeting with the minister.
Dabney testified that Stan and Mrs. Hooker 'were very nervous and upset' when they showed up at his office for their meeting. He said they gave him the details of Stan's captivity and emphasized she had been held against her will.
Earlier this week Stan told the court that Dabney advised her to escape after she and Mrs. Hooker drove her husband to work in the morning.
The minister also testified that during the summer before the meeting Mrs. Hooker often asked him questions about Bible passages dealing with husband-and-wife relationships.
He said she told him she was particularly interested in Abraham, his wife, Sarah, and Hagar, their slave.
'Janice said her husband had been using these passages to get her to submit to unnatural acts,' Dabney said, adding: 'I told her it was entirely wrong in today's world.'
Bruce Palmer, a criminalist with the state Department of Justice in Redding, Calif., testified that, when he searched the Hookers' mobile home, he found several pornographic magazines and newspapers in a freezer in a shed behind it. He said he also located leather handcuffs, straps and headgear in the shed.
James Weigand, another state criminalist, described for the jury a cinder-block pit he found under the shed. It was 8 feet by 8 feet and 8 feet deep, he said. The prosecutor alleged it had been used as a cell for Stan.
The trial, transferred from Red Bluff in northern California's Tehama County to Redwood City because of pretrial publicity, ended its third week. It was recessed until Tuesday.
