Unsolved Mysteries (2020) s03e08 Episode Script
The Ghost in Apartment 14
1
[eerie music playing faintly]
[Jodi Foster]
When I moved into that apartment,
I immediately
started having bizarre dreams.
I could see a dungeon.
Really weird and dark.
But there was one light in there.
And I saw a girl in there
and this weird couple.
Now, all of a sudden,
they're doing creepy things to this girl.
What I discovered
was there's a person that went missing
from that apartment.
I feel like her spirit
was trying to get in touch with someone.
I think she wants to be found.
[mysterious music playing]
[Jodi] Ready?
Yay!
-[Hannah Foster] Marilyn!
-[Jodi laughing]
-Hi!
-[exclaims]
-Hi!
-[Jodi] That's a big smile!
I am a grandma, I'm a mom,
and I share a name with a famous actress.
Jodie Foster, the director.
I was born in Orange County, California.
I had my daughter in 1997,
and I was a single mom,
and I moved to Chico, California.
I thought it was a beautiful town.
There was a college here.
It's a small town
but big enough to, like, raise a family.
It was quaint and beautiful,
and it felt like home.
[bicycle bell ringing]
[Jodi] When I first got to Chico,
I had seen a sign that said "For Rent,"
and it said "Walnut Garden apartment."
There's flowers.
There's a pool.
It looked like, you know,
just a regular, nice apartment complex.
We moved into the apartment,
apartment number 14,
January 31st, 2000.
Hannah was three,
and I was 33 at the time.
It's hard to explain,
but when I first moved in,
it didn't feel peaceful.
It felt kind of, like, dark.
And it had this bizarre smell.
Like, I thought maybe it was a chemical
smell from a carpet or something.
And I say to myself,
"Why are you feeling like this?"
And I just think,
"Okay, I'm here now in Chico."
"I am gonna start a really peaceful
and happy life
for me and my daughter, like, right now."
Then the shit hit the fan.
[menacing music playing]
[Jodi] The first things that
seemed out of the ordinary to me,
Hannah had this little pair of pink shoes.
I always kept them by the door
so that when we were ready to leave,
she could just put 'em on.
I remember my mom was trying to
get me ready to go out for the day,
and she was looking
for those pink little sneakers.
And she's like, "Where are the sneakers?"
You know, "Where are they at?"
I remember them being
right in the middle of the bed.
Like, out of nowhere.
And my mom was like,
"Did you put those there, Hannah?"
I'm like, "No."
She would be very adamant, like,
"Mom, it wasn't me!"
Like, day after day, the shoes
would be in the middle of the bed.
So now these shoes are moving,
and things progressively got stranger.
There was, like, salt and pepper shakers.
And in the morning, when I'd wake up,
they would be, like,
at the very edge of the table.
And I thought, "Am I going crazy here?"
The things that would happen
in the apartment are scary things,
but I remember just not really
understanding why it was happening.
[Jodi] The other thing that was
happening was I had these dreams.
I had a dream that there was a girl
walking down a street in Chico,
and I saw a couple
in either a blue or gray car,
and they asked the girl
if she wanted a ride.
During the dream, this man came behind her
and put something over her mouth.
Like, "Why am I
dreaming about this weird couple?"
Then one day, Hannah goes, "Hi!"
And I go, "Who are you saying hi to?"
[sinister music playing]
She goes, "That girl right there, Mom!"
I said, "Did someone walk by the window?"
"No, Mom. That girl right there!"
She's insisting that there's a girl.
And she said, "She has a white shirt on."
[Hannah] I remember calling her "My Liz."
And I remember seeing her vividly.
I just remember her eyes, and her face,
and her hair, and everything,
just thinking
she was just a normal friend.
Just somebody in the house.
Just like one of her regular friends
that would come over.
[Jodi] One night, me and Hannah,
we went out to dinner.
When we came back,
the phone, it was like one of those
that you hang on the wall.
We found the receiver in the back bedroom,
and all the toys that were
in Hannah's room were, like, in a pile.
We had Hannah's
Sleep and Snore Ernie Doll.
And Ernie was on the top of the pile,
and he had, like, a noose around his neck.
A little shoe string or something
on his neck.
I was shaken. I grabbed Hannah,
I scooped her up,
and I ran out the front door.
So I call the Chico Police, and I say,
"My daughter and I went out to dinner,
we came home, and this is what we found."
And so, the police took a report,
and on the other end of the phone,
they're like,
"Mmm-hmm. Okay, lady, whatever."
[Hannah] I can't even imagine
what my mom went through.
Having to take care of your kid
and also deal with these, you know,
bizarre things that are happening.
[Jodi] It all culminated into
this one night in February of 2000.
I woke up in the middle of the night,
and then I hear
[imitates static crackling]
white, staticky TV noise.
How's the TV on?
You had to literally get up
and turn it on.
The cupboards were flapping open.
The burner in the kitchen was on high.
[doll on recording] I feel great!
[Jodi] All of a sudden,
the Ernie doll is going
[doll] I feel great! I feel great!
[Jodi] "I feel great!" Like, crazily.
[doll] I feel great! I feel great!
[Jodi] I thought,
"The battery is going dead."
[doll] I feel great!
So I take the batteries out of the doll.
[doll on recording]
Twinkle, twinkle, little star ♪
-How I wonder ♪
-[Hannah] The Ernie doll was scary.
[doll] little star ♪
[Hannah] I remember it going off
in the middle of the night,
and then my mom freaking out
because there was no batteries in it.
[doll on recording] I feel great!
I feel great! I feel great!
And then, all of a sudden, boom.
Lights are all on.
"Holy hell! Like, what's happening?
Like, what?"
[doll on recording] I feel great!
I feel great! I feel great!
[Jodi] So I went to the neighbor,
who was actually
the manager of the apartment complex.
I knock on her door, and I say,
"There's something wrong."
So she grabbed her little poodle,
and she went into the apartment.
The dog jumps out of her arms,
and it's barking like [imitates barking]
[doll] I feel great!
And then all of a sudden,
there's this lamp with the cord on it,
and the cord is swinging in the air
like a jump rope.
-[doll] I feel great!
-[Jodi] We're all just screaming.
[Jodi] The dog's barking.
She grabs the dog.
[doll] I feel great!
We hightailed it out of there.
So, by now,
it's about six o'clock in the morning.
And I'm sitting out at the pool
just crying.
And then this older man
who was walking his dog,
who had lived there for,
like, about 25 years,
he says, "You know, Jodi,
nobody lives in that apartment very long."
And I go, "What? What do you mean?
What are you talking about?"
And I'm crying at this point.
Like, "Please tell me why."
So he looks at me, and he says,
"There was a girl who lived there
in the apartment."
"Apartment number 14."
"I can't remember her name,
but she's been missing ever since."
[Al Shamblin] On January 31st, 1976,
the Chico Police Department
received a missing person report
on Marie Elizabeth Spannhake.
She went by the nickname "Marliz."
The missing persons report indicated
she was a white female,
5'5", brown hair, 110 pounds.
Her boyfriend indicated in the report
that they had gone to a flea market
in Chico,
and they got into a disagreement
about something,
and Marliz decided to walk home
instead of riding with him.
He last seen her walking
on Mangrove Avenue,
away from this flea market,
and no one had seen nor heard
from Marie Elizabeth Spannhake
since January 31st, 1976.
[Martha Spannhake] Marliz was my sister.
She was only in Chico about two months
before she disappeared.
We are from Cleveland, Ohio.
There were seven of us all together
in the family.
I was the oldest girl,
and then Marliz was
three years younger than me,
and she did have a good personality.
She was very outgoing.
She was very friendly.
She had this long,
naturally curly brown hair,
and she had eyes as blue as the sky.
She was very beautiful.
In 1975,
Marliz worked with this hoodlum,
my mom called him, John Baruth.
They fell in love.
He came from California,
and he was moving back to California
and asked Marliz to come with him.
And she did.
I think Marliz's ultimate dream
was to become an actor.
She was just so happy.
And I was excited for her.
A big step.
And then she wrote me a couple of times.
She told me that she wasn't
liking it too much in California.
It wasn't what she had dreamed it to be.
I think she was having trouble with
John a little bit, you know, just spats.
And she had nobody to run to.
Nobody to talk to.
Marliz said she was coming home in April.
And she never came home. Yeah.
[Jodi] I knew there was something going on
in that apartment that was not me.
I think some people are born
with certain spiritual qualities.
Some people are more sensitive
or empathic than others.
And I think that, for some reason,
my daughter and I both are just sensitive
to subtle paranormal energy.
And the weird thing is,
when I moved into that apartment,
I felt this
impending doom sort of feeling,
like something terrible
was about to happen.
My bizarre dreams
progressively got weirder and stranger.
-[sinister music playing]
-[Jodi] Now I'm seeing a location,
and I'm seeing a couple
with a young woman.
She was a teenager.
She had, like, auburn hair in the dream.
And I could see that they were in a house.
Like a, um, root cellar.
It looked kind of strangely
like a dungeon.
And there was this weird hook,
like a really big logging hook.
They had this girl, like
There was something around her arms,
and then she had something on her mouth.
Now, all of a sudden,
they're doing sadistic
and weird things to this girl.
Like, sexually creepy things.
I remember my mom telling me about
having dreams about
some weird guy and some lady.
And it gave her a lot of anxiety
and a lot of questions.
It's hard to talk about a little bit
because it gives me a little bit of PTSD,
um, because of the things
that happened in that apartment.
I didn't want something
to happen to Hannah.
So being a single mom,
I took my daughter and I moved.
[eerie music playing]
[Jodi] I only stayed in that apartment
for, like, three months.
That's not a very long time,
but it seemed like forever.
I just thought, "I don't wanna
have anything to do with this anymore."
And so we went
to a different apartment in Chico.
When I got out of there,
I thought it was done.
This was behind me.
I ended up dating this guy.
And so, one day, he came across
this book called the Perfect Victim.
He starts reading through this book,
and then he comes back to my house,
and he's like, "Jodi!"
"Oh my God!
You're not gonna believe this!"
There was a girl that had
gone missing from my apartment.
And he found an article
about a missing girl
from 1976.
She had a nickname.
"Marliz."
[dark music playing]
[Jodi] I was like, "Oh my God."
Hannah, when she was little,
kept saying she was talking to somebody
called "My Liz."
I remember my mom telling me about
the research she was doing.
She's like, "I need to tell you something.
I need to talk to you about something."
"Do you remember My Liz?"
I'm like, "Yes."
And she's like,
"I'm gonna show you something."
And then she showed me the picture of her.
And I'm like, "That is the girl
that was in the apartment with us."
[Jodi] My stomach dropped.
That was so freaky. Oh my God.
And that's when I'm like, "Where is she?"
"Where's Marliz?"
"How come no one
has been able to find her?"
Then I learned that
the disappearance of Marliz
had been connected possibly
to a couple in Red Bluff.
[Al] November 7th, 1984,
my supervisor,
who was head of the detective division,
came to me and said,
"I need you to respond
to the Church of Nazarene."
The first thing
that I see when I get to the church
is Pastor Dabney
and a woman named Janice Hooker.
I notice that Janice
was extremely emotionally upset.
She indicated that, in 1976,
her husband Cameron
had kidnapped
and killed a girl in Chico, California.
Janice's reasoning to come forward
was she was afraid of Cameron.
Also, Janice had a lot of guilt built up
for what had occurred
over the years at different times.
[Kevin Hale] Detective Shamblin realized
that some of this information may
be incriminating towards Janice herself,
so Al read her her rights, per Miranda,
and after reading her rights,
Janice decided she didn't
wanna talk anymore without an attorney.
[Al] So then I called
the District Attorney's Office,
gave the district attorney
the information that I had
and what information that I didn't have.
And he, at that time,
decided to grant immunity to Janice
for her cooperation.
After granting the immunity,
I interviewed Janice in detail.
Janice told me that the victim
that they kidnapped in Chico
was named "Marliz."
Marliz Spannhake.
[menacing music playing]
[Al] On January 31st, 1976,
Janice and Cameron
had seen her walking on Mangrove Avenue.
And Cameron had circled her
a couple of times.
Janice knew what he was going to do.
She knew he wanted to kidnap a woman.
[Carla Norton] She was walking along.
He offers a ride.
He's there with his wife.
It looks very safe.
She gets in.
And then Cameron is asking questions.
"What's your name? Where are you from?
Where are you going?"
She didn't have family nearby.
No one knew where she'd gone.
He was looking for this type of woman
who didn't have any ties to the community.
[Al] At one point,
she started to get out of the vehicle,
and Cameron grabbed her
with a knife to her throat,
drug her back into the car,
and they placed a head box
over the top of her head.
[Kevin] The head box was constructed
of wood and Styrofoam,
and it had hinges on it.
So he would enclose the head
with this head box,
encompass the entire head
inside the head box,
and with that foam in there,
it basically prevented the person
to be heard from any distance.
[Carla] If someone
abducted you off the street
and put a 20-pound head box
over your head,
you'd be so disoriented,
you wouldn't know what was going on.
But Cameron wanted to muffle screams.
He was very concerned
about his captive alerting the neighbors.
And then they drove about 40 miles
all the way back to the house
on Oak Street in Red Bluff.
[Kevin] Janice said that when they
got back to their house in Red Bluff,
they pulled up to the garage
in the back of the house.
When Janice and Cameron
owned this house, none of this
none of this was here,
so they actually pulled the car
into the garage, parked the car.
Cameron got out and closed the door.
Janice was in the house for a few minutes.
She came back out, at which time
Marliz was outside the vehicle,
the head box was off of her,
and she was in a disoriented state.
Janice could smell ether in the air.
She asked him what he had done,
and he said he had sprayed starting fluid
into the rag
and put that over Marliz's mouth
to make her semi-unconscious.
After getting out of the garage area,
they carried her into the basement.
Although he was fascinated
with the torturing
and the dominance of people,
Cameron did not like the screaming
of somebody he was torturing.
So Cameron read that
if you cut a person's vocal cords,
they will no longer be able
to yell or scream.
Janice said that Cameron lifted Marliz up
and took her up to the bathroom.
Cameron was very invested
in keeping this sex slave
utterly cowed and utterly terrorized.
But Cameron made a mistake with Marliz.
[Kevin] Janice, at first, refused to
help him with the cutting of her throat,
and Cameron threatened her
that if she didn't help him,
he was going to do the same thing to her.
So she ultimately agreed and sat down
next to Marliz on the bathroom floor
while Cameron started cutting
one side of Marliz's throat
to try and reach her vocal cords.
But he didn't know what he was doing.
Marliz began bleeding heavily,
so Cameron kind of got freaked out.
He stopped because he realized
he wasn't gonna be successful.
Cameron lifted Marliz up
and took her back down into the basement.
There's a couple
holes up in here where these
these eye hooks would have existed.
Janice came down here
after Cameron had cut her throat.
She saw Marliz hanging from the beam.
The rope was around her neck.
Janice said she felt that
Cameron had strangled her with the rope
and then hung her by the beam, unclothed,
with a pillowcase over her head.
She was dead at that point in time.
[Al] Janice said they then
carried the body back out to the car.
By this time, it was about
two o'clock in the morning.
They drove 30 miles
north of Red Bluff on Interstate 5.
They then took Highway 44 east
towards Lassen Park,
where they turned off on a dirt road.
Janice said Cameron dug a shallow grave
and buried
Marie Elizabeth Spannhake's body.
After the burial,
he burned all of her clothing,
all of her belongings.
The kidnapping took, from start to finish,
about ten to 12 hours.
So he kidnapped her, killed her,
buried her all within a half of a day.
During my initial interview with Janice,
she started talking about the kidnapping
of another victim, Colleen Stan,
in Red Bluff, California.
[Carla] Colleen Stan came down from Eugene
and was hitchhiking through town
to surprise a friend.
Cameron and Janice pick her up.
He threatens her, forces her down,
puts the head box on her.
When you look at the abduction
of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake,
it very much mirrors that of Colleen Stan.
Marliz was 18. Colleen was 20.
They both had long hair.
They had no association
to the surrounding area.
[Al] Janice told us that Cameron
kept Colleen as a hostage for seven years.
Against Colleen, he had committed
a number of sex crimes.
He kept her under a water bed
for 20 hours a day and tortured her.
And then, in 1984, Janice comes to Colleen
and tells her
that she's going to leave Cameron.
I think Janice was having
a spiritual crisis.
She was 16 when she married Cameron
and 17 when Janice says he murders Marliz.
And now she knows her husband
is capable of murder.
So she has this period of time of years,
I mean, almost nine years,
where she's trying to do
what Cameron wants her to do
and not get into trouble.
So this is a very dangerous situation,
if you're a female,
to be in that household.
She was coming unglued.
She was mentally just at her last rope.
[Al] When Janice comes to her,
Colleen begs Janice not to go
because Colleen is afraid of
what's gonna happen to her
if it's just her and Cameron.
So Janice and Colleen
just kept it a big secret
until Cameron went to work
the next morning,
and then they packed their belongings,
and both of them left
and went to Janice's parents' house.
[Carla] For a while,
Janice stayed with her parents.
Colleen hadn't contacted the police.
She had promised Janice that she wouldn't.
[Al] Colleen told her family
some of what happened,
but it wasn't until Janice came to us
three months later
that she said anything to law enforcement.
[Colleen] The police called,
and so then I talked to them
for several hours,
giving my statement about what happened.
Afterwards, they said,
"Well, everything you say
matches what Janice told us."
And so then they said,
"Well, do you know
anything about this woman, Marliz?"
And I said, "The only thing I can tell you
is that he had this picture that I saw."
So then I described her,
and they said, "That's Marliz."
[Al] At that point, we knew we had
a kidnapping and homicide in Chico.
We also had the other kidnapping
with Colleen Stan,
but to be able to continue
with the homicide of Marliz,
we needed Janice's cooperation.
[Carla] They didn't have a body,
didn't have any evidence.
They had nothing
except Janice's testimony.
And so police realized that,
without her, they didn't have a case.
Without having a body,
it would be very difficult
to prosecute someone
and obtain a conviction.
[tense music playing]
[Al] So we wanted Janice to go with us
and show us where they had
buried Marie Elizabeth Spannhake's body.
We drove several trips out east of Redding
on both Highway 44 and Highway 299,
checking all the roads
off on the right-hand side
to see if Janice could locate the road
that they had taken.
[Carla] There's a lot of country out there
that you could easily dispose of a body
and nobody would ever find it.
[Al] After taking Janice
on a number of trips
and not being able
to locate the burial site,
the District Attorney's Office
felt that there was not enough information
to pursue the homicide.
The risk would be that
if he took the homicide to trial now
and lost it,
that we would not be able
to retry Cameron for that.
[Al] The homicide
of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake
was the most important to us,
but we pursued
the other kidnap case of Colleen Stan
to make sure that Cameron went to jail.
[reporter on TV]
Hooker was arrested and charged
with 17 counts of rape, kidnap,
sodomy, and false imprisonment.
[Al] In 1985, Cameron Hooker went to trial
for the sex crimes
and kidnapping of Colleen Stan.
[reporter] Hooker kept her
naked and handcuffed
inside a wooden, coffin-sized box.
[Carla] When the story broke,
everyone focused on Colleen Stan.
[reporter 1] kidnapping Colleen Stan
[reporter 2] assaulting Colleen Stan
[reporter 3] Colleen Stan has a boyfriend
[reporter 4] Colleen Stan
It was such a sensational story
to be kidnapped and held captive
for over seven years.
[reporter on TV] She was stripped,
slashed with a leather whip,
and then watched as Hooker
had sex with his wife on a tabletop.
Hooker is on trial
How can a person do that to somebody,
you know, and not feel bad?
He's more than capable
of torturing somebody.
I know because he did it to me.
He did it through hanging.
He did it through whipping.
He did it through torture.
He did it through electric shocking.
He did it through burning.
[Colleen] In the house on Oak Street,
which was the same one
that he took Marliz to,
he tells me, "Go ahead and scream.
I'll cut your vocal cords."
"I've done it before."
Then I find out about Marliz,
and I find out
that one of the things he did to her
was he cut her vocal cords
'cause she was screaming
and screaming and screaming,
and he wanted to shut her up.
He's more than capable
of murdering somebody.
I have no doubt.
[reporter on TV] The young woman,
speaking in a faint voice,
recalled her abduction at knifepoint
in May 1977.
The trial was six weeks
and there was a lot of media there.
[reporter 1] She was hung from a ceiling
of Cameron Hooker's basement
She said Hooker chained her hand and foot,
shocked her with electrical cords.
[reporter 2] She had this
appalling device locked over her head.
There was the torture, the forcible rapes.
[reporter 1] Years of confinement
in a wooden box
[reporter 2] "The situation was perfect,"
he said. "She was a good slave."
I just learned that the more I fought him,
the longer the torture was,
the more it went on,
the more excited he got.
Where if I could just try
to tolerate the pain the best I could
and let him do his whatever he did,
well, then he would
kind of lose interest, you know?
And, uh
And it would be over quicker.
[Carla] The details that came out
during that trial were just staggering,
but none of that had to do with Marliz.
[reporter] against Hooker,
prosecutor Christine McGuire told the jury
that Hooker alternated
between sexual torture and mind control.
[Carla] The prosecutor
had wanted to introduce Marliz
to show that he had a method
and a history of this kind of behavior.
It does appear to have what is
I would guess is air holes in it.
[Carla] But everything about Marliz
was kept out as too prejudicial
because there's no evidence of a murder.
We were forbidden from mentioning Marliz
or saying anything about her in the trial.
All we could talk about
was what he did to me,
and Judge Knight said,
at his sentencing hearing, he said
I consider this defendant to be
probably the most dangerous psychopath
that I've ever dealt with,
if for no other reason
than he appears to be
exactly the opposite of what he is.
[Colleen] He said,
"I feel you'll always be a danger to women
as long as you're alive."
And so he told him, "I'm gonna give you
as much time as I can."
And he did.
Cameron was convicted on ten counts.
Kidnapping,
rape,
sodomy, other sexual charges
that could be sentenced consecutively,
and he was sentenced to 104 years.
[reporter] Serving the sentences
for all the crimes at once.
[Al] Cameron was sent to prison,
and the Colleen Stan case was resolved.
[somber music playing]
[Al] The homicide of
Marie Elizabeth Spannhake was still open.
But it was not active
because we didn't really have
any new information or avenues to proceed
that we could see.
[Martha] I think I was just so angry,
probably at everybody,
for not being able to find her body.
You know?
Because we all knew she was gone.
I was just more angry
that nothing was said or done about it
during the trial.
This is all after his trial was over with,
and I'm like,
"He's in there for kidnapping
and whatever else he did to Colleen,
but what about my sister's murder?"
[Jodi] When I moved out
of the Walnut Garden apartment,
things were normal, you know.
I never experienced anything weird
physically moving in my apartment
or anything again.
When I got out of there,
it was like a lifesaver for me.
But about a year later,
all of a sudden,
I would have dreams again.
And I'm thinking,
"Good God, I thought this was behind me."
"I thought this was behind me."
There was, like, the couple.
The man was really tall in my dream,
and the woman was short,
and it was dusk,
and they were kind of stalking somebody
or looking for somebody.
And then I would always hear
the number "35.76,"
and then I would see an "A," like,
a capital "A" and "17"
as I was, like, flying in my dream.
I had no idea what that meant at all.
Is it a location?
And that's when I kind of was like,
"Okay."
"Do I have information
that could help somebody?"
And all of a sudden,
I just get this feeling.
Stop what you're doing,
and call the Red Bluff Police Department.
[Kevin] In 2008, we received a phone call
from a person who identified herself
as Jodi Foster, who lived in Chico.
Said that she had
lived in Marliz's apartment
and wanted to provide us information
that she thought was related to
Marliz's murder and potential grave site.
[Jodi] It went silent on the other end,
and I thought he probably hung up on me.
And he says to me,
"Why are you calling right now?"
He goes, "We are in the middle
of opening up a cold case
with Marie Elizabeth Spannhake."
He goes, "I've never been so freaked out
as I was just now by you."
I met with Detective Hale
at a coffee shop.
He asked all kinds of questions.
He asked me what I saw.
He talked to me about the dreams.
[Kevin] I think anytime, uh,
you're gettin' information from somebody
where they're telling you
they're having dreams about something
and they wanna provide you
this information they think
is related to a criminal case,
you're probably
gonna be a little skeptical.
[Jodi] I was so nervous.
I was afraid I was gonna,
you know, um, be criticized.
And then I thought, "It doesn't matter
if you guys think I'm crazy."
"I have to give you this information."
And because it was an open murder case,
he wasn't allowed to tell me anything.
What I could do is tell him information,
but he couldn't confirm or deny anything.
She told us that she was seeing the
letter A and the numbers 1-7, as in "A17."
She believed that was a road that Cameron
and Janice took to Marliz's grave site.
And there is a road in the area of
going out 44 that is A17.
We wanted to get more thorough
interviews done with Janice
and then see if we can try
and put together a potential burial site.
The first time we talked to Janice
was in 2010 in Chico.
We introduced ourselves as the
investigators now assigned to the case,
and I think she may have
still been concerned
that she could potentially be charged,
so upon meeting her,
one of the first things we did
was remind her that
she had an immunity agreement.
We were not there to arrest her,
but we were there to try
and get some answers for the case.
[ominous music playing]
[Kevin] When we interviewed Janice,
we did feel that we got
a better descriptive area of the road
that they turned down off of 44.
She gave us a little bit more descriptions
of some structures
that they had passed on the road, so
she still gave us information
we felt was good for the case.
Right now, we're on Highway 44.
We're a little ways east
of Shingletown in California.
This is one of the primary locations where
we believe Marliz Spannhake is buried,
but it's still a large area.
It's vast, so pinpointing her
is becoming very difficult,
but we feel like we've narrowed it down
to a good approximate area
where we believe she's at.
[Kevin] The case with Marliz is still open
and is still under an investigation
by the Red Bluff Police Department.
-[mysterious music playing]
-It's always been a homicide case.
Chico Police Department still has it open
as a missing persons case
because she was reported missing
to the Chico Police Department in 1976.
-Hi, Jodi. How you been?
-Good, how are you?
-Good! Nice to see you.
-Yeah.
-It's been a long time. Yeah.
-Long time.
[Kevin] To this day, we've never
talked to Jodi about the case
as far as the numbers for the area
we thought was a potential grave site
and the number she gave us.
I don't think Jodi knows how close she was
when she contacted us in July of 2008.
The district attorney and I
have discussed talking about it now.
Would that potentially damage the case
in a future court hearing?
-Yeah.
-And we decided it would not.
So the hope is, by talking about it now,
that we can get some closure on it.
At the time you called us,
that just happened to be the time
when we opened the case back up.
-So that
-Yeah. No I had no idea.
in intensifying
our search for Marliz's grave site.
We were searching an area
where we feel she could be at.
I don't know if you remember
when we talked to you,
but you said you were
envisioning this number, "35.76."
-Yeah. Right.
-You kept seeing that number.
And you kinda felt like that was the
distance from the house to her grave site.
And I think you said
in a northeasterly direction.
Yeah.
After we talked to you, we went back
and used a mapping software
and actually pinpointed the house
and where we thought she may be at.
Yeah.
And the number you gave us was 35.76,
and the number we came up
with that mapping software was 35.77.
So it was very close.
-What?
-It had some of us a little worried.
I kinda freaked out too, 'cause you had
no idea where we were searching,
and all the elements that Janice gave us
in her statement were on that road.
So Janice and I gave similar
area information?
Correct.
And me not even knowing anything,
just having random dreams.
Yes.
For years, I've been wondering if any
of anything that I gave you was relevant
or how it helped on any level.
It definitely helped reinforce the area
we thought she's at.
So, hopefully, you know, this information,
and hopefully
sitting here talking about it
will help get some sort of resolution
for Marliz and her family.
-[tranquil music playing]
-[Jodi] I've always had a sense
that there was
something other than me out there.
You know, bigger than me.
And I want to be a person
known for being caring, empathetic.
And if I have something
that can help another person,
then I want to help that person.
I feel like the spirit of Marliz
was trying to get in touch with someone.
And I want her soul to find rest,
really, you know?
And if I can help her,
that's what I wanna do.
[Hannah] Is she falling asleep?
[Al] I retired from
the Red Bluff Police Department
in June of 2007.
And the only case that is still active
is this case,
the homicide involving Marliz.
Well, any time you have a cold case,
you always wanna try
to obtain closure for the family.
You wanna see justice for the victim.
So there's always gonna be an effort
on law enforcement's part
to try and close these type of cases.
[Carla] Cameron was
sentenced to 104 years.
You would think that he would be in prison
for the rest of his life.
But, unfortunately,
it does happen that people
that shouldn't be set free are set free,
and then they repeat their crimes.
[Kevin] Cameron has
already been granted parole
and will go to a county jail
somewhere in the Alameda area, I believe,
and will actually start
mental health evaluations.
So he will probably be held
at a mental health hospital
for several years.
But at any time, he could
be released from that, potentially.
[Martha] This was the apartment building
my sister Marliz moved into.
She was gonna start her new life
here in Chico.
I was kind of hoping
she would realize her dream out here.
[wistful music playing]
[Martha] Sometimes I would
see movies and go,
"God, that looks like Marliz," you know?
But then, after a while,
you're, like, hoping, I think.
Just blind hope.
I think Marliz's story never got told.
Her story never got finished.
There was no body.
Cameron Hooker went to prison
for what he did to Colleen,
and my sister's still out there
waiting for justice.
[mysterious music playing]
[eerie music playing faintly]
[Jodi Foster]
When I moved into that apartment,
I immediately
started having bizarre dreams.
I could see a dungeon.
Really weird and dark.
But there was one light in there.
And I saw a girl in there
and this weird couple.
Now, all of a sudden,
they're doing creepy things to this girl.
What I discovered
was there's a person that went missing
from that apartment.
I feel like her spirit
was trying to get in touch with someone.
I think she wants to be found.
[mysterious music playing]
[Jodi] Ready?
Yay!
-[Hannah Foster] Marilyn!
-[Jodi laughing]
-Hi!
-[exclaims]
-Hi!
-[Jodi] That's a big smile!
I am a grandma, I'm a mom,
and I share a name with a famous actress.
Jodie Foster, the director.
I was born in Orange County, California.
I had my daughter in 1997,
and I was a single mom,
and I moved to Chico, California.
I thought it was a beautiful town.
There was a college here.
It's a small town
but big enough to, like, raise a family.
It was quaint and beautiful,
and it felt like home.
[bicycle bell ringing]
[Jodi] When I first got to Chico,
I had seen a sign that said "For Rent,"
and it said "Walnut Garden apartment."
There's flowers.
There's a pool.
It looked like, you know,
just a regular, nice apartment complex.
We moved into the apartment,
apartment number 14,
January 31st, 2000.
Hannah was three,
and I was 33 at the time.
It's hard to explain,
but when I first moved in,
it didn't feel peaceful.
It felt kind of, like, dark.
And it had this bizarre smell.
Like, I thought maybe it was a chemical
smell from a carpet or something.
And I say to myself,
"Why are you feeling like this?"
And I just think,
"Okay, I'm here now in Chico."
"I am gonna start a really peaceful
and happy life
for me and my daughter, like, right now."
Then the shit hit the fan.
[menacing music playing]
[Jodi] The first things that
seemed out of the ordinary to me,
Hannah had this little pair of pink shoes.
I always kept them by the door
so that when we were ready to leave,
she could just put 'em on.
I remember my mom was trying to
get me ready to go out for the day,
and she was looking
for those pink little sneakers.
And she's like, "Where are the sneakers?"
You know, "Where are they at?"
I remember them being
right in the middle of the bed.
Like, out of nowhere.
And my mom was like,
"Did you put those there, Hannah?"
I'm like, "No."
She would be very adamant, like,
"Mom, it wasn't me!"
Like, day after day, the shoes
would be in the middle of the bed.
So now these shoes are moving,
and things progressively got stranger.
There was, like, salt and pepper shakers.
And in the morning, when I'd wake up,
they would be, like,
at the very edge of the table.
And I thought, "Am I going crazy here?"
The things that would happen
in the apartment are scary things,
but I remember just not really
understanding why it was happening.
[Jodi] The other thing that was
happening was I had these dreams.
I had a dream that there was a girl
walking down a street in Chico,
and I saw a couple
in either a blue or gray car,
and they asked the girl
if she wanted a ride.
During the dream, this man came behind her
and put something over her mouth.
Like, "Why am I
dreaming about this weird couple?"
Then one day, Hannah goes, "Hi!"
And I go, "Who are you saying hi to?"
[sinister music playing]
She goes, "That girl right there, Mom!"
I said, "Did someone walk by the window?"
"No, Mom. That girl right there!"
She's insisting that there's a girl.
And she said, "She has a white shirt on."
[Hannah] I remember calling her "My Liz."
And I remember seeing her vividly.
I just remember her eyes, and her face,
and her hair, and everything,
just thinking
she was just a normal friend.
Just somebody in the house.
Just like one of her regular friends
that would come over.
[Jodi] One night, me and Hannah,
we went out to dinner.
When we came back,
the phone, it was like one of those
that you hang on the wall.
We found the receiver in the back bedroom,
and all the toys that were
in Hannah's room were, like, in a pile.
We had Hannah's
Sleep and Snore Ernie Doll.
And Ernie was on the top of the pile,
and he had, like, a noose around his neck.
A little shoe string or something
on his neck.
I was shaken. I grabbed Hannah,
I scooped her up,
and I ran out the front door.
So I call the Chico Police, and I say,
"My daughter and I went out to dinner,
we came home, and this is what we found."
And so, the police took a report,
and on the other end of the phone,
they're like,
"Mmm-hmm. Okay, lady, whatever."
[Hannah] I can't even imagine
what my mom went through.
Having to take care of your kid
and also deal with these, you know,
bizarre things that are happening.
[Jodi] It all culminated into
this one night in February of 2000.
I woke up in the middle of the night,
and then I hear
[imitates static crackling]
white, staticky TV noise.
How's the TV on?
You had to literally get up
and turn it on.
The cupboards were flapping open.
The burner in the kitchen was on high.
[doll on recording] I feel great!
[Jodi] All of a sudden,
the Ernie doll is going
[doll] I feel great! I feel great!
[Jodi] "I feel great!" Like, crazily.
[doll] I feel great! I feel great!
[Jodi] I thought,
"The battery is going dead."
[doll] I feel great!
So I take the batteries out of the doll.
[doll on recording]
Twinkle, twinkle, little star ♪
-How I wonder ♪
-[Hannah] The Ernie doll was scary.
[doll] little star ♪
[Hannah] I remember it going off
in the middle of the night,
and then my mom freaking out
because there was no batteries in it.
[doll on recording] I feel great!
I feel great! I feel great!
And then, all of a sudden, boom.
Lights are all on.
"Holy hell! Like, what's happening?
Like, what?"
[doll on recording] I feel great!
I feel great! I feel great!
[Jodi] So I went to the neighbor,
who was actually
the manager of the apartment complex.
I knock on her door, and I say,
"There's something wrong."
So she grabbed her little poodle,
and she went into the apartment.
The dog jumps out of her arms,
and it's barking like [imitates barking]
[doll] I feel great!
And then all of a sudden,
there's this lamp with the cord on it,
and the cord is swinging in the air
like a jump rope.
-[doll] I feel great!
-[Jodi] We're all just screaming.
[Jodi] The dog's barking.
She grabs the dog.
[doll] I feel great!
We hightailed it out of there.
So, by now,
it's about six o'clock in the morning.
And I'm sitting out at the pool
just crying.
And then this older man
who was walking his dog,
who had lived there for,
like, about 25 years,
he says, "You know, Jodi,
nobody lives in that apartment very long."
And I go, "What? What do you mean?
What are you talking about?"
And I'm crying at this point.
Like, "Please tell me why."
So he looks at me, and he says,
"There was a girl who lived there
in the apartment."
"Apartment number 14."
"I can't remember her name,
but she's been missing ever since."
[Al Shamblin] On January 31st, 1976,
the Chico Police Department
received a missing person report
on Marie Elizabeth Spannhake.
She went by the nickname "Marliz."
The missing persons report indicated
she was a white female,
5'5", brown hair, 110 pounds.
Her boyfriend indicated in the report
that they had gone to a flea market
in Chico,
and they got into a disagreement
about something,
and Marliz decided to walk home
instead of riding with him.
He last seen her walking
on Mangrove Avenue,
away from this flea market,
and no one had seen nor heard
from Marie Elizabeth Spannhake
since January 31st, 1976.
[Martha Spannhake] Marliz was my sister.
She was only in Chico about two months
before she disappeared.
We are from Cleveland, Ohio.
There were seven of us all together
in the family.
I was the oldest girl,
and then Marliz was
three years younger than me,
and she did have a good personality.
She was very outgoing.
She was very friendly.
She had this long,
naturally curly brown hair,
and she had eyes as blue as the sky.
She was very beautiful.
In 1975,
Marliz worked with this hoodlum,
my mom called him, John Baruth.
They fell in love.
He came from California,
and he was moving back to California
and asked Marliz to come with him.
And she did.
I think Marliz's ultimate dream
was to become an actor.
She was just so happy.
And I was excited for her.
A big step.
And then she wrote me a couple of times.
She told me that she wasn't
liking it too much in California.
It wasn't what she had dreamed it to be.
I think she was having trouble with
John a little bit, you know, just spats.
And she had nobody to run to.
Nobody to talk to.
Marliz said she was coming home in April.
And she never came home. Yeah.
[Jodi] I knew there was something going on
in that apartment that was not me.
I think some people are born
with certain spiritual qualities.
Some people are more sensitive
or empathic than others.
And I think that, for some reason,
my daughter and I both are just sensitive
to subtle paranormal energy.
And the weird thing is,
when I moved into that apartment,
I felt this
impending doom sort of feeling,
like something terrible
was about to happen.
My bizarre dreams
progressively got weirder and stranger.
-[sinister music playing]
-[Jodi] Now I'm seeing a location,
and I'm seeing a couple
with a young woman.
She was a teenager.
She had, like, auburn hair in the dream.
And I could see that they were in a house.
Like a, um, root cellar.
It looked kind of strangely
like a dungeon.
And there was this weird hook,
like a really big logging hook.
They had this girl, like
There was something around her arms,
and then she had something on her mouth.
Now, all of a sudden,
they're doing sadistic
and weird things to this girl.
Like, sexually creepy things.
I remember my mom telling me about
having dreams about
some weird guy and some lady.
And it gave her a lot of anxiety
and a lot of questions.
It's hard to talk about a little bit
because it gives me a little bit of PTSD,
um, because of the things
that happened in that apartment.
I didn't want something
to happen to Hannah.
So being a single mom,
I took my daughter and I moved.
[eerie music playing]
[Jodi] I only stayed in that apartment
for, like, three months.
That's not a very long time,
but it seemed like forever.
I just thought, "I don't wanna
have anything to do with this anymore."
And so we went
to a different apartment in Chico.
When I got out of there,
I thought it was done.
This was behind me.
I ended up dating this guy.
And so, one day, he came across
this book called the Perfect Victim.
He starts reading through this book,
and then he comes back to my house,
and he's like, "Jodi!"
"Oh my God!
You're not gonna believe this!"
There was a girl that had
gone missing from my apartment.
And he found an article
about a missing girl
from 1976.
She had a nickname.
"Marliz."
[dark music playing]
[Jodi] I was like, "Oh my God."
Hannah, when she was little,
kept saying she was talking to somebody
called "My Liz."
I remember my mom telling me about
the research she was doing.
She's like, "I need to tell you something.
I need to talk to you about something."
"Do you remember My Liz?"
I'm like, "Yes."
And she's like,
"I'm gonna show you something."
And then she showed me the picture of her.
And I'm like, "That is the girl
that was in the apartment with us."
[Jodi] My stomach dropped.
That was so freaky. Oh my God.
And that's when I'm like, "Where is she?"
"Where's Marliz?"
"How come no one
has been able to find her?"
Then I learned that
the disappearance of Marliz
had been connected possibly
to a couple in Red Bluff.
[Al] November 7th, 1984,
my supervisor,
who was head of the detective division,
came to me and said,
"I need you to respond
to the Church of Nazarene."
The first thing
that I see when I get to the church
is Pastor Dabney
and a woman named Janice Hooker.
I notice that Janice
was extremely emotionally upset.
She indicated that, in 1976,
her husband Cameron
had kidnapped
and killed a girl in Chico, California.
Janice's reasoning to come forward
was she was afraid of Cameron.
Also, Janice had a lot of guilt built up
for what had occurred
over the years at different times.
[Kevin Hale] Detective Shamblin realized
that some of this information may
be incriminating towards Janice herself,
so Al read her her rights, per Miranda,
and after reading her rights,
Janice decided she didn't
wanna talk anymore without an attorney.
[Al] So then I called
the District Attorney's Office,
gave the district attorney
the information that I had
and what information that I didn't have.
And he, at that time,
decided to grant immunity to Janice
for her cooperation.
After granting the immunity,
I interviewed Janice in detail.
Janice told me that the victim
that they kidnapped in Chico
was named "Marliz."
Marliz Spannhake.
[menacing music playing]
[Al] On January 31st, 1976,
Janice and Cameron
had seen her walking on Mangrove Avenue.
And Cameron had circled her
a couple of times.
Janice knew what he was going to do.
She knew he wanted to kidnap a woman.
[Carla Norton] She was walking along.
He offers a ride.
He's there with his wife.
It looks very safe.
She gets in.
And then Cameron is asking questions.
"What's your name? Where are you from?
Where are you going?"
She didn't have family nearby.
No one knew where she'd gone.
He was looking for this type of woman
who didn't have any ties to the community.
[Al] At one point,
she started to get out of the vehicle,
and Cameron grabbed her
with a knife to her throat,
drug her back into the car,
and they placed a head box
over the top of her head.
[Kevin] The head box was constructed
of wood and Styrofoam,
and it had hinges on it.
So he would enclose the head
with this head box,
encompass the entire head
inside the head box,
and with that foam in there,
it basically prevented the person
to be heard from any distance.
[Carla] If someone
abducted you off the street
and put a 20-pound head box
over your head,
you'd be so disoriented,
you wouldn't know what was going on.
But Cameron wanted to muffle screams.
He was very concerned
about his captive alerting the neighbors.
And then they drove about 40 miles
all the way back to the house
on Oak Street in Red Bluff.
[Kevin] Janice said that when they
got back to their house in Red Bluff,
they pulled up to the garage
in the back of the house.
When Janice and Cameron
owned this house, none of this
none of this was here,
so they actually pulled the car
into the garage, parked the car.
Cameron got out and closed the door.
Janice was in the house for a few minutes.
She came back out, at which time
Marliz was outside the vehicle,
the head box was off of her,
and she was in a disoriented state.
Janice could smell ether in the air.
She asked him what he had done,
and he said he had sprayed starting fluid
into the rag
and put that over Marliz's mouth
to make her semi-unconscious.
After getting out of the garage area,
they carried her into the basement.
Although he was fascinated
with the torturing
and the dominance of people,
Cameron did not like the screaming
of somebody he was torturing.
So Cameron read that
if you cut a person's vocal cords,
they will no longer be able
to yell or scream.
Janice said that Cameron lifted Marliz up
and took her up to the bathroom.
Cameron was very invested
in keeping this sex slave
utterly cowed and utterly terrorized.
But Cameron made a mistake with Marliz.
[Kevin] Janice, at first, refused to
help him with the cutting of her throat,
and Cameron threatened her
that if she didn't help him,
he was going to do the same thing to her.
So she ultimately agreed and sat down
next to Marliz on the bathroom floor
while Cameron started cutting
one side of Marliz's throat
to try and reach her vocal cords.
But he didn't know what he was doing.
Marliz began bleeding heavily,
so Cameron kind of got freaked out.
He stopped because he realized
he wasn't gonna be successful.
Cameron lifted Marliz up
and took her back down into the basement.
There's a couple
holes up in here where these
these eye hooks would have existed.
Janice came down here
after Cameron had cut her throat.
She saw Marliz hanging from the beam.
The rope was around her neck.
Janice said she felt that
Cameron had strangled her with the rope
and then hung her by the beam, unclothed,
with a pillowcase over her head.
She was dead at that point in time.
[Al] Janice said they then
carried the body back out to the car.
By this time, it was about
two o'clock in the morning.
They drove 30 miles
north of Red Bluff on Interstate 5.
They then took Highway 44 east
towards Lassen Park,
where they turned off on a dirt road.
Janice said Cameron dug a shallow grave
and buried
Marie Elizabeth Spannhake's body.
After the burial,
he burned all of her clothing,
all of her belongings.
The kidnapping took, from start to finish,
about ten to 12 hours.
So he kidnapped her, killed her,
buried her all within a half of a day.
During my initial interview with Janice,
she started talking about the kidnapping
of another victim, Colleen Stan,
in Red Bluff, California.
[Carla] Colleen Stan came down from Eugene
and was hitchhiking through town
to surprise a friend.
Cameron and Janice pick her up.
He threatens her, forces her down,
puts the head box on her.
When you look at the abduction
of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake,
it very much mirrors that of Colleen Stan.
Marliz was 18. Colleen was 20.
They both had long hair.
They had no association
to the surrounding area.
[Al] Janice told us that Cameron
kept Colleen as a hostage for seven years.
Against Colleen, he had committed
a number of sex crimes.
He kept her under a water bed
for 20 hours a day and tortured her.
And then, in 1984, Janice comes to Colleen
and tells her
that she's going to leave Cameron.
I think Janice was having
a spiritual crisis.
She was 16 when she married Cameron
and 17 when Janice says he murders Marliz.
And now she knows her husband
is capable of murder.
So she has this period of time of years,
I mean, almost nine years,
where she's trying to do
what Cameron wants her to do
and not get into trouble.
So this is a very dangerous situation,
if you're a female,
to be in that household.
She was coming unglued.
She was mentally just at her last rope.
[Al] When Janice comes to her,
Colleen begs Janice not to go
because Colleen is afraid of
what's gonna happen to her
if it's just her and Cameron.
So Janice and Colleen
just kept it a big secret
until Cameron went to work
the next morning,
and then they packed their belongings,
and both of them left
and went to Janice's parents' house.
[Carla] For a while,
Janice stayed with her parents.
Colleen hadn't contacted the police.
She had promised Janice that she wouldn't.
[Al] Colleen told her family
some of what happened,
but it wasn't until Janice came to us
three months later
that she said anything to law enforcement.
[Colleen] The police called,
and so then I talked to them
for several hours,
giving my statement about what happened.
Afterwards, they said,
"Well, everything you say
matches what Janice told us."
And so then they said,
"Well, do you know
anything about this woman, Marliz?"
And I said, "The only thing I can tell you
is that he had this picture that I saw."
So then I described her,
and they said, "That's Marliz."
[Al] At that point, we knew we had
a kidnapping and homicide in Chico.
We also had the other kidnapping
with Colleen Stan,
but to be able to continue
with the homicide of Marliz,
we needed Janice's cooperation.
[Carla] They didn't have a body,
didn't have any evidence.
They had nothing
except Janice's testimony.
And so police realized that,
without her, they didn't have a case.
Without having a body,
it would be very difficult
to prosecute someone
and obtain a conviction.
[tense music playing]
[Al] So we wanted Janice to go with us
and show us where they had
buried Marie Elizabeth Spannhake's body.
We drove several trips out east of Redding
on both Highway 44 and Highway 299,
checking all the roads
off on the right-hand side
to see if Janice could locate the road
that they had taken.
[Carla] There's a lot of country out there
that you could easily dispose of a body
and nobody would ever find it.
[Al] After taking Janice
on a number of trips
and not being able
to locate the burial site,
the District Attorney's Office
felt that there was not enough information
to pursue the homicide.
The risk would be that
if he took the homicide to trial now
and lost it,
that we would not be able
to retry Cameron for that.
[Al] The homicide
of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake
was the most important to us,
but we pursued
the other kidnap case of Colleen Stan
to make sure that Cameron went to jail.
[reporter on TV]
Hooker was arrested and charged
with 17 counts of rape, kidnap,
sodomy, and false imprisonment.
[Al] In 1985, Cameron Hooker went to trial
for the sex crimes
and kidnapping of Colleen Stan.
[reporter] Hooker kept her
naked and handcuffed
inside a wooden, coffin-sized box.
[Carla] When the story broke,
everyone focused on Colleen Stan.
[reporter 1] kidnapping Colleen Stan
[reporter 2] assaulting Colleen Stan
[reporter 3] Colleen Stan has a boyfriend
[reporter 4] Colleen Stan
It was such a sensational story
to be kidnapped and held captive
for over seven years.
[reporter on TV] She was stripped,
slashed with a leather whip,
and then watched as Hooker
had sex with his wife on a tabletop.
Hooker is on trial
How can a person do that to somebody,
you know, and not feel bad?
He's more than capable
of torturing somebody.
I know because he did it to me.
He did it through hanging.
He did it through whipping.
He did it through torture.
He did it through electric shocking.
He did it through burning.
[Colleen] In the house on Oak Street,
which was the same one
that he took Marliz to,
he tells me, "Go ahead and scream.
I'll cut your vocal cords."
"I've done it before."
Then I find out about Marliz,
and I find out
that one of the things he did to her
was he cut her vocal cords
'cause she was screaming
and screaming and screaming,
and he wanted to shut her up.
He's more than capable
of murdering somebody.
I have no doubt.
[reporter on TV] The young woman,
speaking in a faint voice,
recalled her abduction at knifepoint
in May 1977.
The trial was six weeks
and there was a lot of media there.
[reporter 1] She was hung from a ceiling
of Cameron Hooker's basement
She said Hooker chained her hand and foot,
shocked her with electrical cords.
[reporter 2] She had this
appalling device locked over her head.
There was the torture, the forcible rapes.
[reporter 1] Years of confinement
in a wooden box
[reporter 2] "The situation was perfect,"
he said. "She was a good slave."
I just learned that the more I fought him,
the longer the torture was,
the more it went on,
the more excited he got.
Where if I could just try
to tolerate the pain the best I could
and let him do his whatever he did,
well, then he would
kind of lose interest, you know?
And, uh
And it would be over quicker.
[Carla] The details that came out
during that trial were just staggering,
but none of that had to do with Marliz.
[reporter] against Hooker,
prosecutor Christine McGuire told the jury
that Hooker alternated
between sexual torture and mind control.
[Carla] The prosecutor
had wanted to introduce Marliz
to show that he had a method
and a history of this kind of behavior.
It does appear to have what is
I would guess is air holes in it.
[Carla] But everything about Marliz
was kept out as too prejudicial
because there's no evidence of a murder.
We were forbidden from mentioning Marliz
or saying anything about her in the trial.
All we could talk about
was what he did to me,
and Judge Knight said,
at his sentencing hearing, he said
I consider this defendant to be
probably the most dangerous psychopath
that I've ever dealt with,
if for no other reason
than he appears to be
exactly the opposite of what he is.
[Colleen] He said,
"I feel you'll always be a danger to women
as long as you're alive."
And so he told him, "I'm gonna give you
as much time as I can."
And he did.
Cameron was convicted on ten counts.
Kidnapping,
rape,
sodomy, other sexual charges
that could be sentenced consecutively,
and he was sentenced to 104 years.
[reporter] Serving the sentences
for all the crimes at once.
[Al] Cameron was sent to prison,
and the Colleen Stan case was resolved.
[somber music playing]
[Al] The homicide of
Marie Elizabeth Spannhake was still open.
But it was not active
because we didn't really have
any new information or avenues to proceed
that we could see.
[Martha] I think I was just so angry,
probably at everybody,
for not being able to find her body.
You know?
Because we all knew she was gone.
I was just more angry
that nothing was said or done about it
during the trial.
This is all after his trial was over with,
and I'm like,
"He's in there for kidnapping
and whatever else he did to Colleen,
but what about my sister's murder?"
[Jodi] When I moved out
of the Walnut Garden apartment,
things were normal, you know.
I never experienced anything weird
physically moving in my apartment
or anything again.
When I got out of there,
it was like a lifesaver for me.
But about a year later,
all of a sudden,
I would have dreams again.
And I'm thinking,
"Good God, I thought this was behind me."
"I thought this was behind me."
There was, like, the couple.
The man was really tall in my dream,
and the woman was short,
and it was dusk,
and they were kind of stalking somebody
or looking for somebody.
And then I would always hear
the number "35.76,"
and then I would see an "A," like,
a capital "A" and "17"
as I was, like, flying in my dream.
I had no idea what that meant at all.
Is it a location?
And that's when I kind of was like,
"Okay."
"Do I have information
that could help somebody?"
And all of a sudden,
I just get this feeling.
Stop what you're doing,
and call the Red Bluff Police Department.
[Kevin] In 2008, we received a phone call
from a person who identified herself
as Jodi Foster, who lived in Chico.
Said that she had
lived in Marliz's apartment
and wanted to provide us information
that she thought was related to
Marliz's murder and potential grave site.
[Jodi] It went silent on the other end,
and I thought he probably hung up on me.
And he says to me,
"Why are you calling right now?"
He goes, "We are in the middle
of opening up a cold case
with Marie Elizabeth Spannhake."
He goes, "I've never been so freaked out
as I was just now by you."
I met with Detective Hale
at a coffee shop.
He asked all kinds of questions.
He asked me what I saw.
He talked to me about the dreams.
[Kevin] I think anytime, uh,
you're gettin' information from somebody
where they're telling you
they're having dreams about something
and they wanna provide you
this information they think
is related to a criminal case,
you're probably
gonna be a little skeptical.
[Jodi] I was so nervous.
I was afraid I was gonna,
you know, um, be criticized.
And then I thought, "It doesn't matter
if you guys think I'm crazy."
"I have to give you this information."
And because it was an open murder case,
he wasn't allowed to tell me anything.
What I could do is tell him information,
but he couldn't confirm or deny anything.
She told us that she was seeing the
letter A and the numbers 1-7, as in "A17."
She believed that was a road that Cameron
and Janice took to Marliz's grave site.
And there is a road in the area of
going out 44 that is A17.
We wanted to get more thorough
interviews done with Janice
and then see if we can try
and put together a potential burial site.
The first time we talked to Janice
was in 2010 in Chico.
We introduced ourselves as the
investigators now assigned to the case,
and I think she may have
still been concerned
that she could potentially be charged,
so upon meeting her,
one of the first things we did
was remind her that
she had an immunity agreement.
We were not there to arrest her,
but we were there to try
and get some answers for the case.
[ominous music playing]
[Kevin] When we interviewed Janice,
we did feel that we got
a better descriptive area of the road
that they turned down off of 44.
She gave us a little bit more descriptions
of some structures
that they had passed on the road, so
she still gave us information
we felt was good for the case.
Right now, we're on Highway 44.
We're a little ways east
of Shingletown in California.
This is one of the primary locations where
we believe Marliz Spannhake is buried,
but it's still a large area.
It's vast, so pinpointing her
is becoming very difficult,
but we feel like we've narrowed it down
to a good approximate area
where we believe she's at.
[Kevin] The case with Marliz is still open
and is still under an investigation
by the Red Bluff Police Department.
-[mysterious music playing]
-It's always been a homicide case.
Chico Police Department still has it open
as a missing persons case
because she was reported missing
to the Chico Police Department in 1976.
-Hi, Jodi. How you been?
-Good, how are you?
-Good! Nice to see you.
-Yeah.
-It's been a long time. Yeah.
-Long time.
[Kevin] To this day, we've never
talked to Jodi about the case
as far as the numbers for the area
we thought was a potential grave site
and the number she gave us.
I don't think Jodi knows how close she was
when she contacted us in July of 2008.
The district attorney and I
have discussed talking about it now.
Would that potentially damage the case
in a future court hearing?
-Yeah.
-And we decided it would not.
So the hope is, by talking about it now,
that we can get some closure on it.
At the time you called us,
that just happened to be the time
when we opened the case back up.
-So that
-Yeah. No I had no idea.
in intensifying
our search for Marliz's grave site.
We were searching an area
where we feel she could be at.
I don't know if you remember
when we talked to you,
but you said you were
envisioning this number, "35.76."
-Yeah. Right.
-You kept seeing that number.
And you kinda felt like that was the
distance from the house to her grave site.
And I think you said
in a northeasterly direction.
Yeah.
After we talked to you, we went back
and used a mapping software
and actually pinpointed the house
and where we thought she may be at.
Yeah.
And the number you gave us was 35.76,
and the number we came up
with that mapping software was 35.77.
So it was very close.
-What?
-It had some of us a little worried.
I kinda freaked out too, 'cause you had
no idea where we were searching,
and all the elements that Janice gave us
in her statement were on that road.
So Janice and I gave similar
area information?
Correct.
And me not even knowing anything,
just having random dreams.
Yes.
For years, I've been wondering if any
of anything that I gave you was relevant
or how it helped on any level.
It definitely helped reinforce the area
we thought she's at.
So, hopefully, you know, this information,
and hopefully
sitting here talking about it
will help get some sort of resolution
for Marliz and her family.
-[tranquil music playing]
-[Jodi] I've always had a sense
that there was
something other than me out there.
You know, bigger than me.
And I want to be a person
known for being caring, empathetic.
And if I have something
that can help another person,
then I want to help that person.
I feel like the spirit of Marliz
was trying to get in touch with someone.
And I want her soul to find rest,
really, you know?
And if I can help her,
that's what I wanna do.
[Hannah] Is she falling asleep?
[Al] I retired from
the Red Bluff Police Department
in June of 2007.
And the only case that is still active
is this case,
the homicide involving Marliz.
Well, any time you have a cold case,
you always wanna try
to obtain closure for the family.
You wanna see justice for the victim.
So there's always gonna be an effort
on law enforcement's part
to try and close these type of cases.
[Carla] Cameron was
sentenced to 104 years.
You would think that he would be in prison
for the rest of his life.
But, unfortunately,
it does happen that people
that shouldn't be set free are set free,
and then they repeat their crimes.
[Kevin] Cameron has
already been granted parole
and will go to a county jail
somewhere in the Alameda area, I believe,
and will actually start
mental health evaluations.
So he will probably be held
at a mental health hospital
for several years.
But at any time, he could
be released from that, potentially.
[Martha] This was the apartment building
my sister Marliz moved into.
She was gonna start her new life
here in Chico.
I was kind of hoping
she would realize her dream out here.
[wistful music playing]
[Martha] Sometimes I would
see movies and go,
"God, that looks like Marliz," you know?
But then, after a while,
you're, like, hoping, I think.
Just blind hope.
I think Marliz's story never got told.
Her story never got finished.
There was no body.
Cameron Hooker went to prison
for what he did to Colleen,
and my sister's still out there
waiting for justice.
[mysterious music playing]