One spring day in 1977, 20-year-old co-ed Colleen Stan left school to hitchhike from Oregon to Los Angeles. But when she accepted a ride from what appeared to be a wholesome family, her journey took a terrifying detour into bondage and sadomasochism.

For seven years, a seemingly mild-mannered millworker named Cameron Hooker - with the help of his ruefully complacent wife Janice - raped, tortured and held Colleen Stan captive often inside a coffin-like box under the couple's waterbed.

When Stan finally escaped to tell her story, it was almost too sensational to believe. The instantly infamous 'girl in a box' kidnapping case was riddled with contradictions: love and hate, autonomy and dependence, Bible readings and sleazy pornography, secret perversions within an apparently average, church-going family.

But who was telling the truth? Colleen Stan and Janice Hooker, who maintained that Stan had been held against her will, "brainwashed" and forced to endure years of degradation? Or Cameron Hooker, who insisted his slave-master relationship with Stan was consensual, and that the two were even in love?