Katie Beers (11 page)

“I don’t WANT to talk to him,” I whimpered.

I just wanted to go back to bed because I had to wake up for school the next day. I vividly remember Aunt Linda telling me that if I didn’t talk to the man that wanted to speak to me, I would not be allowed to go to school the next day and she “would make me sorry.” I really wanted to go to school the next day, so I got on the phone. Aunt Linda fed me the words. I was to say, “Hi, this is Tinkerbelle,” so I did. The man asked me what I was wearing and if there was “anything I wanted to do” to him. I started crying, and Aunt Linda grabbed the phone from me screaming that I was “embarrassing” her. She slapped me across the face and ordered me to go to sleep.

Both Sal and Aunt Linda made me watch porn—for different reasons. Sal made me watch while he made me play with him. This was an almost daily occurrence. Sal had quite the porn collection; he had over fifty porn VHS tapes. John and I counted one day. Linda made me watch porn with her and would play with herself while I watched the video. There was one video with a woman named “Angel.” I couldn’t believe that a woman with such a beautiful name could be so dirty.

Sal also liked to abuse me in his Firebird. He’d tell me to get in the car to visit his mother, to run an errand for Aunt Linda or to bring me to school. He would park the car somewhere —usually a vacant lot, the
parking lot of the mall in a secluded area, of course, at the school after hours or the park—basically anywhere he could find that was infrequently used. The nursery around the corner from our house was a favorite of his. In the off-peak season, the parking lot would be deserted and Sal would drive us there so we could “be alone.” He’d park in a spot that couldn’t be seen from the road. Sal would take lotion out of the glove box, recline his seat and order me to “play” with him. I would have to play with him until he was satisfied, which usually took anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.

Another favorite of his was behind a strip mall off of Sunrise Highway. The stores were closed on Sunday afternoons; this is when Sal would take me there because there was little chance of getting caught. He would go through the same routine as in the strip mall parking lot—lotion and brief instructions to “get busy.”

I hated getting in that Firebird. In fact, I hate getting into any car with a man now. There are still some people who make me skittish. I size people up quickly. I don’t want to say I’m judgmental, but I’m very aware of people and how they make me feel. I mistakenly trusted everyone when I was younger. Now I have a sixth sense. I can tell what people’s intentions are and know when to retreat. I will never be used again.

The drill. I could hear the snarl of the drill again, and pulled myself up into the coffin-box, locking the neck chain, as if I had been there all along. I was proud of myself; I had not fallen asleep. I had just drifted into an even uglier place.

I made the rounds each day, green spiral steno pad and mini-recorder in hand, knocking firmly on dented doors and tin thresholds in the absence of working doorbells. The competition had become acute. Katie stories were dominating the headlines of the city tabloids, a new genre of tabloid TV was devoting entire shows to the saga, and each astonishing revelation about Katie’s Cinderella existence was intently followed by a mesmerized national audience. The little missing waif had won the nation’s collective heart and each day the pressure was enormous to dig up new dirt on those who failed her.

News 12 Long Island, the first regional twenty-four-hour news channel, was considered a training ground by the people at Cablevision who owned and operated the place. There were, though, plenty of folks who worked there who were already “trained,” and for us, it was a tough spot to be in, competing with the likes of the CBS, NBC and ABC flagship stations,
The New York Times,
New York Post
and
New York Daily News
. Turning on News 12 had become a fixture in the daily routine of many across the island. Nonetheless, calculating newsmakers still considered the city stations and newspapers the gold standard. Each of us within the press corps was jockeying for scoops in this story, and they were awarded, most often, to those with big city links. Attorneys and law enforcement sources took my calls and answered my questions, but at times it was a skittish game of catch-up. I tried to remind myself often of the bigger picture and why we did what we did. A little girl’s fate was more important than who broke the next dreadful detail about her miserable existence. I didn’t need to sharpen my news fangs on the likes of a missing child. Yet the competitive streak is innate in most red-blooded reporters, and at times blinding. So there were nights I would go to sleep fearing the morning headlines.

The Suffolk Police Department felt the heat too, and in an effort to shut off the rushing current of leaks, issued this unprecedented statement on January 12, 1993:

It is now sixteen days since the sudden unexplained disappearance of Katie Beers. No effort has been spared by the Suffolk County law enforcement community to follow every lead in an attempt to locate her and identify those responsible for her disappearance. Understandably, the human drama presented by the plight of this ten-year-old girl has sparked enormous media interest as witnessed by the daily intense coverage both in newspapers and on radio and television. Unfortunately, as day follows day, the media’s efforts to report further developments has at times hindered police investigators who are primarily responsible for bringing this case to a definitive conclusion. While we are mindful that ofttimes media attention is case-beneficial, nonetheless, there are occasions when law enforcement activities may actually be thwarted and/or short-circuited by undue exposure or discussion of circumstances and hitherto unpublished “facts.” Accordingly, until further notice, Suffolk County law enforcement officials and personnel will decline to respond to media inquiries concerning any aspect of this investigation. We request the media’s understanding and cooperation in this information embargo
.

The pipeline of leads, though, remained free flowing. The television show,
America’s Most Wanted,
aired an episode about Katie’s disappearance and more than fifty tips were phoned in from around the country. In the Hudson Valley, two people were certain they saw a young girl, the spitting image of Katie, outside a Grand Union supermarket trying to make a call at a pay phone and then pushed into a waiting car. I was dispatched to file a live report. In another call, a Bay Shore mechanic told police he was certain he had given Katie a ride earlier that day.

With police maintaining their silence, we worked around them, covering a circular rotation in an unnerving race to lead the news: The Inghilleris in Bay Shore, John Esposito’s house a mile away, and Marilyn’s place in Mastic Beach. The players in this story had become caricatures in a twisted modern version of the fairy tale. But the macabre characters, drawn on tabloid TV in stark black and white, were in reality shaded in hues of gray. Even the wicked godmother had redeeming qualities. Linda never struck me as a threatening woman. She seemed broken, genuinely crushed by Katie’s disappearance, often lost in thought and a cloud of smoke, attached to her wheelchair and the plausible notion that Katie had run away to find a “Whole New World,” just like the
Aladdin
song she
said Katie adored. Whenever I would sit with her, choking as she chain-smoked, she’d well up as she spoke of Katie. There appeared to be an abiding earnestness about her.

Fat Sal, as he came to be known in the press corps, always wore a hapless, harmless look. He was a sloppy oddball with a bulging belly and neck the size of a bulldog’s, yet he seemed benign from afar. Even with sex abuse charges leveled against him, and a court date pending, no one could be certain the allegations weren’t fabricated as part of the well-documented custody feud. He seemed sincere when he greeted me, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Marilyn, a woman with a gigantic girth and equally oversized bosoms was, to me, the most sympathetic of the lot. She was apparently the only one among them who dragged herself out of bed each day and worked for a paycheck. While she answered none of the critical questions about Katie’s obvious neglect, little of it seemed to be directly her fault. She was thrust into a role and onto a stage for which she was thoroughly unprepared and was blowing the performance badly.

They were, it appeared to me, brutally unlucky people, not to be condemned, but to be pitied and given a platform, if they so desired, to be heard.

It’s not easy to size up people you barely know beyond a sound bite, and that was not my job. My job was to report, and on the afternoon of January 13, seventeen days after Katie vanished, I got to report on something rare: astoundingly good news.

“Get to Saxon Avenue!” the message read on my beeper shortly after midday. The assignment desk was abuzz with speculation that something big was about to break at John Esposito’s house. A break in the case could mean something or somebody was found. I had no idea if it were Katie or her corpse. Adrenaline doesn’t discriminate, and mine was wildly pumping.

The scene in front of the house was chaotic. Live trucks were already on the block with their masts up, reporters were staked out and neighbors were anxiously gathered in the street—but there was nothing to report. Word circulated quickly;
Newsday
had been tipped off that something was up. Curiously though, there was no police presence at the house, not even the usual detectives who trailed John every day. It was the
absence of action that was so strange and dreadfully nerve-wracking.

John Esposito, his lawyers had leaked to
Newsday
, had summoned his family—his twin brother Ronnie and sister-in-law Joyce, and Joan, his brother Pat’s widow. He asked them all to meet at Siben & Siben first thing that morning. He had an ominous message.

“There is something I have to tell you,” John stated.

“What is it, John?” a tanned and rested Sidney Siben asked, just back from a ten day vacation in Florida.

“I know where Katie is.”

“What? Is she alive?”

“Yes.”

The television told me it was about one in the afternoon and I heard Big John coming down the hole. The grinding at the screws in the doorway was warning to chain myself back up fast. I actually fell asleep for a few minutes, and the groan of the ratchet roused me. But this was strange. Big John never came down this early in the day. Normally he would come down early evening, coinciding with the evening news, to feed me and touch me. It was a steady diet of junk food and soda. Almost always there were After Eight Mints. I cringe at the thought. Those thin dark chocolate wafers were all I consumed for days on end. If John prepared something for me, like a hamburger, a bologna sandwich, macaroni and cheese, I let it rot. I couldn’t be sure he hadn’t poisoned the food. I inspected everything. Prepackaged food like pudding and candy, lots of candy, was the only way I could be sure it was safe.

For days, Big John had been saying cryptic things that made me wonder if he was going to kill himself, kill me or kill both of us. Was today the day? My strategy of trying to wear him down to get him to release me was beginning to sound like a broken record he was tuning out.

“Let me go, just let me go, and I’ll run far away from your house. I promise that I’ll never tell anyone that you had me here. I’ll say I didn’t know who kidnapped me!”

It was almost as if Big John was listening to a different soundtrack. He wasn’t responding to anything I said. He seemed to be thinking hard. He’d rub his head in troubled thought.

“Where am I going to go to school?”

“I’ll teach you what you need to know.”

“Where will I work?”

“When you are ready to work, they would have stopped looking for you, so you can go to work anywhere you want, but I’ll have enough money that you won’t have to work. You’ll stay at home as a mom.”

“So how will I have kids?”

“You’ll have kids with me.”

“I don’t want to have kids with you!”

He seemed hurt by that comment, and I had to think fast, so I assured Big John that I loved him and that I would have had kids with him, but by the time I was ready to have children, he would just be too old. Big John seemed a little less insulted with that reasoning. I had to be exceptionally careful. My life was literally in Big John’s hands. If he killed himself, no one would ever find me. He spoke often about taking his own life and this terrified me. But he would try to assure me that when he did, he would leave instructions on how to find me, pinned to his clothes. This didn’t make me feel better. I knew that if he took his life, he was also taking mine. How could the instructions possibly be good enough? How long would it take for someone to find me? And how would they ever find me down here?

I had grown up on horror movies. Little John always had
Nightmare on Elm Street
or one of the
Halloween
movies on. I knew what death looked like. I knew if I couldn’t outsmart Big John, get under his skin, manipulate him into releasing me, I was dead. I needed to dream up just the right thing to say to Big John so that he wouldn’t kill himself. If he did it after he released me, go ahead.

The ratchet stopped and Big John stepped down into the box. It was definitely peculiar that he was coming down on this day so early. Then I heard him speak and my heart raced in fear. Big John was not alone. I could hear other voices. There was a man with him. All that was going through my head was that Big John brought his friends over to have a good time with me too. I couldn’t bear it.

I knew he didn’t have adult friends. What adult would want to hang around with him? If they were men with him, they would have to be the type of men who would want to harm a little girl. I shook.

The door to the coffin-box flew open and Big John reached his arm in and unlocked the chain around my neck. Right behind him, in the dark, I could make out the forms of two other men. They were wearing suits. I felt sick afraid. Please, not again.