Katie Beers (25 page)

Later, during the graduation party at my house, I had to tell my parents that I had seen Ann. I was so ashamed when I told my Mom what I had said. I thought she would be furious and disappointed that I had been so disrespectful and cursed at this elderly woman. I shudder to think that at any point in my life I may have disappointed the woman who means the world to me. I was almost in tears when I confessed to her exactly what I said. There was no anger. Instead, my mother extended her arms and offered me a loving hug.

“Good for you, Katie,” she softly spoke, “for standing up for yourself.”

I was free of the people who had hurt me, and free of the memories that could have defined me.

I was a clean slate and I wanted it that way. The only thing I kept from my early childhood was my name: Katie. Once I said I wanted to be called Katherine. It was a threshold thing, moving from single to double digits. I said it once and Linda put it on my birthday cake. Linda thought
she could say and do whatever she wanted. I’m Katie Beers and always was.

I was regaining the lost memories, safely and slowly, with Mary’s help. She said it was important for me to remember. They came back at unexpected moments, like when I met Harvey Weinstein.

The first time I met Harvey, I was awed by how tall he was. Mary invited him to our sessions several times. Harvey had the most captivating voice, it was so deep, but soothing at the same time. I was so happy that Mary brought us together. Harvey was such a special person.

Harvey went through something strangely similar to me just a few months after I was freed. A man in his late sixties, Harvey was the owner of a tuxedo manufacturing business. He was known as “The Tuxedo King.” He told me every day he would have breakfast at the Mark Twain Diner in Jackson Heights. One day, while he was walking to his car in the diner parking lot, he was approached by a longtime worker, a man who sewed tuxedo pants at his factory and had always been a loyal employee. But on this day, the worker had in mind a plan to make millions. He and his brother, armed with knives, forced Harvey into a waiting car, blindfolded him and drove him to Upper Manhattan, where, on a small island of land between the Hudson River and the Henry Hudson Parkway, they threw him into a fourteen foot deep and five foot wide dirt pit and covered it with a steel door weighted by cement blocks. They shoveled dirt on top of it and left Harvey for thirteen days with nothing except water and a couple of pieces of fruit.

The kidnappers demanded ransom and Harvey’s family got together three million dollars in one hundred and fifty dollar bills. When the kidnappers picked up the ransom, police arrested one of them, who must have given up the location where Harvey was hidden.

Police were standing just over the ditch when they called Harvey’s name and he weakly answered, “I’m here. I’m here.” Dirty and disheveled, Harvey was pulled out of the hole by two cops. After thirteen days of captivity, Harvey’s first words were, “Thank God you’re here, and I’d like to have a cigarette.”

Harvey told me he wasn’t worried about his body surviving. He was a trained Marine. He knew he could get by long enough on the little
bit of water and fruit. He was most worried about his mind. And he would speak aloud each day, remembering his life story, chapter by chapter. It helped me to learn that I wasn’t the only one who had gone through an ordeal like that. When I think of him, I am inspired to help other people, like he helped me.

Harvey died in 2007, but I can still hear his deep voice. In fact, it was Harvey’s voice that unearthed a lost memory.

Behind Big John’s house, there was a hole in the ground. Little John and my cousin Jason were jumping in and climbing out of it. Big John said it was going to be an underground bunker. I was too small to join the guys, so I was just standing on the edge of the deep hole, laughing. I was six, maybe seven-years-old. We were all playing in it, this big open pit in the ground, partially covered with a blue tarp. Jumping in and out and laughing. Later, Big John poured a slab of concrete and built a carport over it. I never thought of that hole in the ground again until Harvey Weinstein mentioned the hole where he was buried alive. I was sixteen years old and I suddenly realized that I watched the construction of the bunker that would later be my prison. In fact, Big John’s neighbors and family may have watched as well, and no one thought a thing about it. Later, when I was kidnapped, no one put two and two together. It was a long term plan to steal a childhood, hatched in plain view.

The phone rang and was picked up quickly—after just one ring. It surprised me that Marilyn Beers would have a cell phone, a luxury for someone I guessed would be flat broke by now, almost twenty years after Katie’s kidnapping. The voice was instantly familiar.

“Hello” she answered brusquely. “Marilyn?” I asked. “Who wants to know?” Predictable, I thought, even after all these years.

“It’s Carolyn—Carolyn Gusoff—the reporter—I’m working with Katie—she said it would be okay to give you a call.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, her voice just as gravelly as it was in 1993, her vocal chords charred by lifelong chain smoking.

“How’ve you been, Marilyn?” I asked with genuine interest. “Alive.”

I chuckled courteously. “Well—that’s better than some others.” It was no joke. Many of the people at the center of the kidnapping case had since died.

We made a date to meet the following Wednesday—her day off. She quickly put the kibosh on my request to meet at her house. We agreed it would be somewhere neutral.

“I’ll treat you,” she offered, “to coffee.”

Her yellow cab, emblazoned with the words, “Sunset Taxi” on the doors, was parked in front of the MVP diner on Montauk Highway in West Babylon, a beacon indicating I was in the right place. Marilyn, seated in a booth, looked much the same as the last time I saw her, nearly two decades earlier, pacing the halls of Family Court trying to retain custody of Katie after the kidnapping. Her long stringy dirty-blond hair was now streaked with grey. While her face had not changed, there were two startling differences. She appeared to have lost most of her enormous weight and the skin on her arms hung loosely like sleeves where rolls of fat used to reside. Even more astonishingly, she was not smoking. The
woman who two decades earlier had a cigarette permanently affixed to her lips, gave it up cold turkey, she announced, on January 29, 2003, at ten to midnight. Took the last drag of USA Gold Light 100s with a half carton left in the house, she told me. That didn’t stop her from hacking over her meatloaf and mashed potatoes lunch. Often. The damage of past sins wouldn’t easily let go.

“Are you sick?” I asked. “No,” she answered. “I don’t know what that is.” Then she volunteered, “Katie is the kind of person that will tell you what she thinks you want to hear. I used to tell her, ‘Tell me the truth, if it hurts me, it hurts me, but I won’t care.’ And she would tell me what she thought she wanted me to hear—not the truth. She would tell Linda one thing and when I asked her she would tell me something totally different. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

Marilyn said she had no idea something was “going on with Sal or Linda. No matter what I asked her. I used to get annoyed at that. If it hurts, it hurts. I wanted the truth.”

I was amazed, all these years later, that Marilyn may have quit smoking but seemed to have acquired little insight into the barrage of abuse her daughter was enduring under her nose. But I had come to hear her out.

The one-sided conversation continued. “Linda acted as if she was Katie’s mother. I missed a lot. I have a lot of regrets,” Marilyn lamented. “If I had to do it over again, I would never have become friends with them. They were bad people who found one another. They deserved each other.”

“Why would they pick on a child?” Marilyn asked and then answered her own question. “Because a child cannot fight back.”

Especially, I thought, one whose mother hen had left the nest unattended.

I was glad to get out of the diner. Marilyn drove the lead in her taxi, as I followed. We were going to visit some places from the past. She led the way to the house on Higbie Drive where she grew up and “raised” Katie. She drove with purpose, zigzagging in and out of side streets to avoid Sunrise Highway, the vast six lane route that starts in New York City and traverses the underbelly of Long Island’s south shore. Her cab, number
one hundred thirty, had “Airport Service” stenciled on the back windshield and I couldn’t help but wonder how many folks around here could shell out one hundred bucks for a taxi ride all the way to the city airports. We passed cookie-cutter strip malls, naked maple trees and streets without sidewalks frosted with a hint of snow, black with slushy winter soot, melting into the sewer grates. We pulled up to a small white cape perched on a corner. It was topped with a brick chimney, and statues of Mary and Jesus were nestled into the front shrubs. I remembered this place.

“This is it,” she said and proceeded to point out which was her room and which ones housed Sal and Linda when they were all packed into the little house like sardines. She turned and gestured to the corner strip mall, visible a block away from the front yard, where Katie was frequently sent to do errands and the family laundry.

“That,” she emphasized, “was for Linda. I never sent Katie to do laundry—not at five years old. John, yes, when he was about thirteen, I may have asked him to go to the local laundromat. I was very naive,” she added. “I never believe anything anybody tells me anymore.”

What about the physical and sexual abuse?

Did she know what was going on under this asphalt grey shingled roof?

“I never knew about it. Katie never told me nothing.” But then she added, “She could have always gone into my room.”

“Hindsight,” said Marilyn “is a terrible thing.”

Marilyn walked me around the tiny patch of property, and then walked me through a long lead up to the loss of her daughter, Katie, literally starting at the beginning.

The name card above the bassinet in the newborn nursery at Fordham Hospital in the Bronx read simply “Female Anderson.” The baby girl was premature—only five pounds—born on September 2, 1949, to an unwed mother from the Midwest who, with the help of a young man from California created a child no one had planned. He wanted nothing to do with his mistake and the young mother fled to New York, where her sister lived, to deliver the baby then instantly turned the newborn over for adoption.

For three months Female Anderson lingered at the Spence Chapin Foundling Home, unwanted.

At the same time, a young couple in Bayside, Queens, Helen and Stewart Beers, was trying to conceive a child of their own. Stewart, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and a WWII veteran, was told by doctors that he was the problem with a low sperm count. Helen, his secretary who would later become his wife, was thirty years old and refused to give up on her plan to have a baby. They visited the Foundling Home in the Bronx and were asked if they wouldn’t mind a little strawberry blond baby. Female Anderson became theirs. They named her Marilyn.

Two years later, on August 10, 1951, Helen and Stewart returned to the Foundling Home and this time chose a baby boy. Two-month-old Alfred Distefano was christened Robert Beers. Marilyn now had a baby brother and the Beers family was complete.

Helen had no intention of telling her children of their beginnings but Marilyn altered the plan when, at age five, she dreamed she was adopted and confronted her parents with the question. A stunned Helen, never one to show much emotion, reluctantly admitted to Marilyn that she was neither brought by the stork nor came from Beers stock. She was in fact adopted, and Marilyn was forever convinced that her vivid and frequent dreams provided her with special psychic insight.

Growing up, Marilyn was shy and introverted. Her low weight at birth was short lived and soon Marilyn was a stout child with low self-esteem and no motivation to please anyone, least of all her teachers. Five days before her eleventh birthday on August 28, 1960, the Beers family moved out of the only home Helen had ever known and into the less crowded suburbs. The Suffolk County neighborhood of West Islip was indistinguishable from so many others that had popped up in the fifties and sixties. Tracks of Cape Cod homes were constructed hastily on slabs to accommodate young families with enough money to finance a small mortgage and leave the New York City boroughs. Nassau County, adjacent to Queens and less than a one hour railroad ride into Manhattan, was the prime choice for white collar garment center workers, businessmen and returned war veterans who flooded the new western Long Island communities. But for those without the financial means and those whose livelihoods were not dependent upon proximity to Manhattan, the prudent choice was the more remote Suffolk County.

Twelve Higbie Drive in West Islip was a small cape with four tiny bedrooms and two bathrooms on a coveted corner lot. By city standards, it had a big backyard. Its aluminum siding made it look well-cared for and its flat shingled roof blended in with the winter sky. It had a small hedge that gave the Beers family privacy and for only fourteen thousand five hundred dollars, they felt as if they had landed a piece of the American dream. Marilyn liked it there so much, she became a permanent fixture, firmly rooted.

Marilyn’s teen-aged rebellion began in her preteen years. She started smoking at age eleven and by twelve was consuming a pack of cigarettes a day in the woods behind the Udall Road Middle School. She dropped out of high school, and when Helen and Stewart offered to pay for community college or trade school, Marilyn refused their offer, claiming she had no aspirations.

While Helen worked in a school cafeteria, Marilyn took odd jobs as a filing clerk at a local insurance company, driving a school bus and filling in as home health aide. As her size grew, so did her smoking habit, some days blazing through five packs of Marlboro 100s. She made no attempt to curtail her drinking either. Vodka and tonic with a twist of lime. Marilyn would get so drunk at local watering holes, she got pregnant twice accidentally and can’t be sure who fathered her second child, but she was happy to share the good news with Helen and Stewart that they would be grandparents.