Katie Beers (29 page)

“This is a command post, this is the …”

As he spoke, I was distracted, wondering when, if ever, we would get to the audio tapes of Katie in captivity. But the Chief continued in a slow and deliberate pace, chronicling the story through the photographs with dogged attention to detail.

Somewhere between the command post photo and the bunker tunnel photo tour, I realized what was going on here. The particulars of the investigation and Katie’s survival were catalogued like locks of baby hair in a parent’s scrapbook. The Chief was deeply invested in this case. Katie didn’t have a father when it may have mattered most. The men early in her life violated her body and soul. But Dominick, years after the case was closed, was still Katie’s protector.

I was heartened by the realization that Katie, whether she knew it or not, had a father-figure.

Tedd had also embraced the role, albeit at times stoically. As Katie was becoming family, he was assigned the unenviable job of escorting both John and Sal from prison to court as part of his detail as sheriff’s deputy. He later told me he endured the assignment professionally and never uttered a word to either one of them. Had he known the details of the abuse Katie suffered, he may not have been able to maintain his composure.

“I viewed John Esposito as a very pathetic man who needed to be punished for his crime,” he revealed to me. “I didn’t feel the hatred for him as I did for Sal Inghilleri. Sal needed to spend the rest of his life in jail. He was a monster, a bully who preyed on the weak. Not only did he spend twelve years in jail, but I am sure he did hard time. He probably spent most of his years in segregation. Jail time for child abusers is hard. You are at the bottom of the pile. The worst of the worst. There is a place for him in hell.” Tedd was as protective over his little girl as are the best of biological dads.

The year after she was kidnapped, I lost my own father. Soon after Katie was found, his brain tumor recurred. His speech vanished after experimental stereotactic radiosurgery. Doctors kept reassuring us he
would speak again. He never did. I would recount for him the stories I was covering each day but was never really sure he understood my words. As I sat beside a morphine pump and the hospice bed where our dining room table had been, at 7:10 in the evening of May 17, 1994, my fifty-nine-year-old father took his last breath. Days and weeks later, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson would lead the news. His beloved Rangers would go on to win the Stanley Cup for the first time in fifty-four years. I know he would have been captivated by the wall-to-wall coverage.

His death left me without a father, but with an abiding sense of what was expected of me. I wondered what becomes of people who do not grow up with a captain of the ship, a moral compass. People like Katie.

Dominick was pointing now at an image of John’s office and the entry way to the bunker.

I asked if I could hold the photos—and I thumbed through them. I could see the carport and Dominick explained that the bunker was located directly under the carport. Esposito, he said, poured the slab of concrete himself and put an oil tank in there. He built all of it and even put a car in the carport so that no one would imagine what lay beneath.

“This is the outer room with soundproofing covering the walls and ceiling; this is the coffin-like room where Katie was secreted most of the time. Katie,” he said, “had been complaining that she was having trouble breathing and he made a hole for her in the side of the box. And there is the makeshift toilet, with plastic in it. And this gave him the excuse that every time she came out to use the toilet, he fondled her and dried her.

“I would like to hear what she has to say now to see how consistent it is with what she told us,” he said. I wondered which version of events he would consider to be more reliable: the details she gave when she was ten years old or the ones she remembers now, as an adult looking back two decades. Will they be the same, or, I wondered, does time erase the most agonizing details? I was hopeful the tapes would answer that question. But I was beginning to wonder if the tapes truly existed.

“This is one of the chains he used around her neck. This is the inner room and you’ve seen photos of this. This is the TV, and it was always on twenty-four/seven. The TV was very important. It provided light. It provided heat. Don’t forget she is down here in December and January in the cold winter months with no heater inside. It provided light, heat
and what I think is the most important piece; it provided psychological support. The broadcasts that were repeated all day—she knew we were looking for her and that gave her hope. I don’t know that she shared that with you.”

She had shared that with me. In fact, it was the reason, I believed, Katie entered into our partnership. She knew of me from my news reports, my presence on the small cathode-ray tube inside her coffin-box.

“When Marilyn or her brother appeared on the TV she would hug and kiss the TV. She gave us a very poignant description of what she endured down there and how she survived. I think that TV was critical to that—she remained in contact with the outside world.”

Holding up the next eight by ten, Dominick continued, “This, it took us a while to figure out what this was.”

I could see what was coming.

“It was just lying there,” he said, as he pointed to the photograph of a wooden box.

“We weren’t sure what it was—at first. What it is—is a head box.”

It was as evil as it sounded. “It’s very well-constructed. There are air holes. This is the mechanism for a guillotine, slide it up and place the victim in, then drop this down under the chin hitting the victim at the bottom of the neck so as to immobilize the victim from the neck up.”

Dominick explained that the captor would then have access to the victim’s body and have the ability to observe the victim’s face without the victim seeing him.

“I didn’t know the genesis of it, but there was actually a girl out west who was abducted in Washington State and held captive for years and a head box was built to hold her in place. We think it’s meant for an adult—it’s certainly big enough and heavy enough, and the FBI noted that the coffin-like box is big enough to accommodate an adult, so we don’t know if his fantasy was to have ultimately taken an adult. But we know it was made for an adult.”

Was it ever used?

“There is no evidence it was ever used. Katie never said it was used.”

But you know he built it?

“We absolutely know he built it. And I now know that he built it based on a book. We know that John Esposito read the book because the book makes reference to the number of juveniles reported missing every year, and there are so many that eventually the police just forget about it. We think this is where it instilled the idea in his mind that he could abduct a child and that after a while the police would stop looking.”

Until this point, I was largely unaware of the twisted details of the story of Colleen Stan, a story that most criminologists consider one of the most extreme cases of sexual torture ever. I am well aware of that horror story now. In May 1977, Colleen, a twenty-year-old free spirit, was hitchhiking through Northern California. She accepted a ride from Cameron Hooker and his wife, Janice. They had their baby in the car. Colleen, who had passed up two other drivers, reasoned it would be a safe ride.
³⁶

The next seven years were filled with brainwashing and unspeakable torment. Colleen was hung by her wrists, whipped, stretched naked on a board and raped by her sick and sadistic captor. She was threatened that if she didn’t submit to the torture, her tongue would be cut out. Her captor also told her that if she resisted, she would be nailed to the ceiling beams or even worse, her family would be tortured and killed. She signed away her life in a sex slave contract, given the slave name “K” and spent years imprisoned in a coffin-like box under the Hookers’ waterbed.

Hooker’s signature handiwork was a wooden box, lined with egg-crate insulation. When placed over Colleen’s head, it engulfed her in total darkness. Holes allowed her to breathe, but insulation rendered her mute to the outside world. Her gasps and anguished pleas could be heard only by her own ears. The box was locked over Colleen’s head as the rest of her body was kept inside the coffin-like chamber, twenty-three hours a day under the bed where Cameron and Janice had sex and where Janice gave birth to a second child. In fact, Colleen lived in that box, her head locked inside the head contraption, for an unfathomable seven years, eventually only being let out to do domestic chores inside the home and to submit to sexual torture.

Dominick showed me the book,
The Perfect Victim,
written by the prosecutor in the Colleen Stan case.

“By the time I became aware of this, had I known, I would have searched his house for this book, gone to the library to see if it was ever signed out to him. But we are convinced he read the book. I read the book myself and came upon a quote:

Like so many missing persons bulletins, this one elicited no response. It was filed and forgotten.

“So this is a portrayal of another criminal, but I think it is giving another predator an idea. And I’m convinced Esposito read the book. I’m convinced that’s where he got the idea of the head box and this is where he starts thinking that if he takes a child and she is reported missing, there are so many cases, it will just be filed and forgotten. And he had no idea; he was overwhelmed by the response, the kidnap team, all the media attention. No one would just let it go.”

He paused, “We are quite lucky he didn’t use it.”

The Chief changed the subject as quickly as he flipped to the next picture.

“This is the drop down into the bunker. Now in between, you crawl forward. And in that hallway, there is a trap door and a secondary barrier to prevent escape and he wedged a board here. So even if you were able to get out of the first box, you would have that obstruction, not to mention on the top he had a heavy six-inch thick piece of concrete. It was certain that no one could escape.

“Here,” he pointed out, “are eyebolts with nuts. Every time he left, he closed it like this and all of these eyebolts had nuts on them. He had an electric wrench to remove the bolts. You’d hear them—the grinding of the bolts. You can just relate to the horror that this sexual predator was coming. And when he left as well. And I’m not sure which was worse. Because now she is deprived of any human contact and realizes, she is really locked in.”

What happened to the bunker?
It was my understanding it was being kept for forensic education.

“We kept it for quite some time. Eventually, we needed the space.” He didn’t elaborate further but was lost in thought.

“This is the side vent here. This provided ventilation for the underground. Something else we missed.”

They missed the significance of the baby monitors too. One part
was positioned inside the bunker and the other, in the living room, upstairs, where detectives had searched repeatedly.

“The monitor—we actually saw up there! And you recall that his sister-in-law lived in the front house. When the detectives asked him what that is, he said, ‘That’s connected to the front house.’ That’s another clue we missed.”

You beat yourself up about that?

“No, it’s bothersome to know she endured as many days as she did. Seventeen days underground. But we also know that had it not been for our efforts, it could have been far worse for her.”

“Here are the handcuffs.” He showed me a glossy of the cuffs John installed to lock Katie to the coffin-sized box.

Then he extended to me a photo of an open grave. “This was a low point in the investigation, when a psychic found a grave and told us it was Katie. Turns out,” he paused, “it was the grave of a dog”.

And the tapes?

“I’ll look for them,” he said. “They are buried here, somewhere.”

I asked Marilyn who my father is many times but never got a straight answer. If not for my brother, John, I would have written off men altogether. John was my brother and father rolled into one. We were six years apart, so we battled often, mimicking the TV wrestlers we watched every weekend, pulling each other’s hair, stabbing at each other’s eyes, and yelling our heads off. But we were very close. The only happy memories I have of growing up, I can count on one hand. And John is a part of all of them. He was the first person who believed me when I got the courage to speak up about the abuse by Sal. I will always love him for that, even though it backfired badly.

I tried to tell Aunt Linda when I was old enough to speak up, maybe seven or eight years old, but she yelled at me and called me a rotten liar. She said there is no way Sal would ever do that. So one day, I climbed onto the roof and refused to come down. I stayed there until Linda hollered every curse and threat at me through her opened window; I eventually climbed back into the house, and until I moved in with Marilyn in Mastic Beach, I never uttered another word to any other adult about what Sal had done to me.

No one, I was sure, would take my side, and anyway, I probably deserved it. My brother, John, didn’t see it that way. John knew firsthand about Sal’s ferocious temper and mean streak. So when I told him I needed to talk to him one afternoon, he brought the radio into his dinosaur-tented bed, turned up the music and in a hushed voice, asked me what was wrong. We were still living in the West Islip House, and I was eight years old. John could tell that I was nervous as I whispered so no one else would hear.

“Sal makes me touch him.”

John asked me to elaborate, so I got up the courage to tell him that Sal makes me touch his private parts. John asked me if there was a specific time or place that Sal made me touch him, and there wasn’t —it was sometimes when no one was home other than Linda —because she never came downstairs —or just my grandmother, but she had no purpose
going into Sal’s room. It happened whenever Sal wanted, which was all the time. John was furious. He was also sad. With tears in his eyes, he told me that he was so sorry that it happened, and that he hadn’t done anything to help me, and that from then on, he would protect me from Sal. John would be home a lot more often when I was there, and he’d have his friends come over to the house more often so he didn’t have to leave. But right away, he said, he was going to catch Sal in the act, then get the cops to come to witness it. And Sal would be locked up and couldn’t hurt any of us anymore.