Katie Beers (35 page)

With me, the cycle ends. I have learned much about abuse, I went through years of therapy and I know that I will never repeat what happened to me with my children. It is the one thing that I am actually grateful about having been kidnapped. My case was broadcast around the country to a nation that had not yet fully and openly discussed the many aspects of child sexual abuse. Children forced into sex by grown men in their own homes. Little girls the object of desire of men who pretended to be average Joes. When I was kidnapped, these were no longer unspeakable taboo subjects. I hope what happened to me helped to open people’s eyes.

People still ask me what I was feeling when all of this was going on. I wondered what I was doing to deserve what was happening to me. I felt dirty and guilty. Dirty because of the almost daily sex acts and guilty because I must have done something wrong to be so badly punished.

Perhaps there is something to be said for inner strength, a strong will to survive. Maybe I was born a fighter. Or maybe the fact that the abuse started so early made me tough. It’s all I ever knew.

Remembering is healing. I’m sure of that now. No matter how hard it is to talk and write about the embarrassing details, they must be brought to light. And then, once they are revealed, they can be shed, like an old skin. And buried. That’s why I never want to hear the tapes. I have remembered enough.

“I have heard the tapes. They were gruesome.”

Mary Bromley’s first correspondence had me confused. If Katie’s therapist had heard the captivity tapes, then Katie must have known of their existence as well, long ago. But Katie told me she was unaware audio tapes existed, until I told her about them. Did she banish that memory as well?

“The tapes,” Mary told me, when we finally met, “were shocking.”

“She is screaming at the top of her lungs for
Linda
. Sobbing uncontrollably. And she never once cried for her mother. I cannot emphasize enough the impact that these tapes had on me. To hear Katie’s cries for help, her fear and loneliness, her fear that John was going to kill himself, the crying for Linda. Over and over and over, she was wailing for Linda.”

This, Mary explained, is often what victims of chronic abuse do. They cling to the only provider they know, even if that caregiver is cruel, abusive or neglectful.

Mary is a psychotherapist with an impressive
Curriculum Vitae.
She trained under the famous Dr. Nicholas Groth, who conducted landmark research on pedophilia, and she later saw the brutality of sexual assault up close. She was a supervisor in the Rape Crisis Program at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, counseling rape victims as soon as they were brought to the Emergency Room. In the mid-eighties, she, her husband and their three-year-old son moved from their Upper West Side apartment to East Hampton. By fast-paced city standards, that was almost akin to dropping out. She opened a professional office on Pantigo Road, smack in the middle of “Bonacker” territory.

Bonackers are Springs, Long Island natives, a breed of their own. Descendants of East Hampton’s original seventeenth century English settlers, they arrived, legend has it, at Accabonac Harbor. For the better part of three centuries, hearty Bonackers worked the fishing and clamming
boats and potato fields. They kept to themselves on Long Island’s south fork and maintained a unique dialect and their own phraseology that leaned more New England than New York. When Mary Bromley arrived, she was most definitely “from away”, Bonac-speak for anyone not a Bonacker.

A year into her transplantation, Mary’s toddler son came home from day care with a note. “Beware of strangers,” it urged, below a picture of a sinister-looking man in a raincoat.

“I had to laugh!” Mary said. “I called the police chief and I said, ‘It’s nice you are concerned about these things, but actually it’s almost never a stranger that abuses a child! It’s someone they know, love and trust.”

The East Hampton Police Department hired Mary Bromley the next day to work with sex abuse victims and detectives.

“There was a huge amount of abuse I was dealing with here at that time,” Mary told me, “but we are talking the kind of abuse that people didn’t even think of as abuse: kids being lowered into wells, bats in their faces; kids staying home for months shucking oysters and not going to school; kids walking on the “oyes” to see if it was frozen solid enough for the ice-fishermen who were following them; lots and lots of sexual abuse; lots of domestic violence. So when they hired me, it was for things that were always kept secret, things that were known, but not spoken of.”

After working for the East Hampton Police Department for a year, Mary pushed for the creation of a domestic violence shelter. The problem wasn’t any more prevalent there than elsewhere, she assured the local Rotary club, but something had to be done to protect local battered women. Rotary members agreed. They were progressive and forward thinking, and Mary’s practice thrived.

When Katie Beers stepped out of the headlines and into the home of a Springs family, Mary Bromley wasn’t only the logical choice for Katie’s therapist, she was a godsend.

Mary’s role was two-fold. She was to work with prosecutors to prepare Katie for the criminal trials of both John Esposito and Sal Inghilleri, and she was to introduce Katie to the notion of love and safety. In many ways, they were contradictory goals.

“She needed to be comfortable with me; I had to create a safe harbor for her. But she also had to understand that some of what she told
me, I would have to reveal to other people. I needed to create a trusting relationship, which given the history with her mother and the other women in her life, was very difficult. She had no trusting relationships with women in her life. None.”

Mary’s office was just as Katie had described. Large and airy, with big picture windows. Plants and bookshelves lined the room along with large bamboo roller shades. A bronze bust of Buddha gave the room an ethereal feeling as did the stained glass panels that hung from strings in front of the vertical windows. The walls were painted light blue; the couches were green leather, and just as Katie had said, Mary sat in a “comfy” chair.

Mary exuded warmth and greeted me wearing rectangular reading glasses, an artistic chunky necklace and a navy blue print sweater dress. Her hair was auburn and her smile kind and inviting.

“I have notes, drawings and many, many memories,” Mary had written to me in advance of our appointment, “both hers and mine that I hold in my heart, waiting for this opportunity to share with you.”

Mary’s memory was clear where Katie’s had faltered. She held a thick pile of notes, hand-penned in perfect single-spaced script, recorded, she told me, after each of Katie’s bi-weekly sessions over more than a decade. She remembered the smallest details and had deep perspective that Katie, at times, lacked.

“She has a lack of affect, a flatness, have you noticed that?” Mary asked. I had, but hadn’t thought much about it. “There is a reason for that,” Mary added.

Mary’s office was my last stop on a journey that began with an assignment in court some four years earlier. Sal was back in the news, having been returned to New York from North Carolina on a parole violation. I wanted Katie’s reaction, but first I had to find her. I dug up her foster parents’ address and wrote a letter, requesting that my message by relayed to Katie. Tedd responded, expressing Katie’s desire to write a book. Upon meeting Katie, she readily admitted her memories might contain gaps. Mary Bromley, she said, would be able to fill in the blanks.

Mary, from her comfy leather chair, did indeed have a unique perspective on the story, not only on the days and years after Katie’s rescue, but on its ending. The journalist in me wanted a logical ending and
concise answers to broad questions. Does profound trauma destroy people or can they survive it? How do they recover? Does recovery from trauma come by remembering or by denying the horrors of the past? I had waited a long time to find out if this indelible story could possibly have a happy ending.

“It is a symptom of Katie’s trauma: her lack of affect. She was flat,” Mary emphasized. “And when Harvey Weinstein came in, that began to change.”

Mary invited Harvey to a half a dozen sessions after reading about his kidnapping and learning that he had a house in East Hampton. He had a deep soothing voice which Mary heard in news reports and she had a hunch the meeting would be mutually beneficial.

“It was so beautiful. He sits there; she sits here,” Mary said, gesturing to the green couches, “and he’s this big guy with a deep voice and they got right to it. They were talking about Katie seeing the cops searching for her but being unable to get their attention. And he said, ‘How did you feel about that?’” Mary mimicked his deep voice and then Katie’s child voice.

“And she said, ‘Well, I just kept waiting and waiting,’ and he raised his voice! He yelled, ‘Katie, how did you FEEL that the cops couldn’t find you?’ And she just started sobbing and he yelled, ‘GET MAD! GET MAD KATIE!’ He made her get mad; it was the first time she ever had.”

Harvey and Katie also compared “notes” on how they survived their ordeal.

“‘I was seventeen days; you only had thirteen days!’”

“‘Well,’ Harvey bellowed, ‘I didn’t have a TV!’”

“There was so much laughing and crying, laughing and crying,” Mary said. “He was a real mensch.”

“What was incredible,” she recalled, “was that they both used the same technique
.
Harvey was seventy-five and Katie was nine, and both used the same process of ‘reviewing their life’ moment-by-moment to pass the time in their respective dungeons. Harvey had seventy-five years of memories as a tough Jewish guy, Marine, fighter, businessman. Katie had nine years of being a tough, sweet-hearted kid, alone on the streets. They both survived using this technique. They laughed and cried when they realized this fact.”

With Harvey’s help, Katie got mad and with Katie’s help, Harvey got spiritual.

“Did you forgive your kidnappers?” Katie asked him one day.

“No,” Harvey answered.

“You have to forgive them!” Katie responded.

It was a simplistic thought, but it spoke volumes. Mary felt it spoke to Katie’s innate moral compass and a spiritual nature that wasn’t taught, but just came with her.

“When Katie went into that dungeon, she was already unique,” Mary said. “She had a strong constitution. You can have a kid that suffers a lot less abuse than she did who would have more trauma. She was born with a strong and practical constitution. But on the other hand, she was sexually abused from the age of two and onward. So her whole landscape was of trauma, sexual abuse and neglect. She learned to adapt to trauma and abandonment by her mother. She became accustomed to that world view.

The inescapable abuse and neglect had somehow immunized Katie from pain.

“It hardened her, but also after the abduction, she was embraced by a huge team of people which most children don’t get. Most children are abused and return to more and more trauma and difficulty, but Katie was rescued and given a team of a therapist, the DA himself, the best case workers, the police and an incredible foster family, and the love and support of all her teachers.” This was quite evident to me. Members of her “team” devoted themselves to a mission. They functioned as Katie’s absent childhood parents attempting to make up for the sins of her past. Even members of the news media had participated in this group rescue, by keeping its distance.

What was Katie like when you first met her?

“Do you remember
Paper Moon
?”

Of course I did. Addie Loggins, the child con-artist from the seventies film. An indelible adorable character.

“That was Katie. Right? Wise, practical, very savvy.
Paper Moon
. And she looked like her too. I told her I was a new member of her team. It was important for her to know she was not alone anymore.”

“The whole world is on my team,” a chipper upbeat Katie announced at her first therapy session.

Katie liked having the whole world on her side. But even the best intentioned on Katie’s team had personal agendas.

“You have to remember there was extreme interest in this case,” Mary explained. “It triggered everyone’s worst nightmare, that their own children could be kidnapped, that their children could be sexually abused. It was a mother’s worst nightmare. And it also engendered incredible curiosity and interest in her and how she was doing, every step of the way.

“Everybody had an agenda. It was incredible. I kept saying, ‘We are not pressuring this kid!’”

During her first meeting with prosecutors, Mary said she was invited into a large “war room.” It was filled with crime scene photos tacked to the walls, two dozen detectives and assistant DAs and the District Attorney himself.

“I walk in and they are all sitting there in a huge room and DA Catterson is sitting there and says, ‘What’s your name?’ And I say, ‘Mary Bromley.’ And he goes, ‘Merry Brommley…Irish?’ with a slight brogue. And I say, ‘Half Irish.’ And he says, ‘Come here Merry, have a cookie.’ And I go, ‘That’s okay thanks.’ And he repeats, ‘Have a cookie.’ And I say, ‘Really it’s cool, no thanks!’ Well finally, I realize I have to go over there and have a cookie, because he is establishing control. Power and control, you
are
having a cookie because you work for
me.
You can’t believe what it was like. I had to establish guidelines so that Katie wasn’t going to be a puppet for his re-election. A poster child.

“Later on, he wanted me to bring her to a staff picnic and I said, ‘No!’ He called me up at eleven at night, and he said, ‘You’re not bringing her to the picnic?’ And I was laughing; I said ‘No, of course she’s not going to picnic with all the ADAs. I thought he was kidding! And he said, ‘You will regret this.’ I never got another case from him.”

Katie escaped the stress of those days, Mary said, through sleep. On the way to court or to the DA’s office, she would fall asleep almost instantly. Therapy was its own trauma. It was focused, in the beginning, on the effort to recall detailed specifics about having been sexually abused by Sal and John. There were times it was just too much for her. Katie would
crawl up in a fetal position on the floor of Mary’s office while Bill Ferris, the assistant DA, would pepper her with questions, and Mary would say, “Enough.” Bill, Mary explained, was a gentle, caring and patient man, an important force in Katie’s life, but there were moments she just couldn’t endure it anymore.