Katie Beers (36 page)

In the second session, Katie told Mary that she was able to survive being in the dungeon because of Linda Inghilleri.

“How badly she was treated. Katie implied that nothing could be worse than how she was treated by the Inghilleris. She said she had a slime ball list, that’s the way she talked,” Mary chuckled, “and Linda was at the top of that list!”

And as they talked, they played games. Katie played checkers the way she survived in the dungeon. She was able to think ahead to her next move.

Katie also wanted to be able to cheat. “She was greedy, starved for winning,” Mary wrote in her notes. “She doesn’t expect guidance and she doesn’t expect to be given a chance. She is amazed that I would be happy for her if she won.”

It took Katie three months to call Mary by name, but when she finally did, Mary felt it was a break through. “She has a lack of trust and closeness with women” she wrote. “She has absolutely no memory of any adult trying to protect her in any way.”

Now, with the beginnings of a trusting relationship, Mary was able to get past the games and ask Katie about Sal.

“I told her it was okay to be angry at me for helping her to recall incidents of abuse. I made sure she knew she would never lose me if she expressed anger or frustration toward me.
”

Katie was very anxious that Sal, at his trial, would accuse her of
wanting
“to touch his penis.” Mary believed that he must have said that a lot while he was abusing her. “You want this.” Said enough times, Katie believed it. As a result, she had deep feelings of shame. Mary stressed how beautiful her body and soul were. Katie began to understand the dynamics of shame and guilt, where the offender blames the child.

“She was a very brave little girl,” Mary said, facing her abuser in court and staring him down as she clung to Mary’s hand.

For many years, Katie denied to Mary that Sal had raped her.

“Sal terrified her and sexually abused her. I went with what she gave me. What I didn’t want to do was suggest anything to her. Because we were going to trial I had to be very careful not to coach her, not to prep her and to allow whatever was going to come out to come out. I didn’t want to give her the possibility of falsely
creating
a memory. I asked her directly. She denied that there was any rape. As we went along, a few years later, she remembered that Sal raped her. There was a crystal clear memory of him raping her near a pipe in a basement. But it came out years later.”

“Denial,” said Mary, “worked very well for Katie for a long time.”

Key people in Katie’s life made guest appearances on the green leather couch. This was Mary’s way of showing Katie that there was a large team behind her.

Dominick Varrone was invited in. “Katie loved seeing him,” Mary recalled.

“During the session with Dominick, it came out that Katie felt extreme guilt for the things she had to do to get out of the dungeon, such as being ‘nice’ to John and ‘playing along with him’. She also believed that she should have been able to get out all by herself
.
Varrone suggested that Katie might benefit from visiting the dungeon when she was older, to get a better sense of how she could never have escaped on her own.”

After a series of “heavy sessions,” Katie would ask to go out to eat, walk around and “people watch” at the park. Mary and Katie took mental health breaks. And they lightened the mood through art.

Mary kept the drawings and paintings and pulled them out of a wide bureau drawer. The paint was cracked and the paper hardened into a roll, but when flattened, the images were still vivid.

Two faces of women are painted alongside each other. One is bright yellow and sunny, the other is dark and enraged.

“I asked her to draw a picture. I didn’t tell her to do this. This is her view of women. She never drew bodies.”

Why would there be no bodies?

“I think she was drawing herself. That part of her doesn’t exist. It’s been violated so many times, it’s cut off.”

“Here is the dungeon. She calls it ‘my dungeon.’ You see how precise she is?”

The painting showed the tunnel and the box where Katie was locked. She painted chains and handcuffs.

“She was very focused on getting it right.”

Mary felt Katie’s ability to paint the dungeon represented closure.

“It was very moving and emotional for her. She cried and I probably did as well. One fact stood out as she made the drawing. She had incredible trouble making the toilet
.
She kept crossing it out and re-doing it. It suggested to me there were very strong feelings connected to the toilet which she later confirmed. Deep shame and humiliation. He watched her relieving herself. In these notes she tells me that when she saw the police on the TV monitor she believed they would never come back and that she was going to die and there would be poop next to her on the mattress.”

Katie also spent many early sessions making a toy box out of clay and spent a lot of time trying to construct a lock for the box. She called the art therapy “dumb,” but Mary felt the lock signified her deep need to protect herself.

Katie drew dark flowers with black and brown appendages and subtitled the work, “Everything but the inside is ugly.” Mary felt the appendages were phallic and Katie’s need to draw these flowers over and over showed an urge to gain mastery over something that was “dark and ugly.”

But there was no mastery of the parts of her life that remained beyond her control. Marilyn was arrested for “labor fraud” and John for burglary. Katie received the troubling news while she was in elementary school and Mary rushed there to counsel her, finding her in the nurse’s office, rolled up in the fetal position, crying deeply.

“After her mother’s arrest, she paints a red sky over a dark blue sea. There is no sun. Everything was on fire. Many behavioral problems were reported by her foster parents around this time. We did family therapy. Katie paints another picture of a bloody sunset.”

Mary visited Katie at school several times. And although she would say “hello” to everyone, she could see that Katie was deeply lonely. There was an inner sadness on her face. She was involved in school— cheerful—but in unguarded moments, there was profound loneliness.

The day a teacher showed Katie a picture of Sal on the cover of
the
Daily News
, Katie felt sick, fled for her home, and covered all the windows with blankets, “thus recreating the dungeon,” Mary wrote.

“Seeing Sal’s face. That is what frightened her most. She recreated her own dungeon. Later she states she never saw the newspaper. She just blocked it out.”

And that, said Mary, is how Katie coped and initially survived. She went underground.

Problems surfaced. Katie feared going down into the foster home’s basement. She fought with her foster siblings, acted out, was oppositional, manipulative, clingy. There was nervous laughter. And when Katie was very stressed, she would suck her thumb. Mary had to urge Barbara, who attended many sessions, not to take Katie’s anger personally. “I would explain to her that it was such a huge gift that Katie was giving to them. She was comfortable enough to be obnoxious.”

Barbara, who worked part-time in an accountant’s office and Tedd, a corrections officer, were conservative Christians and ran an extremely tight ship. Katie was their daughter now. Mary explained to Barbara that Katie would likely regress before recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Barbara braced herself and Katie delivered with nervous clinginess, chattiness and anxiety, needing to know where everyone was at all times and what they were doing.

Mary explained to Barbara that this was Katie’s way of coping with her anxiety. It comforted Katie to know where everyone is. She suggested that Barbara be more direct and reassure her by saying, “I know you are feeling nervous because you remember being so frightened and alone. You are not alone anymore. We love you so much.”

Barbara wanted to shoulder all of Katie’s hurt. In one emotional session, she told Katie, “I wish I could take your pain. I wish you could give it all to me. I am strong enough to handle it.” Katie flew into Barbara’s arms in great relief and burst into tears.

For Katie too, there was hard work for many years. She had to practice “cognitive behavioral techniques,” learning to think before reacting in the household. She was taught to express her feelings to Barbara and Tedd directly, rather than display her anxiety. And she had to slowly peel away useless illusions and view Marilyn honestly. Mary made a decision early on to include Marilyn in the “team.” Katie, she believed, needed to
have a therapeutic relationship with her. Going through an adoption process and losing her mother forever, Mary felt, would be too overwhelming and crushing. But Katie needed to face up to her mother’s many failures.

As part of the team, Marilyn was invited to therapy sessions. Katie was extremely protective of her mother and constantly made excuses for her, explaining to her foster parents the reason she never received gifts was because her mother couldn’t afford them, and the reason Marilyn was distant was that she “grew up without any affection.” Mary recalled that Katie became much calmer and happier with Tedd and Barbara after they showed compassion for Marilyn.

Eventually, Katie began to articulate that Marilyn didn’t know how to be a mother. In one pivotal session, Katie informed Marilyn she almost drowned in Ann Butler’s pool. Marilyn asked why she never told her.

“Because I never lived with you!” Katie shouted.

John Beers also came very willingly to sessions with Katie, sharing that he was sober and active in an AA program. He truly wanted to make amends to Katie for his behavior before, during and after her abduction.

“He stated he was mostly drunk or stoned during that time,” Mary wrote. “He also admitted to a lot of anger towards Marilyn and stated how much he loves Katie.”

The sessions with John helped Katie know she grew up loved by at least one person. Shortly after these sessions, Katie and Mary attended John’s one-year anniversary in AA. Katie sat stoically but held Mary’s hand throughout as John spoke emotionally about the people he felt he hurt. Katie said little after the meeting, except how proud she was of her big brother.

Mary knew she could never approve of Katie living again with Marilyn and John, but she did give Marilyn credit for one thing. Marilyn had provided Katie with many of the traits that helped her survive. Marilyn, a cab driver, knew how to get from point A to point B. She knew how to get around. Katie could also navigate her way around the most awful obstacles with extreme acuity. “And,” Mary said, “Katie was not psychologically deep.”

“This saved her. She didn’t over-think things. She had to get the memories out in order to face Sal and John in court, but once that was behind her, she didn’t look back. Her normal inclination is to be passive and flat. She was never depressed.”

Outbursts of anger and emotion were rare, and came only at the hint of shame and embarrassment, as was the case when Katie found out audio tapes were made by John of her days in captivity.

“How did Mr. Ferris know I was crying in the tapes?” Katie was visibly upset. Mary explained they had to gather evidence, and had to listen to the tapes.

“I assured her they would never be made public. They made her feel ‘yucky.’ She never heard them back then, but she was quite upset and angry they existed. She knew all about the tapes. She knew I had heard them. Dominick let me listen to them.” If Katie had since “forgotten” about the tapes, Mary said, she wouldn’t be surprised.

“Has Katie heard them?” Mary asked me anxiously.

I told Mary that Katie wants the tapes destroyed. She felt their contents would be helpful in this format, for others to learn from the brutality of her experience, but that she did not feel she needed to reopen her wounds so deeply. They had long ago crusted over. She wanted to tell her story in order to help other children.

“Even at ten years old, she wanted to do that.”

Katie asked Mary for “permission” to tell her story to classmates in a seventh grade health class, to “help other kids, who have never been able to ask me anything about what happened.” Mary said yes but added, “We needed to continue to monitor the results. She understood that sharing her story would not necessarily bring friendship. She also needed to understand that sharing her story could help her find closure.”

Eventually Katie made friends and even ran for student government secretary in Junior High School. She lost the election. Sessions with Mary evolved into more mundane pre-teen and teenaged issues, although Mary was always on the lookout for regression and symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

“Katie gets her first period,” Mary’s notes read. “She is proud and happy about this.”

The two had many talks about sexuality as Katie became a teenager. Mary wanted Katie to have a healthy expression of it. She wanted Katie to be able to talk about it.

“I told her that her body territory had been invaded and how frightening that was and she would need a lot of reassurances.”

Around this time Katie began to discuss boys.

“She asks to keep all her feelings confidential as she knows Barbara would disapprove. I told her everything is confidential unless I suspected she was being harmed in some way. She appreciated this on many levels. Feeling protected and feeling validated.” But Mary expected fears of abandonment and bodily harm. “As she enters adolescence,” Mary wrote, “I expect many of these problems to become more apparent.”

In a later session, Katie was happy about friendships that were starting to truly bloom. Katie was matched with a “little sister” in a school peer support program. The child had been abused and was also in foster care.

“Mary, I felt just like you,” Katie announced happily in a session. “I had to ask her how she felt about everything...questions about her feelings and everything!” She was proud to be able to help someone else.

Art therapy also demonstrated Katie’s progress. She made twelve clay caterpillars with a wide range of emotions: happy, sad, scared, angry, bored, shy, anxious, nervous, amazed, surprised.