Katie Beers (7 page)

One by one, merchants told us of a lonely little unkempt girl with no shoes or coat and yellow teeth, a little girl the neighborhood kids called “Dirty Katie.”

J&B Stationery Store also had a missing child poster in the window, offering a ten thousand dollar reward for information about Katie’s whereabouts. The owner, Bob, readily spoke to reporters from behind a counter boxed in with cigarette cartons and lottery tickets.

“She was probably six, maybe seven years old,” Bob said with a shrug. “She would come in to buy essentials for her family at six in the morning, like newspapers and birthday cards.”

Doesn’t that strike you as odd?

“Of course, that’s just the way the family was. There was one time my daughter had a confrontation with Linda. She told us to mind our own business. Katie was in here buying birthday cards and was too young to read them. So she would go home and show them to Linda and Linda didn’t like them. So Katie would bring them back, and we’d have to exchange them. So my daughter said something.”

So you mean she spoke to Linda about Katie’s care and welfare?

“Yeah! And she was told to mind her own business…so what can you do from there?”

There was an awkward pause.

“I mean, my daughter, Dawn, was very concerned about Katie. Katie would come in here all the time and stay sometimes for hours. She was dirty, had knots in her hair. Dawn would try to get the knots out. It was a bad situation. Her brother too, he’d stay here. Help out, for hours.”

The stories got worse with each store owner. Mary Ann, with big red hair and matching nails, said Katie would always wander in to Beauty Corner, her hair salon, like a lost dog.

“She was always underdressed, never had the right clothes on, no shoes, no hat, never right for the weather. It could be freezing cold, it could be pouring rain, she’d come in, she’d look like a little shaggy dog,” she said, raising her hands for emphasis. “She was a child who you’d say, how can she be out like this? I would go to the door, watch her go across the street—tell her make sure you go right home, that nobody picks her up. You wouldn’t have a little child walk around like this. She was only three, four years old like this!”

How would you describe her hygiene?

“She wasn’t a clean child. We wanted to take her home, to clean her, to give her a bath. I just hope that she is alright wherever she is,” she said with a glazed look. “My husband said to me, you know how the child was—how come you never said anything? I said, I don’t know. I mean, I have children, I have grandchildren, I really feel very bad.”

For a dog, someone would have called the pound. For Katie, no one knew what to do. The story was beginning to sound like Little Orphan Annie and Miss Hannigan, but
gee
whiskers
, there was no Daddy Warbucks coming to the rescue. The utter lack of response to what seemed like an obviously neglected child was mind boggling.

We were on a roll but knew that we had more essential ground to cover. Katie’s mother lived twenty-seven miles east in Mastic Beach and we had to make a quick pass to see if anyone was talking.

The house on the corner of Mill Drive and Pineway Avenue looked like a sorry place to call home. A typical one-story Suffolk ranch, except this one was falling apart. Tan peeling shingles and some patched-up elevated windows made it an eyesore even in a stretch of slightly less dilapidated homes. There were none of the ornamental plantings that adorn the front of even the most modest suburban residences. The white garage door had gaping holes in it, as if someone had taken a baseball bat to the wooden panels or perhaps used it as target practice with a BB gun. The front stoop was cement, with no effort to dress up the undeniable fact that this place was a dump. But dressed up like a Metallica band member was Katie’s sixteen-year-old half-brother, John Beers, who was speaking to reporters next to an overturned wheelbarrow and ladder on the cracked asphalt driveway.

When Tony and I pulled up, the adrenaline kicked in. Little John, as his family called him, was already busy fielding questions from a small pack of reporters in the driveway. We sped up and squeezed ourselves into the tight semicircle of press to catch up. He sported all black—a black studded leather jacket, black sneakers and black jeans. The requisite mullet stuck out under his black KISS baseball cap with a black cat iron-on in the back. As he spoke, he exposed chipped front teeth.

By the time I managed to get the microphone in front of his mouth, all that came out was, “I’m outa here.” He stepped on a cigarette butt and
strutted away.

What?
I called after him, introducing myself.

“Get it from them,” he said with his back to me, gesturing to the crowd of media that was packing away tape recorders and coiling up cables. It happens to all of us eventually. But missing a big “get” like this, the brother of a kidnap victim, stung badly.

“Don’t worry,” said one of my competitors snidely. “You didn’t miss much. He just admitted he’s been molested by Esposito.”

The conference room was cramped and cameramen were jockeying for positions in the center for a head-on shot, rather than a profile. But it was futile in such tight quarters. Any position was better than nothing. More than a dozen microphones created a tangle of wires and station logos in front of an obviously uncomfortable and quivering John Esposito, who was flanked by the two Siben attorneys. Andrew decisively slid the collection of mics his way.

“He has fully cooperated with the investigation. His sole concern is that the child is returned safely,” he said, impassively.

It was their idea to have John Esposito face the media, and they called the news conference, even though police had been telling reporters, on background, that the mild-mannered home improvements contractor had a criminal record. John had been arrested back in 1977, fifteen years earlier, accused of trying to pull a twelve-year-old boy he knew into a car at a local shopping mall. He copped a plea to the lesser charge of misdemeanor, and details of the case were sealed.

There were other troubling allegations too. The previous December, Marilyn Beers called the Big Brothers-Big Sisters Organization of Suffolk County worried that John, who was spending weekends with her son for years, might be molesting him.
⁵
John Esposito, the organization’s director told reporters, was never a member, but withdrew an application four years earlier, during the rigorous screening phase, after trying to pin the attempted abduction of the twelve-year-old on his twin brother, Ronald. John Esposito, the director said, tried to make it look as if it were a mix up and that it had been his twin brother who was arrested.

The director was concerned enough to contact Suffolk police, he said, because John might have been posting ads on local supermarkets bulletin boards and in the
Pennysaver
, trying to pass himself off as an official “Big Brother.”

“I am a Long Island Big Brother. I am doing it on the side. If you have a son who you think needs a man’s influence, I may be able to
volunteer my time. Every boy needs a man in his life. A person of good character who he can trust and respect. I have been a big brother for over ten years. I have character references.”

The bulletin board ads were neatly handwritten and signed “J.E.,” offering a phone number for contact purposes. John denied posting the cards and the police investigation into allegations he molested “Little” John went nowhere.

Why then, if Suffolk police had been flagged that John was a potential threat to children, was he being paraded in front of the news cameras and about to be grilled by the media on the disappearance of a child? None of this seemed to shake the Sibens. They invited news coverage and counted on a huge turnout. We didn’t disappoint.

What they may not have counted on was John Esposito breaking down in sloppy tears as the cameras were rolling. He told reporters that he had known Katie since she was a baby, met her through his sister-in-law, Joan. He had been to the Spaceplex arcade three previous times and he and Katie always spent time together. She would run and hug him whenever he came to pick her up. She called him “Big John.”

Reporters, keenly aware of the golden opportunity to question a “person of interest” themselves, dug in. A cacophony of questions was hurled at the pallid John.

When did you see Katie last?

Why would you leave her alone at the arcade?

Were you ever accused of sexual abuse?

John, wearing a blue sweater, black vest and pained look on his face, stared down at the table as he spoke. He said Katie had called him on Sunday saying she saved a piece of birthday cake for him from her party. Then, he said, she begged him to visit her on Monday.

“Can you pick me up today? Can we do anything?” John said he remembered Katie pleading.

He said he picked her up at one o’clock in the afternoon, took her to a toy store where he bought her a troll doll for her birthday and a
Home Alone
video game, then to a 7-Eleven because Katie wanted a Slurpee, and stopped by his house for a little while to try out the video game. He said they didn’t like it, so they decided to go to Spaceplex. There, he said, he didn’t hesitate to send Katie off by herself to get tokens with a five dollar
bill while he played pinball. After a few minutes, he added, as if he had already explained it ad nauseam, he couldn’t find her.

“The last time I seen her, I gave her five dollars and she was walking toward the machine. Then after a while, I started gettin’ scared, where is she?”

If he were lying, it was impressive. His horseshoe-shaped dark hair and grey tipped wisps of sideburns framed an anguished look on his face which appeared to be one question away from actual tears. So reporters pressed on.

“I was gettin’ scared. I couldn’t find her. It’s a big place. I’m going crazy looking all over. Then I went to security. ‘Could you page Katie Beers?’ They did it about three times.” The tears were flowing now.

He said he started frantically searching and was then paged to the arcade office where he was put on the phone with Linda Inghilleri and told that Katie had left a message saying she was kidnapped.

“I just want to do everything I can to find her,” he said, his forehead etched with deep lines of despair.

“If you heard the tape,” he said through sobs, “you’d know it was her. She said, ‘Somebody kidnapped me, a man, a man with a knife kidnapped me.’”

Sidney Siben chimed in, “If it was him,” he said, pointing to his now trembling client, she’d say, ‘
John
kidnapped me.’”

Police had confirmed that Esposito had indeed been to Spaceplex. But no one in the cavernous arcade recalled ever seeing Katie.

John tried to make me his partner in crime. He politely requested that I make as much noise as possible while he listened for me upstairs. He said he wanted to make sure the cops wouldn’t hear me, if they should come. While he made his way upstairs, I was trying to figure out how I could trick him into thinking that I was making noise, but not actually do it. A Playschool baby monitor sat on the wooden shelf in the outer room— below the video monitor. It was always on and I knew it was connected to the upstairs but because I couldn’t hear John, I assumed he could hear me. If he could hear what I was doing when he got upstairs, I figured I better make some noise.

I turned the baby monitor all the way down on my end and yelled directly into it. I made sure that I didn’t make enough noise for him to hear me upstairs without the monitor. I held back. After a few minutes of this controlled, pseudo yelling, the drill groaned and the door crashed open.

“Did you do it, did you make noise?” he anxiously asked.

“Top of my lungs.”

“Good.” He believed me.

I was hoping the sound test would pay off, if police ever came.

They finally did.

Maybe it was day two or three. I can’t be sure. But suddenly the cops showed up at Big John’s house. I was in the outer room, having let myself out the cage above with the secret key I had hidden under the pillow. Big John had chained my neck to the wall before he last left, pointless, I thought, because I wasn’t going anywhere. But I snuck out and suddenly, I saw the cops walking up the driveway on the closed-circuit monitor. Finally, police!

As soon as I saw the cops on the monitor, I just started screaming— this time truly at the top of my lungs. Maybe the dungeon was not sound proof. I could hear the cops upstairs talking to Big John—so maybe, just maybe, they could hear me. I yelled and banged. Then I remembered the baby monitor! I yelled as loud as my vocal chords could stand. Screaming that made my hands shake and my head ache.

One voice asked Big John if he remembered anyone talking or looking at me at Spaceplex. I could hear their conversation in muffled tones. How was that possible? Why can’t they hear me?

Then I realized, and I went limp.

It must have been when I was chained up in the box. John had reversed the baby monitor. Now the sounds upstairs could be heard in the dungeon and nothing could be heard of my voice beyond the eggcrated walls. I don’t know when he made the switch, but the realization was shattering.

Big John told the cop that he remembered a man watching me at the arcade, but didn’t think anything of it until just then. And as they talked upstairs in the house just above me, downstairs I continued to scream my lungs out.

“I’m downstairs. Go into the office. I am down here.”

Over and over again, until my voice was lost.

I screamed, “Help me!!!!”

I screamed “I’m HEEERE!”

I yelled and screamed and begged and hit the monitor, “Pleeeaaaseee! I’m hhhheeeere!!”

I collapsed in exhaustion as I watched the cops walk away, down the long driveway, and get into their cruisers and drive away. No one heard me. A grave disappointment came over me. It was fear to my core. I knew, at this moment, that I wouldn’t be found.

When Big John returned down to the dungeon, I cried. No, I sobbed.

“How will I go to school? How will I learn things?”