Authors: Buried Memories: Katie Beers' Story
Katie Beers
BURIED
MEMORIES
katie beers’ story
KATIE BEERS
with
carolyn gusoff
MEMORIES
katie beers’ story
KATIE BEERS
with
carolyn gusoff
BURIED
MEMORIES
© Copyright 2013 Carolyn Gusoff and Katie Beers
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, except for passages excerpted for the purposes of review, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, or to order additional copies, please contact:
TitleTown Publishing, LLC
P.O. Box 12093 Green Bay, WI 54307-12093
920.737.8051 |
titletownpublishing.com
Editor: Amanda Bindel
Cover Design: Erika L. Block
Map Image on Cover: Jerry Fields
Interior Layout and Design: Erika L. Block
PUBLISHER’S CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Beers, Katherine, 1982
-Buried memories : Katie Beers’ story / Katie Beers with Carolyn
Gusoff. -- Green Bay, WI : TitleTown Pub., c2013.
p. ; cm.
ISBN: 978-0-9888605-9-9
Summary: Buried Memories: Katie Beers’ Story is a neverbefore-told true story of survival, memory and recovery. A profoundly neglected and abused child was kidnapped and locked in an underground box for 17 days. With strength and smarts, she slipped the chains of captivity and began a new life.
1. Beers, Katherine, 1982- 2. Kidnapping victims--New York (State)--Long Island--Personal narratives. 3. Rape victims--New York (State)--Long Island--Personal narratives. 4. Abused children--New York (State)--Long Island--Personal narratives. 5. Esposito, John, 1949- 6. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Gusoff, Carolyn. II. Title.
HV6603.B437 B44 2013
364.15/4092--dc23 1301
I’d like to dedicate this book to my amazing parents, Barbara and Tedd; my loving husband, Derek; and my two beautiful children, Logan and Halee.
—Katie Beers
To my parents, Ileen and Gerry Gusoff, with gratitude and love.
—Carolyn Gusoff
Actual names have been used. In some cases, last names are absent to protect the privacy of those who have not previously been identified publicly.
“When the ‘action of telling a story’ has come to its conclusion, the traumatic experience truly belongs to the past.”
—Judith Herman, M.D.
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
The drive east was therapeutic. Not in a meditative way. I didn’t have time for that. It took me back. Literally. Because for me and most others of my species, the Long Island Expressway is as much memory lane as it is world’s longest parking lot. In Hollywood, they give bus tours of movie stars’ homes. On Long Island, reporters like me could drive you up and down the roads and narrate the twisted and tragic tales. Due south at Exit 37—that’s where a crazed gunman opened fire on a commuter train; Exit 41 to the end, just before you reach the canals—the split level where a teenaged Amy Fisher put a bullet in Mary Jo Buttafuoco’s head; Exit 53 south—where a nurse poisoned patients and then feigned coming to their rescue, but never did in time; Exit 68 to the sea—that’s where TWA flight 800 plunged into the Atlantic; Exit 64 to the Sound—where a wealthy couple was butchered, their son sent to prison two decades for the double murder of which he was later cleared. They are invisible landmarks, faded like scars that are still evident only to those who seek them out. They are like markers on a map of suburban turmoil with so many pushpins it’s hard to make out the land mass. Exit 71—The Hamptons—wineries, farm stands, ocean breezes. But for me, and others like me, it’s simply Katie Beers territory.
I had little company on the solitary stretch of road to East Hampton, and the almost summer sun in a big sky cast dark green shadows on wavy fields of corn and sod. My mind was cluttered with the usual morning fare—getting the kids off to school while pitching and setting up news stories, always a nerve-splitting juggle. Children need to be fed and so do news managers. And I don’t know which are more impatient for their morning meal. As I raced out the door pounding the keys on my Blackberry, the cell rang—it was the school—I had forgotten to send my little one a picnic lunch for her fourth grade field day. Already I needed to make a detour, and I was late.
The two-hour drive slowed me down and took me back to a place in my memory I hadn’t visited for many years. I pulled into a parking space
in front of the East Hampton movie theater, put the car in park and put my mind into reverse. I tried to remember her face, which I had only seen up-close once, in court, when she was ten years old. And as I straightened out the wheel, in front of me, a young couple emerged from a rusty Jeep. The girl was in her mid-twenties, shaggy brown hair, baggy jeans. We made eye contact and I held my breath for a moment. I stared into her eyes for some sign of recognition. There was none. The couple grabbed hands and took off down Main Street.
They were not the ones I had come to see. That would be the man sitting on a bench in front of the movie theater. I knew it instantly, even though I had never laid eyes on him. He fit his name perfectly.
“Tedd?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Yes, Carolyn, nice to meet you,” he said, extending a suntanned hand with a strong grip. He stood up revealing an impeccably dressed man who looked well-suited for early retirement at sixty. Khaki shorts, worn leather flip flops from many a healthy stroll on the beach, and the requisite oxford-striped button down. Tedd was a man of few words in email, but in person he was welcoming. I knew immediately I was not on hostile turf.
We crossed the street to Starbucks and sat on the teak benches that line Main Street, coffees in hand, talking about an event that had occurred sixteen years earlier. We spoke of the timing that had brought us together. Earlier that year, John Esposito had come up for parole after serving fifteen years in prison, and the child he kidnapped, Katie Beers, spoke at his parole hearing. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, he told me. “She remembers everything.”
He was the kind of man who could star in the movie version of his own life. Blond hair, astounding blue eyes and perfectly aligned white teeth that emerged with a warm grin. The grins came often, because here we were, years after one of the most disturbing events in New York’s criminal history, and there appeared to be a happy ending.
“Being kidnapped,” he told me, “was the best thing that ever happened to Katie.”
We spoke for about an hour. He told me he had wanted to meet with me first, before he asked Katie to join us. I told him I felt a sense of maternal protection for her, and I meant it. Her disappearance was a rare test for a reporter. Not only did it evolve into a national obsession with
a media frenzy surrounding every grain of information, but it crept into my heart in a way few stories do. I couldn’t help but take it home, and keep it, forever.
Almost daily during the ordeal, I found myself talking to people in the big tent of Katie’s circus-like cast of characters, all seemingly distraught about her disappearance, but never entirely convincingly. I choked back smoke at the kitchen table of Katie’s godmother, Linda Inghilleri, who would let cigarettes burn until they could no longer, watching her fingers nearly ignite, and then light another one without missing a drag. She would hit “play” on the tape recorder next to the overstuffed ashtray and, as the Disney tune, “A Whole New World,” wafted with the smoke, tell the assembled reporters it was Katie’s favorite song. The interviews invariably ended with her tears dropping onto the vinyl tablecloth and a towering pile of twisted butts.
It was my seventh year in the television news business, and 1992 was like no other. I was simultaneously covering the other big headline grabber of the year, the Amy Fisher/Joey Buttafuoco scandal, splitting my time between two mega stories and Mount Sinai Hospital, where my fifty-seven-year-old father, athletic, strong and full of life, found out he was dying.
“Dad’s in the hospital. Come quick,” my sister announced on what was then a brick-sized cell phone. I instantly reversed my direction on the parkway and, by the time I made it to the emergency room on the Upper East Side, faces were blanched. My husband, then a medical resident at Mount Sinai, looked ashen. Dad’s CT scan showed there was something very wrong. Something dark and opaque that doesn’t belong in a brain showed up on the illuminated view box and the doctor explained that tangled in the crevices were cells growing out of control: a brain tumor.
Weeks later, the eight-inch gash stapled closed on his bald spot marked the opening where the neurosurgeon had entered to scoop out tumor cells growing like mold between cauliflower florets. I imagined it would be an ugly scar, but it never had the chance to heal. My father wouldn’t live long enough. I didn’t know it then, but it was impossible to remove the entire tumor without taking with it vital brain circuitry like speech and hand-eye coordination, little functions dentists need. Seeing my father suddenly lose hand control, his dental practice, eventually his
speech and finally his life, was the backdrop while I covered other people’s tragedies.
I was subletting an apartment in Manhattan with my newlywed husband—no children of our own yet. When Katie Beers disappeared, it was the news story of the day. When she failed to show up, the effort to find her became an epic mission.
To now see Tedd, the man who raised her after her rescue, tell me that Katie had gone well beyond survival and had flourished, was a rare moment for a journalist. When you tell a different story every day in ten sentences or less, you seldom get the satisfaction of knowing the ending. With a spark in his crystal eyes, he told me this story was mine to help tell.
The email screamed for my attention from the daily flurry of digital dialogue—police trumpeting the round-up of unsuspecting johns, politicians hoping to get their two cents in on the evening news about the latest downturn in the market, and pitches from PR houses that think they’re clever using your name in the salutation—as if you won’t realize it’s a mass mailing. And then there was the one with a simple subject line—”Introduction.” In the “sender” column, a person I knew so well, yet not at all: Katie Beers.
The trackball sprinted and I clicked “enter.” It was the first correspondence from a girl who had an almost fictional quality in my mind—or was she a woman? I did the math quickly. She was kidnapped in 1992. She would be twenty-six. What would she look like? All I could imagine was the frail mousy figure hurried away from television cameras, wrapped in a blue polyurethane slicker the night we in the news media and the rest of a mesmerized public learned she was alive. Was I there or had I simply seen the video so many times it was etched in my memory? Suddenly, I wasn’t sure.
I speed read, scanning for disappointment. How many times over the last two decades had I worked for an exclusive of this magnitude? But I waited on this one, remembering the words of the late James Catterson, the Suffolk District Attorney who implored news reporters to let Katie grow up in peace. “Give Katie a Chance!” he had printed on poster board at his news conference after her rescue. I agreed with the sentiments behind the request and abided. But a decade and a half had passed and Katie had grown up. The wounds would be sealed by now, I reasoned, the scars long faded, or at least settled into their final form.