Katie Beers (2 page)

It seemed so odd—someone I had intentionally avoided for so many years, kept outside the perimeter of privacy, suddenly knocking at my inbox. I was surprised she was even using the same name and I was uneasy as I opened it. “I guess it’s time,” she wrote, “for us to meet.”

She wrote of wanting to finally tell her story. “I have been hesitant
to speak to any reporters before,” she wrote, “because it always seems like they exploit people, and I have been exploited too much in my young life.”

Alas, the email was my proof she had survived—but how? Living is one thing. Surviving is another. I had a ten-year-old. She couldn’t get past the cyclone scene in
The Wizard of Oz
. What child could survive a real life trip to a place far scarier than Oz with a flesh and blood cast of monsters? Surely there would be lasting psychological effects. She couldn’t be normal, I thought. If there was one thing I knew as a mother, more than a journalist, it was that love was an essential ingredient when creating a well-balanced child. Skimp on the parenting and the dough won’t rise or something catastrophic like that. Over the years, I had seen the recipe fail many times. I expected an older Katie, but given the missing ingredients, how could she have turned out? What, I wondered, could be left of her?

——————————

Panera Bread in Allentown, Pennsylvania was unexpectedly mobbed. We chose the spot as a midpoint between Long Island and Katie’s current home in rural Pennsylvania. Three hours from metropolitan New York, this surprised me. College kids were huddled around laptops. Elderly couples stared into space sipping soup and navigating shaky hands around giant paninis. The line snaked around the front tables, and customers were squeezing inside to stay out of the driving rain. I wondered how on earth I would locate in this crowd someone I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, and then only as a child.

The sentiment was short-lived. As I carved a path through the lunchtime crush and my eyes scanned the busy eatery, they rested on a young woman seated across from a young man. She was in her mid-twenties with shoulder length amber-colored straight hair, parted in the middle. Her skin was white and unblemished and absent of any hint of makeup.

But it was the eyes that I recognized instantly. Brown almond slivers looked up and met mine. It was Katie Beers, the little girl whose name had become synonymous with abuse, neglect and disappearance. There she was. All grown up. And ready to speak to a reporter for the very first time.

It amazed me that she looked exactly like the little Katie Beers of her fourth grade picture, the one plastered on the missing posters and in all my news reports. And it occurred to me that I had never waited longer to hear the real story behind the headlines.

My instinct was to hug her, but she didn’t really know me at all, so we shook hands and smiled. Her husband, sitting across from her at the table, was endearing but protective. At twenty-eight, Derek was too young to remember the media frenzy his wife of two years generated, but he grasped the concept that she had protected her story for long enough and was not going to hand it over to be cheapened. She wanted it told, he informed me, with truth and dignity. Much had been written about her ordeal—much of it was “speculation,” he said. Merely a collection of newspaper accounts. She was the only one who knew what happened to her, and she had waited to tell it properly. As we ate, a small piece of apple from my Waldorf salad landed on Derek’s sweater.

“Put that in the book!” he chuckled. I told him I certainly would and knew we were going to get along just fine.

Katie told me she used the name “Katie Beers” up until her marriage and deliberately withheld her married name. She revealed that she had gone to college and was a data programmer and Derek a computer programmer. She didn’t sound enthusiastic about her job but had recently been laid off. And she was pregnant.

She spoke of forgiveness but didn’t want her intentions misinterpreted. “I never want to see him free. I want him in prison for as long as legally possible.” She told me she had been raped and didn’t know how to tell that part of the story. I assured her we would find an appropriate way and create something that may help other people—something that may put years of nightmares to rest.

Her hands were young and full. A small diamond adorned her ring finger, and hot pink nails were the only embellishment, that and the diamond necklace with three small round stones that dangled around her neck. When we opened the calendar and made our next date, January13, Katie reminded me that would be the anniversary of her rescue.

“If it were not for the kidnapping,” she laughed. “I’d be living in Mastic Beach with six children by now, driving a taxi.”

“But seriously,” she added straight-faced, “my life would have
been a much different story.”

So began my dialogue with Katie Beers. She would always speak to me as if she were rewinding a tape—scanning for notes and chords she insisted were all still there—precisely recorded in her buried memories. Her answers were at times detached, usually matter of fact, sometimes she even laughed when she spoke about the most skin-crawling tidbits of her dark childhood. And never, it astounded me, were there tears.

The drive home was wet and grey. The clouds hung over the autumn palate like smoke over fire. Brown sticks of trees and evergreens were all that remained in the late fall landscape. The day seemed to define gloomy. It seemed appropriate as I was about to dive into a different kind of gloom —the darkest memories of a tortured child.

By four-thirty, the sky was so dark it felt as if someone had dimmed the lights. Mist hovered over New Jersey’s marshes near Newark airport. I hated this time of year. It made me sleepy and dreadful of the winter when fingers freeze around the metal microphone in blizzard live-shots and words struggle to spit out of frozen lips. It is a northeastern reporter’s most dreaded time of year, especially for a working mother—getting home at an hour when it seemed the kids should be already sleeping and starting my second job. My kids were ten and thirteen. I thought of them as I began to construct the questions that would become Katie’s narrative. And I began to ponder how on earth anyone recovers from a childhood in hell.

Much of it comes back to me in vivid, saturated memories: the manila tan of egg-crate soundproofing, the putrid smells of my own waste and the plastic taste of after-dinner mints that still make me gag. Then there are parts that are hazy like a foggy south shore morning, and parts I don’t remember at all—like it all happened to someone else. Oh, but it happened to me. I have the hole in my left cheek to prove it. And the cigarette burn on my arm. And the deeper scars no one can see.

I would say that I didn’t really know how bad a situation I was in until I was out if it. Like getting used to a chilly lake. You tread water and after a while you warm up, even though the water temperature hasn’t changed at all. Looking back, I can feel the icy waters. But then, I didn’t have the means to take the temperature of my environment. I had only two childhood friends. I saw how their lives were. I knew that my life wasn’t like theirs. I was alone, floating face down in a deadly current and didn’t know it.

People would say that I seemed sad. I don’t remember being sad. I don’t recall crying. Except for after the sexual abuse—which started long before I knew the name for it.

I’m trying to regain the memories, but it’s hard to do after blocking them out for so long and trying to forget them. I would block them out and try not to think about them because if I thought about it, it would happen more. If it was something that was present in my head, if it was something I was thinking about, it could happen again. If I didn’t think about it, maybe I could will it away. But that didn’t work.

John Esposito was always in the picture. My mother, Marilyn Beers, picked up his mother in the taxi she drove and started talking to her about her son, John, who she said was part of the Big Brothers program. He wasn’t actually a part of the organization, but Marilyn didn’t think to check that out since John Beers, my half-brother, needed a male figure in his life. We called them “Big John” and “Little John” and Marilyn allowed Big John to take Little John off on play-dates to go to the batting cage, to
go to his house to play video games, stuff like that. And when I was older, I would go on the outings too. I liked him. Whenever he would come see me, he would give me a toy—like a Barbie doll—and a big hug.

Big John’s house was a toy store, candy store and amusement park all in one. He converted his family garage into an apartment. That’s where he lived, and that’s where any kid with a sweet tooth and a video game habit would end up. The downstairs had two garage stalls and then a door that led into his living room. A little further back was his kitchen and eating area and then a staircase in the kitchen that led upstairs. It was there that all the neighborhood kids would spend hours after school. Up the stairs and down a hallway into John’s bedroom. It was a huge open room with a walk-in closet that was wall-to-wall games. Any game imaginable. Board games, toys, Nintendo, Sega. And then, in one corner, he had a little punching bag hanging from the ceiling. And a basketball hoop. And his room led to yet another room that had ping pong and arcade games lining the walls and another basketball game—this one electronic. Being in those two rooms was any kid’s dream. Not to mention the candy and sweets and soda. I remember he had a little refrigerator in his bedroom always stocked with cans of soda.

Someone told Marilyn that Big John touched Little John in a bad way. So Marilyn said I was no longer allowed to see him or go to his house. But Aunt Linda, my godmother, didn’t go along with that. She had no problem letting me be with Big John. She told me she thought he was a nice man.

December 26, 1992 is one of the heavily saturated days. The memories come back to me in dark reds and black—the colors of Big John’s Nissan pickup truck.

They begin with the knock at the back door of the place in Mastic Beach which I was calling home. It was the only door that worked, really. The little tan converted garage apartment was falling apart and the front door was rotted shut. The backdoor opened into a dingy kitchen with food-caked dishes stacked in the sink—crusty because no one ever thought to wash them. In came Ann Butler, Linda’s mother. Ann liked everyone to call her “Mom.” She drove the half hour from Bay Shore to Mastic Beach because we had no telephone. My “real” mother, Marilyn, was out of work. Marilyn invited Mom into the house, and I came out to say “hi,” and
Ann asked if I wanted to go see Aunt Linda for my tenth birthday, which was in four days.

I really didn’t want to visit with Aunt Linda because I used to be her slave. I cleaned the bathrooms, cooked dinner, vacuumed and did the laundry. Linda liked to have me around to do all her housework because she was lazy and later because she didn’t have a left leg. The gangrene got to it because of her diabetes. So she had me to boss around. I couldn’t exactly say no to her demands. Sal, Linda’s husband, was even scarier than she was. And Sal had ways to make me do whatever he and Linda wanted.

Marilyn instructed me to leave the room. I ducked into the side bedroom I shared with my mother and grandmother and pressed my ear up against the back of the door, so cardboard thin I could hear every word. Marilyn was telling Ann that I was not allowed to visit Aunt Linda because of Sal and Big John. Ann assured her I wouldn’t see Sal or John. Sal, she said, wasn’t living in the house anymore with Aunt Linda, and Big John would not be there either, she promised.

“Please honey,” Ann almost begged. “Linda has a whole birthday party planned for Katie.”

“Alright,” Marilyn finally gave in, “but I want her back for her birthday.”

Marilyn came into the bedroom and delivered the verdict. I would be going to Aunt Linda’s for a few days to celebrate my birthday, but if Sal was at the house, or if Big John showed up, I was told to call her or the police immediately. I was not allowed to see them. I dutifully headed with “Mom” to Bay Shore, home of Linda and Sal Inghilleri.

Linda planned a birthday party for the next day and invited her family. “The Party is Here!” read the giant Mylar sign on the door of the tiny yellow shingled house on Ocean Avenue. I wore a black floppy “Blossom” hat, like the one from the TV show, because it hid my boy-short hair which had been lopped off after a stubborn case of head lice got me kicked out of elementary school. Having my waist long hair chopped bothered me, but I was even more upset that I couldn’t go to school. I knew that lice was something that other kids get because my next door neighbor had it and so did some other kids in my class. I tried to sneak to school often, but the teacher would always send me to the nurse to have me re-checked for lice,
and when they found it, either Grandma Helen would have to walk to the school to get me or Marilyn would have to come from work. I was praying that the haircut would get the lice out because I wanted desperately to go back to school. School had always been the safest place for me.

So I plopped the floppy hat onto my head, and Linda let me put on a little bit of make-up because it was going to be my tenth birthday. Double digits. I told her that since I was going to be ten, I wanted to be called Katherine. “Happy Birthday Katherine” was scrawled in pink script on the supermarket birthday cake.

Big John dropped off a Barbie Dream House for me. It was my Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday in one. That’s why December birthdays stink. He dropped it off and told me he would come by the next day to put it together. Linda said that was fine. I remember reminding her that I wasn’t allowed to see him.

She said, “It’s fine! He’s a nice person. He’s coming!”

Then she added, “We won’t tell Marilyn.”

John returned the next day and sat down at the dining room table and asked Linda if, for my birthday, he could take me to Spaceplex, the giant game arcade in Nesconset about fifteen minutes away. She said sure.

I leaned into Linda and whispered that Marilyn made me swear I wouldn’t go anywhere with Big John and she had told Ann that I’m not allowed to. Linda dismissed me with a pointed finger in my face and said emphatically, “It’s okay. He’s just taking you to Spaceplex. You’ll be home in a few hours.”