Katie Beers (27 page)

Even years later, after I began working at a different network and the stakes had grown even higher, I chose not to seek out Katie on birthdays and anniversary dates of the kidnapping, when her case would revisit the papers. She was a child and technically would be for at least another eight years. Even more importantly, she was a victim of sex crimes and she had the right to anonymity. It wasn’t until I was covering the arrest of Sal Inghilleri in North Carolina on parole violation charges that I did the arithmetic and realized, for better or worse, Katie had grown up.

With her decision to collaborate on a book and with her permission, I sought out the one man I thought could fill in some of the gaps in her memory. Dominick Varrone. The Detective Lieutenant was now Chief Varrone, the man who led the kidnap team in Katie’s disappearance.

I had low expectations as Varrone dug a machine out of a cardboard box he had pulled out from the bottom shelf in his cavernous office at Suffolk Police Headquarters in Yaphank. The tape recorder was vintage eighties: big, black and covered in a visible coat of antique grey dust and home to years of mold spores. If there were anything worth listening to on this tape recorder, I guessed the audio quality would be marginal at best.

His office was a throwback to a different era, when space was not considered a luxury and offices spoke of rank and experience. Varrone had both. He had been on the Suffolk Police Department for thirty-eight years and was currently the Chief of Detectives of a force of more than twenty-
five hundred sworn officers, one of the biggest in the country. The paneled walls of his office were a testament to that experience with barely an inch of space between the collage of black framed photographs, plaques and awards: photographs of Varrone shaking hands with Rudy Giuliani, posing with George Bush and standing with Joe Biden.

The framed newspaper headlines were a journey through Long Island criminal history. One read, “Hunt for the Killer.” Varrone was the tactical patrol commander in the summer of ninety-four when a sniper took aim at random people—shooting through the crosshairs of a high powered rifle as one victim ate at a diner and another filled the tanks of suburban gas guzzlers at a service station. Still another woman was shot as she wiped tables at a busy Wendy’s. Thousands of interviews and still more ballistics checks led to an arrest and thus another success for the upand-coming detective.

A year later, Varrone helped orchestrate the multi-agency response to wildfires that swept through Suffolk’s “Pine Barrens”—an expanse of pine scrub that burned out of control during the end of the summer of ninety-five. The Hamptons were cut off from the rest of the island for days, as a line of fire burned on both sides of Sunrise Highway. A black smoke plume could be seen as far away as Manhattan. Seven thousand acres of low pines and shrubs were charred for a generation, but not a single life was lost.

The next year, Varrone was overseeing the response as the wreckage of TWA Flight 800 was pulled from the Atlantic Ocean and later being reassembled like an impossible giant jigsaw puzzle. Investigators were trying to determine why the Paris-bound jet liner, filled with two-hundred and thirty souls, blew up in midair above the county’s Atlantic Ocean shore on July 17, 1996. The plane was reduced to metallic confetti twelve minutes after takeoff.

In fact, Varrone was in charge at most of these sentinel Long Island events where I, quite often, was scribbling down his words.

I had known the Chief for the better part of my two decades covering Long Island for, at this point, three televisions stations, yet even after countless press conferences and interviews, this was my first visit to his second floor office. I knew the weight of his title, if not the path he had taken to attain it: Commanding Officer of the Second
Precinct, Commanding Officer of the District Attorney’s Rackets Bureau, Commanding Officer of the hostage negotiating team, Assistant Chief of Patrol, and now—Chief of Detectives. Photos of swearing-in ceremonies lined the modest book shelves, but my eyes were drawn to the bookcase to the left of his massive county-issued desk. Here were framed pictures of what had to be his family. I asked about his wife and kids.

He started haltingly, “This is my wife, and these are my kids. I recall at the time of the kidnapping my daughter was about the same age and, you know, because of the similarity, same name, Catherine, same age…” he sighed. “My son was a little older at the time and sort of got involved in the investigation—what little I was home—because my son was very into video games and there was a video game aspect of the case, I tapped his knowledge of some of the games. My daughter was the same age as Katie, nine going on ten. It was just a coincidence…but….”

Varrone stopped, obviously uncomfortable. “I hadn’t prepared to do this.”

I moved quickly back into his comfort zone and we talked about Katie and what prompted her to finally tell her story after so many years of silence and anonymity.

“You sure this will be good for her?” he asked.

For some reason, the Chief always reminded me of someone familiar, although I couldn’t place the face, and this was especially true at that moment. Maybe it was his eyes, with a softness that defied his authoritative position. Or maybe it was the way he answered a question going the long way around to get to the end point. The soft spot I always had for the hard-nosed investigator was punctuated at that moment when I realized that under the blue armor was an active heart. This, quite obviously, was a man who sincerely cared about the victims long after the newspapers had yellowed.

The largest headline on his wall hadn’t lost its crispness a bit. My eyes zeroed in to the top right corner of the back wall. There, in a simple black matte frame, was a front page of
Newsday
with a full page picture of Katie. She looked dazed, wearing the over-sized blue rain poncho, as she was ushered into a waiting police squad car. The headline screamed, “ALIVE!”

Just above the “Alive” headline was one more framed photo of Katie. That was the face I knew well. It was Katie’s high school graduation picture.

Chief Varrone headed the kidnap task force when it was newly formed in the wake of a 1989 abduction of a mentally disabled Suffolk County boy.
³²
Thirty-nine cops were each trained to respond to different aspects of a kidnapping case, from phone tapping to interrogation. Varrone, who was a precinct commander when Katie disappeared, was suddenly thrust to the helm of an investigation that would mean life or death for a child his daughter’s age. He kept mementos of what was obviously one of the highlights of his law enforcement career. One of them was a framed clipping—this one included his own picture. The headline read, “A Comforting Face.” And there was a framed photo of Katie, sitting in the backseat of a detective’s car, moments after being rescued, with Dominick Varrone behind the wheel, whisking her to safety.

Dominick, as he soon gave me permission to call him, apologized for not going through the cardboard box before I arrived and led me into the conference room where he plopped it down causing a dusty cloud to rise and began sorting through its contents. There were tan folders and aged manila envelopes, pads of white pages scribbled with notes and the vintage black tape recorder. He plugged it in to the wall with a long industrial extension cord then fiddled with the buttons for a few seconds and asked, rhetorically, if I were ready. Then he hit play.

Dominick casually informed me earlier in the year that dramatic audio tapes existed of Katie in captivity.

“Tapes?” I was incredulous.

Why would anyone have recorded her days in captivity? I vaguely remembered a mention of tapes in a McAlary
Daily News
column after Katie’s rescue, but it seemed to me anecdotal. McAlary wrote of a law enforcement friend who heard tapes of Katie “sleeping and snoring”
³³
in the dungeon. They seemed insignificant. McAlary, at the age of forty-one, tragically lost his battle with cancer on Christmas Day, six years after the kidnapping. The subject of tapes was never again mentioned in the press. If they contained a treasure trove of insight into the crime, as Dominick
was now suggesting, how is it possible that they had never leaked out? I was floored but tried to mask my anticipation.

“John had a mini-cassette player on the shelf in the bunker,” he told me. “Now you are the only reporter who knows that.”

“And you’ve kept that to yourself all these years? How? Why?” I asked in complete amazement.

“To protect Katie,” Dominick said, more like a father than a cop. “She should never hear them. It wouldn’t be good for her at all.”

Instantly he moved on to a thick pile of eight by ten crime scene photos. There had to be well over two hundred of them. I began to flip through. The first one showed an opened red and black “Home Alone” video game box on the floor of John’s chaotically cluttered bedroom. Bureau drawers were haphazardly ajar, dirty tube socks strewn all over the tiled floor, opened Pepsi cans and snack bags on the tables and the casters of an unmade bed were propped up on folded newspapers.

“We now know Esposito made Katie an offer —she liked to drive the car—so he made an offer to pick her up and to take her to Toys R Us. He was going to let her drive. So on that morning, he comes to pick her up—he sets it up the day before—he allows her to drive, sitting on his lap. They go to Toys R Us and they buy some items which ultimately we document because we knew what some of the items are. Nobody goes to Toys R Us and buys the same four or five items. So we were able to backtrack and document that they did in fact go to Toys R Us and confirm exactly what he said he purchased. And we now know that he took her back to his bedroom and allowed her to play
Home Alone
and then made the sexual advances on her, pushed her down on the bed. He got on top of her. He began to kiss her and she fought back and screamed. With that, he brings her around to the entrance way to the underground bunker which he had prepared, and he throws her down the hole to the bunker and then he comes down with her. And he has a small voice activated recorder. He makes a recording of her saying that she got kidnapped.

“This is the actual recording,” Dominick continued like a seasoned cop commanding a press conference, delivering information with purpose, not waiting to field questions. He remembered every minute detail of this
case and wanted the record to be clear and accurate.

“Later on he goes to Spaceplex to report her missing. We now know he goes to this Amoco gas station which is right near Spaceplex and he goes to this telephone booth and dials Linda Inghilleri’s number—he might be aware of the fact that she is incapacitated in a wheelchair and she doesn’t usually get to the phone—and he leaves a message —what he actually wants her to believe is that it is actually Katie calling. And everyone, including us, initially believed it. So this is the call that Linda receives on her answering machine.”

He fired up the tape recorder, hitting play. There was a loud hiss of background noise, then a telephone answering machine beep followed by Katie’s tiny trembling voice from the distant past.

“Aunt Linda, a man kidnapped me and he had a kniiiiiiife... ooooooohh ohhoh ....Oh NO here he comes——I gotta goooooo.” Her voice trailed off like the ending to a sad song.

A click is then heard on the tape followed by Linda’s voice, said with urgency: “Katie???”

“Now, from an investigator’s perspective,” the Chief continued, “it is somewhat problematic because this actually was played for me the first morning when the kidnapping was activated. As soon as I got to the Fourth Precinct where we set up the command for the kidnap team, I listened to it just as you are listening to it now.”

He played it again. “Now all of us —and Marilyn Beers and her mother all agreed— when you hear it there is no question it sounds like a young girl in distress. Really, that is hard to feign. My first impression when she said ‘a man kidnapped me,’ I was disturbed by the fact that a nine-year-old would say a ‘man
kidnapped me.’
I would expect her to say ‘a man got me’ or ‘a man took me.’ Somebody’s got me. So ‘a man kidnapped me’—that bothered me.

“And then,” he rewound and hit play again, “Ohhh oh no—here he comes —I gotta goooooooo.” The tone in Katie’s little voice is heart breaking.

“And he
had
a knife. That’s past tense. And that’s something we learn in statement analysis. The tenses don’t match. A little girl would not say he
had
a knife—you know? He’s got a knife. A man kidnapped me!
He’s got a knife! For the past tense that was problematic.”

Again he punched the play button. “You hear the sobbing? ‘I gotttaaa gooooooo. Oh no here he comes, I gotta go.’ And the big problem we had with that was, how does a nine-year-old in the clutches of a kidnapper—how is she able to get to a telephone to make a call? It’s just—that was extremely bothersome, however the fact is that this was clearly a girl in distress. Obviously you are concerned for the well-being of a nine-year-old child and you knew she was in trouble. But there were some issues. Now at the time we didn’t know that this was a recording—a playback of a recording —we thought this was her live—talking into a telephone. And we didn’t know until it was sent to an FBI lab that this was in fact a recording and that he was playing it and then we were able to determine actually where that incoming call came from—but that was all days later.

“But the other thing that the FBI picked up on,” Dominick added, “if you listen to the beginning of the recording—and we didn’t pick up on it but the FBI did—you can hear an arcade game prior to her speaking.”

Again, he rewound to the beginning of the tape. “Beep...bom bom...”

Again. It sounded musical, like notes in an amusement park ride. “‘Bom bom bom,’ you hear that? The FBI brought that to our attention. We asked them what they thought that was and they said clearly it sounds like some kind of an arcade game, which was, well, a dilemma for us because it supported the Spaceplex theory, where you play these arcade games. As it turns out, children, when Esposito would have them over the house, would record things on this tape recorder for fun, and they would always be playing these games. And if you ever pause one of these Nintendo video games, “da da...bom bom bom” ...so this was a recording over a tape that apparently had something previously on it from the kids at Esposito’s house. We determined this after.”