Katie Beers (3 page)

I was getting that tight sick feeling in my stomach—the one I had when Sal would come for me in the middle of the night and do dirty things to me. Marilyn had gotten a restraining order against Sal. But not John. Big John had never touched me.

Big John said that he was going to leave and give me time to get ready, and he was also going to get ready. I think I was still in my pajamas. Ready for what? I wondered. I thought we were just going to Spaceplex. I put on my black denim skirt, a white turtleneck, the one with the Scottie dogs all over it, a pair of black cowboy boots, and the ever-present Blossom hat.

Big John was always polite when he would come get me, telling Linda he knew all the rules. Like a date. With the instructions all laid out—mail two letters, phone if late and home by dinner—we were off.

In one of our first meetings, Katie straightened her arm, twisting her elbow to get a better view, scanning the back for the marks she told me she knew were there.

“I know it’s here somewhere. I can’t believe it’s faded so I can’t even find it!” she giggled. “Well, I’m sure it’s here. Trust me!”

“Linda” she said blankly, “put out a cigarette on my arm.”

Her hands then began exploring her smooth cheeks. “There’s a scar here too,” she said, “used to be a hole in my cheek.”

I remember the police description: White female, straight dirty blond hair. Small hole in left cheek. It was one of those passed-over details in a news story that never seems to make much sense but you bury it in the story anyway and privately question its significance. Linda thought it was a wart, Katie now explained to me. Marilyn thought it was a pimple. Her two mother figures fought over the origin of the facial defect and each had her way with it. Linda burned it off with wart removing salicylic acid and Marilyn squeezed it between her plump fingers until it bled. The result was a hole on Katie’s cheek, something she figured she would wear for the rest of her life. But now, as I scoured her face, I couldn’t find a trace of it.

To our meetings she lugged an overstuffed dark blue vinyl binder. In it were one hundred eleven double-sided clear archive sleeves, each neatly filled with folded newspaper pages, yellowed clippings and national magazines, compiled by someone who could obviously foretell the impact of the events and understood that the little waif at the center of the media storm would one day want to remember. Katie told me her “mother” had been assembling it for years. I understood she was not referring to Marilyn Beers. Barbara, her foster mother, had been following the kidnapping in the news and kept every article even before she knew she would end up raising the child who had vanished.

Missing from the binder though is the first communication that went out via fax and notified seventy news agencies from Manhattan
to Long Island on December 29, 1992. It declared in the most understated of “subject” lines: UNUSUAL INCIDENT
¹
:

“The Suffolk County Police Department is asking the public for their assistance in locating Kattie Beers, a nine-year-old Bayshore resident, missing under circumstances evincing an abduction.

Kattie was last seen on Monday, December 28 at approximately 4:30 P.M. at the Spaceplex family Center, Rte 25, Nesconset.

She is a white female , 4 feet tall, 50 pounds, light complexion, brown eyes, with straight dirty blonde hair. She had a small hole in her left cheek from minor surgery. When last seen, Kattie was wearing a dungaree skirt, white shirt with black Scottie dogs, and black boots.

Anyone with information concerning the whereabouts of Kattie Beers can contact the Fourth Squad detectives...or the juvenile/missing persons section.”

The fax that Tuesday morning ended up in my hands. I was the News 12 Long Island early morning reporter. Some folks dread an early shift, but for me it was essential. It was the only way to live in Manhattan and beat the hour-and-a-half rush-hour traffic to Woodbury, Long Island, where News 12 is based. I could leave my apartment on East 82nd Street at 6:25 am, fly across the Queensboro Bridge, thus avoiding a toll which I couldn’t afford on a reporter’s salary, and be in the newsroom by seven sharp. I would show up with a soaking wet head and au natural face. I was working ten-hour shifts with barely a break in the day for the bathroom, so doing my hair and makeup on company time was an ounce of justice.

But on this day, I wished I had come to work ready to roll. The press release handed to me by the assignment editor looked routine enough—missing child—I was certain she would turn up quickly. In fact, most stories that involve missing people seem to resolve before the end of the work day, negating all the effort of putting together a news report. The victim usually turns out to be not missing at all, either taken by a family member or friend without permission, or voluntarily off somewhere hoping not to be found. But this one instantly tripped the radar. “Nine-year-old”
Kattie
Beers, it said. Nine-year-olds don’t usually run away from home, no matter how hellish the home.

I also knew there would be competition. A lot of it. All of the New York City stations covered Long Island with satellite news bureaus, in
most cases one reporter assigned to the entire island of nearly three million residents. Suffolk County, home to half of those residents, is a sprawling spread of terrain on the eastern side of the fish-shaped island. Surrounded by water on two shores, Suffolk is the belly and the flat end of the fishtail, and its inhabitants provide no shortage of salacious, scandalous and, at times, wacky news stories. Long Island could always be counted on to provide an interesting array of news choices. With some of the nation’s most expensive zip codes, there are also pockets of the population that can barely pay inflated metropolitan-area rents and mortgages. Bay Shore, the missing girl’s hometown, according to the police release, fell somewhere in the middle. Its history reads like much of the Island’s: wealthy city families flocked to expansive beaches to build seaside mansions. Decades later, working class families from the boroughs also came east, buying their first homes here, turning farmland into suburbia. Harvey Milk graduated from Bay Shore High. Joe Namath had a summer spread and the Entenmann family baked millions of boxes of beloved crumb coffee cake here. Bay Shore made news for less celebrated reasons too: the shuttering of Main Street stores after malls invaded, and the exodus of homeowners after a flood of psychiatric patients were released from Pilgrim State Hospital. For the most part, though, folks here took care of their kids and didn’t lose track of them.

The Long Island story of the day was often the source of heated morning debate. On any given day, there could be a dozen options. The pile of overnight faxes with story pitches and breaking news could be an inch thick. With each one garnering a few seconds of perusal—the pile was then whittled down to the top ten or so. News judgment varies but often the collective decision boiled down to balance. Too much crime turns viewers off. Too many features put viewers to sleep. Internal newsroom debates often ended with the three network affiliates and several independent TV stations heading off in opposite directions.

But once in a while, the story of the day is indisputable. There is one obvious “lede” story, editorial slang for the word “lead.” Such was the case on December 29, 1992. Missing girl in a game arcade was what we call in the news business—a giant.

There was no hesitation. I knew the stations and live trucks would descend upon Bay Shore to seek out the girl’s parents and neighbors,
teachers and friends—and I also knew the early bird catches the worm. You snooze you lose—worn out clichés in news, because they are true. I needed to get going fast.

Tony Mazza was already geared up, sitting in the Crown Victoria in the parking lot behind News 12’s studios. Tony, a cameraman, was always upbeat, never grumpy, a rarity in the business, especially at that hour. But first thing in the morning, we rarely exchanged much conversation. I gave him the address: 1083 Ocean Avenue, Bay Shore, and knew I had a good thirty minutes of shut eye while he looked it up in the Hagstrom’s and silently headed east.

We pulled up to a small house on the right side of a street without sidewalks. We weren’t the first news vehicle to park and that set off the adrenaline. Dingy yellow shingles framed a wooden door with a big Mylar sign that read “The Party’s Here!”

Inside was what we call “one stop shopping.” The missing girl’s mother, a godmother, a grandmother and cops. I could, temporarily, relax. Everyone important to the story was present in the tiny cape, or so I thought.

Suffolk Police detectives were swarming around the kitchen area. Marilyn Beers, who I quickly learned was the missing girl’s mother, was standing and smoking next to a red princess phone that hung from the kitchen wall. One of the detectives asked Marilyn if the tape was real. What tape? I listened hard.

“Yeah, it’s real.” Marilyn showed little emotion. “I’m going crazy,” she told a reporter. “Every time the phone rings, we all jump.”

Marilyn explained to the growing gathering of reporters in the cramped kitchen that she got wind of the “situation” in a phone call to her next-door neighbor from Linda Inghilleri, her daughter’s godmother.

“She went with John Esposito after I specifically told her she was not to go with John Esposito,” Marilyn fumed.

Marilyn explained that Linda played a tape from her answering machine over the phone and she had no doubt it was authentic. Katie was crying hard and it certainly didn’t sound to her as if she was playing games. She jumped in a friend’s car—hers was dead in the driveway—and rushed to West Bay Shore, twenty-five miles west of Mastic Beach, where she said she lived.

Linda, who explained she was
like
a mother to Katie, but actually her godmother, wore a housecoat and a hint of pink pearl lipstick. But there was nothing to conceal the dark circles under her markedly wide-set eyes on a strikingly flat face. She said she was thirty-eight years old, but looked like life had taken more of a toll than that number of years could possibly have. She sat in a wheelchair at the kitchen table, chain-smoking. The song,
A Whole New World
, from the Disney movie
Aladdin
played on a tape recorder. The sweet lyrics wafted above the heavy smoke-filled air emanating from the overflowing ashtray.

Katie, she said, was looking forward to going with a family friend to pick out a birthday present and then to a game arcade, and the outing turned into a tragedy.

Have you heard from her?

“She called me at a quarter after five on my answering machine and by the time I picked it up she had hung up and I replayed the message, and the message said she was kidnapped by a man with a knife and here he comes. She was crying hysterical. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had to play it back ten more times to make it sure it was real.

“‘Please,’ she said, ‘I’ve been kidnapped by a man with a knife. Oh My God. He’s coming back!’”

Who is this John Esposito, the man Katie was with?

“He was a big brother to a lot of children for mothers—that’s how they raised their kids— alone. He was trusted by a lot of mothers. He told me that he just turned his back for a second to buy tokens and she was gone. He had her coat and hat but that was the last he saw of her.”

I soon learned this was Linda’s house, but Katie had a bedroom here. It was a cheerful little room with
101 Dalmatian
bedding and a
Little Mermaid
nightgown folded on the bed. Linda wheeled herself out from behind the table and gestured to the doorway, inviting us to videotape whatever we wanted in the bedroom. It was now clear why she couldn’t walk. She was missing a leg.

“Diabetes,” she said, noticing my glance. “God-dammed diabetes.”

Marilyn was fielding questions in another part of the cramped kitchen, standing so close to an artificial counter-top Christmas tree, I was concerned her cigarette would spark a fire.

“She’s smart, she’s friendly, but she knows not to speak to strangers. She was brought up that way,” Marilyn said, exposing a missing a tooth on the bottom. “I don’t know what else,” she shook her head, “I just know I want my daughter back.” Her eyes welled up.

Is it normal that she would call Linda if she needed help?

“The first person she would call is Linda, that’s her godmother. She calls her ‘Aunt Linda.’ Next she would call her grandmother. I don’t have a phone so she would call my next-door neighbor who would get me the message immediately.”

What would you say to whoever has Katie?

“Please bring my daughter back. I just want my daughter back.” She clenched her eyes shut and a few tears rolled down her ample cheeks.

Ann Butler, Linda’s mother, looked ashen as she held one trembling hand to her temple and stared down at the kitchen table hiding watery red eyes behind thick bifocals. Her nails were adorned with ancient chipped polish, but her lips sported a fresh coat of matte bubblegum pink for the television interview.

“Katie went with Big John who picked her up, because tomorrow’s her birthday, so he picked her up to take her to Toys R Us,” she said without a breath, “and then he took her to this place over in Nesconset, and that’s where everything happened. Katie likes video games and all that.

“She’s a very happy, content little girl “ she said, showing the gathered reporters who were crouching and crowding around the kitchen table a picture taken just days earlier on Saturday. In it, Katie sported a rascal smirk with her arms wrapped around Ann’s neck, and their cheeks were pressed together. Ann beamed, a proud grand-godmother, a far cry from the visibly shaken woman now sitting before us in the kitchen.

“When she made that phone call, she was hysterical. She was crying, ‘A man kidnapped me and he has a knife’ and she says— ‘Oh my God here he comes’ —and she’s hysterical crying and then the phone just went dead and that’s it—that’s the last any body’s heard of her.” Ann was stoic. She stared down. Her fingers did not leave her temple. Reporters asked her if Katie is a smart little girl.