Katie Beers (5 page)

“A bomb shelter,” he barked and scooped up my shuddering body and dropped me feet first into the black hole.

“Start crawling,” he yelled after me.

It was straight down, too dark to make out a bottom. There were wooden planks for makeshift steps, but they did me no good. I was dropped too hard to make use of them and landed on the cold plywood of a cramped tunnel.

I was in a dark hole. It seemed almost like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole. I remember when she was falling, it was a cartoon fall, and it took forever. She was screaming the whole way; it seemed in the cartoon like five minutes. That’s how it felt, being dropped down that hole. Just like that.

He was still up in the office, getting ready to climb down when he shouted again to me to crawl, to where, I had no idea. But I started crawling.

First John was behind me, and then he maneuvered in front of me. Next I heard drilling. Something very noisy and shrill. The drilling went on for a minute or so, and then there was an opening. There was a small room at the end of the tunnel. I could tell right away there was no way out and I knew that I wasn’t going to get out unless he wanted me out.

John made me go in first, and I plopped myself down into the stifling chamber. Then he followed.

I quickly sized up the landscape. It was bleak. There was one square area no bigger than the closet in Mastic Beach and then elevated off the floor what looked like an enclosed cabinet, not much more than a coffin-sized box, outfitted with a door padlocked shut. The outer room had a toilet in the corner —not hooked up to anything – but with a black plastic garbage bag in the hole. There were two wooden shelves attached to the wall. I could see on one shelf what looked like a security monitor.

The room felt like an animal cage. There was yellow soundproofing
and cork covering the walls. John opened the padlock hanging on the small door leading to the enclosed box.

“Get in.”

Terrified, I reached up and climbed in. There was a thin blue-striped camping mattress and a pillow, blankets and a television sitting on a shelf on the narrow wall. I noticed that there was a
101 Dalmatians
nightgown on the bedding. I asked Big John if it was for me, and he said yes. I then asked him if he had been planning to kidnap me, and he answered, “Yes, for a while now.”

“When am I going to go home?” I pleaded.

“This is your new home now,” he stated. “You are going to live here.”

John said he was going back upstairs to get me more blankets and left me alone for a few minutes. In that box alone, I was scared to death. He closed the door but didn’t lock it. He came back in minutes with the blankets, a can of soda and some candy bars and told me that I was going to make a recording. He pulled me down from the coffin-box and took a small tape recorder out of his back pocket and recited exactly what he wanted me to say. I had been kidnapped by a man with a knife and here he comes now. I had to practice it several times and then he said he was going upstairs and he wanted me to record it without him in the room. I did what he asked, crouching down as I spoke. And then, at the end, in a very soft voice, after a long pause, I whispered into the recorder, “Big John took me!! He has me at his house!”

I was afraid he was in the tunnel listening, but when he came back he didn’t let on that he had heard a thing. I thought it had worked. But then, he grabbed the tape recorder and hit play and when he got to the end, he looked at me for a moment, and without a beat, smacked me in the face. I was stunned. He had never before struck me. This was a completely different John than I had ever known. This time he stood directly over me and ordered me to record it again.

“I’ve been kidnapped by a man with a knife, and oh God, here he comes.”

Seeming satisfied with my acting skills this time, John then ordered me up into the small box with the wafer thin mattress, a pillow and blankets. He told me he was going to play the tape for Aunt Linda, and
I asked him why?

“Because you’re going to be staying here for a while.”

“How long are you going to keep me, John?”

“Forever.”

His next request scared me more than I had been all day. Big John told me to pose for a picture and make it look like I was sleeping. I asked him why in the world he wanted to take a picture like that.

“So that the police will not look for you because they will think that you are dead.”

I refused. He then ordered me back into the box.

The TV inside the box was on, flickering shadows on the egg-crated walls. He slammed the small door closed and I could hear him securing the door but wasn’t sure with what. Then I could hear the churning of the drill again.

When I heard the drill stop squealing, I knew he had gone back upstairs. The sobs had subsided now and I was focused solely on getting out. I positioned myself, with my back to the door, bracing my back, kicking at the wall in front of me, not knowing what was holding me in.

I kicked and pushed and punched and kicked some more, in the flickering light of silent TV newscasts. I kicked for what seemed like forever, with my back pressed as hard as I could to the back wall of the box I was locked in. It may have been hours. It may have been a whole night. Or a day. I have no idea. There was no light in the cage, just the flickering television.

The door, finally, broke open. When I fell out, into the bigger room, I could see that there was a two by four piece of lumber that John had used to wedge the door closed. I had snapped it in half. I was in survival mode. I just knew that I needed to somehow survive and get out of there. I was trying to figure out my surroundings and scanned the room for what I could use for my escape. But there wasn’t anything. I hid underneath in the shadows of the little box hoping that when John came back, I could run out as he came in, or overtake him. Funny now that I think of it. My plan was short lived. As soon as John stepped back into the chamber, his eyes landed on the broken two by four—and then me, quaking in the shadows.

“I see you,” he said apologetically.

He was not angry now. He was the Big John I knew. Sadistic John was gone. He seemed nervous, preoccupied. I asked him what had taken him so long and he told me that he went to Spaceplex and “looked for me.” At Spaceplex, he had the manager call the police. And he used the tape that “we” had made to call Aunt Linda and leave her a message.

I told Big John that I wanted to go to sleep. So he left me for the night. If it were night. I didn’t sleep of course. I only said that to get rid of him.

I remember everything, but in no particular order. Like the television images flickering on the soundproofed walls in the box where I laid, I can still see flashes of what happened in that dungeon but have no idea which day they occurred. With no windows, no light, no meals, no hope, it was one endless sickening day.

My television reporting days were often punctuated by reporting to my parents’ house at day’s end, where Dad sat on the other side of the television, a chunk of the left hemisphere of his brain missing after neurosurgery. He had lost the use of his right hand and a lifelong investment in his dental practice, but he was alive and at the time we thought we were lucky. I was dreadful it wouldn’t be for long; having looked up “astrocytoma” in my husband’s
Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine
, I found a survival rate of thirty percent for that sort of brain tumor. It was a devastating number. Dad turned to me one day and said, “Shorty, you better hurry up and have children.” I didn’t comply fast enough. My first child was named in my father’s memory.

Dad was the original news hound and never lost that faculty. He always had his face buried behind
The New York Times,
sections scattered all over the den’s red shag carpet, fingers smudged with newsprint. If news junkie is an inherited trait, my addiction surely came from him. He wanted to know every detail of the stories I was covering and he couldn’t get enough of the Katie Beers case. He and everyone else.

A swarm of Suffolk police officers camped outside Spaceplex in Nesconset, a stucco behemoth of a building which blended into the rainy winter landscape. Inside, the cavernous play space glowed with disco lights. Co-owner and general manager Gary Tuzzalo was granting interviews, one at a time. He was practiced, but his curt answers and focused grey eyes couldn’t hide the tell-tale look of panic over the thought of a missing child in his arcade.

“It’s hard; we see hundreds of families in here a day. It’s hard to pick out one face.”

Did anyone see a child taken from here with a stranger?

“We have private security, we have staff, and nothing strange seemed to happen.”

Did you see John Esposito?

“He went to one of the mangers and said ‘I can’t find a little girl,’ so we began paging her and when she didn’t answer the page, the police were called.”

Spaceplex was a very noisy place. Maddeningly noisy. Midnight blue walls were painted with tempera cartoon characters and in the vast space below them, kids held tight to their daddies’ hands, nibbled on salted pretzels, took aim into skee-ball machines and crashed blinking bumper cars into one another. It was business as usual in the frenetic space, but for the reporters talking to tuxedo-shirted employees, scribbling down notes on spiral steno pads.

Outside, what looked like a class of police cadets searched in and under big blue dumpsters and walked through the leafless forest around the building, eyes fixed downward, scouring the ground for clues.

Randy Jaret, a spokesman for the Suffolk Police Department, agreed to an on-camera interview. He wore plainclothes and spoke in plain English.

Was John Esposito cooperating?

“We have been talking to Mr. Esposito—of course we would want to talk with the last person she was with—and yes he’s cooperating.”

What has he told you?

“He has told us they had been to Spaceplex, they became separated when she went to get some coins, he couldn’t find her, he searched the premises for her and when he couldn’t find her, he had her paged and then they called police.”

You have to admit, the phone call, ‘a man has me and is coming at me with a knife.’ Kinda strange?

“We are in possession of the tape from the godmother and we are verifying its authenticity.”

Sounds as if she is being put up to making that call?

“Can’t comment at this point.”

The next interview was less predictable. Sal was sweating profusely even before cameras started rolling. It was the regular cast of characters crowded into Siben & Siben’s conference room. The Long Island press corps was a tight group—the same faces for years and we all knew the pecking order—who would get the first question in, who would dwell on the obvious, who would ask the uncomfortable but necessary
question and who would have the last word. Even the attorneys in the room were familiar faces. Andrew Siben and his Uncle Sidney seemed to have cornered the market on odd-ball Long Island stories that were television news magnets. In fact, Sidney Siben made no apologies as a self-proclaimed publicity hound.
⁴

Salvatore Inghilleri was the only unknown entity in the room but was perfectly cast in the part of the dirty Uncle Albert. Life’s wardrobe department certainly didn’t have to struggle to outfit him. Wearing a pleather “Member’s Only” jacket, complete with the requisite aviator sunglasses hanging precariously from the front pocket, he squirmed uneasily while folding his black finger-nailed hands in front of his huge frame. His neck hung heavily from his indistinguishable chin and his wiry wavy hair was full of improbable grey for his 39 years.

Do you have any doubts about the sincerity of Katie’s mother Marilyn?

“Yeah, She’s a phony, anyone can see past those tears.”

You don’t think she’s distraught?

“I know this girl a very long time. I know her inside out like a book, and those are phony tears.”

Why?

“Why? Maybe she has a sick mind. I don’t know.”

Sal had told a parade of reporters that Marilyn had abandoned “the kid” when she was two months “to, you know, my wife because she didn’t want to raise the kid, then her mother decided to come back into the picture.” The two women, Sal said, were now bitterly feuding over custody and Marilyn was on the war path. The battle also seemed to cost Katie any semblance of a normal education. Her attendance in school was spotty, as she was moved from one school district to the other, and it was unclear to school officials in both Bay Shore and Mastic Beach where Katie was permanently residing. The tensions between the families also muddied the apparent sex abuse case against Sal. It was Marilyn who filed charges against Sal alleging he molested Katie.

Have you been served with an order of protection?

It had not taken reporters long to dig up public documents that showed the order of protection and felony sex abuse charges against Sal. Sources said he confessed to molesting the now missing girl, and while
awaiting trial, he was barred from being anywhere near Katie.

Andrew Siben quickly jumped in, before Sal could answer, and interjected, “It’s on file. In the normal course whenever there is a complaint by an infant, Child Protective Services has a duty to investigate.”

“We are not going to comment on an order of protection,” added the elder Siben.

Sal, can you go over again why you think the mother’s tears are false tears?

“I don’t truly believe that she don’t really have no love for that child,” Sal responded, completely unaware he just made no sense.

If you were Katie, would you want to run away from the situation?

Sal didn’t answer that one, but chimed in again when someone asked what his dispute was about with Marilyn.

“It wasn’t a domestic situation. It’s financial. I will say that.”

A reporter then asked the Sibens about their simultaneous representation of both John Esposito and Sal Inghilleri. It wasn’t lost on the press corps that both men were suspects in the disappearance of Katie Beers, with possible conflicting interests.