Katie Beers (9 page)

They traced the mysterious phone call to a phone booth at an Amoco Gas Station. A New York Telephone worker was installing a new phone when I got there. The coins, he said, were already removed by police. The original phone, he said, was part of the police investigation. They removed it for finger prints. Icy rain fell on the camera lens as he hard wired the replacement.

The “unconventional” family dynamics had police openly admitting they were frustrated and running into dead ends at every turn. Police Commissioner Peter Cosgrove told reporters that the two families quarrelling over Katie “complicated an already difficult case.
⁹
”.

“We have a girl who was torn between two apparently dysfunctional family groups. That situation produces so many leads to track down, and it’s what makes this one more unique than most.”

Unique was a generous word. Police-speak for hopeless. The greater the frustrations, the more bizarre the characters entering the spotlight. The story had become the text-book definition of “media circus.”

Ten days in, as the reporter parade at the Inghilleri home was beginning to thin, Linda Inghilleri produced, for police and the media, a folded note made out of construction paper. In black marker the words were scrawled in juvenile handwriting:

To Aunt Linda,

I love you. You are my favorite person in the world. But I am stuck in the middle of You and Marylin. I love you both but I love you more than Marylin. You and I have a lot of good mermies to share. But you got to understand I am only ten years old so it is very hard for me to decied who I want to live with Becaus I have lived with yo both.

Love Always, Katherine

p.s. I love you

On the left side of the card, a red heart was drawn in felt marker and inside the outlined heart, the words “I love you,” six times, with big red oversized lips scribbled below the I love yous.

Police had searched the house top to bottom several times, but the note, Linda claimed, was found the night before, lodged within the pages of a book in Katie’s desk drawer, by a psychic, one of four who had donated time to help find the missing child.

The next day, Marilyn plopped down on a floral mustard colored couch below a velvet Kung Fu picture hanging from prefabricated panel walls. She sat ready to answer questions posed by a cohort of news media gathered for a hastily called news conference at the home of Teddy Rodriguez, Little John’s father. A man in a tweed jacket squeezed in next to Marilyn in what scant space remained on the couch. He introduced himself as John Monti, Marilyn’s spokesman and her own “psychic.”

Marilyn smiled and uttered some sounds, revealing both the fact that she was missing several teeth on top and had a horrendous case of laryngitis. An impossible number of cameras and reporters jammed into the cramped living room struggling to hear Marilyn’s words.

I got us started with,
“You’ve asked us all to be here—what is it you want to share with us?”

“Just to…”she coughed. With the loudest whisper she could muster, Marilyn said, “Just to straighten some things out that have been written in the papers.”

Do you believe your daughter wrote that letter?

“I believe that letter is a fake,” she said flatly, then coughed.

Why? Was that your daughter’s handwriting, Ms. Beers?

Cough, cough. “I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

You didn’t see it? But you think it’s a fake?

Someone showed Marilyn the
Newsday
article with a picture of the note.

Would your daughter have referred to you as “Marilyn
?”

“No.”

How would she refer to you?

“Mommy.”

In the letter, she referred to herself as ten years old, but it was supposedly written before her birthday. Does that make you suspicious
?

“No, because we always rounded her age off.”

Sal has said that the answer to what happened to Katie “lies in Mastic”—that you know what happened to Katie or your son knows. How do you answer that?

“He’s talking out of his hat. If I knew where she was, don’t you think I’d have her?”

He was saying today that there were all kinds of rituals, voodoo that went on at your house.

Marilyn’s laugh, at this point, was just a barking cough.

“Ya right. I’m not into witchcraft…or the occult. I have nothing to do with my daughter’s disappearance. I want her back. She is my daughter, I love her, and I want her back.”

If she is listening—what would you tell her?

“Katie, please come home. Mommy loves you. We love you and we want you back.”

Why do you think the letter is a fake?

“Because the psychic found it. Why didn’t the psychic find it sooner? Why didn’t the detectives find it when they were searching her room?”

The letter suggests that Katie preferred Linda. Does that sound like her?

“No,” she paused. “No!”

Does she prefer you?

“She loves us,” she answered cryptically.

Marilyn kept her eyes on the newspaper and picked at her thumb cuticle, as reporters kept firing questions.

Is there anything familiar about that note? Does that look like Katie’s handwriting?

“No, it does not,” said Marilyn, still looking down.

Would she ever sign her name Katherine instead of Katie?

“No.”

Marilyn’s one word answers frustrated me and the other journalists who simply needed one or two coherent sentences to use for quotes. The goal is to generate answers that can stand alone, without putting words in anyone’s mouth. But here, even with coaxing, nothing was working.

I guess what this boils down to, Marilyn, since you’re saying you don’t believe that note, someone had to put it there—that equals what
?

“It equals deception… or a joke,” she hedged. “I don’t know. I don’t believe this letter is Katie’s.”

What do you think has happened to Katie, specifically?

“Someone took her, I want her back.”

Do you think the Inghilleris have anything to do with it?

Marilyn paused, and then coughed, “I know she is being held against her will. All I know is I want my daughter back.”

The next question was asked inevitably, but meekly.

Ms. Beers, I wouldn’t ask this but, um, your son brought this up himself. He said over a period of years, he was molested by John Esposito. Do you believe your son
?

“I believe my son.”

Are you going to file charges against John Esposito?

“I thought this was about Katie.”

For reasons I still don’t understand, that shut up the reporter.

Did Katie ever say anything about abuse by John Esposito against her?

“No comment.” It was answers like that one that made many in the room wonder who was hiding what. Why would a mother cover for a man she believed abused her child? We were not getting straight answers.

Linda Inghilleri has said she is convinced Katie is still alive.

“So am I!”

What makes you so sure?

“In my heart, I feel it. I feel in my heart that she is alive.”

Ms. Beers, you are probably aware of the stories that have come out over the past eleven days, about Katie’s past three or four years, people
have written long stories. Was Katie getting the proper schooling
?

“She had missed a lot of school, but her grades are very good.”

Why did she miss school?

“Here is a copy of her grades, if anyone wants to see.” The question went unanswered and no one pressed further.

What kind of grades did she get?

Marilyn looked at the yellow crumpled report card. “All S’s, which is satisfactory.”

The subject was changed by the next reporter and no one ever got an answer as to why Katie had not been attending school. Instead, the camera lens zoomed in on her left eye, revealing a slash at the brow line and a yellow, black and blue bruise below it. Marilyn had the beginnings of a shiner behind her large wire rimmed glasses. She had explained to those of us who asked the day before that Little John punched her in “a fit of nerves.”

“We’re all on edge,” she told reporters while sitting on her stoop, smoking. “He never hit me before. I guess this thing is getting to us.”
¹⁰

Are you satisfied police are doing enough to find your daughter?

“I believe they are doing all they can.”

At this point, Mr. Esposito seems to be the prime suspect; you have your suspicions on him?

“He was the last one to have seen Katie,” cough.

So why would this note turn up in the Inghilleri’s house?

“Why would it turn up after nine days? And not when police where there, it’s gotta be a fake. Otherwise it would have turned up sooner.”

So “Katherine” seems a bit odd?

“Yeah.” The cameras zoomed in on Katie’s birth certificate which Marilyn held up.
Katherine Marie Beers, born South Side Hospital. Dec 30, 1982, 4:40am. Born to Marilyn Beers.

Side conversations started up and there were some chuckles as reporters asked Marilyn how Katie came to be spelled
Kattie
with two t’s in the initial police release and consequently some news reports. She had no idea. Others were videotaping a note that Marilyn provided with Katie’s handwriting, as a means of comparison. On it, a red heart and the words, “To mommy—I love you” in bubble letters, then “love Katie.”

This had become a battle of love notes. I’m not a handwriting
expert, but they did appear to be the work of one author.

Off camera, Monti was conversing with a subgroup saying, “I have information that I can’t reveal right now.”

“Why not?” asked incredulous reporters.

“I just can’t.”

It is never wise to suggest to news reporters, when someone’s life is on the line, that you have a critical nugget of information, but just can’t reveal it yet. We were growing visibly impatient, many of us removing microphones and packing up tripods and lights. Monti directed his next comments to the assembled group, revealing a New England accent and the fact that he too had laryngitis.

“That’s not her handwriting, that’s not something she would write. She didn’t run away. This is just another means of distorting the facts. It’s an attempt to discredit Marilyn. And I believe the Suffolk Police thoroughly searched that house. If there was a hair left on the floor, they would have found it.”

Did you throw a radio and yell a racial slur because you weren’t allowed to register your daughter in the school district where she was living with Linda?

“I did not throw a radio,” said Marilyn, refocused now on the remaining cameras. “I didn’t have a radio with me.”

“There may have been a few words exchanged,” said Monti, “a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But over at that other house,” he said, referring to the Inghilleri’s, “there have been signed confessions of things that someone did to this little girl. One thing is clear,” he said, “this is the child’s natural mother and this mother wants her child back.”

No one knew if Katie were alive or dead, but this was the opening salvo of a custody war.

The phone call to Linda’s answering machine had police perplexed. “I don’t think we will ever know, quite frankly, how that call was made,” Commissioner Cosgrove conceded to reporters on the morning of the fourteenth day.

“If we don’t know by now, it may not be possible to determine because we may be dealing with a tape of a tape—so to speak. We have a tape machine used and the tape has been taped over many many times the way telephone answering machines are and it’s very hard for analysts to make a determination. We haven’t gotten a determination yet and I’m wondering,” he paused, “if we ever will.”

The Commissioner was disavowing what sources were telling us, that the FBI had concluded the phone call to Linda’s answering matching was actually a tape recording, played into the mouthpiece of the Nesconset gas station phone booth. The FBI’s conclusion was based on the lack of background noise on the tape. If a live call had actually been made from that phone booth on Nesconset Highway, there would have been a hum of ever-present cars zipping past. Instead, Katie’s call sounded as if she had been inside a soundproof booth.

“We don’t know that definitely. We don’t have conclusive evidence and again I don’t know if we ever will.”

Well, don’t you have a gut feeling?

“Everyone has gut feelings but we really can’t work on gut feelings at this point.”

How could this girl just vanish?

Cosgrove stood patiently answering questions now delving into the realm of speculation. Reporters had little to fill a minute and a half hole in the newscast and fishing expeditions like this one were inevitable.

“Obviously it is frustrating. Even the officers assigned to the case get frustrated when a lead they are following ends up being a dead end. We’ve had the Nesconset Fire Department search the entire area. We had cadets in the police academy search, and we had a road block by the phone
booth stopping motorists asking if they had seen anything. We think we have covered every lead we can. That is what makes it so frustrating.”

Police had also searched John’s garage apartment three times and were camped out in the front house, monitoring the phones.

Is the terrible truth that we may never know what happened to her?

It had been two weeks, but police were not ready to give up.

“It’s always a possibility—we don’t like to think that way. There are some cases that don’t get solved but I would like to think this is not one of them.”

Reporters sullenly realized there would be no scoop from this interview and retreated to the wide-shot position where cameras continued to roll. It was during this wide-shot that the conversation became hushed and the top cop acknowledged police had no firm suspects in the disappearance of Katie Beers.

There was no sleep. Just catnaps when my eyelids would become so heavy, I could no longer fight off the urgent need to close them. And I would fitfully open them when I realized my terrible mistake. I was terrified that if I fell into a deep sleep, Big John would get that picture he wanted of me looking dead, and then cops would call off the search for me. And I would be his forever. So I stayed awake. The whole time.