Katie Beers (14 page)

There was no
home
after that.

So when the social worker at the hospital told me I wouldn’t be going
home
, I had to think for a moment. Where is home anyway?

From my hospital window, I snuck a peek out of a small opening in the drawn curtains. I could see an encampment outside, around the semicircular drive that formed the entrance to the children’s hospital. There were big news vans and at least a dozen antennae sticking high up in the air, almost as high as my window. Cameramen toted gear on their shoulders and reporters stood in front of tripods gesturing and speaking words I could not hear but knew were about me.

A woman who told me she was my “case worker” wanted to get
me out of the hospital without being noticed, so she told me to lay on a gurney—and be very still. Orderlies pulled a sheet over my head and the gurney was pushed into the elevator. Something went wrong and they wheeled me over to the wrong car. When we finally got into the correct car, somehow unnoticed by the throng of media, I climbed into the backseat, and off we went. We drove for hours. I remember wondering where the heck they were taking me. No one told me where we were going. It was Sunrise Highway and the road went on forever and ever. Straight ahead for miles on end, past strip malls and gas stations, and then farm land and barns. Finally a sign read, “Southampton,” and the road kept going… and going.

There were so many trees everywhere. It was getting dark, dinner time. We pulled up to a house. It was a huge house with a two car garage, cedar shingles, and it looked like a storybook farm house. Only this was real, as was my exhaustion. I rang the doorbell, hiding behind the caseworker’s leg, and a smiling couple invited us all in.

I didn’t grow up in a house where there was a mom and dad—so the first few minutes felt to me like something out of a television show. The only family I ever knew was from
Growing Pains.
I sat down at a fully set kitchen table surrounded by three kids, a mom, a dad and pizza. The pizza was warm and so were the welcoming faces. But I had an anxious feeling in my gut. I felt like I couldn’t breathe—as if a rope was tied around my lungs and heart. I couldn’t inhale. The rope was tight and painful. I’ve had many anxiety attacks in my life since then. That was the first one.

That night, at dinner with the foster family, I didn’t talk much. I tried to breathe slowly and calm down. I was skeptical of the adults at the table, Barbara and Tedd. They tried to be very, very nice, even buying a belated birthday cake for me—a Carvel ice cream cake. And there were presents, but I was very rude. I was presented with a
New Kids on the Block
Donny Wahlberg doll but took one look at it and announced that I didn’t like
New Kids on the Block
anymore.

“Kid stuff,” I snapped.

The next day, the father, Tedd, came back to the house with a Steve Urkell doll for me. Urkell was the star of the then hit television show,
Family Matters.
I politely thanked him but still wondered when I would be going home to my real family.

An eleven count indictment was unsealed a few days later, and John was summoned back to court, this time wearing a sports jacket and the beginnings of a graying untrimmed beard. As is standard on suicide watch, there would be no neck tie or razors. This time, Sidney Siben stood beside him and the District Attorney himself, James Catterson, sat at the prosecution table. William Ferris announced that the grand jury had upgraded the charges to first degree kidnapping and six counts of sexual abuse. Now the stakes were higher. Esposito could spend the rest of his life in prison.

“This case has resulted in the search for a child in perhaps one of the most intensive investigations in the history of Suffolk County. This case has attracted worldwide attention. This is a very very strong case. For the severity of these charges, not one but three Class A felonies, we are asking this court to hold the defendant without any bail.”

From behind thick black square-framed glasses, Sidney Siben spoke passionately. In his gruff, street-smart manner that seemed to conjure a Brooklyn stickball pep talk, he made all the usual appeals for some kind of bail—John was a longtime resident of Bay Shore, never in trouble but for that one arrest fifteen years ago, but added that he needed reasonable bail so “we get him out to get him some help.”

The judge technically granted Siben’s request, but set bail outside of John’s financial reach. One point one million dollars. One hundred thousand for each criminal count: sex abuse, kidnapping, endangering the welfare of a child and making false sworn statements.

After the arraignment proceedings concluded, Catterson held his own court. Before an audience of reporters and cameramen, he thanked police for what he called the most expensive and most extensive investigation in Suffolk County history. Then he made what was arguably the most persuasive appeal in his storied legal career. It was an appeal to the media to back off.

Katie, he said, he had the remarkable opportunity to meet a few days earlier and some of her first words to him were, “You know my name is really Katherine.”

“Let me tell you a few things,” Catterson continued, in a manner more fatherly than prosecutorial. “I found her to be a remarkably with-it child, an upbeat kid, but she is a little girl. She is wise, unfortunately, beyond her ten years; she is wise, but resilient, she is quick; she has a sly sense of humor…. She is in good health; I’m advised… she eats everything in sight. She sucks up love like a sponge and you can’t blame her for that. In fact, she is starting to use a computer and she even told someone she may even be thinking of writing her memoirs. She had her first day of school yesterday and, you know, Katie is entitled to be a little girl, in fact she brought a friend home with her to play. And today is another story…. She is well-aware of what’s going on. She talks about the TV stations … and she really doesn’t want to talk to the press. She wants to go to school with other kids. In fact, one of the first questions she asked the officers is, ‘Will I get to go to a nice school again?’

“What does this child need? She needs to go to school regularly with children her own age. She needs a childhood. And she needs a child’s routine. She needs to be silly and be playful and to be hugged and…not to be bothered. And she has to develop the ability once again to trust people, to experience childhood, a childhood that is enjoyed by most children in Suffolk County but was denied to Katie.

“But as we speak, word has leaked out that Katie is in school and people of your profession are out at the school trying to catch that picture, perhaps that little interview. Perhaps tomorrow’s story. And it really brings us down to the fundamental obligation—the media and the public’s right to know, versus a little girl’s right to be a child.”

Five or six news vans were staking out an elementary school in Springs, Long Island, after an East End radio station broadcast that it was Katie’s new temporary school. By day’s end, one television network and a major wire service had taken the wraps off the name and location of the school and live trucks were circling. The tiny hamlet in the township of East Hampton now had one inhabitant who could trump the inauguration of Bill Clinton in the tabloid headlines.

“I’m going to ask the public on behalf of the county of Suffolk to ask the media or
tell
the media, we’d like to know she is safe, but we don’t have to know what she had for breakfast,” Catterson had notes, but barely looked down. It was clear the words came from the heart and not from a rehearsed speech. “We’d like to know that she’s eating well and with a family that loves her, but we don’t have to know what her grades were in school. I’m going to ask you all to back off. Give her a chance. You know, that’s not asking too much. To you, she’s just another story but to Katie, it’s the only opportunity she has to live a life she’s only dreamed about.

“I hope that the editors that you talk to, that they have children. I have a ten-year-old granddaughter and when I compare the two, I wonder where we are going in our society. I have a picture in my mind’s eye of a little girl trying to grow up in a world where most grownups are just bad children. She was hurt by those she put trust in.

“We as a society must protect this child or our professed love for our own children is just a fraud and our so called compassion for each other is just a mockery.

“… I’m going to, on behalf of the people of Suffolk County,
demand
responsibility from your profession in letting this child alone. Let her get on the bus without a camera in her face, and let her get off the bus without a microphone in her face.

“And tell the people who tell you you’ve got to get the story, for God’s sakes have compassion on a little one, for after all, what are we here for?

“The County of Suffolk and the County Executive are going to ask each and every one of you to join in a conspiracy with us and the police, a conspiracy to protect Katie in the days and months ahead. And shame on those who exploit her for a cheap story. They are not any better than the person who locked her in that box.

“I’m going to leave you with a little show and tell, and they tell me not to do it, but I think a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Bill Ferris, who stood on one side of the podium, handed Catterson a white poster board with small capital black letters. GIVE KATIE A CHANCE!

“But wait a second,” Catterson ripped off a piece of paper where the name “Katie” was printed. “It says give Katherine a chance.” He paused
a beat and added, as if slamming a gavel on a judicial bench, “That’s all I have to say.”

It was a compelling argument albeit a touchy one. Journalists don’t like to be told how to behave, especially not by elected officials. But not one of us at that presser questioned his message. It sunk in deeply as the news conference rolled without pause onto other topics: questions about Katie’s state of mind, a possible plea deal, John’s motives. Suddenly, our unanswered questions seemed strangely unimportant. Our curiosity would have to yield to something bigger; we were to stand back and let a child be offered love, the essential ingredient missing from her troubled life. There was not a single challenge to the notion that Katie deserved, and in fact needed, anonymity.

“We have five hundred active child sexual abuse cases right now in this county,” Catterson left us with. “Perhaps this will make us all think about that.”

The next day, Mike McAlary, then a columnist with the
New York Post
, gave Catterson’s plea an extraordinary endorsement.

“Let us revisit the child ten years from now or perhaps even rediscover her as a college-bound treasure.” McAlary wrote. “Everybody knows a truth when they hear it. I am betting that in the dither of the moment, that no one in this business was thinking about Katie Beers when they were snapping off pictures of her yesterday. That doesn’t make them bad people—only jaded. You want to make life easier for Katie Beers? Shut the camera off, dummy.”
¹⁸

The very newspaper that had reportedly been hounding the
East Hampton Star
for the name and address of Katie’s temporary foster family was now appealing for a collective backing off. And as radio stations and newspapers bickered publicly on the editorial pages about which ones had behaved badly, the frenzy to find Katie began to die down.

“Just as suddenly as it began, the media crush ended,” declared the editorial board of the
East Hampton Star
. It dubbed the DA’s message essential to Katie’s recovery. “The wire service reporters and the rest folded their notebooks and departed. There were no more camera trucks roving aimlessly around the byways of Springs. This is as it should be.”
¹⁹

In fact, in the years to come, some reporters dispatched way east to Katie’s foster home at the direction of unrelenting news managers,
admitted in confidence that when they got there, they never even knocked on the door.

Curiosity about John Esposito and the depth of his depravity were, however, considered quite fair game, and the scene on Saxon Avenue drew mobs of on-lookers. It also brought out Clint Van Zandt, a special agent with the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit from Quantico, Virginia. The FBI had been consulted on the making of the movie,
The Silence of the Lambs
.

“It’s much more sophisticated,” Van Zandt said, standing outside the crime scene tape. “In the movie, you’ve got this hole dug in the ground and you’ve got Buffalo Bill keeping somebody in the hole. This is a much higher level of sophistication, so far as being able to conceal it. It was like a prison from medieval times. I’ve never seen anything in all my years as elaborate as this. This thing was like out of a horror movie.”

How could cops have missed it?

“If someone told you that room was there I’d put money on the line you’d have to tear that house apart to find it.”

The next day, Suffolk Police brass gathered to hold another news conference—this time with props: diagrams and a big screen, stage left. Lieutenant Varrone seemed drained as he fielded most of the questions. Esposito, he said, indicated the chamber where Katie was held was built a year and a half earlier, with Katie in mind. It begged a question.

Do you think it was used before?

“We suspect and are concerned it was used before. We may have to take the house apart piece by piece. You can imagine, if he went to this extent to create what he did, we don’t know what other surprises we may find. The FBI behavioral experts were amazed. I hope we don’t find anything more, but at this point it is just conjecture. Your guess is as good as mine. We don’t have any direct evidence at this moment to support what I think we are all thinking.”

Reporters had been told by the Sibens that Katie was relatively content in captivity, an upgrade from her sorry pre-kidnapping state. Varrone promptly put the kibosh on that spin. “In time, I think you will all know what occurred down there, but it’s my belief that, at times, the girl was absolutely horrified.”

What precipitated the abduction? Was it planned?