Katie Beers (31 page)

Somehow, I finished my shift, staring at the stunning ring on my finger. The ring was a platinum band with seven diamonds—the center stone was huge, with three smaller diamonds on either side. Scott had designed it himself, and it was perfect. So was he. I was on cloud nine at the knowledge that I found someone who could love me for me, baggage included. Scott knew everything there was to know about me, full disclosure, and he loved me in spite of it. Scott got along with my new family as well as my old family, Marilyn and John. Until then, I never thought that I would meet someone who would love me knowing everything about my past.

I was so excited to tell my parents about our engagement. I wanted to deliver the news while we were at dinner that night, but my dad wasn’t home and I didn’t want him to miss the moment, so I somehow kept it to myself for one more day. The fact is, they already knew. Scott had properly asked for my hand in marriage a few days earlier, and my parents gave him their blessing.

We all vacationed at my parent’s house in Florida for Christmas and set our wedding date: September 24, 2005. The date has special meaning. It was the same day of the month as our first kiss.

Five months after he proposed, I broke up with Scott over the phone. Cowardly, I know. But if I tried to do it in person, I would not have
been able to go through with it. One look into his beautiful blue eyes, and I would have agreed to anything. I didn’t give him a chance to talk. I knew that if he spoke, he would convince me to stay. It wasn’t that I no longer loved Scott, because I truly did—I just realized that I had not had the chance to live yet. I wanted a career and a life outside of college before I settled down, got married, and started a family. Scott wanted a family right away. At twenty-one years old, I was still a child myself. After all, I had to discount the first ten years of my life. I had no childhood worth remembering. All of it was sad and ugly.

I told him that things weren’t working out anymore and that I no longer wanted the same things he wanted out of the relationship. I hadn’t really lived my life. It was a typical “it’s not you, it’s me” situation. Scott had done no wrong. I wanted to experience what life had to offer.

But there was more. I never verbalized this to Scott when we broke up, but I also think that our relationship had too much emphasis on the physical. Scott had the sexual appetite of a normal young man and I was indifferent. I just couldn’t change that part of me. It was not something that I needed or desired. The first time that I had sex was intensely emotional, not because I was a rape victim, but because Scott and I were so much in love. But after that, it was something I could easily live without. I rarely initiated it. The truth is, I struggled to find sex pleasurable—and I now understand why. It’s one of the long-term effects of it being forced on me so early.

I have seen Scott twice since we broke up in 2004: once when I returned the ring and again, that same weekend, at a bar in Sag Harbor. I saw him walk in the door, and my heart stopped. I was with a few of my girlfriends. Scott walked over and offered to buy us all a round of drinks, and everyone else said yes. I declined, but I ended up drinking too much that night anyway. I had to work the next day, and up until that point, I had never called in sick since I was fourteen years old. I was working three jobs that summer: at the Coach shop as a salesgirl, at a nursery and landscaping store as a cashier and at a restaurant as a hostess. The restaurant job didn’t last long. The owner picked the wrong girl to harass. I wore jeans to the job one day and asked him if it were allowed. He instructed me to turn around in a complete circle for him and then said, “If all of your jeans look that good, then yes, you can wear jeans.” Later that evening, as I walked
past him, he slapped my butt and said, “Looking good, Katie.” I quit the next day. I was no longer a defenseless child.

The nursery quickly made up for the lost hours. This is why I felt horrible about going to work hung over. It was the drunkest that I had ever been in my life. I actually had to ask to pull over on the side of the road to throw up, but I was determined to not compromise my job and disappoint my employer, despite feeling awful and out of control.

My boss at the nursery could tell that I was in no shape to work and sent me home early. My mother asked me what I was doing away from work and I just acknowledged that I wasn’t feeling well. All I wanted to do was sleep away the hangover and the sadness I was feeling. But she is able to read me better than anyone before in my life. She is not my biological mother, but has a connection to me I never knew was possible. When I woke up, she pressed further. I was old enough now to stop lying to her and trust she would react as she always did, with love and support. I confessed that I had had too much to drink the night before after running into Scott at the bar. Rather than lecturing about me drinking too much and missing work, she hugged me and simply said “Honey, this must be so difficult for you.”

I had underestimated my parents’ ability to accept everything about me, perhaps because they were so strict with me when I first came to live with them. But the need for their approval has kept me centered and given me a strong sense of right and wrong. Parents came late into my life, but not too late to make a profound difference.

The loss of Scott was my choice, but a heartbreaking one. Scott was my first love, my rock, my best friend—and now, I had rejected our future together. I think the hardest thing about breaking up with him was losing his friendship. He still holds a very special place in my heart and he left me with more than just memories. He gave me the knowledge that, even after a loveless childhood, I was capable of loving back.

The Chief had a paternal reaction to almost everything I broached about Katie. And I was careful to reassure him that this was Katie’s idea, that she was the one who wanted to unearth these well-guarded memories. He looked at me with a measure of distrust, but proceeded anyway, respecting Katie’s wishes.

The tape started to grind into the play mode. It wasn’t long before a tiny voice startled and shook me.

“Help meeeeeee. Heeeeeeeelp meeeeee. Let meeeeeee ooouuuuuut.”

I leaned in closer to hear. The sound quality was more than adequate. I could hear every bone chilling word.

“Heeeeellllp....get me outta here
,” then a whimper and a whine
, “heeellllppppp me.”

The voice was young—younger than my own children—and stopped my heart. I cradled my head in my hands as I listened.

“Helppppp mmeee...oh pleeease let me outttt
.” Then banging over and over again—”bang bang bang.”

Oh my God, I thought. This is surreal. An actual tape recording of Katie while she was in captivity!

“You are the first reporter to ever hear this,” Dominick deadpanned, as he could see the shattering effects of Katie’s blood curdling screams on my ashen face. He stopped the tape.

“Some people may hear some of the encounter and may be disturbed about how she acts to him. It goes to the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ but more important it speaks to a nine-year-old who is deprived of any human contact. And Esposito, as bad as we think he is, for her, it’s a human being and you almost have to wonder if she took some comfort in his company and conversation.”

He looked up and stopped shuffling papers. “It’s upsetting. But not as upsetting now because you realize she survived.. But very disturbing that a nine-year-old child would have to endure this kind of misery. She wasn’t murdered, we know that. It’s a horrible thing to put a child in a situation like this.”

He returned his eyes to the pile of records.

For the first time, I realized that Katie never told police, that down in the bunker, as a prisoner of John, she was raped.

“A pedophile cultivates a child,” he explained. “It’s almost a love affair, a courtship, and you hear some of that in some of their exchanges.” He stopped the tape and read now from his handwritten transcript.

“See? We could play games and stuff when I get the time, okay?” “
It’s a very fascinating yet very disturbing exchange. He takes her to use the toilet, he says,
‘Go ahead—I won’t watch if you don’t want.’
He says it again. In other words, what the pedophile
wants
her to say is ‘Go ahead and watch.’ But she says
, ‘Good, I don’t want you to watch.’
Sexual predators want the victim to fall in love with them.”

He read more from the log, a hand written account of every decipherable word on the tapes. I patiently listened, waiting for the tapes to actually roll on. But instead, he read.

“Leave it alone and I won’t hurt you.” “I know. I’m going to try to do it one day.” “I know you are. I know you are.”

“I think,” said Chief Varrone grimly, “I think this is, this may be his penis. I think ‘
leave it alone
.’ He may have been rubbing on her.
Leave it alone. I won’t hurt you
. And she is crying. And she says to him, ‘I’m going to try to do it someday.’ So again, this is that cultivation and the victimization.” The seasoned detective was choked up.

Emotional lapses were brief. Recovery was swift and Dominick read more of the transcript.

“Do you want to walk around a little bit? You know what I’m going to do
.
Tomorrow night I’ll get some warm water, you know, to wash yourself.”

With a slight roll of his eyes, it was apparent that Dominick didn’t think John was in the least bit concerned about Katie’s hygiene.

“Again, it gets into the sexual aspect where the pedophile wants to wash and fondle the victim. This is a very common technique when they fondle their victims.”

The tapes are very short snippets, a very narrow window into what actually occurred down there during the seventeen days of captivity. Dominick said he listened to them for months, hours and hours at a time,
donning headphones, going over and over the same small pieces of tape to discern voices and cries. Some parts were so hard to hear, he enlisted the help of a sound lab. And when listening with headphones, he said, “I was there. I was actually in that bunker.”

Parts of the tapes were indeed hard to make out and the Chief was protective of their contents, stopping and starting the machine to add dimension to barely audible voices. He wanted them put in context, and I got it. The tapes are a window into the mind and modus operandi of a pedophile, and he saved them all these years only to share them for an instructional and non-exploitive purpose. They are a rare fly-on-the wall perspective that any criminologist would pour over. They also provided a glimpse into the nature of Katie’s recovery—the potential disparity between what she remembers now and what she may have blocked out.

There was a part of the tape that actually made the corner of Dominick’s mouth curl into a faint smile.

“A fascinating aspect of it that I took comfort in,” he said, “was that harassing him, disturbing him, certainly limited the amount of time that he spent with Katie.”

“They keep calling me—these guys, every fifteen minutes.” “Every fifteen minutes?”
“From the other house and every time I have to pick up the phone. And they’re driving me nuts.”

“He’s dying for us to pack up and leave. And had we ever done that, then he would have spent a very long time with her. So our presence forced him to realize the contact with her had to be limited.

“Katie sneezes and John says
‘Bless you.
’
Getting a cold? Don’t get cold—keep under the blanket.
It’s very fatherly—no I wouldn’t use the word fatherly—it’s a technique he is using to cultivate his victim.”

“I don’t know what they are going to do to me when they find me, but at least I had you a little while. Give me a kiss, you want a kiss? I’m gonna have to go now, okay?
He wants her to say, ‘I want you.’ This is classic
classic
pedophilia and child victimization.”

Dominick lifted his gaze. “This was an incredible amount of work,” he sighed, and pulled out another box of cassettes, another treasure trove of unearthed memories. Debrief tapes. They were Katie’s conversations with detectives in the first hours after she was rescued. These, the Chief
let me hear immediately.

Her voice is tiny. I struggled to adjust my ears to the slightly muffled recording. Then I could make out her words, butted together quickly with a heavy Long Island accent of a child.

“My story is…” “Tell me something,”
cut in one of the detectives. “
The first time you heard about the plan of Big John, when was that?”

Katie said she knew nothing about it, until that moment on John’s bed when everything changed. Immediately, her words defied her age.

“He started kissing me. He threw me on the bed, and then he dragged me downstairs into the room by the kitchen, and then I was screaming my brains out and I didn’t know what to do, and then he got duct tape and then after he put
…” Katie spoke in rapid-fire succession only to be stopped, repeatedly, by the detectives.

“How did you know it was duct tape?” “It’s grey tape.”
She couldn’t be stumped.
“Did he put it on you?” “He said if I didn’t be quiet….And then he threw me in the closet and I hit nails! And then he threw me down the thing and then he came down. He dragged me into that room. He made me make that tape.”

“What did he say to you while he was draggin’ you?” “I asked him when I was gonna go home!” “Did he tell you why he was taking you down into that room?” “He said he wanted to get me away from the custody battle.” “Between your Mom and Aunt Linda?” “Yeah….then I made the tape,”
Katie rattled out verbatim the words “a man with a knife kidnapped me…” as if she had rehearsed the words a million times.

As she told the story, Katie was upbeat. Exuberant. Her sing-song voice had the cadence of a worn out fairy tale, not a horror story.

“He asks me, he said, he’s gonna take pictures of me actin’ like I was dead so then you guys would forget all about me. But then I said NOOO because I knew you guys was gonna find me.”

“Sooner or later we did. So then he wanted to take a picture of you to convince us you were dead? But what about the tape—the tape
recording? How did that all come about?”