SALON

Tuesday, Jan 15, 2013 8:47 PM UTC

Kidnapping was the “best thing” that ever happened

Twenty years after her abduction, Katie Beers tells how an unspeakable crime changed her life — for the better

By

Topics: Katie Beers, True crime, Sex abuse, Dr. Phil, abduction, kidnapping, molestation, Rape,

Kidnapping was the (Credit: AP/Frank Eltman)

Shortly before Katie Beers’s 10th birthday, in 1992, family acquaintance John Esposito lured the girl into his home with the flimsy promise of video games. He then confined her in a dungeon he constructed below his floorboards expressly to imprison the child. For over two weeks, he kept her in a coffin-size box within the bunker, and according to Beers, he chained her by the neck, raped her and hit her. Today she says, “I never thought that I was getting out.” Yet 20 years later, when Beers looks back on those days, she sees “the best thing that happened to me.”

Beers is no confused Stockholm Syndrome sufferer. Instead, the now 30-year-old woman is today a married mother of two who’s recently co-written a book about her experience. But two decades ago, the Bay Shore, New York, native was a “louse-infested, filthy” child with no friends and an absentee mother, a little girl who, from the time she was a toddler, had endured sexual abuse at the hands of her godmother’s husband Sal. When the 7-year-old Beers told her godmother she’d been molested, the woman had called her a liar and told her to get out of her face. To bring the abuse to light, it took an act of unimaginable horror.

It was during her captivity that authorities discovered the ongoing horror of Beers’s living situation. And after Esposito, who is still serving out his prison sentence, led police to where he’d been hiding the girl, Sal Inghilleri went on to serve 12 years in jail for sexual abuse. Beers, meanwhile, went to live with a foster family. She grew up in a “comfortable” East Hampton, Long Island, home with four siblings, cared for and protected from the glare of media scrutiny. And now, when she calmly speaks, as she did on Monday’s “Dr. Phil,” of how she got through it by going into “survival mode,” she’s making it clear that survival mode is still very much in effect.

Beers is a testament to the power of resilience, a skill she’s undoubtedly practiced over years of superhuman effort. “I try not to be sad about what happened, because ultimately it made me who I am today,” she now says. “And I’m very satisfied and happy with my life. You never fully recover. It’s with me every day, but it’s something I’ve learned to cope with.” It’s a sentiment that’s been echoed by Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted in 2002 and recovered nine months later, and who advises fellow survivors to “not to look behind, because there’s a lot out there.” It’s been proven by people like Bob Shumaker, who survived eight years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, three of them in solitary confinement, and who says, “I could have thought ‘Why me, God, why me?’ But I didn’t.”

Beers lived through a series of horrors few people can even fully imagine. But the strength and mettle she exhibits to this day are an amazing example of what it takes to weather the worst. It’s there in her clear-eyed understanding that the past can never be forgotten but it can never be changed, either. You don’t have to have gone from abuse to abduction to eventual freedom to appreciate the grace and wisdom it takes to refuse to stay emotionally confined after being physically freed. To choose to view a nightmare as the thing that changed your life in good ways. And say, as Beers does, “There’s no point really in me right now being sad.”

Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 9 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
224 points225 points | 8 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
167 points168 points | comment
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
135 points136 points | 37 comments
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
51 points52 points | 8 comments
vote
With the help of Photoshop, artist Yao Lu has made shanshui — traditional ink paintings — of China's landfills
26 points27 points | 1 comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations