Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  She then took the time to go through what Katie had been wearing with Esposito. He then said that Katie had left her purse, coat, and hat in the pickup. Linda thought this was strange. Katie would never leave her hat. She was embarrassed to be seen in a public place with a shaved head.

  The police arrived with sniffing dogs, and around fifty officers and cadets began searching the area. They brought in a mobile command post and searched every dumpster along a seven-mile stretch of Route 25.

  Esposito was taken to the precinct to make a statement. As he had been the last person to see Katie, they grilled him for eighteen hours. He consented to having his home searched. From the bunker, Katie could see the detectives on the TV monitors. She screamed and pounded, but nothing could be heard outside. The detectives found Katie’s coat in Esposito’s pickup. They also recovered the Toys “R” Us receipt. Strangely, Katie’s purse was found in Esposito’s bedroom. But if he had something to hide, why wouldn’t he have hid it?

  There was no indication that the girl had run off and no body had been found, so the following day the case was handed over to Detective Lieutenant Dominick Varrone of the Kidnap Department at Suffolk County Police. When he heard the message Katie had left on Linda Inghilleri’s answering machine, he was immediately suspicious.

  If Katie had been in the throes of the abduction when she phoned, wouldn’t she have said: “I’m being kidnapped…” And why did she use the word “kidnapped”? It was a grownup’s word. Wouldn’t she have said “taken” or “grabbed”? When a person is grabbed, they do not immediately know they are being kidnapped; that only becomes apparent later. However, while the words Katie used sounded like they had been dictated, the fear in her voice was all too real.

  Varrone also noticed that there was a certain amount of time unaccounted for in Esposito’s story. The detectives who had questioned him found him strange and childlike. He had also mentioned that Katie had sat on his lap, helping him with the steering when he drove. One question sprung to Varrone’s mind: Was Esposito a pedophile?

  Varrone was eager to speak to Esposito before lawyers got involved. As Katie seemed to have managed to break away from her captor long enough to make a phone call, she might do so again. Varrone asked Esposito if Katie had his phone number. She did. In that case, they would need to put an officer in his house to intercept the call. Esposito agreed. Failure to cooperate with an investigation would have looked bad for him. However, he was insistent that Katie’s disappearance was not a kidnapping. When asked why, he said her family did not have any money. Instead, he said, something “dirty” must have happened. How did he know? Before Varrone had a chance to ask, lawyers were on the phone. Esposito’s family had called them.

  Esposito had already agreed to let the police department listen in on his phone. But when they reached his house, he changed his mind. He wanted his privacy, he said. However, the apartment upstairs shared the same line, so the detective listened in from up there. Meanwhile, Varrone arranged to have Esposito tailed. Varrone was already convinced that Esposito was guilty. If the pressure was kept on him, Varrone was sure he would crack.

  By the following day, WABC/TV Eyewitness News had picked up the story. At noon, they broadcast an interview with Linda Inghilleri and Marilyn Beers, who also happened to be at Linda’s house. With Katie missing, the two women had agreed to a temporary truce. In the bunker, Katie was watching.

  Varrone pulled Esposito’s police record. In 1977, he had approached the seven-year-old son of a friend in a shopping mall and tried to drag him into a car. The security guards at the mall recognized him a month later. Esposito claimed that the boy was planning to run away from his family and Esposito only wanted to be his friend. His lawyers plea-bargained the charge down to unlawful imprisonment, and Esposito got off with a year’s probation.

  However, there was another suspect in the frame. Marilyn Beers had accused Salvatore Inghilleri, Linda’s estranged husband, of sexually molesting Katie that October. The case had yet to come to trial. Might he have killed Katie to prevent her from testifying against him? He had certainly violated the court order that prevented him from coming in contact with Katie; he had been at Linda’s house when Esposito picked her up and would have known where he was taking her.

  But Varrone’s instinct told him that Esposito was his man. He applied for a warrant to search his house again. The idea was to keep the pressure on him. As it was, having his house searched again caused Esposito considerable inconvenience. He had planned to visit Katie twice a day to take her food and toiletries, and it took between ten and fifteen minutes to get in and out of the bunker. When the cops left and he finally got down to the bunker, he found that Katie had climbed down from the upper compartment. He put her back with a chain and padlock around her neck.

  While most of the officers on the case thought they should be looking for a shallow grave, Varrone stuck to his guns. It struck him that no one had called in saying they had seen Katie at Spaceplex. Perhaps she had never been there. He was convinced that Esposito had lied. This gave him cause for hope. The detectives who had contact with Esposito thought him incapable of homicide.

  Examining the telephone records, detectives discovered that the call made to Linda Inghilleri’s house had come from a pay phone at an Amoco station near Spaceplex. In fact, according to phone company’s records, numerous attempts had been made to call Linda’s number from that pay phone. How had Katie been able to escape her captor for so long? Varrone began to suspect that the stilted message left on Linda’s answering machine had come from a tape recorder. That meant that Esposito had hidden the child somewhere before he went to Spaceplex.

  Varrone upped the tail on Esposito in an attempt to rattle him. This amounted to harassment. Esposito’s lawyers called a press conference where Esposito denied having anything to do with Katie’s disappearance. His attorney pointed out that, if Esposito had abducted her, she would have said in her message to her aunt: “John kidnapped me…”

  The press conference was televised, so Katie watched that too.

  Esposito was kept so busy that he barely had time to visit Katie. As a result, she had soiled her panties. He kept women’s panties in his bedroom, but they were too big for her. However, with the police following him, he could not risk going out to buy children’s underwear.

  Katie was a resourceful child. Distracting Esposito with requests for more soda, she stole one of the two keys to the padlock. After that, when he left, she would undo the chain around her neck, locking it again when she heard the sound of the electric wrench. However, that did not mean that she could get out of her metal compartment. He wedged the door closed with a piece of wood so she could not get out. Katie would spend her birthday locked in this metal prison. She shut her eyes and went to sleep singing “Happy birthday to you.”

  Varrone obtained another warrant and had Esposito’s house searched again. This time the police found the instruction manual for a new GE tape recorder.

  By then there were other people on the case. Lou Telano of the Long Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a former Brooklyn cop, had his volunteers out searching. Meanwhile, Marilyn Beers employed a psychic and former housepainter from Massachusetts named John Monti, who said that Katie was alive and underground, behind a red door. This helped keep the story in the news.

  The constant surveillance of Esposito was taking its toll. He had to restrict his visits to Katie to once a day. She begged him to visit more often and started screaming. He threatened to seal her mouth with duct tape if she did not stop.

  Varrone sent the tape from Linda Inghilleri’s answering machine to the FBI. Their labs could not be certain, but they were fairly sure that the message had been prerecorded. Not only had Katie not been at Spaceplex, she had not been at the Amoco station when the call had been made. No one had seen her there either. The net was closing on Esposito.

  Although Esposito claimed that he was protecting her, Katie’s situation was becoming incr
easingly desperate. While he provided a plastic bag for her to pee in and another for excrement, which he then disposed off upstairs, they were only available when he came downstairs and let her out of her metal compartment. Sometimes she could not wait and had to pee under the TV in the box. The place was beginning to smell.

  She was also tired of the diet of fast food and demanded a proper meal. He could not risk that. The police might become suspicious. She had now been held for six days and she began to wonder how long Esposito was going to keep her—a year? Or forever?

  While the Suffolk County police were searching the area around the Spaceplex and the Amoco station for a grave, Varrone persisted with his theory that Katie was being held somewhere and he began to take an interest in the custody battle over Katie between Marilyn Beers and Linda Inghilleri.

  The two women had been friends on and off for some time. They had met years before, around the time Marilyn had fallen out with her adoptive parents after she refused to tell them who the father of Little John was. She had left home and gone to work as a cab driver to support herself. She then got pregnant with Katie. This time she did not even know who the father was; he was just some guy she picked up in a bar. By the time she had Katie, Marilyn was on welfare and Linda helped, taking care of the little girl when Marilyn could not manage.

  Linda was no angel either. A heavy drinker, she had gotten into scrapes with the law. She complained that her husband, Sal, had a low sperm count due to the medication he was taking for his blood pressure. Consequently, she had no children of her own. By the time Katie came along, Linda had dried out. Katie was the apple of her eye, and she was prepared to sacrifice anything for the child.

  Katie went to live with Linda when she was one. Linda insisted that she be baptized. Marilyn agreed, but she did not want her child baptized as a Catholic as Linda wanted; rather, it would take place in the local Presbyterian Church. Linda became Katie’s godmother. She took Katie to visit Marilyn regularly. However, the house where Marilyn lived with her now widowed mother was a mess. Marilyn’s mother had twenty-two cats and a dog that was not properly housebroken. The place was crawling with cockroaches. Dead rats were a common sight. Linda once found a dead cat riddled with maggots behind the sofa. Katie contracted impetigo from dirty clothing. Then there was the lice in her hair.

  Linda went to the Children’s Aid Society to see if she could get permanent custody and was told that the birth mother would have to agree. While Marilyn was happy for Linda to look after her child, she would not take that final step. The situation grew more complicated when Katie started kindergarten. To establish residency in her school district, the child had to live with her mother during the week, but she was constantly calling Linda to come and get her. And, when her mother did not turn up to get her, she would roam the local mall on her own. At one point, the Child Protection Service was called in; over the years, they amassed a file four inches thick, but did nothing.

  Eventually, Linda and Sal moved in with Marilyn and her mother in an attempt to tidy up their home. But they soon had a falling out over money. By that time Linda was bedridden with undiagnosed diabetes. Later, her leg was amputated. But still the struggle between Linda and Marilyn over custody continued.

  As the search for Katie continued, Varrone was unable to sleep for several nights and his boss insisted that he take some time off. Instead of resting, he went to visit Linda’s parents, Ann and Charles Butler. He had begun to wonder whether some concerned member of the family had kidnapped Katie for the child’s own good. When he called at the Butler’s home in West Islip, Ann was out. Charles said he did not know where his wife was. He appeared nervous and said he could not remember what he was doing on the day Katie disappeared. Then Ann turned up with her son Charlie. She was forthright and said she thought that Katie would be better off away from her mother. It was she who had arranged the pre-birthday party at Linda’s. Marilyn had been against it. Ann was also vague about her movements on the day Katie went missing. Varrone took statements from them and he became so suspicious of Charlie Butler that he called in two detectives from homicide.

  Meanwhile, one of Telano’s volunteers reported seeing a small car driving up a back road in the early evening with no lights on. When Telano went to investigate, he was met by Monti, who took him to see a knife that he said he had found near the Amoco station. This had to have been the knife that the kidnapper had used to threaten Katie Beers, he said, and it was covered in blood. It looked like rust to Telano, but he gave it to the police.

  In the middle of the night on January 4, Varrone woke with his head full of new theories. He had suddenly remembered that in the game Home Alone 2, which his son played, a figure on the phone is chased by a man with a knife. Could this be the origin of the message on the answering machine? And had Katie seen the movie Home Alone 2? It begins with the boy played by Macaulay Culkin arriving in New York, when he should be in Florida. Had she been shown the movie to prepare her to take a flight of her own? A flight to a place of safety, say, away from her feuding mother and godmother? When Varrone outlined his theory at the precinct the next day, he was told he needed more rest.

  To advance the investigation in a more logical fashion, the Suffolk County Police put a checkpoint on the highway by the Amoco station, causing huge tailbacks. They asked whether anyone had seen a small girl making a phone call from the pay phone in the gas station on the afternoon of December 28. But that was not what they were hoping to hear. They were really hoping to find a witness who had seen someone with a tape recorder in the phone booth. They found neither.

  The investigation then broadened. While Suffolk country police interviewed local people—Katie’s teachers, parolees in the area, and anyone who might have had contact with her—the FBI checked out relatives, especially those of the Butlers. Varrone still wondered if Katie had been sent somewhere for safekeeping.

  At the same time, Varrone kept up the surveillance on Esposito, despite risking a lawsuit for harassment. If Katie was dead, as most of the police force thought, then Esposito had killed her. The purse found in his bedroom pointed to that. But if he had killed her, why had he stopped to get her make the recording?

  Then Eyewitness News reported that the police thought the message on Linda Inghilleri’s answering machine was prerecorded. At first, Varrone was furious, but in fact, the leak helped him. Esposito now figured that he had been found out. Once it was established that Katie’s call had been prerecorded, doubt was thrown on Esposito’s account. He was obviously a little paranoid at this point and, though the recording did not prove his guilt, he would imagine that the police were on to him. While Varrone had yet to close his case, he was becoming more optimistic that Katie would be found alive. He figured that, if Katie had been killed, her dead body would almost certainly have been discovered by then.

  Linda Inghilleri was convinced that Esposito knew where Katie was. Esposito, she knew, worshiped his dead mother, Rose. She planned to phone Esposito and tell him that Rose had appeared in a dream and had told her that she could rest easier if he revealed where Katie was. But the police were monitoring their calls and she thought better of it. Instead, she too brought in a psychic who, when driving past Esposito’s door—which he left open as if to announce he had nothing to hide—said that Katie was there. The feud between Linda and Marilyn was then taken up by their respective psychics.

  The National Council for Missing and Exploited Children planned to put a poster featuring Katie on tractor-trailers coast to coast and to send out fifty-two million fliers. And Katie saw herself on America’s Most Wanted. Esposito boasted that, as well as keeping her safe from the fight between Marilyn and Linda, he had made her famous. But America’s Most Wanted only succeed in bringing in numerous bogus sightings, all of which had to be checked out.

  Sal Inghilleri eventually submitted to a polygraph test and was cleared, as was Ann Butler. But Esposito, on the advice of his lawyers, refused to take the test.

  By the sixteenth day o
f Katie’s captivity, Esposito was talking about suicide. This scared Katie. If he died, no one would ever find her. He said he would leave a note. But what would happen if it got lost, or was overlooked?

  Then on day seventeen, Esposito cracked. He told his family, then his lawyer that he knew where Katie was—in a bomb shelter under his home that only he knew how to open. At first, they did not believe him. It sounded like fantasy. After all, the police had searched the house three times. If Katie was “behind the wall,” as he said, surely she must be dead. No, he insisted, she was alive.

  This put his lawyer in a quandary. If he failed to tell the police and the girl died, he would be culpable. On the other hand, telling the police would be a violation of attorney-client privilege. First, he had to get Esposito to sign a paper waving his right to confidentiality. Then he called the DA, but not without tipping off Newsday first.

  The media descended, but there were still delicate negotiations going on. The police had searched the premises and there was no sign of a bomb shelter. There was no record of the place even having a basement. If Esposito was telling the truth, they would need his cooperation to get her out. There was still a danger that he might kill himself. What’s more, if Katie were there, behind the wall, the place was now a crime scene. It had to treated with the utmost care; otherwise, vital evidence would be destroyed.

  When Esposito arrived home with his lawyer, the place was surrounded by cops, crowds, and cameras. Inside the office, he spoke into a hidden microphone and said: “Katie, I’m coming down.”

  Then he unscrewed the bookcase and moved it aside. He rolled back the floor covering and raised the concrete block. Detective Chris Zablocki, who had been monitoring the phones in the other apartment, climbed down the shaft with Esposito, who pulled out the power wrench.