Katie Beers: Kidnapping 'best thing that happened to me'

OLD WESTBURY, N.Y. - Being chained as a 10-year-old for more than two weeks in a coffin-size box in a suburban New York dungeon was, Katie Beers says 20 years later, "the best thing that happened to me" because it allowed her to escape a life of abuse.

Katie Beers

On the 20th anniversary of her ordeal, Beers has co-written a book with a television reporter who covered her kidnapping. "Buried Memories: Katie Beers' Story" (Title Town Publishing) has a happy ending.

Beers is now a 30-year-old married mother of two who earned a degree in business management and works in insurance sales near her home in rural Pennsylvania.

Her kidnapping attracted nationwide attention in early 1993, when revelations surfaced while she was still missing that she had suffered years of neglect from her mother and had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by her godmother's husband since she was a toddler.

Beers was described in Dickensian terms back then — a louse-infested, filthy waif who had no friends and often was forced to lug the family's laundry down the block or fetch cigarettes and junk food for her elders.

After kidnapper John Esposito, a family acquaintance, admitted to detectives on Jan. 13, 1993, that he had kidnapped Beers and showed them the dungeon where she was hidden for 17 days under his Bay Shore, N.Y., home, the little girl was placed in foster care and raised in a comfortable East Hampton home with four siblings.

Her foster parents not only imposed newfound discipline into her life, making her go to school regularly and do small chores around the house, but they also shielded Beers from intense media interest. And reporters largely complied with a parent-like plea from a prosecutor to leave her alone.

"We as a society must protect this child, or our professed love for own children is just a fraud, and our so-called compassion for each other is just a mockery," said James Catterson, at the time the Suffolk County district attorney.

So Beers had barely been seen or heard from since until this week in a media blitz to promote the book. She appeared Monday on the "Dr. Phil" show and is the focus of a People magazine feature this week.

FILE - In a Jan. 18, 1993 file photo, a 30-foot-high crane raises the bunker out of the earth from the property of John Esposito in Bay Shore, N.Y. The cement and wood bunker, which contains a trap door, is 6 feet by 9 feet. Esposito is charged with keeping 10-year-old Katie Beers imprisoned in the bunker for 16 days. On the 20th anniversary of her ordeal, Beers has co-written a book with a television reporter who covered her kidnapping. "Buried Memories: Katie Beers' Story” (Title Town Publishing) has a happy ending. (AP Photo/Michael Alexander, File)

The abduction and subsequent rescue saved her life, Beers insisted in an interview with The Associated Press.

"The best thing that happened to me," she said. "I would have never gotten out of the abuse situation I was in."

She went on to play volleyball at East Hampton High, participated in drama productions and went to college in Pennsylvania, where she earned a degree and met the man who would become her husband and the father of their two children.

"There's no point really in me right now being sad or wondering what if," she told the AP.

"I try not to be sad about what happened, because ultimately it made me who I am today, and I'm very satisfied and happy with my life," she said.

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