RedHanded - Katie Beers: The Girl In The Bunker | #448

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Trapped in a soundproof underground bunker, sleeping in a coffin-shaped box, abused and forced to watch news footage of her December 1992 disappearance on a loop, 10-year-old Katie Beers wondered if she’d ever see the world outside her makeshift prison ever again…But one thing her captor didn’t know? Katie was a survivor. This is the story of a little girl who fought against the odds – and managed to escape a lifetime of abuse. --Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Every time I grocery shop, I end up spending more and getting less. And it's not just groceries. Everything costs more. It adds up and soak in the debt. So that's why I reached out to the Credit Counseling Society. After my first call, I felt the weight lifting. I bet they can help you too. Don't wait.

The sooner you call, the more options you'll have. And the weight, leave that for the grocery bags. The Credit Counseling Society. When debt's got you, you've got us. In December 1992, a story hit the headlines that the US public could scarcely believe. A nine-year-old girl celebrating her birthday at a neon-lit kids' fun park vanished into thin air. Panic swept through the state at the prospect of a child snatcher on the loose on Long Island. But soon, it would become clear just how truly deep and dark this story really was.

Because that little girl, Katie Beers, would be. found alive. Somehow, having survived, being chained up in a secret underground dungeon and locked in a coffin, enduring daily rapes at the hands of her abductor, a man she knew. I'm Saruti. I'm Hannah. And this is red-handed. And this is the incredible story of Katie Beers, the girl in the wall. One of genuinely the most shocking surviving, stories that we've come across. It's nice when they survive sometimes, isn't it? I know, I was like, a little present for ourselves.

Should we put that in the intro? I was like, fuck, yes, because how this girl survives is genuinely unbelievable. Well, let's find out. Let's do it. On the 28th of December, 1992, Katie Marie Beers was on the brink of turning 10, a big age with huge responsibilities. Double digits, baby. Double digerunis.

and she had solemnly announced a couple of days earlier that she wanted her Sunday name, Catherine, iced on her birthday cake because it sounded more grown up. What in the hell is a Sunday name? I thought you would be able to tell me. I thought that was some sort of like Christian thing. Is it like a church name?

That would be your confirmation name. I don't know. I've never heard of a Sunday name. I don't know. Let's look it up. I thought you would know what that meant. Oh, because her name's, so it's her, I think it's just what her actual name is and not shortened to Katie.

Is that what Sunday name means? I don't know. I don't know. Well, when I Google Sunday name, it just is telling me the meaning of the name Sunday, as in like you name your trial Sunday, and it means Day of the Sun. Who knew? It must be just like the unshortened version of your name. Maybe, maybe.

It's like how everyone just calls Prince. says Kate, but she's like, it's Catherine. I'm trying to be Catherine, Queen Catherine. But nobody listens and everyone's just like Kate. So Katie is like, no, no, no, I am Catherine. But again, nobody listens. Everyone calls her Katie, as we are going to do throughout this episode. I do the opposite to my sister. Because my mum specifically, I remember the other day, I've always hated that you can't shorten my name. But it's because my mum doesn't like names you can shorten. So none of us have names that she thought could be shortened. More full her naming my sister, Isabelle because her work email is like Izzy at but I can't.

Izzy is Bell. Yeah, exactly. I used to call it Isabel necessarily on a bike. Hated it. But I can't. I remember a very similar, she wanted Izzy, iced on a birthday cake one year and I wouldn't do it because I refuse. Why is that my problem?

I'm unbearable. You get your Sunday name. Isabel. Yeah, exactly. I've been at lunch with her mates and stuff. They'd be like, you can call her Izzy. And I was like, I know. I won't.

No, don't do it. So maybe we've all learned something. Anyway, before Katie slash Sunday Catherine officially blew out the candles on the 30th of December, there was surely time one last child-friendly treat. And the Beers family friend, 43-year-old contractor John Esposito, had just the thing.

Is it bad that every time we say his name in this, I think of... Despacito. Yeah, me too. The whole time script. Just reading, right and tweaking. I'm just like, John, dance. Anyway. Well, I'm glad we're on the same page.

And I'm glad we have so thoroughly aged this episode. Evergreen content. Big John, as he was known in the neighbourhood, offered to take Katie to Spaceplex. One of those vaguely dystopian, all-in-one outdoor fun centres where you can binge on arcade games and get high as balls on e-numbers,

all whilst being serenaded by terrifying animatronic animals under seizure-inducing strobe lights and everything's covered in germs. It was the ultimate 90s party location for children. But this birthday trip was doomed to end in tragedy. At around 5pm on Monday the 28th of December,

John Esposito raised the alarm with the Spaceplex staff that Katie had disappeared. He claimed that he'd gone out to get some more tokens, and when he turned around, she was gone. Staff paged Katie over the tannoy system, but when there was still no sign of her, they launched into a frantic search across the chaotic premises. Soon the police were called, but Katie was gone,

and it wasn't long before things took an even darker turn. Katie's godmother received an answer phone message of what sounded like Katie, crying and saying the following. I've been kidnapped by a man with a knife Oh my God, he's coming back. Investigators had to face up to the grim conclusion. Little Katie Beers had been kidnapped. But given the call, for now at least,

it seemed that Katie was thankfully still alive, albeit at the mercy of a potential knife-wielding child snatcher. So the police knew that they needed to act swiftly if they were to find Katie before time ran out. out. As offices and search dogs were deployed all over Long Island to track Katie down, missing persons detectives got to work identifying the key players in her life. And they very quickly realized that Katie did not come from what you would call a normal family home. Katie was born in 1982 to a single mum, Marilyn Beers, and a mystery father. She grew up

in the Long Island hamlet of Mastic Beach. Like, mastic. Mastic. Mastic is like the stuff you put around a bathroom to like seal it in. Like, I only know because I'm getting my bathroom down and they were like, the Mastic man is coming on Monday. And it does sound like quite a fun job, but actually it's just the guy that comes and seals everything. And then tells me again, I can't shower for two days because the mastic has to dry.

But Mastic Beach. It's not great. Silicon Sela Beach. Yeah, lots of three-eyed fish. swimming around. Yeah, not the best. And it's not the best for other reasons as well. It's a tough neighbourhood with high poverty rates.

And it has been called Appalachia without the mountains. Which is the best bit? Fuck. Appalachia by the sea. Appalachia on sea. Oh no. Appalachia on Mastic. Oh, grim.

Marilyn worked incredibly long hours as a taxi driver. to make ends meet, which left her with little time for Katie and her elder half-brother, John. Presumably little John versus Big John. Yes, actually that is his nickname. And while Marilyn technically had legal custody of Katie, here is where things get a bit tricky. As it turned out, Katie actually spent the vast majority of her childhood in the care of her godmother, the one who got the answer phone message.

A woman called Linda Illigari, who she called Aunt Linda. Now, you'd expect, given this, that Marilyn and Linda would probably be quite good friends, right? You've made somebody your child's godmother, your child spends a lot of time hanging out with her. But that's not quite the case, because Linda and Marilyn clashed bitterly over Katie, with both of them insisting that they were her true mother. Marilyn claimed that she'd initially just dropped Katie off at Linda's when she was a toddler for a few hours of babysitting, because she had to work. But, according to Marilyn, Linda grew possessive and refused to give the baby back.

Linda, on the other hand, insisted that Marilyn had continuously palmed Katie off on her, because, according to Linda, Marilyn was lazy and just couldn't be asked raising her daughter. Whatever the truth, for the next nine. years, Katie yo-yoed between the two women, spending long periods of time living with Linda and her husband, a man named Sal Sal Ilegeri, in the neighbouring town of Bay Shore. It was a confusing domestic arrangement, and the more the police dug into it, the weirder things got. After Katie went missing, her chain-smoking godmother Linda appeared on the news, sobbing to the cameras that she just wanted her little girl back. After tearfully shone, she shot her

Showing reporters what she said was Katie's bedroom at her house full of toys and neatly made up with adorable Disney bedding, Linda even played a tape of a whole new world from Aladdin on repeat, lamenting that it was Katie's favourite song, from behind a thick cloud of fag smoke. But as investigators started asking a few more questions, it became clear that Katie's life was a far cry from the cosy Disney Wonderland. that Linda was trying to portray. Because, to put it bluntly, the Illigaries were not the wholesome mum and dad figures

that they were presenting to the press. No. Because Linda and Sal rarely ever left the bedroom. And I don't mean that in that they're like... Yeah. Desposito. Sorry, no one's getting dick down to Despacito. If you are, you're a pervert.

Yeah, it's not in a, in that kind of a way. No. Sadly, Linda and Sal were morbidly obese. There's no other way to put it. And they were incredibly lazy people. That's just how it was. And Linda was actually even losing a leg due to complications from diabetes brought on by her incredibly sedentary lifestyle.

And seemingly, the pair used little Katie as their chief. cook and bottle washer. Or in Katie's words, they're slave. So yes, this obsession with this little girl is not out of the goodness of their hearts it would appear. From the age of just three or four, the pair would send Katie out into the freezing streets alone, often without a coat or even shoes, to run errands for them. Like washing their clothes at the local laundrette, grabbing endless junk food from local takeaways or even, and this is just like the most 90s thing you're going to hear, even sending her to the local corner shop to buy them cigarettes. Ah, yes.

And yes, the shop did sell cigarettes to a four-year-old. Because her guardian, different time, and her guardians had taken care to write a little note for the shopkeeper explaining that, don't worry, the cigarettes aren't for this little girl. She's just buying them for us and don't worry about the fact she hasn't got any shoes on. This was all happening very much out in the open. None of this, none of how the Illegeres were treating Katie was a secret. In fact, local business owners, when Katie was reported missing and there was a lot of attention on the case, told the media that they'd felt desperately sorry for the little girl,

who they described as kind of like a Dickensian waif, always seen dirty, skinny and with matted hair. And clearly, she was absolutely terrified of Sal and Linda. So it seems that in this area, everyone knew about Katie Beers, the local Cinderella to her wicked godparents. But nobody seemed concerned enough to actually do much about it. As journalist Carolyn Gossoff later put it, for a dog someone would have called the pound.

For Katie, no one knew what to do. It was as if an entire community had witnessed a hit and run, turned its collective head and then just kept driving. It is definitely that case. There is so much neglect going on that precipitates what happens to Katie later. It also precipitates how she's able to handle it. But there's definitely just like an open secret, staggering amount of neglect. And maybe a different time.

But would things really be different now? No. I don't know. People don't like to get involved. No, people don't like to get involved. And it reminds me of that case here from like a couple of years ago of Sarah Sharif, that little girl who got beaten to death by her father and her stepmother. People now, after she died, neighbors were like, oh yeah, we were always really concerned.

We heard really weird noises. She always looked really this, that and the other. Yeah, you're like, why didn't you say anything? But I don't know. I don't know. It's just one of those things. Like you said, people don't want to get involved. Katie rarely attended school, and in the fourth grade, her guardians yanked her out of class for good.

citing the recurring head lice as the reason she couldn't keep going in. School was the one place that Katie ever felt safe. Not that life there had been easy. With that particular flavour of cruelty that kids are so capable of, her peers taunted Katie with nicknames like Dirty Katie and Cockroach Kid. And at just nine years old, with her long and pretty hair now hacked short thanks to the headlice, She slipped through the cracks of the system. The only person who could re-enroll Katie in school

was her biological mum Marilyn, who was using the fact that the little girl was out of education whilst in Linda's care as a bargaining chip in their ongoing custody battle. It's definitely a reoccurring theme throughout this episode that none of the adults in Katie's life do what's right for her. They do what's going to serve them. Because Marilyn isn't like, okay, I'm fighting to get my

daughter back in my care and in my custody. I know she's fallen out of school while she's in Linda's care, but instead of making her go back to school and I'm the only one who could do it, she's like, oh well that plays really well for me in the court cases. Yeah. And while child protective services were well aware of Katie and her so-called family, they totally failed to step in and help her, which is their only job. Visits to Sal and Linda's house were met with hostility and slammed doors, and the social workers didn't seem to make much effort to follow up on Katie's case. Yeah, they're not even like trying to present it like it's a perfect home

and like pulling the wool over these people's eyes. They're like, fuck off every time they turn up and they're like, okay, I will, bye. Off I fuck. In short, Katie Beers was chronically let down by all of the adults who could have and should have taken care of her. And that was all while she was still living in plain sight. It was obvious that Katie had already drawn very much the short straw in her nine years when it came to her various guardians.

But there were even worse things going on in her life than just neglect and chores. Katie's mum, Marilyn, had recently reported Sal Illigeri for molesting Katie. Honestly, it's like a horrible, horrible, just-like. like, collect them all of the worst things that could be happening to a child. And Sal had actually been arrested two months prior and was due to appear in court in February 1993. Marilyn had filed for a restraining order against him and he was actually banned from coming anywhere near Katie.

And Sal and Linda had a very volatile relationship. What a surprise. And as Katie's 10th birthday approached, they were technically separated. And Sal was not supposed to be living at that house. Because remember, that's where Katie is also living at this point. But he was, as always, an omnipresent force in Katie's life, still skulking around over at Aunt Linda's. And just to like give you a vision of who Sal is, he is this huge guy that adults are terrified

of because he is known in the area for having a very, like it's put in a lot of places like a fiery temper. I'm just like, I don't think that comes close. He is an incredibly abusive, violent man. And he was also very publicly known for having a tendency towards violence against his wife and basically anyone who crossed him. Sal Illegeri was undoubtedly bad news. But if you thought that Katie was unlucky enough with a potential nonce like Sal around, wait until we introduce you to the other major male figure in her life.

43-year-old John Esposito. As the last person to see Katie, John was naturally a suspect right from the start. But the more the police looked into this guy, a truly troubling picture emerged. A shy bachelor who lived alone at his family's home after both of his parents' deaths, John Esposito was locally known as Big John, despite the fact he was actually quite a skinny and unimposing character. So, why Big John? Well, he was supposedly a member of the local Big Brothers Buddy scheme, matching vulnerable young lads to local men in the hopes of imparting valuable manly life skills

and boosting their self-esteem. The problem was that Big John was never a part of the Big Brother scheme at all ever. In fact, if you were to speak to the organisation's leader, he would tell you that he had rejected John Esposito's application due to his troubling criminal record and his belief that he fit the profile of a child abuser. I'm glad someone's doing their fucking job. Yes, this unnamed Big Brothers program leader is the only one.

The only one who was like, I don't think so. You seem a bit non-sy to me, my friend. No, thank you. I will not be delivering you children to your house. Thank you for your work, good sir. And that impression that the Big Brothers leaders had of John and wasn't just down to John having a ponchant for anorax or something like that. Big John had actually been arrested 15 years earlier in 1977

after he was accused of trying to pull a 12-year-old boy into a car outside a shopping centre. Ding ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. The charges were reduced to a misdemeanor and the case files were sealed, but people knew about it. I think if you're even accused of trying to abduct a child, that's just going to stick to you, isn't it? As it should. Yeah, or at least you'd hope it would.

Especially in a case like this. Especially in a case like this. But sadly, everyone, other than, as we said, the guy running the Big Brothers program actually seemed to brush any grimy rumors about John Esposito under the proverbial carpet. He was known locally to be a childlike figure who hung around almost exclusively with teenage boys

at his Bayshore house, with, you guessed it, a converted garage that he kept, well-stocked with toys, junk food and video games. And look, we have come across this ploy used by child groomers and paedophiles all over the world, especially when you're working in an area of high deprivation. Because these boys or these girls or whoever, these children that John Esposito is going after, they don't have these things at home because they live in an incredibly impoverished area.

So this is why this works. he creates this like kid friendly like dreamland in his garage that's just filled with all this stuff that these kids' parents can never buy them. He's like, come on over whenever you want. And it's the 90s. So they're not even aware of like what the potential risks are here of doing such a thing. And the problem is also nobody was really keeping that close an eye on him because he came across as harmless. People just thought he was a bit stunted, but like, eh, that's just John. Just big. Which is the most effective way for him to position himself. Yeah.

And his posse of younger boys actually included Katie's older half-brother, who, as you already guessed it, Hannah, was affectionately dubbed Little John. Nothing gets past me. Uh-huh. And yes, this was all going on. John was hanging out over there until a couple of months before Katie's disappearance, when Little John made the very brave admission to his mum Marilyn, the Big John, had been sexually molesting him. Horrified, Marilyn forbade her kids

from spending any time alone with Big John moving forward. Although, interestingly, she didn't tell the police. And again, I know it's very easy to be critical of these people, and believe me, we will be, but like, I think a lot of people in this community, A, just want to get on with their lives, they don't want to get involved. And also, I think a lot of people don't report things to the police

because they don't want their lives being scrutinized by the police either. I'm not making excuses and I'm not saying that's okay. I just think that's a big motivator for why they don't do it. Well, I was thinking that like if the sort of general reaction to the people living in this area to Sal and to Big John is just like, like how bad are the people they're actually worried about, you know, if these guys are like the second wrong. And I think also take Marilyn, for example,

a lot of people are very critical of her for not having reported Big John at this point because she's getting a big red flag from her son, this man is sexually molesting me. I'm not making excuses for her, but in her mind, I'm guessing her motivation for not doing that is don't go near him to her children,

but I'm not going to go to the police because I am in a custody battle with this woman who's trying to, you know, take my child away from me, i.e. Linda, if I go to the police and say, my other child has been molested by this man who I've allowed him to hang out with,

maybe she's worried little John will also be taken away from her and Katie will never come back into her care. So I think it's naive to just blanket blame her for why she didn't do this, but it's really not a good thing that happens because everything just gets so much worse. Oh, good. With rumours flying around, as thick as the smoke pouring out of Linda's mouth, the press had an absolute field day speculating about Katie's miserable home life and the role it almost certainly played in her disappearance.

With such a grim line-up of undesirable figures in her immediate orbit, Katie's disappearance was starting to look less and less like a random abduction, more and more like the call was coming from inside the house. But was it Sal, was it Big John, was it Marilyn, was it Linda, or some horrible combination of some or all? Yeah, because one of the things I was surprised about with this case is It's a very like remarkable story at the end because as we said Katie survives. But the media frenzy starts way before that.

The media frenzy starts almost as soon as Katie disappears. I was surprised because she isn't from an affluent home. She's, you know, very much from like an impoverished community. I was surprised that the media was so interested in her story so young. She's an adorable little girl and I'm sure that did help. But I think in a way, this was kind of like a Jerry Springer disappearance. I see. There's a lot, there's a feeling I have that this was very much linked to like poverty porn of looking in at this case from outside, like across the US and be like, oh, look at all these horrible grubby people in Katie's life. Which one of them did it? Like Shadda Matthews?

Yeah, absolutely. And like, we'll get into like kind of how the TV stations continued to like ramp up this narrative. but I absolutely think it was ingrained in that sort of classist element to it. Yeah. The police were drowning impossible suspects. And the media, as usual, didn't really help. The major players all swiftly loyered up and began pointing fingers at each other over Katie's disappearance. And the local TV stations gleefully lined up to give them all the airtime they wanted. And the raging custody battle between Linda and Maxxie's,

Marilyn in particular really muddied the waters when it came to accusations flying around in the media. Sal Illigari insisted that he never molested Katie and that Marilyn was just making false allegations in a desperate bid to regain custody of her child, which sadly didn't seem completely out of the realms of possibility. Yeah, it really feels like it was hitting at that peak moment in the 90s where we were all watching like outrage chat shows, Like Maury and Jerry Sprick. Was Jerry Springer a bit earlier than that? I don't know. I feel like I've lost track of time.

But you know what I mean? That sort of overly sensationalized battle. And this has it all. Custody battles, sexual abuse allegations, parental alienation, a missing child. It's just the dream scenario for these media outlets. So as the days passed, the media frenzy raged on with Linda and Marilyn busy locking horns in a fierce battle of the mums. both tearfully showing off handwritten notes and drawings of love hearts that Katie had supposedly scrawled for each of them,

with both claiming that Katie loved her the most and wanted to live with her. It all got so intense that Marilyn and Linda even started parading self-professed psychics around in front of the cameras, all of whom claimed to have insight into Katie's location. And this is just so grim. There's one particular prediction that led to a very bizarre scene that was, again, shown on TV, like rolling news, all of this, of bloodthirsty hacks digging up a freshly dug grave that turned out to contain nothing but the remains of somebody's dead pet.

Oh, my God. It was also bonkers that it would almost have been comical, it almost would have felt like a Jerry Springer, like watch it and laugh a long situation, if it wasn't so serious. Because while dead Fido might be resting in peace, The fact remained that nine-year-old Katie was still out there somebody and nobody even knew if she was dead or alive. Thankfully, while the media and Katie's mums were losing it on TV,

detectives were doing their best to find Katie. They traced the chilling man-with-a-knife call to a phone box on the highway outside Spaceplex. But from the start, something didn't really add up. For one thing, the message didn't contain the chaotic background noise that you would expect from a live call made from a busy roadside. And when FBI experts analysed the tape, they reached a troubling conclusion. The voice on the other side did belong to Katie Beers, but it wasn't a real call at all. Instead, it was most likely to have been a recording of Katie's voice, played.

into the phone receiver. So that means that someone had deliberately staged the call to make it seem like a stranger had snatched her from the horrible Jeremy Play Centre. So the real question became, had Katie ever actually even been at Spaceplex? Not a single staff member interviewed by police record seeing a girl fitting her description at all at any point that day. But they did all see John Esposito entering the building alone and swiftly reporting Katie missing eight minutes after the message landed in Linda Illegeri's answering machine

and people started to speculate that as a close family friend John would have known all too well that Linda never bothered to pick up her phone that call was never intended to be a conversation it was a misdirection with John's report of Katie's disappearance now looking like a flimsy smoke screen, detectives honed in on him

as the number one suspect in Katie's abduction. They tapped his home phone and launched surveillance on him and around his house, even setting up camp in his living room for long stretches of time to conduct questioning and to keep an eye on him. Little did they know. Katie Beers was far closer to home

than they could have ever possibly imagined. In fact, she was literally right below their feet. Like Shannon Matthews? Yeah. A few metres below the ground, Katie lay in a tiny coffin-shaped box within a six-by-seven foot underground bunker that John Esposito had meticulously constructed under his house. The chamber was only accessible by pushing aside a heavy fake bookcase, hauling open a 200-pound concrete trap door, and then crawling through a six-foot tunnel. It was the kind of elaborate hidden lair that you would expect from a horror film.

And it was so carefully concealed that police later insisted you'd practically have to destroy the house to find it. if you didn't already know it was there. It's like barbarian. I was trying to think of the name of the film. Yeah. And hidden within its barbarian-esque dungeon, within its dank depths, was little Katie Beers.

And miraculously, she was still alive. So let's now rewind to the morning of the 28th of December. Katie was at her godmother's place, and Linda told her that Big John planned to pop by with a birthday present for her, which immediately made Katie feel uneasy, because remember her mum Marilyn had told her had made her promise not to see him anymore. Katie repeated Marilyn's warnings, but Linda insisted that John was a nice person. So with Linda's blessings, John came over with a very extravagant gift of a Barbie dream house

and the offer of a fun day out at Spaceplex, just the two of them. Despite Katie's misgivings about disobeying her mum's orders, Linda insisted that they go and obliviously waved them off in John's car. Katie had no idea that from this point on, her life would never be the same again. John insisted that Katie sit in his lap during the drive, even though she's 10 and also why ever. She's not like a one-year-old. She's 10 years. years old. That's a, like, I'm, I am the height of a 10 year old. It's also incredibly illegal and

dangerous. I imagine I was just like, Hannah, I'm going to sit in your lap while you drive us around. Like, fucking hell. And John kept plying Katie with treats along the way, almost like he was taking her out on a sort of sickening date. First, he drove Katie to a convenience store and got her a cola slurpy, and then to a Toys R Us where he picked up the brand new. home alone video game Toys R Us RIP, man. I know. It was fun. I actually like have such a nostalgic feeling when you say that.

What was the song? Toys R Us. Toys R Us. Toys R Us. Oh, what time. Not for Katie. John knew full well that Katie did not have the console needed to play said Home Alone video game. So he slyly suggested that they stopped by his place for a bit before they went.

to Spaceplex. Katie had been to Big John's house before. According to her, it was a toy store, candy store, and amusement park all in one, where any kid with a sweet tooth and a video game habit would end up, which is all of them. It's the witch's house from Hansel and Gretel. Yes. And obviously that raises some enormous red flags, but it was the 90s and clearly people in this tough neighbourhood weren't too concerned

that their kids were hanging out at a 43-year-old man's house, if it meant it kept them out of trouble. After playing the game for a bit in John's bedroom, Katie was keen to skip to the day's main attraction, Spaceplex. But John Esposito had no intention of letting Katie leave his house that day or ever. Katie vividly remembers the moment the man she'd always known as Big John, the kind, polite, slightly odd but supposedly harmless family friend, suddenly changed. She says it was like a switch flipped

and his eyes went icy cold. John had always acted like a gentleman around her, but in his bedroom that illusion was shattered for good. John attacked Katie and started molesting her right there on his bed, something he had never done to her before. And when she screamed, he picked her up and carried her downstairs to his office. Katie watched and taken her.

terror as he went over to a large bookcase and started unscrewing it from the wall, shoving it aside to reveal a carpet on the floor. He rolled it back and revealed a heavy concrete slab that had been set into the ground. Using a long metal bar like a wrench, John heaved the slab open and beneath it was a deep, dark hole. John ordered Katie to climb inside and obviously she refused and tried to run away and that's when John Esposito kissed the nearly 10-year-old girl on the mouth picked her up like a rag doll

and physically chucked her into that pit Katie slammed hard against a wall of nails that made her bleed and cry out but she could barely react before John was behind her urging her to scramble on her knees through the tight tunnel that stretched into darkness in front of her. It's literally just like

a tunnel that he has dug in the dirt under that house. We know it's six foot, but when she's crawling through it, she doesn't know when it's going to end. That is horrendous. It's just pitch black in front of her. She's pushed into the soul

and this man is behind her pushing her forward. That makes me feel sick. It's... Ugh. And whilst all that claustrophobia built a terrified Katie eventually found a tiny little door. That led to a tiny little bunker. The room behind the little door, if you can call it that,

with its dirty earth walls, packed with cork and crude egg box-style insulation, was no bigger than a cupboard. And it felt like a cage. Raised off the floor was a coffin-shaped wooden cabinet with a heavy padlock on its door. John ordered Katie to climb inside it. And once she was safely inside, John wrapped a metal chain around her neck that was attached to the wall.

He would later remove that chain, but Katie was still trapped inside the living casket. It's so horrific. It's so horrific. Like even the larger chamber, if you will, is just a tiny fucking hole that he's dug. And then within that, she's kept trapped within a box. I mean, yeah, it's mind-boggling. Once in there, the first thing John did was to pull out a tape recorder and get Katie to recite the lines that he'd prepared in advance

for the fake answer phone message about Katie being chased by a man with a knife. At just nine years old, Katie already knew that this was no ordinary play date that she'd be home in time for dinner from. She asked John how long he planned to keep her. her there, and his response was forever. John told Katie that this was her home now, and for the next

17 days, it was. Katie's new living conditions were like something out of an actual horror movie Halloween nightmare. She slept inside the box in nothing but 101 Dalmatians nighty, and just a thin

blanket and a tiny pillow. In the corner of what we called the larger chamber, there was a disconnected toilet that had been filled with a black bin bag for Katie to use. And while somehow, I do not know how she managed this, but Katie had actually managed to find and hide from John a spare key to the coffin that she was locked in. She somehow managed to get hands on that and she hides it in her blanket,

which did give her access to the larger room at any time even when John was out of the house. But, and this just shows you how intelligent Katie is at just 10 years old, Barely 10. She's nine when she's abducted. How about it hasn't happened yet? Because she knows that even though she lets herself out of that coffin box and into the larger chamber, she doesn't use the toilet when he's not there because she knows that if she does, he'll come back and realize that she's somehow getting out. So she would actually soil herself in her coffin space, which obviously filled her as she talks about in her own book that she's written since,

an intense feeling of shame. And absolutely just adding layer upon layer upon layer to the nightmare of situation that she's already in. But like, just to, I really marveled at that, thinking about how she logically thought about how to survive in this situation. She's faced with a toilet in front of her because she's managed to get herself out of the box, but she knows not to use it and still continues to soil herself in the box because she doesn't want him to know what she's doing. Bizarly, amidst all that squalor, John had put in some touches to make the bunker feel more

like a home for Katie. like a little TV that had been mounted at the end of her coffin bed as well as the endless music videos on MTV Katie also spent hours watching the news coverage of her own disappearance and each time she saw her mum Marilyn and her brother John sobbing to the cameras for her to come home she kissed their faces on the screen

there was also a CCTV and baby monitor system set up in the bunker which provided its own form of torture for Katie because she could literally see and here the police just metres above her head whenever they visited John's house. But they had no idea she was there, just feet below them. John had totally soundproofed the bunker. So Katie's screams went unhurt. Katie's coffin might have been claustrophobic, but at least John Esposito couldn't fit in it.

The most traumatic parts of Katie's ordeal took place in the larger chamber. On his twice daily visits, John would coax Katie out to be bathed by him. After which, John would molest Katie repeatedly, with the initial touching, escalating within days to full-blown rapes. Katie came to dread the sound of banging and drilling as John made his way into the bunker, knowing exactly what lay in store for her with each visit. Katie was also terrified to fall asleep because she thought, that John might reach into the bunker and touch her while she was passed out or worse. And again, this shows like the level of thinking that Katie is doing

because she was also terrified to go to sleep, because she was scared that John would come down into the bunker and take a picture of her in this coffin-shaped box asleep and then send it to the police or the media and pretend that she was dead. So then people would give up searching for her and she would eventually just die down there. It's hard to imagine any child surviving this level of horrific torture and this level of just not just the horrendous rapes he's conducting, the conditions he's keeping her own,

but the psychological torture that she's going through. But Katie Beers was built differently to your average 10-year-old. I think it's safe to say that. Sadly, this wasn't by chance. Her whole life had been a warm-up act for this. As it turned out, Marilyn's warnings about Sal weren't. just to win back custody of Katie. Sal had actually been sexually abusing Katie for as long as she could remember.

From the age of about two, he would get her alone and say that she had to play with him, which was a euphemism for touching his genitals. And as Katie got older, this progressed to rape. Heartbreakingly, but not surprisingly, Katie's early cries for help were totally ignored. Her godmother Linda would beat her for even suggesting abuse was happening. and behaved in twisted ways herself, like masturbating in front of Katie and showing her porn. Katie soon came to realize that Sal's power on her entire household was so strong

that nobody around her was willing or able to protect her. Her mum Marilyn Marilyn was always outworking. Her grandma Helen was loving but frail and her big brother John received savage beatings any time he tried to stand up for Katie. Sal even molested other kids, which brought social workers knocking, but a terrified Katie would always lie and cover for Sal out of fear of the consequences. Sal ruled their dysfunctional family with violence,

battering anyone who dared challenge him, smashing her pet cat against a wall, punching Katie's grandma, and repeatedly assaulting Linda to the point that she was hospitalized multiple times. Sal Ligary was the big bad wolf of Katie's childhood. She had always thought that, there was no escaping him, until she ended up in the claws of a different monster. And so as terrifying as it sounds, Katie's past abuse actually equipped her with a perverse

sort of training for her ordeal in John Esposito's bunker. As she herself has put it, I had been held captive my whole life. I was a maid to Linda, a sex slave to Sal, and now a prisoner of Big John. The sheer scale of the abuse. use that she'd faced had given this little girl a sad but unique level of emotional resilience and the survival strategies that she'd need because Katie already knew how to stay alive under extreme threat and she already also knew how to block out trauma Katie was a survivor and she was going to put those skills to good use so when John offered her food she'd refuse to eat anything that wasn't pre-packaged, living off after eight minutes cans of fizzy drinks and wrapped sweets, all to

avoid poisoning. When John asked her to scream as loud as she could so that he could test out the soundproofing of the bunker, she only screamed loudly enough for him to be able to hear it on the baby monitor, not loud enough to make him decide to reinforce the insulation further. She hoped this might create at some point a chance that she could be heard by one of the police officers she knew were in and out of John's house. And her relationship with John was more complex than just terrified kid and big scary non. Katie quickly realized that John had two sides, commanding captor, and the soft-spoken gentleman that she'd always known. John seemed desperate for the little girl's approval, even giving her $500 in cash every other day to stash under her

pillow as a part of a strange promise that he'd made to her that she'd grow up to be rich and happy in his care. Because John didn't seem to see Katie as his captive. He saw her as his future wife. It was a sickening courtship ritual that John forced upon Katie, desperately trying to get her to buy into the fantasy that he had built in his twisted mind. And this is a classic grooming strategy used by paedophiles who try to justify their abuse as them actually being in love with their victims. But Katie knew that this was John's weakness and she could use it to her advantage. So Katie played along with his game where she needed to while also slipping in little questions to try and destabilise John. She would ask him, for example, how would he keep her a secret

forever? How would they raise their kids together in this bunker? How would they raise their kids together in this bunker? How was she supposed to get an education and learn skills for this fairy tale life they were going to have together? Bit by bit, Katie burrowed her way into John's head, planting seeds of doubt and nudging him towards the outcome she wanted, him letting her go. As John's confidence began to crumble, one day he alarmingly confided in Katie that he was planning to take his own life. He promised that he would leave a note explaining where Katie was, but how could she trust the same man who had kidnapped and abused her for days? Katie faced the terrifying prospect of being stuck down there forever, with the only key locked inside a dead man's house.

It forced her to walk a very perilous type rope, keeping John just unbalanced enough to consider letting her go free without pushing him over the edge to the point that he took his own life. For over two weeks it was a constant game of push and pull. But would it be enough to negotiate Katie's freedom? Yes. Thank God. On the 13th of January 1993, John Esposito finally cracked. He walked into his lawyer's office and confessed.

He said, I know where Katie is. She's in the wall. At first, heart sank. this grim confession surely meant that Katie was dead. But when John led two officers to the bunker, they were amazed to find her cowering in the corner of her makeshift prison, frightened, dirty, sleep deprived, but very much alive. And as for Katie, she could hardly believe that these men were here to save her. In fact, she assumed that John had just brought some of his friends

with similar paedophobic inclinations to abuse her, I would probably think. that well. Eventually though, Katie understood what was actually going on. And while she doesn't remember this now, apparently before she was taken away, she hugged John Esposito and told him that she loved him. Katie's not surprised though. She had been running in survival mode for so long that she would have said anything she thought she needed to if it meant she stayed safe. And it is a completely fucked up scenario where, yes, this man is the reason that she she's down there. He is the one who has been abusing her. But he's also, as far as she can see, the man who's freed her. And so there is going to be a complicated feeling there of like,

you did this to me, but thank you for setting me free. We've talked about it before. We're like the genuine meaning of Stockholm syndrome. I was going to say, yeah. When it actually comes down to it, what it means is you're so deprived at the hands of this person. But then they are the one bringing the food, the light, the conversation, the human connection, even the most despicable way. And so that bond begins to grow because they're your only connection to anything other than the hell that you're living in. And they're the ones who can let you out. And it comes back to that grooming that John Esposito has done because he's very much got the profile of an abuser who wants to absolutely sanitise and whitewash the horrific things that he's doing. He wants to not be seen

as an abuser. Like we said, Katie got this feeling that he wanted her approval. It's like these rapists that you get, it's like a reassurance. rapist where it's like, is this okay? Are you okay while they're doing it? And that is John Esposito. He doesn't see himself as a bad guy. He sees himself as like, everything's going to be fine. Look, I'm giving her $500 every other day. Yes, I've taken her away, but she will love me. And her life is already so awful. This will be better. So yes, unsurprisingly, Katie's rescue did leak to the ravenous press. And TV crews were already stationed outside. Their cameras flashing in Katie's face as she was ushered into a police car in a blue anorak with the hood up.

And this actually is quite an iconic picture in this case. And I just want to show it to you because I think it's so easy to forget how young she is. Look at this picture. It just breaks your heart. Oh my God. It's just, she just is so young. So yes, this blows up. And that image of her with the big brown eyes, her very, very young, tiny little face, blinking in the lights is absolutely ingrained in the memory of Long Islanders to this day.

It was a little girl caught between an old and a new life. Katie was put through medical checks, including rape kits and even a pregnancy test. Fucking hell. And she was also subjected to intense questioning about her ordeal. But one thing was clear from the get-go. Katie beers was one tough cookie. She was chipper, chatty, and methodically answered all of their questions. Those involved in her rescue marveled at Katie's strength.

Which, yes, like, I was reading about this and everybody is very, very like, she's tough cookie. She's going to be just fine. Like, look how she's handling this. And I do not want to take anything away from Katie. She is obviously incredibly brave and incredibly resilient, but it also feels like a trauma response. It is. She's only okay because she's blocking out all of the horrible things that have happened to her. it's not normal to be okay after what's happened to her.

And no, it is. That's what your brain does. It shuts it down because your brain is always trying to survive, right? And especially in children for lots of sort of neurological reasons, but because they are still developing a child's brain will shut things down much quicker and much more often than an adult brain will. So I think it is. They're expecting her to be catatonic.

Yes, exactly. Children are more. adaptive because they're changing and learning and growing all the time. So, of course, it happens, but it is more normal than you would think for a child coming out of something like this to be like her. Wiggles out in other ways later on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in the moment. Yeah.

And I think that's the feeling the team have is that look how much information she's giving, look how okay she is talking about everything that has happened to her. And from my perspective, I'm like, like I said, I don't want to take anything away from Katie and her ability to handle all that. and effectively communicate everything that happened. She plays a pivotal role in like everything that happens next. But to me it was also she's able to do that and be so like verbal and everything. Because she's endured so much in her life already. She's normalized so much. She's been being sexually abused from the age of two years old.

She's normalized so much. That's why she's able to cope with the worst possible scenario. and Katie's so-called team, which included police officers, prosecutors and child therapists, instantly rallied around her and promised to protect her going forward. District attorney James Catterson summed it up with the following. She was nobody's child, but she really is everybody's child, and we have an obligation to protect her. And that started with bringing Katie's abusers, plural, to justice.

Post-rescue, John Esposito, was swiftly charged with first-degree kidnapping. His lawyer did argue that the court should let him out on bail because the only reason Katie was free was due to his client doing the right thing and revealing Katie's whereabouts. They don't have loads to work with, I understand, but, you know, he's got to try. John was the whole reason that Katie was there in the first place.

This lawyer even tried to claim that the bunker conditions were better than Katie's own home environment and that she had been happy with John. All right. That's too much. Too much. Thankfully, the hearing judge was not having any of it, and the bail for John was set at $1.1 million,

which obviously was far more than John Esposito could afford or anyone who knew John Esposito could afford. And with a potential trial drawing closer, in 1994, there came another horrifying twist. It turned out that John Esposito had actually made audio recordings from the bunker, where Katie could be heard screaming out in terror and begging to be set free. And this one is just too much. One of the most heartbreaking sound bites was apparently of Katie singing happy birthday to herself on the morning of her 10th birthday.

These tapes are not publicly available. And honestly, if you were thinking we're going to play them here, we can't, and I don't fucking want to hear them to be perfectly honest with you. And Katie feels the same way. She says she's already been forced to remember so much that she does not need to fill in the gaps with even more buried memories. But back in 1994, there was a real chance of these tapes being played in court if it went to trial. In the end, however, that wasn't necessary.

John Esposito ended up taking a plea deal and pleading guilty to first-degree kidnapping. While he wasn't officially convicted of sexual abuse charges against Katie, the judge confirmed they believed. that this had indeed taken place, which aggravated his sentence. On the 27th of July 1994, John Esposito was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, to be served at the notorious Sing Sing Prison in New York. After keeping Katie as prisoner in his own underground prison, it seemed like a fitting fate.

Sal Inigary was also convicted of two counts, sexual abuse for molesting Katie, along with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Unlike John Esposito, Sal rejected a plea deal and insisted on having his day in court. Crowing to the huddled reporters that he was innocent, he had done nothing wrong. In a particularly cruel twist and now 11-year-old Katie was forced to testify in court. Dressed in a pretty pink dress and holding her new therapist Mary Bromley's hand, Katie bravely and calmly relayed a lifetime of abuse. The whole time.

Sal stared at herman leavenantly, trying to psych her out. But Sal couldn't touch Katie now. After a jury found Sal guilty of all of the charges, Judge Lefkowitz slammed him as a manipulative and amoral individual who has little insight into his behaviour or the consequences of his actions on others. Sal was sentenced to 12 years in prison and was released in 2006, but his taste of freedom didn't last very long. Sal immediately broke his parole conditions by failing to register as a sex offender, and he was re-arrested in 2007. Police found him living with a new girlfriend and her young children in North Carolina. Back behind bars, Sal Lilligari died of a heart attack in 2009.

So let's now take a moment to take a look at the psychology behind the villains in this particular case. And yes, that is, of course, villains, plural. Because this story isn't just about Katie's kidnap. It's about the lifetime of abuse that she endured long before she ever set foot in that bunker in 1992. Now, criminologists, we have talked about this before, but criminologists tend to divide child sex offenders into a few broad subtypes. I think Sal Illegeri probably fits into the type that we could associate with being an opportunistic offender, someone who abuses children largely because of proximity and opportunity, because we know he abused lots of people. people. He kind of abused anyone who had the misfortune to come into his life. He abuses the

elderly. He abuses Linda. Linda's still a piece of shit, but he does abuse her. And he abuses various children. It's whoever he can get his hands on. The victim is there, they're vulnerable, they're accessible, and so this type of offender exploits the power that they have over that individual to get what they need. On the flip side, you have someone like John Esposito, who fits their subtype known as a preferential paedophile. This is someone who is someone who were specifically attracted to children and actively seeks to build twisted relationships with them, grooming them, manipulating them, and even convincing themselves that it's some sort of forbidden romance and not actually abuse. As Lieutenant Detective Dominic Verone later pointed out,

Katie Beers had the unimaginable misfortune of growing up around both of these types of abusers. And that's not to mention the twisted behaviour of her godmother Linda, who, as we know, also sexually abused the young girl. Judge Lefkowitz dubbed John Esposito as a classic case of arrested development. He struggled to relate to adults, instead regressing to an adolescent fantasy world, in the company of youngsters. In court, he appeared oddly childlike and unthreatening. Even Katie said that she almost felt sorry for John at times,

an emotion that she never felt for Sal. but there's an uncomfortable contradiction at play here as well. Because for all his supposed timidness, John Esposito had proven himself capable of deeply sadistic and premeditated cruelty. That bunker didn't just appear overnight. John had to build it by hand. In fact, Katie later recalled playing in a hole near the ground in his garden

about 18 months before she was kidnapped. Oh yeah. It's very allowed. Whilst kids innocently orbited him, John Esposito was building a prison in plain sight. FBI Special Agent Clint Van Zanz said that the setup was even more sophisticated than the dungeon built by the fictional serial killer Buffalo Bill and Silence of the Lambs, remarking, I've never seen anything in all my years as elaborate as this. And from what we've seen, he's not wrong. The police even suspected that Esposito might have actually studied

the infamous kidnapping of Killeen Stan, the girl in the box, episode 7 of Red Handed, in 1977, as there were eerie similarities with the bunker that he kept Katie in. And the fact that Katie's coffin box was large enough to fit an adult also suggested that John had intended to keep her there for years, just like Killeen Stan. So, while John Esposito might have seemed like a slightly tragic Peter Pan figure, the truth is far darker than that.

It wasn't just a boy who never grew up. He was a calculated predator. Years in the making. Still, the depths of John Esposito's denial ran far deeper than the bunker. He never took accountability for his actions, instead continuously casting himself in the role of a rejection. playmate, writing sniveling letters from behind bars where he insisted that he'd always loved and cared for Katie. And crucially, he consistently refused to admit to any element of sexual

abuse. Back in 1994, Katie had admitted to investigators that John had touched her, but she was too ashamed to reveal the full extent of the abuse. But in 2007, after years of therapy, Katie was finally ready to tell the truth. At John's parole hearing that year, she testified that he had indeed raped her. John denied it, describing himself as asexual and insisting that while he'd kissed Katie on the lips, it was really just a fatherly gesture. By his next appeal in 2013, John finally changed his tune and finally confessed to engaging sexually with Katie in that bunker. But even then, he tried downplay it, insisting that Katie loved it and felt safe with him. And he also said he'd never beaten her up or hurt her physically. Needless to say, this was hardly convincing to the parole board.

But now comes one of the weirdest twists in this entire story. Just hours after his parole hearing on the 4th of September 2013, John Esposito was found dead in his prison cell from natural causes. like being a paedophile in prison with other men. If he had managed to hang on for just a day longer, he would have received the official notice that his parole had once again been denied. It's almost impossibly ironic. After decades of delusion and denial,

John Esposito had finally admitted to his sexual abuse of Katie and then quite literally dropped dead of being a paedophile in a prison with other men. Allegedly. Allegedly. I really don't know what happened to him if he took his own life or if somebody gave him a helping hand.

I wonder if he did take his own life. Maybe he thought he had denied it for so long and he was able to tell this story that he wanted that he wasn't a bad guy. He had never done anything like that. He was in love with Katie was taking care of her. And then finally he admits it. And maybe he realizes,

oh yeah, I'm never getting out of her because he sees the look on the parole board member's faces. And I think he can't live with being the bad guy. I don't know. But either way, he's dead, so fuck him. Let's get back to the most important person in our story. Katie. After her dramatic rescue, she was placed in foster care

and sent to live with a new family in the affluent area of East Hampton, just an hour and a half away from where she grew up. But the press weren't ready to let their star survivor go just yet. camera crews parked outside her new school hoping for a glimpse of Katie or jostling for that money shot. Bizarrely, Spaceplex owner Gary Tazalo declared on local TV that he wanted to throw Katie the birthday party she never had

and invite all of Long Island. Everyone just wants to cash in on this story. That's what it feels. That is grotesque. Yeah. But here's where the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office really did shine. because they actually made a public statement demanding for Katie to be left alone. DA James Catterson declared,

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. After the trauma she'd survived, Katie deserved a normal life away from media intrusion. So with more than a hint of disappointment, the journales put down the, their cameras and stepped away. And for the next two decades, Katie Beers lived her life out of the spotlight. Behind closed doors, the custody battle kicked off in full force, once more between

Linda Illeghery and Marilyn Beers. Both of them were suddenly TV regulars bickering on daytime talk shows and insisting that Katie should be returned to their care. Linda even went on the Montel Williams show, dramatically announcing Katie and I share. a real love, a real home, and real tears to be together forever. Not only does that not make grammatical sense, but with all of the information we have about what Katie endured under Linda's roof, it's a completely laughable take. It's pretty grotesque how the same people who'd let Katie down so badly

were now suddenly so desperate to claim her as their own. But in the end, whatever Linda said made no legal difference. She'd never had any parental rights to Katie, so the court slammed the door in her face. As for Marilyn, her temporary loss of custody was eventually made permanent, and the courts decided it was in Katie's best interest to stay with her foster family. And eventually even Marilyn had to begrudgingly admit that that was for the best. But it wasn't easy for Katie to get her head around the new living arrangements.

She was ten years old, confused, scared, and for a while absolutely not having it. Katie couldn't understand why she'd been ripped away from her mum and brother, as if she were being punished for what had happened to her. Her new foster parents, Ted and Barbara, had followed her story on the news and had actually made a personal appeal to the courts to be the ones to be able to foster Katie.

And they loved her, but for a long time Katie resisted because she wanted to be back with her biological family. It took time, patience and unconditional love. for her to start to feel safe in her new home. And eventually, they did become the truest family she'd ever known. Katie struggled to be alone with Ted at first due to her trauma around men. But that changed when she realized that he was a gentle and caring man, the first one I ever knew.

In her foster home, Katie experienced consistent boundaries, rules, support, and most importantly, love. Ted cooked her breakfast every morning no matter what. Barbara taught her how to properly brush her teeth for the first time. Chores were assigned not to punish her but to teach Katie responsibility fairly. Freed from her Cinderella duties, all Katie was expected to do was to go to school and enjoy her childhood like any other kid. She made friends, played volleyball and tennis and bloomed into a confident teenager. And over time, Katie finally began to realise that her biological mum Marilyn's neglect had played a role in what had happened to her. her. Now Katie calls Ted and Barbara, mum and dad, and credits them for saving her life. And it is

astonishingly impressive to raise a child that has been through so much into a normal one. That is so hard. Oh, Ted and Barbara are just like amazing. They've foster multiple children, they've got their own kids, like, they take Katie in. And she herself admits, like, I was a nightmare. She was like, I used to lie about everything. I used to run away all the time. I just did not want to be there. She was like, you know, borderline feral. But they are just like, we love you, we love you, we love you, and they change her life. And to this day, Katie celebrates the 13th of January every year like another birthday

because it marked the start of her new life. After graduating from high school, Katie went to college in Pennsylvania to study business management and then went on to work in insurance sales. Now, while dating wasn't easy with her sexual trauma, she did eventually meet a guy named Derek, who she felt completely safe with. They got married and had two children of their own, Logan and Haley. And this was another turning point for Katie, because after becoming a mum,

she found it even harder to understand how her own childhood had panned out the way it did. Over 15 years after her kidnapping, Katie finally felt ready to unearth the darkest parts of her past in order to fully heal. In 2008, she started collaborating with local TV journalist Caroline Gusewov to write a memoir of her story. And that book, Buried Memories, was released in January 2013,

exactly two decades after she emerged from captivity. Katie said that writing the book helped with finalising the final step of her recovery. Today, Katie Beers is determined to turn her experience into something positive. She gives motivational speeches, works with survivors' networks, and advises social services and psychologists on how to support kids who have suffered abuse and neglect. Katie, there is no doubt. She is honestly an absolutely incredible woman

who is living proof that survivors can break free from the victim mold and go on to live happy, productive, fulfilling lives. And most amazingly of all, Katie actually describes her kidnapping, and this is a quote from the book, as the best thing that ever happened to her. I don't know how I feel about that.

Why does she say this? She says it's because she knows that if her case hadn't made headlines in December 1992, she may never have escaped the abusive cycle she was trapped in. Ironically, being locked up for those two weeks is what Katie credits to having freed her from a lifetime of captivity and into a whole new world. Wow. I think Katie is naturally a kind of person who is able to. to look on the positive and look at a horrible situation in front of her and be like,

what can I dig out that's the positive from this and how has this bettered my life? And I think, oh, yeah, that's what's happening. But I also... I was just trying to calculate how many more decades of therapy I would need to be able to be that person. Yeah, it's horrible. And I think she is right. I think she is right.

If she had never been abducted, she would have just remained living under Linda's roof, being abused by Linda and being abused by Sal, probably until she was well-intested. adulthood. I think it's a fucking tragedy that she had to be abducted by another paedophile and raped for two weeks in his underground bunker before anybody paid attention to her plight and pulled her out of that and put her into this loving home where she then managed to have the life that she now has. And she's had to build that for herself. Nobody gave it to her. It's not like, oh, I got abducted and then I won the lottery so great. Like, she has had to work every step of the way. Oh, yeah.

But it's just heartbreaking that that had to happen for her to have the better life. And she's just an incredibly positive person who's like, okay, if that's what I had to do to have the life I have, then fine. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Katie Beers. Nice to have a survival once in a while. Yeah.

Good for her. Absolutely. So that's it, guys. That is the story of Katie Beers and, yeah, the remarkable survival of Katie Beers. We should say the girl in the war. So, yeah. We'll see you next time for something else. Bye.