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.
