Katie Beers

Credit: Courtesy Katie Beers

Katie Beers Breaks Her Silence About Her Ordeal in a Dungeon

Originally posted 01/14/2013 02:15PM

Twenty years after she was kidnapped, forced into an damp, dark underground hole – 2 feet wide, 7 feet long and 3 feet high – and often held in chains, Katie Beers is speaking out at last about the hellish circumstances she survived.

"I felt it was time for me to tell my story," says the 30-year-old Beers, whose new memoir, Buried Memories, is being published by TitleTown Books and excerpted in the upcoming issue of PEOPLE.

Beers's case made headlines in in 1993 when her abductor, building contractor John Esposito, confessed and led police to the crude underground bunker, hidden by a 200-lb. concrete wall, he'd dug underneath his Long Island home – a genuine hell hole one FBI agent at the time described as something out of Silence of the Lambs.