That wish was realized in March when Esposito, 32, was charged with seven felonies — including incest and rape charges. Supporting court documents stated the girl said she was raped more than 200 times since she was 3 years old.
This isn’t the first time Esposito was accused of harming a child.
A case involving grievous injury to Esposito’s daughter Hannah, now deceased, was featured in a follow-up story on Dec. 31 to the Belleville News-Democrat’s series “Lethal Lapses,” which reported the deaths of 53 children between 1998-2005 while under the custodial care of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The articles outlined errors, lapses in judgment and failure to follow set procedures by state and private child protection workers.
Despite suffering serious injuries that left her paralyzed after she was shaken by her father when the family lived in Virginia, Hannah’s death was listed as being from natural causes when she died in northern Illinois a few years later, according to a report by the Office of the Inspector General for the DCFS.
During the time that police said in the latest charges that Esposito was sexually abusing the girl, the DCFS twice investigated the family when they lived in Illinois just south of the Wisconsin border — once after Hannah’s brother suffered broken ribs and a head injury in 1999, and then again when Hannah died in 2002. After these DCFS probes, the children were allowed to remain with their mother.
DCFS spokesman Kendall Marlowe confirmed the agency was in contact with the Esposito family.
Now, three months after News-Democrat reporters investigated Hannah’s death in December 2006, Esposito faced the new charges in nearby Walworth County, Wis., where the girl’s mother resides.
The criminal investigation began after the victim confided to a child friend that Esposito, a former Marine wrestler and expert in judo, tied her up with his judo black belt and then forced her to perform various sex acts and sometimes videotaped the abuse.
The girl’s friend taped the conversation and later turned it over to police.
The victim said Esposito raped her in his truck and at her home in Wisconsin, where he also forced her to watch pornography. He threatened to hurt her if she told anyone about the sexual acts, a court document stated. A police report stated the attacks occurred when the mother was not at home.
Esposito pleaded not guilty and is being held on $100,000 bail in Elkhorn, Wis. If convicted, he could face 60 years in prison.
In 1997, Esposito pleaded guilty in Virginia to malicious wounding involving his then-infant daughter, Hannah, who suffered from Shaken Baby Syndrome. Hannah’s injuries, inflicted by her father, left her in a wheelchair and dependent on a ventilator to breathe.
Pamela Esposito, Anthony’s wife, who separated from her husband during the Virginia criminal proceedings, pleaded for leniency during the case, because her oldest daughter missed her father. A prosecutor asked for a lengthy prison sentence.
Esposito was sentenced to four months time served and five years probation. After his release from a Virginia county jail, Anthony Esposito reunited with his family, which had moved to Illinois.
In 1999, the Illinois DCFS investigated a complaint that Esposito’s 4-month-old son, Jacob, suffered a head injury and also had a healing rib fracture. No one was charged with injuring the boy.
During an interview with reporters in December, Pamela Esposito claimed her son’s injuries happened when her oldest daughter tried to pick him up. She denied Anthony Esposito hurt the boy.
In 2002, Hannah became ill on a school bus and later died in an intensive care unit at a hospital in northern Illinois.
Pamela Esposito filed for divorce in March on the same day criminal charges were filed against her husband in Wisconsin. She asked for custody of her three children and asked for a court order barring Esposito from contacting her or the children. The divorce case is pending.
Pamela Esposito could not be reached for comment on this story.
Becky Gove, Walworth County Department of Health and Human Services’ executive director, declined to comment, citing Wisconsin’s confidentiality laws in child welfare cases.
Virginia authorities, dissatisfied with Esposito’s relatively short sentence for injuring Hannah, considered possible murder charges following the News-Democrat’s report in December, but the possibility of bringing them now are remote because an autopsy was not performed on Hannah.
“(But) we’re going to have him come back here to show why he shouldn’t get the remainder of his (suspended 15-year prison sentence),” Stafford County, Va., Detective Lt. Jeff DeBord said Friday. “So once he’s done in Wisconsin, he will be return here at some point, I would think.”
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