The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (10 page)

“No, you don’t,” I said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Go away, for your own good,” I told him. “And don’t come back.” I went back to the fire and continued to beckon the gods.

The more Ronnie
talked about his father, the more transparent his feeling of rejection became. He hated the man with all his heart yet wished he could have found the secret to earning his love. I recognized in Ronnie’s voice an awful and classic condition: that of the victim still desperately trying to win the affection of his tormentor. People denied their parents’ love will spend their entire lives trying to get it, even after they’re gone. This I knew from experience.

When I had picked up the coin in the forest, bolts of pain had shot across my arms and torso. Soon my entire body felt racked, and the trip out of the woods proved much more arduous than the trip into it.

“I wanted to be done with it,” Ronnie had told me
after my return from the forest, as though picking up a conversation that had been paused only a minute. “I didn’t want any part of him whatsoever. And that coin was his.”

I had learned to listen, follow one door down a path that led to another. That was how you got Ronnie to slowly disentangle the different strands that would, I hoped, eventually lead to the truth.

As I gained his trust, the phone calls came to be supplemented by letters—an infrequent trickle at first, then temporary bursts of a handful or more at once, then, not long after that, a reliable stream. Soon I knew my mailbox would hold at least one letter from Ronnie every day. Some days there were five stuffed in there. Some weeks I received thirty. They were always in blue or red ink. Ronnie DeFeo, like many inmates, liked to write.

The letters were a curiosity unto themselves. They would take on a variety of forms and expressions, sometimes seeming to come from different people entirely. One letter would have messy penmanship similar to that of a child, as though Ronnie’s handwriting had stopped developing when he was a youngster, and would be characterized by sloppy structure and simple thoughts and ideas. The next would have tight, measured script written by a sure hand, and its contents would contain real insight and intelligence.

I showed some of the letters to associates of mine who work in forensics. They were startled that some of the letters showed a distinctly left-handed slant, while others seemed obviously written by someone right-handed. In
addition, they pointed out, the thrust of certain letters seemed more typical of a teenage girl than a grown man.

The letters continued to come in droves. I have boxes filled with them. And it wasn’t just letters. Ronnie would send cards, drawings, musings, whatever happened to occur to him that day. Sometimes he would send me cartoons. A few weeks after the first letter he’d sent, a drawing arrived in the mail. It was a cartoon drawing of the Surf Hotel.

One morning, Ronnie called and simply said, without greeting, “I want you to have power of attorney.” He seemed especially uptight.

“What?”

“I want you to have exclusive rights to the story and power of attorney over my estate, Jackie. I want to be cremated. I’m not being buried in that plot.”

“What plot, Ronnie?”

“They bought nine plots. They bought the six for my family; then that scumbag Rocky DeFeo, ’cause he had no place to be buried, took more money from the estate—I’m the one that turned it into an estate—and bought three more, for him, my grandmother, and me.”

Joanne, working in the same room, had already started to dig. She was still building the ever-growing file on Ronnie, and I’d gone through the material she provided me numerous times, but it was still hard to keep up with the catalog of characters Ronnie would casually drop, as though I was a fellow branch on the extended DeFeo tree and was familiar with all the players in this drama.

“Why don’t you want to be buried there, Ronnie?”

“Why don’t I want to be buried there? Let me tell you something. When I was in the county jail—”

“Exactly when, Ronnie?”

“What do you mean, exactly when? Right after all the shit happened with my family. As soon as I got up there, they sent Vinny Procita up to see me. He says we don’t want all your money, but we need this signed.”

“Who is Vinny Procita?”

“My aunt’s husband. My aunt Phyllis. My father’s sister is Phyllis Procita, and that’s her husband. He’s the same one who at the crime scene was saying, ‘God only knows what people on drugs do.’ This is what one of my family says? My aunt’s husband says that? To make a long story short, he wanted me to make him administrator of the estate, because they couldn’t pay for the funeral, they needed money.”

“The funeral for your family?”

“Yeah, the funeral for my family. They didn’t have the money for it. But listen, they had to be buried, didn’t they? So now Rocky DeFeo has to pay for the caskets, but it isn’t his money.”

“Whose money is it, Ronnie?”

“It’s my money! But he took it and paid for the caskets, the plots in the cemetery, and the stone.”

“And you were upset that he spent too much of your money?”

“Too much? What are you talking about?”

“I assumed you were angry with him for taking control of the estate money that you were entitled to and then squandering it on expensive coffins and so on.”

“What? No. He takes the money and buys white coffins. I mean, what is this guy doing? They were cheap boxes. It’s not his money. White boxes. This came from the estate that wasn’t an estate yet. Bank accounts and so on. This is because Rocky DeFeo wanted to make this an estate immediately so he could get the money.”

“You were upset that the coffins weren’t good enough.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

It was when Ronnie would engage in these bizarre rationalizations that he would become the most agitated. He was angry at his grandfather for buying insufficient caskets for the family members
he’d
been accused of killing.

“I mean, you want to buy a plot, you go and buy a plot for the six people who were just, you know…”

“Killed.”

“Right, killed. He goes and buys nine. They came in threes. He could have bought six. Nine people were not dead. The other three, according to him, was for my grandmother and him and me. But the deed for all of this is in my name. What are you doing taking the money and buying something for yourself and your wife? There isn’t even an estate yet. And he throws me into the mix, for this third plot. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, ‘one for you, too.’ I said, ‘What kind of garbage is this? This ain’t your money. You can’t do this.’ I screamed at the guy. ‘I wouldn’t care if you spent all the money on the people who died.’ ”

The people who died.

“Maybe he just wanted to make sure you’d be at rest with your family when the time came,” I said, “and that he and his wife would be buried with their son.”

“That’s horseshit. That ain’t it. They just wanted to keep as much of that money as they could for themselves. I mean, when they were all buried, suddenly according to them there’s no money for a stone. I said, ‘Wait a minute here, there’s no money for a stone?’ That’s what happened, this fucking Rocky DeFeo and his fucking daughter.”

“Phyllis.”

“Yeah.”

“And her husband Vinny.”

“That’s what I’m saying. ‘You went and bought you and your wife something. You can’t do that! You want to pay for it, that’s fine. But this isn’t your money. This is a pure rip-off!’ Then he turns all my letters and everything over to the DA, because they’re worried about me coming back on an appeal, he’s worried I’m gonna beat this on an appeal. And his daughter turns around and testifies against me?”

“Who, Ronnie?”

“Geraldine Gates.”

“That’s your father’s other sister?”

“Yeah.”

“So they wanted to make sure you stayed put and they’d get control.”

“The cemetery knows that I’m the owner of those plots. The deed says Ronald Joseph DeFeo Jr. That’s me. So the cemetery’s well aware of the fact who owns it. But I don’t know where the deed is now. Geraldine Gates got her hands on it; the Nanowitzes had it, maybe they still got it.”

“Who are the Nanowitzes?”

“Our housekeepers. They were with us for seven years. We were real close to them.”

“They might have the deed?”

“They were saying my grandparents had it, the Brigantes, and they gave it to my aunt.”

“Your father’s sister.”

“My father’s sister.”

“I’m trying to keep up. How do you know the Nanowitzes might have had it or given it to your aunt?”

“They wrote me and came to see me in prison. They cared about me. They were good people. But giving it to my aunt, that don’t make no sense. I don’t want nothing to do with that woman. I didn’t want anything to do with her before this case.”

Maybe this oddly high-and-mighty stance was part of Ronnie’s way of dealing with what had gone down that night, or his way of displacing the need to face it at all. Did he really feel cheated that he could no longer be in charge of the DeFeo estate? I wasn’t sure. But he certainly sounded as sincere about this as he sounded about everything else. You couldn’t accuse the man of not being passionate in his opinions. When Ronnie DeFeo expressed anger that the family he apparently killed was getting disrespected in death, you found yourself on some level understanding his point.

“I mean, that’s the lowest thing you can do. Took the money and bought himself and his wife a burial plot. And throwing me in there. You can’t do that crap.”

I rifled quickly through Joanne’s file. “They’re both dead, is that right? Your paternal grandparents?”

“He died in 1983; my grandmother in 1984. They’re in those plots now. Then an area where there’s no name. That’s for me. I’m not being buried there. I got news for you. When I go, I’m being cremated. I want nothing to do with them, no part of any of them. They’re snakes with two heads. Phony hypocrites. I even heard they said some nasty shit to my father at the funeral, as they were lowering him into the ground. I heard Rocky DeFeo was at the grave the day he buried him, and he said some pretty bad shit. Sure, you can bury him with garlic and all that crap, but it’s words that count. The man is disrespecting his own son as he’s being put in the ground.”

“How do you know that?”

“The Nanowitzes were right there. They heard it all, and they told me. I mean, I couldn’t be there to hear it, of course, because the Suffolk County Police Department made sure I wasn’t allowed to come.”

“You think you should have been allowed to attend the funeral, Ronnie?”

“They made absolutely sure I wasn’t gonna be there, oh yeah. He was an animal, but as dead as he was, I never got to go to the grave.”

Hearing this victim-speak, even from someone who had allegedly perpetrated so heinous a crime, was heartbreaking. Nearly forty years after his father’s death, Ronnie still stung from not having been given the opportunity to say good-bye to the man he so deeply loathed. The man he’d killed. I’m no psychologist, but I was intimately aware of the perverse phenomenon affecting Ronnie. It’s overwhelmingly painful when the parent whose approval you crave finally goes away
forever, because it means that approval will never come. You will always be a disappointment. You will eternally be ridiculed. You will forever be abused.

Adam drove the
hour from the LSU campus in Baton Rouge to my home in Nola twice more that week in 1982, each time begging for further glimpses into my world. His manner never changed. He was straight up, nothing fake, just a young man too curious for his own good.

“Look,” he said on the third visit, “I’ve come all the way here just to talk to you. The least you can do is talk.”

So I let
him
talk. He was on a full sports scholarship at Saint John’s. He was going to be a professional athlete one day, he said, a track athlete or maybe a football player. Once I let my guard down a little, I found I warmed to him. Despite my general suspicion of anyone who asked to speak with me, Adam seemed different. My intuition told me he was someone who was going to play an important part in my life.

“I have to get back to school soon,” he said. “Will you let me watch?”

“Watch what?” I said.

“Something else. Anything. I just want to see what it’s all about.”

“Fine,” I said. “You can watch. But remember, I warned you. You shouldn’t knock on the door if you don’t want to see what’s on the other side.”

I let him observe another preparatory ritual, a war dance around the fire. Another means to summon the dead.

“Ronnie, earlier, when
I asked you why your father thought you were so bad, you told me that you
were
bad. Do you still feel that way?”

“I need to tell you something, I don’t know if I should tell you. Me and two other guys robbed a bank. In 1973. Two black guys. One was a schoolteacher; the other one worked for my father. The whole thing was a dare. I was scared to death, I ain’t gonna lie. I decided I’d jump right over the bank counter, like in Hollywood. I just said to myself, ‘Let me see if this works.’ I didn’t even have no gun on me. The other guys, they had guns, 12-gauge shotguns, including the guy driving the getaway car. The shotgun was mine. I jumped over the counter with a paper bag. I didn’t have no gun; I wasn’t going to hurt nobody. I told the lady I had a bomb in the bag. There was a kid’s clock inside; it went
tick-tock
,
tick-tock
. I told her, ‘You press that button, I’ll blow this whole bank up including myself; we’ll all die together, right now. I got nothing to lose.’ ”

“What did you mean by that?” I still didn’t have a reliable sense of whether Ronnie’s stories were real, embellished, or completely fictitious. But each one provided a small opportunity to find out more about the man, and what had made him who he had become.

“Just what I said.”

“You had nothing to lose.”

“That’s exactly what I had to lose. What did I have? That bastard beating me whenever he felt like it, and my
mother screwing the hairstylist one day and the brother the next. That’s what I got to lose?”