The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (12 page)

“Was he trying to kill him?”

“No. He knocked him out, but he didn’t intend to kill the guy. I put one arm around him, my father put one arm around him, and we took him downstairs, where my father told me to look for a car—an old Buick, from the dealership. I guess he had it all planned. We threw his black coat over him; he was bleeding.”

“Where did you take him?”

“Nowhere. We just left him in that car, behind the steering wheel, with the keys in the ignition.”

“So it was a warning.”

“I forget what he told him. ‘Don’t make me come back,’ something like that. I don’t know whose apartment it was. Might have been where he got together with my mom. Then there was the second episode. That was the next summer. And he made me watch the whole thing, with the goddamn heart. He made me participate, for Christ’s sake. I had to watch, and then I had to bury the thing.”

I’d been instructed
by my elders as to the general purpose of my mission, but when I left Louisiana, I went not knowing quite what I was looking for or what guide to follow, other than my own inkling. The calls would come from clergy of all faiths, or, sometimes, from the families of the afflicted individuals themselves.

I learned there were people in need everywhere. Sometimes this need presented itself in the form of possession; other times, I was simply sent to visit the downtrodden and search their spirits.

I would do what I could to help right wrongs, fill the holes in doomed lives, or help provide deliverance to souls that had met their makers. Haiti, Peru, India. At first, I traveled alone. Arrangements would be made for me to meet up with a priest or a missionary group, and from there I’d find my way to the place where my cursed gift could be put to use. Canada, Rome, Sicily. I’d pass through towns and watch different souls interact. Each place like a new birth, like seeing with new eyes. A voice would become stronger and stronger, until I was standing next to one in need. Paris, Brazil, Mexico. I died a thousand deaths and passed a thousand souls from one side to the other. I was barely twenty.

“Do you want
to talk about the second episode?”

Here Ronnie paused, which was so rare as to be completely disarming. After what seemed like an endless
silence, he finally said, “It must have been September.” His voice was uncharacteristically quiet—more like a frightened child than a grown man.

“When?”

“I remember it took a long time to get dark. Yeah, September. 1970. He took me back to the apartment again.”

“The brother was still messing around with your mom?”

“He must have been. This time, when my father opened the door with the keys, Brother Isaac wasn’t there. So we sat and waited for him. The guy was shocked when he came in that door and seen the two of us. He went to pull something out of his pocket.”

“A gun?”

“My old man must have thought it was a gun, because he was on him immediately. The ironic thing is he did have a gun on him, but behind his back, in a holster. It was a Smith and Wesson revolver. It wasn’t a Colt. When he put his hand in his pocket, he was just putting something in there, something balled up in his fist. That’s all I seen, his hand going toward his pocket. When it was all over, that’s when I found the gun on him. That gun never had a chance to come out.”

“What’s a man of the cloth doing carrying a gun?”

“I have no idea. As soon as he reached for that pocket, I never seen nothing like it, my father grabbed him by the throat and started throwing him into the wall.
Boom, bang
. He’s throwing this guy around like a rag doll. And this guy wasn’t a little guy, like I said. As big as my father.
But not fat. Muscular. My father was throwing him around like he was nothing. But this guy didn’t want to die. He fought back. My father starts yelling, ‘Butch, help me! Help me, fat boy!’ He called me fat boy. I grabbed Brother Isaac’s arm, and he threw me into the wall. He didn’t wanna die. But my father just kept slamming him into that wall.”

The pain in Ronnie’s voice almost made me want to ask him to stop telling the story. It occurred to me that he sounded more confused and hurt by this event than when he made reference to the murders of his own family members. That memory seemed locked away. This one seemed enduringly fresh.

“I seen the guy’s eyes rolling around in his head. When he got through throwing him around and the guy couldn’t get up, he went over to him with a knife, a sheet knife. He cut his throat. And he was talking to him, ‘You’ll never screw my wife or anybody else’s wife again.’ That’s what he said. When you cut somebody’s throat, they don’t necessarily die, so what he did, he started pulling his head. To separate it from the cut.”

I was called
savior and healer, but the truth was somewhere in between—a strange kind of liberator, maybe. I’m not sure if there’s a name for it, and maybe there shouldn’t be. Not everything should be captured and named. I would take in the spirits and become them, victim or destroyer, the one lost or the one searching. I absorbed them, housed them, released them. Across
thousands of miles I communed with the dead or the dying, holding the spirits at bay until salvation could be, might be, had.

And out of all this death came life. A daughter. Joanne.

“When he knew
the guy was dead, he ripped his shirt open, and he asked me, ‘Where do you think his heart is?’ What do you mean where do I think his heart is? His heart’s in his chest—I’m not a doctor. Then, when he got the skin ripped off, he took a roofing knife—I was into roofing, construction, we used to cut the shingles with it—and man, he started cutting. He starts sawing up and down, up and down. For fifteen minutes he’s cutting. I mean he cut his whole chest open. I thought we were in a funeral parlor the way he was going to work. I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ He puts a big
V
in Brother Isaac’s chest with the box cutter, and then he went right down the middle. He also had a sheet knife with him, but he used the box cutters. Then, once he pulled the skin back and got in there, he tried to get at his heart. The heart ain’t where everybody thinks it is.”

“What do you mean, Ronnie?”

“It’s just beside the breastbone. Closer to the middle than everyone thinks. But the box cutters weren’t enough. He asks me, ‘You got your tools in the trunk?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I got regular tools.’ I had a brand-new axe in there, too, though I didn’t mention that to him.”

“What was the axe for?”

“I carried the axe because I couldn’t carry a gun.”

“So you went and got your tools for your father?”

“He asks me what kind of tools I got. I said, ‘I don’t know. I got some hammers, I think I got a chisel.’ He said, ‘You better get ’em.’ Then when I was downstairs, I was thinking, I had a brand-new pair of bolt cutters, too. Them big ones.”

Ronnie laughed. A sad, terrible laugh.

“I got back and I said, ‘Those are ribs. You gonna go through ribs?’ He said, ‘I know what those are. What are you, a smart-ass?’ So he tells me to go through the ribs, and I take the bolt cutters. Snap. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘You sure you never did this before?’ I said, ‘What the hell would I be doing some stupid shit like this before?’ I just kept busting and busting those ribs open so he could eventually get his hand in there. I put a big hole in him. Those cutters are almost three feet long.”

“Why do you think he wanted to involve you in this?”

Ronnie chose to ignore the question. I wasn’t sure if he was caught up in the awful momentum of his own story or if, perhaps, there was simply no reasonable answer. “I snip the last rib with the bolt cutters, and finally he says, ‘Oh look, his heart.’ I swear to God it was still pumping. He tells me to stick my hand in.”

“Why did he want you to take the guy’s heart out?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“Sounds like he was testing you. Seeing what kind of a man you were. That’s the sickest test I ever heard.”

“I said, ‘I’m not sticking my hand in there.’ So he sticks his hand in instead, and he starts yanking. And he rips the goddamn guy’s heart out. Right out. Tells me to
start cleaning the mess. There were two sinks. I’m washing the heart off in the sink. I found a bottle of fantastik under the sink, that’s what I’m using to clean all that shit up. I just kept thinking to myself how thick a heart was. I had to use a lot of paper towels—couple rolls’ worth. And I had to go get newspapers out of the garbage to clean it up.”

“What did you do with Brother Isaac?”

“We covered him with garbage bags. One bag on the bottom of him and one on the top, then duct-taped both ends together and sealed him up. Then we threw the newspapers and all that shit I’d used to clean up the mess into some other bags. We used four bags or six, I can’t remember.”

“So you buried all that stuff with him?”

“No. The garbage didn’t get buried with him. I know that for a fact, because we forgot one of the fucking bags. I didn’t say nothing to my father. I didn’t want to tell him. So I took the bag and I looked for a Dumpster, you know, one of them big Dumpsters in the street. I couldn’t find no Dumpster. I went everywhere looking. Where they were knocking down buildings, everywhere. There was a garbage company down the street, but I couldn’t go there with the bag. I mean, I was desperate. I couldn’t even find a garbage truck. So, I didn’t have no choice, I had to put it in one of them garbage cans on the street corner. There was no air in the bag. The bag wasn’t really that big, but it was big enough.”

“And the bolt cutters?”

“I washed them off and threw them back in the trunk.
I washed them in the sink in that apartment, with hot water at first, but then I said, ‘What the hell am I doing? I need cold water. That’s what you use to get rid of blood, not hot water.”

This I knew. Hot water only sets the blood deeper.

“I used the sponge, had to get rid of that. I got rid of everything I touched. I was tired. I was disgusted. I wanted to get out of there. We carried Brother Isaac out—my father took one side; I took the other side—to the car. We had a black Riviera. Two-door. Put him in the backseat. Wasn’t dark yet, so we had to kill a couple hours. My father wanted to go and get something to eat. I said, ‘I ain’t really got an appetite.’ He said, ‘Ah, you’re soft.’ We went to one of them takeout joints, then buried him at Cypress Cemetery in a fresh grave, and went home.”

I was twenty
by then, a mother, older, wiser, stronger, more savvy about the ways of the world, but also exploring more obscure and dangerous places. My travels to help patch the wounds of injured souls had become well known to the voodoo community at home in New Orleans, and many within the inner sanctum were starting to worry. I was a priestess of my own spirituality, guided by my own group of elders, a creature whom the energies of the universe flowed through in singular ways. That may have made me unique, but it didn’t make me invincible.

The community is powerful, but small. So when a brawny young man named Will Barrett was introduced to me as someone whom the elders thought would be a
good candidate to accompany me on my journeys, I already knew his face.

I’d seen Will the first time while riding a streetcar in the Garden District. Voices had started talking and fingers pointing toward the back of the streetcar, and when I’d turned around, I’d seen a young man racing after the streetcar through the baking July heat. He caught up to the streetcar and got on beside me. As he reached for a strap to hold, his shirt opened a little, and I noticed, on his chest, a veve tattoo—a religious voodoo symbol. The god of the crossroads. The same as mine.

Over the next several years, I would see the young man during some of my trips home—hanging around the French Quarter, exploring the swamps and marshes—and learned that he, like I, had traveled back and forth frequently between New York and New Orleans.

“This young man is a drummer and ritual conductor,” one of the elders told me. “He’s strong and loyal and will be at your side through thick and thin.” Will smiled his big kind smile.
This boy could crush me like an ant
, I thought. But off we went.

Will and I traveled and talked, talked and traveled. He became part of my secret society, helped me care for Joanne, delighted in watching her grow. At the same time, I learned that behind the soft smile there had been some dark passages. Like me, Will was familiar not only with the mysticism of voodoo but the practical matter of the law. He had been on both sides of the fence, he told me, but had straightened himself out in time to avoid landing irretrievably on the dark side of the path. He could play
the trumpet, the piano, the drums, and the guitar, enchanting everyone around us. Then, just as quickly, he would retreat into the quieter part of his spirit and solemnly rehearse his ceremonial duties.

Will was fearless. With him at my side, I never felt scared or alone. He helped me care for Joanne while we traveled to far-flung places, never asking a single question other than, “How can I help?” He would have died for her, or me, without thinking twice. He made my mission his mission.

Joanne grew, and the three of us became an unbreakable team. We struck an odd collective image—people would often wonder who we were to each other. I would just smile and let them think what they wanted. I knew the truth: we’d been reunited from past lives. Anyone who is close to me in this life has been close to me in the past. When they return to me, I recognize them immediately. Titles mean nothing to me; loyalty, everything. Either I consider you my blood or you’re no one to me.

If you got one of us, you got all three. If you were hungry, Will would give you his last dollar. If you crossed him, he would be the first to dig your hole. I would push you in. Joanne would pack the dirt.

“My mother and
everybody was downstairs. My father went up to his bedroom, and he was carrying the heart. He had one of them big coats, big leather jackets, with the big side kangaroo pockets; he had the heart in there. And he put it under the blanket, on her side of the bed.
He came down and said, ‘You won’t have to worry about seeing your boyfriend no more. I brought him home for you; he’s upstairs in your bed.’ My mother ran upstairs and I heard her scream, ‘Oh my god! Whose heart is this!’ She was just screaming. ‘Ask your son; he’ll tell you.’ So she asked me. I told her some guy that was a brother. Yeah, it must have been September. It took a long time to get dark.”