The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (13 page)

I asked Ronnie what happened to the heart. He said he buried it in the backyard.

“Right there by the fence, there was a garden, and there was a retaining wall; that’s where it’s buried. It was a special stone wall, special blocks, then they had marble on top of that. We had a nice wall back there. Right up near the water. Right opposite the boathouse side door. There was three doors to get to the boathouse, one through the garage; then they had a side door on the outside to get in, then the big boathouse door. Directly across the garden and retaining wall, she had me dig a hole.”

“Who did?”

“My mother. She asked me to bury the thing.”

“And you did it?”

“I didn’t care. I didn’t care about any of it, because I’d just been drafted, and I figured I was going to be on my way to Vietnam, which was better than all the shit I was dealing with in my house. That’s how I know it was the later part of 1970, because I got drafted, and they only gave me ten days to appear at Fort Hamilton, so it was in them ten days.”

“You mean you actually went?”

“No, I got rejected. They did a spot check on everybody’s arms, and mine were all marked up because of the shit I’d gotten into. I told the guy, ‘Look, man, let it go. I wanna go, so just let it go.’ He sent me to see a psychiatrist. He said, ‘Once you see the psychiatrist, the choice is yours whether you wanna go or not, but you look high.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not high.’ So I went in there and I start thinking, do I really wanna go? But I didn’t get a choice in the matter. I should have went. My whole life would have been different. I should have went. Even if I didn’t get killed over there, I could have just stayed and never have come back. Apparently, there are lots of pretty broads there.”

I returned to the topic of Brother Isaac’s sundered heart. “So you buried it?”

“Yeah, I buried it. She’s asking me to go deeper and deeper. I said, ‘Look, I’m getting tired of this digging. I’m digging for him, I’m digging for you—this is ridiculous. Maybe I oughta dig the hole a little bigger, four by six, for you.’ Me and my mother were real close, we were real tight, till the day she died. But I couldn’t get along with my father. You marry a pretty woman, you’re gonna have problems. Before she gave me the heart, she took the newspaper from that day and wrapped it up. My father got angry because he couldn’t find the newspaper.”

“Are you serious?”

“She says, ‘You gotta dig deeper, dig deeper.’ I said, ‘Listen, you’re just like him. Maybe you should go help him at night, with the shit he does in the cemetery.’ She told me, ‘You gotta go down four feet.’ I said, ‘How
would you know that?’ She just looked at me, said, ‘That’s what you’re supposed to do, when you bury a body in the cemetery. You gotta go at least four feet down, but they go six. That’s because coyotes will come and dig up the bodies and eat them.’ He cut that man’s heart right out. It was like gutting an animal. To this day I can’t eat meat. I can still smell it. I can still hear those ribs snapping.”

“What were the kids doing when you guys came home with the heart and your mom started screaming?”

“I can’t remember where the kids were. Maybe in the driveway playing, or in the pool. Yeah, probably in the pool. It was summer, and it wasn’t that late, maybe eightthirty, nine o’clock. That first episode was the winter. This episode was in the summer. Yeah, I guess they were playing around in the pool.”

Something else occurred to me now, a reason why this particular event in Ronnie DeFeo’s life would produce such lasting pain, the pain that was so evident in his voice as he told it. It was that he had been merely an instrument for his father, a means, just as I’d been for my mother. And that what Ronnie had desperately wanted instead—like me—was simply to be loved. Maybe we weren’t as different as I thought.

Will proposed to
me for the first time after we’d been traveling together a year or so. I told him he should take the question back if he knew what was good for him.

“You need me,” he said. “Joanne needs me. We’re a family.”

“I need space,” I said. “My work is too demanding, and my schedule is too chaotic. Don’t burden yourself.”

He kept at it, asking me again at regular intervals. Each time I would say no. And each time Will would just smile his big sweet smile, a man more patient and devoted than anyone I’d ever known. We had grown to become best friends and mutual protectors, and I liked it that way. With him at my side, I felt I could harness my energies with absolute focus, never having to worry about what kind of place I was in or who might be over my shoulder. From every corner of the globe I was summoned by the living, the dead, and those in between. Will continued his practice as a psychic conductor, as committed as I was cursed. The more we roamed, the more strangely at home I felt. I didn’t know if I’d ever put down roots, stay in one place. Then I got the phone call.

It was nearly Christmas 2009. My neighbors had
strung their lights in swags across their rooftops and garage fronts. A dust-layer of snow covered the ground, though the experts on TV were promising more in time for Christmas morning, twenty-four hours away.

The night before, I’d slept little because of the fireplace. We’d had it installed only a few months before, one of those items you decide to splurge on because it has a transformative effect on the house and the salesperson convinces you that its efficiency will save a few hundred dollars over the course of ten years. It was brand-spanking new, wood-framed, glass-encased, gas-operated. Though it was only December, we’d already been using it regularly.

Around dinnertime, it had ignited with a loud
whoomp
, like the sound of a mast suddenly snapping open, making Will, Joanne, and I jump. A little puzzled, I got up and turned it off, then sat back down. A few
minutes later it ignited again—
whoomp!
—and again I turned it off. After getting back up to turn it off three more times, I called the gas company.

The serviceman inspected the fireplace and told me he couldn’t find anything wrong.

“What do you mean?” I said. “This is your company’s fireplace. You need to tell me what’s wrong and how to fix it. You’re the expert.”

“Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I’ve checked everything. No idea.”

I called an independent company and asked if they thought they could figure out the problem. They assured me they could. But when their expert serviceman came to inspect it, he, too, was stumped, and left with the same apology as the first.

Six hundred dollars and five service calls later, I was ready to throw my hands up. My last call was to the company with the best reputation in the city for solving fireplace problems. True specialists. Nothing could get past them, they promised me. The owner of the company himself came to check on my temperamental fireplace. He flicked the switch on and off a few times, removed the glass casing, inspected the connections, moved the logs around. Then he told me there was nothing wrong.

“Nothing wrong?” I said. “This fireplace is turning on by itself. Wouldn’t you say that counts as something wrong?”

“What I mean is
I
can’t find anything wrong,” he said.

“Well, can you look again?”

“I’ve looked,” he said. “I’ve looked twice, three times. Like I said, I can’t find anything.”

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked.

He finished packing his toolbox, snapped the latches closed, and stood. “Sorry, lady,” he said. “Maybe you got a ghost.”

Sometimes I dream
I’m back in New Orleans receiving the phone call again.

It was 1991. Joanne was nearing her eleventh birthday and I was nearing my thirtieth. Will had continued to ask me to marry him and I’d kept saying no, even though in my heart I knew our relationship was for eternity.

Father Vincent, the man called himself. He had a heavy Italian accent and an urgent, mysterious tone. There was little he could, or was willing to, tell me about himself, and he didn’t provide any details on the phone. Only that I had to get to New York, immediately.

I started to question him the way I would try to get preliminary information out of anyone claiming to need help. “Just come as fast as you can,” he said. “Too much information will put you in danger.” I heard the truth in his voice. I didn’t pack a bag. Will did, and also arranged for a neighbor to take care of Joanne.

On our way to the airport, we saw two different accidents on the highway, delaying us more than an hour. It felt as though something was trying to prevent us from getting out. The sky became slowly painted over with a dark, heavy blue.

When Will and I finally landed in New York, we headed straight for the destination Father Vincent had mentioned: the Surf Hotel, on Coney Island. Former playground for the rich and fabulous, now a fleapit. Will asked me if I wanted him to come in. I told him he should stay back. Almost as soon as I was through the splintered doorway, I heard the screams.

The door swings both ways, my mother used to tell me. For some of us, there’s no lock on either side.

Despite my lack
of sleep, there were things to get done on that Christmas Eve in 2009. Will was already off to the gym, Joanne already in the office. I heaved myself out of bed and walked groggily to the bathroom sink. When I lay my hands on the porcelain edge, they slipped off. I looked down and saw that they were red and sticky.

Blood covered not only the edges of the sink but the whole basin as well. It wasn’t just spattered, like when you run to the bathroom trying to stop a nosebleed and a few drops escape. It was
covered
, like someone got their nose split open and then stood over the sink until it stopped. I grew up with brothers; I knew the difference. More red was visible than white. I turned to see Max, our bichon frise, looking up at me in the doorway. He locked eyes with me a moment, then turned and slowly ambled away. This was strange. Max usually stayed at my side for everything.

I called Joanne in from the office. She saw the blood and asked what had happened to me, if I had cracked my head. She remembered the incident with the bathtub.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was going to ask if something happened to you.” Joanne has her own bathroom. She never uses mine.

“No,” she said.

I called Will on his cell and asked him the same question. Through the panting breaths of his lifting, he told me he was right as rain, nothing to worry about. Joanne and I looked at each other, said nothing, and set to cleaning the mess with bleach.

Not long after, Ronnie called, right on cue, midmorning. He sounded particularly worn, his voice drained. I asked him if everything was okay. Not bad, he said, except that he’d had a rough night. Nosebleed. A real gusher.

The devil gets
into you physically and spiritually. For some weeks now, Ronnie had been complaining of a variety of bodily symptoms, and they were accelerating. But that was only half of it. Inside he was still poisoned as well, the deep hostility he still carried coming out often in our conversations. Whether it was directed toward me or someone else didn’t matter. It was bile, and it was polluting his soul. The entity was seeping into him completely, filling him with darkness and anger and ruining his body in the process.

“I’m sick, Jackie,” he said to me the evening after the nosebleed. We were speaking twice a day now. “I’m real sick. I had a hard time going to the clinic. I have a hard time talking to you right now. The phone is shaking a mile a minute.”

The hardest people in the world suddenly become a lot less hard in the face of their own mortality. We had never spoken explicitly about death, but Ronnie had referred many times to the nagging symptoms of his own decline. He felt healthy on most days, but, like a victim worn down to the point of resignation by the relentlessness of Chinese water torture, he was almost ready, he said, to give up the fight.

“Listen to me,” he said. “If this is going to be the end—if I die in my sleep, which I’m hoping I do, remember you gotta get my body and cremate it. No ceremony, no nothing. It’s what I want done. There must be about five thousand in my account. It’s only gonna cost twenty-five hundred, three thousand to get it done, if it’s even that. I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this. I’m getting old. I had to change hands with the phone. It’s shaking too much.”

In the world of Green Haven Correctional Facility, Ronnie DeFeo was both celebrity and outcast, admired by some, detested by others. On one side, he received letters from people in Japan, England, New Zealand, and all other points on the globe expressing sympathy, admiration, or both. He had sent me a letter he had recently received from the mother of a West Point graduate, requesting an autograph. On the other, there was just as large a camp of people out for his blood, those convinced he was every bit the monster he’d always been portrayed as and who wanted nothing better than to see him strung up. It was never clear to Ronnie from one moment to the next where he landed between these two factions, whether
he’d be singled out for special treatment or ignored and left to wither away. But as he felt himself becoming weaker, it was starting to matter less and less.