The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (19 page)

“Was that it? Did he leave then?”

“Oh, no, he wasn’t done by a long shot. Then he tried to hypnotize me; that was the biggest joke in the—oh my god, what a joke—you ain’t hypnotizing me. That was it, he was outta there; he left.”

“Weber was your lawyer at the time.”

“I figure he got screwed on
The Amityville Horror,
so now he wanted to cash in with Holzer. He says that crap about Dawn, and I went crazy. Guard came in and said, ‘That’s it, visit’s over.’ Weber said, ‘Oh, it was just a misunderstanding. Ronnie, you’re not gonna do nothing, are you?’ Holzer tries to hypnotize me and I said, ‘You can’t hypnotize me. There’s something inside me that won’t let you; it’s called a conscience.’ Back then I was carrying about one-eighty-five, one-ninety, ’cause I was working in the wood yard, cutting and splitting wood all day with an axe. It’s gotta be 1980 or 1981, because I left Clinton and went to Auburn in 1983.”

“What did you think about the stuff Holzer said?”

“He said I had an Indian chief’s spirit in my cell. I said, ‘What are you, outta your mind?’ He had the recorder going. What a load of nonsense. Weber said, ‘You can’t use none of that, Holzer.’ Meanwhile, he was busy trying to make book and movie deals on the side.”

Since we’d begun speaking, months before, I had thought constantly about the reasons Ronnie DeFeo and I had been thrown together. As the strange activity in my house continued, and he began to yield physically and spiritually, I had come to feel more and more uncertain about our ability to defeat the evil that had made itself known in various ways over the course of both our lives.

“Everybody wants a piece of this,” he said. “They’ve all had their hands out, every one of them involved—Weber, the DA, the medical examiner, everyone wrote a goddamn book. My lawyer. The psychiatrist. The investigator. They all made deals.”

“Are you upset that they made deals behind your back?”

“I’m upset because I want to tell the goddamn truth.”

I paused a moment, thinking about Holzer, Ethel Meyers, and the parade of others who had passed in and out of the Amityville story over the decades. Was I becoming just another character in this bizarre saga? Had I become merely a sounding board for Ronnie DeFeo’s flights of fancy?

“Ronnie, why trust me? I’m a medium, too. Aren’t I the same as those others? How do you know I’m different?”

“Those others were spouting a bunch of nonsense. I know you, Jackie. I mean, you give a shit about me, right?”

There was one of those rare pauses at the other end of the phone. I’d often had the sense that Ronnie would have stayed on the line all day and all night with me,
venting, spilling. I felt I hadn’t even glimpsed the bottom of vitriol that he needed to get out. And nothing would come of this journey without the basic act of his washing himself clean of it all.

“Ronnie, you said to me once that everyone in that house was bad except the young kids. Do you still feel you’re a bad person?”

“You gotta understand something,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened in my house. If I wasn’t sorry, then you’d have had a real problem.”

It was an opening. “What do you mean?”

More silence from the other end. The bluster retreating, as it always did when we approached the topic of what happened on November 13, 1974.

“I woulda done some damage.”

“To what? To whom?”

“I was so angry. I’ll let you in on a little secret. I had just went and bought a brand new carbine rifle. An M1. It fired .44 Magnum rounds. Some people thought when they saw it, ‘Oh look at that .30-caliber carbine.’ When I went to the store to buy it, the guy said, ‘No, that’s a .44.’ I said, ‘Like a pistol?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I bought it. Hundred dollars, brand-new. Only problem was, I bought the big clip. They were twenty-round clips. I made the guy order some for me. I made him order twelve, plus the two that came with the gun. I was ready. Nothing coulda stopped me.”

“Ready for what, Ronnie?”

“A .44 Magnum goes through an engine block. I gave it a lot of thought that afternoon. Plus I had two grenades.
Two hand grenades. In the boathouse under the floor. I know for a fact they found them. But I put it all on my father. I said, ‘I don’t own the house, he owns the house. He’s dead now, but you ain’t putting these grenades on me.’ I coulda did some damage. But I’m not evil like that. I was gonna get a lot of them.”

“Who? Who were you going to get?”

“Everything that had a blue shirt on, or a uniform, or a cop—I was gonna get ’em all. I ain’t never met a cop that wasn’t on the take. Ever.”

“You wanted to go after cops?”

“I never even stopped for red lights. Never got a ticket in my life. A cop puts his red light on, there’s two things I’m doing, either getting ready to pay him off or I’m gonna outrun him. Lost one in the cemetery once. That was my favorite spot. I knew all the cemeteries. You drive right through there like a maniac—they couldn’t catch you. No lights on. I was good, believe me. My eyes at night are like an owl. Stealing all them motors at night, you gotta have eyes like an owl. I had my share, more than my share. Eight motors in one night once. It was about money. They never caught me. Never even a ticket.”

He hadn’t reconciled it yet. Ronnie still resented everyone in a position of authority or legal enforcement for not putting him away when they’d had the chance. He wanted the bad-seed label his father had convinced him he deserved. He was so bad, he was saying to me, how could they let him keep getting away with things? The longer they let him run, the more it reinforced Ronnie’s—and his father’s—picture of himself. If only they had picked
him up for something. Running red lights. Stealing motors. Evading arrest.

If only they had got him for one of those things, he’d have been put away already. He would have been in jail, or in his mind, even better, killed. And if that were the case, he could not have committed the acts that he did on that fateful night.

“Ronnie, I want you to slow down for a minute and tell me about what happened on Novem—”

But Ronnie barreled ahead, talking about an incident that had happened two years previously, in 1972. He and his friends “threw some guy that had OD’d into the canal. We had to dump him in there, where all the swans are. It’s real nice back there. We didn’t want any trouble with this guy dying on our time. We just tossed him in.”

I knew the area he was referring to. More than three and a half decades later, I had seen the swans, too. I had seen them while helping Adam and the NYPD scour the canal for evidence of seventeen-year-old Kieran McCaffrey’s death. “Remember when I first wrote you, Ronnie? Remember I’d been on that police boat? A lot of disturbing stuff happened on that boat. No one who was on the shoot that day talks to each other now. People became violently ill. Bizarre things, Ronnie.”

“I know what’s in them waters that you were in. There’s a lot of bodies. There’s a lot of murder weapons. I know that for a fact. A lot of evidence that was dumped in them waters, so the police wouldn’t find them. Great South Bay is my turf. For ten years I ran Great South Bay. The police could never get me. The Coast Guard could never get me.
One day a guy came out in a cabin cruiser, forty-foot. Really expensive boat. Stateroom, everything. He’s on the boat. I’m on my speedboat with two of my friends—suddenly,
ba-BOOM!
That’s all I hear, and I see a guy flying through the air like Superman. That boat exploded, right there in front of me. I had to pick him up out of the water. By the time the Coast Guard got there, the boat was gone to nothing; it went under. Let me tell you something about them waters,” he continued. “You woulda never been able to find what you were looking for. The current in them waters is so strong, if you put something there now, in ten minutes it’ll be gone. That’s how strong that current is. That’s the ocean on the other side.”

I tried to get him back on topic, but he kept on bouncing from subject to subject, talking first about his old boat, then about the ease with which he’d been able to smuggle weapons into his cell when he was at Clinton, and even about how his favorite Christmas novelty song, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” had been playing the night before.

I’d lost him. And when he spoke again a few moments later, the voice of the cocky delinquent had disappeared once more, replaced by the suddenly weary voice of the lifer.

“But then of course I couldn’t sleep.” His voice shrank to a pinch. “I’m afraid to go to sleep. I’m afraid I ain’t gonna wake up. I think it’s coming, I really do.”

“What’s coming? Your father?”

“I mean, I think you gonna have to call this Father Fernando and straighten some things out.”

Father Fernando was Green Haven’s chaplain, and, at least according to Ronnie, not a fan of the facility’s most notorious inmate. Maybe he thought Ronnie was beyond redemption. Whatever the case, Ronnie claimed that Father Fernando saw him as bad news. He didn’t exactly think of him as someone he might look to for salvation.

“I keep telling him, ‘Look, I don’t have no relatives left. Everybody’s gone. If anything happens to me, something’s gotta be done.’ You need to tell him you got power of attorney, I wrote a letter and got it notarized. That should be enough. I mean, everybody in my family is dead. There’s nobody left. Something happens to me, my body needs to be turned over to you. He said he wants a copy.”

“Sure, Ronnie. I’ll send it to him.”

“I wish the guy would retire, but he ain’t. He told me he ain’t. He’s been here seventeen years. Got his own little cemetery over there. It’s bullshit.”

I didn’t think Ronnie was saying it was bullshit to have a cemetery for inmates who died and didn’t have anyone else to claim them. I thought he was saying it was bullshit that he wouldn’t be accepted there if he died, too. To Ronnie, Father Fernando was just another person who didn’t want him.

“He’s got a problem now, there’s no inmates that work out there. They closed the annex, so the inmates can’t bury nobody no more. They closed everything. There’s a lot of them back there in that little cemetery. Holds a service in the church for them—that church is bigger than most churches in the state. Some gangster donated the
money and they built it, thirty, forty years ago. Just like the one at Clinton. That’s also a big church. He has a wooden box built, he puts the guy in it, he has the service, then he takes them outta here.”

“What do you mean? For prisoners who die?”

“Yeah, for prisoners who die, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t want to go out like that.”

I don’t want to go out like that.
I didn’t think this had anything to do with Father Fernando, or the cemetery, or the church. I think Ronnie just hoped his remains could end up in the hands of someone who cared—at least a little—about him.

“I’ll tell you truthfully, I don’t think this is getting any better. The father said, ‘Try to exercise this morning.’ I said, ‘Screw that. I got plenty of strength.’ I’m having a hard time getting my beard even, I’ll tell you that. I trim it three, four times a week, but I can’t get the goddamn thing to look right.”

“Ronnie, did you get test results back? Did they find something you aren’t telling me about?”

“Look, I got a visit the other night, okay?”

“You got a visit from who?”

“I mean, that’s why all the stuff’s been happening in your house. He wants to see who I’ve been talking to. He wants to mess around with you now.”

“Who?”

“It was 1990 he came to see me. No, excuse me, 2000—what am I saying, 1990? He came to see me in 2000.”

“Who did, Ronnie? What are you talking about?”

“I was sleeping, and he woke me up. Kept tapping me
on the knee, I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ He had a long black coat and a black hat. I mean, he comes in different forms, right? It wasn’t the face of an old man, it wasn’t the face of a young man. It was in between. Clean-shaven, pure white face. Pure white.”

“You mean—”

“Lucifer.”

“Okay. What did he say to you?”

“I thought it was a ghost at first. I said, ‘Oh my God.’ Then he told me everything. Told me his name, said he was an apostle and Jesus threw him out. Said he was a real nice guy, threw him out. Said, ‘They don’t care about you or anybody else. They’re up there having a good time.’ I asked him if there’s a heaven and a hell. He said, ‘Well, it exists, but it’s not the way you think it is.’ He was in my cell for quite some time. Sat on the bed and he started talking to me. I got real nervous. Told me a lot of things. Said he was gonna help me, that it was gonna take time. The man knew what happened. He knew everything. He knew I didn’t do them kids. He knew I got a bad deal. He respected that I wasn’t a snitch, either.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“Oh, this guy went on and on. Said Jesus screwed him over royally. His face was shining, it was so bright. I didn’t need a light. A regular man, just like me. Like I said, he came with a black coat on and a black hat. It’s the same man that came to your house that night.”

“How did you know that?”

“He came to your house because of me. I’ve pulled you into this, and I’m sorry about that.”

“That night you had a bloody nose, Ronnie—I didn’t tell you, but there was blood in my bathroom sink. A lot of it.”

“He’s messing with you now. I got shit happening to my teeth, my arms. I had those two black eyes. I woke up that way, I had to tell them it was in the medication.”

“Did he say anything about the church?”

“Said I was an altar boy when I was a kid, and I used to go to church, and I used to go to confession. Then he started bad-mouthing the priest, said the priests are a bunch of faggots; they love young boys. He says, ‘You know you went the wrong way in life.’ I said, ‘Well, how am I supposed to know which way?’ He says, ‘You know, I can’t believe it—I’m sitting here talking to you, and you’re not afraid. I can tell if people are afraid or not.’ I said, ‘Why should I be afraid? You didn’t do anything to me.’ He said, ‘Yet.’ I said, ‘All right, here we go.’ ”

“What did he mean he was going to help you?”

“He said somebody was gonna come eventually and help me. But it was gonna take time. I signed a contract.”