The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (2 page)

During our time together, Adam and I had seen just about everything. You would be hard-pressed to surprise either of us, even if you were trying to put together the strangest or most grisly murder imaginable. Still, as Adam prepared to dive off the boat that day, I couldn’t shake the feeling of apprehension curling through me.

It was first thing that morning that I’d awakened with a feeling of disquiet. I’d sat up in my bed to discover I wasn’t alone. And I don’t mean my husband, Will. I had company of the most unpleasant kind. This kind of feeling is difficult to describe but unmistakable; it’s as obvious
as if someone threw a bucket of ice water on you the moment you woke up. For me, the experience is particular. The air becomes still. My insides shift. Anxiety prickles me like an itch occurring from the inside out.

I told Adam not to dive—I felt sure that there was no evidence to be found in the canal that day, and I knew the water would be frigid. My equal in stubbornness, Adam told me he was going anyway. Despite the firmness of his words, I knew that he was as unsettled as I was. I also knew he would never admit it.

In our years together dissecting homicides, I’d never seen Adam fazed or nervous. This is a guy who sprinted into the burning towers on 9/11 to save others, heedless of his own safety. Once, in 1994, while a member of SWAT, Adam was called to a skyscraper on the Upper East Side where a woman with five children and no job stood on the roof. He tried to talk her in, with no luck. She edged forward until only her heels were touching the edge. Adam quickly tied one end of a rope around his waist, the other around the air-conditioning unit, and then, an instant before the woman launched herself, jumped also, catching her in midair and holding her there, dangling twelve stories above the ground, until help arrived.

Now, on the boat, as we continued to prepare—checking the tank gauges, making final equipment adjustments, assessing the level of debris in the canal—Adam tried to assure me that it was okay for him to dive. I saw his mouth moving, but suddenly his voice trailed away and was replaced by a series of rapid shotgun blasts searing
my eardrums. I looked around, asking if anyone else—the camera crew, the captain of the yacht, the safety divers—had heard. I was met with expressions of confusion. Puzzled, I asked a second time, “Didn’t anybody else hear those shots?” People only shook their heads and looked at me curiously. I looked to Adam, assuming that if anyone else had heard, it would be him. His training had conditioned him to be hyper-attuned to every stimulus, allowing him to assess crime scenes and dissect witness accounts in seconds. But I realized, as his voice slowly reemerged in my ears, that he hadn’t heard the shots either.

Normally, Adam and I would dive in tandem. Today, he insisted on diving solo. I should stay on board and spot, he said. I looked at the thermometer bobbing on the surface of the water. Fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. No one should be diving today, I told him again. Again he objected.

Then he looked at me, gave the thumbs-up, executed the same slow backflip I’d seen him perform countless times, and disappeared over the edge of the boat.

I moved quickly to the side and assumed the spotter’s position. Adam became a gray silhouette beneath the dark water; then, as he dived farther, a specter. The only sound was the patter of rain on the surface of the water. My unease intensified. I suddenly had the sensation of being watched by something more than just the cameras.

Minutes passed uneventfully as Adam explored the dark canal, and I started to wonder whether my concern was unfounded. But then he popped up.

Because of the uncommonly bitter temperature—this was cold even for March in Long Island—Adam had worn a dry suit, made of different material than a traditional wet suit and as a result considerably heavier. The weight of his suit, not to mention the muscular bulk of the man himself, should have been more than enough to keep him under. But up he came, needing more mass. I looped a rope around my ankle, leaned out over the platform, and added weighted cubes to Adam’s diving belt.

Back into the murk he dove, but a few minutes later, he popped up again, like a stubborn cork. Again he had to return to the boat to acquire more weight. Again I looped the rope around my ankle and added cubes to his belt.

It kept happening. Adam would beat downward into the darkness of the water, then break the surface once more, tired from the effort but still too buoyant. It was like the water was trying to reject him.

And then, at a remove, I heard myself say these words: “Ronnie’s coming.”

I didn’t know what the words meant or why I’d said them.

“Ronnie DeFeo,” I heard myself say this time, and now I was twice as puzzled. I’d never heard this name, and I couldn’t understand why it was surfacing on my lips.

A new feeling came over me, one I recognized but have never quite become accustomed to—a kind of intense focus that’s also a kind of haze. As I said this mysterious name, the boat’s motor began to sputter loudly. Within
a few minutes, we had stopped dead, and the baffled captain was apologizing, claiming this had never happened before.

Through my fugue, I felt the rain step up its force, becoming colder and razor-sharp. One of the cameramen dropped his equipment and began to vomit over the side of the boat. I asked someone what was wrong with him. No one knew. As had happened earlier, all the sounds around me collapsed into a vacuum and were replaced by a series of shotgun blasts as loud as thunderclaps. Again I asked if anyone had heard, but their faces were no different than they had been the first time.

It was then that I realized Adam was acting odd, disoriented in his swimming and uncharacteristically jerky in his movements.

I shook myself from the trance and saw immediately the reason for his alarm. He was losing air. None of us understood how this could be. Prior to a dive, you don’t check tanks once; you check them three or four times. That’s exactly what we had done. Adam’s air should have lasted an hour. Instead it had depleted in minutes. I yelled at the group to get Adam the hell out of the water and us off the canal.

I don’t scare easily.

I was scared.

I dashed onto the deck, snatched a ten-foot aluminum rod from its clips, then hurried back to the side of the boat and climbed out onto the platform. I held out the rod to Adam with one hand and clung to the boat with the other as rain stung my eyes.

Adam grasped the rod, and I started to pull. I saw his panic growing as his limbs started to flail. Something was pulling against me—something more than Adam’s weight. I stretched farther toward him, yelling for someone to grab my legs and hold on. Someone did. I pulled with every muscle in my small frame, dragging Adam around the side of the boat and toward the metal ladder. Towing him through the water, I also registered that his mask had somehow become a poor fit for his face, despite our having checked and double-checked every piece of equipment prior to the dive.

Finally, Adam, gasping, reached the side of the boat. With the help of three other crew members, I hauled him up and over the gunwale, then climbed back into the boat myself, my knuckles scraped and bleeding. We attended to Adam, feeling relief as his breathing returned to normal. I kept my arms wrapped around his torso and could feel his heart hammering in his chest. As I wrung water from my coat, I repeated to the crew that we needed to get off the canal. I also told Adam I was going to have to walk away from the show. He nodded, knowing I had a sense of something greater coming—something not meant for the cameras.

Then I heard the strange blasts again, this time accompanied by the image of a young man cradling a shotgun at his hip. I looked across the canal, where Joanne, my daughter and assistant, stood with the producer of
Medium P.I.
at the edge of a dock, perhaps a football field away. Joanne is the one who keeps me on the ball. When I’m working, I’m focused on the objective at hand and
nothing else. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t remember to change my flip-flops to boots in January.

Though only in her late twenties, Joanne has both the wisdom and the resourcefulness of someone twice her age. She does it all—research, paperwork, reports—while letting me know where I’m supposed to be and when. People tell
me
I’m always working. That’s how I feel about Joanne. She’s the gas in my tank.

I sensed something powerful blowing in Joanne’s direction. Something malevolent. Joanne is not a good swimmer. I looked at her, then at the icy water. She waved at me through the rain.

“Let’s
move
,” I said to the crew. I kept my arms wrapped around Adam and my gaze fixed on Joanne as the boat’s engine chugged to life again. We carved slowly through the water, finally reaching the other side, and the dock where Joanne and the producer stood, after what seemed like an eternity. They stepped onto the boat and saw the shared unease on our faces. Then we all got the hell out of there.

When the day’s
shoot was done and the pilot wrapped, we all retreated into ourselves. There was little talking, little interaction. Adam’s body language had changed. The man whose chin was usually held high and confident stood with his shoulders slumped, his eyes a million miles away. We all felt something dark and oppressive. No one talked about it. We just went our separate ways.

As we waited to hear whether the show would be
picked up, I tried to return to my normal life: dealing with my long list of clients, doting on my pets, and continuing to quietly assist the police in solving homicides to help grieving families. But returning to normal proved impossible when I promptly came down with pneumonia. It’s rare that I get sick. But this bug took me down hard. I felt like I’d fallen into a black hole.

And the longer I lay there in bed, the more that strange sensation I’d felt at the canal lingered. It had followed me home and was starting to envelop me like a cloak I didn’t want. Will, a tender bear of a man, tried to rouse me from my inertia, but I still felt cold, empty, and anxious. Joanne talked to me reassuringly, telling me I’d be better soon. If I was going to believe anybody, I’d believe her. Though we’d never really talked about it, I’d often suspected that Joanne’s psychic abilities were as strong as my own. I’d never brought it up because she’d never brought it up. That was fine with me. I felt lucky not only that my daughter worked alongside me everyday but that she did it willingly. It was more than a lot of mothers could ask for. My mother certainly hadn’t—she’d had me working for her from the time I was a child, but
willingly
isn’t the word I’d have used to describe my part in it.

Joanne was a born researcher, a logical sleuth, and relentless when it came to accessing information fast. It was a perfect working relationship. My work haunted me as much as it gratified me. If she did have the instincts, I was just as happy for her never to have to use them.

Adam, my partner and confidant, saw my trepidation and was confused by it. He had always seen in me the
same unwavering strength I had seen in him. He asked me what was wrong. I could tell him only that I was feeling something sinister.

Or, rather, I was fighting an instinct I’ve had many times before and was hoping would go away if I ignored it long enough. This instinct isn’t particular to psychics or mediums. We all experience it. It’s the voice telling you there’s something you’re going to have to deal with, whether you like it or not.

I called Joanne into my room. She asked how I was feeling and offered me a cold washcloth for my head. “Never mind that,” I said. “I need you to find out everything you can about someone named Ronnie DeFeo—including where I can reach him.”

I was twelve years old on Wednesday, November 13,
1974. My family had settled in a plantation-style house in Nola, Louisiana—though for us,
settled
was always a relative term. My mother, Mary Palermo, was a high priestess in the occult, and there are still many people who believe they can gain strength from her grave. Paranormal groups, ghost hunters, those who claim to be occult specialists—all of them have tried to learn where she lies. I won’t tell.

Some people still claim they can spot her spirit walking along the roads, trying to get home. This doesn’t surprise me. Her presence was powerful, but her soul was pulled by darkness. She never allowed me to call her mom—only Mary. When she would turn away, I would whisper “Mommy,” even as an adult. Even if out of earshot, she would turn and shoot me a look. I made her a card when I was six. It was simple, a picture of her and me holding
hands. She looked at it, slapped me off the chair, and said, “No soft stuff in this house,” then threw the card away.

Mary lived in the spirit world but liked to anchor her existence to the physical realm by purchasing properties in different places. She’d buy them for the purpose of doing her rituals. We’d go from the bayou, with its streams and marshes, to the Garden District, with its mansions and old Creole money, then land elsewhere for a little while before starting the loop anew.

Just as she felt the need to spread her physical imprint as far as possible, so too did Mary straddle both sides of the spiritual existence, the good and the bad. She would put money in the poor box at church by day, and at night raise Cain. I would sit and watch her, nervous but compelled. By that time, I already knew I had many of the same abilities. I had discovered early that I could, for reasons unknown to me, make the same kinds of connections that she could to people’s inner selves, their before and after. It frightened me, just as I imagined my mother’s talents frightened her, but I also recognized, just as she must have, that such a gift couldn’t simply be pushed aside.