The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (26 page)

“Do you think that’s why you stayed away from the house for so long after? You waited seventeen hours to report the crime.”

“It’s very possible. I don’t know. I guess, maybe.”

In all our conversations, Ronnie DeFeo had never said this. He had never come out and told me, until now, that he had spent all those hours simply wanting to put the act out of his mind, and by doing so, hopefully erasing the fact that it had ever happened. He’d tried to visit his common haunts or be with those who represented his normal life—his workplace, his girlfriend’s, his fellow
junkies—to make it seem as though this was just another day. We all do it sometimes, even in the face of small mistakes. But sooner or later, we know we have to face our deeds.

There was another question that I’d wanted to ask Ronnie for a long time but that I’d kept inside because I figured I already knew the answer. I wanted to know if his answer would be the same. “Ronnie, why didn’t you just run? Before all this, I mean. Why not just go? You had money, you had access to the cars, you had some skills. Why didn’t you just take off and leave all the crap behind?”

“Look,” he finally said, “as bad as my mother and father were, when there was a problem, they were the first ones there. I mean, regardless of the beatings, I actually thought my father was my friend until I found out the man had ordered a contract on me. I mean, come on.”

I actually thought my father was my friend.
I was as saddened as I was shocked to hear these words. So it was the same answer I’d had in my head. When you’re a dog and your owner kicks you over and over, you don’t run away. You keep slinking back, because you hold out hope that, one of these times, instead of a kick, you’re going to get a pat on the head. It never happens, but you keep going back anyway. At the same time, you convince yourself of the virtues of the person kicking you, since they’re providing you food and shelter between the kicks. Maybe later, much later, you decide it was their fault. But at the time you occupy yourself mostly trying to figure out what you must be doing to deserve it.

“People giving funny looks to me weeks before this happened. Then the fun starts. The bastard.”

“When did you finally go home, Ronnie?”

“After Janet’s, I drove back to the bar.”

“Henry’s.”

“Yeah. I ran in real upset and yelled to everyone, ‘I think something bad happened to my family.’ Everyone looked up. Joey Yeswit, the bartender, drove with me back to the house, with a couple of other guys.”

I thumbed quickly through the file again. Joey Yeswit had driven. Ronnie had been a passenger, along with Duchek and, possibly, others from Henry’s. I quickly glanced through the transcript of the 911 call that had been received by the Suffolk County emergency switchboard from 112 Ocean Avenue at six thirty-five that evening.

“I went into
the house after they did. Had to go through the window to get in. I walked upstairs. I was so messed up, I forgot what had happened. Forgot everybody was dead. I had one of them blackouts. I seen it all in the mirror. I was using that mirror to do all the shooting. Looking in the mirror, not at them.”

Ronnie would come back to this description often. I got the feeling that he repeated it so frequently because it was a way, still, after years of serving time for this act, of trying to believe it had happened in another dimension, not in this, his actual life. It was something that had occurred in the mirror.

“They knew the blood on the clothes was mine.”

This, too, happened often: Ronnie suddenly, seemingly
out of nowhere, bringing to the surface individual elements of the crime and then refuting them. I didn’t think it was out of nowhere at all. I believed, no matter what he claimed, that the details of his family’s deaths replayed itself on a constant loop in his head and that the anger, guilt, and confusion boiling inside him were still just as fresh as they’d been in the immediate hours after the act.

The element he was referring to now was the blood found on his clothes. Not the clothes he’d put in a bag and tossed down a drainpipe in Brooklyn—the clothes he was wearing when the police came to 112 Ocean Avenue and found the DeFeos murdered. They’d determined that the blood was Allison’s and that Ronnie had picked up a shell casing from the floor where her blood had pooled, then wiped it on his pants.

“It wasn’t enough the old man beat me up. The cops wanted to get in on the act, too.”

“What are you saying, Ronnie?”

“That wasn’t my blood. It was from the cops beating me up. Not once—over and over. They wanted a confession, and I wouldn’t sign one, so here we go. That’s what they did till I said I did it, I did it. If they’d tested the clothes, then they’d have a problem. But of course they missed that little piece of information.”

I looked at the file. No, there hadn’t been any DNA testing on the clothes—it wasn’t a possibility at the time. It was his word against that of the Suffolk County police.

“Why would the cops beat you up, Ronnie?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you—to get me to confess. I wouldn’t. They knew the blood wasn’t Allison’s,
so they had to beat the confession out of me; then they’d be in the clear. They wanted me to be their guy.”

It was, again, a case of Ronnie DeFeo making claims that could no longer be corroborated. He might as well be speaking in a vacuum. “I just want to say this one more time to be clear, Ronnie. You’re saying the blood on the clothes was your blood. Not Allison’s blood, yours. The cops beat you up enough to make you bleed and to get you to confess.”

“They knew what they needed out of me. They wanted me to be the guy. I mean, that’s all they had, my confession and Allison’s blood on my clothes, according to them. ‘Oh, her blood on his clothes, that proves it, that shows he’s a liar.’ But where are your witnesses? There were no witnesses. That’s
my
blood.”

That’s my blood.
Present tense again. He was there in the house, reliving it.

“I didn’t kill
them kids. I loved them kids.”

“So in your
mind there was no blood of Allison’s on your clothing.”

“In my mind? No, not in my mind. I’m telling you what the facts are. That’s what I’m saying, they made the whole thing up.”

“Ronnie—”

“It was either him or me, for Christ’s sake.” His voice was spiraling upward again.

“I know that, Ronnie—”

“I mean, I was doing my mother a favor! And how about her? Two damn boyfriends, right out in the open in front of everybody’s face! The hairstylist and Brother Isaac. At least. I mean, come on!”

He was close to losing it. I had to bring him back down but keep him within the story. “Ronnie—what do you believe Dawn had been thinking?”

I could feel him coming back to me, just a little. Retreating from the house, again. It was his awful spiritual magnet and always would be. He might escape it for a minute at a time, or an hour, but not forever.

“I believe Dawn was gonna tell the police I came home drunk and stoned like always and then I killed everybody. I guess she never expected me to come back to the house. I had to come back; I had to get all the guns, get everything out of the house. My concern was getting all the money and all the stuff outta there.”

“Just a few hours before, you thought she was trying to save you. Now she’s picking up a gun and pointing it at you. That must have messed you up.”

“ ‘Butch, what are you doing here?’ she says. No shit, what am I doing here. My sister saves my life, and then she puts a gun in my face and gets herself killed. All I was gonna do when I seen her was kick her ass for killing the kids. But she had to grab the gun.”

“Say it panned out differently. Say—”

“She saves my life in the bedroom because my mother’s gonna shoot me, then she goes and gets herself shot. I thought I was shot, but Dawn got her before she got me. The hammer was back on the pistol when I picked it up.”

“Ronnie, say you came back and saw the kids were killed and Dawn didn’t pick up the gun, so you didn’t have to do her. Would you have turned her in for killing the kids?”

“No. We woulda both wound up in prison.”

“Could you have gotten away with it?”

“Yeah, we coulda got away with it. Nobody saw nothing, nobody could place anybody at the scene of the crime.
Those two idiot neighbors that were standing there, they had their chance when they heard the gunshots.”

“Who? The Colemans?”

“Yeah, the Colemans. They dummied up good. I mean, what did they think? They heard shots. Why didn’t they call the police? Then the stupid kid next door, the one who said he heard Shaggy barking. He didn’t hear Shaggy barking, it was a dog in the neighborhood.”

“What kid, Ronnie?”

“Some kid who was home from school the next day because he was sick. He said he heard the dog barking.”

Others had said the same. My file, and the public record, was full of nameless, faceless people claiming to have heard the dog barking throughout the daylight hours of November 13, 1974.

“Shaggy was the dog you got after Candie?”

“Yeah. It was a few years before that we put Candie down. 1971. Yeah, I was twenty. My father decided to get Shaggy a month after that. That crazy thing was, that dog barked at everything, night and day, except when that shit happened with my family. That whole time, the dog was quiet. I put him in the car with me when I left for Brooklyn.”

“The dog was with you in the car?”

“Yeah, I untied him and took him in the car with me.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you decide to take the dog with you? You’re in the middle of this crazy situation, and you stop to untie the dog and put him in the car?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I just didn’t want to leave him alone.”

“Dawn was there, and the kids were there.”

“That’s true.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know what. In that moment I didn’t want to leave him alone.”

Ronnie didn’t like when I pressed him, maybe because it made his memory seem less certain. I already knew the dog had been in his car. Joanne had read me the report: the police had taken Shaggy out of the car and delivered her to the pound, where she’d been picked up by an aunt on Ronnie’s mom’s side.

“Back to the Colemans, Ronnie. Why do you still seem so angry with them? They didn’t commit any crime, did they?” I was pushing on purpose. As always, Ronnie remained deeply resentful toward anyone and everyone who had played a part in not seeing him punished for his sins.

“Maybe they didn’t commit a crime, but they just sat back and did nothing, which is just as bad. What did they think was going on in there? I mean, Dawn had her agenda.”