The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (4 page)

Every day I kept taking out the paper to write, and every day the pneumonia, which had returned, reminded me who was boss. Finally, after another week of cold sweats and a liquid diet, I felt strong enough. I got out of bed and sat at my desk. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say or why I was supposed to write this letter. I began anyway, because if I’ve learned only one lesson in all my years doing what I do, it’s this: at the end of the day, the only true guide you have is your own instincts.

I stared at the paper, my own thoughts reflecting its blankness. The fever had mercifully broken a few days before, but now it had come back with a vengeance, and I was a tangle of mental cobwebs.

Dear Mr. DeFeo
, I finally wrote.

“Jackie?”

I looked up to see Will in the doorway. Will is the kind of person who is almost always smiling out of nothing more than the feeling of wanting to smile. The expression on his face was far from a smile. I asked him what was wrong.

“That day,” he said. “When you were on the canal.”

“What about it?” I said.

He walked over to my side. “I saw something. A big man. In a black coat. I saw him standing in our living room.”

I looked back at the paper. My feeling of unease had taken root on the boat and wormed its way deeper and deeper through me while I scuffled with the virus. Now, the feeling was morphing into something else. Instead of someone felled by an unknown hand, I felt more like a creature quietly steeling itself for battle.

What do you want?
I wrote.
What’s my part in this?

“I’ve got the address.” Joanne was in the doorway, a piece of paper in her hand. “Green Haven Correctional Facility, in upper New York State,” she said. “Maximum security.”

I added my name and phone number and handed her the letter. There was no need to write more. “Mail it,” I said.

Uncle Ray, our
permanent houseguest, is old-school Italian. For a sausage-and-pepper hero, he’d give you his unending loyalty. Uncle Ray isn’t really an uncle. He’s a friend of my brother’s. He started staying with us years ago, the initial arrangement a trade involving his caring for the pets—between his shifts at Whole Foods—and our providing him a roof and a bed. Even as our addresses changed, Uncle Ray always came with. It became a running joke whenever we considered a new place: where would Ray’s room be?

Ray—fifty-five but still a perpetual teenager, still sleeping
on a pull-out couch in the basement, still caring for the pets, still doing his own thing—and Joanne are like brother and sister, even though he’s nearly twice her age. They love each other and bicker the way siblings do, yet in the end are thick as thieves. For years Ray has talked about saving up and moving to Nevada, but it’s never happened, and that’s just fine with us. His sincerity and integrity bring light to any room he’s in. He’s the cheerful one when everyone else is down, the guy telling you to put a smile on your face just because it’s fun to be alive. He takes care of the pets, not because he has to but because he adores them.

There were six of them when he moved in: one dog, Max, a bichon frise just sixteen inches off the ground but fearless as a pit bull; and five cats: Ernie, our Egyptian tabby and the elder statesman, who would sit alongside every ritual as though overseeing it; Toby, the forty-five-pound pixie bobcat; Dilly, a domestic cat, and Will’s shadow—he called her his “favorite girl”; Oreo, a Hemingway (that is, she had extra toes); and Puss ’N’ Boots, the tuxedo cat, who, since the day we’d brought him home, I’d always felt had an old soul and a warrior spirit. Puss ’N’ Boots had found his way to my side years before, and the moment we met, I had the sense that we’d met before on these crossroads. Cats do have a sense; there’s a reason they gravitate to people like me. It goes beyond a bowl of food and water.

The other thing we love about Ray, the thing that serves as a moderating element in our lives, is his quiet respect for the work I do and the world in which I do it.
Most people get their information about the occult and the paranormal from sensationalist books or movies. Ray is in the thick of it, along with the rest of my family. He’s seen the real stuff again and again and hasn’t once turned from it.

Ray went to Catholic high school and college but doesn’t follow any organized religion. If you ask him what he believes in, he’ll say he believes in himself and other living creatures, and that’s that. His main concern is that the pets are cared for and treated well. When Toby, who’d been as healthy as an ox for nine years and then suddenly got sick, had to be put down, Ray tried to hail a cab from Whole Foods so he could get to the vet’s to say good-bye. When he couldn’t get a cab, he ran the three miles instead. During Toby’s last moments, Ray bawled like a little boy.

Sensitive though he is, Uncle Ray is also stone-cold resilient. His life has not been the easiest, yet he displays serious bounce-back again and again. His hide is thick, and his spirit stalwart. Despite the fact that he lives in the basement and generally keeps to himself, he is in many ways the quiet core of strength in our home.

But when he called me on the house intercom the morning after Joanne’s experience in the kitchen, I felt like I was speaking to a scared kid.

I’d never heard Ray sound worried, much less panicked. When his voice burst through the speaker, I jumped. He was calling for help. I asked him what was wrong. He screamed that the basement door to the upstairs wouldn’t open. Through the speaker I could hear him pounding on it.

I ran downstairs, and indeed found the door to the basement, strangely, locked. I unlocked it and he ran upstairs. The fear I’d heard in Ray’s voice was in his eyes, too. He was like a child who’d just been forced through his first haunted house.

It took time, but eventually, Will, Joanne, and I got Ray to calm down. I made him some tea. He sipped at it slowly, then started to tell us about the dream he’d had.

There was a dark, dingy room he didn’t recognize. Someone appeared before him—an old priest, maybe—dressed in black from head to toe, face concealed. No, it wasn’t a priest, he said—something different. It shifted form, but remained covered in black. A strong wind had gusted from behind, lifting Ray off the ground. He kept talking about the wind, which was not quite a wind, he said, but a force. “It was blowing into me from the back, forcing me up, not letting me back away. I couldn’t move,” he said. “I couldn’t speak.”

Whatever the thing was, moved from a standing position to a sitting one, then from a sitting one to a reclined one. Fearfully, Ray walked over, reached down, grabbed the material covering the thing’s face, and yanked upward. He caught a glimpse of something terrifying, then woke up.

After that day, Ray slept with the radio on. He began to frequently get sick, something that had seldom happened before. He began to hear voices and footsteps, and scratching at the walls. He didn’t want the three of us to go out and leave him alone, whereas before he’d always been thrilled with the idea, the perpetual teen having the
run of the house, our treasured pets his preferred company. He became too frightened to be alone.

Uncle Ray also made an important, recent decision. His fear of being alone aside, he thought it might be time to get his own place. It would be the lesser of two evils.

Perhaps the pets
picked up on Uncle Ray’s vibe, or perhaps he picked up on theirs. Or maybe they and he were sensing the same thing. Either way, it wasn’t only Ray whose behavior changed in the days after I mailed the letter to Green Haven. The pets, who usually clung to me, refused to enter my bedroom. They began acting skittish around me. Like Ray, even the hardiest of them started getting sick.

This illness transferred itself to the rest of us. Will, who looks like he’s carved from stone, came down with a high fever and began sensing an oppressive weight on his body every night as he slept. Joanne started acting delirious, retreating to her room, talking in her sleep. The three of us shared a dream: a figure walking toward us, shrouded by dense fog, burned-down trees around us, the growling of animals filling the space.

We would wake up bruised. On one morning, I woke up with half a dozen blue-black marks on my chest and back. I went to my doctor, who asked me what I’d done. “I fell,” I lied.

“Where?” he asked. “Every corner of the house?”

The truth was that things in our house were moving around of their own accord, devices turning on and off,
furniture being displaced. A song would blast out of my iPod after I’d turned it off. Artwork hanging on double hundred-pound hooks that had been in one location on the wall one night would be in another the next day. Terence, our nineteenth-century straw clown doll, would seem to shift position, as though following our movements.

My mother taught me to respect the spirits and the world of the transcendental. People like Adam taught me to look for rational explanations. I operate in a world that lies outside the norm, but all the same, when someone approaches me claiming a laundry list of paranormal activity, my first reaction is skepticism. I wanted to be able to explain away the strange activity in my own home. I had no explanations—so I chose instead to ignore it.

On another morning, I stepped into the shower and turned the knob to hot. Though we kept the thermostat at seventy-eight, the house had become perpetually frigid. I turned the shower handle expecting the soothing feeling of warm water on my head and over my skin. Instead, I felt a series of sharp sensations, like pellets. I looked up to see pebbles coming out of the showerhead.

I turned the handle in the opposite direction, stopping the flow of pebbles. Still choosing the side of the rational, I turned on the bath faucet instead, to see if the issue might be plumbing-related. The water began flowing normally, filling the tub. I knelt at the edge and flicked my fingers under the water.

Whatever it was that shoved me from behind did it unseen. My torso and head jerked forward, my forehead smacking against the marble wall. As the water continued
to pour out and the tub continued to fill, I staggered backward. Will found me there, a bright welt on my forehead, steam rising out of the tub. He turned off the water and carried me to my room.

But it was Joanne who seemed most caught in the crosshairs of our suddenly whipped-up environment. The house had become a violently shaken snow-globe, and her room, it appeared, was at the center of it, a fact that quietly worried me. Any mother would rather be a target than her child. Several times Jo had woken up to see a large, shadowy figure sitting at the foot of her bed, wordless but unmoving. Once, the figure had come to the side of her bed and attempted to crawl in. She had jumped out of bed screaming and nearly flown to my room.

One day Joanne sat in her bedroom reading, an attempt to distract herself from the troubled atmosphere. She has an antique wooden rocking chair in her bedroom. In it sits an old doll from Louisiana. Suddenly the chair began to rock—slowly at first, then faster. The shutter doors of her walk-in closet swung open, and several articles of clothing flew out. That was it. She was in my room seconds later, and all three of us crowded into our bed.

The pets nuzzled close underneath at first. Then Puss ’N’ Boots got up, marched toward the bedroom door, chose a spot near the middle of the doorway, and settled back down onto the floor, gently defiant. Soon the other pets followed suit, with Max, the bichon, last. They remained together at the threshold of the room, a row of furry sentries, united in their resolve. As I looked at them and smiled, my eyelids started to flutter. Eventually, sleep found me.

I woke to
a pounding head, as I had every morning since Joanne had mailed the letter to Ronnie DeFeo. Will’s stomach ached. Joanne hadn’t slept a wink and was stiff all over. Worse, we were faced with a large mess to clean up—Joanne’s room looked like it had been tossed—and no one to help do it. Abby had left running from the house the night before, vowing never to return. To this day, she still calls regularly, pleading for us to leave, too.

For Will, the closest thing to a religious temple is the gym. He bartends, often at night, and his usual morning ritual involves an early, intense workout before tackling the day. On this morning, he was supposed to be at an early meeting at the Sheraton, but he couldn’t muster the strength to go either to the gym or to the meeting. I understood his bailing on the meeting; I was stunned at his bailing on the gym.

I heard Joanne on the phone with Adam. She was supposed to send him a homicide report on a case I’d asked to have reopened based on certain things I’d felt and seen. She hadn’t delivered the report, and Adam, understandably, was concerned. Joanne never misses deadlines. She was exhausted, I heard her telling him. She just couldn’t get herself going. Adam was asking if she’d been hurt. No, she said. He asked if she was okay, if anything had happened. “No,” she said. “Everything’s fine. I’m just tired.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll come to you.”

As I tried to get myself together, I looked over at Will
and Joanne, then at Joanne’s room, and I knew it would be several hours before any of us could go anywhere. I told Joanne to cancel my appointments for the rest of the day.

It was around ten in the morning when the phone rang. Joanne looked for me and found me sitting up on the edge of her bed, sound asleep. I’m not much of a sleeper—on a good night I get maybe four or five hours—but I’m also not usually a sleep
walker
. Yet somehow I’d made my way to Joanne’s bed and sat down on it unaware.

Joanne ignored the conventional advice about never waking a sleepwalker and bent down in front of me. “It’s from Green Haven,” she said. I woke up with a start. She handed me the phone, and I heard the operator ask if I would accept the charges. I told her yes.

After a pause, I said, “Is this Ronnie DeFeo?”

“Yes.”

I inhaled deeply. “What do you want me to do?”

“Help me make it stop,” came the response, spoken in a reedy, childlike voice. Then the voice immediately changed to a huskier one, and this voice said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Jackie. All grown up now.” Then a third intonation, sharper and more cutting: “Oh, before I forget, poor Mommy says hello.” A nasty chuckle followed, then humming. The humming turned to singing. I recognized the tune—“I Remember You,” a song my mother used to sing around the house. The man on the other end of the line asked if I remembered him. He told me I was the only one who could handle what was inside. A darker voice told me I couldn’t save him.