The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (7 page)

I’d learned that I had two choices when Ronnie went off on one of his restless tangents. I could either try to pull him back, or—at moments like this, when his speech accelerated and the tension in it climbed—I could simply go along and wait for him to come back to the story. Eventually, he always did.

“He used to say about a dozen times a week, ‘I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it.’ You knew exactly what he was saying. I had to hear this everyday. He drove me to use the fucking drugs, I’m telling you.”

Whenever I spoke to Ronnie, I did two things: I recorded our conversations—I’d gotten his permission during the first phone call—and I kept Joanne’s research files in front of me. If Ronnie mentioned something noteworthy, unfamiliar, or both, I’d make a note to myself to come back to it later. It was the only way to keep him even slightly focused.

“Last night I was brushing my teeth, and one fell out.
It’s next to the one that got knocked out when the bastard threw a chair at me when I was eleven and hit me in the face. Those two things happened at the same exact time, 9:35. I remember that, because you remember when your father throws a chair at you and knocks your teeth out. A wooden high chair, he bought it in the lumberyard. That thing was solid oak.”

“Did it happen a lot?” I asked. But Ronnie was no longer listening. He was on to a new topic that would come to demand the same recurring airtime as his father’s abuse: his mother’s supposed affairs.

“No wonder he was so mad, the way my mother was running around. Who knows how many there were? I only knew about the hairstylist, that she was doing once a week, and Brother Isaac, who was my gym teacher, if you can believe that. But maybe there were other ones, too. Who knows?”

“Hold on. Leave your mother aside for now.”

“My father made me bury the garbage bag with the heart in it, for Christ’s sake. I’ll never forget it. I stayed in the shower for a half hour, I swear to God, scrubbing myself.”

“I’ve got to go, Ronnie,” I said at this point, hanging up and shutting off the tape. His time limit was approaching. Plus, I wasn’t ready for the new direction he had started to take. I was still considering what he’d said about an evil entity in his cell. Though I had lengthy experience with evil, I needed to take things slowly. Ronnie was a spout you couldn’t turn off if you let it go too long. It was easier to take in everything he had to say in small doses.

As I hung up the phone, a lovely scent hit my nostrils—
something clean, fresh, and mildly spicy. I walked downstairs, found Joanne at her computer, and asked if she was burning something, eucalyptus maybe. She shook her head no.

The next morning, Ronnie called early, just after daybreak. The first thing he said was, “I was in the day room last night, and suddenly I got hit in the shoulder. Twice.”

“What do you mean, Ronnie?”

“Just what I said. I’m standing in the day room, and something clips me in the shoulder, hard, two times. When I look up, nothing’s there. Then suddenly there was this clean, fresh smell, really strong, whooshes right underneath my nose. Like a spirit playing tag or something. Boom, I got you.”

A spirit playing tag
. Maybe.

“Tell me more about your dad, Ronnie.”

“I was trying to tell you yesterday. They made me bury the garbage bag with the heart in it. From Brother Isaac. I mean, come on.”

“We’ll get to that, Ronnie. I want you to put it aside for a bit. Tell me when your father started hitting you.”

“Forever. Three, four. The guy took me on whenever he felt like it. There was plenty of beatings, for no reason at all. None whatsoever. You ask me if I knew what I did wrong. How could I know? I was a kid.” His voice was spiraling upward again. “It happened all the goddamn time. When I was nineteen, he busted my lips open. The top and the bottom. I ran to the forest.”

Here he paused uncharacteristically. In my conversations with Ronnie DeFeo, I was normally able to get a word in
only when I guessed at the right spot to jump in. Often he would still speak over me, desperate to relieve himself of all the anxious thoughts battling for space in his head.

I believe the reason for his pause now was the same reason for my not filling it. We had come to a mutual crossroads. In every relationship there comes a moment where both parties must decide how much they trust each other.

“You want proof?” he finally said.

“Proof of what?”

“You want to be able to trust me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I want to be able to trust you.”

And that’s how I found myself standing at the edge of a forest.

“I had a
coin,” Ronnie had told me. “He gave it to me when I was nineteen. Had an Indian head on it. I still had that coin before everything happened.”

I hadn’t yet asked him about the murders, partly because I was still trying to figure out why I’d been thrust into this strange association in the first place. The other reason was that I’d learned the need for patience. Killers were often victims, and victims were often killers. Ronnie DeFeo had told me plenty, and still only seemed to be warming up. I was confident he would tell me the truth when he was ready. The last thing I wanted to do was scare him away.

There was a third reason. I may not have known at that point what I was really meant to do for Ronnie DeFeo, but it’s fair to say I had begun to suspect that there truly were dark entities afoot which had to do with him. And
in order to fight evil, you need to first learn what tortures the soul of someone who has committed it.

Though
Medium P.I.
had never made it to air, I was still in touch with the production team that had been on the canal with me. They were aware of my peculiar relationship with Ronnie DeFeo. When I told them I’d be searching for a coin in the forest, they asked if I’d be willing to appear on a televised special about my journey with him. More important, they said, would
he
be willing to appear? I told them I would be okay with it as long as I felt it was done properly. When I put the question to Ronnie, he was okay with it, too. He was ready to talk, and was happy to have as large an audience as possible to hear his side.

As I approached the south shore forest with the cameras following me, I hoped I was wrong. I hoped Ronnie DeFeo would prove to be a liar, so I could dismiss everything he had told me, end our communications, and go on with my life. The cameras would be there to prove there was nothing to Ronnie’s claims.

The forest lay three miles from 112 Ocean Avenue, near the corner of Ocean and Merrick Road. Behind it, Croons Lake, also called the Massapequa Water Reserve, sat undisturbed. At the opposite end, the so-called Bogeyman Park led to Bethpage State Park, a popular recreational site among teens and adults alike.

As I took the first step into the forest, a feeling immediately started to gnaw at me, something I wanted terribly to smother. It wanted out; I wanted it to stay in.

“It was before everything happened,” Ronnie had said. Though at no point yet had he discussed the night of the
murders in any detail, he had made several allusions, always referring to it as
when
everything happened
or
when my family died
.

“One day he decided to give me a beating,” he had said. I’d asked him why.

“I don’t know why. How do I know why? That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It was out of nowhere, like usual. He punched me in the face and busted my lips open. The top and the bottom. I took off. I ran to the woods near our house. I grabbed that goddamn coin and buried it. I didn’t want anything to do with him, and that coin was part of him. He collected them, thirty, forty years, maybe more than that. He had every kind of coin. I buried it and left it there. You want to know you can trust me? Go dig up that coin.”

At first I didn’t know what to make of Ronnie’s words. How was I going to find a single coin in a forest, not to mention one buried more than thirty-five years ago? It smacked of the kind of test a madman gives you for no reason other than to exert control. But a voice inside told me to go, and so I went. Now here I stood, steps inside the forest.

As I stared at the trees and the brush, I began to change. I always hesitate to try to describe the experience, because it rarely translates well into words, but I’ll try, and you may judge it, and me, however you like. What happens is that my own spirit slips away for a while in order to make room for another, like taking a brief vacation from the space you usually occupy and temporarily subletting it to someone else. I feel this other spirit as something tangible, as though suddenly given a different pair of eyes to see
with or a different body to master. Don’t picture
Field of Dreams
. I’m not walking into a cornfield and disappearing. I very much remain physically. The part of me that becomes imbued with something else is spiritual. Some call it possession; some transformation. Me, I don’t care what you call it. I just know what it feels like.

Moments after entering the forest, I sensed Ronnie’s voice guiding me. I intentionally don’t say I “heard” Ronnie’s voice, because that isn’t quite right. It isn’t like wearing an earpiece and somebody talking into it. No—it’s a feeling.

There were no footpaths or markers in the south shore forest. It was thick, enjoyable perhaps for squirrels and rabbits, but not a good place to search for an object no more than an inch around. I weaved my way through the dense foliage, along the uneven forest floor, around potential clusters of poison ivy, wondering how in the world I was supposed to unearth a single coin among the expanse. For nearly an hour I followed Ronnie’s silent direction, not yet knowing whether to trust him.

Soon his voice told me to angle slightly in a particular direction and walk forward, to the base of a sugar maple. I knelt in the dirt and began to dig. As I clawed at the ground and tossed aside one small handful of dirt after another, a hulking spider, the kind I used to see in the swamps of New Orleans, crawled up my forearm and across my shoulders. I swept it off and continued.

A few minutes later, my knees damp, my fingernails caked with earth, I spotted it: a faded, round edge of something metal. I pulled it out.

An Indian-head coin. With dried blood on it.

My father called his moonshine the best this side of
the Mississippi. He would show me how to make it. It sat in an old bathtub with cut-up fruit and potatoes, an oversized wooden stick always at the ready for mixing. I would fill the old jelly jars with the stuff, place them into a pillowcase, and off I went, a five-year-old girl happy as punch to go play with the hobos by the tracks.

Dad made like he didn’t know, but he did. I think his respect for the hobos made it okay. When I got older, he leaned down and said to me, “I knew you took my moonshine to those folks to make them happy. It isn’t hard to spot the smile of a man who’s just had a good sip.” He’d laugh and smile at me in his big, warm way.

I would sit by the railroad tracks where he worked and play games with the hobos. I understood their nomadic souls. Sometimes I would go down there alone just to
visit them. They were my secret family, always carrying a smile and a song.

One of the hobos, Old Mr. Johnny, could play the guitar like nobody’s business. The rumor was that he’d come from the Mississippi swamp back in the day to see Momma, and she had granted him his wish, which was to be able to play and sing just like the King. The wish had come true, but Old Mr. Johnny had walked away without respecting the gift he’d been given. Momma had smiled and said, “Oh my, Old Mr. Johnny forgot to pay his dues. What a shame.” And just like that, he’d lost his hearing. All those crowds clapping and yelling his name, him hearing none of it, unable even to hear his own music.

Sometimes I’d bring the hobos food, too, if it didn’t seem the moonshine was enough. I would bring the outside world to them—newspapers, gossip from town—and they would soak it up happily. “I hear the steps!” they would say as I approached. “The young shall lead the old!”

They taught me the things that at the time were most important: how to skip a rock, how to open a can with a pocketknife, how to play the spoons on one knee, how to tell when the train was coming by listening to the ground, what to put on red ant bites. The rule among them was no shoes allowed, and to this day I prefer to be barefoot.

As soon as a train pulled up, the stories would fly. The hobos would talk about how one day we would all sit in the dining car like the rich folks with their fancy china. One day I sneaked onto a train heading north. It wasn’t the way they’d imagined it. The dining cars didn’t have
china at all. But nowadays, I still use a china tea cup every morning.

The leader of the group was an old guy named Mr. Gramp. One evening I was helping them build a fire, and Mr. Gramp looked at me and said, “You a cowboy with no belt.” Then he cut some rope, and that rope became my belt. I still have it. I would sit and take everything in, how they shared food, moonshine, smokes, music. They helped me find the human side of life, taught me real lessons. Crawl if you can’t walk. Eat that pound of dirt if that’s what there is to eat. But there was one cardinal rule you would violate at your own peril: never say Momma’s name out loud. I saw the fear in their eyes. She’ll get ya like she got Old Mr. Johnny.