The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (8 page)

One morning I came to the tracks to find that Mr. Gramp had passed in his sleep. I was seven. Mr. Gramp had always read the news to me from the papers I brought. But at some point I realized he could never actually read at all. He’d just been making up stories for my entertainment. When the train pulled in that late afternoon, we all put something in Mr. Gramp’s pocket to carry on his journey, as was tradition. I gave him a stone that I’d carried for a long time—so he could make soup in the next domain—and a dried flower. Then I stood back and watched the others place Mr. Gramp comfortably in the laundry car, where he would be carried away—to where, we could only guess. Life changes form but doesn’t die.

A few days later I was sitting in my bedroom reading, and when I looked up, I saw Mr. Gramp sitting in a chair in the corner. I knew he’d come to say good-bye. I walked
over to him and felt the temperature in my room drop. With a smile, Mr. Gramp gestured me closer. I put my ear to his mouth. “I love you,” he said. And then he was gone.

Whenever I travel back to New Orleans, I go by train. I take the sleeper car. It’s a twenty-seven-hour journey from New York City, and I love every minute of it. Passing the lazy Mississippi, the shotgun houses, folks waving as the train slows down and passes. I watch my past sliding by me in slow motion.

That tough Canadian
blood coursed hard through my father’s veins. He never felt it necessary to wear a coat, not even in the middle of a winter storm. He’d carry his big, black lunch pail and bring down his sledgehammer with glory and pride. I would sit and watch the sparks jump with every blow.

He worked on pipelines, bridges. His hands were constantly dirty and bloody, and he liked it that way. He’d smile looking at the labor his hands had endured. A man’s hands tell his life, he would say. He had a side-to-side swagger that said I’m unbothered, but don’t be fooled. “Never put your head down, Jackie,” he would tell me.

Once I was trying to climb the big oak in our front yard, and I fell, badly. My dad stood slowly up from the porch but didn’t come over to rescue me. The blood dripped down my cheek, and my eye stung. I was ready to let out a howl of pain—but then, seeing him, I stopped. Instead I brushed the grass and leaves from my shorts and
walked over to him. He took my hand tenderly and said, “Cowboys don’t cry.”

We went into the embalming room in the back of the house, and he sat me on the draining table, a flat tub with a drain and hoses where the corpses would be siphoned of any remaining fluids before being prepared. There was a wooden sign that hung above the door with the words
Out of this world into the next
burned in. Below the words was da Vinci’s pentagram, the wheel of life, the five-point sign of protection.

My father wiped a damp cloth across my eye. “Ain’t that bad,” he said, then he took one of the sickle-shaped needles and some black thread that my mother would use to sew up the mouths of the dead. “Bite this,” he said, handing me a rag. Then he stitched me up.

Often, when the day was done, I would sit on the edge of my bed and he would teach me the blues. Whereas my mother played her beguiling tunes on the piano, my dad’s musical tools were more rural: the fiddle, the harmonica, the spoons. By the time I was six, I could play all of them, and they came to be my escape from the feeling of constant commune with otherworldly souls, walking around my bedroom, those spirits from this realm and the one beyond, lost, drifting, knowing I was there watching. I didn’t know what they wanted.

My father believed in the spirit as profoundly as Mary, but he derived something different from it. His rituals were out in the light, pure, part of a tradition and a line. I would help him build a fire and then dance around it while thumping a canvas drum and chanting. He built
those fires and did those dances and banged on those drums to call on our ancestors for guidance. He summoned the spirits to help him find his center and stay out of the shadows. My mother walked into those shadows and never returned.

I didn’t know
whether Ronnie DeFeo was bad from the inside out, whether his father had convinced him he was, or whether a dark spirit had invaded him at a vulnerable point in his existence. If it was the latter, perhaps I had been thrown on to this path to help. I had observed evil and its endless incarnations. I had seen demons in various forms occupy people and places, and I had learned of the terrible deeds they had sometimes done while swayed by darkness. I had seen it break individuals and families apart. And I had tried to outrun it. I was starting to wonder whether it was now cornering me in the form of a man who had been incarcerated for more than half his life.

Ronnie had been talking about his father almost constantly during our calls, and I got the sense that he’d keep on doing so unless I forced him in another direction.

“I was bad,” Ronnie said. “I know I was bad. Certain people, I guess they’re born that way. I wish I wasn’t, but I guess I was.”

“Ronnie, were you ever involved in the occult?” I didn’t know why I was asking the question. My intuition told me to.

“I went to a meeting once,” he said.

“How old were you?”

“When I was a kid, I ran away a lot to get away from that son of a bitch. I always went to Greenwich Village. I used to have dreams all the time, good ones, bad ones. Anyway, I had this dream that I was gonna run into a pretty girl with blonde hair that was gonna have a brandnew convertible, what kind of car I wasn’t sure, but the bad thing about the girl in my dream was she was a member of the occult and very high up in the ranks. Well, when I ran away, I was going to Saint Francis Prep School at the time, I was either fourteen or fifteen, and I met this girl in the Village; her name was Wanda. She was attractive; she had, you know, it was a front, they try to lure people. She had an all-red Ford Galaxie convertible. Brand-new, with white interior and white top. And sure enough, she tried to recruit me.”

“Recruit you for what?”

“She told me she was a priestess, and they worshipped the devil. I was already familiar with Lucifer—I went to Catholic school all my life. Supposed to be twelve years, but it was thirteen and a half, they held me back one. So I knew about religion. She wanted me to go to Ohio with her. She said, ‘I practice here, too.’ I said, ‘Practice?’ ”

“Did you know what she was talking about?”

“How the hell would I know what she’s talking about? Like I said, I learned that shit all through school, but that ain’t the same as meeting a girl who says she’s a priestess. She said, ‘Tomorrow night there’s gonna be a meeting here, and you’re gonna come with me. Then we’re gonna go to Ohio.’ I said, ‘You’re not gonna use me as a human sacrifice.’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ she says. ‘We don’t do that.’ ”

“Were you scared?”

“I don’t know; I mean, she was pretty good-looking.”

“She was good-looking, so you weren’t scared?”

“Blonde, nice build, about five-seven. And she was up there, in her thirties, maybe. She had a carload of people.”

“So you went?”

“I went to the first meeting. The local one.”

“Where was this?”

“Down by the Meatpacking District, Tenth, near the Hudson.”

I knew the area he was referring to, where, at night, a lot of the buildings turn into underground clubs. I also knew that it was an area where people had often gone missing. Many of the buildings there look shut down or boarded up. But after dark—long after—the place comes to life. Although maybe that isn’t exactly the right way to say it, given the reason for a lot of these meetings.

“We drove. I took one of the cars.”

“One of whose cars?”

“My father would let me use a bunch of different cars from the dealership, and they were all 100 percent good shape, didn’t have to worry about breaking down or anything. Except I was a little nervous because the one I took had New York plates, which I figured would be strike one to the people we met if [we] went to Ohio. People outside of New York don’t always like New Yorkers, you know what I mean?”

“I certainly do.”

“And I had two antennas right next to each other, on the right front fender. One was a power antenna, went up
and down electronically; the other one was solid-mass stainless steel, thirty inches, for my FM radio. That would probably be strike two, ’cause it made the car look like a cop car. And then I had a PBA badge in my wallet.”

“The gold one?” I had one of those myself. A PBA—Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association—badge is a card, an honorary one, indicating that the holder is part of the broader family of law enforcement, or at least that he or she is tight with someone on the force.

“Yeah, the gold one.”

“How did you get a PBA badge?”

“My dad knew a lot of cops. Anyway, when we got there, I opened my wallet and they saw the PBA badge, and now they think I’m a cop. But I told them, ‘Look, the cops ain’t any friends of mine, and I ain’t one. You can search me or the car if you want.’ They did, and then they convinced themselves I was okay. They opened the door and let me in, and this guy named Wayne greets me. Right away he starts talking Satan this and Satan that. Behind him, there are people holding flares burning at both ends. It was a real circus.”

“But you wanted to stay?” My question went ignored. As so often happened, Ronnie was caught up in the momentum of his own words.

“They were for real. They all had black gowns with hoods. Every one of them. They gave me one to wear. Everybody looks the same. There’s a reason for that, so nobody knows who the other person is. So I went through that ordeal. But I didn’t go to Ohio with her.”

“Did you go to any more meetings?”

“One other one, that a different female took me to. Her name was Lauren. And I’m gonna tell you straight out, I saw shit go down in that meeting that scared me good. I don’t even want to remember that stuff, okay? These guys went the whole nine yards is what I’m trying to say. And I couldn’t just leave, because the girl I was with, God knows what coulda happened to her, and I really liked her, so I stayed. Later on I told her look, to each his own, but that shit ain’t my cup of tea.”

I didn’t bother to ask more details about what Ronnie had seen or thought he’d seen. I already knew it wasn’t easy trying to tease out the parts of Ronnie DeFeo’s stories that made sense and the parts that, well, required a dose of skepticism. I was familiar with the world of dark practices, however, and I knew what went on behind its doors. I didn’t know what he’d seen and what he hadn’t, and I wasn’t confident he knew, either. But I knew that world was real.

“I said hey, that coulda been you or me. But she wanted to be a part of it. So that was the end of that. Good-bye, Lauren.”

In Louisiana, the
police would come to our house asking to speak to the child with the strange gift. They were having some difficulty getting to the bottom of a certain case, they’d say, and they wondered if they might talk to her. I may have been a kid in numeric age, but I hadn’t really been one for a long time, if ever.

“Please come in,” Mary would say. They would sit at the kitchen table, and I’d be summoned. “Come on in
here, Jackie. These gentlemen need to speak to you about something important. Try to help them.”

Typically they would slide a picture under my hand. “Tell us, Jackie,” they would say. “What do you see?”

There was one girl, a small girl, like me, but more innocent looking. A fat detective had come to our house with his partner and the girl’s anguished father. The fat detective had passed her photo to me across the table, which I now held under my palm.

The transformation was almost immediate. I fell back on my chair, assaulted by the smell of burning flesh in my nostrils. I ran out the front door. My mother, the detective, and the girl’s father followed.

I reached the lawn and stumbled. I was on the grass now, rolling around, trying to rid myself of the vision. The fat detective started to approach me, but Mary held him back. “Wait,” she said. “Wait.”

The smell subsided, and a pretty girl, slightly shorter than me, appeared at my side. It was the girl from the picture. I stood up slowly and looked at her. She held out her hand. I took it. Together we began to cry.

She leaned toward me, whispered something in my ear, and pointed toward her father. When I looked at him, he sprinted.

The pretty young girl had revealed everything to me. Her father had set her on fire in order to collect the insurance money on her life. When he took off around the side of my house, toward the backyard, the detectives ran after him, along with my mother and me. But he was fast for a big man. We were losing ground.

Then, suddenly, the man buckled, his legs giving way, and he started screaming. I turned around to see my father standing outside the back door, holding his revolver. He placed the gun down as casually as if he’d just shot a tin can, walked over to me, and laid his big, gentle hands on my shoulders as the detectives handcuffed the girl’s father and recited Miranda.

“Enough of this,” my father said, crouching down to me. “Jacks,” he said, looking into my eyes. He called me Jacks after the playground game, because, he said, you never knew where I was going to land. “When you get old enough, go. Go far away, and don’t let anyone in unless you have to.” He pointed to my forehead.

But word was out, and the police kept coming. Detectives, district attorneys, the FBI. All of them wanted a piece of me, their secret junior recruit. They watched me closely and visited often. They would use my help but not talk about it.

They couldn’t. Who would believe them? And, more important, they really didn’t care who might believe them or who might not. In their line of work, as in mine, they saw things on a regular basis that most people don’t ever see, and they cared about one thing only: whether I could help find, and place, missing pieces to all sort of different puzzles.

Ronnie and I
had continued to talk about the occult meetings he’d attended close to home. But, as we talked, I got the sense that he had gone farther afield to explore
the dark arts. My intuition told me to ask him if he’d ever visited my original stomping grounds. I asked.