The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (15 page)

“It’s ridiculous. Manson is the most infamous criminal in the world. Berkowitz is number two. They’re peas in a pod. They write to each other every week. I know that for a fact. You can’t write another prisoner, so they do it from the outside. They get a third party to write the letter, then he forwards it. That’s how they been doing it.”

“It’s like they want to bring you into the ring and have you acknowledge that you’re on their level. They want to bring you close.”

“I don’t know, they all think I’m somebody. I told them you think this notoriety is nice? I’m paying a hell of a price. I never wrote Manson back. He and everyone else think I’m something I’m not. Amityville. Why do I gotta be Amityville? All because of the damn Lutzes. Anyway, I gotta go. I’m gonna drop this damn phone I’m shaking so bad.”

Years before, prior
to one of her trips to New York, my mother had told us she was heading there to buy a property on Sea Gate, Coney Island’s westernmost neighborhood and proudly gated enclave. Coney Island itself was then far removed from its heyday as America’s summer playground and had become more a place for drifters, tramps, and vagrants, but the exclusive areas still held their allure. She went there and purchased a mini mansion, and it wasn’t long before the socialites and artists came flocking to Momma’s door. They all wanted to be touched by her, read by her, imbued with the sense of power and light.

But the radiant side of life, the exultant side Mary Palermo lived by day, proved to be only her superficial existence. It was the darker side, the vague mysteries and faint transmissions, that became her cursed infatuation. The house at Sea Gate was her beginning; the Surf Hotel, her end.

By the time I arrived at the hotel, the exorcism had already been going on for several days. She’d been led to the hotel by a group of addicts, vagabonds, and whores and placed in a room where she was forced to confront
the very demons she had spent most of her life freeing others from. She had chased the devil out of strangers countless times. Now it was from her own body that she needed to banish it.

I first saw her from the vantage point of a long hallway leading toward the room. It was her, but it wasn’t. Her face and body had changed. The ceiling was covered with Latin and the walls spattered with blood. There were voices; there was movement. And my mother, now in the middle of the room surrounded by two priests and a nun, began slowly to rise toward the ceiling. On their faces, I saw horror and defeat.

“Remember me,” a fiendish voice called out from my mother’s body.

The demonic presence in her was resilient, I heard someone say. They told me they hadn’t wanted to call me because they feared I would be as tempting a host as she was. The devil moves fast, they said, when he has a mission. Father Vincent felt different. He thought I might be the only one who could bring her back. But I could see that it was too late. Her eyes were vacant. She was already gone. Perhaps those leading the ritual weren’t powerful enough. Perhaps they weren’t united in their dedication to save her. Perhaps the dark spirit had simply settled too deeply, and she couldn’t be won back.

“The drooling won’t
stop. This shit is pouring out of me.”

“What are they doing for you?”

“I’m going to emergency sick hall.”

“What time?”

“When I get there, I get there. I gotta fill out a paper, give it to the cop. Doesn’t matter, it’s not gonna do anything. I keep drooling; it won’t stop. Doctors ain’t gonna do nothing anyway. I called the nurse. I said if I didn’t go down there complaining about my arm, they wouldn’t even have done the CAT scan.”

“Did you ask them about the HIV test?”

“Oh, yeah, I called the doctor. He’s gonna give me a real hard time. This guy.”

“A few nights ago, you could hardly breathe.”

“Can’t breathe now. Last night someone gave me a Christmas present. I don’t fuck with that shit. I did last night. It wasn’t drugs, either. Said it was 100 percent pure. Vodka. Real stuff. Didn’t do anything to me. I’m too sick to get drunk. I did six shots back-to-back. Didn’t do nothing. Now this shit is pouring out of me. All night I was coughing. Woke up soaking wet. Every day I gotta wash my sheets? They give me those blue sheets, like diapers, because of the prostate problem they think I got. They’re trying to murder me now, I’m telling you straight out. And they’re doing it because of who I am. Not who I wanna be. Now this shit is all over the floor, everywhere. That strip club may be the last one I ever see.”

“What strip club?”

“They took me to a strip club.”

“Who?”

“Them COs.”

“COs?”

“Correctional officers.”

“You mean guards? Guards took you to a strip club?”

“Yeah, last night. When they were supposed to take me to Fishkill. To the hospital there.”

“Look, Ronnie, we’ve come a long way. You have to be straight with me. You can’t put me on.”

“I ain’t putting you on. I guess maybe it was a Christmas present, even though they didn’t say anything about that.”

“Let me understand this. You’re telling me that you went to Fishkill, to the prison, to get checked, and then the guards took you out to a strip club?”

“About midnight. I went to Fishkill and saw the specialist, Dr. Terry, pulmonary doctor. He told me the problem with my lungs, this and that, did the CAT scan, we left there, got all the paperwork, about quarter to twelve. They said, ‘Look, we’d all go out and get something to eat and go to a strip club, but we ain’t got enough money.’ I said, ‘Look, a fifty on the backseat, on the floor. Somebody must have left it here. It’s mine now—possession is nine-tenths of the law, ha ha.’ ”

I started to ask myself the same question I usually asked myself when he launched into one of his stories: was this real or the product of a bored, creative mind needing to construct a retroactive life as different as possible from the one he actually had? Just like the tale of Officer Eddie of the Amityville police force helping Ronnie put up a ladder to have sex with a married woman down the street, I could either take this at face value or try to poke holes in it. The problem was, once Ronnie had momentum, he was difficult to stop.

“All right,” one of ’em says, “come on, this is on you.’ All the steel came off me, the shackles, everything. They told me, ‘Look, I want your word you ain’t going nowhere.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I ain’t going nowhere.’ I left my coat in the van, because it’s a state coat. I forgot my shirt had my tag on it, too. We just went to the bar, sat down, two girls started dancing, you know, they got the metal poles up on the stage there.”

“They bought you drinks?”

“Well, I bought us drinks, with the fifty. A drink is three dollars in this place. We got a couple of Heinekens and a shot of vodka. I wanted to drink it straight. Music stopped, and this girl came over. And, I don’t know, she looked at me; I looked at her; I don’t remember if my hair was tied up. Anyway, she said hello; I said hello back. She says, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong; you’re a prisoner.’ I said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ She said, ‘What are you drinking, tequila?’ I said, ‘No, vodka.’ ”

“What were you drinking again?”

“Vodka.”

“And what did she ask you if you were drinking? Whiskey?”

“Tequila. You trying to trip me up, Jackie? You think I’m not telling the truth? Come on. We’re closer than that now, ain’t we?”

I didn’t say anything. It had been a poor attempt.

“I said, ‘You want a drink?’ I called the bartender over, and I said, ‘Give her a drink.’ She says, ‘No, I gotta work.’ So I said, ‘While you’re here, give me another.’ That was my third. She started talking to me. She was saying how
long you in there for, this and that, how long you been in there. I said I been in prison longer than you been on the face of this earth. She says, ‘Get outta here.’ I said I been in prison thirty-six years. ‘Don’t fuck up,’ I said. ‘You’ll be in the women’s joint. They only got two of them.’ She says, ‘Who’s over there in Green Haven? Isn’t that guy from Amityville in there?’ Cops started laughing. I said, ‘Yeah, he’s in there, I know him real well—he’s a real nice guy, nicer guy than I am. Unless you don’t think I’m nice.’ ”

“And you’re just sitting there, like a regular patron. No shackles, nothing.”

“That’s what I said, ain’t it? ‘No,’ she says, ‘I think you’re real nice, or I woulda left by now. I’m not one to lead people on or get recreation out of it. You’re a gentleman. I wish other guys were as nice as you.’ Asks me when I’m getting out.”

“Christ, Ronnie.”

“I said, ‘Look, there’s something I need to tell you, and when I tell you you’re probably gonna run out of here as fast as you can. I don’t want to burst your bubble, don’t get upset, but the guy you’re talking about is me. Look at my shirt.’ She says, ‘That’s his name!’ I said, ‘Of course it is. I’m him. Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’m not gonna hurt you. I got railroaded.’ She says, ‘I assumed it was murder already, all that time you did.’ ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you believe what you want, but I didn’t commit that whole crime. I committed some of it, but I would never do nothing to my little brothers and sisters.’ ”

I tried to jump in fast. “Ronnie, maybe it’s time we talked about—”

“She says, ‘Oh, I saw that show on TV but I didn’t get to see it all, ’cause I work late.’ I said, ‘Which one?’ ‘The one on Halloween.’ So we start talking and talking. She says, ‘I’m gonna tell you something, you’re really a nice guy.’ I told her, ‘I don’t know about all of that, but I try to be. What’s an attractive young lady like yourself doing in a place like this? Is it the money?’ She says, ‘Yeah, it’s the money. I get seventy an hour to dance.’ I said, ‘When you get a steady boyfriend or something, I don’t know if he’s gonna like what you’re doing. I wouldn’t like it. I’d work two jobs rather than see you up there.’ ”

“Do you remember the name of the place?”

“We went through the back, where they dump the garbage. It was between Fishkill and here. It was a big place. It wasn’t small. Tom and Jerry’s, something like that.”

I imagined calling Green Haven and asking the two guards to confirm that they took Ronnie DeFeo to a strip club. As I chuckled to myself, Joanne angled her computer screen toward me. She’d done a quick search and found Tom and Jerry’s, a dive bar in Fishkill, New York. But that was as much information as we were likely to get. The story of the strip club would have to join the numerous other stories that escaped Ronnie DeFeo’s lips: ones that might be true or might not, but that, in the end, had little impact on whatever our strange journey together was to be.

“The bartender knew the COs. Both of them. Her boobs were in my face the whole time, girls swinging on the poles behind her. Then she came back with another girl, she wanted my autograph. I said, ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’ ”

Then came the laugh again, suppressed as soon as it
had escaped, and in that laugh was both awareness of the absurdity that comes with being taken to a skin joint when you’re a murderer and also the enduring pain of that absurdity, the resentment he felt toward anyone who gave him a break. He had been taught to deserve pain. The officers who never arrested him for stealing thirty-nine thousand dollars from a local bank. The COs who decided to treat him to the awkward pleasure of women peeling off their clothes. To Ronnie they were all part of the same group, people who didn’t recognize that he was bad to the core and should keep suffering for all eternity. That was why he wanted to give himself over to the darkness finally. In his mind, it was simply the hand he’d been dealt.

It seemed since
the beginning of my trip with Ronnie DeFeo that I could never reach that last stage of sleep, or that I wouldn’t sleep at all. Two nights before he told me about the guards taking him to a strip club, I’d received a phone call in the middle of the afternoon. I was getting ready to see a client, and my landline rang. When I picked up the phone and said hello, a strange voice on the other end returned the greeting.

I’d been speaking with Ronnie twice a day for several months now, and I knew all of his voices and tones. The voice that said hello back to me sounded like Ronnie’s voice, but distant, or muffled, the way a voice sounds when someone puts a rag over the mouthpiece. It sounded far away, but, in the way haunting voices can, unnervingly close.

This wouldn’t have been unusual had the number been
an 845 area code, since the only number Ronnie was ever allowed to use was the one inside Green Haven Correctional Facility. He had to call collect and wasn’t allowed on the phone until the person on the other line accepted. So it couldn’t have been him.

After a pause, there was a click on the other end. I called the number back and was greeted by a female telemarketer who I could barely hear over the sound of other phones and voices behind her. I apologized, hung up, and turned around to see Joanne in the room. She asked me what was the matter. Nothing, I said.

“Wait,” I said as she turned to leave. “You don’t think it’s possible Ronnie could get out, do you?”

“Nah,” she said. “That’s crazy. Right?”

“Right,” I said. “Crazy.”

But he had been out indeed, taken by guards to watch women remove their clothes after getting his lungs inspected, and then ignored. Normally Ronnie had to be taken everywhere separately from the other prisoners, always in shackles and at gunpoint, with multiple guards as his personal escort. He’d attained the dubious CMC status within the system—Central Monitoring Case—which meant he could only be transported according to certain guidelines.

“Oh, yeah. Shackles around my legs, a chain around my waist, handcuffs gotta go through that, black box gotta go on top of them. Because I’m the damn Amityville Horror.”

He’d been out. And something wanted me to know it had been out with him.

It was worse
than any crime scene I had witnessed—and by that time I had witnessed many. I looked around the room at faces I didn’t know, all of them surrounding Mary. She now lay in a bed, her face drawn, her eyes not her own. I walked to the bedside and tried to find in this thing’s features the face of my mother. I searched, but I couldn’t find the person I had known. Hurt flared in me, hurt more than fear. I got down on my knees and tried to stare the demon straight in the eyes. Its eyes were mocking me, but I held my gaze and told myself not to back down despite the priest imploring me, “Do not speak to it; do not engage.” I stared straight into those eyes, and as the storm inside me whipped up, I summoned the words so seldom spoken between us, the words that would get me slapped off my chair for weakness. “I love you, Mom. Come back.”