The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (27 page)

Dawn hadn’t gotten him in the end, and neither had his mother. Of everyone in the house, only he had survived. But at an enormous cost.

“Ronnie, have you ever thought about why you went back to the house? You had money. You could have just taken off. Why go back?”

“Because somebody had to report it. I couldn’t leave ’em in there no longer. It was really bothering me.”

“You had a lot of money.”

“Yeah. I coulda done a lot of things. I coulda left and never came back. I coulda called my lawyer and told him what happened. And he woulda told the police, ‘Listen, you can’t talk to him without me.’ That’s what I shoulda did, but then they woulda said, ‘Oh, this is the one that did it.’ ”

“You could have gone lots of places. Brazil.”

“I had a million in cash in the duffel bag in my trunk. Plus the thirty-seven thousand of my own. I coulda got on a jet and never came back. I coulda went anywhere in the world.”

“You could have disappeared. It happens.”

“I guess I ain’t like that. Especially when it came to my family. That’s why I didn’t run. I was gonna burn that place down and then make like the wind. I was scheming and conniving all day long, I said I still got plenty of time to do it. I had ten gallons of gas. Sunoco 240, high-test. I was gonna burn that place to the ground.”

“But you went back to the bar.”

“I went back to the bar. To make it look good.”

“You could have hopped a jet, and that would have been it. But you went to the bar.”

“My friends called the police. The cop who went into the house looked terrified. He didn’t know how many bodies there were. They’d only discovered my mother and father at that point. He went in there with his gun drawn. I wanted to laugh, but, you know. It was showtime. They
found the kids and everything; oh boy, now it really starts. They talked to me in the kitchen, they told me they gotta take me to the precinct. Me along with everyone else. Oh, yeah, they just started grabbing everybody. They grabbed Duchek, they grabbed Janet and Andy. Not Mindy, though. When she got to the house, she said to the cops, ‘You ain’t taking me to no prison. I’ll call my father, and his lawyer will be right here.’ Her father was a doctor who owned half of fucking Hempstead Turnpike. He owned the Nathan’s and the steakhouse. The cops didn’t touch her.”

There was a very long silence—the longest one in any of our conversations, going back to the very first. He was finally spent. Exhausted. He had released it.

“Ronnie?”

“Yeah.”

“That must have taken a lot.”

More silence. His tank was empty.

“But it was important that you did it. How do you feel?”

“Tired.”

Green Haven Correctional Facility, originally a federal
prison, sits discreetly in the town of Beekman in Dutchess County in the state of New York, though the address is listed as Route 216 in Stormville. In the mid- to late 1970s, during a brief period when the state upheld the death penalty, Green Haven was famous for housing New York’s death row. A notorious electric chair, “Old Sparky,” was moved from Sing Sing to Green Haven, though never used. Capital punishment was reinstated in New York in 1995, fulfilling then-governor George Pataki’s campaign pledge, but in 2004 was once again struck down as unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals.

Removal of the death penalty did not mean an absence of death, of course. Two correction officers had died in the line of duty while at Green Haven. One had disappeared while working only to be discovered later in a garbage dump twenty miles away, sexually violated and
strangled to death. Another had been found lifeless in a watchtower with a gunshot wound to the head. That death was deemed a suicide.

Authorities of the state, of course, always hold out hope that the instinct for death can be changed to the instinct for life. In 1975, the Alternatives to Violence Project was conceived and implemented at Green Haven to help develop inmates’ abilities to resolve conflicts without resorting to manipulation, coercion, or violence. The prison also participates in the Bard Prison Initiative, a college-sponsored program enabling inmates to work toward a liberal-arts degree while incarcerated.

Yet it is the darker impulses of the individuals behind these bars that fascinate people on the other side. Most people don’t want to know whether these criminals are recovering; we want to know the details of what they did to get put in such a place. We recognize in them some of our own dark urges, the ones we fight every day to control, and so we are strangely gripped by those who have allowed those urges, even for a moment, to take over.

Certain inmates at Green Haven have carried with them some notoriety. There was bank robber James McBratney, aka “Jimmy from Queens,” who kidnapped Manny Gambino, related to the Gambino Mob family, and who was later killed in a bar on Staten Island by John Gotti and others in a Mob execution.

There was Robert Golub, convicted for the murder of his thirteen-year-old neighbor, Kelly Anne Tinyes, who lived five doors away.

There was Leroy Antonio “Nicky” Barnes, former drug
lord and crime boss, and leader of The Council, the group of black gangsters who controlled the heroin trade in Harlem during the 1970s, later turned government informant.

There was twenty-seven-year-old John Giuca, former student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, convicted in the slaying of Fairfield University student Mark Fisher, despite Giuca’s mother’s desperate public efforts to have the decision overturned.

And there was Ronald DeFeo Jr., tried and convicted of killing his parents and four siblings at their home in Amityville in the middle of the night, for reasons still uncertain, amid circumstances still unknown.

Joanne scheduled my
visit to Green Haven Correctional Facility for a Wednesday morning. I remember that detail well because at Green Haven, Wednesdays are referred to as Wedding Wednesdays, the day when inmates get married. Though it was a chilly morning, the sun shone almost blindingly, making it hard for me to see the road as Will prepared to pull out of the driveway. From other parts of New York, different members of the A&E film crew—the same ones who had filmed me finding the coin Ronnie had buried when he was nineteen—were also getting ready to leave. They’d filmed me in the forest; now they wanted to film me at the penitentiary.

I was in the passenger seat, Joanne in the back. Jo had complained of dizziness the evening before but this morning said she felt good enough to join us. Turning around to look at her now, I thought different, and told her so.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

At home, Joanne was my daughter; on cases, she was my assistant, accompanying me everywhere. But not today. “You have a fever, Jo,” I said. “Go on inside and we’ll debrief later.”

The only thing that could stop my headstrong daughter from arguing would be an actual fever, so the fact that she relented confirmed my suspicion. Though not happy about it, she went back in the house and lay down, though first turning around to tell me to be careful. It was the first time since she’d started working alongside me that she wouldn’t be accompanying me on a case.

Will turned the key in the ignition, and we heard only a series of wheezing chugs. Again he tried, and again came the chugs, diminishing this time to a series of clicks. He waited a minute, tried again, and again failed. It was only after soliciting the help of our neighbor and his jumper cables that we were finally able to get on the road.

Once the car was running, I entered the address for Green Haven into our Global Positioning System device. It defaulted instead to the address of our own house. I entered it again, but the address kept getting rejected. The GPS, it seemed, wasn’t interested in helping us make our way to Green Haven. I went inside and printed out the directions instead.

On the way, Will started to complain of the same dizziness that had persuaded me to force Joanne to stay home. I wasn’t feeling great, either. And Will looked washed out.

When we neared Green Haven, our intended two-hour trip now having taken almost four hours, the air took on
a chill; by the time we pulled into the parking lot, dark clouds covered the sky. The members of the film crew, having encountered their own car troubles, had arrived only minutes before.

A large, black-haired man in a Texas-style suit with an oversize silver belt buckle approached the car as we parked. He was surrounded by a posse of uniformed, armed guards who walked in a
V
, him at the front. The man walked slowly and deliberately. I was used to this kind of walk; it was a walk that said this was his turf. The walk of a big fish demonstrating that every ass in this small pond belonged to him.

The man leaned toward the window. He had sharp eyes, a chiseled jaw, and a tough look that had no doubt turned more than one hardened criminal to instant jelly. It doesn’t usually take long for me to detect weaknesses or cracks in a person’s character. Sometimes it’s in the movements of the eye or the look of the mouth. Sometimes it’s just a feeling. In the first few moments of our interaction, I searched this man for cracks in the armor. I detected none.

He looked at Will, then at me. Arching an eyebrow, he introduced himself as William Lee, Green Haven’s warden. I imagined someone who ran a maximum-security prison didn’t appreciate people showing up two hours late to interview inmates.

I was right.

“Can’t do it today,” he said, in a tone suggesting that his lack of appreciation ran even deeper than I’d assumed.

I apologized, explaining about my daughter’s illness and the troubles we’d run into trying to get there. Warden Lee softened a little at this, but he was nevertheless unrelenting.
A prison warden at his softest is still harder than most others. He repeated that we couldn’t do it today and would have to return first thing in the morning.

We called home to Joanne, who found all of us a nearby bed-and-breakfast called Le Chambord, five minutes down the country road in Hopewell Junction. The house was a beautiful old southern-looking mansion that seemed like it had been lifted directly from the set of
Gone with the Wind
. Will and I checked in, along with the rest of the crew; went out to grab a burger at a drive-through; then went back and settled in for the evening.

When I awoke at five the next morning, my eyes ached—or, more accurately, the area below my eyes. Will looked at me and asked me what had happened. I looked in the mirror to see the beginnings of twin red welts under each eye. Will went down the hall and got some ice, which he then wrapped in a towel and handed to me.

As I stood in front of the mirror holding the towel against my face, I rewound the events of the night, which I’d convinced myself were part of a dream. The feeling of being pinned down in bed. Small hands touching my ankles. The anguished voices of children. Multiple phone calls—how many I couldn’t say—and a threatening male voice telling me to go back home.

You might say
my work requires being an open book for as long as possible, because when the pages get filled up, they get filled up fast. What I mean is that, when a client comes to me—or, more accurately, contacts Joanne, who
then sets up an appointment—I allow no predisposition and make no advance judgments. I can offer true help only if I go in blank. Whether helping Adam fill in the gaps on a homicide case or helping individuals answer questions that are tormenting them, my process is the same. Erase myself as completely as possible so that the client’s spirit can enter and illuminate.

As a result, I feel a certain kind of nothing when preparing to speak to a client for the first time. I don’t ask the person’s name. I don’t ask about his or her background. I ask only for a client’s picture, if he or she is comfortable sending one, through Jo. My discovery is through seeing and feeling the person and the spirit around him or her.

But I never forget a face. So when a woman contacted Jo saying she’d had readings from me before, and Jo handed me her picture, I felt uneasy—for I would have staked my reputation on the fact that I had never seen this woman before. When Jo asked her name, she answered simply “Mary.” Jo said the woman had only one question:
When will I feel complete again?
The question itself is not so odd for a medium to hear. Sometimes folks just want validation about life. But the woman continued to insist to Jo that this wasn’t her first encounter with me. Against my better reasoning, I advised Jo to book the appointment.

Mary called that night at eight sharp. I was holding her picture in my hand when she called. I realize voices don’t always seem to match faces, but the voice I was listening to clashed against the picture I was looking at in an irrefutable way. As I placed the picture facedown on my desk, my mind began to race. Her hollow voice had sent a chill through
me. But there was now silence on the other end, and I needed to say something. I began to explain the process I use: the client simply begins speaking about something pedestrian, anything at all, perhaps what he or she did that day, and soon I will begin to see. I may disappear briefly and then return. I may write things in another hand writing through me and then see what I’ve written only after the possession is complete and the spirit has withdrawn.