The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (9 page)

“After what I saw and heard in those meetings, I wanted to go see what it was all really about,” he said.

“And?”

“And there’s only one place to do that. I was about twenty. I jumped in the car and went.”

“To New Orleans.”

“I was too curious not to go.”

“What did you tell your parents?”

“Nothing. They didn’t really keep tabs on me like that. I went down there and found the people who ran the meetings, who I’d been advised to talk to by the occult people here, and this one guy says okay, you have to drink blood to get the feel of this. So I did. He said a female’s blood is sweeter than a male’s blood. How true that is I don’t know. I drank a glass of blood, probably four ounces. Didn’t do anything to me.”

“Did you feel anything in particular while you were there, Ronnie? Any sense of being pulled or conflicted?”

“You gotta be very careful down there,” he said, bypassing my question in deference to his own path, like usual. “I mean, you’ll just disappear. They check everybody when you go in there, for guns and whatnot. I had to go along with the game plan; I couldn’t bring a gun in. They lock the place up like a vault. Steel bars came down on the door; they had to put a big lug nut, big wing nut on it. You ain’t coming through that. The shutters were barricaded the same way. These people were for real; they don’t play no games. If they even think you’re in
there for the wrong reasons, good luck to you. Man, that place is another world.”

Was Ronnie DeFeo a bored, aimless suburban kid with too much money and too much time on his hands? Maybe. Was he drawn toward life’s underbelly merely for lack of a more stimulating alternative? I’d certainly seen that syndrome play out lots of times. But the darkness in this man seemed deeper-set. As I spoke to the former small-time hood who had become a renowned mass murderer, I felt a fundamental energy in him that shook me to my core.

“Let’s go back to your father, Ronnie,” I said. “Why do you think he felt you were so bad?”

“Because I
was
bad,” he said. “I was up to all kinds of stuff.” For example, he said, he was sleeping around with the married neighbors. “There was a jealous husband a few houses away. And there was this cop named Eddie. I came home drunk one day, and at the time I was screwing, what’s her name, the mother a few blocks away; she was beautiful; she had a son and a daughter. Anyway, I tried to get in the front door and the back door, but one window upstairs was open, and it was their bedroom window. I went into my boathouse and got the forty-foot extension ladder. I took the ladder, and I’m coming up the driveway. Eddie sees me with it, he stops, he says, ‘What the hell, what are you doing?’ I says, ‘I ain’t breaking the law, I’m going to get some pussy. You gonna shoot me? I got a gun, too, you know.’ So we start talking for a while, I showed him my gun, a brand-new Colt Python, and he asks me where I got it. I gave him the gun, and
then I says, ‘We all done here?’ I took the ladder. He says, ‘Get out of here, you’re crazy, you can’t do that!’ But guess who helped me put the ladder up in the end? Eddie.”

“What time was this, Ronnie?”

“Real late. Or real early, I guess. Maybe four in the morning. I got to the top, I says, ‘Baby, I’m here!’ She woke up, the husband turned, she says, ‘Are you crazy?’ So I climb back down the ladder and Officer Eddie is still sitting there in his cruiser. I tell him, ‘She wants me to go to the door.’ Eddie helps me take down the ladder, you know, with the top part that collapses into the bottom part. We put it down on the ground and I head for the front door. When she sees me she says, ‘You can’t be coming here!’ I pushed my way in anyway. I says, ‘Honey, you gotta give me some now, this is bullshit.’ I seen Officer Eddie on the news about six months ago. He rescued someone in Amityville from a burning house on his way home. I said, ‘That son of a bitch is still on the force?’ ”

I had no way of knowing whether this story, or any of Ronnie’s tales, for that matter, were true, and it’s not as though the Amityville police were about to corroborate it. I had only my instincts as a guide. If Ronnie’s stories
were
fabrications, they were impressive both in their vividness and consistency. Were all these things I was hearing day after day merely the products of a sociopathic mind spinning one tall tale after another for the simple purpose of having nothing better to do? I doubted this. Were they stories that he had long ago manufactured and had now come to believe were true, providing the reason
for his conviction in the telling? That also seemed unlikely, if only for the reason that each served to paint an increasingly unflattering picture of him. If we make up stories about ourselves, it’s usually to make ourselves feel better, not worse. Yes, a child who’s getting in trouble will sometimes do something even worse in order to show his parents just how bad he can be, but a sixty-year-old man isn’t likely to do the same. At least, I didn’t think so.

“You were all over the place.”

“If I woulda got caught, these guys woulda killed me. I used to go out and drink with a guy after screwing his wife. The police came up with all these enemies I had.” He listed some names, including black guys in the Bronx from whom he said he would buy dope back in the day. “Where they lived, it was a rough neighborhood, Lewis Avenue, Hundred Thirty-Eighth Street. They don’t like white people around there. They tried to take me out, they tried to murder me down there, I ain’t gonna lie about it.”

The stories often came rapid-fire. On one hand, they sometimes seemed to have nothing to do with each other. On the other hand, taken as a whole, over the course of many conversations, they began to form an overall picture: that of a lost, strung-out young man trying to get attention in a number of ways, many dangerous, all equally sad.

“Who tried to take you out?”

“Some jokers, I don’t know who. I’m telling you they are not fond of white people. They blew the windshield out, brand-new Buick, it was my father’s car, blew my windshield right out, that’s how close they got. I had a.357
Magnum, I pulled it out, Duchek was in there screaming.”

I quickly flipped through the file and found the name Liam Duchek. A friend of Ronnie’s, someone he used to run around with in the neighborhood. And, like Ronnie, apparently a big fan of recreational drugs.

“Duchek was with you?”

“Yeah, we used to get up to stuff together. Things could get a little wild. Like I’m trying to tell you, some of them are very leery about doing business with white guys. But in the end, everybody got to know me, and they told me, ‘Look, you’re safe, you ain’t gonna have a problem.’ Every day I had a new car, a different car, a new Buick. There was one guy I sold a Riviera to, a Gran Sport Riviera, the same color as my father’s car, the one I was using; it was his favorite, burgundy with wine-color interior and a white top. I said to the guys at the dealership, ‘Look, this is gonna sound crazy, but they got a Gran Sport Riviera, loaded, leather interior, sunroof; they paid cash for it.’ Then my grandfather starts in with me: ‘What are you doing with these drug dealers?’ ”

“Rocco DeFeo,” I said, looking at my notes. Ronald Sr.’s father.

“Yeah. He was known as Rocky DeFeo. That’s what we called him. The next morning I had to go to work early, we had to open it up, take it out of the showroom, make it ready. I undercoated the car, tank up with gas, it said three gallons, three gallons my ass. I got up to stuff all the time. I was no good. That’s why they were planning to kill me.”

“Who was planning to kill you, Ronnie?”

“Both of them. My father and my great-uncle, Pete DeFeo. Thanksgiving day.”

I flipped through the file again. Peter “Pete” DeFeo, born March 4, 1902, died April 6, 1993. Known as “Philie Aquilino,” a New York mobster who grew up in Little Italy and became a
caporegime
under a number of big-name bosses, including Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. After becoming a made man, Pete worked his way up the ranks, eventually achieving the rank of captain and operating his “businesses” out of various social clubs in the neighborhood and the Cuomo Cheese Corporation. At his peak, it seemed Pete DeFeo was one of the more respected bosses on the Lower East Side.

How ironic, then, that he didn’t truly become known until November 1974, when his grandnephew was convicted of killing Pete’s niece, Louise, along with her husband and their other four kids. Pete, along with, it seemed, everyone else in the vicinity, was considered an early suspect before the clamps came down on Ronnie.

“You think they were planning to kill you?”

“I don’t think so, I know so. I overheard the whole conversation. My father says, ‘He’s using drugs, he’s using heroin, we can’t trust him. The kid knows too much; he’s gonna take us down. He comes home late at night, drives his mother nuts.’ They were gonna do it. Thanksgiving day. You gonna kill your own kid? I mean, come on.”

No matter where they’re from or what kind of lives
they lead, all teenagers get restless. I was no different. Around my eighteenth birthday, I felt my spirit being pulled. If I think about it, I suppose it was different from the usual scenario, since the reason for my restlessness wasn’t just the typical desire to escape my parents’ rules and do my own thing.

It was something more than that. Voices were coming through to me, from multiple directions, asking for help. Some of them seemed near, some distant. But they were calling. The feeling overcoming me wasn’t like wanderlust. It was a need to answer the voices.

I had always known my mother to travel—New York, California, elsewhere. She’d go almost monthly, sometimes for a week, sometimes two, usually scouting and buying properties in which she could perform her rituals. New York was the place that drew her most powerfully,
and most often, and because of that, I’d always felt a kinship for the place, too, though I’d never been.

The voodoo community, especially the elders with whom my mother conferred, saw my need and understood it. You have to realize that Louisiana Voodoo is not just a practice; it’s a religion, too. Some people are raised in the arms of the church or the synagogue or the mosque. I was raised in the arms of medicine men, dark priestesses, and warrior chiefs. That was my spiritual cocoon.

They agreed it was time for me to spread my wings, but they also needed to know I was up for the challenge. I would be assigned travels, forays into the outmost corners and darkest places, where my job would be to record and witness demonic possession, followed by, in some cases, exorcisms. If it wasn’t too late, I would be charged with saving those who could still be brought back. The visits would require approval from the Vatican, the family’s priest, or someone high up in their church.

I feel this bears repeating. Some teens are sent on church missions or youth retreats. Others are encouraged to do exchanges with those of like-minded faiths. Teenagers in New Orleans who have a talent for communing with the dead are sent around the globe to chase the devil. At least, this one was.

My parents agreed. I hadn’t asked for the gift I’d been given, but, as my mother had told me, with the gift came responsibility. I set out for the world, to see how many lost souls I could help.

I would return home to the bayou regularly, especially when my mother needed, or wanted, more money. After
all, despite her own gifts, for a long time I’d been her meal ticket, the strange and compelling child who could connect with the other side. She knew I could still bring people in for her, and I, still trying to win her approval, was happy to fulfill my role.

During one of these stops, in 1982, I was back in Nola preparing for a séance my mother wanted me to lead. A group of entertainers from California were flying in to see if they could make contact with someone who had passed to the next world, and my mother and I now stood with the five of them in a cemetery, invoking the gods. It was after midnight on a typical sticky Louisiana night. The banging of our drums, along with the crackling from our fire, were the only sounds filling the air. We were making offerings to Baron Semedi, the keeper of the dead and an important deity in the voodoo religion, a figure half in this world and half in the other.

I noticed someone at the side of the cemetery, watching. He was alone. Curiosity seekers aren’t unusual, but the power I felt flowing from this person was different from normal. Seeing me catch his gaze, he walked forward. As he approached, I saw he was a muscular young man who looked to be in his late teens, like me. He stood as rigid as a cadet.

“Are you Jackie Palermo?” he said.

“Who wants to know?” I asked.

“My name is Adam,” he said. “Adam Quinn. I’m from New York. I go to Saint John’s, and I’m here for a national track meet this week. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Who told you about me?”

“We’re staying at the LSU dorms. Everybody there knows about you.”

“What do you want?”

“Is it true what they say?”

“I don’t know. What do they say?”

“They say you can show heaven and hell.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I want to know about voodoo,” he went on. “I want to learn about what you do.”