The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (11 page)

“So robbing the bank was a way of saying you didn’t care what happened to you.”

“I was happy to do it or not do it. It was a dare.”

“What happened when you said that to the woman?”

“She says, ‘Oh my god, oh my god.’ I’d shaved my beard off, I had a blond wig. She starts screaming, ‘Don’t take it all, please!’ So I left all the singles and all the change.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I told you, for kicks. I was restless, I don’t know. Came out of there with thirty-nine thousand. The other guys couldn’t believe I’d did it. I gave them five grand apiece, kept the rest of the money. I didn’t hurt nobody. I was never arrested, never indicted. It’s ridiculous. I shoulda taken the singles. Probably another thousand or so. Manufacturers Hanover Trust, that was the name, it was on a corner. 1973.”

I signaled to Joanne, who looked up the bank online and came up empty. With some more searching, she quickly found that it had closed in 1992.

“The one we hit was in Manhattan. Peter was with me. Peter Hill, he was the schoolteacher. Peter got time for the bank. When I ran into him, in Suffolk County Jail, he had a female lawyer, I’ll never forget that, and he got probation and six months’ jail time running concurrent for that bank. The other charges he got two to four.”

“What other charges?”

“He had a lot of robberies. He robbed an HMC, the loan agency, and they shot him.”

“Who shot him?”

“I wouldn’t go with him on that one. He told me he was gonna do it, but I told him, ‘I’m not going,’ ’cause you had to go up a set of stairs. Sure enough, he went up those stairs, and they got him in a cross fire.”

“Who did, Ronnie?”

“A security guard who was there. Peter was a sitting duck coming up those stairs. He got shot a couple of times. He got two to four. But for the bank, the judge wanted him to make restitution, and he couldn’t, ’cause he woulda had to give me up.”

“He didn’t want to implicate you?”

“No, he was an all-right guy. Judge gave him six months’ jail time and five years’ probation after. I was never arrested, never indicted. It’s ridiculous.”

Ronnie DeFeo was a man caught permanently between unresolved guilt and righteous indignation. He seemed to resent every single person who had ever had a hand in
not
punishing him for wrongdoing. He was someone who had spent his entire youth trying to be as bad as possible in order to validate his father’s opinion of him and then becoming angrier and angrier with those who failed to help him bear it out.

When he said it was ridiculous that he hadn’t been arrested for robbing that bank, on the surface it might have sounded as though he was mocking the authorities for letting him get away. But I’d come to know him better than that. I knew by now that nothing gnawed at Ronnie’s soul more than the idea that bad people got away with things all the time.

The New Orleans
community is a separate world, happily detached. Like many other American ports, it was French first, then Spanish, and then French again, but its true fabric runs much deeper than that. The Louisiana Purchase opened the doors to everyone, and all manner of folks streamed in seemingly at once: French, Creole, Irish, German, Haitian. The first threads of a beautiful tapestry started to take form.

With it, the dark arts, practiced by many, took their place as well, and Louisiana Voodoo became a religion as important to some as the Catholicism that further separated the Big Easy from its Protestant cousins in the rest of the Bible Belt. Voodoo’s practitioners weren’t doing it as a lark. And they didn’t appreciate outsiders.

The occultists, and the police who supported their privacy, didn’t care how genuine Adam was in his interest. To them, he was nothing more than an outsider poking his nose around where it didn’t belong. When they caught him for the second night in a row standing in the cemetery observing my rituals, they told him in no uncertain terms that he’d best make his way back to New York, where his curiosity could be put to better use. They even insisted on personally escorting him back to the campus, just to make sure he got back safely.

Adam came to see me a fourth time before he left. Perhaps the spirit had put this young man in my way, or me in his. In my head, I was already seeing the course Adam would take. His prying ways were going to benefit
him later. He would not be a professional athlete. “I’ll see you where my other foot lies, Chiefy,” I told him. He looked at me curiously. And then he was gone.

It didn’t matter. He was already well on his path, as I was already well on mine. And I knew those paths would cross again.

In the latter
third of 2009, the gentle summer air was starting to take on an edge, and the leaves were beginning to turn. Ronnie DeFeo and I had been talking virtually every day for nearly six months now, but still I felt I couldn’t take him back to the night of his undoing. Not yet. He had bottled the memory in a place deep inside that had remained locked for half a lifetime. The typical exercises I might use to return someone to an earlier event—immersion, forced recall, holding his face up to the mirror—weren’t going to work here. The process was going to have to be slower. Like someone seeking catharsis but unsure how to take the first step, he would approach the topic of the murders himself but then abruptly step back. I could hear the pain begin to engulf him as he got close, the drug-induced haze of his youth replaced now by the stark, painful clarity of recollection. Inevitably, he would retreat.

I tried to come at it from different angles instead. “Do you want to talk about your siblings, Ronnie?”

“What is there to talk about? I loved them kids. Before all the shit happened, we had fun. In 1973, before Christmas, we had snow. I took them to Bethpage State Park, at nighttime.”

“How old were they, Ronnie?”

“Let’s see, Dawn was seventeen. Allison and Marc were about twelve and eleven. And John would have been around eight.”

“Did you do stuff with them a lot?”

“Of course I did. Those were good kids. They never did nothing wrong. I said come on, put warm clothes on, gloves, hat—except me, I didn’t even have gloves on—and we went. I took them tobogganing. And I told them, ‘Listen, this is what you gotta do,’ and I helped each one of them grab the cable. Because you try to walk up there, it’s suicide, there’s people coming down that hill like it’s going out of style. You’ll get run over. They’re coming down on cardboard, garbage-can lids, sleds, skis, anything, all at the same time. So anyway, to make a long story short, each one of them I lifted up and told them to grab the cable; they thought that was funny. So they all did that; they went up the hill. I took the toboggan; I was the last one to go up. Everybody sat on, I told them, ‘Listen, everybody gotta hold on.’ I sat in the back; I was gonna steer. I said, ‘If this thing hits the tree, or hits the road, oh my God.’ Anyway, with all that weight on it, I’m telling you, we were doing at least fifty miles an hour. ‘God,’ I said, ‘if we hit something now, I couldn’t stop it’—we went across the road, we kept going, to the next lot. We finally stopped; every one of them was laughing. We went back up again. I had to go around a guy on skis. Then I took them somewhere, one of them ice-cream joints, Friendly’s; there was one in Nassau County. I took them over there, bought them ice cream, then I went home. They were soaking wet and laughing.”

“People have said you had to be the parent to your siblings, Ronnie. Is that true?”

“No, that ain’t true. My mother took care of the kids. Drove them to school and picked them up in our station wagon. I wasn’t their parent, but I loved them. Took them fishing all the time. I took them to Adventurous Inn on Route 110, the playland there. I took my little brother to the bar with me. I used to take them everywhere. I was in the process of buying them a motorcycle, but then this crap happened, and that was that. Tell you something about my two brothers. That show
Batman
was on TV, every night, five days a week. My mother hated when that show came on, because the two of them upstairs, Marc and John, they’d wait for me to come home, and when that came on, the music, the theme started, and boy oh boy, it was a free-for-all. The two of them got on chairs and just dove on me. I said, ‘Aw, Jesus, here we go.’ ”

He had loved it. You could hear it in his voice as plain as day.

“Then the dog would get mad and start biting me. Candie. Hundred-ten-pound German shepherd. They’d wait for me to come home from Brooklyn, from work. ‘Come on, we gotta watch TV!’ Thank God that show was only half an hour. The two of them, jumping on me. Plus the dog hopping all over me, following me everywhere, biting the crap out of me, every day. I go upstairs; I’m in the sitting room; they had a fifty-gallon fish tank in their room. No, bigger than fifty, it was on a wrought-iron stand my father had bought just for the tank, with expensive fish, exotic fish. They’re beating the crap out
of me as usual, and we stumble into the tank. As I’m breaking loose from them, I see the thing’s coming down. I feel the water hit me, then
boom
—it smashes against the rug, water and fish everywhere. I said, ‘Oh my God.’ My mother comes up there, she says, ‘What the hell?’ We had to put that dog to sleep.”

“Because it was wild?”

“No, because it was crippled. Bad hip.”

“When was that?”

“A few years before all the shit happened with my family. The poor thing had a hip displacement. I carried her into the vet, and the vet put her down.”

The sadness of the event was still there in Ronnie’s voice. Or he was a very good actor. But I didn’t think that was the case.

“Everyone in the house was crying. She was like a member of the family. I was real close with them kids.”

“Did your father hit the other kids, too, or just you?”

“He and Dawn would get into it, but I was the only one he really went at. And my mother, she got abused all the time. If she woulda killed him, or did something, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened. I mean, that’s a fact. She had two boyfriends at least. At the same time. Look, why did she wear a red dress all the time? She gave a lot of people a certain impression of her. I mean, ain’t that the devil’s color?”

“Did your father know about her affairs?” I asked.

Ronnie said he did. “One time my father took me over to this guy’s house; he took me there; we were casing his house. We were coming home from Brooklyn, got off at, I
forget where, we got off the parkway, we were checking out his house in the daytime to see if she was there. We wanted to bust the fucking door down. I didn’t ask him, but I was pretty sure he wanted to do away with the guy for good.”

“What would she do, go over to his house?”

“She’d do it in her own bed. I don’t know, I’m just saying. He admitted he had an affair with my mother out in the open. He was gonna get murdered. This was the hairstylist. We cased his house a few times. It was just waiting; because this guy had a family, it was gonna be hard to get him without his family. My father said we were gonna have to get ski masks. ‘Ski masks?’ I said. ‘Listen, look at the size of you; ski masks ain’t gonna do nothing. If they give a description, forget it.’ He got mad and he cracked me. He said, ‘Get him to come back to the house, and when he follows, we’ll run him off the road and then shoot him. We’ll put two in his head and then leave.’ I said, ‘Oh boy, this guy.’ But he got the other guy. Brother Isaac.”

“That’s the one you mentioned before. You said he’d been your gym teacher at Saint Francis.”

“Yeah, he was. I mean, the guy was a brother, for Christ’s sake. There were two episodes. The first one, it was just a fight.”

“Tell me what went down, Ronnie.”

“We go to Sheepshead Bay, me and my father. He took me with him. I didn’t know what was going on. He told me we’re going to pay someone a visit, and he takes me to an apartment I never seen. He knocks on the door and tells me the guy’s a brother. I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, a guy from when you went to Saint Francis Prep.’ ”

“So he meant a priest.”

“Yeah. They were all priests that ran that place. All of them were brothers. I went to Saint Francis Prep, and those were the brothers there. Them brothers would get on the bus every day with civilian clothes on. Not habits. And they were fooling around. Some of them had cars. Some of them took the bus; some of them took the train. They were fooling around with broads, I knew that for a fact. Like we saw one on a train with a broad. ’Cause I didn’t get off where I was supposed to get off. And I’m gonna tell you something. Guy named Vito worked in our Buick dealership. One of his actual brothers was a brother in Saint Francis Prep. So I knew what he was doing. Vito used to advertise it. He had a broad on the side; he had a room somewhere. It’s what they do. They were in there hiding, most of them.”

“What happened after he knocked on the door?”

“I said to my father, ‘So what are we doing?’ I didn’t see no brothers. ‘This guy’s not only a brother,’ my father said, ‘but guess what—he’s screwing your mother.’ I said, ‘Come on, man.’ ”

“Did you think your mother was having an affair?”

“I knew my mother was sleeping around. She didn’t do much to hide it.”

“Were you afraid?”

“I never knew what to think with him. I don’t know how, but my father had a key. There were two locks, and he had keys for both. He put the keys in the door and undid the locks. My father barges in, and there’s Brother Isaac, the guy who used to be my gym teacher. He stands up. There was a couch in the living room and the TV; the
apartment was just one big area. The only thing separate was the bathroom. My father rushes at him, and the next thing I know, they’re throwing punches. I didn’t know who was gonna win, I ain’t gonna lie about it.”

“He gave him a fight?”

“He gave him a fight. But my father prevailed, as always. He gave him a really bad beating. Threw him into the coffee table and just went to town on him. And Brother Isaac wasn’t no small guy, he was just as big as my father, but more slender and muscular. He had to be a good two-fifty, and he was the same height, five-ten, maybe half an inch taller.”