The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (16 page)

For a moment I saw her face, like a flickering image trying to achieve resolution. She squeezed my hand, and her mouth tried to move but couldn’t form words. I could see her fighting, pleading. My mother’s eyes looked back at me with love as a tear slid down over her cheekbone.

Then she was gone.

As Ronnie’s body
continued to submit, his outward bravado continued to diminish. I knew this meant that, one way or another, things were coming to a head. The shadows around him were getting stronger as he was getting weaker. But his physical apathy was secondary. More
important was that his spirit was slowly relinquishing. I’d heard plenty of people talk about the welcome relief of death before, but often these were people who were prone to melodrama. Ronnie DeFeo was a lot of things, but melodramatic wasn’t one of them. In an odd way, he was understated. But our conversations had become infused with a single theme lately, and I believed I was beginning to hear in his voice a clear note of surrender.

“What are you talking about death for?” I said. “We’re not talking about death. We’re talking about life.”

“I know that, I know that, but Jackie, it’s getting real bad. I just had to go change my clothes, because the fluid’s just running all over me. It’s a constant flow; you can’t control it. It comes out of the left side or right side a little; then it just starts pouring out.”

“You feel it coming out?”

“If I’m up. I touch my beard and I say, what is this? It’s white and it’s real sticky and hard. It’s nasty.”

“Like spit?”

“Nah, it’s fluid. You should see what it’s doing to my clothes. Had to change my shirt again, it’s covered. That’s why I keep coughing, that’s why my voice is like this. This ain’t my voice. I’m just so tired. You don’t know how tired I am.”

“There is a different way to end this, Ronnie.”

“I’m going to do what I’m going to do. I’m telling you right now I’m scared that I’m gonna do it. I’ll do it real quick. We can win if I end it.”

“Your spirit will be tormented.”

“We’re gonna meet up somewhere else, him and me, and I got something for him. It’s the only way to end it.”

“Ronnie, that’s not true. I’ve seen worse cases than yours. In Haiti, in South Africa. I am telling you, there is no way you have to do yourself in. Because then he wins. All of this.”

“No, he loses. He can’t torture me no more.”

“It’s not going to be over, Ronnie. You don’t just die and it’s like sleeping without dreaming. It doesn’t work that way.”

“I woke up with two black eyes one day, and I still got them.”

“Nobody knows the torment you’ve been living with all these years. I know that.”

“Maybe that heart is still in the backyard. If that thing was to get dug up? Oh my god.”

“Ronnie, all these things you’ve held on to for all these years, it gives him momentum.”

“I gotta go. I gotta get ready.”

“Ronnie, you’re not going to go execute yourself because of your father.”

“Tell Joanne I say good-bye.”

“Come on, Ronnie. Tell me some good news.”

“The good news is now you know how to stop it.”

“No. That’s not the way. We can dig up that area, where the heart is.”

“Right outside the door of the boathouse. As far as you can go, to the fence.”

“You can’t kill yourself, Ronnie. You can’t. You spent
all of your adulthood behind bars, and then you’re going to just end your life? You’re not a coward.”

“Eighty years old. That’s what the bastard would be. Tonight.”

“You’re a warrior.”

“I ain’t even gonna try to go to sleep.”

“Ronnie, you can’t beat him by joining him. It doesn’t work that way. It would defeat everything. You can’t beat it like this. When we first started talking, you hated everything and everyone. For the first time in your life, all of that disappears. You call me now and ask how everyone is, the cat, Joanne. You live, you feel.”

“Well, that’s because I love you.”

It was the first time he had said it. I knew he had started to feel something like love, but hearing him say it meant something crucial: it meant the battle could still be swung, could still be, in the end, won. “And now you want to just turn around and end it? You can’t. You’re not
allowed
to.”

“This is a game, don’t you understand?”

“It doesn’t matter who you’re being haunted by. The only thing that matters is you have to have faith in yourself, and you have to have faith in me. You aren’t a coward. Think of the places you’ve been and the things you’ve endured. You aren’t a weak kid, you’re a man. Am I right or wrong?”

“You’re right, you’re right. I mean, this is a maximum-security prison. Sixty percent of the population here is doing life. I met a kid yesterday, seventeen years old, seventy-five to life. That’s his minimum. Has to live
seventy-five more years before he can go to the parole board. They got another one with one-twenty-five to life. I’m not a tough guy, but when I first came to prison, I learned what I did and what I had to do.”

“How many prisons have you been in, Ronnie? How many different places?”

I already knew how many prisons he’d been in. I was just trying to get him to talk about something else.

“Oh Christ. I’ve been in Sing Sing. I’ve been in Clinton twice. I’ve been to Auburn. I’ve been to Attica. Sullivan, Eastern. I spent the night at Comstock. They threw me out; the superintendent said he didn’t want me in his facility.”

“Why?”

“Same reason as always—they think I’m trouble because of this shit following me. The popular guy is always bad news. Superintendent, chubby guy, he had a suit on, no tie, he said, ‘Mr. DeFeo, this is nothing personal toward you, but I don’t want you in my facility. It’s not that you cause problems, but the notoriety that follows you, I just don’t want it. We don’t need no celebrities here.’ I said, ‘Celebrities? I’m just trying to do my time, sir.’ He said, ‘Quick as the bus comes, you’re leaving.’ Took me back to Downstate. Bus driver said, ‘You’ve been on and off this bus seven times this week. What the hell’s going on with you? Nobody wants you. What the hell did you do?’ I said, ‘They don’t want me. They think I’m trouble.’ ”

“So you were transferred right away?”

“I was only there about seven or eight hours.” The giggle again, that disturbing childlike sound that choked itself off almost as soon as it had escaped. “I had to stay
down in the basement until they got a new bus to take me outta there. It was eleven o’clock at night. Off to Sullivan. But it happened there, too. The priest this time. They hold services, you know, over at the church. They had an altar boy named Speedy, he was lighting the candles, but they kept blowing out. So I lit them back, and they went out again. And then suddenly it’s, ‘Maybe it’s that Amityville Horror shit flying around here.’ I had to stop going up to the church. The priest asked me not to come back. Anyway, it don’t matter. This has all gotta come to an end.”

“Don’t start that again, Ronnie.”

“The cell they put me in, the cell I’m in now, the guy was a friend of mine. He died. They got me in a dead man’s cell. I mean, Jesus Christ. Most of the guys I know, they’re dropping dead around here like it’s going out of style. One more ain’t gonna make much of a difference. They’ll be happy to see me go. Anyway, you shouldn’t be part of this no more. I don’t wanna put you in harm’s way.”

“This is not an end,” I told him. “You’re talking about a fight for eternity. Who gets the crown?”

“I love you, Jackie.”

“You can’t use the words
love
and
suicide
in the same sentence. You can’t love if you want to destroy.”

“That guy named Robert Blake just died. His daughter had to sell the tow truck to get money to get the autopsy done and to bury him. Doctor showed her the picture—this is the cause of death. Both his lungs were full of mold. Fungal pneumonia. That was the cause of his death. Both lungs. And now who’s got fungal pneumonia?
There’s something in this jail that I’m breathing, and that’s how I got this. And the goddamn doctor is saying my immune system’s so weak it won’t fight it off. I said, ‘Why is it weak? I don’t have AIDS or HIV.’ They’re trying to cover it up. They take a big needle and put it in your back and try to get the fluid out. This might be my last night, Jackie. I love you. You know, I never loved nothing in my life. I think I loved my dog, the one I had to put to sleep. Candie. They had to put her to sleep.”

“I know, Ronnie. We’ve talked about it.”

“She needed a new hip.”

“Ronnie, focus. Stop rambling. You need to stop talking like this.”

“I’m real messed up, do you understand that? It’s over. I’m tired. I’m tired of fighting with my father. I’m fighting a losing battle. I’m gonna go take a shower. I don’t wanna be dirty when they come get me.”

As Mary Palermo
sank away and the devil re-emerged, the entire room began to shake. Signs and pictures fell off the wall and shattered on the floor. The thing occupying my mother laughed in a guttural voice. Its eyes darted back and forth and its breaths became a hiss.
You will be next
, it said. Behind me the priest spoke his ministrations, trying to keep his voice steady. The demon spoke to me again.
I remember you
, it said, and this time I slapped my hands over my ears and stumbled backward. The priest yelled to someone for holy water.

I sat in the corner of the room and held my knees to
my chest as the priest lay two sets of rosary beads across her body. He began to chant last rites. I struggled to my feet and raced for the door.

There was a large man guarding it, blocking my way. Or at least I thought at first that he was guarding the door, but then I realized I was wrong. He was coming in as I was running out. As I hurried past him, I noticed a badge clipped to his belt.

I thought I sensed someone else there, too, someone familiar, calling my name in entreaty. But as I staggered down the steps, pushing past the drug addicts and night crawlers, I processed little, my only goal to get away, as far away as possible from the terror extending its claws through the spirit of my dead mother and, it seemed, indefinitely toward me. I weaved around the tramps and vagabonds, my shoulders scuffing both sides of the narrow staircase. It seemed the whole building was being brought to its knees. The walls tremored and the floor buckled.

I felt as though something was running directly behind me, carrying with it the screams from inside, for as I ran I could still hear them as clearly as when I had been inside the room. I passed back through the broken entrance and breathed the outside air, though still it seemed a wicked hand was on my shoulder. Rain was coming down in sheets, and the fall air felt icy.

I kept running. I ran across the boardwalk, down across the empty beach, into the ocean until the water lapped at my knees. Above me seagulls circled and shrieked. The tears came hard and fast as I tried to process the fact that my mother had just passed away, during an
exorcism, in a rat- and drug-infested hotel room. The tears turned to gasps, my throat seeming to close in on itself. I tried to snatch breath from the air, but it wouldn’t come. All that air, but no breath.

I didn’t want to turn and look back. But as I stood in the shallow water gasping for air, tears sliding off my chin and mixing with the rain and the ocean, I thought,
You know me, but I know you, too. And I’ll be ready.

Just then a wave curled high out of the water, swelling twice as large as the others, and slammed into me. It staggered me but didn’t knock me down. A familiar voice registered in my head, a voice that soothed me amid the piercing anguish. Again it called, and I turned to see Will walking into the water toward me.

“Take my hand,” he said.

I looked at him, tried to pull my soul up toward the reality of him—his face, his skin, his outstretched hand. “Please,” he said. “Take it.”

My first thought, when I had run from the hotel and across the boardwalk, was to keep walking into that ocean and never stop. I would let the water wash over me, I would float past the breakers, I would become one with the elements forever. Will’s caring eyes held me and started to bring me back.

“Take it, Jackie.”

As the flood of tears began to abate, I willed my hand to reach out toward his, to grab on and keep hold of this side. His palm, upturned, hovered there, the wrist still, the water below it forever in motion. A single, strong hand, the palm patterned with curves and arcs, a cool
still-life against the dark energy roiling inside me. His fingers splayed, desperate in their appeal. I stared at the hand. It was my only anchor.

“Ronnie, listen to
me. It can be beaten.”

“I’m tired, Jackie. I mean, now I’m being sent anonymous obituaries.”

“What?”

“I got obituaries in the mail. Four of them. I don’t know who the hell sent them to me. Who’s going to send me obituaries? What for? I had it checked out. The post office box and the zip code in New York that they came from doesn’t exist. Four obituaries I got. The DA’s obituary was a third of a page long. ‘Amityville Horror Prosecutor Dies’—that’s what it said. You don’t think he had anything to do with that?”

“Who?”

“My father, that’s who. Did you hear what I said? Not just ‘Prosecutor Dies.’ ‘
Amityville
Horror
Prosecutor Dies.’
I’m
the Amityville Horror. It’s ridiculous is what I’m trying to tell you. That was a story about the goddamn Lutzes. I ain’t got nothing to do with it. He came to Clinton, George Lutz, offered me the money to go along with them. I said no.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t go along with them.”

“Just a second, Ronnie. Slow down. The Lutzes offered you money to go along with the Amityville story?”

“They started all this crap. And because of
The
Amityville Horror
, I’m put in this position. But none of that is true. They wanted me to go along with them, because they knew that I knew. But nothing happened to them. Nothing. George Lutz walked into a house that he couldn’t afford, and he had to try to find a way to get out of it. That’s all that happened. The truth of the matter is he paid a hundred thousand for the house. Eighty through the bank, the rest cash. The man got into something over his head, and then he had to try to make the money back somewhere. Guy was a loony tune. He was in South Oaks.”