The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (17 page)

Joanne did a quick search while I asked Ronnie some innocuous questions. She wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to me. It read, “South Oaks—mental institution—Sunrise Island.”

“You’re telling me George Lutz spent time in a mental facility, Ronnie?”

“I’m not sure of the year, but it was right before I came to prison, so I would assume 1973. His grandfather had died, and I assume he just lost it. He had more than a breakdown. I mean he snapped.”

“How do you know this?”

“I saw the guy. Some of the people I was running around with, they were all older than me, they said, ‘Come on, let’s take a ride.’ Three of them. We took turns driving. I don’t know which car I had, to tell you the truth. It was all on the down-low, because one of the guys I took there was a big-time bookmaker. So the four of us went to South Oaks.”

“And you had no idea why?”

“No, I just went because I went. I must have had my
father’s car, or maybe my mother’s, the new station wagon. I went, Duchek went, the bookmaker went, and his associate went. I said, ‘What are we going to the nuthouse for?’ The bookie says, ‘We’re gonna go see my friend George.’ We go, and they introduce me to this guy. ‘Butch, this is George Lutz.’ ”

I asked myself again how much of this story was truth and how much was invention. And again I came to the same vague conclusion: it seemed pretty detailed to be made up. Still, it didn’t matter what I thought. Hospitals don’t disclose patient records; therefore, this wasn’t a claim we could verify or refute.

“After a couple of minutes I was asked to leave. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but I figured George must have owed the bookie money or something. Whatever. Then I realized I already knew who he was.”

Ronnie claimed he knew a circle of guys who used cocaine on the weekends and that he was their source. George Lutz, he told me, was part of that. “I didn’t realize at first that it was the same guy.”

“So you’re saying George was doing cocaine at the time?”

“I don’t know. I would assume so. I mean, this guy was in his own zone, man. Way out there.”

“What did George have to do with booking?”

“How do I know? He might have been gambling. But something had to be going on for this guy, the guy I took there, to go see him personally. I gotta say, that man was out of his mind. If it was an act, it was a good one.”

I’d been thinking the same thing.

“I mean, he belonged right where he was.”

“Why would it be an act?”

“I don’t know. I saw him after that, maybe a few months later, at a bar in town. I believe it was the Chatterbox, on Merrick Road. He came in there looking for somebody. He seen me and asked me if I saw so-and-so; I said no. Yeah, I believe that’s where it was. Next thing I know, my family’s all dead, I’m in jail, and this nut is making me an offer on the goddamn house.”

“How did he get to that point?”

“The bank told me someone wants to buy it. But before anyone could buy it, I had to sign a release, since everything was mine. And when I inquired about who’s buying the house, they told me someone named Lutz. I asked if his first name was George, and they said yeah. I told them he don’t have that kind of money. They told me the bank’s giving him eighty thousand. So I said, ‘Screw that, let’s make it a hundred.’ I didn’t care. I was happy to sit on the place. ‘He better come up with twenty thousand,’ I said. ‘He better borrow it from somebody else, ’cause the bank ain’t gonna give him the rest.’ I don’t know where he came up with the money, but he came up with it. Not through the bank, though.”

“And that went right into the estate?”

“Not the twenty thousand; that went under the table. That went south. I got part of that in my pocket, so I didn’t care. But the eighty. And as soon as he went in the house, he contacted Weber, my attorney, who came over to the house to see him, and his wife, and over plenty of wine, and they were also eating some cheese, they came
up with the story. He took Weber’s ideas—the red-eyed pig, the neighbor’s cat, the marching band—they made all this nonsense up. They turned normal things into figments of imaginations.”

“And he didn’t want to come forward and say that he had ever met you before.”

“Of course not. Nobody knew about that because I wouldn’t feed into George Lutz and his nonsense. So he comes to Clinton, since Weber knew they were gonna have a hard time with me going along with this crap. George comes up to Clinton and offers me seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars—that was the first offer; the second offer was eight hundred and fifty—to go along with these shenanigans. None of it was true. A sixty-seven-piece marching band? Come on. The red-eyed pig, beds going up and down off the ground? Please.”

“What happened when they left the house?”

“They went and got Jay Anson in California to write the book.”

It was the first time Ronnie had directly referred to
The Amityville Horror
, the book that had started his macabre roller-coaster ride of fame, or to Jay Anson, the man the Lutzes had hired to write it.
A True Story
, the subtitle had read.

“Meantime, the Lutzes left all the furniture in the house and stuck me with the mortgage. They had to come to me. I had to get papers notarized, signed, before they could think about selling the house. The bank was screaming. Of course, I was incarcerated, so the bank wasn’t about to get their money back from me. So it got sold again.”

“Let’s just be clear, here, Ronnie. You’re telling me that the Lutzes offered you money to confirm the story.”

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Then eight-fifty.”

“If you want me to tell the world your story, this is part of it. So you’re saying to me this is the rock-solid truth.”

“Seven-fifty. I said no. Then eight-fifty. I told them to go screw themselves. But no matter what, I’m still the Amityville Horror.”

I had taken
Will’s hand and gone back. “This is your mother,” he’d said. “Your own mother. You can’t be afraid. Something else may have taken her, but you have to bring her back home.”

Her body was wrapped with the religious relics and removed from the hotel in the middle of the night. Along with the priests, I had blessed the room, which was then boarded up by a team led by the man with the badge I’d seen in the doorway. A burnt cross—the symbol of an exorcism—was smeared in ashes above the door, warning others never again to enter.

We took her remains to a secret location where curiosity seekers would hopefully leave to rest the mother I had loved and longed for and not disturb the demon that slept within, waiting to be reawakened. I was like a shattered piece of glass, in pieces but still strong, fractured but still dangerous.

After my mother
passed, Will, Joanne, and I, along with Uncle Ray, stayed in Brooklyn. I was clinging to my
mother’s stolen spirit. I would go back home to New Orleans often to be with my father, but we seldom spoke during this long period. He would just sit, waiting—for what I couldn’t tell. He was present but murky, one foot in this domain, the other already starting on the path back to my mother. In my memory it seems the only words we exchanged were with our eyes. The silences spoke volumes. Voices would have only provided false substance.

The greatest favor I felt I owed my father was to be genuine. He had both taught me life and allowed me to discover it through my own perception. At six, when I lost my first tooth, I sat on the edge of my bed holding it in my hand and wanting badly to believe that if I put it under my pillow, a magical fairy would come during the night, place it in her bag, and leave money in exchange. But by then I’d already seen too much. I threw the tooth out the window. My father never mentioned it.

He left the plantation and tucked himself away in the bayou, the comfortable heart of all he’d known. It was nothing more than a shack—the shack where my life had started. I’d watched my mother do her mojo there, watched her meticulously assemble her bag of charms, amulets, blood from medicine men, particles of bones, herbs from the Louisiana swamps. “Mojo can heal as well as take, Jackie,” she would tell me. “The bag is an embodiment of strength and energy, its contents the physical infused with the spiritual. It is the essence of the person enhanced by the gifts of the practitioner. Respect the energy, and always remember, the same hand that rocks the cradle can dig the hole of death.”

The mojo bags I most enjoyed watching her make were those commemorating a birth. She would sit alone, music playing, the music sometimes the newborn’s cry from the next room. Her face would change as she went into full possession. “You are awakening the dead for their assistance, Jackie. Open up to them; let yourself be the conduit.”

The bag would be placed on an altar to charge. Candles would be lit, and an offering would be given, something of worth, never to be touched again. When the bag was ready, it would be soaked in oils that had been handmade from a ritual book written in blood and passed down through my family for two hundred years.

Settled in Brooklyn,
I developed a client base and a regular working pattern. Though letters would come in from all over the world from those experiencing paranormal phenomena and possession, I stayed put. Together Will and I continued to study our spirituality and enhance our psychic power. I welcomed the appeals from people wanting to be read or desiring help communicating with souls stuck in between. Our existence was becoming, at least in a relative sense, normal.

One morning, there was a knock at my door. I opened it to find a muscular man with a kind face. One I recognized.

“Hello, Chiefy,” I said. “How did you find me?”

“I’ve got ways,” Adam Quinn replied. “I’m a detective now. Of course, you knew that already.”

I had seen the path he would take years before, back
in Nola, and now, as I invited him into my home, he talked about the individual steps that had taken him forward. After returning to New York, he had become a policeman in the Midtown South Precinct. Then a patrol sergeant. Followed by special ops lieutenant, detective squad commanding officer, and, eventually, captain of homicide.

“How did you come to be in New York?” he said.

“It’s a long story.”

“Then let me cut to the chase. I could use your help. Will you come to my office?”

I agreed, because I saw something in Adam I had seen the first time we’d met: sympathy across dimensions, a connection to both realms.

I accompanied him to his office in Brooklyn, a plain, low-slung gray building hidden in back of Gold Street behind the imposing courthouses with their columns and statues. Along the way I passed a number of people I figured were criminals, but Adam assured me that half of them were detectives working undercover. He was now in charge of overseeing all homicide cases in the city, and he had put away more killers than anyone previously in the role had done.

We walked into his office, and all I saw were boxes. Dozens of them, stacked on the floor, shoved up against the wall, piled on his desk.

“These are all unsolved cold cases,” he said. “I wondered if you might be able to help.”

“You never quit, do you?” I said.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t.”

I was in his office the entire day and all evening. Most cases occupied multiple boxes, but it wasn’t all that paperwork he wanted me to go through. He just wanted me to look at pictures.

His office was like a morgue, the boxes holding photos instead of bodies. It was like a bizarre twist on someone showing you his or her photo album, except Adam’s album was of the dead or missing. He would place a picture in front of me and plead for information.
What am I missing? Give me a face, a name; give me something to go on.
He would pace around the office, nervous, angry, desperate. This went on for hours. I would tell him things, hand him pieces to try to complete the three hundred puzzles that filled his office.

The news was never good. This body has been burned and put in a drum, Adam. It was the boy’s father, Adam. Abused him and then killed him. They used acid on this one. This one’s bones were buried in different places. It was the uncle, Adam. Got the girl pregnant and then killed her and her mom. I’m sorry, Adam. I’m sorry.

He was devastated by each one of these cases. And I felt a growing duty to him, just as he felt a duty to those who had been forced out of this life and into the next. He had made it his mission to bring them to rest, and he wouldn’t stop at anything until he could do them this one last favor.

“I need you, Jackie,” he said. “I owe it to these families.”

From then on, we began to work as partners, if not on paper, then in practice. Adam’s was the gift of tenacity; mine was the gift of sight. He would review the cases and
apply his unyielding logic to them; then, when that proved inadequate, he’d bring them to me, and I would try to see in my head what his cold reason hadn’t been able to uncover. I would relive and re-enact. I would become. He became my advisor in the world of the practical, and I became his in the world of the spiritual. He respected my skills and understood when, and how, to apply them.

In the criminal underworld and in the homes of otherwise normal people, appalling things occur with awful frequency, and it’s a sad truth that thousands of these crimes remain unsolved every year. Though I’d seen and experienced more than most in my life, I still wasn’t prepared to see the cases that crossed Adam’s desk every day. There was no end to these files, and each seemed to hold a story more terrible than the last.

Much more often than seemed possible, the stories involved young people. Most of us float through our lives with only the tiniest awareness of truly bad things happening. Most of us never see such things. Most of us don’t come into even indirect contact with the people capable of doing them. For Adam, it was the opposite—his job was to be immersed in the depravity most of us never even glimpse.

It was the kind of job where you absorbed the pain of so many unhappy endings for the hope that one might turn out bright. Now and then, it happened. The cold cases would come in as an unending stream, from organizations, families, newsrooms, law enforcement. All of them arrived for the same reason. They hid something—something even seasoned detectives weren’t able to find.