The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (18 page)

As Joanne got older, she became my assistant. She
would prioritize the cases, she told me, according to what she felt. I never questioned her. The order wasn’t suggested by Adam. Different cases just pulled at Joanne more than others. I didn’t ask why.

One evening we were having a birthday dinner at home for Joanne—just me, her, Will, and Ray, plus the pets. Suddenly Joanne said she needed to check the fax. One of us, I can’t remember who, told her to take an evening off and stay at the table. It was her birthday, for God’s sake. She ignored us.

A few minutes later, she returned, holding the single fax that had arrived: a flyer showing the face of a pretty young woman, accompanied by a note from her family. The young woman’s name was Bonnie. Bonnie’s twenty-first birthday had just passed, they said, and she was still missing, as she had been for several weeks. They feared the worst but couldn’t bear to imagine it. The police had been of no help. They said they had no leads.

Joanne placed the fax, and Bonnie’s picture, on the table in front of me. Almost immediately I felt a spiritual pitching, like a wave of nausea. An image slowly started to materialize. I tried to keep the surge at bay. Sometimes it crystallizes fast; sometimes you have to fight the psychic rush long enough to see all the way in.

“Call Adam,” I said. Joanne got him on the phone, and he asked what she was doing working on her birthday. I took the receiver. “Adam, we have a missing person. Twenty-one years of age. Five-eight, one-sixty. Shoulder-length brown hair, dark blue eyes. Lives in the Valley.”

“I’m at a family Christmas party,” he said.

“She’s still alive.”

A short time later, Adam arrived at my house. The two of us, with Joanne, huddled. I told him what I felt: that the girl was in Florida.

“You said she was from the Valley,” Adam said. “California.”

“That’s where she’s
from
,” I said. “But that’s not where she
is
.”

Adam looked at me oddly. I asked him what was up.

“I’m booked to go to Florida in two days,” he said. “On a private case.”

We contacted the girl’s family and told them to book the earliest flight they could to a specific location in South Florida. I did the same.

Two weeks later, we found Bonnie. Adam had taken what I’d seen and used it to find out everything he could from Bonnie’s family. My intuition and his common sense had then placed him in front of a particular hotel one sunny morning, and Bonnie had walked out the front door, her boyfriend beside her. He was no longer her boyfriend, however; he had become her husband.

Sometimes you get doubly lucky: not only do you find the missing person but that person also finds something in his or her heart that wasn’t there before. That evening, sitting with Adam and me in our hotel room, Bonnie called home to her parents. They fell apart instantly, overwhelmed with relief that she was alive. Apologies and expressions of love were repeated back and forth through tears. She would come home, she told them. She’d come back home.

It was a special case. And, unfortunately, an exceptional one—that of a missing person who had chosen to leave her life behind and, eventually, saw reason to come back to it. Most of the crimes Adam and I investigated together had endings that were just as memorable but for the wrong reasons. He worked in homicide, after all.

We continued on, vowing to each other never to give up hope until the worst was confirmed. Most of the time, it was. But rare cases like Bonnie’s kept us hopeful to the end, always. If we couldn’t locate a person or reunite a family, we might at least provide the tragic answers as opposed to the ongoing nightmare of guessing.

Adam and I unfortunately never lacked for reasons to collaborate, but we tried to make what goodness we could out of often horrific situations. I was his secret weapon; he my spiritual kin. I made him a mojo bag for protection, which he still carries with him. He gave me a bulletproof vest.

In 2005, my
father was in his eighties, but only his spirit had diminished. He still had a full, thick head of hair and the tender but calloused hands that had cradled me in childhood. And he still carried a rain stick and wore a medicine bag, ever the diviner inside a laborer’s body.

He had started to resemble my grandfather—also named Andrew, though everyone had referred to him as the White Wolf. Though he had passed away when I was five, I remembered my grandfather well, a large, gentle medicine man and respected warrior chief and shaman.
It was only in adulthood that I realized how powerful he had been, and how he had recognized my gifts before anyone else had.

My grandfather died in old age, quietly, at home, and no one in my family said much about it. But afterward, I felt him coming to me often. If I felt sad, confused, or lost, there he would be, at my side, calming me, taking my hand, and making my spirit well again. He knew I could see past the flesh and feel his guiding touch. It was him, before anyone, who taught me how to part the trees of the physical world and see through the forest to the spiritual. He became my centering force.

During the 2005 trip, as on all my strange homecomings to New Orleans, I would walk the streets of the city I loved feeling on one hand as though I’d been gone forever and on the other as though I’d never left. I looked down as I walked, slowing down, taking in every step. There isn’t a place in the world like New Orleans. Even the drunks are happy. The half-dressed dancers looking for the next dollar all knew me by name, and I would walk the French Quarter and be greeted by those who still regarded me as the voodoo queen, the fire walker. “Mornin’, Miss Jackie,” they would say, their lazy Creole accents wafting on the breeze like music, the smell of jasmine filling the air. The beads falling from decorated balconies. Crowds everywhere. They say New Orleans is 90 percent Catholic, 100 percent voodoo. I loved its spirit and vigor. I took it all in, feeling cocooned.

But a cocoon is temporary. It wraps around you from the outside; it can’t prevent what happens inside. Soon
my heart began to feel heavy with loss and regret, and I headed toward my favorite place in the world, and the only place I knew where I could find comfort: Bourbon Street. I walked it until nightfall. The music was loud; the party endless. Here you see the faces of the living in all their manifestations. Here the spirit roams free and is embraced by all. I was temporarily filled again. It would be short-lived, but I could at least drink it in for now. That one stretch of street, the celebration of life and spirit with no end. Amid all the raucousness, I had peace. I went back home and sat with my father, saying nothing, just breathing at his side, his connection to a fading consciousness. He sat in an old rocker with my mom’s chair next to him, his aging hand holding one arm of her chair. He gazed out the window into the night. You couldn’t tell whether he was the person or the spirit.

Finally, he turned to me, and for the first time, I saw a tear fall from his eyes. I took a tissue and wiped the tear from his cheek. I still carry that tissue in my mojo bag.

“The time has come,” he said. “I’m going home to my maker. Go back to New York.”

“No,” I told him. “Not without you.”

But he knew I remembered the fight, the one that meant he couldn’t come to New York—not now, not ever. My father stood six foot six and was built like a bull. His physical constitution was matched by the firmness of his principles, which meant if he felt you were behaving badly, you were going to hear about it. This applied whether you were his daughter, his wife, or a professional boxer. So when he’d found Jake LaMotta flirting with my mother
in a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, he’d done the only thing that occurred to him: slugged the man. Or so went the story I’d always been told.

Jake LaMotta had come out of the Bronx slums to become middleweight champion. Before that, he’d been forced by his father into fighting other kids to entertain the adults in the neighborhood as they threw change into the ring, which his dad used to help pay the rent. Maybe that’s what had helped him develop the legendary chin in the real ring, the one that allowed LaMotta to withstand astonishing punishment while remaining on his feet. He’d beaten Sugar Ray Robinson, thrown a fight to Billy Fox, won titles, testified to the Senate about the Mob’s influence on boxing, then finally retired and bought bars, the place he felt most comfortable outside the ring. He’d also made and squandered millions, and needed the income.

And he’d taken a shine to Mary Palermo, according to the tale. Apparently, by the time my father first saw them together in that bar, it wasn’t the first time she and LaMotta had met. Some say Mary came to New York looking for properties to turn into spiritual houses. Others say she came for a more basic reason: she couldn’t resist the former boxer. The way it was always told to me, when Andrew Palermo entered the bar and witnessed the interaction, he didn’t care whether LaMotta was a former champ or a palooka from the streets. When he was younger, my father had enjoyed bare-knuckle fighting in the local bars. He didn’t need the cash; he just enjoyed the battle. He knew how to throw a punch, and how to take one. He just started swinging. And he connected.
Hard. The story I heard was LaMotta’s jaw was broken. My father was tossed in jail.

I was told that they deported my father to Canada, back to Hamilton, an industrial port city nestled onto the west side of Lake Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. Don’t bother returning to New York City, they told him. No one’s going to let you in. Two weeks later, he was back in the bayou. Was the story true, or was it one of those family tales that become embellished over time—or perhaps changed to protect a child? I would never know. I’d never thought about the fact that it might not be true. In fact, I’d never thought about it much at all. Now, looking into my father’s eyes, I thought about that and everything else I’d ever known, or thought I’d known, about him and my mother.

“I’ve seen the wolf,” my father said to me. “My work is done, and I’m going home. But you still have work to do. Save yourself, and free the only woman I ever loved.”

Upon returning to
New York, I found I could do nothing but lie in bed. For five days I did little else other than poke occasionally at the food that Will placed in front of me. He made pleas to get me in motion, but I childishly refused. I wanted to be alone with my unrest.

On the sixth day, Hurricane Katrina hit.

I called everyone I knew. Many had died in the initial deluge. Others had become victims of gangs or looters. I went back as soon as it was possible. My dad was gone. He’d died in the shack, my mother’s chair beside him.

When you’re a child, owning up to a small lie is difficult.
You took an extra cookie; you broke the TV remote. Admitting to a larger transgression requires even more strength and self-possession. You hit your sister. You skipped the midterm. You and your friends were the ones who vandalized that car. It’s easier to bottle the truth if it causes a bit of embarrassment or pain, but that truth, as Edgar Allan Poe so eloquently showed us, will fester. The bigger the truth, the more cancerous it will become when kept inside.

Most buried lies stay that way until the perpetrator of the lie decides to come clean. And in most cases, those people ultimately will fess up, if for no other reason than because it feels rotten to keep something nasty buried inside forever. We’re human, and we long to tell each other our stories. They define us. Even a bad story is still better than nothing at all.

Joanne had continued to plumb the Amityville files for me, and now I thought I was beginning to see the convergent sources of Ronnie DeFeo’s conflict and anger. One of the by-products of his becoming a celebrity monster was the opportunity it presented to others. In the years since the murders, many individuals had come forth, or had been solicited, to examine the house and determine whether it was indeed haunted.

Among the most prominent of these opportunists was Hanz Holzer, a self-proclaimed paranormal specialist who had somehow wrangled his way into conducting an investigation of 112 Ocean Avenue a few years after the murders. In January 1977, he and another alleged spiritual medium, Ethel Meyers, entered the house, and the two of them claimed with fierce conviction that it had been built over an ancient Native American burial ground and that the angry spirit of a Shinnecock Indian chief named “Rolling Thunder” had possessed Ronald DeFeo Jr., driving him to murder his family.

The assertion was denied by the Amityville Historical Society, but Holzer wasn’t concerned about the potential inaccuracy. Nor was his audience. He went on to write multiple books on the topic.

When I brought up Holzer’s name, Ronnie reacted in a way he hadn’t reacted to the mention of anyone else. Holzer had visited Ronnie, I learned, at Clinton, bringing with him William Weber. It was the first and last time Holzer came to see him, Ronnie said.

“What year was that?”

“Early eighties—1980 or 1981. He was gonna write a
book. He said, ‘I believe you had sex with your sister Dawn, intercourse with her.’ I jumped up and said, ‘I’m gonna knock the shit outta you right here.’ I threw my right and Weber jumped in the middle. I told Holzer if he said another word about that, I was gonna break him right there in the visiting room.”