The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (24 page)

Once again, if this was true, there wasn’t any evidence of it in the public record. Ronnie’s grandfather certainly hadn’t come forward to say that his grandson had come to see him that night. But given the circumstances and their relationship, that wasn’t so surprising. “Why didn’t he want it?”

“It was all messed up. Him and me are getting all crazy with each other, yelling, screaming. Eventually I left. I pulled outta there burning rubber. That car was three-hundred-seventy horsepower, a big engine back then. I hit the gas; I was upset. I went all the way back home, money was in the trunk. I still had the pistol on me. I released the hammer.”

“You went back home?”

“I went right back home. The Colemans were still sitting out there when I got back.”

“At three in the morning?”

“That’s right. And I can hear goddamn music from outside the house. I go upstairs, I said, ‘What the hell?’ I look in Allison’s room. I see blood all over that pink-and-white chair. ’Cause her bed was right there in the doorway. Allison’s dead, and the room is soaked in blood. I walked in the boys’ room, oh my God.”

So there it was. The bombshell we’d been heading toward all these months. Ronnie was absolving himself of any responsibility for the deaths of his three youngest siblings. I thought to ask him whether he really understood the magnitude of what he was now telling me, whether he could swear it was true. But in the end, this was a question that mattered as little to him as it did to me, because Ronnie DeFeo knew me well enough by now to know that I would give less weight to his swearing on his words than I would to my own instincts. It wasn’t whether he believed what he was saying; it was whether I believed it.

“So you find Allison dead, then both boys. What happened next, Ronnie?”

“The music’s still playing, loud, Eddie Kendricks, “Keep On Truckin’.” I went upstairs to my room, the lamp is on. Then I find Dawn in her room, the lamp and the ceiling light are on, she’s fucking dancing around. She looked weird, there was something off about her. Her eyes looked real dark, and her teeth looked different. I had the pistol. I didn’t even think about it. The pistol fell on the floor. I said to her, ‘Dawn, what the hell?’ She said ‘Butch, what are you doing here?’ ”

“She acted surprised?”

“Surprised? She was shocked. I said, ‘What am
I
doing here? What happened to them kids?’ I ran into my parents’ room to get the rifle, the Marlin. The same gun that was the goddamn murder weapon. But it wasn’t there. Dawn had run and picked it up out of the boys’ room. I start chasing her, and next thing I know she’s holding the thing
up with the fucking barrel right in my face. I slapped it out of her hands. The rifle hits the ground. Me and her are wrestling. The gun falls onto the floor, thank God the hammer wasn’t back—if it was, that would have been the end of that. She gives me a kick, right in the shoulder. I’m fighting with her. I throw her down on the bed. That gave her a crack, and it jolted the rifle out of her hands. Before I knew it I’d grabbed it and hit the lever, and a live round jumped out. I hit the goddamn lever twice. I thought I’d shot her in the neck. But it was in the head. I got her right in the face. I didn’t even know it.”

“The same rifle you’d shot your dad with.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The Marlin. The .35. Same one.”

Ronnie had been speaking in his fevered voice during the entire call. As he had relived it all, he’d spiraled upward. Now, suddenly, his voice dropped. Fevered became sad, quiet.

“Everything happened so fast. It was just a big clusterfuck.”

“Ronnie, six people lost their lives that night. You’ve just told me that you were responsible for only two of them. That you intended only one, your father. That you weren’t even in the house for the deaths of Allison, Marc, and John. That’s what you’re telling me. Right?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.” His voice wasn’t wavering. I’ve interrogated lots of people without them knowing it was interrogation. Adam has taught me all the verbal cues to look for when someone is lying. I detected none.

“Do you think Dawn was high?”

“Of course she was high. All Dawn did was smoke that reefer and smoke the dust.”

Joanne hadn’t found any evidence pointing to Dawn’s having been high that night. But this was Ronnie’s version.

“Every time she smoked one, she smoked the other. This was on a regular basis. The dust was made from ice, not formaldehyde. I smelled it as soon as I came in.”

“What made you do it, Ronnie? What made you shoot your sister?” He had to take responsibility; he had to own it completely, or we were done.

“I just lost my mind when I seen them kids. I went off. I didn’t even realize I was wearing the .357. I’d put it in the shoulder holster on the way back from Brooklyn. It was only missing one round, the round she shot my mother with. I didn’t even realize I had it on me. I seen them young kids, and I just snapped. They didn’t do nothing wrong. They didn’t do nothing.”

“You saw your little brothers and sisters killed in cold blood.”

“I couldn’t handle it.”

“All this time, you’ve been sitting in jail with the world thinking you offed your entire family. That must have eaten at you every day.”

“All that bastard had to do was say sorry. Just be a normal fucking father. And her, with the affairs. It led to all this shit. All of it.”

“It led to six murders.”

“Yeah.”

“Only two of which you committed. Your father, and
then Dawn, after she’d killed both your mother and the other kids.”

“Unless he helped her.”

“Who?”

“Moretti. I spotted him in my room after I came out of Dawn’s. Goddamn son of a bitch. I had no idea he was there with her.”

Carl Moretti was, like Ronnie, a known dope fiend. He was also a highly connected, very dangerous character. Ronnie had mentioned him before, but I’d never made anything of it. Now he was claiming Moretti had been there, in the house. “Ronnie, you’re saying Carl was in your bedroom? Right there in your room when you came home?”

“I come outta Dawn’s room, the stairs up there, they went straight, there was a landing, and then it went down. He takes off. I come outta Dawn’s room, and he’s already down those stairs, making the turn. I’m thinking, ‘You son of a bitch.’ He didn’t have no gun on him, or I’d a been dead. I had the rifle in my hand. I ran after him. Out the front door and down the stoop, around the car, now he’s on the Colemans’ front lawn. ‘You son of a bitch.’ I kept saying it over and over. I hit the lever, figured a round went in there. All that came out was empty shell cases. But I didn’t know that, I hit the hammer. Click. I hit it again. Click. ‘Motherfucker,’ I said—he’s still running. I had to pick up the shell casing that was out there on the driveway. He got away. I don’t know where he had his car parked, it musta been on South Island Place.”

“Hold on a second, Ronnie. Why would you leave the
house? If Dawn is in the house with Moretti, why would he stay there, take the chance of the cops rolling up with Dawn alive and everybody dead, including the kids. Why would he take that chance?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“You’re smart, Ronnie. You mull things over. If I’m Moretti hanging out with Dawn in the house, everyone’s dead and you’re gone, why would I sit around with Dawn, where she could turn the gun on me, or she could say I did it, or one of the neighbors could say I heard a shot and I’m gonna send the cops?”

“All I know is I’m thankful he found my stash, fifty drums of heroin, because if he didn’t, I would probably be dead. We wouldn’t be having this conversation. It wasn’t hidden anyway, it was in the drawer, and the drawer was open.”

“I get what you’re saying, but I want you to get what I’m saying.”

“The police did find the spoon.”

“Say you and I were in the house. Everybody’s wiped out…”

“I understand what you’re saying. I don’t know what happened, I wasn’t there. You’re asking me to believe a theory.”

“It’s not a theory, it’s common sense. Why would Moretti hang out with Dawn?”

“I don’t know, maybe because he wanted some money. The forty grand was missing, so. Four stacks with a band on ’em, each one with ten grand in it. It was gone, nowhere to be found.”

During our hundreds of conversations, a lot of what Ronnie DeFeo had told me carried a ring of truth. For most of it, there was no concrete evidence and never would be. All I had to go on was the sincere anger I sensed in Ronnie’s voice whenever he spoke about Dawn. Maybe he’d invented it in his mind to put it all on her, to make himself feel better. Maybe not.

But I was getting a different feeling about this story—about Carl Moretti lingering in the house with Dawn and then taking off when Ronnie arrived. Something seemed odd. Ronnie’s stories were, if nothing else, always consistent and, in their strange way, airtight. This one seemed more an imaginative ramble. “What were you wearing that day, Ronnie?”

“My army jacket.”

“What was Moretti wearing when you saw him?”

“An army jacket.”

The devil has many tricks. It can make you see things so clearly you believe in them as strongly as you believe your own hand in front of your face.

“Ronnie, did anyone else see Moretti running out of the house?”

“No, I was the only one. That son of a bitch.”

“In the public records, it says your neighbors didn’t see anyone but you running out of the house. They heard you shouting threats.”

“Yeah, I was waving that shotgun around saying, ‘I’ll blow your back out, you son of a bitch.’ ”

“Ronnie, you were high. You weren’t thinking or seeing clearly.”

“I know what I saw.”

I suspected Ronnie DeFeo had not been chasing Carl Moretti but an image of himself. The devil throws up one illusion after another until you don’t know what is real and what isn’t.

I was starting to feel unsteady. But we had to get through this. “Let’s forget about that for now. What did you do next, Ronnie?”

“I went back in and cleaned everything up in the house; then I changed my clothes. They were all bloody. I threw the clothes in a pillowcase and grabbed the pistol from the floor. The gun that shot my mother.”

The gun that shot my mother.

“Ronnie, a gun didn’t shoot your mother,” I said. “Dawn did. Your sister Dawn shot and killed your mother, Louise DeFeo.” I didn’t know whether Dawn had truly shot Louise DeFeo, or whether Ronnie had and was mentally blocking it out, but I wanted him to start admitting that it really had happened. The version he believed mattered less than the importance of his bringing it all the way to the surface, no matter how painful.

“I was going to drive to Brooklyn, but I had to get the goddamn rifle. I went back and got it, trying not to look at Dawn. I mean, I’d gotten her right in the head. I ran to the side of the dock and threw the rifle in the water.”

“And that’s where they found it.”

“Yeah. When I was being held in the county jail, that’s when they went down there and found the damn thing. Instead of throwing it off the end of the dock, the big dock, big water, where the current woulda taken it, I
threw it on the side, where there was only a couple of feet of water.”

“Why did you throw it there?”

“’Cause I was going fast and not thinking right. All I had to do was walk to the end of the dock and just wing it. Even if somebody seen me, they still woulda never found that gun. As strong as that current is, hell no. The width of that canal, gotta be half a mile. I watched an outboard motor fall off the back of the boat once. Everybody jumped in to try to get it, the motor was already moving from the current. That’s where I shoulda thrown it, but that was a mistake I made.”

“What did you do after you threw the gun in the canal?”

“I drove to Brooklyn with the money in the trunk and the thirty-seven thousand I had. Right up to the last minute before the jury went out, the Suffolk County police were going everywhere trying to find that pistol. They found the shoulder holster in the house there, but they never got the pistol. They kept going to the Nanowitzes’ house, our housekeepers, hassling them, ‘Where is this gun? Did you see him with this gun? Where is it?’ They shoulda put her on the stand, the housekeeper. They shoulda treated her as a hostile witness, but they didn’t. She seen it all. She seen me getting beat all the time. Seen my mother getting beat. She had all the information. It’s bullshit.”

“Who else did they ask about the gun, Ronnie?”

“Oh, they went to everybody. ‘Where’s this gun?’ And everybody said the same thing: ‘We don’t know where it
is.’ Because I had the gun that shot my mother. The bullet went right through the floor. Right through the body, through the mattresses, and into the floor. I mean, it was a Magnum. They couldn’t identify it because one bullet didn’t have enough characteristics to say it came out of the Marlin, but the judge let them lie and say it came out of the Marlin. One bullet couldn’t be identified.”

“Why didn’t you take the rifle with you, too, instead of throwing it in the water?”

“Because I had to move fast, so I wasn’t thinking too straight. I just had to get things done. The forty thousand was missing. I went to get it, but it was gone. I’d told Dawn to hold on to it, so I figured she must have took it up to her room. I also had that file. I didn’t want to put the file in the duffel bag, ’cause if they found one, they woulda found the other. I wanted to put it in a goddamn garbage can.”

“But you didn’t. You held on to it.”

“Yeah, I held on to it. Plus I turned the heat way up before I left so that things would go faster, you know, the bodies, and they wouldn’t be able to figure the real time of death.”

“You mean decomposition.”

“Yeah, right. That’s right.”

“You said you were in panic mode. How did you know to turn the heat up to make the bodies decompose faster?”

“I don’t know how I knew. Something just told me to do it. I was trying to think of anything I could do to throw them off, I guess. They always say 3:15 was the time of death. It was actually 1:15. I admit I was laughing
in the back of the cruiser as those cops poured into the house. It was like a steam bath in there. But none of them noticed.”