The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (31 page)

Don’t let anyone in that you don’t have to, Jacks. Be smart and be strong.

I finally recognized why I had been placed in Ronnie DeFeo’s path, or he in mine. Ours had become the same goal, but for different reasons. For him, defeating the dark evil meant owning up to the truth, cleansing his soul,
and, hopefully, finding redemption. I had suspected that, for me, it meant avenging my mother. That was true. But now I realized it also meant protecting my daughter from becoming a trophy.

“Drive!” I pleaded. Will floored the gas. If a cruiser was hiding behind a billboard, we’d just have to lead it home and explain ourselves after.

When Will pulled roughly into our driveway, I jumped out of the car, racing for the house. Will caught up with me quickly and flew past, reaching the door. He was the one who found Joanne in the office, working away as diligently as always.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” I said, panting.

“When?”

“I’ve been calling and calling. I tried all the lines.”

“None of the phones rang,” she said.

I take B12 vitamins, six a day, two, two, and two. I
also take B6 once a day, first thing in the morning. I take three thousand milligrams of vitamin C, plus regular doses of vitamin E. I spread them out.

I drink vitamin drinks, too, quite a bit. I put multivitamins in my juice. I’m not steady with it all the time but mostly reliable. Recently, I also started using olive-leaf extract, which is supposed to have plenty of benefits. When I eat hummus, I add olive oil. I have, like most people, plenty of vices and bad habits, but I take care of myself, at least for the most part. I’m not big, but, then again, you probably wouldn’t want to be the one to get into it with me.

Still, my strength was waning, and I knew it. No matter how strong you start out, when you allow poison into you, there can be only one of two conclusions. Either you win or the poison does.

“Jackie, it’s going away,” Ronnie said.

“What’s going away, Ronnie?” It wasn’t easy for me to talk. My throat was dry and aching.

“The hate. It’s starting to go. I was full of hate before. Before I got in here, when I came here, while I been here. I hated everything and everybody. The hate side of me was getting so bad, I mean, there isn’t even a word for it. It just came to a point where I had to do something. But I’m a different person now. I’m not so hotheaded and not so hateful. I was holding too much inside. I feel like it’s getting out of me.”

What he didn’t know was that, just as the menace around his space was dwindling, the one around mine was building. The venom I was carrying inside was manifesting day and night inside our walls. My own constitution and that of my physical environment were breaking down in parallel, allowing more and more of the demon’s face to show.

“Ronnie, the first few times you called me, you were really tentative. You talked a lot but didn’t say much. I knew you wanted to spill, but it’s like you needed to trust me before you’d let any real stuff come out,” I said. “Sometimes the emotion I sensed from you meant more than the words you said. I could feel the bitterness coming through the phone.”

“I was getting ready to do something. Something really bad. I’m serious. I’m not gonna talk about it, but it was gonna be a first, right here in prison. You can only drive so far before you come to the end of the road. And I was coming to the end of the road.”

“Hate just grows and grows, Ronnie. If you have a leak and you don’t fix it, it gets bigger and bigger. Eventually, it’s going to spill over.”

“I knew I wanted to talk to you, but I was buried in that hate. The only thing I felt was evil. I didn’t know where to start.”

“There were times when I would say to myself,
I wonder why he called—he doesn’t even want to talk. He’s just sitting there on the other end fuming
. But I knew you would come around. It wasn’t easy, but you came around.”

“I’m feeling better. I have more energy.”

“I want you to do something for me, Ronnie. Stop taking medication. Anything they give you at the doctor’s there, don’t take it. I want you to refuse it, or pretend to take it but don’t. I need you to be pure and clean. That includes drugs.”

“I didn’t say anything about no drugs.”

“And I didn’t ask. But I’m not stupid, Ronnie.”

“Never mind that. How’s Allison?”

“What?”

It wasn’t the first time this had happened. I knew who he meant—and it worried me. He would often say Allison when he meant Joanne. It was clear by now that, just as he’d developed a soft spot for Jo, so had he held a soft spot for his youngest sister.

One morning a few weeks earlier, I’d walked into Joanne’s room to find her sitting at her vanity. I had two immediate thoughts. My first thought was that Jo’s room looked remarkably like the pictures of Allison’s room I’d seen in the file. My second thought, when Jo turned
around and smiled, was that she looked, just for a moment, jarringly like the girl herself. It chilled my blood.

Ronnie had told Joanne in a previous conversation that he had always considered Allison the innocent one. I looked at Joanne the same way: strong and smart, but pure.

Things find their way to our door all the time, from people everywhere. Often the things we receive are personal effects—objects sent by parents hoping to gain some insight or morsel of knowledge into people lost or vanished—and at other times they’re simply gifts. Most of the time, the items are addressed to me. A week before, a package had come for Joanne. It was a flannel nightgown. Jo is always warm and usually wears shorts to bed. I assumed she’d put it right back in the box and, as we do with almost everything we receive, return it to sender.

Instead, I emerged from my office that evening to find Joanne twirling in front of the hallway mirror. She was wearing the nightgown. Joanne is my daughter, and I think of her as a precious doll, but twirling in front of a mirror isn’t exactly her thing. She was acting like someone else.

“What are you doing?” I said.

Joanne turned to me. Her body language wasn’t hers. “Do you like it?”

Will had entered from the other side of the room. He walked up very close to Joanne, looked at her directly, and said in a cautious voice, “You’re going to be warm in that.”

Joanne seemed to break clear of whatever abstraction
she’d been under. “I—I don’t know what made me put it on,” she said awkwardly. “I’m sorry. I—” She looked in the mirror and her breath caught. She ran into her bedroom shaking, and pulled off the nightgown.

A week later, another package arrived for Jo: an American Girl doll, made in her likeness—tattoos and all. We called the American Girl offices to ask who had sent it. The information was confidential, they told us. We returned the doll.

“There’s one more
thing I need to do, Ronnie. While I still have the strength. I need to go to the house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I need to enter that house again. I need to take the evil in.”

“But you already went there.”

“That’s not what I mean. Not physically. Spiritually.”

“What do you mean, Jackie?”

Ronnie wasn’t the first person to ask me this question. As I’ve said, it’s hard to describe. If you have the ability, you discover it early, because one moment you’re as normal as can be, maybe talking to someone or exchanging a glance, and the next thing you know you’re trying to deal with a surge of energy so powerful it might knock you off your feet.

In the Stephen King novel
The Green Mile
, an enormous black man named John Coffey (played by Michael Clarke Duncan in the film) has the power to take pain from others, at great cost to himself. When people ask
him to explain his mysterious healing acts—like when he cures a prison guard’s urinary tract infection—he says simply that he “took it back.” That’s about as well as I can describe it, too. My mother was still in pain, and the devil was still laughing. To get to him, and hopefully to save her, I needed to travel back to that place where the demon had played one of his most monstrous tricks.

“No, Jackie. I love you, Jackie. Don’t do it. It will kill you.”

“It isn’t over, Ronnie. Not by a long shot. You’ve done your part. You told me everything. Now I have to do my part. That house is the devil’s playground. I need to walk in there and turn back the clock. I need to experience it. This is my last hope for peace, and yours.”

“No, Jackie!” He was yelling at me now. This was a first. “What are you doing? I felt like I was dying. I had fevers and bleeding and the fungal pneumonia, and you helped me heal. I can’t let you do this. You don’t understand. I’m a real bad person. I’m not supposed to have feelings. But you taught me something. I started to see and remember things. Nice things. I feel stuff I never felt before, Jackie. Yesterday, when I got off the phone with you, something strange happened. I looked down and saw my shirt move. I put my hand to my chest. It was my heart, pumping like crazy. It felt like it was going all the way up to my throat. What the fuck is this, I was saying. So I put my hands up to my eyes, and they were wet. I haven’t cried since the day my family died, Jackie. I haven’t cried for thirty-six years.”

It wasn’t just tears that had been shut off all that time.
After that terrible night, Ronnie had turned purposely numb. He dove way down into himself, to a place from which he’d hopefully never have to return.

But you can’t stay in hiding forever, not even when you’re hiding inside yourself.

“I said, ‘Holy shit, I’m crying.’ And suddenly I just bolted. I ran from the phones, didn’t know where I was going, but I was so freaked out I didn’t know what to do. All them COs were shocked; they’re yelling, ‘DeFeo, where are you going? Stop, stop!’ They didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me.
I
didn’t know what was wrong with me.”

“You were starting to feel.”

“I got to the gates, you know, those high, heavy iron gates that lead back to my cell, and I collapsed. They all knew I was messed up, Jackie. You got the most hard-core, bloodthirsty inmates starting to run over to me, yelling to get help. I swear. The guards were ready; they thought it was some kind of setup.”

I didn’t bother asking him how much of this story was true. He had little reason to make it up, other than maybe the combination of boredom and a captive audience. But Ronnie was in this fully now, and we were past the point where he had to fabricate stories to keep me listening. I think he knew that.

“They’ve got their weapons ready; they’re braced for whatever might go down. And it just came out. I was balled up, my knees are at my head, and now I’m crying like a baby. I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t even talk, couldn’t say nothing to nobody. The guards got three other
inmates to help hoist me. They had to carry back to my cell like I’m a little kid. And the tears just kept coming, just unstoppable.”

“That’s okay. That’s good.”

“There I am curled up on my cot. They just left me there and backed away, my cell door slammed shut. I couldn’t stop it. My whole body was shaking. I ain’t scared of nothing, Jackie—nothing alive, anyway—but this scared the piss out of me. I stayed there in my cell for two days. Didn’t eat or nothing. Whatever you did, all that stuff, it just finally snuck up on me, and once it got me, it got me all the way.
Boom, bang
. But then it went bad after that. It was there again.”

“What was there?”

“I was punched in the jaw, just like that, out of left field. Then a kick to the leg. Your letters start flying around my cell, and I’m still getting beat up. Then something grabs me by the throat and throws me across the floor. The guards come running down C block, calling, ‘DeFeo, DeFeo!’ A few of the guys are yelling, ‘Help him, help him!’ Now they’re worried about me, they see all this shit going down. I’m up in the air a few feet. The guards back away; they’re saying, ‘Holy shit!’ I swear this one guard was praying.”

Had that happened? Maybe, maybe not. But what was clear was that Ronnie was scared. “Ronnie, look—”

“So they left me alone. Everyone was too scared to help, plain and simple. After the thing dropped me down on the floor, hard, I crumpled, I heard nothing, like a stillness, this blank, dead cold. I couldn’t hear anything
all of a sudden. No guards, no other inmates, voices, footsteps, nothing. Then I heard a growl, real small. And it turned into a snarl, real loud, louder and louder and louder. The snarl turns into this voice, and it says to me, like it’s spitting out the words, ‘Don’t you want to see Mommy?’ I just went frozen. They had to help me get dressed later, Jackie. The guards and two other inmates. I was a total mess; do you hear what I’m saying to you?”

“Yes, Ronnie, I do, but we can beat—”

“This thing is stepping it up. It senses me slipping away, I guess, thanks to you bringing me out, and it’s pulling out the stops, okay? It’s using everything it’s got in its goddamn arsenal. I’m telling you, the other guys on the block are complaining now. This thing wants to get anybody who’s near me, whoever they are. They’re saying, ‘Ronnie, you gotta do something; shit is happening to us in our cells; we’re getting hit, pushed, something’s holding us down in our beds, pinning us down.’ One guy told me he saw a big cloud of thick black smoke in his cell. The guy grabbed his Bible and fell to his knees. And this dude is big, Jackie, about two-twenty. Fights have been breaking out on the block for no reason. These are dangerous guys in here, bad guys, but they don’t fight just to prove something, like it is in the movies. Mostly the guys get along. Now there are fights all the time, sounds like goddamn rabid dogs going at each other.