The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (33 page)

Ronnie had regarded
his improvement the way a person who has started to get better after the worst of a bad cold sees it: prematurely. He’d hit bottom and then started to see the light, but seeing the light doesn’t mean you’ve reached it.

“He’s back,” Ronnie said on the phone. There was a shudder in his voice. “I thought you’d beaten him, but he didn’t go nowhere.”

“He isn’t back, Ronnie,” I said. “He never left. Not yet. I told you that. Listen, I know you’re feeling better,
but that’s only the first step. You need to understand this. You’re on your way up, but I’m on my way down. We need to go to that house together. You have to trust me.”

The truth was I didn’t know if I had the strength for it. I’d taken in and passed on ruined souls before. I’d done it my whole life. But never an entire family. Never anything like the DeFeos.

“Okay,” he said. “Just tell me what to do. It’s getting bad again. I can’t live like this anymore, and it won’t let me die, so what choices do I have left? I should have been dead already. The doctors don’t know how I’m still kicking. I must have lost fifty pounds since the beginning of all this shit. I’m afraid to go to sleep again. He don’t like what you’re doing.”

“Ronnie, you told me you were happy that you could feel again. But feeling again means it hurts more.”

“I need your help.”

“It’s going to take some work,” I said. “I have to show you how to do it. But first you have to come clean with me. Is there anything you’re hiding?”

“What do you mean?”

“If there’s anything hidden between us, if we can’t put up a united front, we’ve lost before we start.”

It was a small feeling, but it was there. Since Ronnie had started revealing his story, I’d felt there was a break. I didn’t know what it was, but it had come up again and again whenever he talked about Brother Isaac and the heart. “Ronnie? You there?”

“I don’t know if she was sleeping with the priest.”

“Then why did your father think she was?”

“Aw, shit. Look, I’m sorry any of this happened, okay? I wish it didn’t, but it did.”

“Ronnie, we can’t finish this unless you tell me the truth.”

“They’d brought one priest down from Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. From Canada, for Christ’s sake. My father had gone there on vacation, in 1970, and fell in love with the story of the guy who started it, Brother Andre or something. So he was big into that priest. The guy came and stayed in my house for a week at a time. He’d do mass on the steps on the first floor because they were so big. And he’d give out communion. I mean, I had to leave. They didn’t want me there anyway.”

“Why were priests invited to say mass on the porch? What was he trying to get rid of?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. My parents were deep into the Catholicism, okay? That means they were scared bad stuff was gonna happen all the time, and they believed in it. My father kept saying he had the devil on his back. He’d say it while looking at me. Like I was the devil. I think it was all part of his plan to knock me off.”

“Was the priest from Saint Joseph’s the only one?”

“The only one who was made a part of the family like that by my father. He’s looking at his own son and talking about the devil and then inviting this guy in for dinner. I mean, come on. Then, when that guy apparently couldn’t chase out the devil, they went and got Brother Isaac, the guy who was my gym teacher. A Jesuit. One day I overheard them talking about doing an exorcism. One guess who they were going to do it on.”

“He was an exorcist?”

“Oh, it was all set. He was a real powerful priest, apparently. I used to sit in the crawl space and listen to all this nonsense. He’d done exorcisms requested by the archdiocese in Rome, if you can believe it. My mother and father both knew something evil was in that house, and I guess they decided it was me. Holding mass with the priest from Montreal didn’t do it, so I guess the next choice was an exorcism. I mean, come on. So I made a comment.”

“A comment?”

“My mother had dated Brother Isaac when they were teenagers. I’d heard them talk about it before, so I knew. My dad had gone to school with the guy, and my mom had gone out with him. I knew about my dad’s temper, and I figured he still would be jealous of the guy. So I said it casually to him one day, something like, ‘He’s just another dick she’s jumping on.’ I couldn’t remember doing that until you and I started talking. I swear.”

I thought, in fact, that Ronnie was taking too much of the credit. I didn’t believe someone as young and strung out as he was would have been clever enough to think up so cruel a trick and pull it off so neatly. But the dark spirit inside him would certainly have possessed that sort of cunning. A man of the cloth had entered the house, a man perhaps with the kind of strength to threaten the demon. Shifting Ronald DeFeo Sr.’s destructive focus to Brother Isaac would have been a trick of the devil indeed.

“They’d set up a room for the thing, and I heard them
talking. The idea was for my mother to get me to her room.”

The demon had slipped through during a moment when Ronnie no longer had control. It had murmured the comment through Ronnie’s lips, planting the seed for further pain and chaos. And how it must have enjoyed Ronnie’s father going in for the kill, destroying the only man that at the time might have been strong enough to help. With Brother Isaac gone, it now had full domain over Ronnie DeFeo. The human sacrifice of a holy man, the one summoned to deliver Ronnie from evil, would only have given it strength. Seeing the heart ripped from the chest of the only man that might have saved a cursed family. The devil no longer owned a piece of Ronnie. He owned all of him.

“Anyway, I was taken to sick hall this morning. I had two black eyes and I was bleeding from the mouth. I lost a tooth. They took pictures of my hands.”

“Why?”

“To show that they didn’t have no marks on them. To show that I didn’t do that shit to myself.”

At a remove
from my own consciousness, men in white coats and masks over their mouths prodded my body with cold metal instruments. Blood was everywhere. But where I was I saw only a bright tunnel and, feeling no fear, walked into it. My feet took steps along the ground, but I felt weightless. Toward the middle of the tunnel, a gentle fog settled, limiting my vision to whatever was directly
in front of my eyes. A dog I didn’t know scampered toward me and began turning in happy circles, his barks echoing off the tunnel walls. He licked my face and wagged his tail. A large figure approached me out of the fog, and I realized it was my grandfather. He was beating on the skin of a drum, louder and louder.

I ran over to him, the dog scurrying along beside me, and hugged his thick legs. He took a worn medicine bag from around his neck and placed it over my head. It smelled warm and familiar.

People began filling the tunnel behind my grandfather, and the mist soon melted away. It became so crowded I could no longer see the end of the tunnel, as though this crowd was blocking the way out. A very tall man dressed in black appeared at the side of the tunnel and began walking toward me. My grandfather bent down, grabbed me by the arms, and said, “You must fight this man. You must go back and follow your spirit. Never forget who you are.” Then he stood up and turned around, and he and the happy dog walked back through the crowd of strangers, vanishing along with the rest of them. Before he vanished for good, I heard him say to me, “You shall win.”

Though I wanted to run from the tall man, I couldn’t. With a grin, he took my hand. His eyes were like twin flashlight beams. I looked down and saw his long dark fingernails. As he led me back out of the tunnel the way I’d come in, he said, “Jackie, you’ll grow to realize that things are already set. If I let you go now, it will change everything else.” He held up my hand and said, “Cheer
up. I thought you would like a good fight. I will watch you as you watch me, and when certain deeds are done, we’ll meet again.” He laughed and pushed me out.

“I’m going to
teach you how to leave your body, Ronnie.”

“My pleasure. How?”

“It’s like anything else. Training and practice. Do you trust me?”

“Just tell me what I have to do.”

“We’re going to visit your house. Together.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I hope so, too. Now listen.”

I knew it would have to be a crash course. My energy was waning by the day, and the house, despite the heat being off, kept getting warmer. We’d had the thermostat checked and the boilers inspected. There was nothing wrong.

Ronnie and I began to practice on small things. I would hide a minor object in my house and then have him try to achieve a trance state to depart his body and go find it. At first, I would meet him halfway and act as his guide. Without words, I would put images in his head, giving silent direction. Learning how to travel is possible for anyone with enough intelligence and willingness to believe, but having the strength not to turn tail is a much harder achievement.

Initially, Ronnie couldn’t escape his own spiritual confines. His concentration would break, or his spirit would weaken at a crucial moment, and back he would go. Those
well trained in the ability to transition can achieve it just by sitting still and staring at a light. The most skilled practitioners can shift back and forth between one world and the other, touching two separate realms simultaneously. You become a visitor in one place while keeping a foot in the first.

We used objects that had been in direct contact with him. During the months we’d been speaking, he’d sent me numerous items, a whole grab bag of Ronnie DeFeo ephemera. His watch, stopped at 1:15. A lock of his hair. Nail clippings. A ring. Hospital bands. A piece of bathroom tissue he’d wiped his tears with. A tooth. Pictures of the two of us during our meeting at Green Haven. I looked at the pictures and thought,
What a pair.

I’d hold the watch in my hand or place it somewhere else in my house and then have Ronnie try to locate it by focusing. At first he made guesses that were more or less random, and he didn’t come close. But slowly, as I taught him how to block out other energies and let his natural resistance fly away, he improved. Eventually, he developed the skill of flying. He would leave his body, travel to my house, and locate the watch. It didn’t matter where I placed it—on my wrist, at my bedside, even in the private space in my walk-in closet that Will had built for me, where a large painting of my grandfather hangs. He had found the ability.

“You’re starting to get it,” I told him. “You’re starting to stretch. Soon it will be time for me to try to pull you through into my world.”

“What the hell?” he said. “I thought we were looking for watches in your house.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve done this before. Stay on track with me.”

“If you pull me through into your world, what about what’s inside of me? Did you think of that? I don’t want to pollute your atmosphere over there.”

He didn’t understand that his spirit was already tied up with mine, and that this was in fact the only way the two could ever be extricated. “Ronnie, shut up. I need to go to the scene as it happened and become monster and victim. Do you understand? I need to inhabit both sides. It’s the only way.”

“I got one question.”

“What is it?”

“How do you know that you won’t bring the bad stuff from that house back with you?”

“I don’t.”

“She made it!”
I heard someone yell.

I woke up with tubes attached to me at one end, machines at the other. All around me, doctors were smiling down and saying, “You made it. You made it.” One of them instructed the others to get me into ICU, stat.

During the time I had to stay in the hospital and recover, I heard them explain it again and again to my parents: a large part of my body had been poisoned by the rupture, and my body had gone into shock, giving
me, they felt, approximately a 2 percent chance to live. I’d required a large on-the-spot blood transfusion—they’d had to filter out all the bad blood and replace it with good. I’d flatlined for more than three minutes.

The multiple scars across my stomach still remind me of that hospital room where I spent so many weeks of my ninth year. The procedure wasn’t well known at the time, but it was the only chance they had. Maybe my parents had come to anticipate this kind of thing when I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and a caul covering my face.

A few days later, I was allowed visitors. Doctors flowed in and out of the room constantly, as though showing off their most prized specimen. They studied me and congratulated each other, constantly repeating, “She made it.”

I sensed something at my side and reached for it. “Oh, yes,” the doctor said to my parents as he saw me reach over. “There’s something here. Something I don’t remember her coming in with.” He took from my bedside the tattered medicine bag that my grandfather had given me in the tunnel, then handed it to my father, who slowly slipped it down around my neck, smiling, saying nothing.

A professional sprinter
has to be careful not to overtrain because he might pull a ligament or tear a muscle. A singer must use her voice enough to make it strong but not so much that she’ll lose it. A person trying to master his psychic energy has to be careful not to bring unwelcome things back from the places he visits.

We’d been at it several days, and Ronnie was getting better. But the closer he got to being able to return to 112 Ocean Avenue, the more I had to look out for danger signs. I knew what was there waiting for both of us, and the goal was to reach ever closer without inadvertently walking through the door until he was ready. Then we’d go barreling through, hand in hand.

To begin the next stage of his training, I gave Ronnie instructions. I told him that after we got off the phone, I wanted him to take his place on his cot in prison cell block C with a picture of me in one hand and a small piece of mirror in the other. Through my loud coughs, I told him he should then lie very still, stare into the piece of mirror, and stretch his feet stiffly up and down. Then I told him he should begin replaying in his mind, slowly, as much as it might pain him to do so, the night of November 13, 1974. I asked him to focus hard until he could smell and feel the air. I told him to place himself in his car, listening to the radio.