Free The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders by Jackie Barrett Page A

nobody knows who the other person is. So I went through that ordeal. But I didn’t go to Ohio with her.”
    “Did you go to any more meetings?”
    “One other one, that a different female took me to. Her name was Lauren. And I’m gonna tell you straight out, I saw shit go down in that meeting that scared me good. I don’t even want to remember that stuff, okay? These guys went the whole nine yards is what I’m trying to say. And I couldn’t just leave, because the girl I was with, God knows what coulda happened to her, and I really liked her, so I stayed. Later on I told her look, to each his own, but that shit ain’t my cup of tea.”
    I didn’t bother to ask more details about what Ronnie had seen or thought he’d seen. I already knew it wasn’t easy trying to tease out the parts of Ronnie DeFeo’s stories that made sense and the parts that, well, required a dose of skepticism. I was familiar with the world of dark practices, however, and I knew what went on behind its doors. I didn’t know what he’d seen and what he hadn’t, and I wasn’t confident he knew, either. But I knew that world was real.
    “I said hey, that coulda been you or me. But she wanted to be a part of it. So that was the end of that. Good-bye, Lauren.”
    In Louisiana, the police would come to our house asking to speak to the child with the strange gift. They were having some difficulty getting to the bottom of a certain case, they’d say, and they wondered if they might talk to her. I may have been a kid in numeric age, but I hadn’t really been one for a long time, if ever.
    “Please come in,” Mary would say. They would sit at the kitchen table, and I’d be summoned. “Come on inhere, Jackie. These gentlemen need to speak to you about something important. Try to help them.”
    Typically they would slide a picture under my hand. “Tell us, Jackie,” they would say. “What do you see?”
    There was one girl, a small girl, like me, but more innocent looking. A fat detective had come to our house with his partner and the girl’s anguished father. The fat detective had passed her photo to me across the table, which I now held under my palm.
    The transformation was almost immediate. I fell back on my chair, assaulted by the smell of burning flesh in my nostrils. I ran out the front door. My mother, the detective, and the girl’s father followed.
    I reached the lawn and stumbled. I was on the grass now, rolling around, trying to rid myself of the vision. The fat detective started to approach me, but Mary held him back. “Wait,” she said. “Wait.”
    The smell subsided, and a pretty girl, slightly shorter than me, appeared at my side. It was the girl from the picture. I stood up slowly and looked at her. She held out her hand. I took it. Together we began to cry.
    She leaned toward me, whispered something in my ear, and pointed toward her father. When I looked at him, he sprinted.
    The pretty young girl had revealed everything to me. Her father had set her on fire in order to collect the insurance money on her life. When he took off around the side of my house, toward the backyard, the detectives ran after him, along with my mother and me. But he was fast for a big man. We were losing ground.
    Then, suddenly, the man buckled, his legs giving way, and he started screaming. I turned around to see my father standing outside the back door, holding his revolver. He placed the gun down as casually as if he’d just shot a tin can, walked over to me, and laid his big, gentle hands on my shoulders as the detectives handcuffed the girl’s father and recited Miranda.
    “Enough of this,” my father said, crouching down to me. “Jacks,” he said, looking into my eyes. He called me Jacks after the playground game, because, he said, you never knew where I was going to land. “When you get old enough, go. Go far away, and don’t let anyone in unless you have to.” He pointed to my forehead.
    But word was out, and the police kept