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

coming. Detectives, district attorneys, the FBI. All of them wanted a piece of me, their secret junior recruit. They watched me closely and visited often. They would use my help but not talk about it.
    They couldn’t. Who would believe them? And, more important, they really didn’t care who might believe them or who might not. In their line of work, as in mine, they saw things on a regular basis that most people don’t ever see, and they cared about one thing only: whether I could help find, and place, missing pieces to all sort of different puzzles.
    Ronnie and I had continued to talk about the occult meetings he’d attended close to home. But, as we talked, I got the sense that he had gone farther afield to explorethe dark arts. My intuition told me to ask him if he’d ever visited my original stomping grounds. I asked.
    “After what I saw and heard in those meetings, I wanted to go see what it was all really about,” he said.
    “And?”
    “And there’s only one place to do that. I was about twenty. I jumped in the car and went.”
    “To New Orleans.”
    “I was too curious not to go.”
    “What did you tell your parents?”
    “Nothing. They didn’t really keep tabs on me like that. I went down there and found the people who ran the meetings, who I’d been advised to talk to by the occult people here, and this one guy says okay, you have to drink blood to get the feel of this. So I did. He said a female’s blood is sweeter than a male’s blood. How true that is I don’t know. I drank a glass of blood, probably four ounces. Didn’t do anything to me.”
    “Did you feel anything in particular while you were there, Ronnie? Any sense of being pulled or conflicted?”
    “You gotta be very careful down there,” he said, bypassing my question in deference to his own path, like usual. “I mean, you’ll just disappear. They check everybody when you go in there, for guns and whatnot. I had to go along with the game plan; I couldn’t bring a gun in. They lock the place up like a vault. Steel bars came down on the door; they had to put a big lug nut, big wing nut on it. You ain’t coming through that. The shutters were barricaded the same way. These people were for real; they don’t play no games. If they even think you’re inthere for the wrong reasons, good luck to you. Man, that place is another world.”
    Was Ronnie DeFeo a bored, aimless suburban kid with too much money and too much time on his hands? Maybe. Was he drawn toward life’s underbelly merely for lack of a more stimulating alternative? I’d certainly seen that syndrome play out lots of times. But the darkness in this man seemed deeper-set. As I spoke to the former small-time hood who had become a renowned mass murderer, I felt a fundamental energy in him that shook me to my core.
    “Let’s go back to your father, Ronnie,” I said. “Why do you think he felt you were so bad?”
    “Because I
was
bad,” he said. “I was up to all kinds of stuff.” For example, he said, he was sleeping around with the married neighbors. “There was a jealous husband a few houses away. And there was this cop named Eddie. I came home drunk one day, and at the time I was screwing, what’s her name, the mother a few blocks away; she was beautiful; she had a son and a daughter. Anyway, I tried to get in the front door and the back door, but one window upstairs was open, and it was their bedroom window. I went into my boathouse and got the forty-foot extension ladder. I took the ladder, and I’m coming up the driveway. Eddie sees me with it, he stops, he says, ‘What the hell, what are you doing?’ I says, ‘I ain’t breaking the law, I’m going to get some pussy. You gonna shoot me? I got a gun, too, you know.’ So we start talking for a while, I showed him my gun, a brand-new Colt Python, and he asks me where I got it. I gave him the gun, andthen I says, ‘We all done here?’ I took the ladder. He says, ‘Get out of here, you’re crazy, you