The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders by Jackie Barrett Page A
Authors: Jackie Barrett
Ads: Link
now that nothing gnawed at Ronnie’s soul more than the idea that bad people got away with things all the time.
The New Orleans community is a separate world, happily detached. Like many other American ports, it was French first, then Spanish, and then French again, but its true fabric runs much deeper than that. The Louisiana Purchase opened the doors to everyone, and all manner of folks streamed in seemingly at once: French, Creole, Irish, German, Haitian. The first threads of a beautiful tapestry started to take form.
With it, the dark arts, practiced by many, took their place as well, and Louisiana Voodoo became a religion as important to some as the Catholicism that further separated the Big Easy from its Protestant cousins in the rest of the Bible Belt. Voodoo’s practitioners weren’t doing it as a lark. And they didn’t appreciate outsiders.
The occultists, and the police who supported their privacy, didn’t care how genuine Adam was in his interest. To them, he was nothing more than an outsider poking his nose around where it didn’t belong. When they caught him for the second night in a row standing in the cemetery observing my rituals, they told him in no uncertain terms that he’d best make his way back to New York, where his curiosity could be put to better use. They even insisted on personally escorting him back to the campus, just to make sure he got back safely.
Adam came to see me a fourth time before he left. Perhaps the spirit had put this young man in my way, or me in his. In my head, I was already seeing the course Adam would take. His prying ways were going to benefithim later. He would not be a professional athlete. “I’ll see you where my other foot lies, Chiefy,” I told him. He looked at me curiously. And then he was gone.
It didn’t matter. He was already well on his path, as I was already well on mine. And I knew those paths would cross again.
In the latter third of 2009, the gentle summer air was starting to take on an edge, and the leaves were beginning to turn. Ronnie DeFeo and I had been talking virtually every day for nearly six months now, but still I felt I couldn’t take him back to the night of his undoing. Not yet. He had bottled the memory in a place deep inside that had remained locked for half a lifetime. The typical exercises I might use to return someone to an earlier event—immersion, forced recall, holding his face up to the mirror—weren’t going to work here. The process was going to have to be slower. Like someone seeking catharsis but unsure how to take the first step, he would approach the topic of the murders himself but then abruptly step back. I could hear the pain begin to engulf him as he got close, the drug-induced haze of his youth replaced now by the stark, painful clarity of recollection. Inevitably, he would retreat.
I tried to come at it from different angles instead. “Do you want to talk about your siblings, Ronnie?”
“What is there to talk about? I loved them kids. Before all the shit happened, we had fun. In 1973, before Christmas, we had snow. I took them to Bethpage State Park, at nighttime.”
“How old were they, Ronnie?”
“Let’s see, Dawn was seventeen. Allison and Marc were about twelve and eleven. And John would have been around eight.”
“Did you do stuff with them a lot?”
“Of course I did. Those were good kids. They never did nothing wrong. I said come on, put warm clothes on, gloves, hat—except me, I didn’t even have gloves on—and we went. I took them tobogganing. And I told them, ‘Listen, this is what you gotta do,’ and I helped each one of them grab the cable. Because you try to walk up there, it’s suicide, there’s people coming down that hill like it’s going out of style. You’ll get run over. They’re coming down on cardboard, garbage-can lids, sleds, skis, anything, all at the same time. So anyway, to make a long story short, each one of them I lifted up and told them to grab the cable;
The New Orleans community is a separate world, happily detached. Like many other American ports, it was French first, then Spanish, and then French again, but its true fabric runs much deeper than that. The Louisiana Purchase opened the doors to everyone, and all manner of folks streamed in seemingly at once: French, Creole, Irish, German, Haitian. The first threads of a beautiful tapestry started to take form.
With it, the dark arts, practiced by many, took their place as well, and Louisiana Voodoo became a religion as important to some as the Catholicism that further separated the Big Easy from its Protestant cousins in the rest of the Bible Belt. Voodoo’s practitioners weren’t doing it as a lark. And they didn’t appreciate outsiders.
The occultists, and the police who supported their privacy, didn’t care how genuine Adam was in his interest. To them, he was nothing more than an outsider poking his nose around where it didn’t belong. When they caught him for the second night in a row standing in the cemetery observing my rituals, they told him in no uncertain terms that he’d best make his way back to New York, where his curiosity could be put to better use. They even insisted on personally escorting him back to the campus, just to make sure he got back safely.
Adam came to see me a fourth time before he left. Perhaps the spirit had put this young man in my way, or me in his. In my head, I was already seeing the course Adam would take. His prying ways were going to benefithim later. He would not be a professional athlete. “I’ll see you where my other foot lies, Chiefy,” I told him. He looked at me curiously. And then he was gone.
It didn’t matter. He was already well on his path, as I was already well on mine. And I knew those paths would cross again.
In the latter third of 2009, the gentle summer air was starting to take on an edge, and the leaves were beginning to turn. Ronnie DeFeo and I had been talking virtually every day for nearly six months now, but still I felt I couldn’t take him back to the night of his undoing. Not yet. He had bottled the memory in a place deep inside that had remained locked for half a lifetime. The typical exercises I might use to return someone to an earlier event—immersion, forced recall, holding his face up to the mirror—weren’t going to work here. The process was going to have to be slower. Like someone seeking catharsis but unsure how to take the first step, he would approach the topic of the murders himself but then abruptly step back. I could hear the pain begin to engulf him as he got close, the drug-induced haze of his youth replaced now by the stark, painful clarity of recollection. Inevitably, he would retreat.
I tried to come at it from different angles instead. “Do you want to talk about your siblings, Ronnie?”
“What is there to talk about? I loved them kids. Before all the shit happened, we had fun. In 1973, before Christmas, we had snow. I took them to Bethpage State Park, at nighttime.”
“How old were they, Ronnie?”
“Let’s see, Dawn was seventeen. Allison and Marc were about twelve and eleven. And John would have been around eight.”
“Did you do stuff with them a lot?”
“Of course I did. Those were good kids. They never did nothing wrong. I said come on, put warm clothes on, gloves, hat—except me, I didn’t even have gloves on—and we went. I took them tobogganing. And I told them, ‘Listen, this is what you gotta do,’ and I helped each one of them grab the cable. Because you try to walk up there, it’s suicide, there’s people coming down that hill like it’s going out of style. You’ll get run over. They’re coming down on cardboard, garbage-can lids, sleds, skis, anything, all at the same time. So anyway, to make a long story short, each one of them I lifted up and told them to grab the cable;
Similar Books
