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

can’t do that!’ But guess who helped me put the ladder up in the end? Eddie.”
    “What time was this, Ronnie?”
    “Real late. Or real early, I guess. Maybe four in the morning. I got to the top, I says, ‘Baby, I’m here!’ She woke up, the husband turned, she says, ‘Are you crazy?’ So I climb back down the ladder and Officer Eddie is still sitting there in his cruiser. I tell him, ‘She wants me to go to the door.’ Eddie helps me take down the ladder, you know, with the top part that collapses into the bottom part. We put it down on the ground and I head for the front door. When she sees me she says, ‘You can’t be coming here!’ I pushed my way in anyway. I says, ‘Honey, you gotta give me some now, this is bullshit.’ I seen Officer Eddie on the news about six months ago. He rescued someone in Amityville from a burning house on his way home. I said, ‘That son of a bitch is still on the force?’ ”
    I had no way of knowing whether this story, or any of Ronnie’s tales, for that matter, were true, and it’s not as though the Amityville police were about to corroborate it. I had only my instincts as a guide. If Ronnie’s stories
were
fabrications, they were impressive both in their vividness and consistency. Were all these things I was hearing day after day merely the products of a sociopathic mind spinning one tall tale after another for the simple purpose of having nothing better to do? I doubted this. Were they stories that he had long ago manufactured and had now come to believe were true, providing the reasonfor his conviction in the telling? That also seemed unlikely, if only for the reason that each served to paint an increasingly unflattering picture of him. If we make up stories about ourselves, it’s usually to make ourselves feel better, not worse. Yes, a child who’s getting in trouble will sometimes do something even worse in order to show his parents just how bad he can be, but a sixty-year-old man isn’t likely to do the same. At least, I didn’t think so.
    “You were all over the place.”
    “If I woulda got caught, these guys woulda killed me. I used to go out and drink with a guy after screwing his wife. The police came up with all these enemies I had.” He listed some names, including black guys in the Bronx from whom he said he would buy dope back in the day. “Where they lived, it was a rough neighborhood, Lewis Avenue, Hundred Thirty-Eighth Street. They don’t like white people around there. They tried to take me out, they tried to murder me down there, I ain’t gonna lie about it.”
    The stories often came rapid-fire. On one hand, they sometimes seemed to have nothing to do with each other. On the other hand, taken as a whole, over the course of many conversations, they began to form an overall picture: that of a lost, strung-out young man trying to get attention in a number of ways, many dangerous, all equally sad.
    “Who tried to take you out?”
    “Some jokers, I don’t know who. I’m telling you they are not fond of white people. They blew the windshield out, brand-new Buick, it was my father’s car, blew my windshield right out, that’s how close they got. I had a.357Magnum, I pulled it out, Duchek was in there screaming.”
    I quickly flipped through the file and found the name Liam Duchek. A friend of Ronnie’s, someone he used to run around with in the neighborhood. And, like Ronnie, apparently a big fan of recreational drugs.
    “Duchek was with you?”
    “Yeah, we used to get up to stuff together. Things could get a little wild. Like I’m trying to tell you, some of them are very leery about doing business with white guys. But in the end, everybody got to know me, and they told me, ‘Look, you’re safe, you ain’t gonna have a problem.’ Every day I had a new car, a different car, a new Buick. There was one guy I sold a Riviera to, a Gran Sport Riviera, the same color as my father’s car, the one I was using; it was his favorite, burgundy