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

approval from the Vatican, the family’s priest, or someone high up in their church.
    I feel this bears repeating. Some teens are sent on church missions or youth retreats. Others are encouraged to do exchanges with those of like-minded faiths. Teenagers in New Orleans who have a talent for communing with the dead are sent around the globe to chase the devil. At least, this one was.
    My parents agreed. I hadn’t asked for the gift I’d been given, but, as my mother had told me, with the gift came responsibility. I set out for the world, to see how many lost souls I could help.
    I would return home to the bayou regularly, especially when my mother needed, or wanted, more money. Afterall, despite her own gifts, for a long time I’d been her meal ticket, the strange and compelling child who could connect with the other side. She knew I could still bring people in for her, and I, still trying to win her approval, was happy to fulfill my role.
    During one of these stops, in 1982, I was back in Nola preparing for a séance my mother wanted me to lead. A group of entertainers from California were flying in to see if they could make contact with someone who had passed to the next world, and my mother and I now stood with the five of them in a cemetery, invoking the gods. It was after midnight on a typical sticky Louisiana night. The banging of our drums, along with the crackling from our fire, were the only sounds filling the air. We were making offerings to Baron Semedi, the keeper of the dead and an important deity in the voodoo religion, a figure half in this world and half in the other.
    I noticed someone at the side of the cemetery, watching. He was alone. Curiosity seekers aren’t unusual, but the power I felt flowing from this person was different from normal. Seeing me catch his gaze, he walked forward. As he approached, I saw he was a muscular young man who looked to be in his late teens, like me. He stood as rigid as a cadet.
    “Are you Jackie Palermo?” he said.
    “Who wants to know?” I asked.
    “My name is Adam,” he said. “Adam Quinn. I’m from New York. I go to Saint John’s, and I’m here for a national track meet this week. I’d like to talk to you.”
    “Who told you about me?”
    “We’re staying at the LSU dorms. Everybody there knows about you.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Is it true what they say?”
    “I don’t know. What do they say?”
    “They say you can show heaven and hell.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “I want to know about voodoo,” he went on. “I want to learn about what you do.”
    “No, you don’t,” I said.
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Go away, for your own good,” I told him. “And don’t come back.” I went back to the fire and continued to beckon the gods.
    The more Ronnie talked about his father, the more transparent his feeling of rejection became. He hated the man with all his heart yet wished he could have found the secret to earning his love. I recognized in Ronnie’s voice an awful and classic condition: that of the victim still desperately trying to win the affection of his tormentor. People denied their parents’ love will spend their entire lives trying to get it, even after they’re gone. This I knew from experience.
    When I had picked up the coin in the forest, bolts of pain had shot across my arms and torso. Soon my entire body felt racked, and the trip out of the woods proved much more arduous than the trip into it.
    “I wanted to be done with it,” Ronnie had told meafter my return from the forest, as though picking up a conversation that had been paused only a minute. “I didn’t want any part of him whatsoever. And that coin was his.”
    I had learned to listen, follow one door down a path that led to another. That was how you got Ronnie to slowly disentangle the different strands that would, I hoped, eventually lead to the truth.
    As I gained his trust, the phone calls came to be supplemented by letters—an infrequent trickle at first, then