Authors: Jackie Barrett
“Did you think they were doing some kind of ritual?”
“Who knows what them nuts were doing? But I was worried. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went downstairs to get a shotgun. Pump-action. Then I got the ladder from the boathouse and leaned it against the side of the house. I climbed up to my parents’ window with one hand, I’m holding the shotgun in the other.”
“What did you think you were going to find up there?”
“I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just reacting. At first I thought maybe someone broke in or they were having sex, like I said.”
“But you know the difference between somebody screaming if they’re having sex or—”
“It wasn’t sex. At that point I didn’t know what it was.
I did a lot of peeking once I was up there, but I still ain’t figured out what it was. I stood on the ladder there with the shotgun. Couldn’t go back to sleep. It just kept going on. Crazy noises, Jesus Christ. Didn’t sound right.”
“Ronnie,” I said again. “It’s okay. Now tell me. What happened?”
For a long moment, he was silent. By now I was well familiar with Ronnie’s remarkable memory. I knew it wasn’t a matter of him trying to recall the details. He was simply pausing to consider.
“He came home early,” Ronnie finally said.
Though I felt
weak, I couldn’t tolerate a dirty house. I had spent the evening cleaning all around our downstairs, then closed the laundry room and bathroom door to keep the cats out, locked everything up, came upstairs, and then went back down to get a stamp for a letter I’d written Ronnie. When I came down, all the doors were open.
I’ve got a firm rule about closing doors. I’ve let go of people who worked for me for leaving doors open. If you leave the laundry room door open, one of the cats could get between the wall and the stackable machines, and if they were to get stuck it would be lights out, because I can’t move those damn machines, and even though Will can, he wouldn’t necessarily be home then, or in time. If I couldn’t get one of the cats out, it would start panicking. And I always worried about that, so I put a hook and eye on the door as a constant reminder.
After scrubbing the floors and the walls and the basin,
I’d locked everything down and come up. It was only minutes later I’d gone back down. The bathroom door stood wide open. Laundry room doors, the same. I’d closed them all. I’d locked them myself. There’s no wind down there, no movement, nothing that could jolt open multiple doors at the same time. I closed all the doors again and went upstairs. In my office, one of the files I’d been working on having to do with Ronnie’s case lay on the desk. On top of the pile had been a picture of Ronald DeFeo Sr. It was now on the floor, on the other side of the room.
“My grandfather would
come two days a week to take care of the garden by the boathouse. He planted vegetables. That was a real nice picture to everyone else. Real nice.”
“Listen, Ronnie. Let’s continue.”
When Ronald DeFeo Sr. returned home early from work that November afternoon, he encountered one of the most powerful and defiant forces known to man: a stubborn teenage daughter. Dawn DeFeo, a fresh high school graduate, had started attending secretarial school, but, according to Ronnie, she was more focused on moving to Florida to live with her boyfriend, a kid named William Davidge, who was a year younger than she.
Dawn was equal parts willful and reckless, and, like most teenage girls, she felt utterly misunderstood by her parents. Ronald was no sooner in the door than Dawn had launched into a familiar tirade: she was going to drop
out of school and move south to be with her boyfriend. She’d had enough, she said. She wanted out, and no one was going to stop her.
“When my sister started that crap again that she’s done with school and she’s going to Florida, she’s done with all of it, he started in with her, my mother started in with her. He went and put his hands on her, which was a mistake.”
Kids who grow up in volatile households tend to go one of two ways. They either become quietly submissive, avoidant of confrontation at almost any cost, or they become as incurably hot-blooded and reactive as those who have served as their unfortunate role models. Dawn DeFeo had become the latter, and she wasn’t about to back down from the man who, despite being her flesh and blood, she despised.
“She went and opened the kitchen drawer, nice and gently. She pulled out a blue steel knife with a wooden handle. Carving knife. That knife don’t break. She got it and said, ‘You fat motherfucker.’ That’s what she called him. I said, ‘Oh my God, here we go.’ This is about sixthirty. She chased him into the dining room. Now he’s running around the table, and I’m standing there, you know, laughing.”
Ronnie himself had been virtually invisible for the previous three days, at home but holed up in his bedroom in self-imposed quarantine. He hadn’t been dodging work or avoiding his family, he said. He’d simply been trying to kick a bad habit.
“I’d done too much heroin, and I knew if I went to work, I’d end up going straight to Harlem to buy more, right to One Hundred and Sixteenth. So I said, ‘Nah, I gotta take a few days off.’ I forgot I had a stash in my bedroom.”
I asked him how high he’d gotten, or how long it had taken, or during what parts of the day he was stoned and which sober. Although he didn’t know the answers to those questions, everything else apparently remained horrendously vivid.
“When all the shit started with her and him, I said, ‘To hell with this crap, I can’t deal with it.’ So when things had finally calmed down a bit, I told her, ‘Look, my car’s in the garage, take it and go. That’s what you should do.’ That’s what she did.”
“She left for the night?”
“No, she came back about, I don’t know, nine thirty, ten o’clock. I was in my bedroom. She came in, wearing her nightgown. I said, ‘Look, I don’t wanna be here no more than you do. I’ve had enough.’ And she says, ‘We gotta do something.’ ”
“That’s all she said? Something?”
“I said, ‘Look, I’m sick of them, too, but if we’re gonna do it, this ain’t the place, it’s gotta be done in Brooklyn, make it look like the Mob.’ She didn’t want to wait. I said, ‘I’m going to sleep.’ She starts watching TV in my room. I said, ‘See, you didn’t want a TV, now you want to watch mine.’ I had a brand-new Zenith, color, portable. Eighteen-inch screen. She didn’t go to sleep.”
We’d gone
to the hardware store, Will and I, to look for bulbs for our inset lights in the living-room ceiling. While we were there, Will wandered over to another aisle and came out holding a long-handled axe. He walked toward me swinging it casually, mimicking a woodsman. I didn’t like the look on his face. It wasn’t Will’s usual look.
“What are you doing?” I said.
He didn’t say anything. Just kept walking slowly toward me, swinging the axe up and down. I thought about Ronnie’s descriptions of splitting wood in the yard at Clinton.
“Will, are you crazy? What the fuck are you doing?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This is what I need to fix that house once and for all.”
He said it with a grin I didn’t know, a grin that wasn’t part of his range of expressions. Quickly, I stepped toward him and grabbed the axe. He resisted for a moment. Tears were welling in his eyes.
“Will,” I said, pulling on the axe. “Give it to me.” I leaned in close so that my face was nearly touching his. “Will. Let it go. Let’s go home.” Finally he released his grip and reeled backward. He was trembling.
“Like I said,
I’d heard my father talking with my grandfather about killing me. Yeah, my father and his own father talking about killing their son and grandson. I know how it sounds. I heard stuff all the time. I could
see things, like you, Jackie. They thought I was nuts half the time. Put me in counseling, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t need counseling. They did.”
“How old were you when you had counseling?”
“Eleven or twelve. They took me to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to see a guy named Qualler. Quavler. Quavlo. Starts with a Q. Psychologist. Psychiatrist. I went for about a year. Finally, he called my mother and father in. I was nosy. I was standing outside the door. I remember because there was an old man out there looking at me, I told him to mind his own business. Doctor Q told them they both needed counseling, like I just told you. They got very upset, stormed out of the place, grabbed me, let’s go. They had a real bad attitude, like I was gonna get a beating again, which I did. ‘What did you tell that man?’ my mother said. I said I told him the truth. Well, that was that. I wasn’t gonna see the inside of that guy’s office again. He came to my trial and testified. The statement I just made to you, he made at my trial, he said, ‘The DeFeos, Louise and Ronald, they both needed counseling. They needed to see somebody.’ ”
Whether the official court documents (currently sealed) support this statement is unknown. But whether Ronnie’s memories of the trial are accurate nearly four decades later is, to me, largely irrelevant. When you don’t have certified records to go by, all you have is your gut. My gut told me that something evil had run rampant through 112 Ocean Avenue, and it had made the DeFeos its prey.
“What did they tell you they were taking you for in the first place?”
“I don’t know who put them up to it, they just decided I needed it. They said I wouldn’t talk to people. And my school marks. He had a brick house, two floors, office was downstairs, in the basement. And I always went on a Saturday, because my mother and father both had to be there, and that’s when my father was off, Saturdays. I had headaches all my life from the beatings that asshole gave me. Always kicking me and hitting me in the head. He didn’t say they both needed counseling; actually, excuse me, he said they both needed help. That’s what they needed, help.”
“Ronnie—how long did you go for?”
“Age ten or eleven or twelve, all of a sudden I woke up, and my twenty-twenty vision was gone. Eye doctor said, ‘What the hell is this?’ We’re playing catch, I’m a little kid, he’s throwing the ball as hard as he can. It’s a hardball—he throws the ball like you’d throw it to an adult, it hits the leather on the glove, glanced out and hit me in the eye. Looked like I had a plum on my eye for the next week. That’s what he was all about.”
“Competitive with you. Like he had to prove something.”
“The day of my confirmation, they had it at my grandparents’ house, so that means I wasn’t living in Long Island yet. Everybody brought me money. There was, I don’t know, two, three hundred dollars there. This was back in 1959 or 1960. He takes all the money, I was waving it around, takes all the money and rips it in half, then throws it on the ground and starts giggling. My grandfather had to pick up all the money.”
It was a story he’d already told me two or three times before. “I know, Ronnie. We’ve talked about this. You have to get back to what you were talking abou—”
“It wasn’t just me. He had the same reputation with everybody. No one wanted anything to do with him, including the cops. One day I saw my mom in trouble out on the road, a car speeding toward her car and trying to run her off the road, right in front of the house. I ran in as fast as I could—and I could run—I ran down the stairs. My father was sleeping on the new couch. I said, ‘Out in the street, it’s Mom.’ He came out in his socks, no shoes. Ran out the back door as fast as he could. I thought a jet went by. The guy got out of the car by this time and was banging on my mother’s window. My father grabs the guy. It was like these phony wrestling matches on TV; he had the guy up over his head, then slammed him on the ground and was on top of him. Amityville police cruiser drives by and keeps right on going. They wanted no part of him, I am telling you. There was two cars out there. The cops had to drive around those cars to get by. He’s giving the guy a goddamn beat-down. The guy’s wife came by a couple days later, apologized to my mother, said, ‘Oh, sorry, he was drinking.’ Drinking? Ain’t supposed to be driving and drinking. One of the little Volkswagen station wagons. What a beating he gave him. My friends had been in the car with my mother, they’d jumped out. ‘Oh, leave him alone,’ she says to my father. ‘Leave him alone—you’re gonna kill him.’ That’s the only reason my father stopped. It was the Fourth of July. Maybe she was sleeping with him, too.”
I was feeling light-headed. The room was starting to spin. “Look, Ronnie, none of that matters now.”
“He didn’t care about nobody. He used everybody. He had the police in his back pocket. A high-ranking PDA official was his goombah. I used to deliver the guy’s car to upstate New York. I used to go there to pick up parts, I forget where. I didn’t mind going. His wife was beautiful, she was from France, and his daughter was my age—she wanted to go out on a date with me. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll pick you up.’ He said, ‘Forget it. I know you.’ I had his car anyway. I didn’t use my car; I took the brand-new car. He had a 1975 in the driveway, not a 1974. I’d come home from that or something else and get a beating for no reason. Headaches all the time, still. I take Tylenol.”
“Speaking of Tylenol, I need one myself. Hold on, Ronnie.”
He didn’t.
“So my father and great-uncle are discussing me. All business with them. My father says, ‘He’s using drugs, he’s using heroin, we can’t trust him.’ And Pete DeFeo says, ‘Let’s put a contract out.’ They were gonna kill me. The Brooklyn DA’s office had a wiretap, they listened to every word of this. Them people were gonna kill me. You know what the DA’s office did? Nothing. They listened to the highest-ranking member of the Genovese crime family. They listened to Pete DeFeo talking to Mike Brigante about murdering me. Where was the law then?”
There was no evidence of this, of course. Ronnie was implicating not only his father in the murder scheme but also his grandfather and great-uncle. And even if there
was evidence, we weren’t going to get our hands on it. Like I said, when you don’t have something on paper, you’re left with your instincts—and my instincts said that, although Ronnie DeFeo may have been making up some of it, he wasn’t making up all of it.
We all agreed
we’d forgotten what it felt like to be a family. We were spending so much time battling sickness, pain, and unseen menace that we’d neglected to spend time with each other the way we’d always been accustomed to doing.