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

they thought that was funny. So they all did that; they went up the hill. I took the toboggan; I was the last one to go up. Everybody sat on, I told them, ‘Listen, everybody gotta hold on.’ I sat in the back; I was gonna steer. I said, ‘If this thing hits the tree, or hits the road, oh my God.’ Anyway, with all that weight on it, I’m telling you, we were doing at least fifty miles an hour. ‘God,’ I said, ‘if we hit something now, I couldn’t stop it’—we went across the road, we kept going, to the next lot. We finally stopped; every one of them was laughing. We went back up again. I had to go around a guy on skis. Then I took them somewhere, one of them ice-cream joints, Friendly’s; there was one in Nassau County. I took them over there, bought them ice cream, then I went home. They were soaking wet and laughing.”
    “People have said you had to be the parent to your siblings, Ronnie. Is that true?”
    “No, that ain’t true. My mother took care of the kids. Drove them to school and picked them up in our station wagon. I wasn’t their parent, but I loved them. Took them fishing all the time. I took them to Adventurous Inn on Route 110, the playland there. I took my little brother to the bar with me. I used to take them everywhere. I was in the process of buying them a motorcycle, but then this crap happened, and that was that. Tell you something about my two brothers. That show
Batman
was on TV, every night, five days a week. My mother hated when that show came on, because the two of them upstairs, Marc and John, they’d wait for me to come home, and when that came on, the music, the theme started, and boy oh boy, it was a free-for-all. The two of them got on chairs and just dove on me. I said, ‘Aw, Jesus, here we go.’ ”
    He had loved it. You could hear it in his voice as plain as day.
    “Then the dog would get mad and start biting me. Candie. Hundred-ten-pound German shepherd. They’d wait for me to come home from Brooklyn, from work. ‘Come on, we gotta watch TV!’ Thank God that show was only half an hour. The two of them, jumping on me. Plus the dog hopping all over me, following me everywhere, biting the crap out of me, every day. I go upstairs; I’m in the sitting room; they had a fifty-gallon fish tank in their room. No, bigger than fifty, it was on a wrought-iron stand my father had bought just for the tank, with expensive fish, exotic fish. They’re beating the crap outof me as usual, and we stumble into the tank. As I’m breaking loose from them, I see the thing’s coming down. I feel the water hit me, then
boom
—it smashes against the rug, water and fish everywhere. I said, ‘Oh my God.’ My mother comes up there, she says, ‘What the hell?’ We had to put that dog to sleep.”
    “Because it was wild?”
    “No, because it was crippled. Bad hip.”
    “When was that?”
    “A few years before all the shit happened with my family. The poor thing had a hip displacement. I carried her into the vet, and the vet put her down.”
    The sadness of the event was still there in Ronnie’s voice. Or he was a very good actor. But I didn’t think that was the case.
    “Everyone in the house was crying. She was like a member of the family. I was real close with them kids.”
    “Did your father hit the other kids, too, or just you?”
    “He and Dawn would get into it, but I was the only one he really went at. And my mother, she got abused all the time. If she woulda killed him, or did something, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened. I mean, that’s a fact. She had two boyfriends at least. At the same time. Look, why did she wear a red dress all the time? She gave a lot of people a certain impression of her. I mean, ain’t that the devil’s color?”
    “Did your father know about her affairs?” I asked.
    Ronnie said he did. “One time my father took me over to this guy’s house; he took me there; we were casing his house. We were coming home from Brooklyn, got off at,