Deliver Us from Evil (8 page)

Although I felt good about helping get crooks off the streets—first in the Lower East Side, then in the slums of the South Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn (East New York), and now as a sergeant in the Bronx again, where I work the midnight-to-8:00
A.M.
shift in the Forty-sixth Precinct—the savagery never stops. Although the Four-Six–“the Alamo,” as this precinct is known by cops—is only 1.32 square miles in size, it's one of the busiest and most dangerous in the world. More than 118,000 people—nearly two-thirds of them Hispanic, one-third African American, with about 2 percent white and 1 percent Asian—live in this crowded inner-city area, which is also home to 1,950 violent parolees.

In a typical year, we investigate 32 murders—roughly one every eleven days—87 rapes, 682 violent assaults, 870 robberies, 1,022 burglaries, and 2,234 car crashes. Our cops also help 4,472 sick and injured people, respond to 76,789 radio runs (911 calls)—and make 10,353 felony arrests. Even in New York City, that volume of calls is incredible: When our seven sector cars turn out for patrol at midnight, at least 19 jobs usually await each one. As a sergeant, I have to respond to every serious call that comes over the radio. It's my job to decide whether to make the location a crime scene and whom to detain for questioning and whom to release. I decide whether we need detectives, helicopters to chase suspects, an evidence collection team, the accident investigation squad, the canine unit, or a whole array of other specialized resources.

To give an idea of what that's like, here are a few cases I handled this week: The first call came over the radio as a 10–53 (car accident). “One man down, likely,” Central added, meaning that there was a victim who was likely to die. At the scene, we reconstructed what happened: After smashing into a parked taxicab at such high speed that one passenger was flung through a window and landed eighty-three feet away, the driver sped away, utterly indifferent to the fate of his friend. We arrested the callous son of a bitch later that night. Although the injured man was lying in pools of blood and brain fluid when we arrived, he was still alive when the ambulance came.

So was the assault victim in another case, who'd been stabbed in the heart during a dispute over twenty dollars.

Another night I got a call that's every parent's nightmare: A baby wasn't breathing. Even though we all knew it was too late when we saw the one-month-old boy, paramedics spent long, desperate, and ultimately futile minutes trying to breathe life back into him. What upset and infuriated me the most was that this little boy didn't have to die. He'd be cooing in his crib right now, if his parents had put him to bed on his back—the sleep position that lowers the risk of crib death by 50 percent—instead of his stomach.

The next day I caught a homicide where the victim had no face. His features had been totally obliterated with one blast of an assault rifle, except for an eyeball, which dangled from his head. What was left of his brain was still throbbing inside his shattered skull. I'd never seen anything like it—and neither had the paramedics. We found bits of brain and skull fragments splattered on a sidewalk twenty-five feet away.

Even the animals are violent where I work. Earlier this month I got a call about a berserk pit bull. From the size of the crowd at the scene—and the screams I heard—I knew something really bad had happened. We pushed our way through the horrified spectators, some of them little kids, and found the dog growling furiously as it shook something small, limp, and bloody in its mouth. The victim was a tiny Chihuahua, still wearing its little pink leash, that the pit bull had attacked and killed right in front of the pet's shrieking owner. As a dog lover myself, I felt awful about the whole thing.

The constant brutality I saw after joining the police force had a corrosive effect—I felt myself becoming brutal too. After having been shot once, I was all too ready to get rough with a mugger who resisted arrest or a batterer who got in my face when I showed up at his door to stop him from beating his wife or kids to bloody pulps. I got angry too easily in these situations, and didn't like what I was starting to see in myself. I didn't want to become one of those sadistic cops you read about in the headlines after some awful act of brutality.

To relax on my days off—and to put the projects out of my mind—I liked to get together with friends for a few drinks at Kate Cassidy's, a neighborhood bar in Queens. On one of these nights, even though I was with a date, my eye was drawn to a dark-haired beauty sitting at a table in the back. Unfortunately, she had a date too, and I didn't get to talk to her. I couldn't get her out of my mind the next day, and asked my friends if they knew her name. No one did, but a few days later I was in Gantry's, another Queens bar, and saw another tall, gorgeous brunette. I spotted her immediately: I guess you could say it was love at first sight, or second sight, since I realized, as I subtly made my way over to her side of the bar to start a conversation, this was the same woman I was drawn to at the other bar. She'd just changed her hairdo.

Once we got to talking, I discovered I'd met my mirror image in female form, because twenty-one-year-old Jennifer Lanfranco was every bit as hot-tempered, outspoken, and stubborn as I am. That was exactly what I wanted in a woman—someone who would stand up to me as an equal, instead of meekly saying “Yes, Ralph” all the time. I was also delighted to learn that she was a film buff too and worked for a prop rental company that's said to have supplied the bed used in
The Exorcist.
When we got married, a year later, I suggested we buy the bed, but Jen vetoed the idea as bad luck. I didn't argue with her—our relationship was already stormy enough.

It was also in 1990—the same year I married Jen and we had our first child—that I felt the call to enter what I now call “the Work.” Jen and I were at the mall, shopping for baby clothes for our new daughter Christina, when I spotted a bookstore. Well, I can't pass a bookstore without stopping in and seeing what's new. Knowing of my fascination with the occult, Jen pointed out a title she thought would interest me:
Satan's Harvest.
When I saw that the book was about demonic possession—and that Ed and Lorraine Warren had investigated the case—I grabbed it and headed to the cash register. At home, I couldn't put the book down, and read it cover to cover that very day.

Swept up by this book, which sharpened the spiritual hunger I'd been feeling, I called the Warrens. I don't know why I waited until this particular point in my life, after having read about these people for years without ever picking up the phone. Perhaps I wasn't ready to do God's work until I had the foundation of a wife and family to make me stronger. Although I thought I'd lost my faith, it was just below the surface without my realizing it. The Work was just waiting for me to grab it—or maybe it grabbed me. I'm not really sure. But I knew I could no longer live without it.

Lorraine answered the phone, and I told her how much I admired her courage. She asked what type of job I had. When I told her that I was a cop in the South Bronx, she said, “And you admire
my
courage? I think I admire yours!” Extremely excited to be speaking to someone I'd been reading about all these years, I told her I'd like to get involved in the Work, and she gently inquired if I truly understood what that meant. “Lots of people think they'd like to do this work—until they actually try it,” she warned. I felt I was more than up for it but wanted to take the classes she and her husband held at their house. We talked a long time, and I was impressed that such a well-known person was so nice and normal. I asked her to send me whatever literature they had about their work and gave her my address.

All of sudden, she sounded excited and said, “Hold on Ralph, this is strange.” She got back on the phone and said one of her investigators was a man named Joe Forrester who also had a law enforcement background and lived in Queens. When she gave me the address, I just about fell off my sofa, because it was only two blocks away from my apartment—on the same block where my wife, Jen, had grown up. With all the millions of people in New York, what are the chances of two people calling the Warrens from practically the same block? Lorraine and I were both amazed and felt this was no coincidence, but God's destiny.

More enthusiastic than ever, I called Joe. We talked for quite a while, then he met me on the corner of his block. He was a large man—over six feet tall—and carried himself with military confidence. I learned later that he was a Vietnam War hero, who earned a Purple Heart when he was wounded in combat. We eyed each other cautiously, because Joe knew I was a cop with a gun—and could be some lunatic for all he knew—while I had my doubts about him, since he worked for Legal Aid as a polygraph examiner and might be a raving liberal.

I figured we wouldn't get along at all, because I'm out there busting crooks while he's helping to defend them. That made him the enemy in my book, until I learned that he's an extremely upfront guy who has no problem saying “This dirtbag is guilty” if that's what his tests show. He's the same way off the job: From so many years of evaluating people's truthfulness, he's developed a built-in bullshit meter that almost never fails to detect a liar. He also has very strong opinions about what's right and what's wrong and isn't shy about expressing them. If he likes you, he can be the kindest friend you'll ever have; and if not, watch out! Joe's not a man who forgets a grudge easily, but due to his strong Catholic faith, he will put it aside.

We made fast friends right there on the corner, though, and he later became my partner in the Work. He gave me some holy water, a crucifix, and a copy of Father Malachi Martin's brilliant book,
Hostage to the Devil
, the best I've ever read on the subject of demonic possession. Realizing what a devout Catholic he was, I was ashamed to admit that I rarely set foot in church—and hadn't yet had my three-month-old baby baptized! I promised myself—and Joe—that I'd have Christina christened as soon as possible, so she'd be protected from whatever evil I might encounter in my new vocation.

Not only does he have a powerful faith in God, which has inspired me to become a better Catholic too, but of all the people I've met since becoming involved in this work, Joe has taught me the most about the occult. Since we both have forceful personalities, however, we had some terrible arguments—and have sometimes stopped speaking to each other for a couple of months—but true friendship always pulled us back together. I blame a lot of this on our work: If there's one thing the demonic love to do, it's stir up discord.

When the Warrens came to New York to give a seminar, I went with Joe, Jen, and a priest friend of Joe's. Both in their sixties, the couple looked more like kindly grandparents than experts on the occult. Lorraine was thin, with lively eyes and brown hair swept up into a bun, while Ed was big with silvery hair, a quick wit, and down-to-earth manner. Their lecture was full of the stuff I'd read about—ghosts, demons, possessed people, and exorcisms—but they'd actually witnessed these phenomena, and had photos, videotapes, and recordings to prove it. Afterwards they invited us to their house in Connecticut for coffee, cake, and a tour of their occult museum.

Attached to Ed's office, this collection of strange and sinister objects from the Warrens' cases is plastered with warnings not to touch any of the diabolically charged items gathered there. This room was literally chilling, as it is always unnaturally cold, even in the summer. The reason, Ed explained, is that these objects draw the heat from the room and use it for negative energy. If you touch one of them, you'll mix your aura with evil and open yourself to problems with the demonic. It's to safeguard innocent people from diabolical assault that the Warrens keep this collection locked away in their home. It's also visible evidence of the reality of evil—and its devastating impact on people's lives. Should any of these objects be destroyed, Ed added, its cursed force might rebound back to the person who originally owned it, putting him or her in mortal jeopardy. Jen and I considered ourselves thoroughly warned and made sure to keep our hands safely at our sides.

Each object had a story: There were human skulls that have served as “chalices of ecstasy” for black magic blood-drinking ceremonies, crucifixes melted or shattered by evil forces, handwritten pacts with the Devil, Ouija boards, mysterious amulets, a coffin a possessed man used to sleep in every night, and rocks that fell from the sky and pounded a family's house like hail from Hell. Some of the items looked so innocent that they seemed strangely out of place in such a collection, such as a large Raggedy Ann doll seated in a wooden cabinet. Yet when you looked closer, the doll's hands were arranged around a simple wooden crucifix.

These same soft, mitten-shaped hands had once been animated by a demon—and made a bloody claw mark on a man's chest, then tried to strangle him. When the Warrens subdued the doll with holy water and brought it to their home, it sometimes moved from one room to another, with Ed's easy chair being its favorite resting spot. A few times the doll even brought a “friend” into the house—a black cat. No ordinary cat, this creature would prowl Ed's office looking around carefully, as if it were spying on him, then slowly vanish. Unlike the Cheshire Cat in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, where the body dematerialized until nothing remained but its grin, this cat faded away headfirst, leaving its sharp claws for last.

Another deceptively harmless-looking toy was a plastic model of Godzilla. Having built such models as a kid, I wondered about its origin. It turned out that a possessed boy had built and played with it—a case the Warrens wrote about in their book
The Devil in Connecticut.
Although an inanimate object can't be possessed, it can be manipulated by the demonic or give off evil energy. That's just what happened to this toy: Although it wasn't motorized, it began to walk across the boy's room, and a voice spoke not from it but from somewhere around it. The following year I experienced the strange powers of this toy myself. One day as Ed and I were standing in the museum, discussing a case I was working on that had some parallels to that of the Connecticut boy, the model's head exploded right in front of my eyes. With a loud
pop
, the reptile's head was violently propelled right off the green plastic body. It shattered into two pieces that landed on the floor with a thump.