I started by sending Rick an email back in May. It contained a dozen questions regarding various claims he's made. He answered that email, but most of the responses were vague and it didn't really clear up things. A week later I sent a followup email with some more questions, and in response to his first reply I told him my piece was going to be more about him than the case. I told him my article was going to take a hard look at the various claims he had made about Amityville.
Rick didn't respond.
So I wrote the article and sent it to Rick for him to comment. This was an earlier draft of the one you see online -- it covered the same material but a lot of it was in the form of questions for Rick to (hopefully) answer.
My intention was to get as much clarification from Rick as I could regarding his claims, and then rewrite the article to reflect whatever new information I could get.
Rick didn't respond to that, either.
So I phoned him up (he has a toll-free number listed on his website). We chatted for about 15 minutes
and he told me he liked my writing style, but felt my tactics sucked, and that he would rather just ignore me and my article rather than answer my questions. We argued a little bit about the case and he finally hung up on me.
I rewrote the article to reflect a few tidbits he told me during that last phone call and to reflect him shutting me down rather than explaining his case against the Lutzes and Dawn DeFeo. Mostly what I did on that last rewrite was to change it from an "open letter" to a normal article (the original version ended with a long list of questions for Rick to answer).
So the article Rick saw is pretty different than what is online at amityvillefiles.com -- but that's mostly just the formatting.
