Posted by On 13 November 1974 Ronald DeFeo Jr., 23, shot dead his parents and four siblings in their sleep at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island. Sentenced to six terms of 25 years to life, he died in prison in 2021. In December 1975 the Lutz family moved in and fled after 28 days, claiming paranormal phenomena: this inspired the 1977 book and the films, but their account has always been disputed.
In 2005 “The Amityville Horror” was released in theatres. It is a remake of the 1979 film, which was itself inspired by the book “The Amityville Horror”. The film and the literary work both tell the story of the Lutz family, which had to abandon the house where they used to lived due to sinister events.
These strange phenomena would be linked to the tragedy that took place in the same house shortly before the transfer of the Lutz family.
Ronald DeFeo, aged 23, shot his entire family with a rifle: his mother, father and his four siblings.
Why did Ronald kill his family? And why was the Lutz family forced to leave their home just 28 days after they had moved in?
Amityville Horror
It’s 6:30 pm on November 13, 1974. A young man, aged 23, burst into a bar in Amityville, Long Island, and cries out:
You gotta help me! I think someone shot my mother and father!
Some men then go back to the boy’s home with him, at 112 Ocean Avenue, to check out what’s happened.
When they get there they find the bodies of the DeFeo parents and one of the men calls the police to come and help. They discover 4 bodies, those of Ronald’s brothers, all killed by gunshots.
The victims are Ronald DeFeo Sr. and Louise, both 43, and their four children Dawn, 18, Allison, 13, Marc, 12, and John, 9. They were all shot in their beds at around 3 am with a .35 calibre Marlin lever-action rifle. The children were killed with a single shot each, the parents with two.
The investigation reveals that the mother, Louise, and one of Ronald sisters, Allison, were awake at the time of their death.
Ronald says that the culprit could be a mobster who had previously threatened his family, but the day after the murders he finally confesses: it was him who killed his family.
He will declare that he heard voices plotting against him.
Once I started, I could not stop myself
After killing his entire family he took a bath, changed his clothes and got rid of the evidence, that is the blood-stained clothes, the rifle and the cartridges, and went to work as usual, then gave the alarm.
The trial
At trial the defence claimed that Ronald was insane while the prosecution sustained that the young man was addicted to heroin and had a history of LSD abuse, as well as suffering from antisocial personality disorder.
Ronald was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder and on 4 December 1975 he was sentenced to six terms of 25 years to life.
He never left prison. In a 1986 interview with Newsday he changed his story again: he said his sister Dawn had killed their father, that their mother had then killed his siblings, and that he had only killed his mother, while Dawn died by accident as they struggled over the rifle. Ronald DeFeo died on 12 March 2021, aged 69, at Albany Medical Center, still a prisoner.
Hypothesis
The speed with which the killings were carried out, and the fact that only two people were awakened by the shots, would imply that the murder might have been carried out by multiple perpetrators. However, no evidence was found to support this theory. The police also ruled out that the rifle had a silencer and found no trace of sedatives in the victims.
The neighbours, oddly enough, didn’t hear any gunshot from the house; they just heard the dog barking.
This, coupled with Ronald’s statement of having heard voices, pushed many to explain the events with supernatural reasoning.
The Lutz family
In December 1975, a year after the murders, George and Kathy Lutz, with their three children and their dog Harry, decide to move into the house at 112 Ocean Avenue because of its very low price, 80,000 dollars.
However, after only 28 days, on 14 January 1976, the family leaves the house, leaving all their belongings behind. The head of the family, George, said that many strange things had frightened them so much that they fled.
George stated that demons were present in the house, the names of which however were never revealed because, he said, once called upon, they would have appeared.
The story became a book, The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson, published in September 1977 and based on about 45 hours of the Lutzes’ tape-recorded recollections. The famous parapsychologist Stephen Kaplan, however, argues that the facts described in the book are too general and too broad to be real.
Not everyone believes it, though. As early as 1976, an acquaintance of the Lutzes told Newsday that they had left because the heating had failed and they could not afford to fix it. And in 1979 William Weber, Ronald DeFeo’s lawyer, told People magazine: “I know this book is a hoax”, explaining that he had made up the story with the Lutzes “over many bottles of wine”. Several lawsuits followed.
Since that time, however, the house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville has been subject of research done by parapsychologists and fanatics of occult and mystery.
Since 1979, dozens of films inspired by the Lutz family’s story have been made and, although more than fifty years have passed since the tragedy, this house has not lost its mysterious charm.
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