Ronald DeFeo Jr., the killer who inspired films like “The Amityville Horror” and “The Amityville Possession” died aged 69 in Sullivan’s prison in Fallsburg, New York. He was serving life sentences to which he had been sentenced for exterminating his family in 1974, when he was 23 years old. At 6:30 a.m. on November 13 of that year, DeFeo killed his father, mother, two brothers and two sisters in their Dutch colonial-style mansion on the Amityville waterfront in Long Island with a .35-caliber Marlin rifle. All were found face down in their beds. Two shot at the parents, one at the brothers.
A year after the murders, George and Kathy Lutz bought home, but they abandoned it 28 days after they set foot there because, they said, paranormal phenomena had arisen: “strange sounds, voices and green slime oozing from the walls.” The story of the massacre inspired the 1977 horror novel “The Amityville Horror, A True Story” by Jay Anson knows which was made two years after the cult film “The Amityville Horror”, followed by seven episodes and remakes. DeFeo tried in vain to convince the jury that he was insane, saying that drug abuse had led him to believe that his family was plotting against him.
In a 2006 documentary he claimed it was drug use that the massacre had been triggered by the abuses suffered by her father and that one of her sisters, Dawn, had been complicit in the murders and had killed three of their younger brothers before dying in a fight with Ronald. At the time of the massacre, DeFeo’s father, Ronald Sr., a wealthy Italian-American from Brooklyn and owner of car dealerships, was 43, like his mother Louise. Dawn was 18, Allison 13, Marc 12 and John Matthew 9.
March 16, 2021 (change March 16, 2021 | 02:59)
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