The Amityville Horror: The Real DeFeo Murders and the Haunting That Wasn't
Just after 3am on 13 November 1974, a 23-year-old man walked through his family's big Dutch Colonial house on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, with a lever-action rifle and shot his parents, his two brothers and his two sisters as they lay in their beds. Nobody screamed for help. Nobody ran. The family dog barked its head off outside and not a single neighbour picked up the phone.
A year later a young couple bought the same house for a bargain price. They lasted 28 days. What they said happened in those four weeks turned into a bestselling book, a hit film and a franchise that's still churning out sequels. The trouble is that the haunting falls apart the moment you poke it. The murders don't. They're the real Amityville horror, and they're stranger and sadder than any ghost story.
Quick Answers
• What happened? Ronald "Butch" DeFeo Jr shot six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, in the early hours of 13 November 1974.
• Who died? Ronald DeFeo Sr (43), Louise DeFeo (42), Dawn (18), Allison (13), Marc (12) and John Matthew (9).
• What weapon? A .35 calibre Marlin rifle that Butch kept in his bedroom.
• Motive? Never settled. Rage at a violent father, money, drugs and resentment of his siblings have all been put forward.
• Sentence? Six terms of 25 years to life. He was never paroled and died in custody in March 2021, aged 69.
• Was the haunting real? The evidence says no. DeFeo's own lawyer later said he and the Lutzes cooked it up, and a federal judge said the book was largely fiction.
The House on Ocean Avenue
The DeFeos looked like they'd made it. Ronald Sr was service manager at his father-in-law's Buick dealership in Brooklyn, and in 1965 he moved his family into 112 Ocean Avenue, a five-bedroom house on a slight rise with a boathouse on the canal and two quarter-moon windows staring out from the top floor. The family went to Mass, held Sunday prayer get-togethers and put a statue of St Joseph in the front garden.
Inside, it wasn't anywhere near as peaceful. Ronald Sr was a big man, around 280 pounds, and people who knew the family described him as volatile and overbearing. He also liked to brag about having mob connections, which A&E's write-up of the case says did a pretty good job of putting the neighbours off getting involved whenever things kicked off.
One small detail that's often wrong: lots of accounts say the DeFeos bought the place in July 1964. The researchers behind AmityvilleMurders.com dug out the deed, which shows the sale went through in June 1965.
Butch
Ronald Jr, always called Butch, was born on 26 September 1951 and was the eldest of five. By his early twenties he was using heroin, had a conviction for stealing an outboard motor and was suspected of other thefts. He worked at the family dealership, where his grandfather made sure he was paid whether he turned up or not, and he kept a collection of guns in his bedroom that he sometimes sold on.
He and his father fought constantly. Years later, in a 2006 A&E documentary quoted in his Boston Globe obituary, Butch said: "The man knocked teeth out of my mouth." How bad the abuse really was is disputed. Journalist Ric Osuna, who interviewed Butch at length, believed the father regularly beat his children. Professor Paula Uruburu, who's studied the case, says she's not aware of physical abuse but agrees the man was overbearing. Either way, the house was a pressure cooker.
The Robbery That Wasn't
Two weeks before the murders, Butch was sent to the bank with the dealership's takings: about $1,800 in cash and $20,000 in cheques. He left at 12.30pm and came back roughly two hours later saying he'd been robbed at gunpoint at a red light.
He hadn't been. Crime Library's reconstruction says he'd arranged for an acquaintance to stage the hold-up and split the money with him. When police asked about the missing time he lost his temper, swore at them and banged on the bonnet of a car. They backed off, but his father didn't buy a word of it.
The two had a blazing row at the dealership when Butch refused to look at police mugshots. His father told him "You've got the devil on your back," and Butch threatened to kill him. It's a line that sounds made up for a horror film. It wasn't, and it was said in a car showroom a fortnight before six people died.
The Night of 13 November 1974
Butch was the only one awake. In his written statement he said he'd stayed up until around 2am and heard a toilet flush at about 4am, and police put the killings somewhere between those two times. He took the Marlin from his room and went into his parents' bedroom first.
He shot his father twice in the back and his mother twice as she lay in bed. Then he went into the room shared by Marc and John and shot each boy once as they slept. Allison was shot in the face. Dawn was shot in the head. Eight shots in total, and the whole thing took less than 15 minutes.
All six were found face down in their beds, in their nightclothes. That's the detail that's haunted the case ever since. A high-powered rifle going off eight times in an ordinary family home and nobody sits up? Shaggy, the family dog, was tied up by the boathouse and barked through the night, and still nobody on Ocean Avenue reported a thing.
Just Another Day at Work
What Butch did next is almost more chilling than the shootings. He showered, trimmed his beard and put on jeans and work boots. He bundled his bloodstained clothes and, by his own account, the rifle into a pillowcase, drove into Brooklyn and dumped the lot down a storm drain. Then he drove back and turned up at the Buick dealership around 6am as if nothing had happened.
He kept up the act all day. He rang the house and said out loud that he couldn't understand why nobody was answering. He left work around noon, called on a girl called Sherry Klein at about 1.30pm and spent the afternoon drinking and taking heroin with friends.
Some time after 6pm he walked into Henry's Bar, a local hangout, and found his friend Bobby Kelske. He told Kelske he'd have to break a window to get into the house, left, then came running back in a state, saying someone had shot his mother and father. A group from the bar went over. Kelske went inside and found Ronald and Louise in the master bedroom, and another friend, Joey Yeswit, phoned the police from the kitchen. Crime Library says Officer Kenneth Geguski was there within ten minutes, followed by village patrolman Edwin Tyndall. It was the two officers who went upstairs and found the four children. The bodies had been lying there for around 15 hours.
The Mob Hitman Who Was Never There
At first the police treated Butch as a witness, maybe even a target. He was the only one left alive, after all. Talking to Detective Gaspar Randazzo that evening, he pointed the finger at Louis Falini, a man he said was a Mafia hitman who'd once lived with the family, helped build a hiding place in the basement and fallen out with Butch over his work at the dealership.
It didn't last the night. At about 2.30am on 15 November, Detective John Shirvell found the empty boxes for the Marlin rifle in Butch's bedroom. Butch changed his story: now Falini and another man had woken him at 3.30am and forced him to go along with it. Then that fell apart too. Falini had never been there.
He was read his rights at 8.45am and, after hours of questioning by detectives Robert Dunn and Dennis Rafferty, he gave it up. "Once I started, I just couldn't stop. It went so fast," he told them. He was charged with all six murders on 15 November, two days after the shootings.
Why Did He Do It?
Nobody's ever pinned it down, and Butch himself was no help because his story changed every few years. These are the main theories.
Rage at his father. This is the one Butch leaned on in later life. In a 2000 prison interview with Ric Osuna he reportedly said he'd killed out of desperation to stop his father's abuse. It explains Ronald Sr. It doesn't explain why a nine-year-old had to die.
Money. Uruburu thinks he may have expected to inherit his parents' assets. The staged robbery shows he was already happy to steal from the family business, and a dead father couldn't keep asking awkward questions about where the takings went.
Jealousy. He reportedly resented the attention his parents gave his younger siblings, which might explain the children but feels thin on its own.
Drugs and drink. He was a heavy drinker and heroin user, and was getting high with friends just hours after the killings. Whether drugs drove the murders or just numbed him afterwards is anyone's guess.
Then there's the version he told the police at the time. He said that once he had the gun in his hand he "turned into God", and he blamed voices in the house for turning him into a killer. That became the backbone of his defence.
The Trial
The trial opened in Suffolk County on 14 October 1975. Butch's lawyer, William Weber, didn't try to argue he hadn't done it. He went for insanity. A defence psychiatrist told the jury Butch was psychotic, had no memory of the killings and wasn't criminally responsible. The prosecution's psychiatrist diagnosed antisocial personality disorder, meaning Butch knew perfectly well that what he was doing was wrong. Prosecutor Gerard Sullivan, an experienced 45-year-old, won that argument comfortably.
On 21 November 1975 Butch was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder. He got six consecutive sentences of 25 years to life. In 1992 he tried for a new trial, claiming Weber had pushed the insanity plea because he wanted a cut of book and film money. Given what happened next, it's not the wildest thing he ever said, but the bid went nowhere.
If you're thinking of other cases where a child turned on the parents behind closed doors, Lizzie Borden's story is the obvious comparison, and the Witte family murders show how warped family dynamics can turn children into killers.
The Questions That Won't Go Away
Plenty of people think the official story doesn't add up, and they've got a few reasonable points.
Why didn't anyone wake up? Butch later claimed he'd drugged the family's food with barbiturates so the gunshots wouldn't wake them. It's one of many versions he gave, and it's never been shown to be true.
Was Dawn involved? In later years Butch said his sister Dawn had helped him, that she'd killed the younger children herself and that he'd shot her during a struggle over the rifle. In court papers he went further and said she'd done all of it. He also said two friends had been hiding in the basement and helped make it look like a botched robbery. Osuna found the Dawn story believable, and filmmaker Ryan Katzenbach thinks the crime scene photos point to more than one person. Uruburu isn't having any of it and describes Butch as someone with a persecution complex and a delusional personality who'll blame anyone but himself. Police said the scenarios he described simply weren't possible.
Was there a second gun? This is the bit most write-ups miss. In December 2011 Katzenbach, making a documentary series called Shattered Hopes, paid for divers and a marine survey team to search the canal behind the house for a .38 handgun he believed police files pointed to. Seequent's account of the survey describes the team throwing chunks of asphalt the weight of a pistol into the water to work out how far someone might have flung one, then scanning the canal bed electromagnetically.
On the third dig a diver came up with a rusted, broken revolver. The Long Island Press reported that Suffolk County Police took it straight into evidence and quickly decided it didn't appear to be linked to the murders, describing it as the handle of a handgun or possibly a flare gun. So that was that, officially at least.
Where the rifle itself ended up is another muddle. Butch's statement said he dumped it in Brooklyn with his clothes, but some reports say police pulled it out of the water near the house. What's not in doubt is that ballistics matched it to the bullets in the victims.
Enter the Lutzes
On 18 December 1975, less than a month after the verdict, George and Kathy Lutz moved into 112 Ocean Avenue with Kathy's three children, Daniel, Christopher and Melissa. They paid $80,000 for it, which was cheap for a house that size on the water.
They left on 14 January 1976, after 28 days. The list of what they said they'd been through is long: swarms of flies in midwinter, black slime in the toilets, green ooze on the walls, a priest ordered out of the house by a disembodied voice, George waking at 3.15am every night, Kathy levitating above the bed, a hooded figure burned into the fireplace, a porcelain lion that bit George's ankle and a pig called Jodie with glowing red eyes peering through the window. There were cloven hoofprints in the snow, too.
Writer Jay Anson turned it all into The Amityville Horror: A True Story, published in September 1977. It was a massive hit, and the 1979 film with James Brolin and Margot Kidder grossed more than $80 million. It came out of the same 1970s appetite that made The Exorcist such a sensation, and that's no coincidence.
How the Haunting Fell Apart
It didn't take long for the cracks to show, and most of them led back to one man.
The lawyer and the wine. William Weber, Butch's defence lawyer, had met George Lutz during those 28 days. Weber needed something to get his client a new trial, and a house possessed by demons would have done nicely. He later told People magazine the whole thing was a hoax, as the Society for Psychical Research's encyclopedia records: "We created this horror story over many bottles of wine." Skeptoid notes he also said bits were lifted from The Exorcist.
The court case. Weber, writer Paul Hoffman and the Lutzes had talked about a book in January 1976, but the Lutzes went with Anson instead. Lawsuits followed. In May 1977 the Lutzes sued Hoffman, Weber and two magazines for $4.5 million, and they were countersued. In September 1979 the judge threw out the Lutzes' case, saying the book was largely fiction built on Weber's suggestions. He even suggested the state bar association look at lawyers acting as literary agents. Crime Library names US District Court Judge Jack Weinstein among those who debunked the story.
The snow. There was no snow during the 28 days the Lutzes lived there. No snow, no hoofprints.
The police. The book describes police calls and visits. Police records show none, and no complaints from neighbours either. The book also renames Henry's Bar "Witches Brew" and invents a police sergeant who didn't exist.
The priest. Anson's tormented "Father Mancuso" was made up. The real priest, Father Ralph Pecoraro, said nothing unusual happened, and some reports, including his own affidavit, say he never actually went to the house and only spoke to the Lutzes on the phone.
The house. The book has doors and windows ripped off their hinges. They were all still on, with their original fittings.
The burial ground. Paranormal writer Hans Holzer claimed the house stood on a Native American burial ground, and his daughter has said he believed Butch may have been possessed by an old chief. The nearest Shinnecock settlement was about 70 miles away. Another legend blamed a witch called John Ketcham who supposedly once owned the land, but there's no proof any Ketcham lived there and the family's own genealogy turned up no witch.
The investigators. When parapsychologist Stephen Kaplan spoke to George on 16 February 1976, George claimed he'd known nothing about the occult until two months earlier, then casually namedropped the witch Raymond Buckland, who'd left the New York area a year or two before. Kaplan smelt a rat and went on to list more than 100 factual problems with the story. Psychic Alex Tanous, sent by the American Society for Psychical Research, sensed nothing in the house and reportedly found a publishing contract requiring the Lutzes to keep promoting the story.
The money. Here's a detail that tells you a lot. The Lutzes never made a single payment on their $60,000 mortgage, and they handed the house back to Columbia Savings and Loan on 30 August 1976.
The Lutzes never backed down completely. They reportedly passed polygraph tests in 1979, and in a 2000 documentary George said: "It's certainly not a hoax." Oxygen's piece on the hoax notes the couple divorced in 1980. Kathy died in 2004 and George in 2006. Kathy's son Daniel still stood by the story in the 2012 documentary My Amityville Horror, although he spent much of it talking about how much he'd hated his stepfather.
The House Today
The people who actually lived in the house the longest had a much duller time. Jim and Barbara Cromarty bought it from the bank in March 1977 and stayed about ten years. The only thing that haunted them was tourists. They changed the house number to put sightseers off, and they sued the Lutzes, Anson and the publishers for invasion of privacy, settling for an undisclosed amount. In a two-page statement they called the book a hoax.
Later owners swapped the famous eye-shaped windows for square ones, filled in the pool and added a sunroom. Nobody's reported so much as a creaky floorboard. The house last sold in 2017 for $605,000. A 50th anniversary piece on AOL notes the current owners, the mayor and the local church all declined to talk, while Laura DiDio, the reporter who broke the original story, summed up what the legend has become: "Amityville is more like a cottage industry."
There's one genuinely dark footnote. Ricky Kasso, the Long Island teenager who killed Gary Lauwers in Northport in June 1984, had often visited the house. The legend had pulling power, and not always with harmless people.
How Butch DeFeo's Story Ended
Butch spent the rest of his life in prison, the last stretch at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York. Every parole bid was knocked back. He kept changing his story, blaming his sister and even his mother, and claimed to have married twice behind bars, neither of which could be confirmed. He seemed to resent the haunting more than anyone. In a 1986 Newsday interview he said he was sick of people thinking he'd been possessed.
He died on 12 March 2021 at Albany Medical Center, aged 69. ABC7 New York reported that the cause of death wasn't immediately known, and it's never been made public.
Strip away the flies, the slime and the red-eyed pig and you're left with what actually happened in that house: a violent, troubled young man shot six people in their sleep, then went to work. Like the Lawson family murders or the Welch family on Route 66, it was a family destroyed from the inside. The ghosts were added later, by people who stood to make money.
Further Reading
If you want to go deeper into the night itself, Ric Osuna's The Night the DeFeos Died is built on years of interviews with Butch and makes the case that the official story leaves too much out. For the demolition of the haunting, Stephen and Roxanne Kaplan's The Amityville Horror Conspiracy goes through the Lutz account claim by claim.
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