In the early hours of November 13, 1974, twenty-three-year-old Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. burst into a bar in Amityville, New York, claiming his parents had been shot. Police who arrived at the family’s Dutch Colonial house on Ocean Avenue found six members of the DeFeo family dead in their beds — parents Ronald Sr. and Louise, and four siblings ranging from nine to eighteen — each shot with a .35-caliber rifle while apparently asleep, with no sign that any of them had woken or struggled. Butch DeFeo was arrested within days, and although he offered shifting accounts — first blaming a mob hit, later confessing to the killings himself — he was convicted in 1975 of six counts of second-degree murder.
What has kept the case genuinely unsolved in the eyes of many investigators and researchers is not who pulled the trigger, but why none of the six victims apparently woke, moved, or attempted to flee during a shooting spree that would have taken several minutes to carry out room to room, and why DeFeo’s own account of his motive and mental state shifted so many times, including claims — never substantiated — that voices from the house had directed him to kill. DeFeo, who died in prison in 2021, gave at least half a dozen contradictory versions of that night over the following decades, several offered to journalists and documentarians rather than in any legal proceeding, leaving even his own guilt-in-detail an open question despite his conviction.
The House That Became a Legend
The DeFeo murders alone would likely have faded into regional true-crime history had the house’s next owners, George and Kathy Lutz, not moved in just over a year later and moved out again within twenty-eight days, later describing slime oozing from walls, swarms of flies in winter, and a presence that drove them out — the basis for The Amityville Horror book and film franchise. That story has been widely disputed and, by several later investigators including the Lutzes’ own lawyer, partly admitted as embellished for profit. But the haunting narrative, real or invented, grew directly out of the unresolved strangeness of the DeFeo case itself: a family killed in their sleep, in a house with no forced entry, by a son whose own explanation of that night never fully held together.
Ocean Avenue’s house — its address long since changed and its distinctive quarter-round attic windows altered by later owners specifically to deter gawkers — still draws visitors and paranormal tourists more than fifty years later. Whatever separates the documented murders from the manufactured haunting, Amityville remains a case where the criminal mystery and the ghost story became so entangled that few people now remember the DeFeo family’s names at all, only the house.