The Amittyville Horror
The murders in Amityville have sparked countless movies and one novel, inspired by the paranormal activity the Lutze family claimed to experience. While these claims have only been substantiated by the Lutze family and debunked by many, the murders that happened in the home before they moved in were very real.
On November 13th 1974, patrons at Henry’s Bar in Suffolk County Long Island were confronted by a frantic man claiming that he believed his mother and father had been shot in their shared home. The man, Robert DeFeo Jr. led a group of men from the bar to his home. When they arrived, they discovered a gruesome scene. Robert DeFeo Jr.’s parents were in fact shot in their beds. One man from the group frantically called the Suffolk County Police department for help. When the police arrived, they searched the home and found the rest of the family dead in their bed. The whole family was massacred except for 23 year old Ronald. The victims consisted of Ronald DeFeo Sr. 43, his wife Louise DeFeo also 43, and their children Dawn (18), Allison (13), Marc (12) and John Matthew (9). Each family member shot in their beds with a .35 caliber riffle.
Ronald Jr. was quickly rushed to the police station for an interview. it was there he claimed that a local mob hitman, Louis Falini, had murdered his family. Due to inconsistencies in his story, police grew wary of Ronald Jr. The following day, he gave a full confession to the murders. He told police that once he started killing, he just could not stop, he had to shoot everyone in the house. After the murder, he disrobed, bathed and discarded his bloody clothes along with the rifle and gun cartridges. Following this, he went to work at his father’s car dealership as usual. He later told police where exactly the evidence had been discarded.
Ronald Jr. showed signs of emotional instability from childhood. At home Ronald was frequently the target of his father’s belligerent fits. School was not a safe haven either. As a child, he was consistently bullied by his peers for his size. As he grew older, he began to reciprocate his father’s violence and began to physically fight with his father. After becoming violent with friends, Ronald Jr. was taken to a psychiatrist. This whoever was no avail to Ronald Jr. who insisted he was not mentally ill. By the time he was 17, he was expelled from school and became a consistent user of LSD and heroin. His habit was supported by his father who gave him a job at his dealership. However, Ronald Jr. was not a good employee. Nonetheless, his father gave him a salary regardless of work attendance or performance.
Before the murders, Ronald Jr. reached a boiling point. During a fight between Ronald Sr. and Louise, Ronald Jr. attempted to shoot his father at point blank range. The gun malfunctioned but that did not prevent the brawl between father and son that ensued. After this, Ronald Jr. was becoming increasingly hostile of his father. Believing his dad was not paying him enough, Ronald Jr. created a scheme to begin funneling money out of the dealership. In October of 1974, when Robert was entrusted with depositing $20,000 of dealership income into the bank, he had friends stage a robbery. After splitting the money evenly, police began to think Ronald Jr. as a suspect and questioned him at the dealership. When asked to come look at mugshots of possible suspects at the station, he resed. Startled by his son’s lack of cooperation with police, Ronald Sr. began to suspect that his son was behind the theft. When accused, Ronald Jr. threatened to shoot and kill his father. On the night of the murders, Ronald Jr. shot both parents, then went into his brothers’ room where he shot them, then his sisters. Everyone was dead within a matter of 15 minutes.
To this day, people struggle to understand certain circumstances surrounding the murders. When police evaluated the crime scene, there were no signs of a struggle and everyone was in their beds. This is odd for a crime scene where multiple people are shot in different rooms. In most cases, other people in the house would put up a fight or at least flee the house. To explain this, Ronald Jr. said he sedated the family to ensure no one would be able to wake up when they heard gun shots. However, during the autopsy no traces of sedatives were found in any of the family member’s blood or urine. After learning this, police checked to see if a silencer had been installed in the gun, explaining why the family did not wake up during the attack. They concluded that the riffle did not have a silencer fitted to it during the murders. In a bizarre twist, neighbors told police that they did not hear anything coming from the house when the family was killed. They are said to have only heard the family dog barking incessantly. No one in the surrounding area heard screams or gun shots. Leaving people puzzled about what actually happened to the DeFeo family during those 15 minutes.
At his trial in October of 1975, Ronald Jr.’s lawyer, William Webber, formed an insanity plea. Claiming that years of repetitive LSD and heroin use, had rendered him insane. Ronald Jr., was also diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder which the prosecution maintained would have left him cognizant of his actions. The defense countered this claim b saying Ronald Jr. heard voices in his head of his family plotting to kill him. In order to protect himself, Ronald Jr. massacred his entire family. Ultimately, the prosecution won. On November 21st 1975, Ronald Jr. DeFeo was deemed competent of the murder and found guilty on six counts of first degree murder. The judge, Thomas Stark, sentenced Ronald Jr. to 25 years to life in prison. He served his term at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York where he died on March 12, 2021.
