The DeFeo FamilyThe still shroud of night blanketed the village of Amityville in the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 14, 1974. Stray house pets and the odd car were the only signs of life as families and neighbors slumbered. But hatred and savagery were brewing beneath the seeming calm at 112 Ocean Boulevard. The entire DeFeo family had gone to bed, with the exception of Butch. As he sat in the quiet of his room, he knew what he wanted to do, what he in fact was going to do. His father and his family would be a nuisance to him no longer. Butch was the only member of the family with his own room. His violent disposition and the fact that he was the eldest had afforded him this small luxury. It also afforded him a private storage place for a number of weapons he collected and sometimes sold. On the night of the murders, Butch selected a .35-caliber Marlin rifle from his closet, and set off, stealthily but resolutely, towards his parents’ bedroom. He quietly pushed aside the door to their room and momentarily observed them as they slept, unaware of the horror at the foot of their bed. Then, without hesitation, Butch raised the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger, the first of 8 fatal shots he would fire that night. This first shot ripped into his father’s back, tearing through his kidney and exiting through his chest. Butch fired another round, again hitting his father in the back. This shot pierced the base of Ronald, Sr.’s spine, and lodged in his neck.
By now, Louise DeFeo had roused herself, and had barely a few seconds to react before her son began to fire upon her. Butch aimed the weapon at his mother as she lay prone on her bed, and fired two shots into her body. The bullets shattered her rib cage and collapsed her right lung. Both bodies now lay silently in fresh pools of their own blood. Despite the distinct snap of each rifle shot, no one else
stirred in the house. Butch quickly surveyed the destruction
he had wrought, before resuming his massacre of the
innocent. His two young brothers, John and Mark, would be
the next victims of Butch’s murderous sense of self-righteousness
and rage.
He entered the bedroom the two boys shared and stood between their two beds. Standing directly above his two helpless brothers, Butch fired one shot into each of the boys as they lay sleeping. The bullets tore through their young bodies, ravaging their internal organs, laying waste to the lives that lay ahead of them. Mark lay motionless, while John, whose spinal cord had been severed by his brother’s heartless attack, twitched spasmodically for a few moments after the shooting. Again, the shots had not roused the only remaining members of the DeFeo family, and Butch skulked unchallenged to the bedroom his sisters Dawn and Allison shared. Dawn was the closest in age to Butch, while Allison was in grade school with John and Mark.
As Butch entered the room, Allison stirred and looked up just as he lowered the rifle to her face and pulled the trigger. His youngest sister was murdered instantly. Butch aimed his weapon at Dawn’s head as well, literally blowing the left side of her face off. It was just after 3:00 a.m. In a span of less than fifteen minutes, Ronald “Butch” DeFeo, Jr., had brutally slain each defenseless member of his family in cold blood. The DeFeo’s dog Shaggy was tied up out by the boathouse, and was barking violently in reaction to the brutality occurring in the house. His barking didn’t distract Butch one bit, however. Aware that he had completed the task he had set out to do, he now turned his attention to cleaning himself up and establishing an alibi to throw the inevitable police investigation off the trail. Butch calmly showered, trimmed his beard, and dressed in his jeans and work boots. He then collected his bloodied clothing and the rifle, wrapped them up in a pillowcase, and headed out to his car. He threw the evidence into the car, and took off into the pre-dawn hours before sunrise. Butch drove from the suburbs into Brooklyn, and disposed of the pillowcase and its contents by casting them into a storm drain. He then returned to Long Island, and reported to work at his grandfather’s Buick dealership, business as usual. It was 6:00 a.m.Butch did not remain at work for long. He called home several times, and when his father failed to show up, he acted as though he were bored with nothing to do, and left around noon. He called his girlfriend, Sherry Klein, to let her know that he would be home early from work, and that he wanted to stop by and see her. On his way back into Amityville, Butch passed his friend, Bobby Kelske, and the two stopped to talk. Butch proceeded on to Sherry’s house, arriving at about 1:30 p.m. Sherry was 19 years old, a shapely and popular waitress at one of the many bars Butch frequented with his friends. Upon arriving, Butch casually mentioned that he had tried to call home several times, and, although all the cars were in the driveway, there was no response. To demonstrate, he called home from Sherry’s apartment with the same, predictable result. Acting puzzled but unconcerned, Ronald took Sherry shopping during the afternoon. From the mall in Massapequa, they drove to Bobby’s house. Ronald gave Bobby the same report he had given Sherry, that his family appeared to be home, but that there was no answer when he called on the phone. There’s something going on over there, he said. The cars are all in the driveway and I still can’t get in the house. I called the house twice and nobody answered. Abruptly shifting gears, Butch asked if Bobby was going out later. Bobby replied that he was going to take a nap, and that if Butch wanted to meet him out, he would be at a local bar called Henry’s around 6:00. Butch spent the remainder of the afternoon visiting friends, drinking, and taking heroin. He finally arrived at Henry’s after 6, and Bobby followed him in shortly thereafter. Once again, Butch feigned concern over his inability to reach anyone at home. I’m going to have to go home and break a window to get in, he told Bobby. Well, do what you have to do, his friend replied blithely. Ronald exited the bar on his supposed journey of discovery, only to return within a few minutes in a state of agitation and dismay. Bob, you gotta help me, he implored. Someone shot my mother and father! The two friends were joined by a small group of patrons, and
they all piled into Butch’s car, with Bobby at the wheel. It
had been approximately 15 hours since the murders took
place. Within moments after arriving at the house, Bobby
Kelske had entered the front door and raced upstairs into the
master bedroom. |
The Lutz's  George and Kathy Lutz only knew a little of the strange history of the Dutch Colonial in Amityville when they decided to buy it- only that a poor crazy boy had killed his family there a year or so earlier. It didn't matter to them; they still wanted the house. "The agent hadn't really thought of us as serious buyers," Kathy remembers. "I think she just got tired of having us turn down places because they didn't have what we felt we needed. So she decided to show us that what we did want was out of our reach. She was totally surprised when we said we'd take it." The house was right on the water, complete with a boathouse, a garage, and a pool. It was even large enough for George to set up an office of his own, and it was more than they had hoped to spend. In short, it was everything they wanted- a perfect place to raise their children. On December 18, 1975, only a little more than a year after Ronald DeFeo listened to the voices and murdered his family, Kathy and George Lutz, their three children, and their beloved mongrel dog Harry moved into the beautiful Dutch Colonial. It all seemed too good to be true. It was. The day after they moved into their new home, a Catholic priest named Father Mancusso came to bless the house for them. But as he began the simple ceremony, he was slapped viciously across the face by an invisible assailant, and an unseen voice ordered him to "GET OUT!" Later, psychics would say that blessing provoked the evil in Amityville, and began a chain of events that would affect the Lutzes for years to come. Still, Father Mancusso pressed on and finished his blessing, then fled the house. Later, at his rectory, he was physically attacked a second time. This assault, much more intense than the first, left him dangerously ill. He hovered at the edge of death for days, and though he was sick and frequently delirious, he tried to call Kathy and George to warn them about the thing he had felt. He wanted them to leave the house immediately. He tried again and again to reach them by phone, but it simply couldn't be done. Every time the connection was completed, it would be cut off at a crucial moment or static interference would make it impossible to talk. And each time, a new bout of sickness would follow his attempt. Meanwhile, at the house, strange things were happening to the Lutzes. They were slowly being twisted out of shape by demonic forces that wroked in constant, subtle, invisible ways; and what had once been a warm and loving family gradually became a group of vicious, cruel, embattled strangers. It was, in every sense, a nightmare. Even today, the Lutzes have trouble deciding what really happened physicallly, and what occurred only in their minds. Dreams, physical attacks, apparations, and imagination combined, conquered, and eventually shattered outside reality. They saw, not what they could necessarily, prove, was "real." It began immediately after they moved into the house. As early as thirty-six hours after the Lutzes arrived, George began to consciously feel something "not right." "Before Amityville," he says now,, " I don't recall ever being really scared. I just wasn't the kind of person to jump at things that went bump in the night. But the attack on me started in such a strange way that it wasn't until after we left the house, when we looked back in retrospect, that I realized it was even an attack at all." "I just couldn't keep warm," he recalls today. He began to spend more and more time in front of the large open fireplace in the living room, stirring only long enough to go into the yard and cut more wood, or check the thermostats. he was sure the furnace had gone out, but it always read eighty degrees. (Psychic researchers call this manifestation psychic-cold- the ability of a spirit to drain thermal energy from a victim or a room. They say this energy, which has been known to produce "cold spots" in haunted houses, is usually transformed into a negative power and turned back on the victim from whom it is taken.) Kathy felt something, too. Even though she and George had been married only a short time, she was secure in the knowledge that she undersstood her husband well. Now, however, she saw them all changing for the worse. "Even on the nights when he did finally pull himself away from the fire and come to bed," she recalls today, "he would wake around three in the morning, get dressed, and go off to wander around in the snow near the boathouse. And George was normally a neat and tidy person, too, but suddenly he started to forego even personal cleanliness in his mania for keeping warm. It became an obsession." He was becoming a stranger, and he didn't even know it. That was only the beginning. . . a deceptively quiet first round in what would become a battle for the Lutzes' souls. For the next twenty-eight days, they would go through their own personal versions of hell. "Trying to put into words what happened is impossible," George said later. "It seems too unreal to possibly have happened, even to me. And I was there; I went through it." The psychic-cold intensified and affected them all. George would awake at 3:15 every morning- the exact time the DeFeo murders had occurred by dreams and visions of death. Hordes of flies swarmed in the sewing room, the room that had belonged to Ronald DeFeo. Toilet water in the upstairs bathrooms turned inky black and emited a putrid smell. Furniture and objects were thown about. Little Amy became friends with an invisible entity she called Jodie- a pig-thing that was more real than anyone could have imagined. young Greg's hand was squashed flat by a window, and later showed no signs of injury. And all of them- even the poor half-breed dog- changed and decayed as the evil spirit of the house took them in. The terror that the Lutz family endured is fully documented in the runaway best-seller, The Amityville Horror. Afterwards the book was made into an equally successful movie. Both versions show what took place during that horrible month in the house. One thing, however, is certain: on January 15, only twenty-eight days after a happy young family had taken possession of the house, the Lutzes grabbed what clothes were in easy reach and fled in terror. They left behind over $40,000 in antiques, cars, boats, furnishings, clothing, toys- even the deed to the house itself. The international notoriety of the Lutz family's ordeal has led to accusations of a hoax, to suspicions about conspiracy or pointless publicity-mongering. More than a few skeptics have even questioned the very existence of certain principle characters in the account. These comments make little difference to Kathy and George Lutz. "My husband and I know, without any doubt, that evil does exist in the world. And the fact that people argue over it's possibility or its impossibility- well, that's totally academic to us. We have been through it. We have lived it, and we know it exists," Kathy Lutz said when she and George visited Amsterdam some time ago. Later she added, "Even though we try, it's quite impossible for us to put into words what really happened. Much of it is beyond words. You would have to go through it to even partly understand." George added to her statement. "It's close to impossible for us to effectively put into words the horror that plagued us, first at the house and then as we continually moved in hopes of emancipation from it. The word horror, though explicit, is totally inadequate." |
