28 Days on Ocean Avenue: The Real Amityville Murders

0:00 There was a big house on Ocean Avenue in Aminiville, New York, with a statue of the Virgin Mary Outfront and a little sign on the lawn that said "Hi, hopes." A family of seven lived there. Then on a Wednesday night in November of 1974, the oldest son walked into his usual bar and asked his friends to come home with him.

0:48 Long Island grew like crazy after World War II. Suffolk County nearly doubled in population during the 1960s with families leaving New York City for houses of their own. By the fall of 1974, the New York Times was reporting the boom had stalled. Aminiville was a little village on the south shore right there on the water. If you drove down Ocean Avenue that fall, you'd go right past this big old colonial-style house with a statue of the Virgin Mary Outfront and a sign on the lawn that said "Hi, hopes."

1:29 That was 112 Ocean Avenue. It had a pool and a boat house and the Defeo family had lived there since 1965. Ronald Defeo's senior was the service manager at Brigante Carl Buick in Brooklyn, a dealership Luis's dad co-owned and their oldest son worked in the family car business too, which made the family and the job kind of the same group of people. Later retellings called Ronald Senior Rigid and Luis Quiet and Kind. They had five kids. The oldest was Ronald Jr. and everybody called him "Buch." He was 23 years old. Don was 18 and later accounts says that she went to Catherine Gibbs' Secretaryal School because her parents wanted her there close.

2:13 Allison was 13 and people remember her as Quiet's who shot pool with family and friends. Mark got hurt really bad playing football and a later account says that he was in physical therapy. John was 9. He was the baby. He shared a room with Mark and the little bit you can find out about him says that he loved playing with his big brother. Butch, the oldest, walked into Henry's bar in Amityville on the evening of Wednesday, November 13th, 1974. It was about 6.30. The people at Henry's new butch really well since he went there a lot. He came in saying that he thought his parents had been shot and that he needed someone to come back to the house with him. A few of his friends went.

2:53 He got people who stopped into a bar that night just morning and drank and walked into a whole murder case situation. Somebody called the police at 6.35 so it didn't last long. He was only in the bar five minutes telling this before someone said, "Let's call the cops." The officers got there and found six people dead. Ronald Sr. and Louise had each been shot twice. Don was in her third floor bedroom and Allison was in her own room. Mark and John were together in the room that they shared. Each of the kids had been shot once. All six were in their night clothes and most of them were face down in bed. Nothing was stolen and police saw no sign of a fight.

3:34 Nobody knows why the rest of the family didn't get out or why no neighbor called about rifle shots in the early morning hours. Neighbors told the times that defaos were a nice normal family. Butch was the only person of the family left and he had a name for the police. A suspect. The name was Louis Fellini and butch told the police that he was a mob guy. Police took it very seriously for about a day because when you walk into a house with six people dead and no struggle, a professional hit is a possibility and the son standing in front of you might be next. The detectives did what you would expect for them to do and they checked his story against what actually happened.

4:16 A later account says that he went to work that morning and called the house during the day acting confused about why his dad never came into work. Investigators found some ammunition evidence that led back to Butch and that gun was nowhere in the house. You can see where this is going. He confessed on November 14th. In a later account a detective tells him the mob story doesn't hold up and Butch says it all started so fast that he couldn't stop. He told them where he dumped the evidence and they found it. 35 caliber Marlin rifle and all. A few days later a times headline said police were reporting the family had been drugged and if you go looking that headline is pretty much the whole paper trail.

4:58 The paper also tied Butch to about $19,000 missing from the dealership and a later report says his dad already suspected him of stealing it. About a thousand people came to the funeral. Butch got indicted on six counts of murder. The trial started in the fall of 1975. The judge wrote that about 120 possible jurors had to be kept apart from the rest of the pool because of the publicity and when the clerk read the case out loud he remembered that you could hear the whole room react. Butch's lawyer was William Weber. William went with insanity. The defense agreed Butch fired the shots and argued that he was too sick in the head to be held responsible.

5:39 Butch said that he heard voices and that LSD and heroin helped convince him that his family was plotting against him. The prosecutor argued that hiding the rifle and making up a mobster story showed that Butch knew exactly what he was doing and he knew what he was doing was wrong. Experts for the prosecution said Butch was legally sane. And if you're sitting on that jury, a made up mob story is a big problem for an insanity defense. The jury came back on November 21st, 1975. They found him guilty on all six counts of second degree murder. He got 25 years to life for each one and the judge ran them all back to back. He ever really landed on a single reason why.

6:22 You hear people point at the missing money and the fights with his dad and years later Butch claims his father abused him and I haven't found anybody besides Butch backing that up. The prosecutor later co-wrote a book about the case and he called it "high hopes" same as the sign on the lawn. The house sat empty for a little over a year, about 13 months. Because who wants a house where six people were murdered. George and Kathy Lutz bought it in December of 1975. They paid $80,000 for it. They moved in with Kathy's three kids. They lasted 28 days and left saying that something in that house drove them out. A writer showed up and turned their story into the Amityville Horror.

7:04 A 1977 book sold as a true story and loaded with flies and slime. The movie came out in 1979 and it was a huge hit. In speaking of the slime, they couldn't really come to an agreement about certain aspects of it since depending on which version you read. It's a red liquid slime or it's green slime. Other details in the book clash with weather records and the priest's own account. The next owner told Newsday nothing weird ever happened there. His family said the famous hidden red room from the book was actually a closet. Then William Weber showed back up. Which is defense lawyer. He started calling the whole thing a hoax.

7:47 He said the Lutz has cooked it up over many bottles of wine. The Lutz stood by every bit of it and they ended up in court. In 1979, a federal judge threw out the Lutz's remaining claims and said the book looked to him like mostly fiction. Built on a lot of William's suggestions. You've got Kathy's sons telling it two different ways. Danny Lutz said the paranormal stuff absolutely did happen. His brother Christopher Corntino said real things happened and George blew them up bigger. And he called George a showman who was into the occult. George and Kathy eventually divorced but they kept telling the same story. Kathy died in 2004. George died two years after her.

8:28 But now back to the actual thing in this story that we can prove. The murders. Butch spent the rest of his life in prison. You could fill a notebook with the versions of the story he told. He said detectives beat the confession out of him with the phone book. The verdict still stood. Then he started blaming Don. At a parole hearing in 1999, he said Don was the only person he actually killed. Sometimes in his telling, she shot the younger kids and sometimes she shot their father. Nobody else in this case was ever charged. A later author brought up possible gunpowder residue on Don's clothing and all six of Butch's convictions stayed right where they were.

9:09 Don was 18 and she was killed in her own bedroom. After his second prison wedding, Butch sued to get into the state's family reunion program. And in 2008, an appeals court backed the prison system, saying the murders were brutal enough to keep him out and calling what he did an execution-style shooting. Butch eventually died in Albany Medical Center on March 12, 2021 after being moved there from Sullivan Correctional Facility. He was 69 years old. And if you're wondering what it was that killed him, the state never said. The house on Ocean Avenue is still there and people still live in it. After the book and the movie, site seers on Ocean Avenue meant traffic and trash for the neighbors and overtime for the police.

9:54 So a later owner got the address changed to 108 to keep the lookers away. Renovations took out those quarter-round windows from the movie and if you drive past it today, you may not even recognize it. It sold in 2017 and it went for $605,000. For listening to 10-minute murder, bingeable true crime stories. Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host and here's an email. Subject, the blog is my morning thing now. Joe, I don't know if you track this or if it even matters, but I'm on your site almost every day.

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