In the early evening of November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr., known as “Butch” by family and friends, walked into a hometown bar in Amityville to have a drink. John Altieri, one of the patrons, recalled DeFeo shouting, “My father and mother have been shot!”
Altieri and four other barflies piled into 23-year-old DeFeo’s car and drove to his family’s three-story house in the tiny hamlet in Long Island, New York. While DeFeo waited in the car, Altieri and the others went up to the second floor.
One of them called 911 after they found the bodies of DeFeo’s four siblings, 18-year-old Dawn, 13-year-old Allison, 12-year-old Mark and 7-year-old John Matthew, the New York Times reported. Suffolk County Police detectives subsequently discovered the bodies of DeFeo’s parents, 43-year-old Ronald Sr. and 42-year-old Louise.
The six victims, who were found in their beds wearing pajamas, had each been shot in the back with a rifle. The following day, homicide investigators arrested DeFeo, charging him with murdering his parents, sisters and brothers. DeFeo initially claimed his relatives were victims of a possible mob hit, but DeFeo eventually confessed to shooting them during his police interview.
“Once I started, I just couldn’t stop,” DeFeo said. He also claimed “voices from the house” turned him into a killer. At the time, DeFeo also faced accusations of being a heavy drinker and drug user.
DeFeo, who died in prison in 2021 when he was 69, never disclosed his true motives for gunning down his entire family. But for some journalists and Amityville natives who followed the case for decades, DeFeo’s murderous rampage was rooted in years of conflict with his father, as well as jealousy toward his siblings whom he believed his parents doted on more than him.
DeFeo was also possibly motivated by greed, thinking he would inherit his parents’ assets if the entire family was dead, theorizes Paula Uruburu, a Hofstra University professor emeritus who lived in Amityville as a teen and was friends with Dawn DeFeo.
“I think his primary motive was financial,” Uruburu tells A&E True Crime. “But [I believe] he was also motivated by his growing anger and hatred for his father. And he was probably resentful of the attention Dawn and the little ones got.”
The Black Sheep of a Devout Catholic Family
In the early 1970s, the DeFeos moved from Brooklyn to a five-bedroom Dutch Colonial house in Amityville and soon became a part of the community. Ronald DeFeo Sr. would regularly give a neighbor rides to her job, and the entire family watched over another neighbor whose husband died, the New York Times reported. The DeFeos also held Sunday prayer huddles and had a large fountain statue of St. Joseph holding a baby Jesus in their front yard.
Uruburu and Dawn DeFeo attended the same Catholic elementary school, and when they were teens, they played for the same neighborhood softball team. “She was a sweet and funny girl,” Uruburu says. “I was at her house for a lot of family pool parties.”
Ronald DeFeo was “the black sheep,” Urburu says. “In Italian families, first-born male sons are the heir apparent, and he was not headed in that direction,” she recalls. “He was always lurking around, and he seemed like a creepy guy. He kind of looked like [cult leader and mass murderer] Charles Manson.”
DeFeo partied hard, often bringing friends and acquaintances to his parents’ house after bars closed to keep drinking, according to press reports. DeFeo also regularly lost his cool and got into fights—behavior that caused friction with Ronald DeFeo Sr., Uruburu says.
Yet, DeFeo inherited his short temper from his father, says Ric Osuna, an investigative journalist who authored the book, The Night the DeFeos Died.
“Ron Sr. was quite abusive to the children, especially Butch,” Osuna tells A&E True Crime. “Ron Sr. would go on an abusing spree and then go pray in front of the St. Joseph statue for forgiveness [according to neighbors Osuna interviewed for his book]. Neighbors didn’t want to get involved because Ron Sr. bragged about having mob connections.”
Uruburu says she’s unaware of any incidents of Ronald DeFeo Sr. physically abusing his kids, but confirmed that the dad “was overbearing” with his oldest son and that neighbors would sometimes mention the father had tangential ties to organized crime.
“We grew up at a time when the nuns in Catholic schools could hit you,” Uruburu says. “The father was probably very tough on [DeFeo] as the oldest son. The father was a big guy and Ronald Jr. was not.”
DeFeo Implicates His Dead Sister Dawn
Based on DeFeo’s confession, Suffolk County Police detectives recovered the rifle used in the murders from a canal behind the DeFeo home where he said he had tossed the firearm and other crime scene evidence. A ballistics test matched the projectile fragments recovered from the bodies of the six victims, the New York Times reported.
In 1975, a jury convicted DeFeo of the six homicides despite his insanity defense. He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life in prison. Nearly two decades later, DeFeo made a failed attempt for a new trial by claiming his criminal defense attorney coerced him into an insanity defense in order to capitalize on potential movie and book deals due to the horrific crime’s notoriety. The murders were the inspiration behind the 1977 book and 1979 supernatural horror movie The Amityville Horror.
Around the same time, DeFeo conjured up many different versions of the murders.
He accused his sister Dawn of conspiring with him to kill their parents and claimed it was she who murdered the younger siblings. DeFeo claimed he killed Dawn in self-defense while they wrestled for the rifle.
In court records, he also claimed Dawn was responsible for all the murders and that he shot her in a rage after discovering the bodies.
The convicted killer also alleged that two friends were with him in the DeFeo family home’s basement helped him try to make the crime scene look like a botched robbery. In 2000, Osuna visited DeFeo in prison for six hours as part of his book’s research. During the interview, DeFeo allegedly told him he killed his parents “out of desperation” and that his motive was to end his father’s abuse, Osuna tells A&E True Crime.
Dawn DeFeo allegedly egged her brother on because she also lived in fear of Ronald DeFeo Sr., Osuna says DeFeo told him.
Osuna found DeFeo’s version involving Dawn credible after poring through the evidence files and trial transcripts following the prison interview. He says the crime scene photos strongly suggest that more than one person was involved in the slayings. Others who investigated the case concur—like Ryan Katzenbach, who has produced multiple documentaries about the DeFeo murders.
“How could a person walk through a three-story Dutch colonial and shoot six different victims, on two separate levels and no one got out of bed, no one put up a struggle?” Katzenbach told CBS News in a 2012 interview.
Uruburu scoffs at the idea that DeFeo’s sister plotted with him to murder their family only to lose her life too. “Blaming his sister was just ridiculous,” Uruburu says. “[DeFeo] always looked for a scapegoat. He had a persecution complex and a delusional personality.”