The quiet Dutch Colonial on Ocean Avenue in Amityville held its breath before dawn on November 13, 1974, while the DeFeo family slept behind drawn shades. In an upstairs bedroom, Ronald Joseph DeFeo Sr., 43, a white man, lay face down in bed, the kind of posture that might have looked like ordinary sleep from the hallway, if not for the rifle fire that had already torn through the night.
Hours later, as daylight thinned into early evening, the calm broke in a neighborhood bar when the eldest son, Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr., burst in and blurted that his parents had been shot. Men from the bar followed him back to the house, and the first steps inside quickly turned to panic as they climbed toward the bedrooms and realized the stillness wasn’t rest. A call went out for police, and Suffolk County investigators began moving through the home, room by room, finding that the slaughter had reached every corner of the family’s sleeping spaces.
Investigators would say each victim had been shot in the back with a rifle while in bed, an eerie detail made worse by what the house didn’t offer: no signs of a struggle and, despite the power of a rifle, no chorus of neighbors claiming they’d heard gunfire. In the first confused hours, DeFeo Jr. tried on an explanation that pointed away from himself, telling people the killings must have been a mob hit, but the story didn’t hold. By the next day, police had arrested him and charged him with murdering his parents and four siblings, and the case’s center of gravity shifted from a shadowy outside threat to the son who had been the one to summon help.
As detectives pressed for the truth, DeFeo Jr. confessed to the shootings, later offering a chilling refrain that he “couldn’t stop,” while also claiming that voices in the house compelled him. Police recovered the rifle he said he had discarded, and reporting on the investigation described ballistics evidence linking the weapon to what was taken from the victims. Yet even as the case moved toward court, he repeatedly changed his account—sometimes reviving the mob story, other times shifting blame toward his sister Dawn or suggesting friends had been involved—threads that fueled rumor for decades but never turned into another prosecution.
When the case finally reached a jury, DeFeo Jr. went on trial on October 14, 1975, with his defense arguing he was not responsible by reason of insanity. The jury rejected that argument, finding him guilty on six counts of second-degree murder on November 21, 1975, and he was sentenced to prison terms that amounted to life behind bars. The official record left the murders with a single man held criminally responsible, while the house itself—forever linked to what happened in those bedrooms—took on a grim afterlife in public imagination that could never soften the reality of the family’s last night.
