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Amityville, Part 1 – Many Stories, One Crime

This is the My Dark Path podcast.

Babylon Township is located in the southeastern part of New York State, situated along southern Long Island’s Great South Bay. It’s a collection of quaint little villages and charming hamlets, blending the vibe of a small town and a bedroom community situated 30 miles from the bustle of Manhattan.

In 1653 three men – Robert Williams, Richard Holbrook, and Daniel Whitehead –purchased a parcel of land from the Matinecock Tribe and founded the Town of Huntington. European settlers moved in to where Native Americans used to live. More land purchases over the years expanded the footprint of Huntington, until it spread from Long Island Sound to the Great South Bay.

In 1803 a Dutch settler named Nathaniel Conklin moved here. This is when the area was still called South Huntington. Conklin was a widower caring for his mother and raising two sons. He designed his new home in the popular Federal style, a neo-classical architectural movement synonymous with the earliest years of America. Picture the famous estates of the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Conklin’s mother was disturbed and suspicious of the new community; she considered it a licentious area, and would often describe it as like the wicked city of Babylon in Biblical Scripture. Nathaniel Conklin decided to make light of this, and as one of the finishing touches of his new home, he inscribed these words in his stone chimney: “New Babylon – This House Built By Nat Conklin 1803”.

And, in one of those ironies of history, the community embraced the words Nat Conklin’s mother used to condemn them. When they split from Huntington to become independent, they adopted the name, Babylon Township.

While it didn’t become a hotbed of Biblical decadence, that we know of, it did become an enormously popular vacation spot. Resorts sprung up, wealthy families built vacation homes, and a bustling local economy grew up around supporting and catering to that lifestyle. Over the years, Babylon was the holiday destination for personalities like Wild West legend Annie Oakley, or the boundary-breaking Cherokee humorist and writer Will Rogers. Al Capone even took vacations here – for anyone looking for a sleepy getaway from the celebrity spotlight or the bustle of city living, the villages of Babylon Township offered peace and quiet.

And that might be all the area is known for, if it weren’t for the Dutch Colonial-style home located at 112 Ocean Avenue. This house in a quiet suburb become synonymous with one of the most notorious horror stories in American culture; one that you can evoke in people’s imagination with just one word, the name of the village where it’s located.

Amityville.

I want you to sit for a moment in the feelings conjured up by that word – what did you think of? Because there’s so much behind that word – a popular franchise of books and horror films, a legend of a family buying their dream house only to be assaulted by dark spirits living within, but behind it all, a real and terrible crime of multiple murder.

I visited the house at 112 Ocean Avenue not long ago – previous owners requested that its address be changed to reduce the number of curious visitors; so it’s now technically 108 Ocean Avenue. I distinctly remember feeling a strange chill while looking upon this otherwise ordinary house, whose windows look unsettlingly like eyes. But was that dark sensation something that was already there, or something I brought with me because of what I knew about this place?

At My Dark Path we like to get past the common shared memory of the stories we tell – to examine how a legend grew and took shape, how much of it is based on real history. What we find very quickly in the case of Amityville is that it didn’t take long for the storytelling to become a part of the story, for the distortions of fame and money to begin polluting the record. In a way, we have to treat them as two separate stories – one of them a fantastical ghost story, the other one a true crime story, in its own way, much darker. Because while both of these stories are about evil forces lurking behind the façade of suburban life in an idyllic village, when we retrace the dark path to the beginning of the Amityville story, the only monsters to be found are the people. In this first of two episodes we’re dedicating to this quintessential piece of American horror; we’re going to look back at the crime that started it all, when a young man named Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his entire family, right here at 112 Ocean Avenue.

***

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome to Season Two of the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you’ll check us out on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just send an email to us at explore@mydarkpath.com. And now in 2022 we’re launching our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 31: Amityville, Part 1 – Many Stories, One Crime

***

PART ONE

I want to caution you from the very start that there are going to be a lot of caveats to this story, a lot of qualifiers about the information we give you. There are countless sensational versions of the death of the DeFeo family; and we’ll tell you right up front – what actually happened in the house at 112 Ocean Avenue in the early morning hours of November 13th, 1974 was only, to the best of our knowledge, witnessed by one person – Ronald Joseph DeFeo, Jr. Most people called him Butch. Butch DeFeo was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder for the killings of his family, and remained in prison until his death last year at the age of 69. The judgment of history and the jury at his trial and multiple subsequent appeals is that he was, beyond any reasonable doubt, guilty. And in spite of the many oddities of the case, no alternate theory we have seen feels more plausible than that.

But for all those many years, Butch’s story of what happened has continued to change. Sometimes he had accomplices. Sometimes, his late sister helped him. Sometimes, it was entirely her doing. Sometimes his Mother did it and then killed herself. Sometimes it was dark voices in the house that told him to murder his family. Sometimes, the Italian mob was involved. And sometimes, he was guilty of all of it. These are all stories that Butch DeFeo has told; and each time, he has asserted that this version is the absolute truth.

The difficulty in deciding whether to make the story of Amityville about a murderer, or about a haunting, or about organized crime, all stems from the fact that we have only this one witness at the center of everything. Six people really were murdered that night – each of them shot by a .35 caliber rifle. They were Butch DeFeo’s parents – Ronald Sr. and Louise – and his four siblings: Dawn, Allison, Marc, and John Matthew. John Matthew was the youngest; just nine years old when he was shot to death in his bed. And from the very start, Butch DeFeo showed a casual, guiltless willingness to lie about how those six family members died. And he wasn’t the only one.

But let’s rewind to the house, a three-story Dutch Colonial with its own boathouse. Ronald, Sr., sometimes called “Big Ronnie”, put a sign out front which named the house “High Hopes”. The DeFeo family was originally from Brooklyn; Ronald’s father-in-law, Michael Brigante, owned the Buick dealership where Big Ronnie worked. He purchased this house in 1965, nine years before the murders. It was a sign of success, of status; the DeFeos were going to live more of the good life.

Even here, there are stories where the truth is elusive. There are consistent claims that Big Ronnie was violent and abusive, threatening or hurting his wife and children on a regular basis. There are accounts of neighbors overhearing loud confrontations – and at DeFeo’s trial, a witness testified to seeing a fistfight between father and son just days before the murders. There are many suggestions that the family had ties to one of New York’s Italian criminal families, that Michael Brigante’s Buick dealership may have served as a front for theft and money laundering. Big Ronnie’s uncle, Peter DeFeo, does seem to have had a high-ranking position with the Genoveses, one of New York’s Five Families.

This would help explain how the manager of a car dealership was able to afford such a large house in this popular vacation community – there are credible suggestions that it was actually the father-in-law who put up the money, and not Big Ronnie. This is the sort of thing that’s exceptionally tricky to verify – as we discussed in our episode about WITSEC and the battle of law enforcement versus the Mafia, mobsters have a vested interested in seeming to be powerful and important, but they also hide behind clouds of code words and intermediaries, to protect themselves from consequences. A mobster is happy for you to think they’re involved in everything, as long as you can’t prove it in a court of law. Where the money came from that bought High Hopes is just another one of the mysteries buried inside this case; another secret that died with the DeFeo family.

Young Butch also had a job at Michael Brigante’s dealership, but it doesn’t seem that he did much there but collect a paycheck. He had already shown that he had bigger appetites, and a willingness to break the law to fulfill them. By 1974 he was on probation for stealing an outboard motor, and freely admitted to using LSD, heroin, and other hard drugs. In addition to drugs, he liked cash, guns, boats, and cars. His best friend Bobby Kelske had seen some of Butch’s gun collection – which proved to be very important later on.

There’s a story that, just a week before the murders, Butch and Bobby worked together to steal $20,000 from the dealership; and that Butch had also bragged to friends that his father had a stash of money and gems in their basement.

That’s the snapshot of the DeFeo family right before their deaths – volatile, living more extravagantly than they likely could afford within honest means, and with an unstable eldest son who had already experienced several brushes with the law.

And then, a few hours before sunrise on November 13th, Butch DeFeo shot all six members of his family dead.

***

While we don’t have a reliable description of what happened inside the house that night, we can tell you how Butch DeFeo spent the day after he committed the murders. He spent it covering his tracks. He showered and changed clothes. He put all the rifle cartridge casings he could find, along with his bloody clothes and other evidence, into a pillowcase. He threw the murder weapon into the river nearby, and then took the pillowcase with him as he drove to work in Brooklyn, so his co-workers at the dealership could see him. While in Brooklyn, he disposed of the pillowcase in a storm drain.

Throughout the day, he would make a show of calling his house, lamenting that no one was answering and wondering if everything was alright. After work, he went to a shopping mall with his girlfriend, Mindy Weiss. Remember that he had a steady girlfriend as we start to unwind later versions of this story – although in some versions, her name is Mindy Weiss; while another account calls her Sherry Klein. It could be that some of this confusion is to protect her identity. But after spending time with Mindy or Sherry, Butch went to a friend’s house, where he shot heroin. Then, in the late afternoon, he went to Henry’s Bar, a popular local hangout. His friend Bobby Kelske was with him there. Once again, he loudly proclaimed his concerns about being unable to get in touch with his family. He then left Henry’s Bar to go home.

At 6:30pm he burst back into the bar, crying and pleading for help, saying that his family had been murdered. Bobby Kelske, along with four local citizens, went back to the house with him. They would be the first to see the dead bodies. The first other than Butch, that is.

***

PART TWO

Joey Yeswit was the local from Henry’s Bar who called 911. He called from the DeFeo’s house phone, and the transcript of the 911 call shows the state of frantic shock he was in, unable to provide the number he’s calling from, struggling even to communicate where the house is. Remember that there’s no GPS here, no instant Caller ID – when he first says that the house is on Ocean Avenue, the operator mistakenly hears the word “Austin”. The problems pile up from there - when the operator learns that this is a murder case, they transfer the call to a police officer. And when the officer asks the caller to identify himself, he answers “Joe Yeswit”, which the officer mishears as “George Edwards”. In a TV cop show, you wouldn’t see the moment where Joey Yeswit has to carefully spell his name into the phone multiple times; it wouldn’t be considered exciting enough.

I want to highlight those misunderstandings, not because they had any eventual bearing on the trial, but to underline just how unprecedented an event this was for everyone in the area. It’s very humanizing to me to remember that 911 operator had likely never taken a call about a multiple murder before. That Joey Yeswit didn’t go to Henry’s Bar that night prepared to describe a crime scene to a police officer, that he was probably under the influence of alcohol, surrounded by noise and confusion; and that, even though he didn’t know it at the time, he was only here because Butch DeFeo was trying to manipulate events in order to escape punishment for his crime.

But it’s also a reminder that, in a matter this serious, it is absolutely crucial that we take a breath, and make sure that what we see, hear, and read, is accurate. So much of the confusion and misinformation that comes with the Amityville case results from a failure to do that. And even more confusion and misinformation comes from Butch himself.

The first law enforcement on the scene was Amityville police officer Kenneth Geguski. He saw the dead bodies, all of them laying in their beds, seemingly executed while they slept. This is one of the nagging details of the case which has opened the door to so much speculation. From the forensic evidence, all the victims seem to have been shot while laying down, and their bodies don’t seem to have been moved. They were in separate bedrooms on two different floors of the house. Did none of them wake up when the shooting started? Butch DeFeo didn’t have a silencer for his rifle. Did it happen so quickly that, due to sleepiness and confusion, none of them had time to act while Butch made his way from room to room? At one point, Butch claimed that he drugged them all so that they wouldn’t be conscious when he killed them. But a toxicology report found no such substances in any of the victims. It’s a grim, lingering mystery, and as we’ve said – the only witness is both unreliable, and dead.

When Officer Guginski saw the bodies, he promptly called the Suffolk County Police, and they dispatched officers from their homicide squad.

A neighbor volunteered to let the police use their house as a base of operations; and it’s here, as Butch DeFeo sat with those homicide investigators, that he started to tell lie #1. In this version, he fell asleep watching television the night before, heard nothing, saw nothing, went to work that morning suspecting nothing; but that based on his family’s mob ties and arguments he had recently seen and heard, he believed the murderer was a mobster named Tony Mazzeo. Mazzeo was, he said, a professional murderer, who had a key to the house, and knew about the stash of money Big Ronnie kept there.

Side note – another account of this night claims that the mobster he named was Louis Falini. Interestingly, there actually was a real mobster named Louis Falini at the time of the killings – but he had an alibi for the night. Just to keep things simple, we’re going to stick with the name Tony Mazzeo. As we’ll see, the name doesn’t matter, it’s all just part of the fiction Butch DeFeo is spinning.

A crowd was beginning to gather outside 112 Ocean Avenue. A priest was among them; offering prayers. This would not be the last time a priest became involved in the stories of Amityville; but most of that is going to be told in our next episode.

The police summarized all of DeFeo’s answers into a written statement. DeFeo signed the statement, attesting it to be true. Then the police asked if he would accompany them to the station. They wanted to learn more background about the family’s connections to organized crime; DeFeo was more than willing. Since, as he said, his family was being targeted by mobsters, he felt safer with the cops.

At the station, the police asked Butch if there were any weapons in the house. And the young man admitted that he had owned guns, but said that his father had taken all of them away before the murders. The police set up a cot for him, gave him a sandwich, and let him go to sleep. At the time Butch DeFeo fell asleep, he was not a suspect in the murders of his parents and siblings. But during his long conversations with the police, he had unwittingly given them a thread to pull on, which unraveled all of his lies.

***

The Police Laboratory had examined bullets from the crime scene, and determined that they came from a .35 caliber rifle. While the police had been questioning Butch DeFeo, they were also talking to his best friend and occasional partner in crime, Bobby Kelske. Remember that Kelske had come to the house with Butch from Henry’s Bar to purportedly “discover” the bodies. The police asked Kelske how Butch felt about guns, and Kelske was happy to share – Butch, he said, was a “gun nut”, that his father had taken his guns away at some point but he had retrieved them, and had been attempting to buy a silencer.

Prompted by this information, the police searched Butch’s room – there they found a semi-automatic rifle, a .22 caliber revolver, and a 12-gauge shotgun, complete with ammunition. They also found the carton for a .35 caliber rifle, but no rifle. Despite not finding the murder weapon, this discovery was enough – it proved the Butch had access to firearms, and that he had lied to the police. As the sun came up on November 14th, just over 24 hours after the murders, Butch DeFeo became the #1 suspect.

***

Now, there are some disputes in the actions and chronology of these few hours. Michael Brigante, Butch DeFeo’s grandfather, does seem to have sent an attorney to multiple police stations looking for Butch; but at the time he was looking, Butch wasn’t a suspect, and this attorney does not seem to have properly introduced himself as Butch’s legal representative. But this fact did become contentious both at DeFeo’s trial, and the multiple appeals which followed for decades after.

There’s also the question of the statement DeFeo provided to police, the eight-page summary of the story he told about Tony Mazzeo. At the time he gave these statements, he had no attorney present, and he hadn’t been read Miranda rights – the Constitutionally-protected right for criminal suspects to remain silent. But during those evening hours before Butch DeFeo went to sleep, he wasn’t a suspect. He had spent all day disposing of evidence and trying to establish an alibi; and the police were earnestly pursuing information about Mafia assassins. He had no interest in remaining silent – he was spinning his cover story and they were taking it at face value.

That all changed when he woke up on that cot in the police station. Now, he was informed that he was an official suspect, read his rights, and offered the services of an attorney. Butch DeFeo waived those rights, and he started talking.

I want to jump ahead in time here for just a moment, and talk a little about what’s known as antisocial personality disorder. This is just one term for a complex network of personality traits which science is still struggling to understand. If you’ve heard of sociopaths, psychopaths, toxic narcissists, these are all terms that circle around the same dangerous regions of human behavior. Although there are competing terms, we’re going to keep things simple by using antisocial personality disorder, or ASPD; because this is the term that was used by Dr. Harold Zolan, a psychiatrist commissioned by the prosecution in Butch DeFeo’s murder trial to diagnose his mental state. We’re going to repeat this plain fact because it’s important as subsequent fabrications and sensational claims work to muddy the waters – Butch DeFeo’s legal defense, led by William Weber, never disputed that he personally pulled the trigger and killed his six family members. Their defense was built on the premise that he was either temporarily insane and emotionally distraught, believing his life was in danger, or that he was otherwise in a state where he was unable to distinguish right from wrong. Temporary insanity is one of the seeds that produced the entire story of hauntings in the Amityville house, so keep it in mind.

The prosecution countered this defense with this diagnosis of ASPD – it wasn’t that Butch didn’t know right from wrong, or didn’t understand the dire consequences of his actions. It’s that he fundamentally didn’t care. Driven by a grandiose sense of self, unwilling to recognize the humanity of others, and convinced that he was clever enough to bluff his way out of anything, he had no second thoughts about his actions, and no guilt.

ASPD is characterized by impulsive, aggressive behavior, and a total disregard for the truth. All that matters is the constant feeding of the ego and other appetites, and an enraged need for vengeance against anyone who bruises that ego.

I lay all this out now not to spoil the ending of the trial for you, but because as I describe for you the progression of stories Butch DeFeo tells once his first alibi has been dismantled, you may find yourself wondering – why would any person do this? Why would they think they could get away with it? Why could he never just admit that he was caught and he was guilty? But when seen through the lens of antisocial personality disorder, it all begins to make sense. Because Butch DeFeo believed he was the protagonist in a story that he was the sole author of, that any setback was just temporary, and had nothing to do with his evil deeds. It was always a massive, complex conspiracy against him; and eventually, his master plan would fool everyone, and would see him set free, and rich. I’m pleased to remind you that it never worked, that he died in prison, with every attempt to overturn his conviction ending in failure. But as it so often does, much of the misinformation he gleefully put into the world lives on; so now let’s go back to November 14th, when Butch DeFeo decided that he didn’t need his right to remain silent.

***

When Butch woke up, senior officers from Homicide and Organized Crime took over the questioning. Patiently, steadily, they started grinding away at the inconsistencies in Butch’s stories. Evidence from the lab made it more and more clear that the murders had taken place during the night, not after Butch went to work. If Butch was in the house, as he said, surely the sound of over a half-dozen rifle shots would have awakened him. Butch then said that he heard two gunshots before leaving. But who would do that – hear two gunshots inside their own house and just leave for work without investigating? Without calling the police?

Now Butch said that he actually heard seven gunshots, and that he had heard footsteps moving around on the second floor where his family slept. He drew a diagram of the house to help the officers visualize it. But once again – did he hear all this and see nothing? Did he spend all day traveling to and from Brooklyn, hanging out with his girlfriend, and drinking at a bar, and not tell anybody what he had heard?

Again, Butch changed his story. This time, he pulled the trigger himself, and disposed of all the evidence, but it was only because he was forced. That professional mob killer, Tony Mazzeo, burst in with a second man, and forced Butch at gunpoint to do this horrible deed, then meticulously dispose of all the evidence. He was mysteriously not able to provide any descriptive details of this second man. While he was spinning this version of the tale, by the way, Butch told them about both the spot in the river where he threw the rifle, and the storm drain where he stashed the pillowcase. Police went to both locations, and found everything right where he said. The net of evidence was getting tighter around him.

The questioners pressed further. This was incredible – mob assassins handed him a loaded rifle to make him kill his family members? And then left him alive so he could tell all this to the police? At this point, they finally asked the simplest question of all – what if Butch did everything he said he did, but did it alone; not forced by anybody?

And in response, Butch suddenly said “I just started, and it went so fast I couldn’t stop.” The police had a confession.

***

PART THREE

This was going to be the biggest, most high-profile case in the history of this community. The defense was led, as we mentioned, by William Weber, an attorney assigned to defend DeFeo. DeFeo had already rejected and fired multiple attorneys for not conducting his defense the way he thought they should. One attorney said that DeFeo had physically threatened him – if you were facing life in prison for murder and couldn’t afford an attorney, you probably wouldn’t consider threatening to hurt the attorney assigned to you. But this comes back to what I said earlier about ASPD.

The People were represented by a young career prosecutor named Gerald Sullivan. The presiding Judge was Thomas Stark – both he and Sullivan have written excellent books about their work on the case, and this episode wouldn’t be possible without the clarity they brought to their memoirs.

In pretrial hearings, Butch DeFeo was already attempting to explain away all the self-incriminating revelations he made to the Suffolk County Police. The statements he signed, he claimed, were false and coerced. He was taken into custody against his will, he said – starved, handcuffed to a cabinet, viciously beaten and kicked. He claimed he was told that he couldn’t go home unless he signed a statement full of lies. When asked why his clothes had no blood on them in his booking photograph, he claimed that the cops had forced him to change clothes. When asked where his injuries were, he had only a small, closed cut over one eye. A witness clarified that this happened in a fistfight between Butch and Big Ronnie days before the killing. The witness was a 9-year-old friend of the family’s youngest son.

Butch was back to claiming that the mobster Tony Mazzeo was the real guilty party. It was Judge Stark’s responsibility to weigh the credibility of all these claims and determine whether the trial should go forward. It was conspicuous to him that these extensive allegations of police brutality were only happening now; they had never come up during Butch’s initial booking and many months in custody. Also – Butch was unable to name or describe any of the multiple detectives he claimed subjected him to beatings. Judge Stark ruled that the trial would move forward. It was nearly a year since the killings happened.

***

As I mentioned before, Defense Attorney William Weber based his strategy on the premise that Butch DeFeo was temporarily insane at the time of the killings. This is a matter of some complexity, when a courtroom has to make a determination on someone’s state of mind; and it’s more complex since the Prosecution was countering with a similar argument – that Butch DeFeo was psychologically abnormal, but not in a way that merits clemency. That his mind was fully functional, it was his personality that was disordered, and that due to this, he was a persistent and unrepentant danger to society.

Both sides of the trial enlisted experts to analyze him. As we mentioned, the People used psychiatrist Dr. Harold Zolan. During Zolan’s interview with Butch, Butch floated yet another version of events – in this one, it was his sister Dawn who killed their siblings. Dr. Zolan testified that, in his professional observation, Butch DeFeo was an Antisocial Personality, that the reason he couldn’t stick with one story is that the only story that mattered is the one that made him feel the best in that particular moment.

The defense enlisted Dr. Daniel Schwartz, who later became involved in the trial of David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” murderer. Schwartz claimed that, when Butch removed evidence from the crime scene, it was evidence that he had been temporarily insane when he shot his family, and was now merely trying to rid himself of anything that provoked his deep, subconscious guilt. The defense psychiatrist compared Butch to Lady MacBeth crying “Out, damned spot!” while sleepwalking. The prosecution dismantled this argument – if Butch DeFeo didn’t want to see reminders of his evil deeds, why did he leave all the dead bodies in their beds?

And it turned out, in the notes Dr. Schwartz took during his interview of Butch DeFeo, that Butch said straight out that he disposed of the evidence so that the police wouldn’t find it. Temporary insanity was having a hard time standing up as a defense.

Even worse, the prosecution called for testimony from prison guards who had observed DeFeo while he was in custody. He had been kept separate from the general population, and believed that he had befriended the guards, spinning stories for them about how mob-connected members of his family were going to try and kill him by poisoning the food in the prison cafeteria. According to these correctional officers, he also asked them to do him a favor: to describe him in their logs as acting bizarrely. He boasted that he was going to win his case by pleading insanity, that they should come see the trial so they could watch what an impressive show he was going to put on of acting crazy.

But even if these guards were sharing hearsay or flat lying, even if there’s some psychological nuance to Butch DeFeo throwing the murder weapon in a river, we have not moved one inch off the core facts – he was there, he pulled the trigger, he disposed of the rifle, and every member of his family died.

And Butch DeFeo didn’t need the help of anyone else passing along words he spoke outside of the courtroom. Once he took the witness stand, what he said was more than enough.

William Weber, his own defense attorney, asked him: “Butch, did you kill your father?”

And Butch replied, quote: “Did I kill him? I killed them all. Yes, Sir. I killed them all in self-defense.” He talked about being possessed by Satan, about voices in his head telling him that his family was conspiring against him. Then, he said this:

"As far as I'm concerned, if I didn't kill my family, they were going to kill me. And as far as I'm concerned, what I did was self-defense and there was nothing wrong with it. When I got a gun in my hand, there's no doubt in my mind who I am. I am God."

That last part, about feeling like God when he has a gun in his hand…Butch DeFeo spent most of his life telling lies. But that part – I believe.

Cross-examining DeFeo for the prosecution, Gerald Sullivan was intentionally provocative, wanting the jury to see that DeFeo was fully rational and self-aware, but aggressive, impulsive, and willing to do anything to protect his ego. Under his questioning, DeFeo bragged that he felt good when he shot his father. And, as he felt more insulted and belittled by the attorney, DeFeo snapped. "You think I'm playing," he said, in front of the court, the judge, and the jury. "If I had any sense, which I don't, I'd come down there and kill you now."

While the trial lasted six weeks. Jury deliberations lasted just three days. Ten of the twelve jurors were ready to convict immediately. The other two were sure he did it, they just needed to make up their minds about what kind of insane he was. For each guilty count, the Judge ordered a sentence of 25 years to life. Each sentence was to be served consecutively, so there was no possibility that he would ever be free.

***

PART FOUR

During his incarceration, Butch DeFeo became something of a self-taught expert in the intricacies of New York criminal law. He filed with the state appellate court, which unanimously ruled against him. He filed a request to appeal that decision to the highest court in New York, which denied him. He then appealed to federal court, which ruled against him. He elevated that case to federal appellate court, just one step away from the U.S. Supreme Court. Once again, he was unanimously rejected. His appeals weren’t based on any evidence, but rather procedural – he claimed that the police had denied him his constitutional rights, and therefore nothing he told them could be used in the case against him – including his telling them where the murder weapon was. Major cases have fallen apart over 4th and 5th Amendment issues like this; our Constitution was written with the principle that our country would rather let a guilty person go free than put an innocent person behind bars. But in this case, every judge who reviewed the case against Butch DeFeo ruled that the Amityville and Suffolk County police had done things by the book.

There’s a person I haven’t mentioned up until now who becomes important in later versions of this story. She was born Geraldine Romondoe, though she has gone by different names – Geraldine Corey, Geraldine Rullo, Geraldine Gates, and Geraldine DeFeo. You see, Geraldine will tell you that, on the day the DeFeo family was murdered, Butch DeFeo was with her, and the child they had after they were married.

Married? Is this a wild twist ending – proof that Butch was innocent all along? In 1986, Long Island’s Newsday published an interview with Butch DeFeo – advertised as his first interview from prison. There, he introduced Geraldine, and said that, on the day of the murders, he was actually with her and their daughter at the home they shared in Long Branch, New Jersey, when a call came from his oldest sister, Dawn. Dawn pleaded with him to come home, said that there was a violent family fight in progress. Butch claims that he went back to Amityville with Geraldine’s brother, Richard. That he intervened and stopped Dawn from stabbing their father, Big Ronnie. That once the confrontation was settled, Butch and Richard went to the basement to watch TV, when they suddenly heard gunshots. That it was Dawn who murdered their father, but that this made something snap in their mother, Louise, and that Louise then killed Dawn and the other children before killing herself.

In this version of events, Butch was so afraid of the wrath of Louise’s mob-connected father, that he took the rap himself rather than make it publicly known that she was a murderer. In 1990, he filed a new appeal, claiming that his defense attorney had committed malpractice by not using this story as his defense; and the appeal included sworn affidavits from Geraldine DeFeo and Richard Romondoe.

Sounds like a hell of a story, doesn’t it? Dramatic confrontations, a secret marriage, and Butch as the tragic hero who takes the fall after trying to save his family. And that’s just it – it’s all a story. Geraldine didn’t meet Butch until they struck up a correspondence after he was already in prison. The marriage license they produced was a forgery, doctoring a certificate from her actual marriage and changing the date. At the time of the killings, Geraldine was proven to be living in upstate New York, not New Jersey. And she was married to another man. There are no birth records of the daughter supposedly born less than three months before the killings. And her brother, Richard, who signed an affidavit claiming he had witnessed it all? To this day, no one has found any evidence that Richard Romondoe even exists.

When confronted with this evidence, Geraldine admitted that the affidavits weren’t even her words, that Butch had provided both hers and Richard’s, already completed. Butch had even signed Richard’s, and asked her to sign hers and take them both to a notary. She admitted, in court, and under oath, that she didn’t have a brother.

And despite all this, to this day, amateur Amityville historians take Geraldine’s stories as gospel. There are wild tales of corrupt police framing Butch in order to get a conviction, of vengeful and all-powerful mobsters falsifying or destroying records of marriage and childbirth; but remember – even if, against all verifiable evidence, Geraldine actually knew Butch DeFeo at the time, even if he was in New Jersey with her, Geraldine didn’t witness the events at 112 Ocean Avenue. We’re right back to where we were, where only one person truly witnessed what happened. And it was Ronald “Butch” DeFeo, Jr., the one who pulled the trigger, told lie after lie about it, but then told a jury of his peers that he did it, and it made him feel good.

Maybe the brutal simplicity of that is hard for us to accept. That six people died not from a master criminal, or a professional assassin, or supernatural evil, but one impulsive, drug-using petty crook who wanted to feel big. And that he was convicted not because of some labyrinthine conspiracy, but because he wasn’t very good at covering his tracks.

Maybe we want there to be more to the story; some greater power behind it all. Maybe preserving the mystery helps keep us from accepting that life could be that fragile, even in a luxurious vacation community. But there’s something else at work here – the overwhelming public response to this crime, the notoriety, the fame, and the part of the story we haven’t even discussed yet – when the next tenants at the house called “High Hopes” claimed that they were forced from their home by evil spirits. When I asked you what you thought of when I said the word “Amityville”, there’s a good chance that’s the story you remember; but there’s more to it than you probably know. Stay tuned for our next episode as we pursue that dark path; but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with the words of Gerald Sullivan, the prosecutor who successfully put Butch DeFeo behind bars for life. That Newsday article which introduced Geraldine DeFeo to the world asked him for comments on Butch’s new version of events – on why, after a decade, he would suddenly present this wild new narrative. Sullivan’s view of Butch’s motives may be the most chilling of all:

"I think he enjoyed all the attention," Sullivan said. "I think it's been several years since he had any of that attention. What the hell else does he have to do in prison?"

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Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host. I produce the show with Courtney and Eli Butler; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Roseanne Sinclair. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.

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