“High Hopes” -- the house on Amityville’s Ocean Avenue as it looked when the DeFeo family moved in. No one had any idea of trhe horror that was coming.
The horrific carnage that prefaced the story of the "Amityville Horror" began one dark fall night in November 1974. The DeFeo family, Ronald Sr. and Louise, their two young sons, Mark and John, and two daughters, Dawn and Allison, were sleeping peacefully in their comfortable, three-story, Dutch Colonial home in Amityville. The silence of the house was shattered when Ronald DeFeo, nicknamed "Butch", murdered his parents and his siblings with a high-powered rifle. One by one, he killed each of them as they slept, beginning a tale of terror that has endured for three decades.
The DeFeo's seemed to be a happy all-American family in 1974. Ronald Sr. had been born and raised in Brooklyn and had worked hard at his father's Buick dealership until he finally became successful in his own right. He moved his family to Long Island and into the large house at 112 Ocean Avenue. It was perfect for the family, with two stories, plus an attic, several rooms and a boathouse on the Amityville River. A signpost in the front yard read "High Hopes", a physical reminder of what the house meant to the DeFeo's.
Beneath the surface of success and happiness though, Ronald was an angry man, given to bouts of rage and violence. He and Louise often fought and he was a threatening figure to his children. As the oldest child, Butch often bore the brunt of his father's expectations and ill-temper. He was an overweight, sullen boy who was often picked on in school. His father harassed him to stand up for himself - but never at home. Ronald Sr. had no room for backtalk or disobedience.
As Butch grew older, he grew stronger and larger and was no longer as tolerant of his father's abuse. Their shouting matches turned into physical battles and even Ronald Sr., with his own anger issues, began to realize that his son's temper and violent behavior were not normal. He and Louise arranged for Butch to visit a psychiatrist but it did no good. The young man insisted there was nothing wrong with him and refused to work with the counselor. In the absence of any other solution, the DeFeo's began simply buying Butch whatever he wanted in order to placate him. At the age of 14, his father gave him a $14,000 speedboat to cruise the Amityville River. Whenever Butch needed money, he only had to ask and it was handed to him.
By the time that he was 17, Butch had been kicked out of the parochial school that he had been attending because of drug use. His behavior had also become more erratic and his violent outbursts more psychotic. The altercations with his father grew more frequent and more dangerous. One night, when Butch was 18, a fight started between Mr. and Mrs. DeFeo and to settle the matter, Butch grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun from his room, loaded a shell into the chamber and went downstairs. Without hesitation, he pointed the gun at his father and pulled the trigger. Mysteriously though, it did not go off. Ronald Sr. froze in place and watched as his son lowered the gun and walked out of the room. He was completely unconcerned that he had nearly killed his fathering cold blood. The fight was over but Butch's reaction was a foreshadowing of events to come.
In the weeks before the murders, the relationship between Butch and his father reached a breaking point. He was unhappy with the money that he "earned" from his father (he had been an easy job at the Buick dealership and a weekly allowance that he used on drugs and alcohol) and so he arranged to be "robbed" one day on the way to make a deposit at the bank.
Ronald Sr. was at the dealership when his son returned from being "robbed at gunpoint" and exploded into a rage when he heard Butch's story, berating the staff member who had entrusted him with the money in the first place. The police were called and when they arrived, the naturally wanted to speak with Butch. Instead of devising a fictional story about the robbery, he became tense and irritable with them. He soon became outright violent when they began to suspect that he was lying. Butch began to curse at them, banging on the hood of a car in his grandfather's lot to emphasize his rage. The police backed off for the moment, but Ronald, Sr. had already come to his own conclusion about the motive for his son's behavior - he knew that he had stolen the money.
On the Friday before the murders, Butch had been asked by the police to look at some mug shots on the chance that he might be able to identify the thief who had allegedly robbed him. He initially agreed to do it but then backed out at the last minute. When he father heard this, he confronted Butch and demanded to know why he would not cooperate with the authorities. The two began shouting at one another and then Butch ran to his car and drove away. This fight had not turned into a violent one - but that was coming.
The night of Wednesday, November 14 was a cool one in Amityville. The streets were quiet and so was the house at 112 Ocean Avenue. Everyone had gone to sleep with the exception of Butch, who was brooding in his room. The more that he simmered in his thoughts, the more determined he became to solve his problems once and for all. He took out a .35-caliber Marlin rifle from storage space were he kept several weapons and started off, silently but purposefully, toward his parent's bedroom. He opened the door and walked in, raising the rifle to his shoulder and without hesitation, opening fire on his father's prone body. The first shot ripped into Ronald Sr.'s back, tearing through his kidney and exiting through his chest. Butch fired another round, again into his back, and this shot pierced his father's spine and lodged in his neck.
Louise DeFeo had now awakened but had no time to react before Butch fired at her too. He shot her twice, shattering her rib cage and collapsing her right lung, and then left her to empty into the spreading pool of blood on the bed.
Despite the crack of the rifle shots, no one else in the house stirred. Butch left his parent's room to continue the massacre, making his two young brothers, John and Mark, his next victims. He entered the bedroom the two boys shared and fired one shot into each of them as they lay sleeping. Mark was killed instantly, while John, whose spinal cord was severed by his brother's attack, twitched for a few moments and then lay still. Again, the shots had not roused the remaining members of the family and Butch went unchallenged into the bedroom that 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 walked into the room, Allison stirred and looked up just as he pointed the rifle at her face and pulled the trigger. His youngest sister was killed 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 every member of his family in cold blood. Butch calmly showered, trimmed his beard, and dressed in jeans and work boots. He then collected his bloody clothing and the rifle, wrapped them up in a pillowcase, and headed out to his car. In the minutes before sunrise, Butch drove into Brooklyn, and disposed of the pillowcase and its contents by tossing them into a storm drain. He then returned to Long Island, and reported to work at his grandfather's Buick dealership.
From work, Butch called home several times and when his father failed to show up, he acted bored with nothing to do and left around noon. He called his girlfriend, Sherry Klein, and told her that he had left work early and planned to come over. On the way to Amityville, he ran into his friend, Bobby Kelske, and stopped to talk. After that, Butch went to Sherry's house and casually mentioned that he had tried to call home several times but there had been no answer. He tried again in her presence just to show her what he meant. Acting puzzled, but unworried, he and Sherry spent the afternoon shopping and then met up with Bobby Kelske later at a local bar. He was now feigning concern about being unable to reach anyone at home and he told all that would listen that he planned to go there and to see what was going on. He returned a few minutes later in a state of apparent agitation. "Bob, you gotta help me," he told his friend, "Someone shot my mother and father!"
The two friends were joined by a small group of patrons from the bar and they all piled into Butch's car. When they arrived at the house, Kelske ran upstairs to the master bedroom and found Ronald Sr. and Louise in the blood-soaked bed. He returned outside to find Butch beside himself with grief. Joey Yeswit had found the telephone in the kitchen, and called the police. Within ten minutes, the first policeman was on the scene, Officer Kenneth Geguski. As he arrived, he found a group of men gathered on the DeFeo's front lawn. Butch was now sobbing uncontrollably. The officer went inside and then called the headquarters from the kitchen. Butch was now at the kitchen table, still crying. As he listened to Geguski's call about his murdered parents and brothers, he told the officer that he also had two sisters. Geguski put the receiver down and hurried back upstairs. By this time another village patrolman had arrived, officer Edwin Tyndall. The two of them found Dawn and Allison's room together. There was too much blood for them to even guess what kind of gun had killed the DeFeo's.
Shortly after 7:00 p.m., the neighborhood was buzzing with word of what had transpired in the house called High Hopes. The house itself was filled with police personnel, while neighbors and curiosity-seekers gathered on the front lawn. Suffolk County detective Gaspar Randazzo was the first to question Butch, the massacre's sole survivor. Butch claimed that the family might have been killed by a notorious mafia hitman who had long had a grudge against his family. Detective Gerard Gozaloff joined in the questioning and was suggested that if the murders were indeed linked to organized crime, that Butch might still be a target. Any further questioning should take place at police headquarters. It was here that they were joined by a third detective, Joseph Napolitano.
The police arrive on the scene on the night of trhe murders. By this time, several hours had passed since Butch had “discovered” the bodies of his family.
Ronald DeFeo Jr.
It was also here that Butch gave police his written statement. He claimed to have been home the night before, and that he stayed up until 2:00 a.m. watching television. At 4:00 a.m., he reported walking past the upstairs bathroom and claimed to have heard the toilet flush. Since he couldn't go back to sleep, he decided to head to work early. He described the rest of his day, leaving work early, visiting with Sherry and Bobby, drinking, and trying to reach his family by telephone.
After Butch submitted his signed statement, the detectives continued to question him about his family, about his suggestion that a hitman, Louis Falini, might be the killer. Butch explained that Falini had lived with them for a period of time, and that he had helped Butch and his father carve out a hiding space in the basement where Ronald, Sr., kept a stash of gems and cash. The argument with Falini had stemmed from an incident where Falini criticized some work Butch had done at the auto dealership. Around 3:00 a.m. the detectives had finished their questioning, and Butch went to sleep on a cot in a back filing room. He gave every appearance of being a cooperative witness, and so far the detectives had no reason to hold him under suspicion.
That soon began to change as investigators continued examining the evidence. Butch had been stupid enough to leave boxes of Marlin .35-caliber ammunition in his room, which detectives learned matched the murder weapon and subsequent questioning of Bobby Kelske led to the discovery that Butch was a gun fanatic, and that he had recently staged the robbery of the receipts from the Buick dealership.
The detectives began to seriously consider the possibility that Butch had been playing them, that he may be their suspect, that he at least knew much more about the killings than what he had told them so far. At 8:45 a.m., Detective George Harrison shook Butch awake. When roused, he asked if the detectives had found the "killer" yet but Harrison had not come with news of Falini - he was there to read Butch his rights. DeFeo protested that he had been cooperative all along and he went so far as to waive his right to counsel, all to prove that he was an innocent witness with nothing to hide.
By this time, Gozaloff and Napolitano were exhausted. Two other officers, Lt. Robert Dunn, and Detective Dennis Rafferty took over. Rafferty re-read Butch his rights, and proceeded to question him about the prior two days. Rafferty focused on the time of the murders. Butch had written in his statement that he was up as early as 4:00 a.m., and that he heard his brother in the bathroom at that time. Rafferty continued to press Butch until he was able to pry him away from his earlier version of when the crime took place (Butch claimed that it had been after he had gone to work), establishing that the crime actually took place between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m.
Butch's story began to crumble. Dunn and Rafferty hammered at the discrepancies in Butch's version of events and what the evidence led police to believe actually happened. Butch was physically linked to the scene once the time of the murders was established. At first, Butch tried desperately to make the best out of a deteriorating situation, trying to make the detectives believe that while he had indeed been present in the home during the murders, he had only been in each bedroom after the murders had taken place. But Rafferty continued on, telling Butch about the ammunition that had been found in his room.
More desperate then ever, Butch continued to lie. He claimed that he had been awakened at 3:30 a.m. and that Louis Falini had been there with a gun to his head. He had forced Butch to accompany him as he went from room to room and killed the DeFeo family. The police let Butch keep talking, and he eventually implicated himself as he described how he gathered and then discarded evidence from the crime scene. They let him keep talking, shouting more questions at him and then finally one of them asked him if it had really happened that way?
"No," Butch finally confessed. "It all started so fast. Once I started, I just couldn't stop. It went so fast."
