ALBANY, NY (AP) – The man convicted of slaughtering his parents and four siblings in a home that later inspired the book and movies of “The Amityville Horror” has passed away, prison officials said Monday.
Ronald DeFeo, 69, died Friday at Albany Medical Center, where he was taken from a prison in New York’s Catskill Mountains on Feb. 2, according to the State Department of Corrections and Community Services. The cause of his death was not immediately known.
DeFeo was serving a 25-year to life sentence in the 1974 murders in Amityville, on the suburbs of Long Island.
The house became the basis of a horror movie classic after another family lived there briefly about a year after the murders, claiming the house was haunted. A book and two films – the 1979 original, starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger, and a 2005 remake – portrayed a house with strange voices, walls spilling slime, furniture moving on its own, and others. supernatural features.
DeFeo had pursued a frenzy defense during his trial and said he heard voices leading him to kill his family.
He unsuccessfully sought a retrial in 1992, claiming that his 18-year-old sister murdered the other five family members and then shot her.
“I loved my family very much,” he said at a 1999 hearing, where he also said he was married in prison.
The correction department said it could not reveal why DeFeo was hospitalized, citing health privacy laws. The Albany County coroner’s office, which is tasked with determining the cause of his death, said it will not release such information except to relatives of the dead.