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Tonight, a mystery that's haunted the world for almost 50 years. One so terrifying, it spawned a tidal wave of books, documentaries, and film. They've endured what some of the family have defined as a circus act of paranormal activity. They decide right then and there, we are leaving in the dead of night. Now we uncover the top theories surrounding the most notorious house in America. I don't think it was the murder that scared them away. I think it was something much more devilish.
There are a couple of other things that indicate that there is another accomplice on the loose. Can new testimony finally reveal the answer? Danny claimed that George's interest in the occult instigated the haunting. Who or what is responsible for the Amityville Horror? December 18th, 1975. Amityville, New York. George and Kathy Lutz, along with their three children, Danny, Christopher, and Melissa, move into their new home.
It was a typical day by anybody's standards. The weather was fine. Uh everything was seemingly normal. But it's immediately clear that the Lutz's new house is anything but normal. From the very first night of being in the house, they start to experience knocks, chills, so many things are happening. Gust of wind in a room that is sealed. George even believes that there is an invisible force in this house. As the days pass, patriarch George seems to be affected the most. George says he could never get warm. He's building fires all the time. He's not going into work. He stops bathing. He's very disheveled and unkempt.
Soon, other members of the family are impacted as well. George's wife Kathleen comes down with a mysterious illness. The crescendo of horrors continues to build until one final night when it comes to an alarming peak. George reports a deafening sound coming from the living room, like a marching band at full volume marching across the living room. Windows are going up and down. Doors are flying off the hinges. When they check, there's nothing there. They've been living in this house for 28 days and they've endured a onslaught and what some of the members of the family have defined as a circus act of paranormal activity.
The Lutzes finally can't take it anymore and at 7:00 a.m. on January 14th, 1976, they flee. They packed just a couple of changes of clothes. They grabbed the dog and literally leave or abscond in the van and that's it. And they're at Kathy's mother's house and they said they will never go back there again. Why would this seemingly normal family abandon their brand new home in the dead of winter? What or who are they running from? While dozens of theories have risen over the years, the first is based on an actual horrific event that happened 1 year earlier. Before the Lutzes purchased 112 Ocean Avenue, the DeFeo family lived there.
The members of the DeFeo family are Ronald DeFeo Sr. and his wife Louise Brigante DeFeo. They are 42 and 43 years old. They have five children. Ronald DeFeo Jr. who is known to his friends and family as Butch. His younger 18-year-old sister Dawn followed by Allison who's 13 and then the two youngest are Mark 12 and John nine at the time. And they are a typical middle upwardly mobile suburban family. For the DeFeo children, coming from a small apartment in Brooklyn, moving to this lavish property had to be a dream come true. But that dream comes to an abrupt end on November 13th, 1974. At 6:30 p.m. the crowd at Henry's bar, just a few blocks from the DeFeo home, are enjoying their cocktails when
suddenly Butch DeFeo, the eldest son, bursts in. He's very frantic. He's very upset. And he's telling everyone that his mom and dad have been shot and that he needs assistance. Initially, the patrons don't believe him. They think he's making it up. They think it's kind of a sick joke. But the more Butch goes on about that, the more they believe that he in fact is telling the truth. Couple of his friends, Bobby, John, Joey, and three other men decide to leave the bar, go to Butch's house, and see what's going on. When the group gets to Butch's house, there's some discussion about who's going to go in. There's some concern.
Hey, is there a suspect inside? What should they do? Bobby takes the lead. He's going in. He becomes the alpha dog in this group and he's going to go in and find out what's going on. As the rest of the men come inside, the house is eerily quiet. The only sound is the barking of the DeFeo family dog, Shaggy. As they move up the stairs onto the second floor, they start to smell something. It's a smell that they associate with death. Nothing else in life smells like death. Once you smell it, you will always recognize it.
Bobby heads straight to the master bedroom. Bobby goes inside, turns on the light, and this is when he discovers the first two murders. The father, Big Ronnie, he's laying face down. He's been shot a couple of times. And in the bed is Louise, the mother. She's curled up in a fetal position, and she's been shot a couple of times. This is more than Bobby can handle, to the point that two of the guys believe that he needs to be taken away from this scene and taken downstairs. One of the men in the group, John Altieri, he decides to stay on the second floor and investigate further.
Further down the hall, John Altieri stumbles upon another horrific scene. When he goes in that bedroom, he discovers Butch's two brothers. John, who's 9 years old, he is found dead in bed, soaked with blood. In the same bedroom is his brother Mark, who's 12 years old. He too has been murdered in his bed. Altieri sees this. This is too overwhelming for him as well. Leaves the bedroom, he goes back downstairs. The men have found four victims, but the body count doesn't stop there. In another room, the two DeFeo daughters, Dawn and Allison, are dead as well.
The police arrive at the scene, and they start to interview the group. What these men find are six people, all family related, all murdered in their own home, in their own beds. As police begin to process the scene, a prime suspect emerges. On the outside of the residence, they find a Marlin rifle,.35 caliber. This rifle is kind of unique, one of the rifles that Annie Oakley used to use in her competition. They learn that Butch is a gun guy, that he's a gun fanatic. In Butch's room, they find a box of.35 caliber rifle ammunition.
Based on these discoveries, Butch is brought in for interrogation. He eventually breaks down and admits that he is responsible, saying that once he started, he couldn't stop. That he killed everyone in cold blood. Butch's trial begins on October 14th, 1975. And on its face, it's a pretty straightforward case. You have a confession, you have the murder weapon, you have lots of pieces of physical evidence. Butch goes through multiple lawyers before he finally decides on William Weber. William Weber and Butch decide on an insanity defense. Butch states that he was hearing voices, that he did these murders based on the voices that he heard, that these voices drove him insane, and that's why he killed his family.
Butch also claims he was possessed. During the trial, the prosecution brought out that Butch is a heavy user of LSD and heroin. LSD and heroin can both cause psychotic symptoms in the using individual during the time that they're in the body. While someone is under intoxication of LSD, they can have psychotic symptoms, including, but not limited to, feeling that they're possessed. If someone is possessed, they may not know what they're doing, much like a hypnotist can get someone out of a crowd and hypnotize them and make them quack and walk like a duck. And then when they snap out of the hypnosis, they don't remember what they did.
I find the insanity defense a little weak. And I'm not the only one that thought it was a little weak. The jury rejects the insanity argument. And on December 4th, 1975, Butch DeFeo is sentenced to 25 years to life. Most people in Amityville and Long Island in general thought that once Butch was put away, that was the end of the story. That the house would be wiped of its dark past. And that life would move on. That was only the beginning. 13 months after the murders and just two weeks after Butch's sentencing, George and Kathleen Lutz buy the property. George and Kathy Lutz got it for the bargain basement price of $80,000.
They also purchased a great deal of the furniture, including the beds, the living room furniture, you name it, because the DeFeo family wanted no part of it. But unfortunately, new owners don't mark a fresh start for the Amityville house. One month after they move into their new Amityville home, the Lutz family flees in terror. The question is, why? Some believe the property's dark past is to blame, but not everyone's convinced. I don't think it was the murders that scared them away. I think it was something much more devilish. According to the Lutz family's account, from the moment they arrive at the Amityville house, they face a host of terrifying events.
As practicing Catholics, the Lutz's bring in a priest, Father Ralph Pecoraro, to bless the home before they move in. The ritual and blessing is going through every room of the house, sprinkling holy water, and reciting prayers of peace throughout the house. When Father Pecoraro goes inside of the house, everything is calm and peaceful. But when he enters the room of John and Mark DeFeo, he hears this voice say to him, "Get out." Pecoraro leaves the house as commanded, but he doesn't say anything about the ghostly voice he's just heard. He doesn't tell the Lutz's what he heard because he does not want them to think that he's crazy. But he does tell them to not sleep in that room.
Soon after, the Lutz's begin having their own strange encounters. George starts this habit of waking up at 3:15 a.m. every morning cuz he's not able to sleep. 3:15 is important because this is the time Butch DeFeo did his murders in the house. The Lutz's didn't even know this. They had to talk to the authorities to piece together a time frame of what took place. But it may be the Lutz's daughter, Melissa, who experiences the most bizarre terror. Melissa, or Missy as she was called at that time, she spends a lot of time in the room, which is typical for any child of that age. But when asked what she's doing, she's talking to an imaginary friend.
This isn't your typical imaginary friend. It's a red-eyed pig. It can supposedly change shape, sometimes even as large as the house. And it apparently has a name, Jodie. And their troubles don't end there. They claim that there is green slime coming down from the ceilings and on the walls. An infestation of flies, which doesn't seem to make any sense. They see objects moving and breaking. The Lutzes tried to contact Father Pecoraro to do a second blessing to cleanse the house. But every time they try to call him, the phone shut off.
It's as if the house won't let them contact Father Pecoraro. I don't know how they survived 4 hours in that house, let alone 4 weeks. Regardless, they never spent another night in their dream home, which is now nothing but a nightmare. To the Lutzes, one thing is clear. Evil lurks in their new house. Over the 140 years of parapsychology and psychical research, we have looked at a lot of possible explanations for what are called hauntings. These are repetitive experiences that people have.
The DeFeo murders are definitely, to my mind, an environmental imprint. In hauntings like the Lutz family situation, they are picking up on an imprint that is tied to that environment, an event that happened that is completely negative, which is killings of his family. When the Amityville hauntings make national headlines, it catches the attention of two world-famous paranormal investigators. The Warrens are paranormal investigators who done over 10,000 investigations. But they aren't ready for what lies ahead. When we went into the house that day, we didn't realize that it was diabolically infested. On of 1 to 10, I would have to say
that Amityville was a 10. In January of 1976, the Lutz family claims their house is haunted. But can they prove it? The Lutzes were not nutjobs. They were very ordinary suburban middle-class people. Back in the mid-70s, you couldn't just go online and look things up. You actually had to have feet on the street, dig for information, look for people face-to-face, talk with the Lutzes, talk with the neighbors, and then go into the house and see what was happening. To help them gather evidence, the Lutzes call on world-renowned paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.
The Warrens are paranormal investigators who done over 10,000 investigations for hauntings, poltergeists, exorcism. This is what they do. The real-life inspiration for the Conjuring film franchise, this husband-and-wife team make a name for themselves in the late 1960s when they investigate a doll supposedly possessed by the spirit of a little girl. Lorraine was psychic. She was a light trance medium. She would go into a trance to try and connect with the other side. Ed was a self-styled demonologist. He would guide Lorraine through her trances, ask her questions, generally run the investigation.
In February 1976, Lorraine meets George Lutz at a local pizza parlor. George gives permission for the Warrens to enter the house, but he refuses to come along. George Lutz wouldn't even go to that home. He said, "There's no way I'm going into the house." And when I asked him at this restaurant where we met him, I said, "Mr. Lutz, what happened to you in that house?" He didn't say anything. He just looked at me. He said, "You know." According to the Warrens, although the property is empty, they can tell they're not alone from the moment they arrive.
A warrant is drawn to the cellar. And down here is where he believes that everything started. This home is haunted. I mean, they left behind everything. Everything to eat, everything to drink. Within seconds, I could feel what I can only describe as being under a waterfall. Pressure. Pushing me down to the floor. Then I could feel hundreds of pinpoints of electricity hitting my body. Ed leaves the basement to check on Lorraine upstairs. She also describes feeling a powerful, unseen force. Going up the stairs, I was going against a tremendous pressure.
It was the worst feeling. In over their heads, the two quickly flee. I knew right at that point what we were dealing with. And I said to myself, "I don't think I'll ever come back in this house again." But despite their misgivings, the Warrens don't give up. A few days later, they return to the house. But this time, they bring backup and cameras. There were five people from Channel 5, myself, Marvin Scott, and the crew, two other reporters, the Warrens and their team, which was about seven people. Then there was another team of psychics and investigators. So, all in all, I counted 21 people in the house that night. The Warrens and their team spend hours investigating the house. And it's not long before disturbing things start happening.
It moves. And as it moves, it of it says I feel personally threatened or [panting] It's I think it's it's whatever's here. Whatever it's here is You're trying to harm them? It Yes. We had a cameraman, Steve Petropolis. Steve was in his 40s, about 5'10, a marathon runner. So, in other words, he was in good shape. He starts up the stairs with his light meter to take light readings, and I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs with the other members of the crew.
He gets to the middle of the staircase, and he turns around and he says to me, "Hey, there's a room at the left, and it's one wall is filled with mirrors." So, he continues up the stairs, he gets to the top of the landing, and he turns around, and he looks at me strangely, and he says, "I don't [snorts] I don't know how I knew that." And all of a sudden, I can see the blood drain from his face. He goes ashen, and he doubles over, and he's clutching his chest. And he's gagging. He's trying to get words out, but he can't. So, our sound man and our lighting man run up the stairs to assist him down the stairs.
One of the scientists that had come up from Duke University, he became so terrified in this home, and the chair that he was sitting on actually went right backwards with him in it. They had a real hard time just stabilizing him emotionally in that home. The Warrens record their entire experience. That night, the Warrens were accompanied by Gene Campbell, their photographer, who had what for the time was advanced infrared equipment. He's hoping to pick up something, white noise, what have you. So, he sets up the camera, he points it at that second-floor landing, sets it, forgets it. He takes many photos that night.
You know, well over 100. Once the infrared photos are processed, the team uncovers an unusual find. This image on the one picture, peeking out of a doorway, looks like it's a young boy. The eyes are sort of bright and glowing. There are no children present during the investigation. So, who or what is the mysterious figure in the photograph? It's what has come to be known as the ghost boy photo. And this has been the object of much curiosity and much controversy.
People have said and speculated, "Oh, it's the youngest boy, 9-year-old John DeFeo. It's his ghost." Ed Warren, however, thinks it's something different. Well, is that the spirit of the young boy? No, it is not the spirit of the young boy, but is a spirit of a diabolical nature in that room that appears in that home to confuse the investigators. The mysterious figure in the photo remains unidentified. But, the Warrens agree that something is terrorizing the property. And they're now armed with proof.
I always consider myself an objective person and not given to flights of imagination or fancy. But, at the same time, there were many things that happened that night. There were subtle signs of what many paranormal investigators classify as infestation and some not so subtle things. Amityville Horror, the very name conjures fear. While some believe the home's darkness was brought on by the DeFeo family murders, others chalk it up to paranormal activity. But one member of the Lutz family who experienced the terrors first hand thinks the source is much closer to him. Their move to Amityville in 1975 was supposed to mark a fresh start for the blended Lutz family.
Kathy had three children from a previous marriage. There was Daniel, Christopher, and Melissa. At the time they lived in this house, Daniel was nine, Christopher seven, and Melissa was five years old. George was actually their stepfather. These were very young impressionable children. Certainly uh subject to the feelings that were going on from the family. Eldest son Daniel stays silent for decades. Then, in 2009, he finally speaks publicly in a series of interviews. Daniel Lutz reached out to me wanting to tell his story. At the beginning, I was very skeptical. But as soon as I saw photographs right away, the likeness to Kathy Lutz was so striking, I knew it was him. At that time, I began conversations with
Daniel Lutz that really changed the paradigm of how I viewed this entire case. This is not something I enjoy discussing. I don't look forward to it. It's It's not easy to tell somebody how you got thrown up a staircase. It's not easy to tell somebody that your bed was bouncing off the ceiling. Once I start talking about it, I become stuck with it. I felt strongly [snorts and music] sitting with him the passion, the anger for living in the shadow of the story. His story had been told by everyone else but him. He felt that his voice had been silenced and so it was almost a cathartic process to
purge these demons of his past for him to have a say. Daniel offers a dramatically different potential reason for the Amityville hauntings. When you walked into George's house, it wasn't inviting and welcoming. If you read his uh bookcase, you know, it would range from satanic history, mind control type of books and hypnosis books. This guy was into some pretty dark stuff. And I walked over to my mother and I said, "You married this guy, you moved me to his house. What the hell is he into?" Danny claimed that George's interest in the occult instigated the haunting, that it was like a magic trick that you couldn't shut off.
Was an evil spirit invited to Amityville by George Lutz in a spell gone wrong? Daniel believes it was. Danny claimed that he felt he was possessed and that the only way to get away from it was to leave the family. And so that's what he did. In a lot of ways, I think Daniel was haunted by George and still is to this day. At the end of the day, something happened to his family and to him in that house that forever shaped them. Daniel's story isn't first-hand account from the Lutz family. 30 years earlier, his parents offer a very different and very public version of what happened in Amityville. After the Lutzes move out, they're telling people about the situation and
they're not actively just trying to tell people to get help. They are actually telling people to try to sell the story somehow, to make some money, to make the money back that they paid for their house. The Lutzes paid out $80,000 with a large down payment for this particular house. George needed to recoup that loss. You know, if it were me paying all that money, I'd be really concerned about how to provide for my family. And one way to do that would have been to try to sell the story somehow. Yet, the time the media was very interested in these kinds of stories. They had covered the Exorcist and looked for other types of cases like that. And so,
George may have seen an opportunity. So, the Lutz's hire an attorney who turns out to be William Weber, who was the defense attorney for the Lutz's family. Weber agrees to help sell the family's story if they split the profits 50/50. George declines Weber's deal, but Weber goes out and sells the story anyway. So, William Weber sells two articles to publications about the situation that George had described and that they had worked up in their conversation. George is enraged about this because it was done without his permission. So, at that point George is so upset that he walks away from Weber. As a consequence, Weber
files a lawsuit against the Lutz's. They eventually settle out of court, but the damage between the two of them is irreparable. The Lutz's ultimately move forward in a book deal with author Jay Anson, who agrees to a more reasonable partnership. In response, Weber makes a bold accusation. Once the story got very popular and the book sales were high, William Weber started going out to the media and actually disputing the facts of the case as reported in the book.
Weber was totally willing to say that everything was 100% true until it turned out that he couldn't cash in. To counter his claims, the Lutz's agree to a polygraph test. They pass. George, unless he was the Oracle of Delphi himself, had no way of predicting that even if he was hatching this grand master scheme, that it would come to fruition. Are you really going to bet your entire life savings on a ghost story? Well, some people might. I never bought into that.
Whether it's a haunting, a summoning, an elaborate hoax, or the chilling aftermath of a family homicide, for the next several years, the Amityville case continues to puzzle the public. Then, in 2000, a bombshell confession pins the terrors on a surprising new source. While many questions surround New York's infamous Amityville House of Horrors, at least one has long been assumed to be solved. Who committed the brutal murders that started it all? After a confession, a conviction, and a sentence of 25 years to life, it seems certain that Butch DeFeo single-handedly killed his family in 1974. But in 2000, Butch DeFeo makes an astonishing claim.
He didn't act alone. Butch writes a letter from prison on May 1st, 2000, with a shocking revelation. Butch mentions that he didn't kill his family by himself. He had help, and it wasn't even his idea. So, this is interesting. If there's another killer out there, is that who was tormenting the Lutz's? Maybe it wasn't a haunting after all. At the time of the murders, Butch is 23, Dawn is 18. They're in the family basement with a few friends, drinking and smoking. This is an escape from their family, especially their father.
Their father, Big Ronnie, apparently lived up to his intimidating name. This family was not a happy one. For many years, Ronald Senior, in particular, had inflicted domestic violence against Ronald Junior, Louise, the other children. There's been stories about how he had walked over and punched Louise in the face that she fell down. And then he had just gone back to dinner and said, "We can eat in peace now." This type of occurrence encapsulates what life must have been like in that house for these children. But despite Butch's struggles with his father, he claims it's his sister Dawn that harbors the deepest resentment. She is 18 years old. She has a boyfriend that lives in Florida who happens to be 33 years old, a great age difference.
Big Ronnie is very disapproving of this relationship. He belittles her. He berates her. Per Butch, Dawn comes up with a plan. And the plan is to murder their parents. Dawn states that the other siblings can be taken to grandmother's house in Brooklyn and they can live there. Mom and Dad will be out of the way. Kids will be taken care of and everybody will live happily ever after if Mom and Dad are murdered. Apparently, it wasn't hard for Dawn to convince Butch because the plans were set in motion pretty quickly. Butch says he recruits two friends to help. About 1:00 in the morning, they sneak out of the basement and go into the interior of the house.
They then go upstairs to the parents' bedroom. Butch is arming himself with a.35 caliber Marlin rifle. He makes no bones about that he has the rifle. Lit only by a nightlight in the second floor bathroom, the siblings open their parents' bedroom door and the massacre begins. Butch goes into the bedroom. Fires the rifle twice into his father and then fires the rifle twice into his mother, killing them both.
Butch then says he and his two friends flee the Amityville house, leaving Dawn and their three other siblings inside alone. Butch relates that the plan was merely to kill the parents. It wasn't to kill the brothers and sisters. He says Dawn, however, goes rogue. Butch returns inside the house. Dawn has done something horrible. Butch says that she took it upon herself to murder the other brothers and sisters.
Dawn believes that these children were a liability, certainly not an asset. This infuriates Butch. He explodes. This is more than he bargained for. He didn't want his siblings killed. He only wanted the parents killed. They get into a violent argument and that argument turns into a struggle. They struggle, he knocks her out and then shoots her in the back of the head. Now, whether Dawn was involved in these murders or not really has no influence about what the Lutz family went through. The bottom line, six people got murdered there, whether Butch was the primary shooter or Dawn was the shooter, really makes no difference.
But what about the two other friends he claims were there that night? Were they involved in the massacre? Butch DeFeo's jailhouse confession of an accomplice to his family's murder throws a twist into the case of the Amityville Horror. For 25 years people believed Butch was a lone gunman in these multiple murders. In 2000, Butch reveals his sister Dawn was the mastermind behind the murders. We know that Butch killed Dawn. So, we know that it's not her that's coming back and tormenting the Lutz's. However, according to Butch's written affidavit, there may be yet another unknown killer.
Butch mentions two friends that he brought along as lookouts, but as soon as there was gunfire, they panic, they leave, and he never mentioned them committing any violence. Butch mentions something curious in a letter. Quote, "It was cold-blooded murder, period. No ghosts, no demons, just three people of which I was one." So, he says there's three people. We know there's two, Butch and Dawn, but who's this mysterious third person? Butch never names this third person. Nobody follows up. They chalk it up to the ramblings of someone who's been in prison 20 years, maybe looking for a reduced sentence, or somebody just looking for attention.
Ronnie was running through every possible scenario he could in his mind to deflect away from the fact that he had committed these murders. Butch dies in March of 2021, taking any further details of a possible third killer to his grave. But some are convinced that this is the key to the Amityville hauntings. Besides Butch's letter, there are a couple of other things that indicate that there is another accomplice on the loose. The first thing happens at the time of the trial. Louis DeFeo's father hires a private investigator to look into the
idea of there being more than one killer. The house is very big. It's three stories. The people that were murdered were spread out throughout the house. And so, for someone to move around deliberately firing a rifle, which is very loud, could seem very puzzling to people. Why didn't somebody get up? Why didn't they get out of bed? Why didn't they flee? Why didn't they hide? I can understand how some people have difficulty believing that this was a single suspect killing all these folks. The private investigator also presents evidence that two guns may have been used in the murders. During the investigation, there is physical evidence called powder burns. And on Dawn's body, there were powder burns that some experts believe did not
match what the murder weapon would be. And that there were some theories that there could very well be a second murder weapon based on the powder burn evidence on Don's person. But at the scene detectives only find Butch's.35 caliber Marlin. That is until 2011 when a Long Island dive team goes searching in a canal near the Amityville house. The divers are following up on a documentary and the multiple killers theory. They fish out an old revolver in the canal behind the house that could easily have been dumped by somebody fleeing the murder scene. Police try to collect evidence from the handgun but time and the elements have erased it.
The answer to who or what lies behind the Amityville horrors remains just out of reach. I think it's possible that Butch and Dawn had help, especially since no one else was arrested in the case. And if that's true, is that other person still out there? Is that who is tormenting the Lutzes? Will they be back for another haunting? Supernatural or not, one thing is certain. The Amityville house has experienced incredible tragedy. And while this story has captivated more than three generations, none of the four families who owned the house after the Lutzes have reported any paranormal activity.
Yet. I'm Laurence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
