At a quarter past three on the morning of November 13, 1974, in a stately Dutch Colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, six members of the DeFeo family were shot to death in their beds. Every one of them was found lying face-down, hands near their heads, and not one appeared to have woken or tried to run. The killer was the family’s own 23-year-old son, Ronald DeFeo Jr. The ghost stories that later made the address world-famous were invented. The real mystery has never been fully explained: how do you shoot six people, one room at a time, and none of them stirs?

The House on Ocean Avenue

The DeFeos were an outwardly ordinary Long Island family: Ronald Sr., a car salesman; his wife, Louise; and their five children. On that November night, six of them were home — the parents and four of the children, ranging from 18-year-old Dawn down to 7-year-old John Matthew. The big house with its distinctive quarter-moon attic windows looked like the picture of suburban comfort.

A Family Killed in Their Beds

Around 3 a.m., Ronald DeFeo Jr. moved through the house with a .35-caliber lever-action rifle and shot all six family members where they lay. Every victim was found face-down in bed. That detail is the heart of the enduring puzzle: a high-powered rifle fired repeatedly is extremely loud, yet there is no evidence that any of the six woke, fought back, or fled, and neighbors reported hearing nothing. How an entire family could be killed this way, in sequence, without anyone reacting has never been satisfactorily answered.

“The Mob Did It”

That evening, DeFeo Jr. burst into a local bar saying someone had shot his family, and he led friends back to the house to discover the bodies. At first he blamed a mob hit. But his story collapsed almost immediately, and within a day he confessed. “Once I started, I just couldn’t stop,” he reportedly said — later claiming he had heard voices in the house telling him to kill.

The Trial

At his 1975 trial, DeFeo’s lawyers argued insanity, pointing to the “voices” he claimed had commanded the killings. The jury did not accept it. He was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life. Over the following decades, he changed his account of that night many times — sometimes claiming he had not acted alone — before dying in prison in 2021.

The Haunting That Wasn’t

A little over a year later, a new family, the Lutzes, moved into the house — and fled after 28 days, claiming they had been terrorized by paranormal forces. Their account became the basis for a best-selling book and a sprawling horror franchise that turned 112 Ocean Avenue into the most famous “haunted house” in the world. But subsequent investigations and lawsuits cast serious doubt on the haunting, and many came to see it as largely fabricated or embellished. The fiction grew so loud that it nearly buried the real crime underneath it.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Amityville case is a strange double tragedy: a family of six murdered in their sleep, and then a circus of ghost stories that swallowed their memory whole. For all the demonic legend, the genuinely unsettling questions are earthbound — how the victims never woke, why DeFeo’s story kept changing, and whether everything that happened that night has truly been accounted for.

Strip away the glowing windows and the invented demons, and what remains is starker and sadder: a young man shot his parents and four siblings as they slept, and could never give a straight answer about how. The ghosts were made up. The real question never was. How did six people die in that house, one by one, and not one of them wake up?