ALBANY, NY (AP) – The man convicted of sacrificing his parents and four brothers in a house that later inspired the book and movie “The Amityville Horror” has died, prison officials said Monday.
Ronald DeFeo, 69, died Friday at Albany Medical Center, where he was taken Feb. 2 from a prison in the Catskill Mountains of New York, the State Department of Corrections and Community Services said. The cause of his death was not immediately known.
DeFeo was serving a 25-year life sentence in the 1974 murders in Amityville, on suburban Long Island.
The house became the basis of a horror movie classic after another family briefly lived there about a year after the murders and claimed the house is haunted. A book and two movies – the 1979 original with James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger, and a 2005 remake – depicted a house with strange voices, gleaming mud walls, self-moving furniture, and other supernatural features.
DeFeo pursued a defense of insanity in his trial, saying he heard voices that led him to kill his family.
He unsuccessfully sought a trial again in 1992, claiming that his 18-year-old sister had killed the other five family members and then shot her.
“I loved my family very much,” he said at a conditional hearing in 1999, where he also said he got married while in prison.
The Department of Corrections said it could not disclose why DeFeo was hospitalized, citing health privacy laws. The Albany County coroner’s office, tasked with determining what caused his death, said it did not publish such information, except for the relatives of the dead.