DeFeo, 69, died Friday at Albany Medical Center, where he was taken Feb. 2 from a prison in New York’s Catskill Mountains, 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 for the 1974 murder of his father, mother, two brothers and two sisters in their home in Suffolk County.
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.
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