ALBANY, NY (AP) – The man convicted of murdering his parents and four siblings in a home that later inspired the book “The Amityville Horror” has died, prison officials said Monday.
Ronald DeFeo, 69, died Friday at Albany Medical Center, where he was taken from a prison in the Catskill Mountains in New York on Feb. 2, the Department of Corrections and Community Services said. The cause of his death is not immediately known.
DeFeo served a life sentence of 25 years in the 1974 murders in Amityville, on the suburban Long Island.
The house became the basis of a horror film classic after another family lived there about a year after the murder and claimed the house was haunted. A book and two films – the original 1979 by James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger, and a remake of 2005 – depicted a house with strange voices, walls that flowed slime, furniture that moved by itself and other supernatural features.
DeFeo defended an insanity during his trial, saying he heard voices driving him to kill his family.
He unsuccessfully tried trial again in 1992, claiming that his 18-year-old sister killed the other five family members and that he then shot her.
“I loved my family very much,” he said during a parole hearing in 1999, where he also said he got married in prison.
The Department of Corrections said it could not be disclosed why DeFeo was admitted to the hospital, citing health safety laws. The Coroner’s Office of Albany County, which has the task of determining what caused his death, said it did not disclose such information except to relatives of the dead.