ALBANY, NY (AP) – The man convicted of murdering his parents and four siblings in a home that later inspired the book and films “The Amityville Horror” died, prison officials said on Monday.
Ronald DeFeo, 69, died on Friday at Albany Medical Center, where he was taken on Feb. 2 from a prison in the Catskill Mountains in 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, in the suburb of Long Island.
The house became the basis for a classic horror movie after another family lived there for a brief period, about a year after the murders, and said the house was haunted. A book and two films – the 1979 original, starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger, and a 2005 remake – portrayed a house with strange voices, muddy walls, furniture that moved on its own and other features supernaturals.
DeFeo had sought a defense of insanity at his trial, saying he heard voices that led him to kill his family.
He unsuccessfully tried a retrial 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 at a parole hearing in 1999, where he also said he married while in prison.
The corrections department said it could not disclose why DeFeo was hospitalized, citing health privacy laws. The Albany County Coroner’s Office, charged with determining what caused his death, said it did not release this information, except to relatives of the dead.