![]() New York Daily News Archive (NY Daily News via Getty Images) arriving at a courthouse on Long Island days after being charged with murdering his parents and four siblings. He also holds up as evidence a supposedly comic song written by Dawn some time earlier, The night the DeFeos died – also the title of his book – in which she fantasized about the murder of her family. The author, among other arguments, points to the affidavit signed in 1974 by Dawn’s boyfriend, with whom she wanted to move to Florida despite the disapproval of her parents. “I think that Dawn was involved and simply saying so makes me sad, because we are talking about a girl ready to do anything to get out of the house and escape from her parents,” Osuna says via email. In his conclusions, Osuna maintains that DeFeo killed his parents, Ronald and Louise DeFeo, with the help of a friend, but that his younger siblings were killed by his 18-year-old sister Dawn, who was then shot by DeFeo after he witnessed the atrocity. There have been question marks over DeFeo’s guilt from the moment he was arrested, given that the authorities at the time were convinced the crime had to have been carried out by more than one person. ![]() ![]() His goal was not to see Butch DeFeo – who confessed to the crime and died in custody in March, 2021, and the age of 69 – exonerated, but that his true involvement in the killing of his family be established. Osuna has for years advocated for the case to be reopened. In his 2002 book The Night the DeFeos Died: Reinvestigating the Amityville Murders, Ric Osuna goes over all of the irregularities surrounding the case, the obstacles the defense team encountered in gaining access to evidence that had not been submitted and the hurry on the part of the authorities to lock up a culprit even before a coherent version of events had been obtained. These movies often carry the tagline “based on real events” because surprisingly they have some basis in reality: the original court ruling in the case, handed down in 1975, did not make explicit mention of malign spirits, but it did consider the story plausible. This is how most of the more than 30 horror movies inspired by the patricide in the Long Island neighborhood of Amityville in New York start – from the original and most famous of all them, The Amityville Horror (1979) – to then go on and tell the story of how another family who moved into the house later experienced paranormal phenomena. It was as if a supernatural force had somehow silenced the weapon and kept the six victims in a trance until their fate was sealed. All died face down in bed, as if none had been awoken by the sound of gunfire, and none of them had been drugged. (more commonly known as Butch), wakes up and, rifle in hand, executes his entire family: his parents, two sisters and two brothers.
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