ALBANY, NY (AP) – The man convicted of killing his parents and four siblings 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, Long Island, on the outskirts.
The house became the basis of a horror movie classic after another family lived there briefly about a year after the murders and claimed the house was enchanted. A book and two films — the 1979 original, starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger, and a 2005 remake — represented a house with strange voices, silty walls, moving furniture, and more. supernatural traits.
DeFeo had pursued a defense of madness at his trial, saying he heard voices leading him to kill his family.
In 1992 he called for a new unsuccessful trial, claiming that his 18-year-old sister killed the other five family members and then shot her.
“I loved my family very much,” he said at a 1999 parole hearing, where he also said he had married while in prison.
The corrections department said it could not disclose why DeFeo was hospitalized, citing health privacy laws. The Albany County Forensic Office, tasked with determining what caused his death, said it would not disclose that information, except to relatives of the dead.