Ronald DeFeo Jr., whose murder of family members launched ‘The Amityville Horror,’ dies at 69

The house at 112 Ocean Ave. had five bedrooms, 3½ bathrooms, a swimming pool and a boathouse. In 1974, a family of seven lived in the three-story Dutch colonial structure in the Long Island village of Amityville, N.Y. A sign out front read “high hopes.”

In the decades since then, it has been the most famous house in town, and for all the wrong reasons. On Nov. 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr., the oldest of five children in the DeFeo family, alerted police that his parents and four siblings had been killed in a bloody rampage.