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ALBANY, NY (AP) – The man convicted of the massacre of his parents and four siblings at a house that later inspired the book and movies “The Amityville Horror” has died, reports said Monday prison officials.
Ronald DeFeo, 69, died at Albany Medical Center on Friday, where he was taken on February 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, a suburb of Long Island.
The house became the basis of a horror film classic after another family briefly lived there about a year after the murders and claimed the house was haunted. One book and two films – the 1979 original, starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder, and Rod Steiger, and a 2005 remake – depicted a house with weird voices, walls oozing slime, furniture moving from themselves and other supernatural characteristics.
DeFeo had pursued a madness defense during his trial, claiming he heard voices that prompted him to kill his family.
He unsuccessfully requested a new trial in 1992, claiming his 18-year-old sister killed the other five family members and then shot her dead.
“I loved my family very much,” he said at a 1999 parole hearing, where he also said he married in prison.
Corrections said they couldn’t reveal why DeFeo was hospitalized, citing health protection laws. The Albany County Coroner’s Office, responsible for determining the cause of his death, said it was not disclosing this information except to relatives of the dead.
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