The Amityville Hoax? Part 1: A Tragic History

In the early morning hours of November 14, 1974 Butch decided what he was going to do. While his parents and four younger brothers and sisters were sleeping he methodically shot and killed each one of them with a .35 caliber rifle. He tried to point the blame on a mafia hit man who he claimed had a vendetta against him, but the detectives grew suspicious when they found an empty gun box in his bedroom that matched the murder weapon. His story fell apart and after hours of interrogation. “It all started so fast. Once I started, I just couldn’t stop. It went so fast,” he confessed. When asked during his trial why he had done such a thing Butch replied “As far as I’m concerned, if I didn’t kill my family, they were going to kill me. And as far as I’m concerned, what I did was self-defense and there was nothing wrong with it. When I got a gun in my hand, there’s no doubt in my mind who I am. I am God.” Butch was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison on all six counts. Butch DeFoe remains behind bars, his first request for parole denied in 1999.

Butch slowly faded out of the public eye, yet the scene of his crime wasn’t through making the headlines. After the Lutz family moved in barely a year after the murders, 112 Ocean Avenue became one of the most famous haunted houses in history. George and Kathy Lutz felt a little uneasy about the house’s history, but the price was good and they couldn’t pass it up. They bought the house for $80,000 and moved in on December 18, 1975. “Twenty-eight days later, they fled terror,” as chapter one of the best selling novel The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson describes. Anyone who has read the book, seen the movie, or even heard the name “Amityville” thinks of vengeful demons, ghostly visions, icy drafts, and bleeding walls. The trailer on the book’s back cover boasts that the story is true, yet a parapsychologist by the name of Dr. Stephen Kaplan spent the last years of his life trying to expose the story as a hoax.

So where does the unsolved mystery lie if the Amityville story is a hoax? Many still believe that the house is haunted and

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