Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 175: Amityville Part I - The Story

Episode Date: May 21, 2015

It's the most famous haunting of all time on today's Last Podcast as we cover the accepted story of the 28 day haunting that the Lutzes experienced as portrayed in Jay Anson's The Amityville Horror and the mass murder that preceded it.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Well, Mother Teresa is to be canonized in 2016. Oh. What a fucking waste to everybody's time. I agree, she was a lie. Do you know that she never actually helped out the poor? That whole thing was just a money funneling operation. They laundered all the cash.

She may as well have been a Courtney Cox or a Giselle Buncheon the way she used all of those lepers for PR opportunities. Indeed. Mother, Mother Buncheon. I want to start this whole episode by decrying Mother Teresa and say, if I had seen her, I would have set her clothes on fire. Oh, that would have been nice. It's not the first time that we've talked shit about Mother Teresa on this fucking show and I don't know why either one of you are pretending like it is.

What? I don't remember making sure. Last podcast on the left, official stance. If we had met Mother Teresa, we would have ripped off her garbs to take a look at her boobies. That's what I would have done. I would have played with them a little, I don't know what she was. What was her race? I would have played with her teabags. Was it just a white gal?

I think she was Italian. Ooh, actually I like her a lot more now. Just go with them Italian women. Isn't your mother Italian? Yes. Okay, interesting. Very, very good. She was just too good for this world. Oh, Ed, you are on the last three episodes, Ed.

We're done talking about you. Too good for this world. I must speak sweet, Mother. Sometimes when I just looked at my mother, I was just like, God, I need a jacket. That's all right. It's enough edginess. Oh, it's perfect. Oh, my God. All right, we're on to another house of horrors

in a much different sense. There's no lampshades made of skin, but there's a bunch of demonic situations occurring, and of course we're discussing Amityville. Ooh, the Amityville horror. Possibly the most well-known, the most well-covered haunted house and haunting in the history of man, or at the very least the 20th century.

If you ask someone to name a haunted house, chances are the first thing they're going to name is Grandma's House. I was going to go with the Zabrowski's house in Staten Island or wherever you grew up. I remember Grandma's House being full of terrifying things. The mirrors, the beds, the spiny fingers. That hard candy that everybody knew no child wanted.

That's why Grandma kept it around. This is my question with grandmothers. Do you just get shipments of hard candies? Do they just show up at the house as soon as one of your children have one? All of a sudden, you're getting werthers and those weird little strawberry things that just basically become rocks. Yeah, I love those things.

Well, you go through one hard candy a year, and that's when a new child is born. He doesn't realize how terrible they taste. He takes one and then he realizes there's always some random fruit inside of them. Even if it is chocolate, it's a lie. See, when my mom became a grandmother, she just started leaving out bowls of sausage.

Yeah, it's good grandmother. All right, so the Amityville Horror. This show, again, it's the most famous, haunting of all time, great imagery in this story. But it lies at the center of the Amityville Horror House, is an incredible story of murder and mayhem. To me, when I went to go research the Amityville Horror, because we were talking about doing a whole thing on Ed and Lorraine Warren,

but they were just too boring because they just don't, they were just, they're con men. Which we'll go into, they're con artists. They're con artists without knowing that they're con artists. They're con artists that believe in their own height, their own bullshit, because Ed's whole thing is like, well, you're never going to understand my work unless you understand my faith.

Pretty much saying you've got to be a Catholic piece of shit to really follow Ed's line of bullshit. But they're also con artists. Sometimes con artists can do very good things. For example, when we went on our psychic journey on episode, was it 17, 18, way back in the day, that psychic, that large woman, I could see her children playing in the next room,

they were playing a massive Xbox, and they gave her $100 to hang out with her for 15 minutes so I know where she got the money. She gave me some very nice advice though, and she was encouraging. Or like being one of those Patch Adams cancer doctors where you're like, make them laugh, make them laugh, make them laugh, but even while you turn to the nurse and you're like,

start measuring the casket. Oh my goodness, and the nurse is like, that is not my job, I actually, I give that to a different person. I'm the one who euthanizes the poor boy. Oh, it's Lorencio, the gravedigger consultant. Every hospital. The casket's got to be big enough for the body to dance. Dance in silent dance of cryptic death.

And also sometimes you got to leave an extra foot on top if you want to give them a fancy top hat. Yep, that's a good point. You never know when a boy wants to be buried like Abraham Lincoln. Every cancer child's last wish is to be our Civil War president. So the center of this entire thing, of course all of this happened in the early 70s. The Amityville whore is a very 70s thing,

and one thing to keep in mind, very much keep in mind during all this, is that the entire country was ripe for this sort of haunting. The exorcist had just come out. The exorcist had just come out. Everyone was primo-primo dripping wet for a good haunting story. I mean, to me, I'm always dripping wet, slash hard as, and dry as a bone for a good haunting story,

and they're rare these days. So this was just like mama's milk. But you're a boy, Henry. So when you say dripping wet, that would be your butthole. That would be the only option that would be dripping. So your butthole doesn't sweat when you're having a good time? No, I never noticed.

I'll check next time. I'll hand check it. I've been having to put a whole bunch of maxi pads all around the inside of my underwear because of just how happy I get about working on heroes. So you go to the store and you buy tampons, and the person behind the counter is like, oh, your girlfriend must be on a real heavy load this month.

Yeah, I'm just like, yeah, she's as big as me, and she's just, I gotta tell you, it has been rough and going to dinner with her. Right, heavy load, heavy load. Totally different. I don't stick them up my ass. I just kind of lie them in between my butt cheeks like it's a really shitty hot talk.

Oh, that's great. And this is also before the sex scandal of the Catholic Church really came up, and the Catholic Church really had a lot more significance in pop culture, and they had a lot more say in actual events when it comes to their point of view, not being seen as wackety-dackety, which is what it's seen as now.

Well, people trusted them at the time. It's important to know about the exorcist. This is a bit of a digression, but before the exorcist, the devil was not something that was at the forefront of American minds. The devil was something that wacky evangelicals thought about. The devil was not a guy out to get you.

The devil was more of an evil force if you even believed in him at all. But the exorcist, when that came out, all of a sudden, demons were real again. Devils were real. Exorcisms were real, and Catholic priests were the front lines of defense. Right.

Well, never discount the Catholic Church. We've been talking about the devil for a long fucking time, because it makes priests, shitty Catholic priests, and makes them warriors and therapists instead of just crippled, bent pedophiles. Yeah, exactly. Kind of spraying everybody with water here and there. It's really just aggravating what they do.

Well, at the center of the haunting, everyone asks, where does the Amityville Haunting come from? Well, at the center of all of this is a mass murder, a one-night, six-body murder perpetrated by this guy, Ronald Butch DeFeo Jr. Now, if you want to talk about haunting fuel, this is exactly the perfect melange for a massive haunting. So look at the stories already been set.

It's a tragic murder of an entire family in one night. So short and sharp, which is exactly what you need to create a bunch of ghosts that don't know that they're fucking dead yet. Right. Release them quick. Now, this story is obviously horrific in its own right, and this is 100% true, obviously. Yes.

So you could write a movie just about this alone. Absolutely. Now, and there have been books written about it, but no one has really... Ronald DeFeo, the actual murderers themselves, tend to get glossed over. Which is amazing, and that shows you, again, more of the belief in the paranormal

and in what the Catholic Church was discussing during this time. Six real people were murdered, and they were like, but what about the ghosts? Move on. I heard they were ghosts afterwards. Ooh.

So... Did you hear about the flies? I hate flies. It's the sounds that they make that I don't like. What else I heard is that the toilets got all dirty with slime, and it's one thing I absolutely hate is grabbing my toilets. That's why I need these scrub bubbles, because all it does is scrub bubbles,

my mamamins, and we will make sure that your toilet doesn't have any slime in it, and we'll make sure that the flies are also... They'll be clean, at least. Well, you know what, Mr. Zabrowski, here at Scrubbing Bubbles, we love you as our admin, but can you stop going around the country

and saying, well, clean up toxic ghost goo from your toilets, please? We don't have any scientific tests to prove that. Well, if these Long Island dipshits stop killing their families, then I won't have to fucking sell these things anymore. And this is the... The DeFeo's are the most Long Island family.

Yes. You can imagine. Butch DeFeo was the oldest of five kids living at 112 Ocean Avenue in the affluent town of Amityville, New York. You got to remember, Amityville, it is a very rich town. Right. It is a coastal town.

Butch... The DeFeo family had their own business. They were deeply connected, possibly, with the mob. I had an uncle Butch that was also a twisted piece of shit that is a sanitation officer, quote-unquote, means a garbage man who lives in Staten Island. And there's a very special pride...

There's a very special, like, Queens Long Island kind of white trash pride that comes with, like, living in a nice house in, like, Amityville. You're like, hey, take a look at that. We got two floors, so I don't have to hear the kids taking a shit in the morning. Right, right. Well, there is an actual correlation

between the number of track suits you own and the amount of pride you have in your family. So that is very true. Legally, the most you can own in Long Island is 12, because if not, then you'll technically have more than the mayor, and that means you have more votes. That's a good...

I did not remember that fact, but that is a law. So Butch's father, Big Ronnie, he was said to have the intense gaze of Rudolph Valentino, while his mother, a former model, was said to have hobnobbed with legendary singer Mel Tormey. Oh, wow.

Belved smoke. Was it a velvet fog? I'm sorry. Belved smoke is the weed I smoked last night here. I got here in Toronto. Mel Tormey, if you've ever seen a picture of Mel Tormey, I don't know if our younger viewers know who he is, but imagine Abe Vagoda if he's uglier.

Whoa. Mel Tormey was in like a Pepsi ad campaign when we were growing up. He was selling some product. That's the only way that I remember him. I think it was Mountain Dew. Was it Mountain Dew? I believe it was.

Yeah, Troll of a man. No, more of a goblin. Yeah. It was a beautiful voice. It was like a... Like kind of voice. When the world smiles with you. That was his song.

My question. He wasn't the same dude who did the... That's brisk, baby. No. Was it? I don't know. Let's move on. Good guy.

We can't talk about marketing campaigns from when we were 12. So Big Ronnie, real big piece of shit. He was abusive. He really liked throwing Ronnie against the walls. As Ronnie was growing up. A lot of times hit him head first. So Ronnie's got your classic head injury.

Big Ronnie beat his wife constantly and created just a stupid hostile environment for this entire family. Ronnie was the oldest of five. So it's a big family. But Big Ronnie, he had a softer side as well. He co-wrote a song in order to get his wife back after he beat her for the 57th time.

Oh, okay. He co-wrote a song with this guy, Joe Williams, 1963. Joe Williams recorded the song for his album. One is a lonesome number. It is. Let's listen to just a little bit of the real thing. You can almost hear his fists hitting her stomach.

Ow, ow, Ronnie. Oh, my God. You're so sweet. Oh, God, the last time you tried to break the toilet lid over my head, I was like, oh, Ronnie, we're done. But as soon as I heard this song, I was like, oh, Ronnie, come get it.

So that is, yep, that's the real thing. So written by Big Ronnie DeFeo. Ronnie is treating his children like Terrence Howard's character in the show Empire treated his gay son very abusive. And I'm watching Empire now and I highly recommend it. Thanks, Ben. Very abusive.

Ben, TV guide, kissle. Yeah, very abusive to their gay son. I don't like it, Terrence Howard's character. I forget your name. How was this week's episode of the Big Bang Theory, Ben, TV guide, kissle? Well, they didn't do enough science for me. But I was like, oh, they said McLaughlin.

And I have no idea what that means or what that is. Well, I'll tell you this. I'm staying true to my fucking self. I just watched a whole bunch of Alex Jones. So you tell me who's cool and who's on the edge. I've been watching a BBC program called Time to Remember. It's, you know, old newsreel footage from the... Let's get back to the murders, please.

So the house itself, the Amityville house, iconic. Perfect haunted house. Perfect. Three stories, Dutch colonial. It's got these two half moon windows right at the top that look like evil eyes staring right at you. And I actually thought it was pretty gauche the way they put those weird like eyelash things

on top of the window sills. But I mean, what are you going to do? I guess they're Long Island trash. Right. I want it to look like a slut is winking at everybody in the street. Yeah. Then I go inside of it.

I say, I'm inside a slut. Get the joke. You get the joke. So Butch, 23 at the time of the murders and still living at home. Butch was 5'8". Husky guy given to wearing open shirts to display his ample chest hair.

Ooh, that sounds like me. It does, Henry, sadly. And he was also a very heavy user of heroin, acid, and speed. How are you fat if you're doing the three drugs that make you skinny? I just don't get it. Every one of the drugs makes you forget that you just ate. Ah, I see.

I've seen plenty of big fat cocads. Yeah, but usually if they're doing heroin also, you know, they tend to maintain a good waistline. That is true. If you're on the mix of heroin and acid and the food is starting to be like, all of a sudden you see the refrigerator door open for no reason, a little hamburger opens it up

and he's just like, Hey, buddy, I think maybe you could use a little bit of a pick-me-up. I think you forgot to eat recently. Butch is just sitting there like, You're a fucking hamburger. You're one of the smartest friends I've ever had. And I'm just going to come over there

and I'm going to eat the fuck out of you, hamburger. He's so nice. Ouch, ouch, ouch. So at around 6.30 p.m., on Wednesday, November 13th, 1974, 23-year-old Rono DeFeo Jr. entered Henry's bar and yelled, You gotta help me.

I think my mother and my father are shocked. I think they were Asian. I think the baby, they were Asian. They were Asian. One of the patrons seated at the bar was Robert Bobby Kelsky. There's a lot of Bobbys in this story. A lot of Bobbys.

He was an out-of-work brick mason and Butch's best friend. And to which, after Ronnie yelled, I think my mother and father are shocked, Bobby offered, Are you sure they're not asleep? Which is just such a- You check to make sure they're not sleepy.

Because sometimes, you know, how many times I'm like really sleep, you know, and then people come and check my pulse and they're like, hey Bobby, wake up, wake up. But I'm like, I don't wake up for like days. You know, when I end up with a wake-up, I'm inside a fucking casket. What do you believe in?

You know, I gotta dig myself out of five feet of dirt. I sleep heavy, huh? Oh yeah, heavy sleeper. But you gotta take Bobby seriously. He was the closest one to being a doctor in town. He drove by the hospital on a daily basis. He had to commute to the sausage fucking restaurant. And then back to Henry's.

So after assuring his friends that they were indeed shot and not- It definitely shot because I saw a bunch of stuff in the bag. I thought maybe it was ketchup. So I went and I got some fries. I went back in the house. I wanted to go check on. I was like, oh ketchup.

There's nothing like that. There's some fries with ketchup. You know, because I suck at the fries. They're talking to me. So I'm like, hey maybe you should try me out. And I was like, oh shut up fries. Okay, I'll take you home. And the next thing you know next,

I got a mouthful of my brother's blood in my mouth. A typical, typical sleep bleeding. That's what I would diagnose it as. So those two guys and four other bar patrons, John Altieri, Joey Yeswhite, Al Saxton, and William Scordamoglia, the six men. They piled in a butch's 1970 blue Buick Electra, 225 and drove off.

So a butch climbed in the back while Bobby took the wheel. And here's a funny thing about this is that Henry's bar and the DeFeo house, they were only a block apart, but all these fucking idiots got in the car and drove over to the DeFeo house. I can see Bobby driving over, right? And then like, he's like, enough.

Looking for parking. Ah, damn. Okay. Okay, I got a pair of real bucks. No, no, no, no. I'm gonna let you out. I'm gonna let you out. Let me get back in.

No, no, no. My whole family's dead. My family's dead. Hey, Scordo. Get out and make sure that I'm not too close to the bumper. I don't want to. All right, come on back. I'm back about six inches.

Six inches. Did you say something about your family being dead? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole, the whole DeFeo family's dead. Yeah. All right. I'm telling you, you just, you let me park. You let me park.

25 minutes later. Yeah, I love when Guido's do things. So the victims were Ronald DeFeo Sr. 43, Luis DeFeo, 42, and four kids, Don, who was 18, Allison, who was 13, Mark, who was 12, and John, who was nine. All of the victims have been shot with a.35 caliber lever action Marlin.336 rifle at around three o'clock a.m. the night before.

Also known as the Devil's Hour. And in fact, that is known as the Devil's Hour because it said that a lot of demons like to be active at 3 a.m. because it's a mockery of the Holy Trinity. Oh, very interesting. So that's their go wild time. That's when the walls of reality are thin. Cool.

So DeFeo's parents have both been shot twice. While the children had all been killed with single shots, physical evidence suggests that Luis DeFeo and her daughter, Allison, were both awake at the time of their deaths, but every single victim would be lying on their stomachs. There are a couple of mysteries that are already at the very top. All right. So this Marlin.336 C rifle is supposed to actually be

incredibly loud. It's a.3030. If you know anything about guns, it is a fucking earblower. It would wake up the house next door, not only the people inside the house that the shot was taking. It'd wake up the fucking street. Right. So nobody heard shots that night.

The only report that anyone had was that the, they heard the DeFeo family dog barking, right? They somehow, however this went down, killed the parents first and then went down and systematically shot each one of the brothers and sisters without anybody getting up in the middle of that. Were they shot in the back or were they shot and then turned on to their stomachs?

No. They were all shot in their back. Right. They were obviously died while sleeping. So they died in their sleep. Oh, it must have been peaceful. No, it was a shotgun. Yeah.

And this, by the way, we're going with the accepted story here. Right. This is the accepted story. Yes. We're just, we're just, these are the facts as known. Yeah. Or have been decided upon by committee. So Butch told the police as he, he was taken back to the police

station to be interrogated because he was the only surviving member. So he told police that the killings have been carried out by a mob hit man, an old friend of his dad, a guy named Louis Fellini, who after a falling out a few years earlier had promised to quote unquote whack big Ronnie and his family. What I did like when I'm watching documentaries about this,

about the actual crime, so that all of the police kept saying like rubbed out, which is a great time. Like I haven't heard that phrase in a long time. I love that one. Yeah. Rub. Yeah. The next thing you know is just like Ronnie's throwing everybody that

Fellini went over there and it rubbed out the whole family. But I gotta tell you, I don't know if that's exactly true because what it comes down to is like, well, if they're going to rub out the whole family, why wouldn't they rub out Ronnie? You know what I'm saying? Why did it leave all Ronnie? Why didn't it rub out Ronnie? Because when I said to him, I was like, they're going to rub

anybody out, but they're going to rub out Ronnie, you know? Well, I understand that all these are euphemisms for hand jobs. He went over and rubbed out. Well, I will always, you know, make this mafia family upset. I'll get a handy if I do it. Get rubbed out, maybe even get whacked. Because Butch says the whole thing happened because he called Fellini a cocksucker once.

Oh, I see. He's like, I'm not a cocksucker. I just give hand jobs. But that's the reason why, like, but it's so funny with Long Island police officers because that's how they talked because it's just like this big fat dude is just like, because yeah, Butch said the reason why the incident occurred is because that Butch, well, he called Fellini

a cocksucker. And that's just what you do. I mean, yeah, maybe he was a cocksucker. Who knows? You know what I mean? A lot of people are cocksuckers. All right. But at the same time, Fellini was a cocksucker.

You don't fucking call a cocksucker. Yeah, he's going to go over there and give him a rim job. Well, you ask why was Ronnie not there? Why didn't Ronnie not get rubbed out when detectives asked him why he hadn't eaten dinner with his family as usual that night? Right. He said, and this is a direct quote.

My mother was a lousy cook. She cooked up some brown shit in the bowl. It looked like shit and it smelled like shit. If you had to eat it, I tell you what, it tastes like shit. And the next thing you know, guess what? I realized she'd been cooking shit for 30 years. Oh, well, that will get you killed. It's not even a euphemism.

You got to stop cooking shit, Mark. You're rolling in these pots and pans, Mark. Yeah. Well, you know, it's got some good nutritional effects there, I assume. So finally, after, what is it, about 12 hours of interrogation, as interrogations go, not all that long, he finally admitted, yes, I killed him.

Yes, I committed all the murders. The floodgates opened about his family and about his brothers. He said, My brothers is a couple of fucking pigs. I often use his name back from day use. I go in there and sometimes it's like shit in the bowl and it's the toilet paper. These fucking pigs don't even wipe their asses.

A couple of times, there was even shit on the back of the seat. I don't know. You're a 23-year-old who lives at home. That was less than 12 hours after his brothers had died, after he had murdered them. And they are 11 and 12 years old. They were young. And when you were going to actually, like,

I know it sounds like sometimes people call my characters a bit of an exaggeration, but Butch DeFeo sounds like that and he is a massive piece of shit. Yes, he is. And he, he hated his family. Yeah, that's what you, again, like we've said many times before, get out of the house.

Get out. 18 years old, you got to go. Otherwise, you're going to end up like Mr. DeFeo, murdering your entire family and saying terrible things about your mother's cooking. Which is very offensive. So after a full day of interrogation, he finally confessed. He said that he got the idea while watching the Sidney Pollock movie called Castle Keep, which, by the way, is fucking awesome.

Go watch Castle Keep fucking Peter Fawkes in it. But don't kill your family afterwards. No, absolutely. No one else would do that. No, Castle Keep, it's kind of, it's a bit of a romp. Peter Fawkes, funny as shit in it. Yeah, I loved The Dark Knight, but I didn't blow up a hospital. No, absolutely not.

Yep, and DeFeo told detectives... Once I started, I just couldn't stop. It just went so fast. Yeah. And it got me the fun noise. Isn't that nice? It's like Pringles, but with shooting your whole family, once you start, you just can't stop.

So DeFeo's trial began on October 14th, 1975. He and his defense lawyer, William Weber, who will become more important later on, mounted an affirmative defense of insanity, saying that DeFeo claimed that he killed his family in self-defense because he's sitting there watching Castle Keep and he said that he heard his family plotting to kill him. And that was just one of the stories.

A thing that's going to be common with Butch DeFeo is that he just throws out 90 stories, right? Which is what he says later on, was him building his insanity case, but I also think that he's a fucking moron. He's so... He just forgot what he was saying. You actually have to be very intelligent to make yourself out to be insane.

And it's certainly really difficult to try to build a fake insanity defense because people can just see you as really stupid, which is not going to get you out of being a murderer. Absolutely. Because you're supposed to not be able to consciously know right from wrong. Exactly. Another story he said is that he was approached by a female demon in a robe with black hands

who handed him the rifle while he was down on acid in the basement. Which that might be true. While things happen on acid. We don't know if that wasn't true. I mean, to some degree, you could argue that he was going through some an insane mental bout, but it was drug-related. And so that might have been a plausible explanation for him to get off in front of a jury.

But there's no doubt that he wasn't insane. He was just a total moron. Yeah, you don't often kill your whole family like if you lose a game of Monopoly to him. No, you don't. Although I really wanted to kill my older brother quite often growing up who was quite a cheater and boardwalk is still mine. Which one?

Eric, the eldest. I see it. I don't like him very much whatsoever when it comes to playing Monopoly. He was a cheat and there's no doubt about that. But that's fine. So the actual court psychiatrist, he says like, alright, yes, this guy has been doing a lot of heroin, a lot of acid, but at the most he has antisocial personality disorder

and antisocial personality disorder doesn't mean you're insane. It just means you're an asshole. You're a dickhead. Yeah, you're a dickhead. And so Butch, but you know what? They did say like, yes, he was aware of his actions. But to Butch's credit, he did everything he could to prevent these murders. He knew that he was going to do it.

Because he's literally been threatening it for years. They have said this for a long time that he was always like this. He was a troubled kid. He was always the one getting deeply into trouble. Like when you watch one of these documentaries called The Real of Amityville Horror, they also said the same thing about Butch is that as soon as they heard the news that the whole family was dead, they're all like, oh, Butch did it. Right, right, right, right.

Definitely. Yeah, because he had always been like this. They were like, he was always very dark and always, he just didn't give a fuck. He was a sociopath. Yeah, a year before the murders, the whole family, well not the whole family, but him and his parents went to go see a psychiatrist in Brooklyn. And the psychiatrist told his parents very bluntly, he will kill you one day. If you do not commit him and get him help, he will kill you.

So, I mean, and of course his parents created a perfect storm with all of the verbal and physical abuse around the house. Really, I don't mind him so much killing his father. I think every boy wants to kill their dad at some point, especially if their dad acts like Terrence Howard did to his son in the show Empire. Very mean to that poor gay boy. Leave him alone, Terrence Howard's character. I don't remember the name of.

No, so the story is too, is that, you know, I guess we're going to go more into the alternative versions of the DeFeo family murders. But a lot of what they say is that the reason why he even killed his mom and dad is that he was just, you know, he kind of flipped out. He killed his dad. But the reason why he killed his mom, the goal was to just kill his dad. But the reason why he killed his mom was because she had a gun too. You're talking about a whole family that's literally armed.

Right, and ready to fucking kill each other. And honestly, if you would do a lineup and you would cut off their heads and just show their torsos, the exact same amount of chest hair, including the mother, they can't tell them apart. I mean, these are just Neanderthal type people. Yeah, yeah, armed against each other. Not armed against intruders, armed against each other. No, they're living like the movie The Thing.

They're all living like the scientists in The Thing. They all have guns pointed at one another and nobody knows who's going to snap first. And the other thing about Butch moving out, you know, we say like, yeah, he's 23, living at home, he tried to move out, he tried to leave. But his father just fucking cajoled him into coming back. He disabled his car, he cut off, you know, he also cut off his allowance because that was the other thing that they said about Big Ronnie is that he was, yes, he was a piece of shit,

but he was just one of those fucking assholes that beats his family and then just showers them with money. It's exactly. And thinks that it's okay. Like what Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-soon did in North Korea. You kill half the people and you give the other half some nice gifts and then people are like, I guess I'll be friends with you. Yeah, because you gotta be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's the, that's the DeFeo family and about a year later. And again, that is just, that is just the accepted story. Right. Right, again, we're going to say that again, this is just, this is the blanket, you know, Butch, this is the storyline that Butch killed the whole family and then he went to jail for like a thousand years. He's in jail for the, he got convicted, guilty of murder

and he is still alive and in jail right now. And this is, in my personal opinion, this is where the true crime horror, it's where it ends. Yeah. But this is such a terrifying case. Can you imagine you're just a 12 year old boy and your older brother comes in and shoots you in the back as you lie in your stomach. It's very tragic and the victims are the children, you know, the parents.

They seem to, they bred a murderer. Well, they said that the mom was, the mom was just as abused as anyone else. The mom, the mom, the mom was very much trapped. And it was said that Ronnie actually did very much love his mother and was very close to his mother. You're going to watch that in later interviews with Butch DeFeo is that he felt, the one thing that he felt conflict about was the deaths of his brothers and sisters. Right.

That was the thing that he looked at as, he obviously has no explanation for why he did it. There's, I mean, there's many other explanations. There are alternative explanations. We're going to go through next episode. But he, you can see him struggling with why they also had to die. You know, as a person who has ADHD, such as myself, occasionally your brain just doesn't stop you from going. And then after, when it finally does stop, you're like, I just ate an entire pizza, which is not nearly as bad as killing your entire family.

So you get the feeling his brain was just like, at no point did the stoppers go off and be like, I'm going to let the kids live. In terms of a carbless diet that is just as bad as killing your family. I'm sorry. But this, so now we're looking at though, because I'm a person who does believe in haunting activity. And I believe that this is the, the event that could definitely create something like the Amityville Horror House. Is there a specific name for this kind of haunting this sort of like shock trauma that occurs? Residual.

This is a residual haunting. Yeah. Yeah. But you're going to hear claims that this was not a residual haunting, that this was a demonic haunting, which is that an entity was inside of the Amityville Horror House, which basically made Butch do the crime. Right. Yeah. And made it possible.

So this is where the mysteries kind of happened. So let's start right now. If it's true that there was a demonic entity in the house, it is possible that was the entity that gave him the gun. That was the entity that kept everyone asleep in the house and basically fed itself with the negative energy of the crimes it created. As you know, so Ronnie DeFeo, he was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was serving like consecutive sentences. So he's guilty. Two weeks after he is pronounced guilty, George Lutz, his wife, Kathy, and their three kids moved into the house on 112 Ocean Avenue,

still furnished with all of the DeFeo's furniture, saved the bloodied mattresses. It was 13 months after the murder in December of 1975 when the Amityville Horror would begin. All of the information that follows is from either the Lutz's personal testimony or the book by J. Anson, The Amityville Horror. Kathy, you know how he never, you say I never do anything right? I just got us a great deal on a house on Ocean Avenue, Kathy. My whole life, I've always wanted to live in Amityville. Oh, it's so nice and it's classy. That's what I like about Amityville is that it's classy. Who's the man?

How much did you get? How much did you get the house for? They're giving us $5,000 to move in. I can't believe it. We're making money. I can't believe that. That's a good, oh, what a good, good husband. Oh, this is nice. I love you, Kathy. Well, what the Lutz's knew all about the DeFeo murders and they had had a little family meeting beforehand and they had said like, hey, is everyone cool with this?

Are we all going to be able to sleep at night pretty much? And they all decided like, no, we're not superstitious people. We can handle this. We're getting a great deal on this because it had a boat house. It was right next to the water. It had a swimming pool and it was a beautiful home. It should have felt really weird. It should have felt really weird when the daughter was like, I can't wait. Nothing. Just immediately starts menstruating.

The plates and fucking dishes start sliding all over the kitchen. I will say if you're George in this situation, you do feel like the world's greatest dad and husband. You got a great deal on the house. Your wife is happy and there's no doubt that your children are like, oh, we're going to a haunted house. Absolutely. Of course. I love you dad. This must have been a great time for him. Yeah, well, but according to the Lutz's, the paranormal activity began almost instantly. As they're moving in, they had a dog, Harry, he was tied to a tree. The dog tried to hang itself within the first hour by jumping over a fence while its collar and chain was still attached.

But the problem was that the first thing that happened is that Kathy Lutz was taken over by the DeFeo family mother's ghost and she was cooking for the dog. She was cooking human feces for the dog. So this is a reading from theamonyvillefiles.com, which is a fun little website that describes the haunting. Cool. Due to the property's grim reputation, a friend of George's suggests the house should be blessed by a Catholic priest. I was a Methodist, so this was no fault of me at the time, recalls George. Father Ray shortly after we were in the process of moving in.

I waved, he waved, he went on an house and went about blessing. When he was done, I tried to bang him. You know, you got to bang his priest, show up, you gotta get a slip and something. But he wouldn't take money, you know? He said, no, you don't charge for this. You don't charge friends for this. I think that was very kind, it was nice for him to stay, you know? And then he said, you know, I feel something very strange in that one room upstairs, that upstairs bedroom. He's like, hey, don't even worry about it, we're gonna turn into a someone room. And he's like, that's good.

As long as no one sleeps in there. And then strange occurrences began almost immediately. Yeah. It's kind of fun. It's real fun. So the priest goes in and he starts blessing the room. And as he's blessing the room, he heard a deep voice from behind him saying, get out. Get out. Get out. Get out. Get out.

Get out of here. Just get out. Yeah, because that's a problem. The next thing is, Father Ray felt someone slap him across the face, so that's how I thought of my head. I was like, get out. Get out of here. Get out of here. This is why priests make terrible real estate agents. You know, just walking them through the house. Why are you blessing every single room?

Oh, you know, this is the bathroom. This is the children's room. Don't sleep in that room. This is the master bedroom, the kitchen. And then go in this room. Don't go in this room. Okay. Don't you dare go in the bathroom.

All right. Left bedroom. So when you mark it as a four bedroom. Whatever it is you do, Matt. Okay. So it's really more, it's more of a three bedroom. Okay. It's a three bedroom then.

If we can't go into one of the bedrooms, it's a three bedroom, not a four bedroom. Okay. So the priest also later developed boils on his hands similar to stigmata. Oh, the nails of Jesus Christ. It also could have been herpes. Yeah, exactly. Kathy also said there was an odor of very sweet, but very cheap perfume. And she said that she felt the sensation of a woman coming up and embracing her from behind.

She said that it was more of kind of a comforting gesture. It wasn't really something that was threatening. It was, she said it was almost as if there was one mother trying to comfort another. I'll tell you, the major victim here is Mrs. DeFeo. Even post-mortem, people are mocking the way she smelled. You know, that's just her old, that's just her old perfume. Her food's been mocked, her perfume's been mocked. Everything about this woman is being mocked that makes her good, like a good Italian.

You know, they're just like tearing her apart. I like, I think she was a nice girl. You were over 45 in Italian. If you're over 45 in Italian, eventually your body begins to spoil perfume. I did not know that, but that is also a fact. Well, George, he once described a sound coming from downstairs as, quote, a whole bunch of musicians going, each one in their own direction, playing their own song like an unorganized musical sound.

He also said he also felt hurt footsteps, but when he went down there, there was nothing. And George himself started acting really fucking weird. This is a really cool storyline. This part of it here with George like slowly turning into a madman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His personal hygiene went way downhill. He started becoming obsessed with fire. He had this idea because he could never get warm.

Yeah, he was constantly freezing cold, like bone deep cold. He couldn't handle it and became obsessed with being cold. And he became obsessed with keeping the fire in the living room going. And he was constantly chopping wood. I'm going to say the way that George described the sounds coming from the basement is the way that a white person describes hearing jazz for the first time. And I think he might be a little racist. Another thing, the Lutz children, they were starting to sleep on their stomachs,

which is the same way that all of the DeFeos were found when they died. Now, did this family know the specifics of the case before they moved in? Obviously, they knew a massacre occurred. That's why they got the good deal. But did they know about the kids sleeping on the stomachs? Did they know about the sounds from the basement? I don't think they did. Okay.

I think all they knew is that, okay, six people were killed here less than a fucking year ago. Right. Do you want to move in? But I will put it this way. They definitely could have learned the details in a second because the DeFeo crimes were heavily covered by the newspapers. And the crime scene photos were already out there. All they really had to do was look it up.

But I mean, this is the 70s. And they would have had all that information. This is the 70s. So when you say look it up, it's not on your iPhone. You don't Google it. You got to go to the library, micro fish, or micro fish it. I mean, it would have been a little bit more difficult to get the information that it is now, obviously. And then it started getting violent.

They said that an unseen force ripped doors from hinges, slammed cabinets, closed. There was a noxious green slime that oozed from the ceilings. They would see it on the carpet. And of course, the most famous thing, the swarm of insects that attacked the family that were specifically in Don's old room. And what is the significance of flies and insects when it comes to the folklore of demonic possession? Beelzebub is the Lord of the Flies. Okay. And he is among, Beelzebub is not necessarily Satan, but he is among the higher echelon of demons.

Right. And so the other weird things that George started to wake up every night at 3 a.m., which was the time of the murders. And a 12 inch crucifix, which Kathy hung in the living room, revolved until it was upside down and it gave off this weird sour smell. Which is just the normal scratch of crucifixes because that's just what Jesus smelled like? Exactly. Put a yuck sticker on it. Who likes them? Yeah, yeah, so you're saying Jesus smelled like Ted Kaczynski?

Yes. I'm sure if Ted Kaczynski went back to biblical times, people would be like, what's your secret? How do you smell so fresh? Who's the new playboy? Oh my. I want to blow up a building. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's a building?

I will have my revenge! Okay. Another weird things that George tripped over a four foot high China lion ornament in the living room. And when he looked, he found bite marks on one of his ankles. And later on, this lion would reappear in the living room after George had already moved it back upstairs into the sewing room where the priest got slapped. Get out. Get out. How dare you?

This is my private room. I'm changing. It's for the club tonight. Get out. I was thinking maybe I can wear the red bands, but instead I was thinking maybe where are you going? When I get out, I meant sarcastic. I like it when people pay attention. I mean, the strangest thing out of all of this though was said by the youngest daughter who said that she had an imaginary friend named Jody,

who was a big demonic pig with glowing red eyes. And both George and Kathy reported seeing the eyes at different points. And I will say this, if this haunting had happened in Wisconsin, Jody wouldn't have made it a fucking week because Jody would have been bacon. Jody would have been loved, maybe honored and worshiped. Wisconsin, as much as we eat our pigs, we also respect them for the divine creatures that they are. And a lot of times you marry them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You marry them and elect them to be mayor and shit like that.

And most of the people, you can trust a pig more than a fucking person. Oh, absolutely. Porky Pig, the mayor of Stevens Point, Wisconsin was the best mayor we ever had. Oh, it was wonderful. So as far as the pig goes on December 1, 1976, cloven hoofed pig-like footprints were left in the morning snow. Two weeks later, George heard his bed slamming up and down on the floor, and he couldn't do anything about it.

He was immobilized in bed by some unseen force. Later on that night, he woke up and saw his wife levitating and moving across the bed. He then saw his wife transform into an old woman saying, The hair is wild. It was a shocking white. The face of May's wrinkles and ugly lines. It's so life will just drip him from a toothless mouth. And I gotta say, I still was horny.

You gotta parlor those things into a different kind of fetish. If you know that your wife can turn into an elderly little lady, get into them. But also sometimes when you're married to somebody for a long time, you don't even realize that all of a sudden you're like, you've become old. I don't even realize it. I haven't looked at you with fresh eyes in so long. I wondered why your chuch wasn't as mystifying to me. Chuch, huh?

So the next morning, about 28 days after they moved in, the Lutz family fled the house, leaving every single one of their possessions behind. And one thing that they will say is that there was an inciting event that they won't talk about is why they left. There was a thing the last night that made them leave, which I think they're insinuating is that, in my personal, the way the story is playing out, is that George Lutz attacked the family.

That his growing hostility towards everyone, because he started hitting the kids, hitting his wife, that's what they say, and that he'd become a completely different person. And I think he attacked them, and they were like, we got to get the fuck out of here, and then they left. If all of this is true. Right, right. So then once they got a certain distance away from the home, theoretically, the cloud was lifted and everything went back to normal.

No, he just got used to how satisfying it was to hit your family, and so he just kept doing it. Oh, I see, I see. So two months after the Lutz is left in the middle of the night, a reporter named Laura Didio assembled a group of psychic researchers to evaluate the family's claims. The investigators spent a night in the house walking from room to room trying to pick up ghostly vibrations.

Didio said it was like a psychic slumber party. And the best part about a psychic slumber party is that everybody knows who wants to kiss who. Who's got a crush, and who likes likes each other. So at the forefront of all of this psychic slumber party were Lorraine and Ed Warren. These people are among, if not the most famous paranormal investigators in the world.

They've been portrayed in The Conjuring. They've been portrayed in Annabelle. They claim to have investigated over 4,000 cases, and they're the founders of the New England Society for Psychic Research, or Nesper. So Ed and Lorraine, they brought in this group of parapsychologists. All of the parapsychologists were all affected in different ways in the Amityville Horror House.

One of them saw the face of a young girl and heard crying and weeping. And during the seance, Lorraine said that there was an evil in the house from the bowels of the earth. Not just the murdered spirits. She said, I hope this is as close to hell as I'll ever get. So, just going back really quick. Did the Lutz family call the Warrens to tell them what happened?

No, no, no, like I said, there was a reporter that called the Warrens. Oh, okay, oh yes, DDO. Yes, and the reporter found out basically through them. Because now we will talk about that timeline in the next episode of when the Lutz's decided to start telling people about the haunting and the immediate sort of aftermath of that. But this woman took this ahead of herself and put together this psychic team.

And what I love about this whole story is that it's a bunch of psychics walking around going, huh, huh, I see your face, I see your face. And then it cuts to Lorraine in this documentary and she's just like, and you know what's like really funny is that, I mean, I didn't see anything. But everybody was really, really reacting pretty strongly. Yeah, the most thing it says like, yeah, the cameraman, he had some chest pains when he was walking up some stairs. Very overweight, fella.

But meanwhile, it's just a bunch of psychics just walking around and like, there's demons, there's demons. It's just so exciting. I would love to be in one of these houses during one of these experiments. So the Warrens maintain that the source of evil in the house was there long before the DeFeo murders and that each person is affected differently by these demonic forces when they live in the house.

And when they ask Lorraine, it's like, hey Lorraine, why is it that nobody else who has ever lived in this house after the Lutzes have ever had any problems whatsoever? She said it's because they weren't open. Which is the same line she used to get women to be the third with her and Ed. Right, right, right. The nighttime, they go to places like Schlitz's, so they go to cruisers. You know what I mean?

And she was like, some people are just open to certain experiences. Like I see ghosts, but I also, I eat pussy. Isn't that wonderful? I love the Warren couple. Here's where you're starting to see the veneer crack a little bit. Kathy, she said that they were more open because they were practicing transcendental meditation at the time. And I guess you could say that DeFeo was more open because he was fucking tripping balls constantly.

This is one of the differences between residual hauntings and demonic hauntings. So this is what we're saying. The reason why all these people, the way you couldn't explain it, the reason why everyone's affected differently is because imagine like demon in a house. It's like, like a residual is like, again, it's like watching a projection, right? All of this shit's happening all around you. It's happening all the time, but it's, you can't, it doesn't affect you. You can't affect it.

You're just like watching a movie. So you're just watching a ghost play. Yes, but a demonic haunting specifically, or what it's also called like an active haunting or like physical haunting, is an entity that was never human that is now here. And basically it's like we're all operating systems and the demon is a program and that we kind of, it affects the environment and everybody in it, depending on what's going on, but it's got nothing to do with people.

What would be, if a demon does, let's just assume that it's true. If it is a demonic haunting, what would be the motivation for the demon? Is he harvesting the energy or is it depends on why he was called? A lot of the times when you're talking about if he was called to the house or she, I don't want to resize this. They were called to the house. A lot of times they have a specific purpose or there was a specific goal or a lot of times they're attached to an object or a person.

So the, in demonic hauntings, sometimes they're possessing someone and that's why they're there. And sometimes it'll be like there's something in the house, which you see like in the story that the movie Annabelle's based on, a demon was attached to a doll and then the haunting went where the doll went. Right, right. And according to this, and Dr. Professor, what's his... Yeah, and according to Dr. Professor Hans Holzer,

he said there was a very specific entity at this home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Professor Dr. Hans Holzer was America's most famous ghost hunter at the time. And you must remember that he is both a teacher and a doctor. Isn't that something? Both things, I can't believe it. Both things. So let's hear what Professor Dr. Hans Holzer had to say about the case.

I particularly like this picture that clearly shows a white outland of a horse overimposed over me. Now it so happens that the entity in the house that was disturbed was an Indian chief on a horse. And what I like most is pictures of horses when I see them in the calendar. But what I most like more than the pictures in the calendar is the pictures of the ghost horses because it's fun to see the ghost ride the horses. Well, we've gotten through the Amityville horror. We've talked about everything that was said in the book, everything that the Lutzes said, everything that happened in the DeFeo case.

That's part one. And in part two, we're going to go through why every single line of that was 100% bullshit. Horseshit. Well, except for the actual DeFeo murders. Right, exactly. Every single, everything that Ronnie said was horseshit. Everything that the Lutzes said was horseshit. Everything was absolute and total fucking garbage.

The Lutzes were lying? The Lutzes were lying. Jay Anson was lying. Was Mrs. DeFeo a good cook? That's what I want to know. I think that's the one thing that was real because you don't get that sort of rage built inside of you if your mother is a great cook. Let me, my mother was a great cook.

I'm a jolly man because of it. So that's what we said in the very beginning. We basically, the story of the haunting covered what is actually a very compelling murder story. And it's, I can't wait to get back into the motives and all that bullshit because Butch is an entertaining human being. He's Butch. Butch. Yes.

Yeah, we'll go into Butch's alternate theories, which we'll go into the much more likely theories as far as what the murder, what happened with the murder. We'll go through the Lutz family hoax. We'll go through all that shit on Emmityville Part 2 coming up next week. Butch is an amazing storyteller. He really is. I would say that. So I guess I'd go to iTunes, rate and review, be sure to go to cavecomedyradio.com

slash last podcast on the left to get your last podcast. On the left t-shirt, $25 domestic, $40 international, and Heil Gehn, everyone. Let's do a hail yourselves. Thank you guys so much for listening. Find us on Twitter at Marcus Parks at Henry Loves You. I'm at Ben Kissel. Thanks so much for supporting all the shows here on CCR. We really appreciate it.

At LP on the left. Oh, yes. A hail Satan. Keep him in your hearts. He's the only one you can trust. Everybody else is lying to you, but him. Just know that for sure. Also want to give a shout out to John Sherer.

Thank you so much for saving my ass in Atlanta. That's right. Henry was recognized on the streets of Atlanta in a drunken stupor and a fan was able to drive him home. So what a hero he was. We got to take care of each other, guys. Yes. And Henry, for the fans, a little insight. How's it going in Toronto?

You're doing well? You're having a good time filming? Things are really good. The show is going to be a lot of fun. I'm pretty beat up right now because I get wailed on quite a bit. Good. Good. That makes me very happy.

Hail me as well because I don't have much time left. What if you don't? You're healthier than you've ever been. I am. I feel good. I'm on this laundry that I'm doing. Oh, I see. You've got to go to the mats in the laundry.

Goodbye. Hey, just one more thing before we go. I wanted to let y'all know that on May 29th, that's next Friday, the band in which I've played drums, The Cowmen. We're going to be releasing our debut self-titled album. It's going to be fucking great. In fact, y'all are here in just a little bit of preview of it right now. And next week, at the end of the show, we're going to be playing a full preview track from the new album. If you're in the New York area on May 29th, we're going to be playing our record release show at Bar Matchless in Brooklyn with the Reformed Horses.

It's going to be $10 at the door. It starts at 8 o'clock. We're going to have a clown that does road tricks and skeletons.