Associated Press
ALBANY, N.Y. The man convicted of slaughtering his parents and four siblings in a home that later inspired the “The Amityville Horror” book and movies 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 New York’s Catskill Mountains, the state Department of Corrections and Community Services said. The cause of his death wasn’t immediately known.
DeFeo was serving a sentence of 25 years to life in the 1974 killings in Amityville, on suburban Long Island.
The home became the basis of a horror-movie classic after another family briefly lived there about a year after the killings and claimed the house was haunted. A book and two movies the 1979 original, starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder and Rod Steiger, and a 2005 remake portrayed a home with strange voices, walls that oozed slime, furniture that moved on its own, and other supernatural features.
Last modified on Wed 17 Mar 2021 12.10 EDT
Several past-it tropes from 1990s and 00s teen horror films strut the corridors of high school once more in this debut by director Courtney Paige. In a devoutly Christian small town, local preacherâs daughter Grace Carver (Kaitlyn Bernard) rebels against her conservative community by wearing scarlet lipstick and conducting a strenuously titillating affair with her BFF (very Cruel Intentions). The actual scandal though is her cultish clique, the Sins (very The Craft), founded with six of her naughtiest classmates. The group is so named because each member is reputed to embody a different one of the seven cardinal vices. Flirtatious Grace is Lust, rich girl Katie is Greed and so on.