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Acting puzzled but unconcerned, Ronald took Sherry shopping
during the afternoon. From the mall in Massapequa, they drove
to Bobby’s house. Ronald gave Bobby the same report he had
given Sherry, that his family appeared to be home, but that there
was no answer when he called on the phone. “There’s
something going on over there,” he said. “The cars are all
in the driveway and I still can’t get in the house. I called
the house twice and nobody answered.” Abruptly shifting
gears, Butch asked if Bobby was going out later. Bobby replied
that he was going to take a nap, and that if Butch wanted to meet
him out, he would be at a local bar called Henry’s around 6:00.
Butch spent the remainder of the afternoon visiting friends,
drinking, and taking heroin. He finally arrived at Henry’s
after 6, and Bobby followed him in shortly thereafter. Once
again, Butch feigned concern over his inability to reach anyone at
home. “I’m going to have to go home and break a window to
get in,” he told Bobby. “Well, do what you have to do,”
his friend replied blithely. Ronald exited the bar on his
supposed journey of discovery, only to return within a few minutes
in a state of agitation and dismay. “Bob, you gotta help
me,” he implored. “Someone shot my mother and father!”
The two friends were joined by a small group of patrons, and they
all piled into Butch’s car, with Bobby at the wheel. It had
been approximately 15 hours since the murders took place.
Within moments after arriving at the house, Bobby Kelske had entered
the front door and raced upstairs into the master bedroom.
There lay the bodies of Ronald, Sr., and his wife, Louise. He
returned outside to find Butch beside himself with ostensible grief
and dismay. Joey Yeswit had found the telephone in the
kitchen, and was calling the police. Within ten minutes the
first policeman was on the scene, Officer Kenneth Geguski. As
he arrived, he found a group of men gathered on the DeFeo’s front
lawn. Butch was among them, sobbing uncontrollably.
“My mother and father are dead,” he said as Geguski approached
the group.
The Village of Amityville patrolman entered the house and
immediately went upstairs. He first discovered the bodies of
Ronald and Louise, as well as those of John and Mark DeFeo. He
returned downstairs to phone village headquarters from the kitchen.
Ronald was seated at the kitchen table, still crying. As he
listened to Geguski’s description, he alerted the officer to the
fact that he also had two sisters. Geguski put the receiver
down and hurried back upstairs. By this time another village
patrolman had arrived, officer Edwin Tyndall. The two of them
found Dawn and Allison’s room together. It would take a
forensics investigator to locate where the girls had been shot, and
what kind of gun had killed them: there was too much blood for the
officers to even begin to guess.
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The DeFeo house with
officers both inside and outside
(CORBIS) |
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Shortly after 7:00 p.m., the neighborhood was buzzing with word
of what had transpired in the house called High Hopes. The
house itself was filled with police personnel, while neighbors and
assorted gawkers gathered on the front lawn. Suffolk County
detective Gaspar Randazzo was the first to question Butch, the
massacre’s sole survivor. They sat together in the DeFeo
kitchen, as Randazzo asked Butch who he thought could have done such
a thing. “Louis Falini,” Butch replied after a moment’s
pause. Falini was a notorious mafia hit man whom Butch claimed
held a grudge against his family as a result of an argument between
the two of them a few years prior.
The interview continued at the next-door- neighbor’s house,
where a temporary police command center had been established.
Detective Gerard Gozaloff joined in the process. It was
suggested that, if the murders were indeed linked to organized
crime, that Butch might still be a target, and that any further
questioning should take place at police headquarters. It was
here that they were joined by a third detective, Joseph Napolitano.
And it was here that Butch gave police his written statement.
In it, he claimed to have been home the night before, and that he
stayed up until 2:00 a.m. watching the film Castle Keep on
television. At 4:00 a.m., he reported walking past the
upstairs bathroom, and that his brother’s wheelchair was in front
of the door. He also claimed to have heard the toilet flush.
Since he couldn’t go back to sleep, he decided to head to work
early. He described the rest of his day, leaving work early,
visiting with Sherry and Bobby, drinking, and trying to reach his
family by telephone. He said that when he finally returned
home to check on his family, he entered the house through a kitchen
window, and went upstairs where he discovered his parents’ bodies.
Upon his discovery, he raced downstairs and back to Henry’s Bar,
where he rounded up some men who subsequently alerted the police.
After Butch submitted his signed statement, the detectives
continued to question him about his family, about his suggestion
that Louis Falini might be the killer. Butch replied that
Falini had lived with them for a period of time, and during that
time he had helped Butch and his father carve out a hiding space in
the basement where Ronald, Sr., kept a stash of gems and cash.
His argument with Falini had stemmed from an incident where Falini
criticized some work Butch had done at the auto dealership.
Butch also voluntarily confessed to being a casual user of heroin,
as well as to the fact that he had set one of his father’s boats
on fire so that Ronald, Sr., could collect on an insurance claim
rather than paying for the motor, which Butch had originally
damaged. Around 3:00 a.m. the detectives had finished their
questioning, and Butch went to sleep on a cot in a back filing room.
Ronald, Jr., gave every appearance of a cooperative witness, and so
far the detectives had no reason to hold Butch under suspicion.
That circumstance was beginning to change, however, as
investigators continued to examine physical evidence, both at the
crime scene and in the police laboratory. A crucial discovery
was made around 2:30 a.m., November 15, when Detective John Shirvell
was making a last sweep through the DeFeo bedrooms. Rooms
where the murders had taken place had been scoured thoroughly, while
Ronald’s room had so far been given a cursory once-over.
But, upon a second look, Det. Shirvell spotted a pair of rectangular
cardboard boxes, both with labels describing their recent contents:
Marlin rifles, a .22 and a .35. Shirvell was unaware that a
.35-caliber Marlin had been the murder weapon, but snagged the boxes
anyway in the event that they may be important evidence.
Indeed they were! Shortly after arriving at police
headquarters with the new evidence, Shirvell learned exactly what
make of weapon had been used in the murders. Subsequent
questioning of Bobby Kelske led to the discovery that Butch was a
gun fanatic, and that he had staged the robbery of the Brigante
Buick receipts.
In short order, the detectives on the case began to seriously
consider the possibility that Butch had been playing them, that he
may be their suspect, that he at least knew much more about the
killings than what he had told them so far. At 8:45 a.m.,
Detective George Harrison shook Butch awake. “Did you find
Falini yet?” DeFeo asked. But Harrison was not there with any
such news: he was there to read Butch his rights. DeFeo
protested that he had been trying to be cooperative all along, and
that it wasn’t necessary to read him his rights. He went so
far as to waive his right to counsel, all to prove that he was an
innocent witness with nothing to hide.
By this time, Gozaloff and Napolitano were exhausted. Two
other officers, Lt. Robert Dunn and Detective Dennis Rafferty, took
over. These two meant business. Rafferty re-read Butch
his rights, and proceeded to question the suspect about his
activities and whereabouts over the prior two days. Rafferty
zeroed in on the time of the murders. Butch had written in his
statement that he was up as early as 4:00 a.m., and that he heard
his brother in the bathroom at that time. “Butch, the whole
family was found in bed lying in their bedclothes,” said Rafferty.
That indicates to me that it didn’t happen at like one o’clock
in the afternoon after you had gone to work.” Rafferty
continued to press Butch until he was able to pry him away from his
earlier version of when the crime took place, establishing that the
crime actually took place between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m.
With this slight fissure, Butch’s crudely constructed story
began to crumble. Dunn and Rafferty hammered at the
discrepancies between Butch’s stated version of the events and
what the physical evidence led police to believe actually happened.
Butch was physically linked to the scene once the time of the
murders was established. At first, Butch tried desperately to
make the best out of a deteriorating situation, trying to lead the
detectives to believe that while he had indeed been present in the
home during the murders, he had only been in each bedroom after the
murders had taken place. But the police weren’t biting.
“Butch, it’s incredible,” said Rafferty. “It’s
almost unbelievable. Butch, we know we have a
thirty-five-caliber gun box from your room. Every one of the
victims has been shot with a thirty-five-caliber. And you’ve
seen the whole thing. There has to be more to it. It’s
your gun that was used.”
More desperate than ever, Butch continued to lie, even as his
lies put him more squarely in the middle of the murders. He
told his interrogators that at 3:30 a.m., Louis Falini woke him up
and put a revolver to his head. Another man was present in the
room, Butch said, but upon further questioning, he could not provide
any kind of physical description for the police. According to
Butch’s new version of events, Falini and his companion led Butch
from room to room, murdering each one of his family members.
The police let Butch keep talking, and he eventually implicated
himself as he described how he gathered and then discarded evidence
from the crime scene. “Wait a minute,” said Rafferty.
“Why did you pick up the cartridge if you had nothing to do with
it? You didn’t know it was your gun that was used.”
Butch didn’t respond to the question, so the investigators
allowed him to talk some more. They had already mined a good
deal of evidence implicating Butch, all the while pretending to
believe that Falini and his accomplice had taken Butch along on
their killing spree while sparing his life alone. Once they
had been given a solid description of how the murders took place,
Dunn went in for the kill. “They must have made you a piece
of it,” he told Butch. “They must have made you shoot at
least one of them -- or some of them.” Butch fell for it,
and the trap was sprung.
“It didn’t happen that way, did it?” asked Rafferty.
“Give me a minute,” Butch replied, his head in his hands.
“Butch, they were never there, were they? Falini and the
other guy were never there.”
“No,” Butch finally confessed. “It all started so
fast. Once I started, I just couldn’t stop. It went so
fast.”
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