The dead were Ronald DeFeo Sr., his wife Louise, their daughters Dawn and Allison, and their sons Marc and John Matthew. Ronald Jr. used a .35-caliber Marlin rifle. The house is a Dutch Colonial on a canal, with a gambrel roof, a pool, and a boathouse. After a trial of about seven weeks he was sentenced to six terms of 25 years to life. He died in prison in March 2021. An insanity defense did not succeed. The idea that a presence in the house had ordered the killings is not what the jury found. It is the use William Weber wanted to make of the Lutzes, at a press conference on 16 February 1976 in his own law office, when he said their story might support a new trial for DeFeo.

George and Kathy Lutz had married in July 1975. Her children were Daniel, 9, Christopher, 7, and Melissa, called Missy, 5. They paid $80,000, a price called a bargain, and $400 more for DeFeo furniture left in the rooms. The broker told them about the murders before they bought. They moved in on 18 December. Newsday first printed the claim on 14 February 1976. Some friends said strange things had driven the family out. Another said the heat had failed and they could not afford the repair. A mover who came for their belongings the day after they left reported nothing unusual in the house.

The book’s priest is Father Mancuso. The man is Father Ralph J. Pecoraro. In a 1979 In Search of interview he said he had blessed a sewing room, found it strangely cold, heard a deep voice say “Get out,” and felt a slap from no one there. In the Lutzes’ lawsuit he also said, in an affidavit, that his only contact with them about the matter was a telephone call. He denied the afflictions Anson gave the priest. Both statements are his. They do not match.

Anson did not sit in the house. An editor at Prentice Hall introduced him to the Lutzes, who gave him about 45 hours of tapes. The book came out on 13 September 1977 and sold in the millions. It includes winter flies, cold spots, a smell of perfume and of excrement, green-black slime, doors torn from hinges, a pig-like figure, cloven prints in snow on New Year’s Day, and a hidden “red room.” James and Barbara Cromarty, who bought the house in March 1977 for $55,000 and lived there about ten years, said the doors, locks, and windows looked original and unrepaired. The red room was a basement closet, in plain sight. Investigators Rick Moran and Peter Jordan found no snowfall for those hoof prints. Neighbors reported nothing unusual during the 28 days. The village police had no call from the Lutzes to the house. There was no bar in Amityville named the Witches’ Brew. The Shinnecock rejected the book’s claim that the site was a place where the tribe had left the sick and the dying. Cromarty’s line was that nothing weird happened except the people who came because of the book and the film.

On the night of 6 March 1976 Ed and Lorraine Warren went through the empty house with a Channel 5 crew and with reporter Michael Linder. Photographer Gene Campbell left an infrared camera on the second-floor landing. One frame, a small figure with bright eyes in a doorway, was not shown until 1979, when George Lutz put it on The Merv Griffin Show to help the film. A standing reading of that frame is that the figure is Paul Bartz, an investigator on the Warren visit, and that the white eyes are what infrared film does to eyes. The Warrens called the house demon-ridden. That conclusion is theirs.

Note on the Warrens: Ed and Lorraine Warren’s work has long been dogged by allegations of fraud, exaggeration, and invented or coached detail. Their involvement does not automatically invalidate a case or other witnesses — but it does make Warren-sourced investigation and conclusions suspect until independently corroborated.

In May 1977 the Lutzes sued Weber, writer Paul Hoffman, two claimed clairvoyants, and the magazines that had printed the story, for $4.5 million. Judge Jack B. Weinstein dismissed their claims in September 1979. He said that to a large extent the book was fiction, relying in large part on Weber’s suggestions, and that there is a serious ethical question when lawyers become literary agents. Weber’s line in People, 17 September 1979, was: “I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine.” George Lutz kept saying the book was mostly true. In June 1979 he and Kathy took polygraph tests that the examiners scored as truthful. A passed chart is not a record of what was in the rooms. The 1979 film is the book, acted out, with a lot of creative liberty.