Hey everybody welcome back to cold case murder mysteries. I'm your host Ryan Kraus and this is part 3 of episode 16 covering the real amityville horror, otherwise known as the Defeo murders and the subsequent haunting of the residents

in which it took place.

That of course is 112 Ocean Avenue in Abeneville, New York, where 23-year-old

Ronald Defeo Jr. slaughtered his family with a rifle as they slept during the night of

November 13, 1974. but nobody heard the shots except the family pet, Shaggy the sheepdog, who kept barking incessantly during the crime.

Yet, if the family members who were ultimately killed after the first shot rang out

failed to hear the booming thunder of the rifle fire indoors,

why should we believe the dog did?

The answer is we shouldn't.

We could speculate that it's the truth because it's the most logical conclusion.

But we're not seeking sound logic here. We're seeking parallels that will

reveal psychological origin, something deep and even more primal, something that is understood innately, but never through articulation.

Something in Ronnie DeFeo's brain that is going to serve as the adapter to the port of the Lutz family,

and create an explosion of electricity that produces the

paranormal phenomenon. But there's a pathway to this, one we can only establish by reverse

engineering Butch's thought process.

So where do we start?

We start by analyzing what a human is, what comprises our psyche.

So while I could fabricate a thousand names more sophisticated than the following description,

I think the most transparent way to describe a human, as it pertains to functionality,

is to call our species a wanting machine. We are nothing more

than a continuous string of desires played out in repetition to an extent that inspires a certain

...