The True, Twisted Story Of Amityville Horror

The Cromartys would eventually sue the Lutzes, Anson, and book publisher Prentice-Hall for $1.1 million in assorted damages for fraud, trying to get them to admit that the subtitle of Anson’s book—“A True Story”—wasn’t quite what it was cracked up to be. (The suit settled for an undisclosed six-figure sum in 1982.)

The subtitle still stands, but sometimes it seemed even Jay Anson thought “true story” might have been an exaggeration. Whenever he was asked by the press if he actually believed the story he had written, he usually gave some wry reply. To People, in 1978: “I’m a professional writer. I don’t believe and I don’t disbelieve. I leave that to the reader.” To the New York Times, the same year: “I believe these people believe that they went through all those things they saw and heard.” Then, in 1980, at the age of 58, he up and died of a heart attack, and so never got around to explaining why so much of what is claimed in his book—police visits, Catholic priests with ghostly experiences, stormy weather—turned out to be utter bunk, according to all concerned.

But then few of the participants here were ashamed of copping to embellishments. William Weber, for example, was quite prepared to say that it was all a lie, granted that he also wanted to take credit for having come up with the great idea in the first place. On the day that the film version was released in July 1979, Weber went to the press and said he and the Lutzes had made up the entire story “over a bottle of wine.” While he said that they did claim to have had some kind of supernatural experience in the house, he said it was only with his help that they began to elaborate on the details of the story after looking at evidence of Ronald DeFeo’s crime, which he provided them. The famed green slime, for example? That was blood. The flies? Based on flies from the crime scene.

Weber quite mildly explained, later, that he had been approached and told that a publisher would happily offer a large advance for a book about the DeFeo case. He tried to get the Lutzes to go in on it with him. His notion was that some of the royalties could be split with DeFeo himself, “effectively paying him for the murder,” as George Lutz pointed out in a British documentary on the case 20 years later. After hearing that, Lutz said, he and his wife stopped speaking to Weber. When they cut the deal with Prentice-Hall and Anson, Weber wasn’t involved. They had effectively cut him out of any future deal. Weber tried to carry on by himself—the freelance writer he’d enlisted to write the book would eventually publish an account of the Lutz’s experience in the house in Good Housekeeping—but the Lutzes sued him for invasion of privacy. That suit settled, too, in 1979.

DeFeo later corroborated Weber’s account too, saying he’d never wanted to claim insanity. That said, his credibility was suspect, and his explanation for the crime was more baroque: his mother and sister had been involved in the killings too. In an appearance before his parole board in 1999, DeFeo explained that he had actually only killed one of his sisters, Dawn, 17. He claimed she had been responsible for the rest of the murders herself. “I loved my family very much,” he allegedly insisted. The parole board did not believe him.

The only people, in fact, involved with Amityville who insisted that it was real were the Lutzes themselves. Their relationship to the story always seemed to swing between absolute faith in its truthfulness and ambivalence about telling it to anyone. They gave the press conference, then promptly fled Long Island for California. They only agreed to cooperate with Anson, and gave a few press interviews pegged to the book. But in those interviews, they were suddenly the same reluctant, guarded couple they’d been in the original press conference. For an interview with the Los Angeles Times, for example, they demanded that the reporter not reveal precisely where they live, take photographs of the inside of their house, or take photographs of the children.

The only thing George Lutz was eager to get across in that interview, the reporter said, was that the family was happier now for the experience they’d gone through. The experience he still seemed somewhat reluctant to articulate in detail. “We now appreciate good things more,” he said, of the family’s current state. “We are closer together. We value materialistic things less.” And then later, he’d add cryptically, “Privacy is not just about where we live, but about our thoughts. They are no one else’s business.”

Kathy died in 2004, George in 2006. But over the years, George, in particular, would give a few more interviews, slowly opening up the frame. Still, he was this strange, enigmatic figure on the truth of it all. He insisted the family had experienced a horror. But he also came to admit that certain elements of the story—that green slime, in particular—were embellished, never accurate. And George’s admissions of such piecemeal, small inaccuracies, allowed everyone to doubt the whole thing, to assume that it was all Weber, a simple case of a hoax, all along.

But his children have complicated that. Because at least two of them clearly believes that there was a haunting. Danny Lutz and Christopher Quaratino, the two older Lutz children, say they remember the events, shadowy figures and being thrown up a staircase by malevolent spirits. And when Danny Lutz told his story in a recent bizarre documentary called My Amityville Horror, he was in evident turmoil about it. “I was possessed by a spirit that I could not get rid of on my own,” he insisted.

Actually, Danny Lutz claimed, the disturbances in the Amityville house had nothing to do with the DeFeos. He said it was actually George who had summoned the bad spirits with his dabblings in the occult. A vain, domineering stepfather, he had terrorized his stepchildren. He sometimes beat them with a wooden spoon as punishment. (Christopher Quaratino, the middle Lutz child, has told similar stories and also blames George for the haunting. The third Lutz child, Missy, has never spoken publicly about her experience.)

Still, Danny Lutz insists there was a force larger than George Lutz at work in the house too. “Evil demonic spirits,” Danny Lutz says with absolute certainty in the documentary. “I know they exist.” Which, in one of the many weird parallel truths and untruths of this whole, messy story of the Amityville Horror, he seems absolute to believe.

Credits: topic.com

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