"Amityville Horror" Homeowner Dies - George Lutz

" The man whose haunted house story scared the pants off of moviegoers has passed away.

George Lee Lutz, the patriarch of the family whose short stay in Amityville, New York, became fodder for films, books, Websites and endless speculation, died Wednesday in Las Vegas of natural causes. He was 59 and had been suffering from heart disease.

The chilling story allegedly began Dec. 18, 1975, when Lutz, his new bride Kathleen and her three kids moved into a suspiciously cheap ($80,000 for 4,000 square feet) waterside Dutch Colonial house in Amityville on the southern shore of Long Island. Twenty-eight days later, they were outta there.

As it turned out, six members of the family who used to live there, the DeFeos, had been shot to death in various rooms of the house about a year earlier. The family's eldest son, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, was later convicted of the murders of his parents and four siblings and sentenced to life in prison. He mounted an insanity defense, claiming an evil presence in the house told him to off his family, but a jury ruled that he knew that what he had done was a bit on the horribly wrong side. "

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You have to admit, if you were around when the book first came out and were young enough it was a pretty scary book. I personally believe in this kind of stuff, but I don't know about this one. I do find it strange that both Kathy and now George have died at a relatively young age. Of course I'm sure that the stress that they dealt with through the years didn't help much.

Jody's evil red pig eyes in the middle of the night. My Mom threw away the book and had to sleep with me for a week.

it and talking about it. One of our teachers even discussed it with the class- probably because it was nice to see young people actually reading something voluntarily.

but never believed in Amityville. Too much evidence came out at a later date that showed that the family faked many of the situations as an excuse to get out of a financial burden.