Rant #2,613: One Velvet Morning

I saw this headline mid-day yesterday, and I had to take pause with what I saw.
 
“DeFeo, Convicted Killer in ‘Amityville Horror’ Case, Dies.”
 
I read the story, and I had to think back to the 1970s, when sex, drugs and rock and roll were really king, and such things as AIDS and the realities of drug use and partying were not really that out front.
 
Oh, we knew that “running around” was as good for you as smoking cigarettes was, but we could do what we wanted to do, and nothing would stop us … heck, we were the Baby Boomers, and we were looking to take over the world.
 
But then we had Ronald DeFeo, and perhaps for the first time in our lives, we had to take a step back from our perceived notions and just shake our heads.
 
DeFeo lived in the suburbs with his family, and he fully embraced the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” lifestyle, engaging in rampant drug use and everything that went with it.
 
I am sure his family was concerned with him, as any family would, but somehow, he got through Amityville High School and was now free of any shackles that education might have had on him.
 
Then in 1974, at the age of 21 or 22, with his life fully ahead of him, and still with time to change his life for the better, DeFeo committed the most unimaginable crime that anyone could ever imagine: he bludgeoned his parents and four siblings to death.
 
Asked at trial why he did what he did, he said he had heard “voices” ordering him to do so. He had pleaded insanity, but jurors did not buy what he was selling.
 
He was sentenced to prison for 25 years to life for his actions, and other than a couple of tries at retrials, he really wasn’t heard from very much while he was in prison.
 
However, the firestorm that erupted after he was put in jail really is one for the ages.
 
The house where the murders were committed was sold to another family, and whether it was keen marketing or the notion that the family lived in a house where a horrible incident had taken place, the family told the world that the place was haunted, and that they were so put out by what was going on at the house that they needed to tell the world about it.
 
So began “The Amityville Horror” saga, a franchise which spawned best-selling books, successful movies, and for a while at least, a vacation stop for those en route to the Hamptons or those who were just so curious about the house in question.
 
Honestly, I forget the address of the house, but it became a huge tourist attraction in the late mid to late 1970s.
 
It is about 10 minutes away from where I live, and thousands, if not millions, of people visited the house in their cars as sort of a real-life haunted house.
 
Of course there was a lot of vandalism, and the people who lived on the block where the house stood filed numerous complaints with police about the house and the people that were attracted to it, but let’s be honest about it: was this the perfect story for the late 1970s mindset we were in?
 
Remember, “sex, drugs and rock and roll.”
 
The real reality of this whole thing was that this was a horrible, horrible crime that took place in a suburban town whose root name of “amity” means friendly.
 
I knew people in college who knew DeFeo personally, and I remember then telling me that if anyone could ever do such a heinous thing, they were not the least bit surprised that it was this guy. His reputation as a drugged-out, mentally-deranged lunatic evidently preceded him.
 
I remember all the cars that drove through my town to get to Amityville, the hordes of TV and news people who set up camp in and around where I lived, and the quiet of suburbia being broken by the mass hysteria that surrounded what had happened in that house.
 
I even remember people who stopped me while in their cars, asking me for directions to the house.
 
And as someone who never bought into this nonsense and looked at it not as a cartoon but as the real-life tragedy that it actually was, I darn well knew how to get there from my town, but I always gave the people who asked me the wrong directions.
 
Let them get there on their own, and I wasn’t going to help them one bit.
 
And I never bothered to see the movies or read the book, because, I mean, what was the point?
 
Little did I know what was right around the corner … the “Long Island Lolita” sage, which happened right smack dab in my town and involved people who I went to school with … but that had years to come to fruition.
 
The “Amityville Horror” case was here and now in the mid 1970s, taking place when Joey what’s his name was just a guy who went to the same school as I did.
 
And let’s nor forget the Jessica Hahn saga, either, again happening to a girl that was my sister’s age who I went to school with.
 
All of these events were yet to happen, but like the DeFeo saga, they all destroyed, perhaps forever, the solitude that suburbia brought to us former city dwellers, who were kept up at night while living in the city by city sounds like fire engines and bullets and screaming.
 
Now, we had to deal with caravans of news people invading our solitude and not allowing us to hear the birds chirping anymore.
 
It is what suburbia has become, even all these years later.
 
They have not yet released the cause of DeFeo’s death, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where his next stop is.
 
Good riddance … the only negative is that I am sure people will once again search for the house to stop and stare at for no apparent reason other than gawking and being able to say that they did it.
 
Happily, the house has been redesigned, the address has been changed, and one wouldn’t know the house if they were standing right in front of it.
 
It is great that Amityville took the necessary measures to try to preserve a little bit of suburbia, but suburbia was forever changed by what happened on that terrible day more than 40 years ago, and the other incidents I described didn’t help matters either.
 
I guess that is what made them so attractive to the news media and the gawkers, who reported on the “fables” that these incidents spawned rather than the realities of heartbreak, deaths and anxiety that these incidents actually caused.
 
Yes, all of these atrocities became yellow journalism fodder, making each outlet that covered them into offshoots of the National Enquirer.
 
That is what people wanted, that is what people got … and we as a society should be ashamed of ourselves for buying into this utter nonsense and bypassing the pain that these incidents really caused.
 
Shame on us all.