The discarded .35 caliber Marlin that linked one survivor to six shots in Amityville

The call came in on November 13, 1974, after a neighbor reported a shooting at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York.

Inside, officers found six members of the DeFeo family dead in their beds.

All had been shot with a .35 caliber Marlin rifle at close range.

All but one were found face-down.

The sole survivor of the household, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr., was taken to a local police station for questioning.

The rifle was found discarded in the house.

It sat there, a plain object, waiting to be picked up and logged into evidence.

It is the kind of detail that anchors a case: a weapon, a room, a body count.

But the rifle does not speak.

It does not say who pulled the trigger.

It does not say whether the young man at the station was a witness, a victim of circumstance, or something else entirely.

Those answers were not yet established on that November morning.

The rifle was there, and so was the survivor.

That was all the record showed.

THE CONFESSION

He told police he had come home from work and found the bodies.

That story did not last long.

Police learned he had not been at his job that morning.

The alibi collapsed.

Under interrogation at the Fifth Precinct in Suffolk County, he confessed.

The confession came within hours.

That speed was notable.

First, he said he had killed his family in a fit of rage.

Then he said he had heard voices urging him to kill them.

Which version was true?

Which version was the lie?

That would require evidence.

The record does not detail the exact content of the confession.

The record does not fix the timing of his later recantation.

He did recant, claiming he had been insane at the time.

But the physical evidence did not shift with his story.

All six victims had been shot with the same rifle.

The rifle, a .35 caliber Marlin, was found discarded in the house.

Ballistics matched it to the bullets recovered from the bodies.

The victims had been shot while sleeping.

The shooter had moved methodically from room to room.

His confession was detailed and consistent with the crime scene.

It was also consistent with the evidence that would decide the case.

The rage and the voices were his explanations.

The rifle was the investigators' fact.

THE BALLISTICS