The uncle who found six shot in their beds — and the confession that followed

The door at 112 Ocean Avenue was an ordinary Dutch Colonial, the kind of house a family might call home for a decade.

On the afternoon of November 14, 1974, a group of men pushed that door open and walked in.

The uncle was among the first inside.

He found six people shot in their beds.

The victims were his brother, his sister-in-law, and four of their children — two brothers and two sisters.

They had been dead for more than a day.

The shots came in the early morning hours of November 13, but the bodies were not discovered until the following afternoon.

That is the gap the record leaves open: a full day and a half between the sound of a rifle and the moment someone opened the door.

Who walked in and what they saw is not in the record.

The uncle's name is not in the record either.

He is referred to by role only.

What is in the record is the weight of that ordinary door.

It opened onto horror.

It opened onto six beds, six bodies, six gunshot wounds from a .35 caliber Marlin rifle.

The house later became the subject of a book and film franchise claiming paranormal activity.

That is a claim, not a fact established by the evidence.

The record shows a straightforward act of familicide.

The paranormal story came after.

It came later, in print, in film, in the telling.

But on that afternoon in November 1974, there was only the door, the men, and the bodies.

The uncle stood in the hallway.

He stood in the room.

He stood where the rifle had been fired hours earlier, when the house was quiet and the family was asleep.

No one knows exactly what he said.

No one wrote it down.

The record holds the discovery, not the reaction.

The bodies were not moved until police arrived.

The rifle was recovered from a nearby river.

The uncle was among the first inside, and that is all the record says.

That is all it needs to say.

THE FAMILY IN THE HOUSE

They were a family of eight who had lived in the large Dutch Colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue for about a decade.

The victims were the father, the mother, and four siblings — two brothers and two sisters.

The eldest son, Ronald DeFeo Jr., was 23 years old at the time.

The family's day-to-day life before the murders is not in the record.

What is in the record is grief.

The victims' maternal grandfather publicly accused DeFeo Jr. of the murders before the trial.

He expressed deep grief over the loss of his daughter and grandchildren.

His name is not established.

The record refers to him only by his role.

He was certain of DeFeo Jr.'s guilt, and he said so publicly.

The house itself was ordinary before the violence.

It was a home where a family slept.

It was a home where six of them were shot in their beds.

The grandfather's testimony was a human anchor in a case that would later become a story about ghosts.

Not because the house was haunted.

But because a man had lost his daughter and four grandchildren, and he named the man he blamed.

He named his own grandson.

That is what the record shows.