Psychological Autopsy
“Once we know how a story ends, almost everything before it starts to look like an omen. The harder question is what was actually visible at the time.”
Psychological Autopsy examines a crime after the dust has settled. These episodes reconstruct the family dynamics, relationships, and warning signs that surrounded a case, and look at how those signs were interpreted at the time, how the explanations offered afterward changed, and how the story that outlasted the facts took shape. The goal is to understand what the evidence can show us about people and relationships, and to be honest about where it stops.
DeFeo Family Massacre: The Original Amityville Horror
The Amityville Horror is remembered as a haunted-house story, but the darkest thing that happened at 112 Ocean Avenue wasn't supernatural. In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his parents and four younger siblings in their beds, thirteen months before the Lutz family moved in and fled after 28 days. This episode separates the documented murders from the disputed haunting and asks what we gain by turning a dangerous person inside a family into a dangerous house. What happens to six real victims when their story becomes someone else's prologue?
Play Story (55 mins)