Ep. 137 | Daniel LaPlante: Killer in the Walls

In Salem, Massachusetts, a storefront museum opened at the end of August 2026. Staff hand you a flashlight at the door, and phones are banned. On Halloween night, a ticket costs $130. Behind glass at the center sits a Raggedy Ann doll named Annabelle, the star of a collection Ed and Lorraine Warren spent half a century building in their Connecticut basement. The legend sold those tickets, and a billion-dollar film franchise: a devout Catholic couple, a self-taught demonologist and a gifted clairvoyant, walking into the dark places nobody else would enter. The record is darker. It includes a woman who says she was fifteen when Ed Warren began a sexual relationship with her, and that she then lived across the hall from the couple for forty years. It includes a farm wife whose grave was smashed over a story nobody told until 1973, a murdered Long Island family turned into a franchise opener, and a sick child whose illness was sold as possession. And it includes Alan Bono (BOH-noh), a forty-year-old man stabbed to death in 1981, whose death the Warrens made the third act of their own story. You know the Warrens' story the way they sold it: in their own books, on college lecture stages, and in the hit horror film The Conjuring and its sequels. This is the version they left out.

On a Wednesday evening in November 1974, a twenty-three-year-old man pushed open the door of a bar on Long Island's South Shore and begged the room for help. He had found his parents shot and killed in the family's home. Within the hour, the men who followed him back to the house had found six people in their beds: a mother, a father, two daughters, and two sons. Every single one was dead, and the man who led them there was the only member of the family still alive. The strangest part of the DeFeo family murders is what happened to the house afterward. A young couple, George and Kathy Lutz, bought it at a discount, but moved out after only a month of living there. They said the house has haunted them. According to George, he woke at 3:15 every morning, around the hour the DeFeos had died. The couple said doors were torn off their hinges by something invisible, swarms of flies filled a closed room in the dead of winter, and their youngest child made a new imaginary friend: a red-eyed pig named Jodie who peered in through the windows. The Lutzes turned their story into a bestselling book, The Amityville Horror, then a hit 1979 film, then more than thirty movie adaptations, and it turned 112 Ocean Avenue into the most famous haunted house in America. Along the way, the six people who actually died there were mostly forgotten. So today, I'm going to separate what's real from what's folklore. This is the true story of Ronald and Louise DeFeo and their children, Dawn, Allison, Marc, and John Matthew: the six people who lived, and died, at 112 Ocean Avenue.

On a Wednesday evening in November 1974, a twenty-three-year-old man pushed open the door of a bar on Long Island's South Shore and begged the room for help. He had found his parents shot and killed in the family's home. Within the hour, the men who followed him back to the house had found six people in their beds: a mother, a father, two daughters, and two sons. Every single one was dead, and the man who led them there was the only member of the family still alive. The strangest part of the DeFeo family murders is what happened to the house afterward. A young couple, George and Kathy Lutz, bought it at a discount, but moved out after only a month of living there. They said the house has haunted them. According to George, he woke at 3:15 every morning, around the hour the DeFeos had died. The couple said doors were torn off their hinges by something invisible, swarms of flies filled a closed room in the dead of winter, and their youngest child made a new imaginary friend: a red-eyed pig named Jodie who peered in through the windows. The Lutzes turned their story into a bestselling book, The Amityville Horror, then a hit 1979 film, then more than thirty movie adaptations, and it turned 112 Ocean Avenue into the most famous haunted house in America. Along the way, the six people who actually died there were mostly forgotten. So today, I'm going to separate what's real from what's folklore. This is the true story of Ronald and Louise DeFeo and their children, Dawn, Allison, Marc, and John Matthew: the six people who lived, and died, at 112 Ocean Avenue.

In March 1989, four friends from a small Texas town drove through the fog to South Padre Island for what they joked might be their last spring break together. On their second night, they walked across the bridge into Matamoros , Mexico, where the beer cost a dollar, the music shook the sidewalks, and fifteen thousand college kids drifted down one neon-lit street like a slow river. Near two in the morning, a few hundred feet from the border, one of them stepped away for less than two minutes. When he came back, twenty-one-year-old Mark Kilroy was gone. For almost a month, no one could say where he went. Then a young smuggler drove straight through a police checkpoint, certain a spell had made him invisible, and led officers down a dirt road to a ranch in the brush. Behind the corral stood a shed with tar-paper walls and no windows. Inside, candles had melted into puddles on the floor, beside cigar stubs and empty bottles of cane liquor. Outside the door sat iron cauldrons, one of them bristling with stakes. The Mexican officers took one look and refused to go any further until a healer came to cast out whatever had been living there. Then they started digging. The ground around that ranch held fifteen bodies. Most belonged to people no one with any power had ever been looking for. This is the story of the ritualistic murder of Mark Kilroy. 🎙️Sponsors, special offers & discount codes: https://www.atrialbypodcast.com/sponsors ⭐ Support the show on Patreon for bonus content & ad-free listening! ⭐ https://www.patreon.com/c/ATRIALBYPODCAST Find us everywhere: 🔗 All links: https://linktr.ee/atrialbypodcast 🌐 Website: https://atrialbypodcast.com 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558845693491 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atrialbypodcast 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@atrialbypodcast 📧 Contact: [email protected] Theme Music: https://uppbeat.io/t/all-good-folks/mr-mischief License code: MOYK9CTUWGH7BLCS Sources for this episode will be posted at atrialbypodcast.com within 30 days of the publish date. DISCLAIMER: This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. While we research thoroughly and use credible, publicly available information, it should not be considered a legal or definitive authority. We cannot guarantee veracity or completeness. Neither host is a lawyer, journalist, or investigator — views expressed are personal and should not be taken as fact. Listeners are encouraged to do their own research. This podcast is not intended to harm, slander, or defame any individual, group, or organization. All individuals discussed are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected].

On the evening of November 5, 2006, an NBC camera crew sat parked outside a house in Terrell, Texas, waiting for a SWAT team to bring out 56-year-old assistant DA Louis "Bill" Conradt Jr. He never came out. Moments after officers entered, Conradt shot himself in a hallway and the cameras kept rolling. It was the most honest moment To Catch a Predator ever produced: the instant its premise stopped being television and became something that no one on set knew how to handle. For three years, To Catch a Predator was one of the most-watched, most-memed, and most ethically contested shows on American television. From 2004 to 2007, the show’s staff worked alongside police and a volunteer group call Perverted Justice to lure adult men to sting houses by impersonating children in online chats and agreeing to sexual acts. But of course, waiting for them inside that house, was not a child, but none other than Chris Hansen himself. The show pulled in over seven million viewers a week: a 13% lift over Dateline's usual audience. It exposed something real. But the format built to expose it wouldn’t survive its own methods for long. So why don’t you have a seat right over there while I tell you the story of how a hit TV show designed to catch predators ended up on trial itself.