Why did Ronnie murder his family?
Unknown. Early newspaper speculation was that Ronnie perhaps did it to collect on the family’s insurance, but that seems far-fetched. Prosecutor Gerard Sullivan felt the motive may have been a large amount of hidden cash in the DeFeo home, and in his book High Hopes he notes that a fellow inmate claimed Ronnie told him where he buried a box of cash & jewelry (and remembers a shovel being found in the trunk of the family car). Also, an empty metal box was found in the DeFeo home, hidden in the floorboards of the master bedroom closet – possible evidence of missing valuables. Ronnie has made various contradictory claims regarding the murders, from his being totally innocent to him killing everyone single-handedly. In that regard, he has claimed that he killed his father because he physically abused him, and then killed his mother because she kept silent (then supposedly his sister Dawn, for some reason, killed the kids while Ronnie left the house, so when Ronnie got home he killed her fo
