Ronnie DeFeo was married to Geraldine Romondoe in 1974. At least that's what Ric Osuna claims. This is important because Geraldine is the main source for the claims in Osuna's book "The Night the DeFeos Died." Geraldine seems to have been an eyewitness at nearly every event, even claiming to have been in a bar with the Lutzes and Bill Weber (DeFeo's attorney) as they supposedly hatched the idea for the Lutzes to buy the house and claim it was haunted (in some bizarre effort to help with Ronnie's defense against 6 murder charges, according to Geraldine).

As evidence of their marriage, Osuna provides affidavits from old friends of Ronnie's, like this one:

According to this, they not only got married in 1974, but also had a child out of wedlock that August. So we checked to see if there was any record of this marriage. Here is the official Document from State of New Jersey showing them as havingno record of any marriage between Ronnie Defeo and Geraldine in 1974. The search was done using both maiden names given by Gerri and Osuna.

Why does no record of the marriage exist? Ric Osuna claims that the DeFeo's connections to organized crime made sure that all such records of the marriage were destroyed, in order to prevent Geraldine from getting involved in Ronnie's murder case.

Why would they go to such great lengths to do this? That's not made clear.

Here is a notarized statement from Geraldine which may be a bit closer to the truth. In it she claims that she was never married to Ronnie, and was, in fact, married to Joseph Pisani in 1974 and then Gerald Gates in 1978 (who she claims she is still married to).

And that seems to match this birth certificate, showing the child she delivered in August of 1974 was not Ronnie's, but the daughter of her and Joseph Pisani:

And notice in those previous documents that Geraldine lived in upstate New York -- about a 4 hour drive from Amityville. And that's still where she lives today.

So was she married to Ronnie? It's tempting to say 'no,' but here are some more documents -- this first one being a marriage certificate showing Gerri married Ronnie in 1989:

And as you can see in the next page (DeFeo v DeFeo), the state of New York granted them a divorce in 1993, so I suppose the 1989 marriage really went down, though it seems Geraldine was already married to Gerald Gates at the time, which, if true, would be a case of bigamy, and would mean the marriage between Ronnie and Geraldine was never truly valid in the first place.

 

This subject is discussed in these two threads on our forum:
Back When the Night the DeFeo's Died was published
Shattered Hopes (film by Ric Osuna & Katco)