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George Lutz on "Coast to Coast with Art Bell" (2002)

George's one and only appearance on Coast to Coast with Art Bell, just before Art left the show in 2002. With special guests Mary Pascarella and Joel Martin.

 

Coast to Coast / Art Bell

(Dec 27, 2002)



ART BELL: Well this is an interview that during the course of my career I'm really quite surprised I've never done before. Its almost "odd" that I've never done it – fortuitous that I'm about to. I saw, like everybody else, the movie The Amityville Horror, and isn't it odd that the man involved in that happens to be just over the hill from me in Las Vegas. George Lee Lutz was born and raised on Long Island. If his birth was any indication, he was meant to be different from the beginning. Seconds after delivery, doctors raced him into surgery and mended a large crack in his skull – one that should have killed him. His mother often said that she thought his miraculous recovery was a sign that he was destined for something special.

At a very young age, George displayed a remarkable mechanical aptitude. At the age of 12 he modified a hobby kit hydroplane adding his own custom-designed waterski jets. That was only the beginning of a lasting love for boats, canoes, rowboats, sailboats, almost anything that'd float on the water.

Later the fascination grew to include cars, and today George can remember the color, interior design, make, model of every car he's ever owned. At 19 he volunteered for the Marines. My parents were Marines. So he volunteered, huh? And later went on to earn two degrees with honors at an FAA course that led him to a job in Boston as an air traffic controller. One of the high-stress jobs in the world.

His father's death a short time later took him back to New York to run WH Parry, Inc, the family's land-surveying business. George, who was born and raised Methodist – who always considered himself more of a devout realist – married for the first time in '72. Divorced in '73. Short marriage.

During the process of his annulment from his first marriage, George met Father Ralph J Pecararo ... a Catholic priest and ecclesiastical judge within the archdiocese of the church, with whom he quickly forged a strong and lasting friendship.

In 1974, after years of profitable business management and years of enthusiasm and training in the martial arts, George met Kathy Connors, who had three children from a previous marriage. A year after George & Kathy's first date, they were married, and soon they began searching for a house of their own. A nest, right?

By the Summer of '75 they thought they had found their dream home, which happened to turn out to be a 22 story Dutch Colonial in the quaint Long Island community of Amityville. Little did they know that a legend was about to be born. In a moment, the truth, the real truth, behind that legend.

[break]

ART BELL: Alright, here from Las Vegas, Nevada – just over the hill – is George Lutz. George, welcome.

GEORGE LUTZ: Hi Art.

ART BELL: Hey, welcome to the program.

GEORGE LUTZ: Thank you.

ART BELL: God, its great to have you. George, you're not on a... what kind of phone are you on now?

GEORGE LUTZ: I'm on a hard line.

ART BELL: Oh, you're on a hard line. Okay, good.

GEORGE LUTZ: We got a bit of static tonight.

ART BELL: Yeah, I hear that. I hear that. I hope that doesn't get us. Alright, what are you doing in Las Vegas, by the way?

GEORGE LUTZ: Right now I'm repairing computers and restoring old cars.

ART BELL: Uh huh. Old cars – your love.

GEORGE LUTZ: Its what I enjoy the most, but I have what's called fibromyalgia, so there are times when I just can't do the work.

ART BELL: I understand. Well, alright, George – maybe we'll investigate the possibility of another line or another telephone. It was good. I wonder what happened.

GEORGE LUTZ: I'm not sure.

ART BELL: Yeah, that's odd. There's no other phone line open, is there?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, not in this house.

ART BELL: Alright, let me try this, and reset this and see if that helps. Alright, anyway, George – its hard to even know where to start, except all my life, you know, I saw the movie, and all my life I've been hearing about Amityville; and in fact, a man that I interviewed, who has now passed away, of course – Father Malachi Martin – said to me in the course of an interview that the Amityville house was one of the most haunted places in all of America.

GEORGE LUTZ: This is a live interview you did with him?

ART BELL: It certainly was. Yes.

GEORGE LUTZ: So I assume hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people heard this.

ART BELL: Oh, absolutely. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Of course. So I'm not sure where to begin all of this with you, except, I guess, you know, in the bio there it said that you and Kathy had just married and you were looking for a brand new house to live in – and its the nesting thing. You know, you get married, you get a family and you wanna go and you wanna find a place, you know, to have that family. And that's what you were doing.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well we both had homes. We each had our own home.

ART BELL: Oh!

GEORGE LUTZ: So the idea was to sell both homes and get one that we could look at as both of ours.

ART BELL: That's right. Something new and something that belonged to both of you.

GEORGE LUTZ: I'm not sure if Kathy liked my house or I liked her's, either. So it was one of those "let's go find something we both like."

ART BELL: Yep. Makes sense.

GEORGE LUTZ: And she had three children. And so it really made sense to put them both up on the market and then whichever one sold first, move into the other one and then as soon as that was sold, hopefully we would have found another house by then. And it did work out that way.

ART BELL: Yeah. Do you remember how old the children were at the time? Roughly?

GEORGE LUTZ: I believe Missy was not in kindergarten yet, so she would have been, like, four. And then Chris and Danny would have been, oh, seven and nine, I believe. I'm sorry, its too long since I've tried to remember those things.

ART BELL: Yeah, a long time ago. Well you're gonna be trying to remember a lot that's been now a long time ago.

GEORGE LUTZ: Hopefully I'll do better.

ART BELL: And by the way, folks, George has a cold, too. We both have colds, so bear with both of us. Its tough to think clearly – its tough to do anything when you're in the middle of one of these monsters. How we've gone to the moon and now all this other stuff, now even cloned the first human according to [unintelligible], and we still can't cure the common cold, George. Doesn't make sense to me.

GEORGE LUTZ: That's pretty amazing.

ART BELL: Yep. Alright, so you went to look at the house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville. All of you, I presume, or just you and Kathy...

GEORGE LUTZ: No, all of us.

ART BELL: All, even the children, huh?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes, and we had a criteria about what we were trying to find a home on the water, because I had a boat then that wasn't trailerable, really, and it was important to have the boat close by rather than travel back and forth to it, since we tried to use it as much as we could.

ART BELL: Okay, well you knew – I presume you knew – about the DeFeo massacre. That six people had been murdered in that house. I mean that's a very serious thing to have occurred. Six people...

GEORGE LUTZ: We didn't know this when we first went to see the house. We knew it after the realtor told us, after we had toured the house.

ART BELL: It was a pretty good price, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Uh, the market – it had been on the market for, I believe, a hundred thousand or so, and by then it had been reduced to, if I remember correctly, to 90. We made an offer of 80 and they accepted it.

ART BELL: Really? George, what do you think market value was for that house then? Real market value.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well the house was 4,000 feet. It had a boathouse that would take in easily a 36-foot boat at the time, it had a 2-car garage attached to that, a heated pool, a full basement... My guess would be then, realistically, $125,000 would have been not unheard of.

ART BELL: Alright, then, so at some point you must have asked yourself, or the realtor, hey, how come – maybe after you've consummated the deal – how come its so cheap? Or when did you find out six people had been murdered there?

GEORGE LUTZ: After she showed it to us, and it was obvious that Kathy had fallen in love with it, and I liked it very much – she said, "I don't know if I should have told you this before I showed it to you or after, but this is the house the DeFeos were murdered in." And we kinda looked at her like, "What do you mean?" And then she reminded us of the news stories that had been a year earlier, and the trial that was just, I guess, in the process of starting, or was going on.

ART BELL: Alright, for those who don't remember, can you tell us about the DeFeo murders? I mean this DeFeo fellow said that he – I think at the time he claimed that he heard voices telling him to kill his family, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Ronald DeFeo was eventually convicted, yes, of killing his mom, dad, two brothers and two sisters.

ART BELL: And for that he is serving what?

GEORGE LUTZ: And while they weren't asleep – while they were asleep.

ART BELL: Went around with a shotgun and dispatched them, I think?

GEORGE LUTZ: It was a Marlin 36 caliber rifle.

ART BELL: Yeah, okay, and he's now serving, I think, six life...

GEORGE LUTZ: Consecutive life terms supposedly with no possibility for parole, but a hearing comes up every year or so.

ART BELL: I imagine the house had been cleaned up – there was no sign of the massacre that occurred there.

GEORGE LUTZ: Oh no, no, no – nothing like that. The house showed like any house would.

ART BELL: And George, you're looking at it, you're looking at the water thinking, "Oh my God, yes." Right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Oh yeah. We weren't looking for an $80,000 or $90,000 or $100,000 house, but we were certainly in the 60-70 thousand dollar range. When we considered we had two homes that sold for over $40,000 each. And just the fees on keeping our boat in a marina back then really made the difference very well as far as the money went.

And I had a successful business that had been my grandfather's and my father's, so it wasn't something that – well, we went – I'll put it this way – we went to one bank, got qualified there and got the mortgage right away. Didn't have to go around and shop for a mortgage or apply anywhere else.

ART BELL: That's interesting.

GEORGE LUTZ: We had – we walked in with a little over $20,000 down, so we ended up with a $60,000 mortgage.

ART BELL: Did the family – you must have sat down with the family, you know – a family conference at some point, and said, " Look, this horrible thing happened here, can you handle that fact? Do you love the house? Do you still want to move in?"

GEORGE LUTZ: Oh sure. We asked the kids, Art, if this was gonna bother them. Because if it was going to be an issue with them, then we would have certainly walked on considering the house. They were all fine with it.

ART BELL: Was there anything at that point – I mean none of the children, nor Kathy, nor anybody said, "Look, what if its haunted," or anything like that. I mean that never really ever entered your psyche, or did you even consider that?

GEORGE LUTZ: Not considered in that way, no.

ART BELL: No.

GEORGE LUTZ: It was, you know, look, you're gonna have the same bedrooms that these kids had when they were killed here. Is that gonna be a problem? You know, that kind of thing. We asked them, and we talked about it at length as a family. It wasn't a snap decision by any means. We went back and saw the house a number of times. One time Kathy and I even went down in my boat to see it from the water – see if we could find it. South Shore isn't always the easiest thing to get up into little rivers and whatever and find a house along there.

ART BELL: Did you and Kathy have enough from your other – from the sale of your other houses – to afford the $20,000, the downpayment?

GEORGE LUTZ: Oh yeah. Sure.

ART BELL: Okay. Are you a religious person, George?

GEORGE LUTZ: That means something different to everybody. Back then I think absolutely not. I believed in the Lord's Prayer, that kind of thing. I was a non-practicing Methodist. But today what I believe is, my own personal beliefs, and there are some things that I believe are pretty unshakable, and have been proven to be so over the last 25 years.

ART BELL: And Kathy?

GEORGE LUTZ: Very. I would consider Kathy very religious. Kathy has a ministry that feeds thousands of people in Phoenix every year – homeless people.

ART BELL: Then you met this, and you're going to have to help me with his name – Father Ralph, is it Pecararo?

GEORGE LUTZ: Father Ralph Pecararo.

ART BELL: Pecararo, okay. When did you come in contact with him, and under what circumstance?

GEORGE LUTZ: He was an ecclesiastical judge. He sat in the diocesan office for the Catholic Church in Rockville Centre as a judge, ruling on various cases that came subject to Church law, for the Catholic Church. My first wife that had, she had applied for an annulment – meant that I had the opportunity to go in and be interviewed, if I wished, about that annulment process. And I didn't understand it at the time, and so I went down and met with him. He called me and invited me in to do that. I really didn't think it was a necessary thing, I really didn't care if she got an annulment or not. I wasn't really sure that an annulment was proper, but end result is that's how I met him.

ART BELL: Okay, what kind of man was he?

GEORGE LUTZ: Extraordinary.

ART BELL: In what sense?

GEORGE LUTZ: He read and spoke 9 languages, had an equivalent law degree from Oxford. He met you on your terms, you didn't have to go to him. He was friendly and smart and he took his time to explain things to me – why it was important that this annulment be granted, and what were the conditions the Church considered it to be properly so. But more than that, he – I didn't realize at the time that there was something unusual about him in the sense that he was an ecclesiastical judge – I just figured that was his job. I realized the kinds of degrees he had, or the intellect involved in doing such a job, or how you get to do that.

ART BELL: So I guess you all became fast friends through this process.

GEORGE LUTZ: We came through it as good friends, and talked on the phone maybe once every ten days, seven days – sometimes two weeks – but it was always gonna be, he was gonna come to dinner, meet Kathy and the kids, that kind of thing.

ART BELL: Alright, he ended up – anyway you became friends – and he ended up blessing this house, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yeah, and I should tell you how that came about.

ART BELL: I'd like to know how that came about, yes.

GEORGE LUTZ: One of my hobbies was building Harleys then, and a friend of mine, Jimmy Loscaizo in New York had a Harley shop in East Northport in New York, and Jimmy, when I told him what house we were buying, the DeFeo house, he said, "You've got to get the house blessed." And I said, "What are you talking about?" And he said, "You've got to get a priest and get the house blessed." And I went home from that and asked Kathy about that, and she said, "Oh yeah, that's something you do if you're a Catholic and you buy a new house, you do that."

ART BELL: And especially in this case.

GEORGE LUTZ: And we didn't know any priests. So Kathy was a non-practicing Catholic at the time, and so I called Father Ray and asked him if he would do it, and he said yeah, sure, I'd be glad to. Little did I realize that wasn't the kind of thing that an...

ART BELL: This was, this was after you moved-in, George?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, this is before we actually closed on the house. Its one of those things you do supposedly as soon as you can when you buy it. So it was coordinated that he would come in the day that we actually had the closing. That afternoon.

ART BELL: Gotcha.

GEORGE LUTZ: So we were moving-in when he showed up to do that.

ART BELL: And, so, boom boom boom, here he comes and begins, what, moving through the house to bless it? I don't know how that's done.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well I hadn't actually even seen him arrive, and I hadn't seen him since I had seen him in his office, that I recall now, when I think back about it, it is the first time I'd seen him in months. I talked to him quite a bit, but always on the phone.

So there he is going into the house, and I waved. I was in the back of the truck unloading the U-Haul, and a number of our friends, even one of Jimmy's brothers was there helping unload the stuff and moving it into house. Moving day. We were a little bit behind because after we had closed on the finances – in New York you do real estate a different way than you do out here – you go to a closing and they have their attorney and the bank has an attorney or a representative and you have your own attorney, and they all sit there and they write everything up right down there. And the title company has someone. Its a different process than it is anywhere else that I've seen.

Well we had forgotten to get the key at the closing, so we had to go back and find the realtor and go back, get the key so we could actually get in the house. And there are all these people waiting around to help us move-in.

So he showed up and we were quite behind time. It was starting to get dark – it's November. And so I waved at him and he went on in, found Kathy and went about blessing the house.

ART BELL: Which means, what? You go from room to room? That kind of thing?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes, he went room to room, said prayers in each room using holy water and I guess there's a house blessing that they do. I'm not privy to the words.

ART BELL: Nor am I. But very interesting. Alright, stand by...

[break]

ART BELL: Ghosts, or the presence of evil, seems most frequently to show up at places where great evil has been done, like the DeFeo murders, for example. Six family members murdered, slaughtered. That's one. There are other occasions, but that's probably the most frequent, with the regard to hauntings. Something evil around. No question about it. So the setup was there.

[break]

ART BELL: George, okay. So, I guess we'll call him "Father Ray."

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: Blessed the house, went room to room, blessed the house; and then came back and told you what?

GEORGE LUTZ: He was a bit uncomfortable in the upstairs back bedroom. I wanted to pay him for coming – he wouldn't accept payment. I tried to give him a bottle of Canadian Club – he wouldn't take that. We invited him back for dinner. He stopped and just said – he asked us what we were going to use one bedroom for, which was on the second floor in the back; and that was evidently the bedroom where the two boys had been murdered.

ART BELL: So he told you not to use the second floor sewing room-- I've got a little echo, let me try to get rid of that. He told you not to use the second floor sewing room at ALL, or as a bedroom, or what?

GEORGE LUTZ: Kathy explained she was going to use it as a sewing room, and that, he said, was fine. He just – there was something about the room that made him uncomfortable, and he managed to communicate that to us without any alarm or anything. I really don't know how to explain this other than he asked what we were going to use the room for; he said he felt a little bit uncomfortable there, and that's basically what he said.

ART BELL: And so you didn't really probe and want to know the exact whys and wherefores of the warning?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, he wasn't forthcoming with it; he was, um, it was like he wanted to leave, and we weren't going to use it as a bedroom, so it wasn't an issue. It was a strange thing for him to say, but it was, like, okay, you have to leave and that's all you're going to tell us, obviously, you know – thanks for coming.

ART BELL: Goodnight and see you later?

GEORGE LUTZ: Really. We invited him back another time, you know, to come back for dinner; and he said he would, and that was it.

ART BELL: Alright, I've got somebody else here who had impressions of the house, who's on the line, I'd like to bring on. Mary Pascarella was the lead psychic who investigated the house along with Ed & Lorraine Warren – I've interviewed them – in March of '76. Mary is a professional psychic and time walker, who picked up on some truly terrifying things when she visited your home. She said the case had a profound effect on her. It was the first time she had ever encountered something she can only describe as "pure evil." Pure evil.

GEORGE LUTZ: Art, I don't know that she's ever been interviewed about this.

ART BELL: Well she is going to be now. Mary welcome to the program.

MARY PASCARELLA: Well good evening, Lee, and how are you?

GEORGE LUTZ: Hi Mary.

MARY PASCARELLA: Hey honey.

GEORGE LUTZ: How are you?

ART BELL: Where are you, Mary?

MARY PASCARELLA: I'm in Pennsylvania.

ART BELL: In Pennsylvania. So you've never been interviewed in this fashion before about what happened?

MARY PASCARELLA: No. We had strange arrangement with that. I'm very private about things that I do, and it was just something that I wasn't comfortable doing.

ART BELL: You are private, because I'm pretty familiar in this field, Mary, and I'm not familiar with you. So you obviously are very private. Anyway, you went into the house at the behest of Ed & Lorraine Warren – I've interviewed them. And what happened? Can you, in your own words – what happened?

MARY PASCARELLA: We went in at a time when the North Carolina team was out there from Duke. And I had not met Lee. When I go any place I always say, "Don't tell me anything about the house," and Ed called me one night and said, "I have a case I'd like you to investigate, and what is your impression?" And I said, "I see a white house with a fan window," and he said, "Okay, don't say anything else and we'll get in the car and go."

And when we arrived there it was – there was a team there – and we could not go in and they went up and got pizza, and I stayed in the car. Then I walked out to the back of the house, because I like to get feelings of things. And when I got into the back I had heard water. And so I saw a pool, and I thought, "Well, that's it – there's the pool, there's the water," and discharged that. But while I was in back there, I usually say – I'm Catholic – and I usually say some prayers before I go into a house. That was my quiet time. And I looked up into the window in the back of the house and I saw the face of a young girl looking back out.

ART BELL: A young girl.

MARY PASCARELLA: Right. And I had never – I knew nothing of the DeFeos. I hadn't met Lee – I'm sorry, I meant George.

GEORGE LUTZ: Either one works, Mary.

MARY PASCARELLA: Well you're Lee to me. So I had not met the family, but because children were involved and I'm a proverbial mother, I was only interested in doing the house because there were children involved in the house.

ART BELL: Of course.

MARY PASCARELLA: So I looked up and I saw the face in the window. It later became – it was the Sewing Room, I believe, that was the upstairs window looking out.

ART BELL: That'd be the one Father Ray talked about.

MARY PASCARELLA: Right. And at that time we hadn't been in the house. When you enter this house, its very deceptive. When I first went into the house, I said to Ed, "These people are really weird. We're not even going to think about that this house was beautiful," and the house was beautiful. The Lutzes had decorated the house so you walked in and it was a beautiful home. And it gave you no feeling, no sensation of anything other than a house. That comes much later.

ART BELL: Alright, but at some point.

MARY PASCARELLA: When I went upstairs to – the first thing that we did when we went in is, there's a dining room to the right-hand side, and that had a table, that had dishes and things. Later we cleared some of that. When you go – there's a stairwell as you enter, and then when you go down, there's another stairwell that goes down to a basement area.

When you get into the basement area, there's a little laundry room off to your right-hand side of the stairs. And then I looked to the left and there was this large game room. And the game room had a pool table and family things – where a family would enjoy themselves.

ART BELL: Sure.

MARY PASCARELLA: In front of you, there was a little door, and it went into a small, like a cold cellar. You know, the old houses that had like a little root cellar?

ART BELL: Oh yes.

MARY PASCARELLA: Yeah. So you opened the door and you go into a root cellar. I never could really go into that room because it had an odor to it. Now, you have to understand that I was under the impression that the house had nothing there. But I investigate the house to see – because I walk time – to see what possibly could have affected it to cause people to be affected by the house. So we got to – the laundry room had some clothes that were on the floor, so I'm Mrs Clean by nature, and I picked up the clothes and I threw them in and washed them, figuring maybe if there's an odor there it might be in the clothing, themselves. Because it was definitely like a "dirty socks" smell, or something had soiled.

ART BELL: A foul odor.

MARY PASCARELLA: Yeah. Exactly. Just an odor. And I'm one of these people that is very fussy and very clean, and if there's a smell, I'll either find the source – and as a psychic, if you say a refrigerator is in the air, I'd better be able to put my hand under it, or otherwise I'm not going to believe that there's a refrigerator in the air. You know, you have to use logic.

ART BELL: Well I know that sock smell. My mom told me my socks could march the way to the washer by themselves, when I was about 13 or 12. It was awful.

MARY PASCARELLA: Well, I tell you, the Lutzes were impeccably clean, and the house was absolutely gorgeous. I mean what they lost, they'll never be able to replace. That was for sure, afterwards. When you sit down and the reality is, is that there's has to be something that drove them away, because there was more truth in that house as you got to know it.

ART BELL: Well I know the finances of all this, and the people who say this is some kind of farce or hoax are full of it, because the money thing doesn't add up in any way you look at it, either before, during or after. None of it makes any sense unless.

MARY PASCARELLA: Oh no, because that house had had his possessions alone – when you walked in, you knew you were walking – I thought they were very affluent because they had collections of coins and things, you know. He was a collector, obviously. But that's a moot point right now.

ART BELL: What is important, though, and what I want to get from you, is what you sensed, finally, in that house.

MARY PASCARELLA: Okay. When you go up the stairs, from the first stair to the seventh stair, there's a [sounds like "cotton batting"] feeling – a feeling of rapping. And its as though something terrible has happened on that stairwell. And that was the first sense of something not quite right.

Going up the stairs to the sewing room, I walked in and I've been blessed with an imagination, or a mind that can see time – and there was a young woman in there – I'd say 15 or 16 – with long brown hair parted in the middle, and if you remember those little moo-moo dresses...

ART BELL: Oh of course, yes.

MARY PASCARELLA: They had the paisley things. And she was crying. And one of our jobs has – one of MY jobs – is if you see something that's misplaced, you try to place it back, so I started to say some prayers and said "go to the white light," because I knew then, I thought that was what the haunting was. And so I said, "Go to the white light," and at that point in time it was as though the house did not want that soul released, and you started to feel pressures and anger.

And then when you walk out into the hallway, I felt that I had given her the white light and she had gone. In my mind.

ART BELL: But there was evil – real evil – in that house, Mary?

MARY PASCARELLA: Absolutely. Absolutely. After the investigation there was a – I could never go to the third floor. When you walked down the hall on the right hand side, there's a stairwell. Well, I'm not allowed, sometimes, to do things, because I'm one of these people that still believe in Bambi and the tooth fairy and things like that, and so I'm not good with evil or bad things.

ART BELL: I don't think many of us have confronted pure evil directly. Father Malachi Martin spoke of it many times, and I still – even the concept of evil as an entity, as a pure thing, will stand the hair on the back of my neck straight up. And I have a sense, but that's all. I've never confronted it directly – nor do I wish to.

MARY PASCARELLA: Well neither have I. And I had a group of friends – I worked for the [unintelligible] in Bridgeport at that time, and I had a school – and I had four priest friends. And whenever I went anywhere they always gave me holy water and I borrowed one of their Bibles and a cross and brought it with me, just as a kind of a protection for myself. Because you never know, if you don't – people don't understand that if there's good, there's evil.

ART BELL: Yep. I understand.

MARY PASCARELLA: You just don't touch it as frequently. And because we're locked in a clock time, we don't walk the perimeters.

The one thing I did know about that house was that it was not the original house. I used to be an artist, and I can – in my mind – blueprints will form, and I kinda sense when something's real or not real. And the thing that I knew immediately, without having met Lee, was that this was a man that was protecting his children and his home. It had nothing – I don't even think he believed in us as psychic investigators. I mean, not truly. I think his main concern was the money that he had invested in the home and his children.

ART BELL: Of course. Yeah, that's the real world. But bottom line, Mary, in your investigation, there was no question in your mind, you had encountered in that house pure evil.

MARY PASCARELLA: Pure evil. We had channel 5 that was doing a seance, and I was to be the lead psychic in that. We had gotten to the point where the house had began to affect me. And I had gotten up to the stairs and I called down to Ed and I said, "Ed, I'm as sick as a dog." Well I had this little room upstairs. I believe it was Missy's bedroom.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yeah.

MARY PASCARELLA: And that was my haven. I could go there and feel perfectly safe. Perfectly safe. And so I said to Ed, "I'm going to lay down in the bed for a little while because I'm..." – it was either that I hadn't slept or whatever. And so I began to say my prayers, and I was saying the Our Father. And I was saying the "Our Father," I looked out of the door and there was a young man that was with me, taping; and I looked out of the door and as I was saying the Our Father, there was a group of figures standing outside of the door, saying the Our Father backward.

ART BELL: My God.

MARY PASCARELLA: I thought, "Excuse me" – that doesn't sit well with me. I'm also a stubborn person that says, "Don't threaten me," because I'll stand up and my fists go up...

ART BELL: Mary, is there any question in your mind the DeFeo souls were trapped in that home?

MARY PASCARELLA: I didn't know about the DeFeos at the time, but I did know...

ART BELL: I understand

MARY PASCARELLA: I did know in one of the bedrooms I sensed a young man who was crying as though he had done something really bad. So I knew two things about this house. I knew 1: that someone was forced into a position to commit something really horrible there. Didn't know what it was, but I did know that it happened – that there was a force or an energy in that house that was subject to taking hold of somebody.

And I will say this now, and I'll say it 'til the day I die, that since we don't know what time is, and time in time is only a fraction of a second, that the energy in that house remains. It may take a hundred years of our time, but it will implode again. And that house is purely evil.

I took the holy water and threw it outside to the figures, and I took the cross and I raised the cross and I said, I said a prayer and I said, "God is with me," and I threw it, and – did you ever throw water on a fire? And you get this kind of – a little hissing sound?

ART BELL: Yes.

MARY PASCARELLA: Well that's what the sound was. And the kid that was with me, I thought he was going to faint. But again, that's the house. The house is deceptive. It will take an innocent person – and I believe Kathy was such a sweet and innocent child. A girl – a young woman – and it affected the house. It affected curious children. And Lee was the strength in that house, so the house could never really affect him – only make him angry and want to find out what was the matter.

ART BELL: You're very well aware the investigators, Mary, caught a photograph when there was no child in the home. An eerie photograph that will stand the hair on the back of your neck straight up – up on the top of that stairwell – caught a photograph of a child when there was no photograph of any – or no child in there to be photographed. They got a photograph of what appears to be a ghost child. I've got that on the website right now – www.artbell.com. Is there any question in your mind that photograph is one of the Lutz, or excuse me, not the Lutz, the DeFeo...

MARY PASCARELLA: No. God forbid.

ART BELL: God forbid. Right. The DeFeo children?

MARY PASCARELLA: I believe that since I was not allowed up on the third floor to where the children were – the boys, I believe, were – that it was probably one of those. And do I believe they were trapped? Yes I do. I think the girl escaped into what may have been another room of haven, and that what Father felt was the presence without being able to be aware that there was a presence there. Us Catholics are trained in a very different way.

ART BELL: And Mary, you believe that house is going to, as you put it, implode again?

MARY PASCARELLA: Absolutely. You get somebody that's very susceptible...

ART BELL: Mary, we're out of the thing you walk – time – and I've got to go, but I want to thank you for calling-in, and thank you so much.

MARY PASCARELLA: Okay, and tell Lee I'm on and listening.

ART BELL: Alright. Mary Pascarella. George Lutz is my guest. She walks time. That was some stroll she took in that house.

[break]

ART BELL: George, welcome back to the program.

GEORGE LUTZ: Hi, Art.

ART BELL: You have described what happened in that house in Amityville, George, as, oh, I don't know, I guess kind of a three-ring circus. Now, many, many in my audience have either read the book or seen the movie, and the movie, of course, dramatized the heck out of what happened, I suppose...

GEORGE LUTZ: That's a really nice way to put that.

ART BELL: Is it?

GEORGE LUTZ: It was very "Hollywood."

ART BELL: Very Hollywood. Alright, but what's the real story, George? What really did happen there?

GEORGE LUTZ: It didn't happen all at once. When I think back on it now I think my perceptions of it are different then they were then. It seemed at times, then, that it just was like a rolling snowball that got bigger and bigger and bigger.

ART BELL: Well nobody, no family, pays that kind of money for a house, lays their life on the line – especially a place they love – and then flees a house, George. It doesn't happen without some really serious stuff going on. Movie or no movie – nobody does that. Nobody flees a house without significant reason. What really happened?

GEORGE LUTZ: Well when we left the house, Art, I should tell you that we wanted to get the house fixed. We really did not want to just leave or leave our stuff or give up on living there.

ART BELL: Of course not.

GEORGE LUTZ: And so when the opportunity came to put together the psychics that went in and investigate the house, the idea was that they would fix it.

ART BELL: Yeah, but there was obviously a lot wrong to fix, and that's what I want to know about. I mean what the hell happened in that house to even bring the psychics on...

GEORGE LUTZ: What made us leave, in other words.

ART BELL: Well, or even to the point where the psychics came in. I mean what began to happen in that house, George?

GEORGE LUTZ: By the last week we were there, it was nightly occurrences of noises. Things like odors coming and going, or Kathy being touched from behind by some unseen person, or Missy talking to herself and asking questions like – telling us about her imaginary friend that wasn't so imaginary, it turns out...

ART BELL: Yeah, she claimed to have an imaginary friend, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes, and she would come and ask Kathy questions like, "Do angels talk?" And Jodie is the name of the angel, and she – Jodie is telling Missy that we're going to live there forever.

ART BELL: Forever.

GEORGE LUTZ: Strange things. Its kind of off-putting. Our dog, Harry, would not go in that room that Mary was talking about earlier. The last night we were in the house was the reason not to stay there anymore. And when we called Father Ray the next day, he asked what we were still doing there. He was surprised we were still even in the house. And it hadn't even occurred to us that, even at that point, to just up and abandon everything and get in the van and leave.

That night, Kathy had levitated and moved away, across, away from me on the bed...

ART BELL: Now, now, now – wait a minute. Slow up right there.

GEORGE LUTZ: Sure.

ART BELL: Kathy levitated?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: Now you were both in bed?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: And you were both awake, or both asleep at the time, or what?

GEORGE LUTZ: Kathy was asleep.

ART BELL: She was asleep.

GEORGE LUTZ: And she lifted up off the bed and went towards the wall, away from me.

ART BELL: Huh.

GEORGE LUTZ: This is after she had turned into an old crone – a really ugly old woman – that literally took hours and hours for it to go away.

ART BELL: In front of your face?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes. And then later she did that again at her Mom's house – after we moved out of the house and moved-in with her Mom.

ART BELL: Oh my God. You're sitting there watching your wife, and she turns, like "The Picture of Dorian Gray," she almost instantly becomes an old woman?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: And then that effect remains for hours?

GEORGE LUTZ: Remained, yeah – one time it was longer than just a few hours. What happened, Art, was that these things – in and by themselves – for example I... Everyone in that house – all my kids and Kathy – slept on their stomachs in that house. After we moved out, we found out that the DeFeo murders – all of, the whole family had slept on their stomachs. They were all murdered in their sleep. None of them got up. None of them got out of bed or were awakened, evidently, by the sounds of the rifle going off, killing all six of them. There were no drugs found in their bodies in the autopsy. And they were all sleeping face-down. I was the only one who could not sleep face down in that house. I never slept face-down before that, and I certainly couldn't do that there.

ART BELL: Through all of this, George, did you ever question you own sanity? I mean we don't often look at our wives and see them become a 90-year-old woman instantly, and then have that remain for hours. I mean we just don't. Did you question your own sanity?

GEORGE LUTZ: Sure. Many, many times in many different ways.

ART BELL: What about the effect on Kathy? Was she questioning your sanity or her own, or were you beginning to understand it was the house?

GEORGE LUTZ: Kathy was damaged in a different – each of us were affected in a different way, and I think Kathy was damaged in a different way than I was. And I think that for her, in so many ways, it was much harder for her to recover over the years and be able to put it in a place, so to speak, you know. Give it some distance. Even after moving to California, and then later on to Arizona, there were times when she was much more sensitive than I was.

ART BELL: Do you think she's alright with it now? Has she come to terms now with it? Or is it still a bad word haunting her?

GEORGE LUTZ: When we did... We did a special for the History Channel two years ago, and that interview was some eight hours, and she was hooked up to oxygen – she has a disorder known, a breathing disorder, known as Valley Fever, that is quite serious, quite debilitating, and right now she's still in a form of a hospital that deals with respiratory diseases.

ART BELL: Yeah, I saw the oxygen tubes.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yeah. Well she's had a relapse since then. That was a very hard day for her. The interview was I think something like 82, 8 hours, and then afterwards we went out to dinner. So it was a long day for her. And there were times when, you know, certain questions would come up and be worded in a certain way that are really – you can see the effect on her, sure; but that happens to me as well. Its not – this is not a comfortable subject. Its not something that has a lot of humor in it.

And humor is the one thing that does make it less strong – less affecting of you.

ART BELL: Yes, I understand that. I use it myself.

GEORGE LUTZ: It is a wonderful tool to deal with this kind of thing.

ART BELL: The movie, of course, dramatized the ooze out of the walls, and the flies, and all the rest of that...

GEORGE LUTZ: The flies were real.

ART BELL: The flies were... Tell me about that.

GEORGE LUTZ: The flies were... This is the winter time, and the back bedroom – that one Sewing Room – had flies from the day we moved-in. And they became more and more and more. And they were there when the investigators went in. Just on the back window, and that's the same window that Mary saw the, I guess you'd call it an apparition or a person from the – looking up at it. The flies were always there.

ART BELL: They were always there.

GEORGE LUTZ: They didn't go away. You'd kill them and they'd still come back.

ART BELL: Really. So that part was real.

GEORGE LUTZ: Not the oozing out of the walls.

ART BELL: Not the oozing out of the walls.

GEORGE LUTZ: That was one of those things that, in fact, is sometimes in my mind, at least, is stranger than fiction. What really happened, that I think they tried to draw that from – what really happened in the house was that there were keyholes – old-style doors, this is, the house was built in the 30s and it had old-style keyholes...

ART BELL: I remember them. Yes.

GEORGE LUTZ: They had drips that got longer and longer. They were black. They were almost like an epoxy. And the longer we were in the house, the longer the drips came out of certain keyholes on the 2nd and 3rd floor.

ART BELL: Oh, oh! So there was some basis in truth.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes, but not the oozing out of the walls.

ART BELL: Not the oozing, but something.

GEORGE LUTZ: And then there was [unintelligible]. We would wake up in the morning and we would find this gelatin-like substance going from room to room. And you would think, "Well the kids got into Jell-O or somebody did something," but there was no Jell-O in the house at the time, and the kids didn't do that. And it was sticky and it was there. It was there for...

ART BELL: So what did you do with this stuff? Just try and clean it up, or what?

GEORGE LUTZ: Well it was like spots. It wasn't like, you know, a big mess of some kind. It tracked from room to room. And Kathy would wipe it up.

ART BELL: And just move on. So that was occurring every day?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, that would... I mean, you couldn't depend on anything. The one thing, thank God, is that the lights didn't go out. At not time did they, you know – they would flicker, but they did not go out.

ART BELL: They would flicker, though?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yeah.

ART BELL: So I guess I see what you mean by a 3-ring circus. All of this kind of thing was going on.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well, I'm sorry, I strayed from where I was going before. One of the things was that I would be laying there in bed on my back and everyone else would be asleep, and the house would be quiet and I would be ready to go to sleep, and I would hear – or I would be already asleep – and I would wakeup to a sound of musicians, like tuning-up downstairs.

ART BELL: Really?

GEORGE LUTZ: And I would think that a clock radio had gone off and it was off the station, or something like that. And there was no clock radio down there, but that's the first thing that comes to your mind – you wouldn't know what else it could be. You'd go down there, and there'd be no noise, and the dog would be asleep right by the front door. Harry was a big black malamute – he wasn't a shirking little princess, he was a really cool dog, and he was in love with those kids. He was gotten as a tiny puppy.

ART BELL: I don't know whether you've ever been asked this, George, but its a logical question in view of the DeFeo slaughter. Was there ever a time when you found your mind drifting to an awful place? Where you were perhaps being urged to, or considered doing evil, yourself, George?

GEORGE LUTZ: That's not a question I've ever answered in public.

ART BELL: Really?

GEORGE LUTZ: I don't know if I'll answer you this straight out. Okay? But what I will tell you is this. The tool we mentioned – of humor?

ART BELL: Yes.

GEORGE LUTZ: I told Father Ray many of the things that went on for us. And he was the one that told me about humor – that evil can't stand it, it can't be in the presence of it – it has no understanding of humor. It can't relate to it. And it drives it away. And I had to learn the mental ability, if you will, to be able to think of something humorous when I would get a thought that I didn't like.

ART BELL: So you did answer it. You did get them. And that's how you responded.

GEORGE LUTZ: That's the only thing that's ever worked other than the rosary.

ART BELL: A kind of a defense. Humor is a defense – there's no question about it. You're right about that. It is. And so you were strong enough to muster that up as a defense.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well it was a very – it became an exercise. But it took years to get for it to be just an exercise and not something that was a real struggle.

ART BELL: I understand that you actually began to have some feelings of sorrow or a caring about DeFeo, who, you know, was going to be in jail for six life sentences. And the only reason that I can understand that you would begin to get those feelings is because you would understand perhaps a little bit of what he went through; and that's why I ask you the question, George.

GEORGE LUTZ: There's no doubt in our minds. Never has been any doubt after living there that a sane person doesn't do this to his family, and someone with any kind of right thinking, or ability to reason – that reason has been taken away, or has been obfuscated in such a way – occluded or clouded, or they've been separated from their reasoning powers in a way that most of us hopefully will never understand. And there's no doubt in our mind that he was influenced by that house and that he was controlled – at least for a point. He provided a service to that, if you will, that was so horrible that he couldn't live with it or realize it, himself. And without extreme, long-term psychiatric care, he had no help of redemption of any kind in this life.

ART BELL: Do you think that his case should be reviewed for the reasons you're talking about right now?

GEORGE LUTZ: I don't know that what I think – I don't know that that matters.

ART BELL: It probably doesn't, but its an important question.

GEORGE LUTZ: He's had his appeals. They've failed. I think that a disservice was done to him terribly years ago, that it wasn't a full-blown insanity plea, that it wasn't appealed on that basis, that it wasn't an absolute that he needed psychiatric care – and still does. I think its inhumane to think that – okay they got the guy. He did it. Yes. Physically he did the murders, but spiritually, emotionally, no, I don't believe that he's, in a pure sense, responsible for that as a human being. I think that he needs help, and I don't think that anyone cares enough to try and get it for him anymore.

We did what we could and we tried a number of different ways, and his attorney William Weber wanted to do a book and make money off him and signed Ronald DeFeo up for a 5% cut of whatever book that his lawyer did, you know – put together. So it became obvious that these people were not going to try and help him.

ART BELL: The final night that you spent in that house, you've never talked about. You've always refused to talk about the last night in the house. Why?

GEORGE LUTZ: What happens, Art, is when you do that, the worst of it comes back. It doesn't – its not like it disappeared. Its not like I can detach myself from it and just talk about it like what I did yesterday. You feel it. Not all of it, thank God, but it comes back and its not a pleasant experience.

I was laying there in bed. Kathy levitated and I had to grab her to keep her from going off the bed...

ART BELL: There's no question in your mind, George, you weren't dreaming this. You weren't asleep. [George laughs] I mean its an obvious question.

GEORGE LUTZ: I understand the question, yes. No, there's no question. We were so very pleased three years later to have Chris Googas come along and give us a polygraph test – each of us – in his office with Michael Rice.

ART BELL: I was not aware that had been done.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes. And one of the questions... It was a long process. Its not like you walk in and strap on the machine and go.

ART BELL: Oh yeah.

GEORGE LUTZ: You have to agree to the questions; they have to run a baseline; they do a physiological work up to get within that baseline so that they can get the real responses. Chris Gugas had taught the use of the polygraph. He was considered number two and number three man in the world at the time. He had taught the use of the polygraph throughout the world for the armed forces, for the army, for their intelligence people. He had been instructed personally by the head guy at the FBI.

ART BELL: So that was one of the questions he asked?

GEORGE LUTZ: One of the questions was "Did you levitate?" One of the questions was "Did Kathy turn into an old woman?"

ART BELL: And you answered them all and went sailing past the polygraph.

GEORGE LUTZ: Absolutely. Later those findings were published in the National Star, of all things. It was one of those things where the movie company was getting ready to release the movie, and they wanted to do this, and these are expensive tests.

ART BELL: Oh, I'm well-aware.

GEORGE LUTZ: They were willing to pay for it, and we said, "Get us the best there is and we'll do it, otherwise we're not interested in doing it with someone that just got out of school." You get five questions – they have to be yes or no, and that, you know, you get one shot at doing this thing right. Its not like you have...

ART BELL: Well George, you know, you know, people who are lying usually don't agree to a polygraph. That's for damn sure. George, hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour...

[off-topic talk excised] [break]

ART BELL: Once again, here's George Lutz. George, when you saw Kathy become a 90-year-old woman, or better, suddenly – I can't even imagine what would have gone through your mind. I mean, it would have been like – out of this house now. Gone. I'm outta here. Running out of here, actually. But to see that happen to your wife apparently more than once?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: Yeah, more than once. I mean, what went through your mind, aside from questioning your own sanity, once you realized this really was going on? What did you think was happening?

GEORGE LUTZ: What occurs to me to answer you right now is that I'm thinking "how do we fix this - what caused this?" But not putting it together with the house as such.

ART BELL: Do you think that you were seeing your wife as an old woman, or did you think you were seeing something else?

GEORGE LUTZ: I had watched the transformation, so I knew it was her. I wasn't going all of those, all kinds of other places, I don't think, in my mind. Its so long ago now, Art, for me to try to tell you exactly what I was thinking then, I couldn't do it. It wouldn't be right. I'd be making something up that wouldn't be what went through my mind then.

ART BELL: Yeah, don't do that.

GEORGE LUTZ: I know the main thing was "how do we fix this – what caused this." That's the obvious stuff.

ART BELL: Alright, well obviously its...

GEORGE LUTZ: There's revulsion that I remember feeling also. I mean this is not a pleasant thing.

ART BELL: Of course not. And seeing somebody levitate in the air...

GEORGE LUTZ: But I don't know that you'd put it to the house.

ART BELL: Well I can understand. I mean you loved that house. You were trying, I'm sure, in your own mind, to think of anything else other than "the house."

GEORGE LUTZ: Absolutely. When the odors occurred in the basement, you go looking for broken pipes or leaks.

ART BELL: Absolutely.

GEORGE LUTZ: When you have noises, you go trying to look for the cause of them. We'd be sitting in the kitchen at night, and the kids would be asleep, and you'd hear someone upstairs walking around. So you'd go up and you'd find all the kids asleep in bed. So you'd come back down and a couple of nights later, you'd have some people over and they would hear the same thing. Then you would know that you weren't crazy, and then you would know that something is going on that you don't really understand. But that doesn't mean you just get up and leave your house.

ART BELL: Aside from having a priest in, you did – you and Kathy tried to bless the house on your own, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes we did – twice.

ART BELL: What happened?

GEORGE LUTZ: We were, basically we were told it didn't work. We heard this chorus of voices, as its been described, asking us to stop blessing the house. We went around and opened a window in each room. A friend of ours – when I said earlier that you have people over and they hear the same things – well, in the process of that, a fellow by the name of Bill Newcombe had come over and – excuse me for just a moment, I have to cough...

ART BELL: I understand, I've been doing it non-stop here for days.

GEORGE LUTZ: What a cold.

ART BELL: Yeah.

GEORGE LUTZ: And he had a similar problem in his house when he was in a house that evidently was haunted – and he said you go around, you bless – to do the house blessing yourself – you go around, you open a window in each room, you say the Lord's Prayer, you tell whatever is there to leave, and then you close the window. Well that seemed like a reasonable solution, especially since here was someone that it had worked for. And he had heard the footsteps, and he knew the kids were asleep. So we did that.

My son Danny's hands were caught in the window in the sewing room, and they were flattened. His hands were down and the window had flattened the hands, and the immediate reaction is "we got to go to the hospital." And we start to go get ready to go, and...

ART BELL: And what happened? This window, of its apparent own accord, came slamming down on his hands?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes. And it didn't just slam down, it was mushed in such a way that his hands were actually deformed – they were flat. So we get ready to go to the hospital, and then – and he's screaming – and everyone is running around getting their coats and getting him downstairs and trying to calm him down, which was pretty much impossible. And you go to leave and look at his hands and he's fine.

ART BELL: What?!

GEORGE LUTZ: It didn't occur to us until much later that the house never really wanted us to leave. We would always invite people over. We would have, you know – but we wouldn't – we would go out of our way not to leave – not to go out someplace.

While we were there, we had enrolled in a re-upholstery course at the local high school. [coughs]

ART BELL: [unintelligible] colds do ya, folks.

GEORGE LUTZ: I'm sorry.

ART BELL: That's alright.

GEORGE LUTZ: And we never went to any of the classes. Kathy went out and bought the material to recover the dining room set that we had bought from the DeFeo estate, but we don't, we just don't go out.

ART BELL: You know, that's a curious thing. You did buy a number of things from the DeFeo estate, from the house, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: Why did you do that? Just because it was a really good buy, or, I mean, what was the reasoning?

GEORGE LUTZ: Well, let's start with, we had two houses. Not both of us liked each other's furniture. We had garage sales at Kathy's house, we had garage sales at my house.

ART BELL: Alright.

GEORGE LUTZ: Now we're moving into a 4,000 square foot house, and we've got to fill it up, if we can, with some stuff. They made us a deal we kinda, sorta, couldn't refuse.

ART BELL: Yep. Gotcha.

GEORGE LUTZ: And they had nice stuff. It wasn't like this was blood-spattered or anything, it was...

ART BELL: Good stuff, yeah.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yeah. The dining room set was extraordinary. The kitchen set was lovely. Some of the dressers that were up in Missy's room were fine. There was no reason not to buy all of that. It was there.

ART BELL: Yeah, and really, if you were buying the house, and you're walking into that, and you know what happened – then what's the difference between that and the furniture, the whatever.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well the mattresses weren't there, or anything like that. I mean we had our own beds. It was one of those things that was decided at the closing. What happened at the closing was that they had – the people who ran the estate – had filled up the oil tank, which was almost another $2,000 in cash that was needed right then and there, too; so actual cash out of pocket at the closing, including the furniture and everything, was about $24,000 or something like that.

On the last night that we were in there, I wasn't able to get up out of bed. There was a storm going on, as far as we were concerned, as a family, in the house, while we were awake.

ART BELL: A storm in the house?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, out – while we were in the house, there was a storm going on right around outside. Big storm. Later it has been said that there was no storm there. Well, we know what we experienced, and as far as we're concerned, there was an incredible storm that night.

The boys' beds were being lifted up and slammed down overhead of me, but I could not get up out of bed to go up and deal with that, or stop it, or see what was going on.

ART BELL: What about Kathy?

GEORGE LUTZ: That's when Kathy was levitating and moving away from me and turning into an old woman. Kathy was mostly asleep that night. I had brought Harry, our dog, up and tied him to the master bedroom doorknob for him to stay there at the – right there. And he had kept getting up, walking in circles, throwing up and then going back to sleep again.

ART BELL: When you say you couldn't get up, you say you didn't sleep on your stomach, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Right. I could not get up out of bed.

ART BELL: You literally couldn't move?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, I could not move.

ART BELL: And this went on all night long?

GEORGE LUTZ: This went on for most of the night. The bed was soaking wet, and it was from sweat.

ART BELL: Prior to this night, had you been talking to Kathy at all, privately – I would assume you had conversations with Kathy about what was going on, aside from the children?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes, and talking – and she would tell me what Missy would say to her and the boys were treating each other differently then they had before we moved-in there. Everyone kind of went to their own spaces at times. For each of us, we learned later, it was different experience at times in the house. It wasn't like we all experienced everything in unison, or saw the same things or heard the same things.

ART BELL: Well that's the next question I was going to ask. Do you have any knowledge, George – I asked you about your own state of mind and whether you were perhaps being pushed to do something awful, or felt moments of that. I wonder if since you've found out that anybody else in the family was being pushed in one way or the other.

GEORGE LUTZ: You need to ask me that again a different way, if you would. Sorry. I don't want to answer this in a way that I am assuming what you're asking me.

ART BELL: Yeah. Are you now aware of anybody else in your family was being affected in a particularly negative way, perhaps to the degree that they might have done something awful? And if you don't wanna answer that...

GEORGE LUTZ: No, I'm not aware of that. No, that's not... The boys were little.

ART BELL: Unfortunately, in America we live in a time where little boys have done some pretty awful things. And so if there really was, if there was evil in that home, George, its affect could have been different on each and every one of you.

GEORGE LUTZ: It was different on each of us, Art, but it wasn't – I don't think of it in those terms. I have never considered that that was a strong possibility. One of the things we did do – going back to your previous question, though, and this will probably help with this – is we tried to talk to Father Ray a number of times, and we got phone static, got hung up on, unable to call him from the house. I would go to my office and I'd be able to talk to him, and tell him what was going on. We asked him to come back to the house to bless it. You know, the blessing hadn't worked. When we got through to him the next morning, after our last night there, and he asked us why we were still there, that's when it was slammed home "we gotta leave. He's not coming here, he's not going to do anything, and we're not going through any more of this."

ART BELL: Well did he ever break down and actually tell you what he really thought about that house? Obviously if he said "You're still there?" like that, in that...

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes, he did. But that was after we moved out.

ART BELL: And what did he say?

GEORGE LUTZ: His words were almost parallel to Father Malachi's in some ways. He said that they knew about the house, meaning the archdiocese, the Catholic Church.

ART BELL: Oh!

GEORGE LUTZ: That they knew that the De – that there had been things that had gone on when the DeFeos were there. The DeFeos had had masses said there, which may very well have triggered what went on for them just like having the house blessed did for us.

When I heard – and I never heard the words, myself, on your show that Father Malachi said – but when I heard that he said the Church knew about this...

ART BELL: Yes.

GEORGE LUTZ: That was not a surprise to me. It was a surprise that he said it on the air, live, because the Church has denied and denied and denied the existence of evil in that house at that time.

ART BELL: Well, George, Father Martin admitted and said a lot of things that the Church, as an organization, would not be willing to. Father Martin was close to a couple of popes. He was way up in the Catholic Church at one point. Father Martin said some things about the Church and the Vatican, itself, that I'm sure the Vatican would have preferred he not say.

GEORGE LUTZ: I consider that truly a heroic act when I heard that.

ART BELL: Oh, indeed.

GEORGE LUTZ: Because the Church has gone to great lengths in different interviews and at different times to deny that there was any validity to this case. And for him to say that and know it. And I've heard this from other priests, privately, over the years; but the Church has never said, "Look, we knew there was a problem with the DeFeos in that house, and we believe that there's something really wrong there.

ART BELL: You know, its a strange thing, George, when you think about it a little bit. My wife is a non-practicing Catholic – I'm not a Catholic, and I think I'm, you know, I'm not very strictly in a church/religious way. That's not me. I think that I certainly believe in a creator and so forth and so on, but I think its strange, George, that the Church, itself, which preaches that there is a God and there is a heaven and there is all the rest of it, seems, particularly in modern times, to be in denial about the opposite – about evil – which so obviously, even to a halfway rationally-thinking person, oughtta be. If you've got good, I mean there seems to be an opposite to everything, then there's also evil in the world, and the Church seems to be in official denial about evil. Do you agree with that?

GEORGE LUTZ: I think of it in a different way. I'm not going to say that I disagree with you. I understand why you say what you do. And I have no idea, really, why I'm more tolerant, maybe, than being so quick to condemn the Catholic Church like so many people are right now.

ART BELL: I don't know if this is really – I don't know if its a condemnation.

GEORGE LUTZ: I understand, but I... Look, I'm a divorced Catholic. I can't partake of the sacraments. I became a Catholic after this, voluntarily. At one point I was a Eucharistic Minister in San Diego, at the Mission San Diego de Alcala – which is the Basilica in San Diego. Nothing pleased me more than to be a part of the Church. But when I got divorced from Kathy, that was – my votive to take partake of the sacraments was gone. And that hurt. And it still does.

I went to mass for the first time on Christmas Eve – first time in something like 13 – 12 or 13 years – this last week. And it wasn't the same as going to a mass that Father Ray said. When you went to mass with Father Ray, it was a joyous celebration. And this was a serious Christmas Eve mass, and there was nothing wrong with it, it just – it was like the heart had gone out of some of it. And I missed that. And I will always support the church – the Catholic Church. And if they have, for their reasons, done and said things that they believe are right, and they can believe in their heart is true – okay. But we have pictures of apparently what is a very good likeness of Padre Pio, who is now Saint Pio, in the house, appearing there on the side of a moose head, that was my grandfather's – and at the time that that picture was taken, Lorraine Warren – one of the psychics that was in the house, has been on your show – was saying a prayer to Padre Pio, asking him to come and be with her in spirit there at that house. This is during the investigation. And so, you know, the picture's more important to me that what the Church says. What some priest says that wasn't there. Okay? The picture to me is more to me. And I hold Padre Pio very dear to my heart. And always will.

ART BELL: George, the last night in the house – do you remember the time, the actual time of day you left? Was it morning? Was it nighttime?

GEORGE LUTZ: Somewhere's around 4 in the afternoon.

ART BELL: Four in the – oh – in the afternoon? Really? So you had that horrible night where you couldn't get out of bed, and then you had all day long until 4 in the afternoon before you left that house.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: What was that day like?

GEORGE LUTZ: Well, its that idea that the house doesn't want you to leave. Getting out of that house wasn't easy, even after Father Ray saying, "What are you still doing there? Get out. Can't you go someplace. You can go to Kathy's Mom's house. Go someplace. Go to Lee's Mom's house."

ART BELL: Did he think you could ever get back in, or did he mean "leave and don't ever go back"?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, he never – I don't think we would have left if he had said – as silly as that sounds – I don't think we would have if he had said to us "No, you're leaving and you're leaving your stuff, and you're not coming back, and forget it." I don't think he could have gotten us out. I think without him choosing the right words – that was one of those things about meeting him that was just so extraordinary about him. He later went on and got a degree in forensic psychiatry. He just knew what to say to move you, to get you to do what you needed to do even if you were in denial.

The only other person I've ever found like that was the Archbishop of Canterbury's exorcist, Reverend Neal Smith – and that was years later when we did a book tour for the original book in London, England. We met with him through a reporter for the New York Times – I'm sorry, for the London Times – her name is Dani Brooke, and she had even published a book on natural childbirth. She was quite a well-known reporter at the time, and she introduced us. Made arrangements to meet with Reverend Neal Smith, and he performed for us what some people would call an exorcism – I call it more of a blessing – but it was a rite of separation in the Anglican Church, and it was a separation from the house – from the affects of the house. He looked right at Kathy and he said, "You're still affected by this."

ART BELL: Did Father Ray think that if you didn't leave that house, somebody was going to die?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes he did.

ART BELL: Hold on, George.

[break]

ART BELL: Now George, I'm going to visit this again, and I know you've never really answered this publically, when I ask you about your state of mind through this, and whether you ever thought that you were perhaps on the edge, or even considering, even flitting through your mind, that you might do something bad. There was a story that you took you gun – you had a gun...

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes, I'm sorry, I can't get this to go off of speakerphone now, so I'm going to have to talk to you on the speaker. I hope that's...

[off-topic talk excised]

ART BELL: Okay, now let me try again. George, again, with regard to your state of mind, there was a story that you went to the Amityville police department and you turned in your gun saying that you perhaps had an impulse to murder your family. Is that a bogus story, or did you turn in your gun?

GEORGE LUTZ: I had a license to carry a firearm in Nassau and Suffolk counties and upstate New York, but not in the 5 boroughs of New York City. And the Sullivan Act in New York prohibits that – prohibits it and its a felony. So we were going into the city, so the proper thing to do is drop it off at a local police station. That's what I always did. Nothing else to that story.

ART BELL: So there was nothing about any impulse or any of the rest of it.

GEORGE LUTZ: No.

ART BELL: It was just you dropped it off.

GEORGE LUTZ: Right. That's what you're supposed to do.

ART BELL: Were you ever concerned about the fact that you were in possession of a gun? I mean did that ever give you pause for thought?

GEORGE LUTZ: Well, its a responsibility, but not in terms of the house.

ART BELL: Yeah, okay. That's what I meant. And not in terms of the house.

GEORGE LUTZ: No, I had a cash payroll from my business – that's why I had a license to carry. Its not an easy thing to get.

ART BELL: I know. Alright. You left the house, 4 o'clock one afternoon, you just – enough is enough. You left. I mean did you – what did you think at that moment? Did you think, "Look, I'm leaving this house – I'm never coming back – I'm gonna leave everything I own, virtually, in the house and just get into the car and go"?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, absolutely not. Probably would not have left the house, Art. I wouldn't have been able to give it up. My boats, motorcycles, everything was there.

ART BELL: Yeah, I know.

GEORGE LUTZ: Little things like the 16mm movies of my whole family – I had just gotten them from my mom so that I could put them together and make a family movie, from the time when we were little kids. All of that kind of stuff – I mean it just goes on and on and on.

No, we were going to Kathy's Mom's to stay there, at Father Ray's direction/suggestion, and that was the mission – just leave the house with the boys, a couple of changes of clothes and go. Get the dog and go. So that's what we did.

It was... The world became very small there. We didn't want to go out, and leaving the house was a problem. And so to venture someplace you had to, like, form it in your mind. I didn't go to the office anywhere near as often as I had before this. I mean before I'd go six days a week, sometimes seven. I'd be lucky to show up three times a week while I was living in that house.

ART BELL: Really. Really. So it was having a profound psychological effect on you.

GEORGE LUTZ: It changed everyone's point of view about life and what was important. Kathy always described the house as charming, and then she thought about it after we left and said, "Yeah, it really was charming." It really charmed her.

ART BELL: Hmm. So you intended what, then? When you left you were going to come back. In other words, you thought you would come back eventually.

GEORGE LUTZ: Oh yes. And for, let's say, the first week out of the house, the hardest thing for me was to drive past that exit and go on to Kathy's Mom's house. All my stuff is there.

ART BELL: And keep going. Yeah.

GEORGE LUTZ: And there were a couple of times when it was a real struggle to just mentally keep going to Kathy's Mom's house and not stop and check on my stuff.

ART BELL: So, George, why didn't you go back? What stopped you?

GEORGE LUTZ: I went back once with another psychic – his name is Dr Heffernan. He said that he cleared the house. He said that we would... Kathy didn't come with me. It was a Sunday afternoon. He had a little girl with him. He went into trance. He had someone else with him as well, and he said we would smell violets and know that the house was cleared.

I didn't smell them. I wasn't convinced, and that was the last time I was there.

When Laura DiDio found the Warrens and got them to come down, she had wanted to get Hans Holzer to come, and he was busy at the time. He went to the house later. I met with them, gave them the key, but I would not go in the house.

ART BELL: Yeah, I heard that. That you.

GEORGE LUTZ: The idea was to get the house fixed. When they tell me that the house is fixed, then I'll go back, but not until. And when Ed Warren said this is – and he wanted, you know – they went in, Ed & Lorraine and Laura DiDio went in the house, and Ed said he wanted to put more people together and come back with a team. And we invited in the people from Duke University, and the Psychical Research Institute there.

And Mary maybe didn't make it clearer earlier this evening – she had her own school where she taught psychics in Connecticut. And after leaving the house, she moved to Florida. She up and left, the house affected her life so much.

They came in with the team, and they all met and gave, you know, they still had the key, and its like, "Okay, go do what you're going to do." And when Ed came back afterwards and said, "I'm not going back – I can't do this – and you're gonna have to get an exorcist to come in and exorcise the house – he's gonna have to say mass in the house, and basically he'll be putting his life on the line to do it." How do you go and ask someone to do that for a house?

So then we were – then the idea started to settle in that we're stuck here now. We've got everything there. I've still got my business, and we're living in Kathy's Mom's house, but life can't continue this way.

ART BELL: Was there a profound change when you moved to your relative's house? I mean, was there a profound relief? Was it obviously, at that point, over, or was something still with you?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, it kept going on, but it was different. Kathy turned into the old woman again, in front of her Mom, which then gave a witness that was different than just me.

ART BELL: Sure.

GEORGE LUTZ: Kathy and I, when we took the polygraph tests years later with Chris Gugas, one of the things we wanted to make sure that got covered in the tests was "Is it true that you levitated at your Mom's – at Kathy's Mom's – house after leaving the house in Amityville." And yes, we did.

And we levitated together that time. And that was a pleasant experience. That was not scary or frightening. We were talking to each other, and we were in the bedroom. We shared a little single bed there – a little cot. But that wasn't an unpleasant experience by any means.

ART BELL: George, does Kathy still talk about this or not?

GEORGE LUTZ: She did for the History Channel two years ago. Right now, even getting up is a real problem for her physically. But there is 8 hours of tape that MPH has that we did that interview side by side. So I would have to say yes, of course.

ART BELL: When the... The current owners of that house now say that nothing is going on. They believe the house is clear and everything's just spiffy and okay. Do you buy that?

GEORGE LUTZ: I'm glad that they're able to say that, and I have no reason to think otherwise. I'm not there. I haven't been back there in 25 years. Whatever's going on for them is their business. They knew what they were buying when they bought it.

ART BELL: Well by then they certainly did.

GEORGE LUTZ: We gave it back to the bank. Couldn't stomach the idea of selling it to another family.

ART BELL: You know, that's another thing that I think the audience should understand. There have been allegations over the years that this was a hoax – some big money-making affair on your part. So you lost the house. You had to give the house back to the bank. And while people have made millions, I guess, on the book and the movie, and whatever all else has come out about Amityville – the History Channel (I forget, or ABC, I can't recall which one) said, 'Look, the Lutzes may have made a grand total of $300,000 minus, no doubt, attorneys' fees and a lot of other stuff, so...

GEORGE LUTZ: No, I think the $300,000 or so would be the expendable – after the taxes and all the rest.

ART BELL: And even after attorneys?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yeah, sure. There have been a number of lawsuits about this over the years. What happened is that we moved out in January of 76. We bought it in November, so 28 days later when we moved out – which is like a full cycle of the moon, which I don't know if that matters or not – but eventually I sold my business. I put it up for sale in the Long Island, in the New York State Surveyor's Civil Engineering Magazine, and the first buyer bought it. We wrote up a contract right then and there between the two of us. A couple of days later his attorney and my attorney put it into a formal language. Transferred ownership of – my grandfather had died during that time, and some of his furniture that my Mom and my Aunts did not want from his house – we got some of that furniture. And I had one motorcycle that I had managed to hold onto, and salvage from the whole thing. A couple of people went in on Easter Sunday for us and got my Grandfather's chest back out, which was just about all that we were able to get out of the house. We donated the food to Salvation Army and that was it for that.

On Mother's Day of 1976 we landed in San Diego on a plane. We gave the car away to like – one of the last office cars that I had – gave it to the guy that was at the ticket place, where you show up at JKF, and said, "Here, here's the keys, here's the title..."

ART BELL: Oh my God. You were really cutting all ties, weren't you?

GEORGE LUTZ: Oh, it was gone, yeah. You bet. I had one car still there that we had bought. We got rid of the van because it developed a problem that wouldn't go away. So I had bought a 1973 Thunderbird – a used car that we used. And then I left that at Father Ray's rectory, and we went on out to San Diego. And we got off the plane there and we had hotel reservations up in Del Mar, and we stayed at the Del Mar Inn for a couple of weeks. And Kathy found a condo for us to rent over in La Hoya, and we stayed there for a while, and then I went back to get the car, and meanwhile Kathy had found a house out in Tierrasanta, and we moved there and rented a house for a couple of years. And then eventually we bought a house up in Carlsbad.

ART BELL: And at this point, do you think the effect of what had happened to you was gone, or still in some way with you?

GEORGE LUTZ: I've always kind of looked at it, Art, like it had a half-life. I eventually came to believe that the half-life wasn't necessarily the same as what it would have been for something radioactive, but that as time went on it would go away, it would get less, it would get less. There were many times when we really made an effort not to blame everything that went wrong in our lives on the house.

ART BELL: On the house. Yeah.

GEORGE LUTZ: And so we would be asked, and we'd say, "Yeah, you know, it appears to be over – it's over – you know; for us, it's gone," and then so many other things would go wrong.

I'll give you an example. When we left New York, we didn't have a book contract – we had a... Weber, the DeFeos' attorney, had asked us to sign a book contract with him, and we refused because he was – because of all the [unintelligible]. This was a really sick contract, and it was very disturbing. This is a guy that was trying to get us to donate the house to his corporation and then take lie detector tests, and if we failed the lie detector tests, then we were going to give him the house, anyway, and everything else. Plus, he was gonna get to say what we did for the rest of our lives with regards to this story. And it was just beyond belief. Plus he was gonna pay DeFeo 5% of the proceeds for murdering his family.

So a friend of ours, he hooked us up Tam Mossman, who's the editor for Jane Roberts' books – the "Seth Speaks" books that Prentice-Hall had published – and Tam Mossman knew Jay Anson, and had suggested him. We met with Jay Anson. We spoke with him. We gave him the research materials we had done on the house, and some tapes that Kathy and I had done – just to undo this. We were sitting around talking about it at Kathy's Mom's house afterwards, over the weeks, after we left the house.

And said, "Look, we're not going to sit down and be interviewed about this. You can do what you can from the tapes, and then we'll try to correct whatever you write, or help you out with that, but we're just not going to relive this. We've done it once and we're not doing it again. We did it for the tapes.

We went to California and a year and a half later – at the end of August in 1977 – is when we actually had a book contract. Then, right after that, Anson sold the rights for the movie rights to CBS without our permission. He just went ahead and did it. And then AIP found out it – American International Pictures – and what they did was they went and got the rights from CBS and came to us and said, "We're going to make a movie," and we said, "How are you gonna do that – you don't have our permission to do that, and its our story?" And so we had to renegotiate all of that, and in the process of that, then we were finally able to get some control back over what happened with the story in the future. Not then, but in the future. So we got what is known as the sequel rights, which is very rare – you just don't do that – and it was just one of those things that happened to work out right. Who was even thinking about sequels then?

ART BELL: Oh, of course.

GEORGE LUTZ: Anson did a deal with us that – it was about 8 or 9 years later that we discovered that he and Myron Saland, whom he had worked for at the time at Professional Films – they became the producers for the movie, and so far they've made about $22 million personally between the two of them.

ART BELL: So in other words, a lot of people have made a lot of money.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well Anson and Saland, from this – the author of the original book – he made at least $10 million for himself.

ART BELL: Millions and millions.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

ART BELL: And yet you've cleared maybe $300,000.

GEORGE LUTZ: We cleared after taxes and lawyers – yes.

ART BELL: $300,000.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well we got the sequel rights, so no one can do anything with The Amityville Horror story in the future without our permission.

ART BELL: Which may, I guess one can hope, will turn out well for you. Who knows.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well my attitude about it has always been one that not necessarily everyone understands or agrees with, but its one I came to on my own – and that is that whatever exposes – this stuff happens, and we didn't know that. And we learned that from the people we were fortunate enough to meet along the way. And people don't talk about it. And we can understand why they don't, because we understood there'd be controversy, and we understood there'd be naysayers...

ART BELL: Oh, there's always those, George – I've had them all the time I've been doing this program. Stay right where you are...

[break]

ART BELL: I'm intensely curious about something, George. You contacted me and you obviously then wanted to do this interview. I wonder why.

GEORGE LUTZ: You're going off the air, and I never have talked to you.

ART BELL: That's true.

GEORGE LUTZ: You have the greatest respect around the country – around the world – about these kinds of things.

ART BELL: Oh, that's very kind. Thank you. Well I surely appreciate your having contacted me.

GEORGE LUTZ: And there's another side to this, and you and I spoke of this. The part about Father Malachi Martin was very important to me. I haven't been able to verify it with your archives. Its just my ability to find the right program when he said that, and when he exposed it for what it was. And that was very important for me, but also over the years there have been some – I don't know another way to put it – real loud-mouthed people about, you know, calling this a hoax, and its not a hoax. And I've gotten to the point of where I'm really tired of even hearing that.

ART BELL: Yeah, I never thought it was a hoax, George. For what that's worth.

GEORGE LUTZ: Its the kind of thing that has hurt my family for a long time, and I've gotten to a place mentally or spiritually with it all that just says, "You know, bring it on," because this is what happened, this is the truth. These things happen, and I understand why people don't talk about them when they do happen to them. In my own opinion, I would do fictional books, fiction books, books based on fact and factual books. Anything at all to expose the existence of this stuff. To get people to read about it and question it.

ART BELL: Alright, I've got somebody else you might know on the phone. Joel Martin. Joel was the Long Island correspondent for the Associated Press at the time of the DeFeo massacre. The first reporter, actually, to arrive at the scene of those murders. Joel, hi. Thank you for getting to us. You're on the air, Joel.

JOEL MARTIN: Oh, good morning, Art.

GEORGE LUTZ: Hi Joel.

JOEL MARTIN: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. Yes, hello George.

GEORGE LUTZ: I haven't – you and I have never really met.

JOEL MARTIN: No, we were on the History Channel special together, and we talked on the phone years ago, but somehow we kept missing each other.

GEORGE LUTZ: We were on the Lou Gentile Show, at the same time.

JOEL MARTIN: Yes, we were on the Lou Gentile Show recently as well. And as you know, I was the first reporter there that horrible night in November of 1974, and I saw one of the dead bodies and later was questioned by the DA and then became involved with the side of the story that called it a hoax, as you just referred to. And again, I've had years and years of listening to Stephen Kaplan debate the Webers – forgive me, the Warrens – about whether it was true or not. And I really have not the same opinion as Steve Kaplan has, that it was a hoax. I don't believe that at all.

What I wanted you to do, I was hopeful, was to clear up some of the questions I had. Because when I was there the first night in '74 I never thought the story would continue. Then five years later I had that exclusive radio interview with Bill Weber. And he contradicted a lot of what you said, or at least, you know, raised doubts about it. I'm just curious how you can...

ART BELL: Joel, Joel, Joel, Joel – what do you want cleared up?

JOEL MARTIN: What I'd like cleared up is what George Lutz' opinion is of what Kaplan said, which was counter to what George said, and what Bill Weber said, which took issue with what George said. I don't want to argue it – I would just love to hear George's opinion. [unintelligible] because we haven't met to talk about it.

ART BELL: Alright. George?

GEORGE LUTZ: Actually you can add a new one to that – someone who calls herself Geraldine DeFeo as well. And I understand, you know, that she...

[technical glitch - unknown amount of time lost]

GEORGE LUTZ: ...that he interviewed you recently.

JOEL MARTIN: He met me. He and Geraldine did both meet me. That's right.

GEORGE LUTZ: Did they interview you?

JOEL MARTIN: Well they, you know, they asked questions and frankly it wasn't a formal interview where we sat down and they, you know, said, "Well let's take notes." It wasn't the kind of thing a reporter does. But yeah, they definitely questioned me and they definitely talked to me.

GEORGE LUTZ: And is she someone that you knew back then?

JOEL MARTIN: Was he?

GEORGE LUTZ: Geraldine.

JOEL MARTIN: Its interesting about Geraldine. Geraldine claims to have been married to Ronnie DeFeo.

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

JOEL MARTIN: Geraldine's physical appearance today, to be kind, is not anywhere near what it looked like back in the 1970s. Now I don't know what her role was back in the 1970s, but if you ask me do I recognize a girl who looks something like that back around the time when this happened – yeah, she does look like her. But what she did or what her role was, you would know. And those are the kinds of things I was curious about getting answered, since I never believed her, or – I never thought I'd fall into the story, though, so heavily.

GEORGE LUTZ: Did you ever hear back then that she was married to him?

JOEL MARTIN: Back then?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

JOEL MARTIN: No. No.

GEORGE LUTZ: Nothing like that.

JOEL MARTIN: No.

GEORGE LUTZ: No one ever knew that.

JOEL MARTIN: No.

GEORGE LUTZ: There was never no – never brought up in the trial, not by Weber, no one.

JOEL MARTIN: No.

GEORGE LUTZ: So for all practical purposes, in the 70s she didn't exist.

JOEL MARTIN: For all practical purposes there was a girl who looked like that, but in terms of the story she tells – no, I never heard that story in the 70s. I never heard that story until much, much more recently. But I recall the face, but that doesn't necessarily suggest that what she says is, you know, exactly what happened.

ART BELL: Well Joel, you've obviously followed this story for all these years.

JOEL MARTIN: Oh God, yeah.

ART BELL: Are you, I mean how do you feel? I mean do you think something happened in that house that took the Lutzes out of it?

JOEL MARTIN: Yeah, you know what I think, frankly – I did not have the privilege of interviewing Malachi Martin more than one time. And I know you did many, many times.

ART BELL: Yes I did.

JOEL MARTIN: Yeah. But I tend to agree with his concept that you mentioned before – but I don't know if you're referring to your own or Malachi Martin's. I've been listening since this began – its fascinating, by the way. I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

I think that if you say there's good, you have to say there's evil. And I do think that if you fool around with things that you don't understand, you could be fooling around with things that are evil.

ART BELL: And do you think that's what happened to the Lutzes?

JOEL MARTIN: Yeah. Absolutely.

ART BELL: Alright, Joel, thank you. And I'm gonna go ahead and disconnect there. Do you wanna go ahead and address anything, George? Do you wanna...

GEORGE LUTZ: Sure, I'd like to deal with what Joel brought up, which was Stephen Kaplan and William Weber.

ART BELL: Yeah, fire away.

GEORGE LUTZ: They're individuals that came to us in different ways. We sought out Weber – found out that he was the attorney for DeFeo – and so we contacted him through a friend of ours, Mimi Vedder, who worked as a receptionist, I believe it was, or an assistant of some kind, at his dentist's office. She got a hold of him for us. We talked with him on the phone. Told him we had lived in the house. That we believed we had information that would help get him help of some kind – help get DeFeo help. And we agreed to meet with him. And he came over to Kathy's Mom's a couple of Saturdays and we sat and we talked.

At one time he introduced to us a fellow who was supposed to be a criminologist, who eventually did an article that was unauthorized, that was published in Good Housekeeping magazine, and another one in New York Mirror, I think it was – Sunday News Mirror. Weber is a slick guy. He's a guy who will say what he wants to to fit the moment.

It became obvious to him when we left for California, and had our attorney, Frank Giorgio, notice him formally that our story was ours and we were not going to do a contract with him about a book, and we didn't want anymore to do with that. We weren't interested in dealing with him. And they wrote back and acknowledged that, and then he goes and he gets Paul Hoffman to do this "Good Housekeeping" article, and Prentice-Hall wasn't even going to publish the book after that was done. It wasn't that the article was inaccurate – the problem was that was done without our permission and under less then honorable circumstances to say the least. I mean this guy was represented to us as a criminologist helping Ronald DeFeo get mental help. And instead, he's a writer trying to make money for Weber.

ART BELL: Yeah, still, I can't for one second imagine that you would have two seconds of interest in helping, in any way, or feeling compassion for DeFeo, unless you understood a very profound reason why you should feel that compassion. And that could only come from your experience in the house. I mean, where else...

GEORGE LUTZ: And this guy killed that. I mean he just literally took that possibility of DeFeo not sitting in jail for no – and I shouldn't say for no reason – but for no good purpose. And he belongs in jail – don't misunderstand – but a mental jail. One where he can get some help.

ART BELL: Yeah. I understand. And we're so short on time. First-time caller line, very quickly. You're on the air with George Lutz. Do you have a question? Hello? Going once. Going twice. Gone. Wild card line, you're on the line with George Lutz. Do you have a question?

CALLER: Art?

ART BELL: Yes.

CALLER: Okay. I wanna ask him if the proof of his personal proof of evil in his life has resulted in really a personal proof of goodness? I mean...

ART BELL: Oh no, I think that's a good question. I think we answered it the other way around. But really, George, the fact that you experienced that evil validates the fact that there's good as well, right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Father Ray taught me something very interesting, that at first almost sounded sacrilegious in a way. It sounded weird. He said, "You know the thing about prayer is that it makes God say 'yes' when he had said 'no' all along."

ART BELL: Umm, that answers it, I guess. East of the Rockies, you're on the air with George Lutz. Hi.

CALLER: Hi. Do you think that your wife – you mentioned that she looked almost like a crone for once or twice or several times. Do you think – did she realize that change was taking place, or was that just in your eyes that that happened?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, no – she realized it. She could look in a mirror, and when her Mom was there, it was even – it was worse.

ART BELL: Yeah, remember, sir, her mother saw this as well. It wasn't just George. Right?

GEORGE LUTZ: Yes.

CALLER: Okay, thank you.

GEORGE LUTZ: You're welcome.

ART BELL: You're very welcome. West of the Rockies, you're on the air with George Lutz. Do you have a question?

CALLER: Yes, hello?

ART BELL: Hello.

CALLER: Art Bell, this is my last farewell. I'm a great fan.

ART BELL: Thank you.

CALLER: God bless you, and [off-topic talk excised] And first and foremost, I heard a rumor that the property has a history of some kind of Indian burial ground, or some kind of...

ART BELL: Oh yes!

CALLER: That the ground, itself, was either sacred, or it had some kind of Indian connotation.

ART BELL: I actually heard a rumor that some Indian artifact, or skull, even, had been found at that property. Is there any truth to any of that, George, that you're aware of?

GEORGE LUTZ: When we first visited the Amityville Historical Society, we obtained maps and all kinds of information that we turned over to Anson. That included that area as having been a place where there were Indians buried, and that they were – their insane ones, they didn't know what to do with, were – there was even a rumor at the time, and printed in some of the stuff in the Historical Society, that said they were chained to trees and left to die there. Not the nicest of circumstances by any means.

When the Amityville story was published, all of a sudden the Historical Society secreted that information away. We have, through other people, have been in contact with previous curators that know of this, and are willing to talk about it. But as far as the town is concerned, and the Amityville Historical Society – no, that was never true.

What happened later was – and I was still talking about some of Weber – Weber invited Hans Holzer to come in and investigate the house. Now [Weber] is on shows like Joel Martin's saying, you know, this whole thing's a hoax. But then he's calling up Hans Holzer to go in and verify that the house is haunted. Pretty weird stuff when you put the two things together – why is this guy double-dealing this way?

ART BELL: How does the town of Amityville now handle all of this, I mean since.

GEORGE LUTZ: Well they're not gonna shut Holzer up, and Holzer says, without a doubt, what happened there with Ethyl Johnson Meyers when she went in trance was there's an Indian chief and he's quite angry and he's not gonna go away until some things are restored back the way he thinks they should be.

Now I don't know about that. I wasn't there. I didn't own the house at the time. Weber made arrangements to go in with the bank, because we had given it back to the bank by then. The Historical Society has basically covered it up, from what I can determine. From what anyone else can determine since then.

ART BELL: In your opinion. But now the town of Amityville – I mean they must have a Chamber of Commerce there in Amityville. How do they...

GEORGE LUTZ: Well we've never been their favorite people, that's for sure.

ART BELL: No, huh? Alright. Wild card line, you're on the air with George Lutz. Hello?

CALLER: Lee, I just wanted – you're obviously right about giving Art the respect he's due. I'm honored he took my call. I just wanna say, Lee, this whole experience is obviously very personal to you, but as I heard – and I listened very intently to Art's whole interview with you – I was kinda shocked when you got to the part where you said you and Kathy weren't together anymore. And I was wondering if you can say when you divorced and why – if it had anything to do with this, or her turning into an old woman. It just seemed kind of odd...

GEORGE LUTZ: Her turning into an old woman didn't have anything to do with it.

ART BELL: Yeah, but did the half-life of what happened, and still maybe in some way, present – do you think that had anything to do with it, George?

GEORGE LUTZ: The reasons we got divorced are really personal. We went in separate directions with regards to our own personal lives and religion. Our main interests – and we still talk – is the kids and their lives. And we're both very proud of our kids – all five of them – and we went on and had two more children after we left. Three of my daughters today are ministers.

ART BELL: Isn't that something!

GEORGE LUTZ: We couldn't be prouder of them. And so, the reasons we got divorced – they are our own reasons – they're not something for the public – but we really just did go in separate ways.

ART BELL: And you don't think any of – there was any residual effect that – I mean sometimes its really hard to know what drives something. But you think it had really nothing to do with it. Is that right?

GEORGE LUTZ: No, its not right. I will say this much – we disagreed about exposing the house, in that my own thoughts are, and my own belief is, that whatever exposes what went on there; whatever gets people to talk about this as a real problem that exists in the world – that's shoved under the carpet every moment that it possibly can be, and in all kinds of ways and with all kinds of confusion – it should be exposed. As far as Kathy is concerned, her point is that she only wants to deal with the non-fiction part and does not believe that fiction also helps to do that. So we differ right there – and that wasn't the reason we got divorced, but when it comes to the house and disagreeing about some things afterwards, then that's part of it.

ART BELL: So there's really no part of all this that has not affected your life, is there?

GEORGE LUTZ: [laughs] Yeah, I guess you can say that.

ART BELL: Even through your cold and all that, you've still got a good sense of humor, George. Listen, we're out of time. I really don't know how to thank you for coming and giving me this interview toward the end of my time on the air, permanently, anyway. So George, thank you.

GEORGE LUTZ: Art, thank you for having me on, and anyone that's interested in any more that they would like to find out about this, Lou Gentile Show – lougentile.com – has an archive up for a whole Amityville Week that we did earlier this year. So that might help also.

ART BELL: Alright, my friend. I appreciate the interview, I appreciate how candid you have been, and take care my friend.

GEORGE LUTZ: I wish you well, and I'll send you what you asked for.

ART BELL: Thank you.



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