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You're watching HLN On Demand.
My father was my best friend.
He was the best friend I ever had.
My mother and me, we were very, very close.
Me and my two sisters, we got along excellent.
My two younger brothers, Mark and John, we were really a close family, you know.
It was a tragedy. I lost every one of my old family.
Welcome to Very Scary People.
I'm Donnie Wahlberg.
In November of 1974, the quiet seaside town of Amityville, New York, became
known the world over for a crime so horrific it inspired a Hollywood horror
franchise.
Six members of one family were murdered, shot to death in their own home, lying
in their own beds.
Only one family member lived to tell the story of what happened that night at
112 Ocean Avenue.
This is part one of the Amityville Horror.
Amityville is an old town, and it has tradition.
There was this very congenial feeling.
It sounds so cliche, but it is like the quintessential small town.
The center of the town has the gazebo where they have Fourth of July,
and Christmas celebrations with carols.
Then you're by the water, the Great South Bay.
When I was young, I used to spend my summers in Amityville. It was named
in Latin means happy. It's a happy place.
Amityville was just another town until the murders happened.
Inspired. one of the greatest horror stories of all time.
It was in the middle of the night, pitch black, at the DeFeo household, 112
Ocean Avenue.
The family's old English sheepdog, Shaggy.
with howling.
It's very odd and quite chilling.
And that's the way the story began.
Ronald DeFeo Jr., his nickname was Butch. Butch DeFeo said that he had been
trying to get in touch with his family throughout the day, and he went home.
had to break a window to get in because he had forgotten his house key.
I couldn't get in the house, so I went through the back window and went through
the house.
And I said, what's going on here?
It was dark in the house, and he went right to his parents' room.
When Ronnie entered his parents' room, he made a horrific discovery.
It was like a nightmare.
He found them lying in bed.
Shot execution style.
This is my car. I got scared. I ran out of the house.
And he drove very fast down the street to Henry's bar.
He opened the door and he was screaming, come on, help me. Somebody shot my
mother and father.
Everyone ran out of the bar.
It definitely broke the sleepiness of Amityville. Something you just would
imagine in that quaint town.
A friend called 911.
The local Amityville police were the first on the scene.
There, they found something even more unthinkable.
And the tragedy that unfolded that night is absolutely shocking. We heard it was
maybe a double homicide, but there was one or two local cops from Amityville
that tipped me that this thing is a lot worse than you guys think it is.
I proceeded to check out the house.
and I found Mr. DeFeo Sr.
and Mrs. DeFeo laying in bed with gunshot wounds to the back.
I then checked the northeast bedroom, and I found two young boys lying in
separate beds with gunshot wounds to the back.
Then I checked the southeast bedroom, and I found a young girl with a gunshot
wound to the rear of her neck and head area.
I proceeded to the third floor of the house.
And on the east side bedroom, found another young lady with a gunshot wound
the head.
This was a multiple murder.
Six bodies, six victims.
And then we found out it was the DeFeo family.
The father, the mother.
Dawn was 18.
Allison was 13.
Mark was 11.
And John, the youngest one, was nine his whole life.
The DeFeo family had moved from Brooklyn to their stately Amityville home in
1965, and many wondered, was it a burglary or maybe a home invasion that
been the motive for the murders?
You could tell they had money.
The house was... A very, very nice house in a good neighborhood on the water
with a pool and a boat dock.
And there was a sign out front that said High Hope.
I remember saying to myself, well, I guess their high hopes are gone.
This is Bulletin from the WOR Newsroom. Six members of one family have been
found shot to death in their nightclothes in their expensive home in
Long Island.
Six people in one family.
had been murdered. That was quite astounding. Not only were there six
they were all killed in their beds.
And there's no evidence of a struggle, and everyone was sleeping peacefully.
All found in the same position, face down.
And that was very unusual.
They were found by a 23 -year -old son, Ronald DeFeo, who is believed to be the
only surviving member of the family.
Police investigating the case say they have no suspect, no weapon, and no
There were just a few of us that were gathered there in Suffolk County. They
the homicide unit, and they had the police tape up. Because the police were
there, some of the neighbors started showing up, and the neighbors said,
going on? What do you know?
There we were on Ocean Avenue, and there's a crowd on the other side of the
street. The scene was, it was surreal.
And then the body bags started coming out.
There were two large body bags at first, and then there was another one, and
another one, and another one, and then the final one.
And the one at the end, they were the smaller body bags.
And then we looked at each other, and we said, oh, my God.
We're just watching bodies come out and cameras going off and police and
officials in the crowd. It's very quiet. I've never seen a crowd that quiet.
Something big had gone down. That was what was in the air.
Little did we know what was going to happen.
The DePayos had a reputation.
You have a family with secrets, criminal secrets, and they're also violent
secrets.
The story broke of a family of six slaughtered in Amityville, Long Island.
members of a suburban New York family have been found shot to death in their
beds.
It was all over the news because Amityville, they had had maybe one
hundred years.
I remember the phone rang and they said, the DeFeos are all dead. They
were all murdered.
Killed were auto dealer Ronald DeFeo, his wife, and four other children.
They were all gone.
They were all gone.
And there's only one surviving member of the family,
Ron Jr.
Ron Jr. said he came home to find his family dead.
It was a tragedy. I lost my whole family.
Ronald DeFeo Sr., also known as Big Ronnie, had grown up in Brooklyn, New
He had been a high school athlete back in the day when he caught the eye of the
beautiful Louise Briganti. When Big Ronnie, Ronald DeFeo Sr., met Louise, it
seemed like they had fallen in love pretty quick.
And Louise's parents, the Brigantis, were not a fan of Big Ronnie.
He was crude, obnoxious, a bragger. They didn't really see Louise with him.
Despite her parents' objections, Louise married Big Ronnie.
and the two settled into a life in a Brooklyn apartment.
Soon after, the couple welcomed a son, Ronald Jr., and two daughters, Dawn and
Allison, and another son named Mark.
Before the birth of their last child, John Matthew, the family moved out to
Island and their waterfront home in Amityville.
They had been living in Brooklyn, and Louise Briganti DeFeo was the apple of
father's eye. He would do anything for his daughter. The Brigantis...
Loved Louise very, very much, and they wanted to make sure she was provided
So they actually bought the house in Amityville for the DeFeos.
For me, the house was like something out of a movie.
They lived on the canal, and they had a boathouse.
When you went in, they had these big rooms with high ceilings. I felt like I
going back in time.
They were having these portraits painted of themselves.
That were going to be hung on the staircase.
Like this is some sort of 19th century Gilded Age family.
Not knowing at all what the future was going to be. The move to Amityville was
like a new start.
That's why they named the place High Hope.
This was going to be the beginning.
But who would kill this family, all of them, in cold blood?
We have no suspect at this time.
We have no indication of the motive for this time.
It was like unreal.
It can't be true. It can't be possible that this could happen.
They were just very sweet, very religious people, very family -minded
Louise was a very sweet girl, and all our children were similar ages.
We would take the bus and go to museums in New York and just...
hang out with the kids and the husband.
Louise was a typical Italian mother. She cooked. She did what she had to do to
take care of the house.
Ronnie was Big Ronnie. He was the man of the house.
Little John Matt was nine when he died, and he was just your typical nine -year
-old boy. Just a sweet kid.
Mark DeFeo, he was into sports.
Mark and I were in the same football league.
Our parents got close together watching the games.
Mark and I used to play in the driveway on the bicycles and drive around and
just have fun and spend the night there. There was nothing odd.
It was just a typical family.
I remember that the little girl, Allison, loved to do puzzles.
And in her room, there was a puzzle that she had been working on.
Alison was a sweet girl. People I met that knew her said she was a little
It was not a bad word, came out of her mouth.
But Dawn Tafio, she was more rebellious.
Dawn, she was a year older than I was. We first connected on CYO softball. We
were in the softball league together.
She always had this nice smile. She was always friendly.
There were other girls, too, because they were older than you by a year. They
didn't really want to associate with you, but she was never like that. We
just 13-, 14 -year -olds having slumber parties and pool parties. There was
nothing out of the norm.
Against this wonderful setting, you've got six bodies in body bags. It was
unthinkable. And we said, well...
There must be a gunman or gunmen, women, men, young, old, who knows? We had no
clue. Authorities were baffled at who would want this picture -perfect family
killed, but they were learning that appearances can be very deceiving.
On the face of it, this is a family that is very good at keeping up appearances,
and they're living in bucolic Amityville, but this is a family with
People we talked to seemed to feel that whatever was the motive for this crime,
it had something to do with the family.
The one surviving member of the family, Ronnie DeFeo Jr., says that his father
had enemies.
I mean, so many people wanted to kill him.
I remember the neighbors telling me that Big Ronnie would boast how he had a
gun, how he had connections.
And there was rumors that he was in the mafia, like that was the thing. And
because he had a lot of money and he had...
Big cars and things.
Big Ronnie DeFeo.
He was a strange guy.
At one point, he thought he had ESP. He would wake family up in the middle of
the night, family who lived by the water, saying, you have to evacuate,
a tsunami coming.
I feel it.
He really had delusions.
And all of a sudden, religion came into his life.
He got this revelation.
He was one with St.
Joseph, and he was a changed man.
In front of the house, there are a lot of Catholic statues.
There is a St. Joseph holding a baby Jesus, and Big Ronnie would come out,
he would pray in front of that statue in his underwear.
He was strange. He told us one time that he was at the crucifixion, and what
could we say?
If you were there, you were there.
He was a big presence. He had a big personality, and you were a little
him. He was a little scary because his voice was a little loud.
And Big Ronnie's behavior was more than just odd and off -putting. It was
reported that he was abusive to his wife and children.
The DeFeos had a reputation.
The problem is that they don't get along sometimes.
There's dissension and there's conflict within the DeFeo family.
It was a very chaotic, tumultuous household.
Mr. DeFeo Sr. was jealous about his wife. He thought she was having an
with her.
the man who painted the family portrait.
He kind of wanted to be in control of Louise.
He wanted everyone just listen to him and do what he says.
There was a history of violence there. Big Ronnie had a horrible sickness, and
it got worse and worse.
The old man used to beat her.
She's wearing sunglasses this big, and you could see, you know, bruises, her
arms, her legs.
Big Ronnie Sr., he was chauvinistic.
He had a temper.
And there are stories about how Louise was coming up from the basement and she
was carrying a washbasket full of clothes.
And he punched her right in the mouth.
And she tumbled down the stairs.
And he closed the door and said, well, she's not going to bother us and we're
not going to have any more noise now.
And they sat down and finished dinner.
Dawn DeFeo had a problem, specifically with her father.
Her relationship with her parents towards the end of her life was very
tumultuous. She wanted to elope with some guy, and this caused friction
parents didn't want her to leave.
My sister wanted to be free, and...
You couldn't be free and be a DeFeo. None of us. We were all like a dog on a
leash, everybody in that house. Nobody could be free.
The place was a powder keg waiting to explode.
Something was bound to happen in that house. If it wasn't for his anger, hate,
and violence, the DeFeos would still be alive.
Authorities swarmed the quiet community of Amityville, New York, after the
bodies of six members of the DeFeo family were found by the sole survivor,
eldest son, Ronnie DeFeo Jr.
It was 1974, and Amityville was a nice, quaint little village.
And it was all over the news that these six people had been murdered.
Ronnie DeFeo Jr.
Two brothers, two sisters of his.
Mother and father all gone.
I knew something bad was going to happen to my mother and father.
I didn't know when it was going to happen. I didn't know who was going to
but I could say that I knew something was coming.
When the murders were uncovered, Ron was pulled in and questioned, and he said
that this was a mob hit.
At first, Ronnie blamed the mafia.
He said, yeah, you know, my dad was in the mob, and they rubbed out the whole
family. Folks in Amityville knew Ronald DeFeo Sr.'s family.
They were connected to the mob.
My father was involved with big, big people.
An organized crime.
One of the people was Peter DeFeo, my uncle.
One of Ronnie's uncles.
Keith DeFeo was reputed to be a member of the Genovese crime family. And again,
putting this in the context of the time, back in the mid -70s, early
80s in New York, you had a lot of mob hits going on.
And there was speculation that Louise's family, the Brigantes, also had ties to
the mafia.
This is the rumor, and these rumors keep swirling around, that Juan is
grandfather. Mr. Burganti was somehow tied to the mob.
Michael Burganti Sr.
was connected to organized crime.
He owned a Buick car dealership. They did dirty work for the mob.
Burganti Sr.
employed his son -in -law, Ronald Sr.
My father worked for Mike Burganti Sr., who was my grandfather, my mother's
father. He owned a Buick agency, a Buick dealership.
My father was the boss of the service end of the dealership.
It was a legitimate business.
They didn't do anything wrong in the Buick dealership. They took it outside.
Ronald Sr.
was in charge of the ledgers for the dealership. And we're talking the
unofficial accounts where it showed all the monies, all the transactions, all
the dirty hands, and so forth.
He would often take those books home.
and cook them up for the dealership.
Butch worked there as well.
And DeFeo would do work for the mob, delivering money and delivering packages
and things like that.
I did whatever I had to do.
Whatever they told me to do, I did.
And I was paid money for doing it.
There had been some secret tape recordings, you know, authorized
the RICO squad.
the racket boys, if you will, that involved the Briganti Buick dealership.
Ronnie Jr.
was the subject of many of those conversations between Michael Briganti
grandfather, and his friends, associates, etc., who talked about very
oh my God, that kid, meaning Ronnie, he could hang us all with what he knows.
There was also talk at the time that Ronald DeFeo Sr.
had also been skimming some money off the side from the Buick dealership.
Ronald Sr.
embezzled money from the mob.
At the time of the murders in November of 74, things were really going bad for
Big Ronnie.
Briganti was thinking very heavily of closing the dealership. So that meant
Ronnie had to do one big score.
He was...
trying to work with Butch on embezzling as much money as possible.
Several weeks before the murder, $20 ,000 bank deposit that Ronnie Jr.
and one of the other employees was supposed to be making had suddenly
disappeared.
That would be a death sentence.
Police immediately put Ron DeFeo in protective custody. Therefore, if they
the whole family, they would get him as well.
They didn't really know if this was a mob hit or not, and they weren't taking
chance.
Today, police combed the DeFeo's handsome three -story house for clues.
The rifle used in the murders, it is so definite.
Why didn't somebody wake up?
Which is another big mystery here.
Welcome back to Very Scary People.
The mystery about who committed the execution -style murders of the DeFeo
family, mother, father, and four of their children, consumed the town of
Amityville. Was it a robbery gone wrong?
Could it have been a mob hit?
Or a family vendetta?
They were shots that left six members of one family dead in this charming Dutch
colonial home. And there's only one surviving member of the family.
Ronald DeFeo Jr., his nickname was Butch, and he was the oldest.
He was the firstborn.
He loved his mother very much.
And Louise, from everything I've learned, Butch was her pride and joy.
Ronnie was quiet.
Never said a whole lot. He gave you the sense that he was a tough guy, but
never threatening, never violent.
The police took Ronnie Jr.
into protective custody and took him to the police headquarters to provide his
statement.
Police have been questioning the son, Ronald, and now say he is being, quote,
safeguarded. I was scared.
My whole family is dead.
I remember talking to a cop, and he told me that there was some speculation that
it was a mob hit.
Ronald DeFeo Jr.
was claiming that somebody was out to get the family. There was talk of these
killers coming from Brooklyn.
But I immediately thought, no, they wouldn't kill the kids.
Organized crime did not condone the execution of small children.
So that would have been a cardinal sin for them.
And there would be plenty of ways if they wanted to send a message to do that
without killing those kids.
No, it doesn't stack up.
Police had continued on their investigation.
Today, police combed the DeFeo's handsome three -story house for clues
divers explored the backyard swimming pool for the still -unfound murder
The day after the bodies were discovered, the police were looking for
and everything that could point them in the right direction for the suspect and
the motive.
The first thing you're going to do is look at the crime scene and try to
understand what occurred in the house.
And what may have been the psychology of the perpetrator.
You have an entire family that was killed.
All the victims were found in bed.
And there's no evidence of a struggle.
The nature of the shootings was shooting in the back in bed.
It had to be somebody who knew the house really well.
They were on different floors, in different rooms.
Typically, if there's a home invasion, there is some alarm raised in the house.
I think that the fact that they were all in their beds does raise the question
of whether it really was somebody who was known to them.
The medical examiner determined that all six victims had been killed in the
early morning hours of November 13th.
The time of death, 16 to 18 hours before they were discovered.
At the time of the murder, somewhere between 3 a .m., 3
.15, 3 .30, the family's sheepdog was howling.
The teenage boy, two doors away, told investigators he heard the dog howling,
which he thought was a little odd.
And the cause of death was gunshot wounds from a rifle. According to the
coroner, it was the very high -powered .35 caliber Marlin rifle.
It was a cowboy gun.
It is so deafening.
I remember thinking, geez, somebody had to walk around the house shooting
people. Why didn't somebody wake up?
There were questions about whether the victims had been drugged before they
to sleep.
But according to the coroner and the autopsy reports, they were not drugged,
which is another big mystery here.
Why didn't anybody hear anything?
More intense questioning of Rhonda Thayer.
Somebody else was in the house, ran out of the house.
It turns out that one person did hear the gunshot.
It was terrible.
Six people were shot dead in their bed.
On the night of November 13, 1974, all the bodies were found shot from all the
point -blank range.
None of the family members was awakened by the explosive burst of gunfire
throughout the house.
Autopsies showed that they had not been drugged. Why didn't anyone hear a
gunshot?
But it turns out that one person did hear the gunshot.
Ronnie DeFeo Jr.
now tells the police that he was there, at the house, when his family was
killed.
So Ronnie had been drinking that night.
He was watching TV down in the basement. He had been taking drugs.
He told the police that people broke into the house. He was in the basement,
he heard muffled sounds.
It didn't sound like a gunshot. It sounded like a backfire on a car, but
Somebody else was in the house, ran out of the house, but I couldn't catch him
when he ran out the front door.
When you're talking to someone who has a very unstable account of what happened,
you want to go back again and again to try and see how he's going to respond,
what his explanations are going to be.
and to also focus in on the discrepancies.
More intense questioning of Ron DeFeo.
And then another story that someone came into the house, they pulled him
along with them, and they shot everyone while he was present.
I knew then I was set up.
I was going to be the scapegoat for everybody.
Ronnie DeFeo Jr.
was not the most stable.
of individuals.
There was something odd about him. He wasn't the warm, friendly older brother
who comes over and asks if you need help or anything. He just was this loner and
not in a healthy way.
He quit school and didn't really work.
He drank a lot, hung out in a neighborhood bar.
He was known as sort of a troublemaker around the town.
He borrowed money from people and didn't pay it back and bullied people.
He was a heavy substance abuser starting from the age of 15 or 16.
Every day I got high, I used heroin. I was using a lot of heroin back then. I
was drinking too excessively. Scots are on the rocks.
His parents, they took him to a psychiatrist in hopes of calming him
didn't work.
So his parents lavished him with gifts.
They did not spare the rod, but they continued to spoil the child.
He had access to an allowance of several hundred dollars a week.
Ronnie would walk around with a couple thousand dollars in his pocket.
They bought him a $14 ,000 speedboat, but that didn't settle Ron.
He was an angry young man.
He also had a stockpile of several weapons in the house.
They have Ronnie in custody.
just to talk about the murder. And very soon they begin to wonder.
He threw out a lot of wild theories.
He makes some unconvincing excuses, but what is very significant is
he seems to be justifying the death of his family. That does raise a lot of red
flags.
He said that he discovered his mother had had an affair and that he despised
for that.
He also told the police that his father was making him work too hard.
He complained that his brothers were little pigs in the bathroom.
They said, what do you think about your sister Dawn?
Dawn, that effing bitch.
That's how he described her.
That's very striking for somebody to say that when their family has just been
murdered.
Louise used to tell me that Butchie was bad.
I didn't know what she meant, but she said, no, Butchie is bad.
I think he had more troubles than we thought, than they thought.
I first heard about this case, about Ronnie DeFeo, on the 11 o
'clock news that his family had been murdered and that Ronnie was
being held in protective custody.
What about Ronald DeFeo, the son, the surviving son? Ronald is being
by the Suffolk County Police at this time.
Investigators say without explanation that they now feel Young DeFeo was in
house at the time of the murders, but they're not yet considering him a
It came to my mind that he has to be a person of interest.
Talking about the death of his family, there is such a lack of emotion, and he
also is so preoccupied with the justification for the killing.
He describes the father as abusive. He describes the mother as checked out.
Dawn, he talks about her with clear hostility.
Dallas and Mark and John, when he talks about them, it's very superficial.
There's very little sadness about their death, which is what you usually hear
when someone talks about someone that they have real love for and that they're
grieving for, which to me makes it certainly within the realm of
that he killed them.
While searching the DeFeo home, Police find a box for a Marlin .35 caliber
rifle, along with boxes of Remington shells, all of which belong to Ronnie
Jr. And within the first 48 hours, the focus had quickly shifted to
him as the chief suspect.
They read in his Miranda rights, and they officially told him that he was the
suspect of his family's murder.
Now a suspect, police switch from interviewing Ronnie Jr. to interrogating
And different police talk to him, and the head of homicide, Robert Dunn, is
first one, and then Dennis Rafferty.
He was the detective who was an expert at extracting confessions from people.
I just tried to warm up to him, really.
to talk to him, try to make him comfortable, and proceeded to
Several detectives took a turn on Butch, and finally the key detectives were
able to get Butch to cooperate.
Ronnie Jr.
was vacillating between telling the police that he had no idea what happened
his family and then switching his story to he was there and the killers forced
him to watch his family being killed.
Here's Ronnie saying other people did it, taking him through his house room by
room, telling him other people did the shooting.
But the details he had were so precise.
And finally, Rafferty says to him, you did it. Ronnie didn't do it.
And Ronnie said, yes, I did it.
As far as I was concerned,
I got to them before they got to me.
Louise used to tell me that Butchie was bad.
I didn't know what she meant, but she said, no, Butchie is bad.
I was always in trouble. I don't know what I did.
I was out of trouble.
I think he had more troubles than we thought, than they thought.
At 17, he was into drugs, LSD, heroin, a fifth of scotch every day.
He was always at odds with his father, Ronald Sr.
His father was a violent person, and Ronald DeFeo was subject to a lot of
starting at a very young age.
There's evidence that even as an infant, as an 18 -month -old, his father would
whack him on the head to stop him from crying.
He was a violent man.
You've got a very domineering father and a mother that's caught in the middle of
this mess.
Butch started blaming his mother for allowing his father to get out of
with the abuse.
He blamed her more than the sickness that his father had because she allowed
to continue.
Children of an abusive father will often blame the mother for not having
protected them or view her as an accomplice just by virtue of her
her denial of what's going on.
After Ronnie Jr.
became older, his resentment against his mother grew, and he began to fight back
against his father.
There's fighting.
Ronnie and his father fight, and he gets crazy, and he's got a horrible temper.
Ronnie... Senior and Ronnie Jr.
had a very contentious, bellicose relationship.
They were always at war.
They had fistfights that spilled out onto the front lawn.
And then Ronnie would take off in his car, and his father would get in his car
and speed down the block following him.
At one point during a fight, he pulled a 12 -gauge shotgun out and pointed it at
his father's face and pulled the trigger.
The rifle malfunctioned. The last time I saw Butch and Big Ronnie, they were
fighting in the driveway, yelling at each other.
Big Ronnie was saying, get out of here.
The relationship between Butch DeFeo and his father was coming to a head.
He felt controlled by his father and terrorized by his father.
I didn't want their love. I didn't want anything to do with them.
How much abuse did you think I was going to take?
He was a ticking time bomb.
I had it with him, and it was fun. This has got to stop.
Anger and abuse and violence and drug addiction and alcoholism,
it became a perfect storm that fed into the murders.
He said, yes, I did it. I killed them all. You couldn't believe how it
There were very strange things associated with the DeFeo murders that
coroner, the forensic people could not understand.
Ron DeFeo said that he heard voices telling him to kill, compelling him to
one member of the family after another.
Before you know it.
People are talking about this house allegedly being haunted.
The story got bigger and more embellished and more fantastical.
Ghosts flying to levitating, to doors flying off hinges, to demons, to satanic
horses. I was there at midnight.
They started the seance.
It's like a black shadow that forms a hood.
And it moves.
This is the closest to hell I ever want to get.
I'm the devil. I'm possessed.
I'm supposed to be vicious.
A madman.
Insane. Hear voices.
That just makes your blood run cold.
The evil in the house was him.
After Ron DeFeo Jr.'s shocking confession that he was the murderer, the
deepened. Why would he kill his entire family?
There was no sign of a struggle. Why didn't any of them fight back?
Why didn't anyone try to run away?
What was his motive?
Greed, anger, or insanity?
What really happened that night? In part two of The Amityville Horror.
I'm Donnie Wahlberg.
Thanks for watching. Good night.
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