After his conviction, DeFeo gave several varying accounts of how the killings were carried out. In a 1986 interview for "Newsday", DeFeo claimed his sister Dawn killed their father and then their distraught mother killed all of his siblings, apparently with a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, before he killed his mother. He stated that he took the blame because he was afraid to say anything negative about his mother to her father, Michael Brigante Sr., and his father's uncle, out of fear that they would kill him. His father's uncle was Peter DeFeo, a "caporegime" in the Genovese crime family. In this interview, DeFeo also asserted he was married at the time of the murders to a woman named Geraldine Gates, with whom he was living in New Jersey, and that his mother phoned to ask him to return to Amityville to break up a fight between Dawn and their father. Subsequently, he drove to Amityville with Geraldine's brother, Richard Romondoe, who was with him at the time of the murders and could verify his story completely.