by Liza Rodman
Finally, under the body of Patricia Walsh they found the blackened remains of yet another dismembered woman. But unlike Pat, Mary Anne, and the body found the month before, these body parts had been carefully reassembled and laid out, almost reverently, as if in an Egyptian tomb. The face was ruined by decomposition, making an immediate identification impossible. Underneath the body they found a pair of sandals, a bloodstained shirt, and a pair of bell-bottom jeans with a $10 bill carefully folded in the back pocket.
At the base of a tree they found a knife, a gun, and a Warner #108 single-edged razor-blade tool, used in cutting heavy fabric and wallpaper.
“Go grab the son of a bitch,” 4 Killen told Flynn.
No one had to ask which son of a bitch he meant.
* * *
Lieutenant William Broderick, the same Massachusetts State Police detective who had tailed Tony in Boston the month before, was sent to arrest him. When he and two of his colleagues got to the Beacon Street apartment where Broderick had first spotted Tony, they were told Vinnie had moved, so they went to Macy’s Liquor Store in the North End where he worked.
Broderick recognized Vinnie from their ignominious meeting at the Beacon Street apartment and dismissed him as not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. Small, dark, and looking somewhat slow-witted, the kid had evasive eyes that the seasoned cop had seen countless times.
“I haven’t seen Tony in ten days,” Vinnie said, his eyes shifting.
Wise to obfuscation, Broderick and the two other detectives went to Vinnie’s new apartment on Marlborough Street.
When the knock came at the door at 4:20 p.m., less than an hour after the three bodies had been found, Tony calmly greeted the detectives in their khaki trench coats.
“Hi, Officers. What can I do for you?” Tony said.
“You are…?”
“Vincent Bonaviri.”
“Good try, pal,” Broderick said, recognizing him from his surveillance of the VW. “We just spoke with Bonaviri at Macy’s Liquors. Wanna try again?”
“All right, I’m Tony Costa,” he said, a guileless smile spreading across his face.
“You’re under arrest.”
Because he was a flight risk and they didn’t have a warrant yet for the murders, Tony was initially arrested for grand larceny of an auto and was again read his Miranda rights. The Massachusetts State Police then called Provincetown, and Officers Flynn and Gunnery immediately got in a squad car and drove to Boston to take Tony to the Barnstable County House of Correction.
During the two-hour drive from Boston to Hyannis, Tony never said a word.
It was his son Michael’s fourth birthday.
50 LIZA
It seemed as if I was hearing “Cape Cod” and “Provincetown” and “Truro” all over the news. Mom snapped off the radio or television as soon as the story said anything about those places, but I heard enough to know something had happened, something bad. I asked her what, but she shot me a look and muttered, “Nothing,” and I knew not to push it. Besides, I was busy planning my upcoming birthday. My tenth. A big one, and I wanted it to be perfect.
Now that the snow had stopped falling for the winter, the early spring rains began and the days were cold and wet and miserable. I couldn’t wait for summer to arrive so we could get back down to Provincetown and I could work on my tan. I thought about Bob Stranger and little noisy Duke. I thought about Cecelia and Tony and driving to the dump with him. I thought about biking to the Penney Patch for waxed lips and candy dots and swimming in the RC pool with Gail and Geoff. And I thought about what sort of bathing suit I’d get this year. I had grown so much since last summer, even Mom agreed I’d need a new one. In the past she had sometimes made our suits out of scraps of fabric she brought home from her home ec classroom, and all I could do was pray that she’d be too busy or distracted to force me into one of those. They were always baggy in the wrong places and tight where it was most uncomfortable. This year, now that I was going to be ten, I wanted something pretty and that fit me. Please.
One day after school we all went shopping, but not for bathing suits. Mom needed something at the drugstore, and I wandered down the hair products aisle; along with a new suit I wanted blond hair. One of the girls in my class had put Sun In in her hair and presto chango she was a blonde! I was reading the directions on the bottle when Louisa walked up.
“Mom says let’s go,” she said, and I kicked her in the shin as she passed.
“Ouch. What did you do that for?” she said, her hand reaching down to rub her leg.
“Ouch. What did you do that for?” I said, mimicking her in a high, whiny voice.
Just then, my head was swatted from behind.
“I heard that,” my mother said. “Why in hell are you so miserable all the time?”
I looked at the Sun In bottle in my hand.
“Can we buy this?” I blurted out without thinking.
Mom looked at me, her eyes wide with disbelief that I would ask for the Sun In right after being smacked in the head for being a brat. Then her eyes narrowed dangerously, and she gritted her teeth and grabbed my upper arm, digging in her nails. The bottle of Sun In fell to the linoleum floor and rolled away under the shelf.
“Buy me, buy me, buy me,” she hissed. “That’s all I ever hear from you. Now get your ass to the car.”
I pulled free from her grasp and ran out of the store, through the parking lot and kept going, all the way into the woods behind the shopping mall. Humiliated and furious, I vowed that someday I’d get her back. Hit her back. Threaten to spank her in public. Make her cringe with shame. It was getting dark but no way in hell was I getting back in her car. So I ran through the woods toward home, pretending I was running away. I wasn’t scared of the woods. I knew them the way I knew the dunes in Provincetown, and I felt safe in them because I knew my mother would never set foot in them. She’d never find me in here.
I followed the abandoned train tracks out of the woods and back up to Crescent Street about a mile from our house. Once on the road, anybody could pick me up and maybe I’d never be seen again. I sort of wished anybody would. That would show Mom.
If Tony lived nearby, he would have picked me up if he’d seen me walking alone through the woods. Tony would have, but he was far away in Provincetown.
51 TONY
The day after his arrest, Tony was transported from Barnstable to the Provincetown district court and arraigned on two counts of murder in the first degree. Avis and Cecelia sat among the spectators, most of them women, crammed into the courtroom on the town hall’s second floor. All rose as Judge Gershom Hall entered. He looked at the rare spectacle of a crowded court and then took his time seeing to the other business of the day—speeding tickets, fishing violations, eviction disputes. Finally, he turned to Tony and asked him to rise. As the judge began, Tony’s eyes looked around the room vaguely, not focusing on anyone or anything besides a painting he loved, The Fish Cleaners by Charles Hawthorne, which hung on the wall. Then when the second charge, “murder in the first degree of Mary Anne Wysocki,” was read, Tony bowed his head and stared at the floor.
With the arraignment over, Tony was led down the town hall’s impressive stairs that bracketed both sides of the two-story lobby and ushered out the double front doors. As the doors opened, a crowd of nearly 150, including his old buddy Woody Candish, greeted him with cheers and shouts of support: “We’re with you Tony!”
Bernie Flynn descended the stairs behind Tony, frowning in disdain. Who are these freaks? Celebrating a guy who butchered four girls?1 It confirmed for Flynn the worst of the hippie culture, American youth, and, most of all dirty, desolate Provincetown. It didn’t help his opinion of the place that nearly every local had stonewalled him, refusing to answer even the most basic question. He looked forward to seeing it in his rearview mirror when the case was over and he could leave, permanently.
Tony smiled, raised his shackled hands, and waved. The crowd cheered. He walked down the stairs
like a movie star on the red carpet, enjoying the spectacle of it all, particularly the attention and praise bestowed on him. As he drove away in the back of a police cruiser, he flashed a peace sign for the photographers; the picture appeared on the front page of the Cape Cod Times the next day.
“They seemed like a nice couple with young kids,” David Raboy, the man who had rented Tony and Avis the Shank Painter Road cottage, said. “You don’t expect he’s Jack the Ripper.”2
“Everyone feels bad it had to be a Provincetown boy,” admitted the mother of one of Tony’s friends.3
Many in Provincetown agreed, believing that Tony Costa never could have murdered the four young women. Not “our” Tony, they said, the handsome husband and father of three, the part-time babysitter, carpenter, and plumber who just about everybody considered the friendly, even charming guy next door. In fact, many people thought he’d been railroaded. Dr. Hiebert was upset that Tony had been arrested and felt that the police were “persecuting the boy.”
And those who didn’t think he was innocent kept their opinions to themselves. One of them was Woody Candish’s wife, Donna.
“I wasn’t shocked,” she later admitted. “He sat on my counter and told me there were three things he could never be forgiven for. The worst sin is killing, right?”
Jim Zacharias agreed. “I learned that Tony treated Avis like an animal.” Capable of anything. “There was just something about him that creeped me out.”4
While his defense team began to search for other potential suspects, Tony wrote Avis from jail, demanding that she falsely accuse other possible suspects in the murders as well as claim to know Chuck Hansen, a character Tony had concocted to foil police. She refused to do both.
It wouldn’t be until forty years later that Avis would admit, “No one wanted to believe when the last two girls went missing that Tony could have been responsible, but we all suspected it was true. I, more than anyone, knew it was.” She went on to write, “There was a month between the discovery of the first body and the last two [sicI]… a month in which we all came apart and started whistling in the dark… sleeping with one eye open, if at all. A month where not one of us would tell the others what we suspected. To say it outloud [sic] was to die. That’s what I thought, anyway.”5
Because Tony was known around town as some sort of stoned Santa Claus who would pass out drugs like gifts to his minions, some locals suspected that sooner or later “he’d be picked up for the slayings.”6 But publicly they defended Tony, talking out of both sides of their mouths to reporters and investigators, as if it were a game of cat and mouse—as if it were the locals versus the outside world. In short, the locals had created an almost Mafia-like code of silence to insulate themselves, Tony, and those in his crew who broke the law. When brought before the police and questioned about Tony’s drug possession, theft, even assault and domestic violence, many openly, even brazenly, lied.
* * *
Back in Hyannis, Bristol County district attorney Edmund Dinis called a press conference for the following day at 8:00 a.m. Dinis, a lifelong politician, had doggedly worked his way up from New Bedford city councilman to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and then the State Senate. In 1956, he became the first DA of Portuguese descent to serve Bristol County, which then included the Cape and Islands. When the press conference was called, it rankled the Provincetown police, who felt Dinis was overstepping his bounds, but Dinis was a showboater who couldn’t resist the cameras.
It was like nothing sleepy Cape Cod had ever seen. Dinis stood in front of the packed room and detailed the most atrocious aspects of the police findings, including the erroneous detail that the bodies had been “cut into as many parts as there are joints,” and that the hearts had been removed from the bodies and had not been recovered. He also claimed that one body had teeth marks on it. But what Dinis didn’t understand, and no one in the room clarified, was that an “incised wound” was not a result of incisor teeth but rather one caused by an incision, the type a knife or other sharp instrument would make. When asked by a reporter if the killer was a “Cape Cod Vampire,” he agreed that perhaps that’s exactly what they had on their hands. The moniker “Cape Cod Cannibal” was born.
The locals were outraged by the horrific murders, garishly portrayed in the carnival-like press coverage. Truro residents bemoaned that children used to wander through the woods hunting for blueberries without fear but that now those woods were a place of horror.
Perhaps the only people enjoying themselves, besides Tony, were the press. For them, the entire spectacle was catnip. No matter how mawkish the headline, they couldn’t sell their papers fast enough. Desperate for any new detail to splash on the next edition, they camped out in front of Avis’s and Cecelia’s apartments, 5 Standish Street, and both the Provincetown and Truro police stations.
“You gotta give me something,” they begged Truro Police Chief Berrio as he got out of his cruiser and headed into the station.
“I gotta give you nuthin’!” Berrio bellowed as he pushed past the throng into the building. “Now get the hell outta here!”
Berrio told Killen that as bad as the press was, “the tourists are even worse.” The woods became prime real estate for souvenir hunters, many of whom brought their children along for the search, as if it were a holiday or a day at the beach.
In Provincetown, a reporter with the Cape Cod Times quoted an unidentified long-haired kid who watched from the Benches, muttering as the newsmen milled around Town Hall.
“It makes me so mad; they’re making a circus out of this,” he said.
And it was a circus that sold out the big tent, every day.
I. The correct number was three.
52 TONY
A month before, when police had warned Tony that he needed an attorney, his uncle Frank Bent had called his friend and one-time fellow town councilor, Maurice Goldman, asking him to represent his nephew. Now that Tony had been arrested and charged, Goldman took the case, perhaps as a favor to his old friend Frank, perhaps because it sounded more interesting than his usual docket of probating wills and litigating property liens in sleepy Brewster.
Born in Canada on July 4, 1900, Goldman immigrated to America with his family when he was a toddler. He had a scar over his right eye from a fight when he was six years old over territory for his paper route. He’d been a Boston city councilor, a state senator, and a Suffolk County assistant district attorney before he went into private practice. At almost sixty-nine years old, Goldman was portly with pale, hooded eyes and a strong, thrusting profile. Proud that he often took on pro bono cases, he called himself “the poor man’s lawyer.” And with his last $3 in his pocket at the time of his arrest, Tony was nothing if not poor.
On March 8, two days after Tony’s arraignment, Goldman and his co-counsel, Justin Cavanaugh, drove to Bridgewater State Hospital, where Tony had been taken for thirty-five days of court-mandated psychological examinations to determine whether he was legally sane and therefore eligible to stand trial. Until the bodies had been found, Goldman thought Tony’s involvement with the women could have been purely coincidental but not necessarily criminal. Now, with the bodies at the morgue and Tony having told a string of lies about how he came to possess the women’s car, Goldman got right to the point.
“I’ll ask it bluntly, Tony. Did you kill those girls?” he said.
“I had nothing to do with it. I have killed no one,” Tony replied in his best I’m offended you’d even ask voice.
For the next two hours, Goldman and Cavanaugh had Tony detail everything he knew about Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, starting with where they met and how they looked. As Tony wove his tale of professed innocence, part fact, part fiction, the narrative included a list of those he said were most likely responsible, starting with a man named Chuck Hansen.
“Find Chuck Hansen,” he told Goldman and Cavanaugh, “and ask him where he was that weekend.”
Cavanaugh promised they’d put finding Ha
nsen high on their agenda. As he and Goldman watched Tony get escorted back to his cell, Cavanaugh thought their client was innocent. He found Tony too soft-spoken, too mild, too polite to have killed and killed in such a heinous manner. Impossible. He turned to Goldman and remarked that Tony seemed scared. Goldman didn’t seem to share Cavanaugh’s opinion of Tony’s innocence.
“Of course he’s scared. You’d be scared too if you’d killed four people,” Goldman said.
* * *
After Tony’s admission to Bridgewater and for the next thirty-five days, he was interviewed by a caravan of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. One session included thirteen professionals, all holding clipboards. Everyone in those diagnostic sessions was impressed by Tony’s utter calm, poise, eloquence, and intelligence. He did not have the usual profile of an inmate accused of such barbaric crimes, although few of the professionals in the room had ever seen this degree of brutality. While various doctors cited “sexual identity confusion,” “possible schizoid personality disorder,” “lack of personal insight,” and “a narcissistic, inadequate man who needs to manipulate people, especially women,” none found him psychotic or criminally insane. At the end of his examination period, the determination of the entire Bridgewater staff was that “Mr. Costa showed no psychological illness”1 and was therefore deemed competent to stand trial.