by Liza Rodman
On April 10, with all of his psychological examinations complete, Tony was transferred from Bridgewater back to the Barnstable County Jail, where he would remain throughout the investigation and trial.
A dreary two-story brick edifice built in the 1800s on the hill behind the courthouse overlooking Cape Cod Bay in the distance, the Barnstable County Jail was something out of a Dickens novel—dark, dank, and claustrophobic, with imposing steel bars every twenty feet through its halls. Each six-by-nine cell had cinder-block walls, a metal cot, a stainless steel sink and toilet built into the corner, and a four-by-twelve-inch opening in the solid steel door through which a plate of food or a letter could be passed. Though Tony was not the only prisoner in the jail’s history to be held for more than fifteen months, he was certainly one of its most infamous.
* * *
While Tony had been undergoing his examinations in Bridgewater, the two partially decomposed bodies found with Pat’s and Mary Anne’s bodies in the woods were finally identified as those of two other missing Provincetown women, Susan Perry and Sydney Monzon.
The search for Sydney Monzon, the pretty girl people called Cricket who wanted to be a stewardess and travel the world, was over.
In remembering Susan Perry, Alice Joseph, the librarian, thought of the William Wordsworth line: “A Maid whom there were none to praise / And very few to love.” Someone would later post a variation of the epitaph on Susan’s online memorial page.
53 LIZA
Spring finally arrived in West Bridgewater, and Mom was starting to make summer plans again. Things were looking up.
Dad had briefly resurfaced in our lives, promising to take us to have Easter dinner with his new family. But we waited in our Easter bonnets and shiny patent leather shoes on the front lawn all day, and he never showed; judging by Mom’s fury, he didn’t call to say why. All she knew was that he had ruined her plans to have a fancy Easter dinner with Ron at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, where she’d heard there was a huge buffet with a bottle of champagne on every table. All of that and no kids. But then Dad ruined it. “Mr. No Show” had struck again.
At the start of the summer, Mom sent me to a two-week YMCA camp in Plymouth. I had tried to fight it because I wanted to be in Provincetown, swimming, biking, and riding to the dump with Tony. But she couldn’t be budged; she was sick of my questions and my rolling my eyes at everything she or Ron said; she wanted a two-week “Liza-Free Zone,” and she would have it. Camp actually wasn’t bad at first, but after a couple of days I broke my big toe. Still, she refused to come pick me up; she had paid for two weeks, and two weeks is what I would stay, broken toe or no broken toe. Geoff had gone to camp with me, but he hated it and wrote a note home that only had one word—HELP!—and before I knew it, Uncle Hank arrived, scooped him up, and took him home, leaving me and my broken toe behind. So instead of playing hide the flag and diving off the dock into the lake, I sat in my bunk and wrote my first full-length story. It was about Tex, the boy who had moved into Nana and Grampa Georgie’s house next door to us. My goal was to write one hundred pages about him and how he had made me feel. I finished, writing the end in big cursive letters with my purple pen, just one day before everyone was due to come get me so we could all head to the Cape. I didn’t often feel pride, but staring at the end, I wanted to hug myself. I had done it, without any help, and no one could take it away.
I waited all day for them to pick me up, and it was almost dark when the car finally pulled into camp. Most of the other families had already come and collected their kids, but I was still there, waiting on my crutches. Mom was behind the wheel of her convertible with a scarf around her head, smoking one of her little cigars. Ron sat in the passenger seat, smoking his bigger and smellier cigar. Louisa, Jill, and Danny sat in the back seat. When no one got out to help me, I struggled to open the door, clumsily laying my crutches on the floor, and then crawled into the back seat for the hour-and-a-half drive from Plymouth to Provincetown.
I scrunched in next to Louisa and pulled the story out of my bag. My stomach felt like ants were crawling through it and my heart was pounding, but I was eager and proud to share it. One hundred pages! And I’d written every word.
“I wrote a story at camp. Wanna hear it?”
I looked up at Mom and Ron in the front seat. They exchanged a look that didn’t make my stomach feel any better.
“Sure,” Mom said, with a chuckle. “Why not?”
My hands shook, so I pressed the pages into my lap and began.
“It’s called ‘The Boy Next Door.’ ”
Before I could finish reading the first paragraph Mom snorted, and then Ron snorted. I looked up, and Mom was looking over at Ron; they were both snickering and looked like they were going to burst out laughing at any minute. I felt a hot surge of embarrassment, but I really, really wanted them to hear my story. I knew if they heard it, they’d stop laughing and tell me it was quite good and that they were proud that I’d written a whole hundred pages all by myself. I looked over at Louisa, Jill, and Danny, and they all looked at me, but they weren’t laughing. I continued reading, but I only got through another sentence or two.
“Okay, okay,” Mom said, glancing in the rearview at me. “I think that’s enough. We get the picture.” She and Ron both laughed again.
I quickly shoved the pages back into my bag and scrunched as low in the seat as I could, out of Mom’s line of sight.
When Mom’s and Ron’s laughter finally trailed off, she wiped at her eyes under her sunglasses. “ ‘The Boy Next Door.’ Now I have heard everything!” she said, and that sent them into another round of laughter. No one else said a word.
As we drove, the sun set and I sat against the car door, twirling my hair with both index fingers—a double twirl. I watched the oncoming headlights on the other side of the road, wondering how I could run away from home, and from Mom. I doubted Mom would come after me, so maybe I didn’t even need to run. I could just stroll away from home and then find another mother, maybe even one who wanted to have me around and hear my stories.
Like always, as we drove up and over the Sagamore Bridge, officially leaving the mainland and landing on Cape Cod’s sandy shores, my mood got a little better and Mom’s positively soared; I would be back in Provincetown soon, and she was headed to her Eden. Even though she spent a lot of her time cleaning toilets and making beds, she loved owning the motel: “It doesn’t even feel like a job, that’s how much I love P’town!” she said. With Mom happier, I was happier.
54 TONY
While Tony sat in his jail cell and counted the days until he was sure they’d find him innocent and set him free to get high and walk the dunes again, Goldman was busy building a defense that might save his client from the electric chair. The lawyer’s first stop was Cecelia Bonaviri’s gloomy, second-story apartment, where Goldman had asked that the family gather for a group interview. The weather was even more bleak than usual for March on Cape Cod and when Goldman and Justin Cavanaugh got out of their car at 9 Conant Street, they had to bend their heads against the gale-force winds. They entered the tiny apartment and found it uncomfortably stuffy and crowded with consoling relatives. Goldman handed a pack of cigarettes to Avis as introductions were made. He took note of Cecelia’s sad, stooped posture, her threadbare yellow sweater, and her mournful eyes. He began by asking her about Tony’s childhood; as she spoke, wind rattled the windows and silent tears streamed down her cheeks. She gazed out into the storm, her words drifting into a mumbling dream world.
“California,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I loved it so much. That’s where my Tony was made when his father and me were there during the war. It was like all my prayers were answered.”
No one in the room knew what to say. Her California dream was now an unspeakable nightmare.
In order to have some privacy, Goldman asked Avis to come out to his car for her interview. She agreed, and in her typical forthrightness, she spared no detail of the troubled past between h
er and Tony.
“He changed when he started on drugs,” she told Goldman. “I think he’s schizophrenic, because when he got mad, really, really mad, and showed any kind of violence, he was a different person. He would flip out if he was nagged. But he got over it fast. Then he wouldn’t admit he was ever sore.”
She told Goldman that Tony was never particularly fond of his children, except for the baby, Nichole, whom he named.
“You see, he always wanted a girl.”
When Goldman and Cavanaugh finally stepped out of Cecelia’s building, both felt relieved to be out of the depressing apartment. Both men took in huge lungfuls of the fresh air blowing in off the ocean.
* * *
Goldman knew Tony didn’t have a dime to his name, so he petitioned the county to pay for his and his defense team’s work, agreeing to repay the money, if necessary. But the county refused, so Goldman came up with another strategy to eventually get paid: a book and possibly even a movie deal.
“Murray always had an angle,”1 Tom Gunnery observed of Maurice Goldman.
Goldman relished the prospect of not only defending Tony Costa, the already infamous Cape Cod Cannibal, but of selling a book with all the lurid details of his crimes. Gerold Frank’s book on the Boston Strangler was on the New York Times bestseller list and rumor had it a film was in the works. It didn’t hurt that Tony’s crimes were even more grotesque than Albert DeSalvo’s. And it would only add fodder to the public’s appetite for horror stories to have the villain a soft-spoken family man, polite to a fault, “adored” by his ex-wife and children, looked up to by the young and old alike, a man who worked hard to pay his bills, as a carpenter no less, very Christlike, Goldman thought. Goldman had even hired Tony to do work on a few of his properties around Provincetown, so Goldman himself would be able to add a personal anecdote or two about what a good guy he was. It was the perfect scenario for a bestseller. Goldman could wait the year or two for his payoff; it would be all the sweeter when it became a blockbuster film as well.
The first order of business was to have Tony and Avis sign over the rights to their life story, which they did; after all, what choice did they have? Tony needed an attorney, a good one, and they could barely afford to put food on the table. Then Goldman called his friend Kurt Vonnegut and told him about his new client and how he needed a kick-ass writer to write the book. Vonnegut was intrigued, but when he demanded a larger percentage of the advance and royalties than any of the legal team would receive, including Goldman, Goldman went looking elsewhere. One of the writers he found was Victor Wolfson, an Emmy Award–winning writer for his work on a Winston Churchill biopic. At first, Wolfson was optimistic about the book, but after learning the hideous details of the murders and their unrepentant perpetrator, Wolfson told Goldman there was no way he could “clean up” Tony enough for a book that would have mass-market appeal. Finally, a local writer, Lester Allen, took on the task. Allen was a little-known and semi-retired contributor to the Cape Cod Times who had never written anything longer than a two-column piece for the paper. While certainly not the big name he had hoped to get in Vonnegut or Wolfson, Allen, Goldman assumed, would at least be able to capture the essence of Tony, his rather salacious sex life, and his grisly crimes.
As Goldman began planning what would be the defense strategy, Allen went to work interviewing Tony and every available person in his life, particularly Avis, whom he spent more time with than anyone else, save Tony. Through the interviews, she suffered under his invasive and often lewd questioning. His interviews with her read more like interrogations, and sleazy interrogations at that. Allen seemed fixated on the more erotic if not lurid details of Avis and Tony’s sex life, repeatedly bringing the beleaguered Avis “back to the subject”—Allen’s subjects of cunnilingus, fellatio, sodomy, masturbation. He wanted to hear, almost eagerly, every intimate detail.
“Did he want you to take his member into your mouth?” “How many times did he masturbate onto your naked body?”2
Today, Allen and Goldman might well be sanctioned and Allen sued for sexual harassment.
As abusive and inept an interviewer as Allen was, he was the only member of the defense team who was paid, receiving more than $650 in fees and expenses, nearly $4,500 in today’s money, all of it out of Goldman’s pocket. (It’s also worth noting that this bare-bones defense team rewarded itself mightily, spending more than $3,000 on just four meals at the Dolphin Restaurant in Barnstable, across from the district courthouse and jail, receipts of which were submitted to the county for reimbursement but were rejected. Along with his expensive fish, Goldman ate what he claimed were nearly $8,000 worth of defense team costs, more than $48,000 in today’s money.)
55 LIZA
After running the Bayberry Bend pretty much single-handedly the first year, Mom decided she needed a manager and once again hung a HELP WANTED sign in the front window. Ron spent the workweek in Boston and only occasional weekends with us on the Cape, leaving Mom to happily run her motel. I’m not sure if she interviewed anybody else, but within a couple of days of opening the place for the second season, Frank appeared on the doorstep. He was an odd man who always seemed to have eyeliner and a dab of lipstick on his otherwise pasty, puffy face. He tapped on the front door and stuck his head inside the office.
“Hellooooooo! Are you still looking for help?”
Mom hired him on the spot and put him to work that day. Frank’s résumé, credentials, and references to manage a motel? Not so much.
“I couldn’t run the place alone, could I?” Mom said.
Even though Frank often looked like an unmade bed, he was a hard worker. He was average height and pudgy, especially around his belly, with brown hair that was long, but not hippie long, just long enough to curl uncombed over his collar. He was jolly, silly even, and laughed a lot, strutting around Bayberry Bend as if it were his personal vaudeville stage. Behind his back, Mom called him a “flaming fag,” but I think she was actually really fond of him. We all were. And he seemed to like me and Louisa. He took us to the dump to collect scrap sheets of plywood so he could make us a fort in back of the motel. And whenever Mom disappeared down the road, he stepped in to look after us. It must have been more than he signed up for, but he didn’t complain.
“Frank just loves being a fag,” Mom said under her breath probably once too often, but I don’t know if he did love it. Sure, he loved wearing lipstick and mascara, he loved tight, colorful clothes, and he loved mooning after other guys, but sometimes it seemed like all of his dancing around, happily fluttering his hands, was somehow an act. At times he looked so sad it made me wonder about his “loving being a fag.” It was illegal to be gay in those days, even in Provincetown, and Frank talked about being homosexual in a whisper. How much could anyone love that?
And gay or not, happy or actually sad, he was nice to me. Everyone liked Louisa, but I was the difficult daughter, the “one that’s gonna put me in an early grave,” my mother often said, and most people seemed to agree. But not Frank. I guess Frank appreciated that I was different, like him maybe.
One June evening, as Mom was getting ready to go downtown to see Bobby Short and his orchestra at the Crown & Anchor and Louisa and I sat on the bed reading, Frank appeared at the screen door, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other.
“Yoo-hoo! Come on, girls, open the door for Frank!”
I looked at Louisa, but she kept her eyes on her book, Charlotte’s Web, so I got up and went to the door.
He waited on the other side of the screen with a toothy grin.
“Evening, sunshine!” he said, laughing.
I smiled; he always made me feel better. I unlatched the hook and held the door open for him.
He was dressed in a skintight stretchy paisley shirt and white hip-hugger bell-bottoms with what looked like Mom’s wide white leather belt that made his stomach hang over the buckle. He jumped through the open doorway into the room, causing the entire place to shake under his weight, then did a wide-arme
d pirouette, not spilling a drop of his drink, and announced, “I am what they call downtown a whole mouthful.” Louisa and I looked at each other and laughed; we didn’t understand exactly why what he said was funny, but we knew just looking at him was.
“Big night for old Frank, ladies! I shaved my legs,” he said with a wink. “Wanna see?”
We giggled, and he put his drink on the side table and made quite a show of pointing his toe like a ballerina and pulling up one of his pantlegs about six inches to reveal a fleshy, pasty calf with now-smooth skin.
That summer, the Provincetown Players were staging a play called Camino Real, and while Mom couldn’t afford to go to the theater, she heard it starred some handsome new actor. His name was Richard Gere, and he was evidently a “real swoon.” Bob and Frank talked about him so much I half expected to one day find the “dreamboat” actor smoking cigarettes with them on the lawn chairs in the back of the motel, all wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses and holding up reflectors to work on their tans.
* * *
After a few weeks back in Provincetown, I realized something big had happened there that winter and wondered if it had anything to do with Billy’s visit to West Bridgewater. But no matter how much I listened to the adults around me, I couldn’t get the details of exactly who was involved or what had happened. They always stopped their whispering as soon as I came into the room. I wondered if they were deliberately keeping something or someone from me, but I’d felt that way my whole life. Everything seemed to be a secret. I had always been so good at eavesdropping on people, but all of a sudden it felt like the volume had been turned way down. All I knew was that my mother started locking our doors and windows at night, something she’d never done before.