The Babysitter

by Liza Rodman

  By midsummer, the whispering stopped and everyone was talking out loud about murdered girls buried in the woods. As the rumors and fears circulated around Provincetown, I tried to make ten-year-old sense of it. The woods of the Outer Cape and behind our house in West Bridgewater had always been peaceful for me. Places where I played with friends and alone for hours. Places where I felt happy and safe. And in Truro, a place where I had been with Tony many times.

  I thought back to those drives to the dump and to the Truro woods with Tony and remembered how grateful I was for the fresh air coming in the windows as we drove back down Route 6 toward home. Inside the truck often smelled bad, sort of like lobster and clamshells when they’ve been in a hot dumpster too long. Maybe that’s why those seagulls always followed the truck, I thought, remembering our usual trail of birds.

  Then suddenly I thought of something from one of those drives, but it was dreamlike and fragmented, and I wondered how much of it was true or if the scary rumors around town were making me remember things that weren’t real at all. In that foggy memory, we were driving down Route 6 and Tony started in on a long list of complaints about his life: Avis, the kids, his brother, his boss—they were all stupid jerks and ding-a-lings and lowlifes, and he needed to get the hell out of Provincetown for good. When we got to the woods, he parked the truck and told me to stay put; he had to check on things, and he’d be right back. But he wasn’t right back, and I nearly fell asleep waiting in the front seat, lulled by the summer heat. He finally came back, and as we drove out of the woods, he stared straight ahead out the windshield, his eyes unblinking. I felt bad for whatever was making him so sad. Neither of us spoke as we drove back to Provincetown.

  Dream or not, I missed those days. I wondered if I was ever going to see Tony or Cecelia again.

  56 TONY

  As the man charged with designing and executing a successful defense for a man now accused of not one but four infamous and monstrous murders, Maurice Goldman had few options. He also had a client with a history of prolific lying, most of it to the Provincetown police and all of it admissible in court. Goldman knew the prosecution’s first line of attack would be the simplest: the innocent don’t lie.

  He began by looking for Chuck Hansen, the man Tony first implicated in the murders, in the slim hope that the case against Tony was one of mistaken identity. But all too soon, Goldman realized it was a fool’s errand.

  “Listen, fella,” he told Tony, “this Chuck Hansen doesn’t exist. If he existed, we would have found him by now. Trust me.”1

  After Hansen failed to materialize, Tony then named an ever-lengthening list of “friends” who probably killed the women, first among them Cory Devereaux, his young acolyte who had sold him the .22 revolver. Tony not only tried to frame Cory for the murders, he also told investigators that he had a strong love-hate relationship with Cory that had been “homosexual but not homogenital… whatever that distinction means,” his defense team noted.2

  When Goldman informed the prosecution that Tony had named Cory Devereaux as the guilty party, Bernie Flynn was sent to check him out. Flynn found the teenager squirrely but credible; Flynn even admitted to a grudging admiration for the street-tough kid, seeing a bit of himself in the troubled teen. But Cory had a solid alibi, and he passed three polygraphs. When Goldman informed Tony that Cory was innocent, he became incredulous, insisting that the evidence was there and then that the cops were “hiding something” in order to nail him.

  Goldman’s best chance at a defense, and one that if successful would have changed criminal defense law, was to petition the court for a plea of “guilty but insane” as opposed to “innocent by reason of insanity.” Goldman knew that once the jury heard the details of the murders, as well as viewed autopsy photos of the brutalized bodies, those twelve men and women would never be able to look at Costa and deem him “innocent.”

  Because the Bridgewater team had declared Tony competent to stand trial, Goldman enlisted the services of his own team of psychologists and psychiatrists who would, he hoped, be able to reveal the truly crazy, if articulate and poised, man who had eluded detection at Bridgewater.

  In the thirteen months between his return from Bridgewater and the start of his trial on May 11, 1970, Tony continued to undergo what became an unprecedented number of examinations, including ten by doctors brought in to evaluate his mental state and four full physical examinations. Tony wrote in his prison diary, marveling at all of the attention he was getting. His genetic and chromosomal makeup was also tested to determine whether Tony had a so-called double Y chromosome. If he did, Goldman could use that disorder’s traits—among them impulsivity, explosive temper, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior—in his defense. But those tests showed no abnormalities; Tony was an otherwise healthy specimen.

  Through the barrage of examinations and interviews, Tony proved to be a prolific and “extraordinary liar, deluded by his own skill in weaving tales… either to fill in events which he cannot remember or to conceal from himself what he does not want to remember.”3 To test that memory, the defense team gave Tony copies of the gruesome autopsy reports; he only pretended to read Susan Perry’s and refused to even look at Patricia Walsh’s. When challenged in one of his lies, he erupted in rage, yelling that he was being framed, and then later was “all smiles” and said he made a mistake in what he had earlier told investigators. His facile manipulation of truth and his endless lies frustrated Goldman and made it impossible for him to know exactly what he would be facing from the prosecution when the case went to trial. It also made it very hard to nail down a clear story for the book in progress.

  Nearly every examination and interview with Tony was tape-recorded, and on those recordings he assumed various personae, his voice veering from that of a New England fisherman to Ivy League highbrow to whispering child. His examiners were curious about Tony’s odd elocution—prissy, almost effeminate in its precise, fussy pronunciation, and how it was totally out of character with his masculine good looks.

  In one of Tony’s meetings with his attorneys, Goldman began the session asking Tony to recall the exact timeline of January 25, the last day Pat and Mary Anne had been seen alive.

  “Well, I can tell you it was a brilliant day,” Tony said.

  The attorneys all looked at one another, eyebrows raised. Tony sounded like Prince Philip, or rather, Queen Elizabeth. For whatever reason he had assumed a fey British accent for the meeting.

  “Tony, why are you talking that way?”

  “I am sure I don’t know what you mean, Maurice.”

  He also spent more than forty-five hours being interviewed by Lester Allen, more time than he spent with any other member of his defense team, his family, or his psychiatric examiners combined. In those sessions Tony frequently answered Allen’s questions in an arched, affected manner—“This I do not know,” “Yes, I too am strong on that idea.” “I don’t rightly recall,” and “I am as perplexed as you by this.”

  When asked about his philosophy of life, Tony said his “figure for identity” was Jesus Christ and that “if someone is hurting or slandering or destroying someone else, they in turn must be destroyed.”4

  Between Tony’s British lord, pious martyr, and stuffy professor, the defense team had enough Tony Costas to fill an entire cell block.

  * * *

  The most thorough psychiatric evaluation of the prisoner was done by Dr. Harold Williams from McLean Hospital outside of Boston, the oldest mental hospital in New England, ranked as the best free-standing psychiatric facility in the country. Tony boasted to his attorneys that because of his drug dealing, organized crime might be involved in his case, so Williams, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor Larry Hagman, took a loaded .357 magnum with him to the jail. After one of his visits, he ran into Avis as he waited for his gun to be returned to him from the safety lockup. He noted that she stood transfixed, watching him reload the gun and snap its barrel back into position.

  Williams walked aw
ay from each session with Tony emotionally and physically exhausted after spending so much time with the “evil” that surrounded Tony and permeated the room.

  “I felt the devil was watching… from Costa’s side of the table,” he told Goldman. Coming from a man who dedicated his professional life to working with the criminally insane, that said something. Yet despite his personal revulsion, he was able to provide what was the most detailed explanation of Tony’s history, psychosis, and murders.

  Williams postulated that Tony’s obsession as a young boy with his dead father and then his feeling of abandonment sparked by Cecelia’s marriage to Bonaviri and birth of Vinnie were at the root of Tony’s pent-up fury against all women. The murders, and specifically raping and dismembering the corpses, allowed him a “glorious” release as he acted out a horrific drama of incest and matricide during which he returned to the blissful state of infancy when he had Cecelia all to himself.5 And finally, because Tony told Williams that “the real Tony” was “buried deep,” the act of burying his victims ensured they would be “with him” forever.6

  Maurice Goldman heard of all this in a stunned silence. While he knew Tony was guilty of the murders, having Williams lay out the measure of his ruined and dangerous psyche was shocking. But at the end of Williams’s evaluation, even with his damning indictment of Tony’s moral and ethical code, the doctor was unable to render Tony legally insane. Unlike a true psychotic, Tony knew right from wrong, and further, he had consistently tried to cover up the murders—another indication that he knew the degree of his crimes. Finally, Williams told Goldman that he deemed Costa a sexually dangerous person who should be sent to prison, not a psychiatric hospital. Rather than accept the lurid diagnosis, Goldman fired Dr. Williams and began looking for yet another psychiatrist to tell the defense team what it needed for an insanity defense.

  57 LIZA

  One day while I was hiding in the Bayberry Bend laundry room reading a Nancy Drew mystery, I heard Frank and Bob chatting as they sunned themselves on the lawn behind the office. They were talking about how the “murdered girls” had been “all cut up and shit” and how the hearts had been removed and had teeth marks on them. “Someone really did a fucking number on those girls,” but Frank and Bob didn’t believe he could have done it. I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t want to come out of my hiding place to ask.

  The one person not talking about the murders was Tony, but that was because he’d disappeared. At camp I’d finally smoked my first whole cigarette, and I wanted to show him how I had learned how to blow smoke rings, just like he did. I asked Auntie if she’d seen him, but she just gave me a weird look and said no. Then, I went looking for Cecelia and found her in the laundry room at the Royal Coachman. She looked awful and more tired than usual, with the circles under her eyes nearly black. She hugged me as always, but as I lingered in her arms I smelled liquor on her breath, and it made me sad. It had never smelled so strong, and I didn’t like it. I pulled away gently and asked her about Tony, but she just shook her head and looked away. When she turned back, I could see she’d been crying. She reached out and patted my shoulder.

  “I’ll tell him you were asking for him. He loved you girls,” she said, pausing to adjust her sweater, then continued folding a pile of towels.

  Loved, I thought. She said loved not love. He can’t be dead. I would have heard if he was dead, wouldn’t I? He must have left town. Tony had always talked about going to California. I figured he had gone there for the winter and just hadn’t come home. And just like that, he became another man who disappeared from my life without saying goodbye.

  As I walked back across Route 6A to the Bayberry Bend, I imagined him driving west into the setting sun with the top down, singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” at the top of his lungs.

  Tony must be gone for good, I thought. No wonder Cecelia looked so sad.

  A few days later, as I took clean sheets out of the washer, a station wagon pulled into the parking lot, even though we had the NO VACANCY sign hanging out front. Mom was working at the front desk, and she grumbled What the hell do these people want? The screen door squeaked open, and a man in Bermuda shorts and a pink golf shirt walked into the office.

  “Which way to the woods where that man killed all those girls?” he asked.

  Mom barely looked up from the column of figures she was adding and gave a wave of her hand with her index finger pointing south.

  58 TONY

  In addition to the slew of psychiatric evaluations, Goldman had Tony undergo a series of polygraphs with the aim of getting something from him that he refused to give: the truth of what happened to the women in the woods, as well as the three women who had vanished after their encounters with Tony—Bonnie Williams, Diane Federoff, and Barbara Spalding. There were also as many as five more young women whose disappearances in the same time frame were eerily similar, and Tony’s own defense team suspected he may have killed and buried those missing women in remote graves as well.1

  With the truth, Goldman would be better armed in facing the prosecution and for building his “guilty but insane” defense. And a confession wouldn’t hurt book sales either.

  Maurice Goldman asked Bridgewater State Hospital’s lead polygraph examiner, Charles H. Zimmerman, to conduct the tests. Zimmerman knew a thing or two about dealing with pathological liars and violent criminals. Born in Germany in 1920, he had had an illustrious career at the German crime laboratory in Frankfurt before immigrating to the United States and becoming a citizen in 1964, where he worked on high-profile intelligence matters, some with the CIA. In his career, he conducted more than ten thousand tests, including those on Patty Hearst and each of the suspects in the Boston Strangler case. Charlie, as he was called by friends and colleagues, spoke in a soft voice with a slight German accent, and his modest humility hid a ferocious tenacity that could disarm even experienced criminals. Through his career, in addition to bolstering the state’s evidence, Zimmerman often worked with defense teams, believing that “informed counsel is brilliant counsel.”

  Zimmerman not only respected Maurice Goldman; he embraced challenging cases, and Tony’s proved too irresistible to pass up. He and his wife had a summer home in Sandwich on the Upper Cape and Zimmerman agreed to work on weekends with Tony at the nearby Barnstable County Jail. It didn’t hurt that Goldman talked big about the huge payoff the book and movie deals would bring, a piece of which would presumably go to Zimmerman because while he submitted bills for his time to Goldman, none of them was ever paid.2

  After Zimmerman finished a session with Tony, he turned to a colleague who had observed the proceedings and asked his opinion.

  “Charlie, he’s got problems,” the man said.

  Indeed.

  While Tony had denied any direct involvement in the murders, he had had “reactions” to nearly every direct question about the crimes, indicating considerable knowledge. And, Zimmerman knew, innocence did not leave traces on a lie detector test.

  In the polygraphs, Tony proved himself a master at manipulating the dialogue away from the question at hand and diverting it to subjects that Tony then rambled on about, often incoherently. Fellow inmates had assured him that it was a breeze to beat a lie detector; you had to breathe slowly and methodically and just keep talking. That Tony could do.

  As early as June 1969, Zimmerman got Tony to admit to “being the cause of” Christine Gallant’s death and to helping dismember Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, but, as had been his pattern, he maintained that Cory had done the actual killing. Susan Perry’s and Sydney Monzon’s murders, he continued to insist, were a “mystery” to him. It would take nine polygraphs in all and countless re-creations and variations of his story before Zimmerman finally seemed to break through Tony’s wall and get him to admit to not only knowing about their murders but to knowing details that only someone who at least smelled the smoke of the gun would know.

  In one of the tests, Zimmerman did all the talking for the first tw
enty-six minutes. When Tony finally spoke, he asked Zimmerman to turn his eyes away; he didn’t want Zimmerman to look at him while he told him something. Zimmerman complied and turned toward the window away from Tony, but it wasn’t enough.

  “You can see me in the reflection. Could you please put your coat over the window?” Tony said.

  By hooking his jacket over the window lock, Zimmerman was able to cover enough of the glass to satisfy Tony. He sat back down, made sure all the connections were solid, and waited.

  When Tony began speaking, he sounded wounded, upset, scared, as if the reality of his prison cage was finally hitting him. Then, he described in terrible and precise detail how Pat and Mary Anne were murdered, again insisting it was Cory who did the killing. But in this test, he finally revealed that it was he who stabbed Mary Anne in order to silence her “gurgling.” It was, he insisted, the “humane” thing to do. Then, he described cutting off her head. In a voice flat and without affect, Tony said he’d grabbed her head by the hair, wedged the knife against her throat, and cut back and forth, as if slicing salami, until he’d severed the head completely. He then carried the head by the hair to where he threw it into the hole, on top of Sydney. In the process he had hacked off a handful of hair and threw that in the hole as well. Zimmerman was shocked by the admission; never before had he had a patient feign innocence of murder but admit to dismemberment. When he asked Tony why he went to the incredible labor of cutting the women into so many pieces, he responded easily, even pleasantly, “so they would fit in the hole,” as if pointing out the pure logic of it.

  In the last test, on October 26, Tony finally came clean.

  “The fact is, I do remember committing these murders. Why, I don’t know. I’d like to have someone study it. They were committed by me though, for reasons I don’t really know. There’s a lot that I don’t remember.”3