The Babysitter

by Liza Rodman

  Zimmerman asked him, “Now, as you look back on these acts and the realization that you’re the person who did it, do you feel that you are mentally sick?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tony said eagerly. “I believe so. This is a problem that needs to be ironed out. There has got to be something there, otherwise they wouldn’t have been committed. There has to be something from that.”I 4

  Zimmerman concluded his sessions and felt as though he’d never witnessed such cold-blooded displays. Like Harold Williams, Zimmerman found that his time with Tony left him exhausted and depleted.

  Tony’s case personified an issue that had nagged Zimmerman. He felt that the United States should have one federally funded institution where mass killers, like Tony Costa, could be studied in order to better understand what caused their violent rage. The killers’ psychological profiles could eventually establish a set of guidelines for psychiatry at large and for the courtroom. Zimmerman’s hope was to develop a psychological test for mass killers that could reveal the early signs of psychopathy, prevent a possible recurrence, and create a central data bank to provide psychiatric guidelines for judges, probation officers, and criminal justice professionals.

  Although the FBI created a Behavioral Science Unit in 1972 to research a rise in sexual assault and murder,II Charlie Zimmerman would likely be disappointed that progress on a data bank to identify and prevent those offenders from committing violent crimes before they occur has not yet been reached more than fifty years later.

  * * *

  Because of the laws surrounding attorney-client privilege, Tony would have had to agree to share his confession with the prosecution. He didn’t, so the state’s case against him was purely circumstantial; although he was the last person to be seen with each of the dead women, there was no evidence, no eyewitnesses, and because he had been very careful to wear gloves, no fingerprints that linked him directly with the murders. (Although Tony had raped the corpses, it wasn’t until 1984 that DNA was discovered as a unique marker.) Nonetheless, Goldman struggled to build a credible defense because of Tony’s profligate lying. Finally, he was left with no other option than to claim that Tony’s drug use made him do it. During several jail cell consultations, Goldman, Cavanaugh, and Allen tried their damnedest to explain their strategy to an uncomprehending Tony.

  “Mr. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you have no evidence against Tony Costa,” Goldman began, illustrating how he might address the court. “But if you did, the man did it completely under the influence of drugs, barbiturates, and he was in a state under which he didn’t know what he was legally doing.”5

  That too was going to be a hard sell, because since the day of his arrest Tony hadn’t shown any sign of addiction or withdrawal. Still, the drug-addiction claim was all Goldman had left.

  * * *

  The last psychiatrist Goldman hired was Dr. Jack Ewalt, who held the Bullard Chair of Psychiatry at Harvard and was the architect of President John F. Kennedy’s task force on mental health. Now that Tony had finally put the knife in his own hand at the scene of Pat’s and Mary Anne’s murders, Goldman hoped that Ewalt would be able to break through Tony’s defenses and get the entire story. Ewalt interviewed Tony eight times, during which Tony warmed to the idea that even if he did kill the women, it wasn’t his fault, the drugs made me do it. He told Ewalt about the girls’ murders as a series of flashbacks, as if they were drug-infused dreams rather than a clear road map of his crimes. Even as Tony got closer to telling the truth, he again dodged an actual confession by claiming a sort of selective amnesia. In his “memory” of killing Sydney, Tony once again blamed the drugs, and, speaking in the third person, feigned shock and horror at “his” having killed Sydney, then stripping and raping her body. He described the scene to Lester Allen:

  First there was a memory of Sydney holding his hand as he guided her through the woods from the road where the car was parked to his cache of stolen drugs. Then there was a glimpse of her kneeling and watching him dig up the ammo can. She said something and he strained to hear her soft voice. And then the memory of a flash of a knife and her small sigh as she tumbled backward, her lovely hair covering half her face as she laid on the dirt. How small and childlike her body was when he stripped off her clothes. How vulnerable she seemed under the frenzied stabbing. And finally, the memory of a voice, his voice, screaming “Why?! Why?!”6

  In his report to Goldman, Ewalt apologized for not being able to deliver what the attorney most wanted—a clear diagnosis of Tony’s psychosis. Just as Williams had, Ewalt told Goldman that Tony clearly knew the difference between right and wrong, and therefore he would face the full extent of punishment for his crimes.

  I. Within weeks, Tony had recanted his confessions, again insisting that various friends, real and imagined, had committed the crimes. He would maintain his innocence for the rest of his life.

  II. It was Robert Ressler, an investigator on this FBI team, who coined the term “serial killer” and would later be profiled in the Netflix series Mindhunter.

  59 LIZA

  Mom loved her life on Cape Cod. She loved being her own boss and sweeping the warm sand from her motel’s walkways. She loved the energy of all the weird and wonderful folks who crowded Commercial Street in their flamboyant outfits. And she loved dancing the nights away. Most nights, Louisa and I were still left with Sally, the chambermaid, in number nine. Mom figured between Frank and Sally we no longer needed a traditional babysitter (as if we’d ever had one of those).

  Frank had been a wonderful find for her; he felt more like a girlfriend than an employee. On nights when she was headed to the clubs, she would pour them both a “dressing” drink while she put on what Grampa Georgie called her war paint. As she teased her hair into the perfect beehive, the two of them would laugh, and Frank would try on her different lipsticks and teeter around our tiny room in a pair of her high-heeled mules, with a cheap feather boa that she’d found at a flea market flung around his neck. (Why Frank was allowed to play with her lipsticks and makeup and high heels and boa but Louisa and I were absolutely forbidden to touch anything of hers, period, I didn’t dare ask.)

  Some nights she went to the Pilgrim Club on Shank Painter Road, which was rapidly evolving into what would become Piggy’s, a wildly popular dance bar that welcomed both gay and straight patrons. Other nights, and with Ron at home in Newton, she’d head out with Auntie to what was known as the “dyke bar,” the Pied Piper. At the Pied Piper, they became fascinated with a lady singer who frequently entertained there. The woman had been married with twin daughters, but she left her husband and children to move in with her girlfriend. It was the first Mom and Auntie had ever heard of a woman leaving her husband to live with a girlfriend, and they were obsessed, and even a little envious at the thought of it.

  But as the summer rolled on, Mom and Ron suddenly broke up and her already sporadic good mood vanished altogether. She was pissed. She had tried to plan a “family” trip to Disneyland, and I guess the problem was that we weren’t, in fact, a family. Louisa and I had barely figured out where Disneyland was on the map when Mom started in on Ron, asking when they’d be married; maybe they should do it in Disneyland? He didn’t lie.

  “I don’t want to get married again. And,” he added, “I don’t want any more kids.”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he meant Louisa and me. I wasn’t surprised; nobody seemed to want us around, besides maybe Cecelia and Tony and sometimes Grampa Georgie. But I know she hated seeing what she had hoped would be her ticket to an easier life disappear. I took extra care to avoid her because it didn’t take much for her to backhand me for telling a lie I hadn’t told or to chase me down and drag me to the sink and wash my mouth out with soap if she so much as imagined I’d used the s-word, which by now I was doing a lot. I usually said it under my breath—“What a little shit,” or “What a shithead,” but not as under-my-breath as I hoped, so she would bend me over the hard edge of the sink and run the bar of soap across
my clenched teeth. She asked me where I learned to talk like that, and it took every ounce of my self-control not to answer, “Duh, I wonder.”

  Her drinking started earlier and earlier in the day. One day she had a meeting in town and no one around to look after Louisa and me, so she took us along. Afterward, we all went out for a rare treat: chowder and a foot-long hot dog on MacMillan Wharf. We sat at a picnic table outside the hot dog place and ordered our food, but Mom just asked for an ice water. When it came, she drank the water and poured gin in the cup from a bottle hidden in her purse. After our meals were brought to us and before I thought to keep my mouth shut, I complained that my clam chowder was too hot to eat. Without taking her eyes off mine, she reached into her drink, took out a few ice cubes, and threw them into my soup, splashing the hot chowder in my face.

  “There. That should cool it off, princess,” she said, taking a swallow of her drink and eyeing me over the rim of the cup.

  I wiped bits of clam from my cheek and nodded, picked up my spoon, and hoped she couldn’t see the tears gathering in my eyes.

  Mercifully, her mood was somewhat softened when two new guys came on the scene. One was a married lawyer with an office on Commercial Street who took her out for drinks, and the other, Steve, was a frequent guest at Bayberry Bend who came to Provincetown, he said, for the fishing. His arms and legs were deeply tanned but so hairy you could barely make out the skin beneath. He took us for rides in his Jeep and for cookouts out on Long Point. He was nice, like Tony, so I forgave him for all that hair and gave him about a seven on the boyfriend scale. But then one weekend he brought his girlfriend to Provincetown with him, so that was that. When we were cleaning their room, I watched Mom dip her fingers into the woman’s face cream and spread it slowly up her neck and all over her face.

  “Someday,” she said, leaning into the mirror and watching her hand smooth the cream, “I’m going to have expensive cream like this.”

  I looked away, a little sad for her.

  In mid-July, Ron suddenly reappeared. He flew into Provincetown Municipal Airport on a private plane and took Mom to a champagne lunch at the Provincetown Inn overlooking Long Point and the harbor. Over dessert, he presented her with a two-carat diamond. She came home holding up her left hand, turning the ring this way and that, marveling. Two days later, she left Frank in charge and she and Ron flew to South Carolina to elope. Again, I don’t remember any goodbyes. What I do remember is Frank announcing that Mom had “run off” with Ron to get married and that she’d be home in a couple of days. I couldn’t help but wonder why in the world she’d run off and marry Ron, a mere five and a half on my boyfriend scale. And why Ron’s sudden change of heart about marriage and more kids? I worried about that, but Mom didn’t question her good fortune.

  I’d have a stepfather. I remembered that Tony had talked a lot about this stupid stepfather, and I hoped Ron wouldn’t turn out to be stupid too.

  When they returned, and even though she was now married, our summer in Provincetown didn’t change much. She moved us into one of Bayberry’s two-bedroom cottages, because we couldn’t very well sleep in the same room with her and Ron, and now we had Jill to help with cleaning toilets and hairy drains. Danny, because he was a boy and the youngest of us, was off the hook.

  That summer, along with a stepfather, another sister, and a little brother, I also got my period. Not that anyone noticed.

  60 TONY

  Late in 1969, both the defense and the prosecution were wrapping up their investigations and compiling their list of witnesses. But then on December 21, one witness was taken off the list, permanently. Cecelia Costa Bonaviri suffered a brain aneurysm and died in an aisle of King’s Department Store in Hyannis while shopping for Christmas gifts.

  Tony, still being held at the Barnstable jail, blamed himself for her death.

  “I feel as if I’ve lost my last friend,” Tony told Justin Cavanaugh. “I might as well’ve killed her myself.”

  It may have been the truest thing Tony Costa ever said.

  Her body was taken back to Provincetown, where viewing hours were held at Nickerson Funeral Home, the same mortuary where the autopsies of Patricia Walsh, Mary Anne Wysocki, and Sydney Monzon had been conducted nine months before. Tony was then taken to the mass at St. Peter the Apostle. He was allowed to be unshackled; Chief Marshall had received a tip that there could be an assassination attempt on Tony’s life, so security was already at a maximum, and the shackles would be overkill. After the service, Tony watched Father Leo Duarte give the last rites over his mother’s grave. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Avis and remained dry-eyed throughout the ordeal, but as he was led back to the police cruiser, Tony’s shoulders sagged, and once seated between the two officers in the back seat, he put his head in his hands and wept.

  * * *

  In the year since the murders, Provincetown locals had become desensitized to the horror. “Tony Costa digs girls!” and “Chop Chop Costa” were among the one-liners that went around town like the bad jokes they were—cocktail-party banter, otherwise funny if one discounted the brutal murders and mutilations of four women.

  Tony loved all the attention he was getting. A popular joke circulating around the Cape made macabre fun of the particular way in which the women had been killed: “Tony Costa walked into a Cadillac dealer and asked the price of an Eldorado. ‘Oh, it’ll cost you an arm and a leg,’ the salesman said. ‘It’s a deal!’ Costa replied.” Tony even embellished the joke: “I said, ‘This is the car I want.’ And the salesman said, ‘Son, you can’t afford it; it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.’ And I said, ‘If you have a shovel handy, I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ ”

  In April 1970, with the trial only weeks away, Goldman staged his last-ditch effort to get information out of Tony that might help bolster the defense: hypnosis. With a proper confession and detailed information about the murders, Goldman could plead either diminished capacity due to his heavy drug use or use his “guilty but insane” defense. He felt that Tony, while undoubtedly a killer, belonged in a state hospital for the criminally insane, not a federal prison.1

  But after three tries, the most the hypnotist, Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, got out of Tony was an admission that “I just got to” commit murder, but no explanation of why. However, the tapes and transcripts of her three sessions with Tony curiously never ended up in the case files and archives. What remained was the repulsion Stephen Lipman, one of Tony’s defense attorneys, felt after having sat in on two of the sessions. “Quite frankly,” he later said, “it was disgusting. I couldn’t attend the third [session].”2

  Inside the Barnstable County Jail walls, Tony’s days were grim. He had a lot of time to consider his crimes and perhaps feel real remorse for having taken the lives of at least five women. But true to his pattern, his abiding sorrow was only for himself. In one letter to Lester Allen he wrote, “The hostile sensations have gone, but the sad, lonely memory remains forever. To live with such inner sorrow and regret with no contrition available ever, is punishment beyond which any man’s sadistic qualities could possibly contrive.”3 Once again, it was all about Tony.

  He spent his days pacing his cell, writing furiously in his journals, and urinating in paper cups because he couldn’t bring himself to use the stainless steel toilet in the corner.

  “He’s a very sick guy,” Armand Fernandes, the assistant district attorney for Barnstable County, observed.4

  61 TONY

  After fifteen months and all of Goldman’s machinations, countless psychiatric evaluations, polygraphs, and hypnosis sessions, it was over with barely any fuss.

  On May 11, 1970, the bailiff escorted the jury into the famed Barnstable County courtroom in single file. He wore the traditional eighteenth-century garb of the court—a long blue coat and tails—and carried a tall staff. Tony wore a suit Goldman’s wife had picked out of Maurice’s closet; she had let out the cuffs of the jacket and pants, but they were still inches too short.

  Instea
d of trying him on four counts of murder, the prosecution opted for the two in which they had him dead to rights because of the stolen car: those of Mary Anne Wysocki and Patricia Walsh. They concluded that since it’s not possible to serve more than one life sentence, they didn’t need to try him for the murders of Sydney Monzon and Susan Perry. Although Massachusetts had enacted a “mercy bill” in 1951 that removed the mandatory death sentence for murder in most cases, given the heinousness of the crimes, the prosecution left open the possibility of sending Tony to the electric chair.

  Before testimony began, the jury was taken out to the Truro woods to view the burial sites. A caravan of National Guard jeeps drove nearly thirty-five people, including the defense and prosecution teams, Judge Robert H. Beaudreau, state and local police, the press, and of course, Tony Costa, into the woods, the heavy brush scraping both sides of the vehicles. They parked in the clearing and the group was walked down a narrow path to a small hole dug into the side of a hill.

  After the “tour” ended, the caravan drove back into Provincetown, where Tony’s friends who were walking on the sidewalks paused to watch the cars pass. They cheered and yelled, “Yay, Tony!” and a teenager spotted Tony’s car and trailed it on his bike through the streets. Tony sat smiling, accepting the adulation like an astronaut returning from the moon. He waved with shackled hands through the window.

  With the trial having formally begun, the prosecution opened its case. The Wysockis were too ill and perhaps too broken to attend the trial, so Patricia Walsh’s father was the first witness called to the stand. When asked to identify his daughter’s cable-knit sweater found in Tony’s closet, Leonard Walsh fought back tears as his fingers hovered over the sweater; he couldn’t seem to bring himself to touch something that intimate to his daughter’s skin. But when handed a picture of her blue VW bug, he clutched it to him like a talisman, and identified the car as belonging to Patricia. Catherine Walsh followed her husband to the stand, and as she answered questions, at one point she paused and leaned forward, almost out of her chair, fixing her eyes on Tony until finally Armand Fernandes, the assistant district attorney, noticed what was happening and distracted her with another question. When Bob Turbidy took the stand, he identified the suede handbag found in the woods as belonging to Patricia Walsh.