by Liza Rodman
“How do you know it was Patricia Walsh’s?” Fernandes asked.
Turbidy put his head down briefly and took a long breath. Then, he looked up at Fernandes.
“Because I made it for her.”1
Goldman didn’t cross-examine, and in fact would only cross a handful of times as the state’s parade of witnesses gave their testimony.
When the prosecution rested, the defense began, and over the next two days called ten witnesses, but the only one who got a reaction out of Tony was one of the last—Avis. He cried as he watched her take the stand, steam gathering behind his glasses. He removed his glasses and Goldman handed him a handkerchief to wipe his eyes and clean the lenses.
In the months before the trial started, Avis had told Tony’s defense team that she felt as if she was “going to lose my mind” and “totally freak out on the stand.” When asked if she’d seen a doctor about it, she said she hadn’t because she feared something might be wrong. “I think I have leukemia or cancer and they’re going to tell me I’m going to die pretty soon.”2 Lester Allen promised they would give her something to calm her nerves when she testified; “After all,” he told her, “we have an obligation to help you out… a contract with you… and it’s in our interest to keep you healthy and to keep you functioning.”3
When the day of her testimony finally came, Avis was indeed functional, but visibly nervous and giggling and waving at Tony as she passed the defense table. She wore a plaid miniskirt with a crocheted vest over a turtleneck jersey and a peace-sign medallion around her neck. Long bangs covered her eyebrows, and tinted aviator glasses obscured her eyes. Once on the stand, she held one hand in front of her mouth, possibly to hide her crooked teeth, and in the other she held a sprig of white lilacs. She was repeatedly admonished to “Speak up so the jury can hear you.”
“I’m talking as loud as I can, okay?” she retorted, again covering her mouth and giggling. Goldman chided her, telling her to “Pay attention! It’s not fair” to Tony. Meanwhile, Tony sat at the defense table, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Avis finally stopped her odd antics when district attorney Edmund Dinis approached the witness stand to cross-examine her. In all the prior interviews she had given the defense team, the police, and the prosecution, she was asked again and again to discuss her and Tony’s sex life. She had spoken about her promiscuity, her drug use, and their sexual history casually, almost as if she’d been reciting a recipe. But when Dinis began his questioning by asking her about her overdose of chloral hydrate, she refused to discuss it, as if she had suddenly become very aware of just how much she was revealing.
Dinis: Would you tell us about the incident with Dr. Hiebert that happened early in your marriage?
Avis: No. I really would rather not.
Dinis: You would rather not?
Avis: Yeah.4
Avis admitted to Tony’s defense team that she and most of Tony’s friends weren’t “afraid to lie to police or in court. They don’t think anybody’s going to find out. If I was caught up in something this big, and asked to put my hand on the Bible, it wouldn’t matter to me. You can find justification for lying.”5
As Avis left the stand, she blew Tony a kiss and then formed her fingers into a peace sign.
Goldman called a long list of Tony’s friends, colleagues, and followers, several of them still in their early teens, to the stand. Each told a variation of the same story: Tony was high, Tony was depressed, Tony was out of work, Tony was a mess, Tony liked to talk, but Tony was never angry: “I never saw Tony yell”; “Tony was super mellow”; “Tony wouldn’t hurt a fly.” And on and on as the team tried to build a case that, if not for the profligate drug use thanks to Dr. Callis, Tony would have been a model father and husband, a talented carpenter with plenty of work to support his family.
In a case wrought with damning details, Goldman was gratified that none of the grisly facts about Susan’s and Sydney’s deaths was permissible in the trial because Tony was only charged with the murders of Pat and Mary Anne. In particular, Goldman was relieved that the jury never learned that Susan’s body had basically been “dumped by the side of the road.”6 Unlike the other three women who walked unaware into their burial sites, Susan was transported in pieces to hers and hastily buried only feet from where Tony parked the car on the dirt road. Goldman justifiably feared that if the jury knew and envisioned that chilling scene, it would have assured that Tony went to the electric chair.
One of the last witnesses to take the stand for the defense was Tony’s brother, Vinnie. While police suspected he had been less than truthful in his numerous pretrial interviews, he admitted that when Tony was arrested, his father, Joseph, instructed him to cooperate fully.
“It’s over and done with,” Joseph told Vinnie. “There’s no protection now.”7
And Vinnie did cooperate, telling police that Tony had been in possession of a pistol, a large hunting knife, and Patricia Walsh’s blue VW bug with Rhode Island plates. Even with his having implicated Tony in possessing two of the murder weapons and a victim’s car, when the time came Vinnie testified for the defense, not the prosecution. Presumably well-coached by Goldman, Vinnie reaffirmed Tony’s heavy drug use and how it changed his very character, echoing the defense’s strategy that, in essence, the drugs made him do it.8
When the defense wrapped up its case and both sides were set to rest, Tony insisted on taking the stand in his own defense. Goldman flatly refused to let him, saying he would absolutely, positively not stand up under Edmund Dinis’s cross-examination. Tony, eager to parade his super intellect in front of the court, asked that he be allowed to at least read a statement to the judge and jury. Goldman wasn’t happy about it, but he agreed, knowing that in death-penalty cases the defendant is allowed to address the jury without that testimony being under oath or subject to cross-examination.
For a rambling ten minutes, Tony expounded on his theories of life, love, drug abuse, and the future of America’s youth to a rapt audience. He was calm, reasoned, articulate, and passionate—not exactly a case for the insanity defense, and both his team and the prosecution knew it. But he thought he’d “done it.”
“Christ!” he exulted to Goldman. “I think I just won the case!”
At the prosecution table, Dinis sat back stunned. He agreed the case had just been won, but not by the defense. He turned to Armand Fernandes.
“There goes their insanity plea.”
After Judge Beaudreau gave the jury its instructions, it took only six hours for them to find Tony guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. They also suggested clemency, saving Tony from what would have been an almost guaranteed death sentence. Beaudreau complied and immediately sentenced Tony to life in state prison in Walpole without the possibility of parole.
When the verdict was read, an incredulous Tony murmured, “It can’t be,” and told Goldman on the spot to appeal. “We’ll win,” he said.9
As everyone left the courtroom, many jurors shook hands with Dinis and Fernandes, congratulating them on a job well done. Others approached the defense table and told Goldman and his team, “It was a really difficult decision.” As Goldman had feared, it was hard for them to say the words innocent given the ghastly evidence presented and Tony’s unchallenged role in the murders.
One reporter later wrote, “Tony Costa made the Boston Strangler look like a choir boy.”10
As Tony was driven away, this time to Walpole State Prison for the rest of his breathing days, Bernie Flynn turned to George Killen.
“He won’t last very long in there,” he predicted.
62 LIZA
I never learned what happened to Tony, and by the time the summer of 1970 rolled around, I stopped asking. The murders were no longer the talk of the town, but every now and then I’d hear Frank and Bob talking about how they just couldn’t believe it, but that he must have done it since they were sending him to Walpole for life. From what I heard, Walpole wasn’t anywhere I’d want to spend much time,
and it sounded like this he was going to be there a long time.
Besides, I was eleven now and had other things to be concerned about. For one thing, now that Ron and Mom were married, Ron wanted to buy a boat, sell the Bayberry Bend, and get the hell out of Provincetown. I didn’t want to leave the one place where I felt at home. The thought that we might leave kept me awake at night, my stomach a jangle of nerves and my eczema leaving raw patches all over my body. Most days I had to wear a shirt over my bathing suit because the rash was so ugly. Then one night, my normal level of anxiety became white terror.
It was a Saturday night, and Frank was on duty in the office, keeping an eye on us while Mom and Ron went out to dinner. That night the motel was full and the NO VACANCY sign was hanging out front, squeaking as it swayed in the breeze. Our cottage felt safe and warm, glowing with a rare sense of safety and family. Louisa and I and Jill, Danny, and Gail were all eating hot dogs and beans. I don’t know where Geoff was that night. After dinner, Jill and I were doing the dinner dishes and listening to the radio, dancing to the Jackson 5’s hit “ABC,” when the phone rang in Mom and Ron’s bedroom; I answered it. It was Frank.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice low, almost a whisper. “Lock all the windows and all the doors. There’s been another murder, right behind you in the cottages. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
My throat tightened, and my heart pounded in my chest. Another murder. Right behind you. I ran back to the kitchen, yelling for Jill to grab the kids and get under Mom’s bed while I locked all the windows and doors. Then I grabbed a carving knife out of the drawer and ran to Mom’s room. I dialed the operator and told her to connect me to the restaurant where Mom and Ron were eating.
But before the call could be put through, there was a loud banging on the side of the cottage, and quickly after that, another outside the bedroom window.
“LET ME IN!” a man demanded.
I dropped the phone on the floor without knowing I had.
Peering through the partially closed blind I saw a man with a nylon stocking over his head.
“I said let me IN!” His teeth were bared against the stocking.
He banged on the windows of the cottage as he made his way around to the front door. The kitchen knife shook as I held it straight in front of me and walked back into the living room. I couldn’t have screamed if I had tried. I was frozen with fear. Jill had come out of the bedroom, and we stood with our backs against the wall and watched the doorknob jiggle, back and forth, back and forth.
Suddenly, the door was flung open, and the man in the nylon stocking stood in the doorway. My legs gave way and I slid down the wall like molasses. As I hit the floor, the man peeled off the stocking and laughed. It was Frank.
“Scared ya, didn’t I?” he shrieked, then started laughing again.
After that, I was okay with Ron’s plan to get the hell out of Provincetown. A year later, the Bayberry Bend Motel and Cottages were made into individual residences and sold off, one by one. They were some of the first condos ever sold in Massachusetts.
The captain of industry had struck gold once again in the burgeoning condo market. He made a killing.
63 TONY
For the first year of his incarceration, Tony received a lot of fan mail from strangers, most of it from women. He also did his fair share of writing, mostly to his legal team lambasting them for the job they’d done that put an “innocent man” behind bars: “I am not a murderer,” he wrote Goldman on December 28, 1970, “I am instead a victim. I am a victim of a drug-pushing doctor and ultimately of drugs.”1 It was always somebody else’s fault. When he wasn’t haranguing Goldman, he was begging the man for money to fund whatever scheme he was cooking up that month—a leather business, a jewelry business, a typewriter with which to write his memoir, pocket change for toiletries and cigarettes; it was always something. Goldman usually responded with $20 or $30, sometimes $50, but not the hundreds that Tony insisted he needed.
In addition to letters, Tony wrote a memoir of sorts, calling it a “factual novel,” perhaps stealing the idea from Truman Capote, who called In Cold Blood a “nonfiction novel.” Tony titled his book “Resurrection,” a suggestion of his Christlike fantasies. He was sure it was going to be a huge bestseller and provide for his children while he was in prison (he continued to believe he’d eventually be free on appeal, even though his appeal had been denied without challenge). The four-hundred-page manuscript never sold.
“Resurrection” makes for disturbing, often loathsome reading. In it, Tony again demonstrated his intelligence, writing long and convoluted treatises, one explaining his sympathy for and kinship with other fatherless children, and what a strong need they had for solace, protection, and love.
A coward to the end, he blamed two of his alter egos, fictitious drug buddies whom he called Eddie and Carl. In a rambling, violent, and lurid reconstruction of Susan Perry’s murder, Tony recounts how “Carl” described what happened. It is most likely as clear a blueprint of the crime as we’ll ever get.
Susan died in my room. Then Eddie and I were trying to decide how to get the body out of the house… she was too big to fit in the duffle… he came up with the idea of cutting her up into chunks… he ran some cold water in the tub… put her body in a kneeling position… a huge hunting knife… gripped her by the hair and tilted her head back… put parts of her body in the duffle bag… my mom came home… what a hassle she gave me when she saw the blood and guts laying in the tub… she cursed me then cursed Susan. She told me to get rid of the mess fast and to clean up the place and hope for the best.2
Among the repellent details in this quasi confession is the astonishing claim that Cecelia walked in on Susan’s dismemberment, cursing Tony, then cursing the victim herself who lay in ruined pieces in the bathtub. If even marginally true, it reveals just how far she was willing to go to protect “her Tony.” If, on the other hand, Tony made up the story, why would he insert his mother, over whose grave he had grieved just months before, into such a ghastly scene? Leo Damore, who would go on to write an exhaustive account of the case and its investigation, acknowledged, “The terrible part is, I think his mother knew.”3
Donna Candish agreed. “He was her pride and joy. He could do no wrong. If she walked in on Tony doing something [like that], she would never have said a word.”
Further, Tony cut Susan up into more pieces (eight) than any of the other three women, because unlike Sydney, Pat, and Mary Anne, Susan wasn’t killed in the woods. And as a result, he himself later explained, he had to cut her into parts small enough to carry and to transport without detection. Whatever the truth of Cecelia’s involvement, in one of her last comments on the charges against her son, charges that included killing four women and then raping, dismembering, decapitating, and burying their bodies in shallow graves only a few miles from her doorstep, Cecelia was quoted as saying, “If our Tony cut up those girls, he must have had a good reason.”4 It will never be known if Cecelia was mentally ill, but the possibility that she was aware of his crimes and said nothing adds an entirely new layer of outrage. Had she spoken up, it very likely would have saved the lives of Christine Gallant, Patricia Walsh, and Mary Anne Wysocki.
With Cory exonerated and none of Tony’s companions ever linked to Susan’s or any of the other murders, the reality of his crimes was finally revealed by his own pen: Tony brutally beat Susan, cut her body into eight pieces, very possibly in his own mother’s bathtub, put those pieces in five separate bags, including one for her head, and dumped them in a shallow grave next to the dirt road in the woods. Afterward, he rode his bike into Provincetown, had a cup of tea with his Lorna Doone cookies at Adams Pharmacy, and gossiped with the women behind the counter.
When Goldman read “Resurrection,” he finally learned the revolting totality of the murders and warned Tony, “Don’t let this fall into anyone else’s hands!” But Tony had already shared it with most of his cell block mates and submitted it to Houghton Mifflin, where
it was quickly rejected.
His prison file notes that he was “polite, cooperative and friendly—no trouble,” but prone to depression and anxiety that he “salts away with intellectualizing and manipulation. He definitely must keep his time occupied.”5 And he did, working in the warehouse, with his leather business, and with a list of prison help groups—Christian Action, the Lifers’ Group, and one combatting drug abuse—as well as participating in ongoing counseling with prison doctors.
While he was a model prisoner he was also a pontificating one, counseling younger inmates on the perils of drug addiction. One can only imagine how being lectured to by a pious Tony Costa, who was fond of saying “I live for God,”6 went over with the hardened Walpole population. Perhaps not well, because he was subjected to “pranks.” What kind of pranks or how humiliating they may have been was not divulged by Tony or prison officials, but according to Goldman, Tony was continually sexually molested, and fellow prisoners called him “Choice Cuts.” His request to be relocated to the Norfolk prison due to Walpole being too “stressful” was denied.
In the end, he found love, or at least a warm body to help him feel safe. He told Maurice Goldman of a prison romance with Peter Olsen, a man serving a three-year sentence for petty crimes; Olsen had a rap sheet pages long with crimes ranging from breaking and entering to drunk and disorderly conduct and illegal possession of a narcotic, but nothing close to horrific quadruple murder. Still, the heavily tattooed Olsen and the clean-cut Costa found each other.