The Babysitter

by Liza Rodman

  On May 12, 1973, Olsen was found dead in his cell by suicide. At least that’s how it was recorded. Why a man with less than a year left on his sentence for petty crimes would kill himself was apparently not asked at the time. Tony never mentioned or wrote about it, so it is difficult to judge how the death of his friend and sexual companion affected him. However, only days after Olsen’s death, Walpole’s acting superintendent petitioned for Tony’s recommitment to Bridgewater for sixty days psychiatric observation. When Tony returned to Walpole in July 1973, the Bridgewater doctors reaffirmed Dr. Ewalt’s 1970 determination that he was a sexually dangerous man. In their notes they also cited his “hopelessness” at failing to gain a new trial on appeal. Again, Olsen’s name was never mentioned.

  Exactly one year later on the anniversary of Olsen’s death—May 12, 1974, and also Mother’s Day—Tony was found dead in his cell, hanging from the bars by a belt he had made in leather shop. His tongue was bitten nearly in half, and he’d urinated down the front of his prison uniform. It’s not known whether a note was found. And while his death was also ruled a suicide, it was believed by several who knew him that he had been murdered by other prisoners. Maurice Goldman was one of them. He believed that Tony had received intense sexual harassment from other prisoners and that after Olsen’s death, Tony, “still a young man—attractive, muscular, good-looking…” may have rebuffed other prisoners’ advances, and paid the price of that rejection.

  Attorney Stephen Lipman agreed: “The prison population is a conservative one. They don’t usually go for Tony’s type of crimes.”7

  Donna Candish also believed Tony had been murdered, years later saying, “I was surprised to hear he’d committed suicide, because the person I knew Tony to be would never take his own life. Even after what he said to me. I think he was just planning on living out his life. He was very righteous.”8

  Dr. Nicholas Groth, who evaluated Tony in prison and hoped to get him transferred out of Walpole and into a Connecticut prison where Groth ran a clinic for the sexually dangerous, commented, “His death has always puzzled me. I guess psychologically he was capable of suicide, but there were underground rumors about his being murdered and it being made to look like a suicide.”9

  One of Tony’s fellow prisoners at the time was another serial killer, Albert DeSalvo, the notorious Boston Strangler. Like Tony, DeSalvo enjoyed a piece of gallows humor and would sign Gerold Frank’s biography of him “Sorry to have missed you.” It’s probable that DeSalvo and Tony knew each other, given that DeSalvo, like Tony, crafted a plethora of leather goods while in Walpole. Regardless of whether they shared a love of leather, neither was a particularly popular prisoner. On November 25, 1973, DeSalvo was found stabbed to death in his cell; fellow prisoners said it was retribution for his having run his own amphetamine business, undercutting the prison syndicate’s drug pipeline. Six months later, Tony would also be found dead.

  “This case has haunted me for fifty years,” Lipman said in 2018. That’s in part because what the defense team feared the most happened: they saved Tony from the electric chair, but they couldn’t save him from death at his own hand or at those of other Walpole inmates.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, May 14, 1974, an invitation-only funeral service was held for Tony at St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in Provincetown.I Immediately following the service, he was buried next to Cecelia in an unmarked grave. After a lifetime of trying, Tony finally had his mother all to himself.

  I. With Cecelia gone, her sister wouldn’t collect Tony’s personal effects at Walpole for another year, and only then at the insistence of prison officials.

  64 LIZA

  2020

  On August 1, 1988, I went into labor and headed to Falmouth Hospital, about twenty miles down the road from where I was living in Sandwich. An hour later, my mother showed up and tried to bully her way onto the maternity ward, but the nurses wouldn’t let her into my room. Then, just as my labor was kicking in hard, I heard a loud knock on the room’s first-floor window. I looked up and there was my mother, waving wildly, giving me a thumbs-up. When a nurse saw what was going on, she pulled the shade and I heard Mom run off laughing. Thumbs-up.

  The next morning, August 2, my son, Will, was born; my mother rejoiced that “she” finally had her boy. Had Tony Costa lived, that same day would have been his forty-fourth birthday.

  Six months after Will’s birth, I went back to work. Within the first week my mother appeared at my office and plunked herself in the chair on the other side of my desk with a great harumph.

  “You don’t return my calls,” she said, reaching for a cigarette. I pushed the ashtray toward her but didn’t respond. Her eyes narrowed, and through a puff of smoke she said, “I will have a relationship with my grandson, you know.”

  I felt the rage bubble up in my throat and had to swallow hard before I could speak.

  “Not if you lay one hand on him, you won’t.”

  She looked me square in the eye. I stared back. It was almost as if she’d been waiting my whole life for me to stand up, to call her bullshit, to stop her from ever harming me again. We sat in silence, staring each other down, neither knowing what to say. She at least knew not to protest, not to call it a lie—that she’d never laid a hand on me or that she’d had to discipline me because by the time I turned four I was “a nightmare.” She knew she had to keep her mouth shut if she wanted to see Will, let alone have him in her life. And to her credit, she did. She wanted it that badly. Even so, I blinked first and looked away. She had won the staring battle, but I had won the war. I hoped.

  After she left, I called my therapist. She encouraged me to compile my questions about my childhood and then ask Mom to lunch. A few weeks later, Mom and I were settled in a pine-paneled booth at the Bee-Hive Tavern in Sandwich. Once Mom’s glass of white wine and my iced coffee were in front of us, I took a deep breath and began.

  “Why did you have such a hard time with me when I was a kid?” I could feel my heartbeat throbbing in my throat. Why in hell was I still scared? I was a grown woman, a wife, and now a mother and a stepmother myself. But still, my fear of her raced through my body like an electric current.

  She picked up her wineglass and turned up the corners of her mouth, revealing her canines, which even though she’d long since had them filed down were still fangs. It was somewhere between a smile and a sneer. I held my breath.

  “I don’t know what it was about you,” she began, the smile-sneer holding her mouth. “But from the day you were born, I always felt you were out to get me.”

  I raised my eyebrows, trying not to gasp. “Why?” I managed to ask.

  “Well,” she said, taking a deep breath. “You were conceived on our first time on our wedding night. And I didn’t want to be pregnant yet. And then”—she continued as if she had been waiting a long time to get this off her chest—“you were a girl. Everyone wanted a boy first.” She spilled some of her wine as she waved the glass in emphasis.

  Two strikes, I thought. I didn’t have to wait long for the third.

  “And then”—she paused, readying her final blow—“you were just so damn stubborn. Impossible really. Just like your father.” She sat back and took a healthy swallow of her wine.

  There it was.

  The air around me felt heavy and time slowed. I think she kept talking, but I couldn’t hear the words. It felt like I’d passed out and just regained consciousness. She was telling the truth, but I was hearing it for the first time. She hadn’t wanted to get pregnant on her wedding night. She hadn’t wanted a girl. And then that unwanted girl had a mind of her own. My mother’s worst “nightmare.” Had I even stood a chance? She had always considered me a threat, a living, breathing mistake, and as with all her other mistakes, instead of examining herself as the possible cause, she turned her frustration and anger outward. And I was her favorite target.

  I don’t remember much more of that lunch, except that I felt an odd lightness, as if I’d been unburd
ened. That, and trying not to cry into my French onion soup. But over the following weeks and months I realized she’d done me a great favor. For the first time in my life I understood that my mother’s resentment toward me was formed before she even gave birth. Who I was had never been the problem. The fact that I existed at all was the issue. Before I had ever opened my infant mouth and let out my first cry, my mother looked at me as her adversary. And somehow, it was my fault. My entire life I had felt as if I was fundamentally bad. That something was wrong with me at my core, something that could never be cleansed or confessed away and that everyone could see from the outside, like a scarlet letter or a third eye. But that moment in the Bee-Hive Tavern felt like the beginning of a new life. Unwanted was different than bad. It was somehow workable. I could climb out of unwanted, but bad was a death sentence. Unwanted at least had a chance at life.

  It was ten years after that painful lunch that my recurrent nightmares began and eventually brought me back to my childhood, my summers in Provincetown, and my friend named Tony. Only then did I realize the true depths of my wound: in addition to her abuse and neglect, my mother had been so self-absorbed that she unwittingly left her children in the care of a psychopath.

  Since beginning this project, I have been asked one question above all others: Why didn’t he kill you? Why wasn’t a little girl for whom he bought Popsicles and drove countless times to the clearing in the Truro woods among those he killed, violated, dismembered, and buried? The only answer that makes sense is my age. I now suspect that Tony was grooming me to be one of his adoring “kid chicks,” his harem of young, troubled girls; I certainly fit the description. Mercifully, by the time he was arrested, I was just turning ten—too young to sexually arouse him.

  Then again, maybe it was just luck. When I told Judge Armand Fernandes, the last surviving member of the prosecution team, of my history with Tony, the first words out of his mouth were “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  After Mom blithely told me, “Well, I remember he turned out to be a serial killer,” those summers with Tony came rushing back, and I decided I needed to learn everything there was about him and his crimes. As my research began, I thought about my recurrent nightmares and their violence. Had I witnessed something in those Truro woods as a child? Did I, like perhaps Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, stumble upon one of Tony’s haphazard graves, seeing something that my brain couldn’t comprehend at eight or nine years old but that continued to roil through my subconscious as I matured?

  Over lunch one day with my childhood friend, Gail Becker, we reminisced about the Royal Coachman, those summers in Provincetown, and our mothers. She suddenly fell silent, her head bowed over her plate. When she looked up, tears were running down her cheeks.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice quavering. “I just never felt that anybody had your back.”

  “That’s because they didn’t.” As I said the words, their full weight hit me. Gail hadn’t been much older than a toddler in those days, but even she knew.

  I’ll always struggle with my mother and the flashpoint anger I inherited from her. But this process has laid bare my life and opened every wound I have. And here is the deepest of those wounds: I have always felt as though there was something wrong with me, inherently deep and dirty and dark. Something unlikable and unfixable and worst of all, unlovable. And I believed it. As a result, I spent my childhood more afraid of my mother than I was a psychopathic serial killer. Finally, when I became a mother and in spite of my fear, I was able to stop what had been generations of physical abuse. It ended with me.

  During the laborious process of writing this book, I visited my mother often to tap into her memories of people and events. She’s in her eighties now, and as with so many wounds, time has healed some of ours. In one conversation we talked about the late 1960s and how it was a hell of a time to grow up; the Catholic Church was still unchecked in its abuses, the country was embittered by an ongoing guerilla war in Southeast Asia, and indiscriminate sex had become common, fueled by ready access to birth control and street drugs of all kinds. Finally, at the time of Tony’s arrest in 1969, there were thousands of missing girls and young women across the nation, and overwhelmed police departments could do little to find them. In that perfect storm of chaos and neglect, children often survived by taking care of themselves. Louisa and I certainly did.

  Mom has no regrets, at least none she’d ever admit to me.

  “That’s just the way it was back then,” she said recently, and chuckled softly, remembering her golden days on Cape Cod. “Boy, oh boy, I sure had a good time. But then I remember I had two little kids and I wonder who the hell was looking after you girls.”

  Who indeed.

  EPILOGUE

  One of the most fascinating aspects of this story has been trying to solve the puzzle of Tony Costa: What happened to the bright young boy who turned into a heinous serial killer? What makes a monster? While those around him never imagined the evil lurking beneath his handsome facade, Tony knew something was wrong. He had terrifying, graphic nightmares and violent thoughts he couldn’t control. He read a library shelf of books on mental illness. He pored through his stolen copies of the Physician’s Desk Reference and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM, the bible of psychiatry) cover to cover, over and over. But there was nothing written at the time that would have prepared him, his family, local police, psychiatrists, the district attorney, or his defense team for the horror of who he was and the hideous brutality of his murders.

  “That’s not just a serial killer,” Dr. James Fallon, author of The Psychopath Inside, said of Tony Costa and his butchery. “That’s a whole different animal.”1

  * * *

  In 1969, there wasn’t even a term for serial killers, let alone treatment or a cure. It wasn’t until early in the twenty-first century that scientists and psychologists linked a trifecta of potential causes to the development of psychosis: (1) chromosomal, genetic, and hormonal abnormalities; (2) low-functioning prefrontal cortex; and (3) childhood neglect, trauma, and/or abuse.

  According to Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote a seminal book on childhood trauma called The Body Keeps the Score, “Fifty percent of the people who seek psychiatric care have been assaulted, abandoned, neglected, or even raped as children, or have witnessed violence in their families.”2 He goes on to say that trauma experienced in childhood changes the brain’s actual viscera by releasing certain hormones and chemicals; it literally rewires the circuitry and reorganizes the way the mind and brain work. Trauma recovery coach Michelle Rosenthal agrees: “Every cell records memories and every embedded, trauma-related neuropathway has the opportunity to repeatedly reactivate.”3 In other words, once rewired by trauma, the brain can experience an explosive misfiring whenever and however triggered.

  One indication of Tony’s possible childhood trauma is van der Kolk’s belief that “If you’ve been traumatized, being in silence is often terrifying. Memory is stored, so when you are stilled, demons come out.” Time and time again, Tony professed to being terrified of both noise and silence; change in his pocket was maddening, as was the quiet of the St. Peter sanctuary, where instead of peace Tony heard accusatory voices.

  From what we know, Tony didn’t fit the classic profile of a serial killer: he wasn’t orphaned at an early age or sent to a string of gruesome foster homes. His mother, Cecelia, while a drinker, wasn’t a staggering alcoholic, and there are no reports that she or his stepfather, Joseph Bonaviri, beat him. However, Tony was reportedly tied up and raped in his early adolescence, and while Tony himself dismissed it as “nothing of great consequence… it wasn’t even really an attack,”4 the assault apparently left its mark. A reporter who followed the case closely and interviewed many of Tony’s closest friends noted in her file that Cecelia had caught Tony masturbating on a young girl whom he had tied up and hung by her ankles in his bedroom closet. After rescuing the girl and sendin
g her home, Cecelia then tied Tony to a chair as punishment. The story is inflammatory and unverified, and yet, Tony did tie up his young neighbor in Somerville, his wife, and possibly his four victims who were found in the woods along with strands of bloody rope. If even marginally true, the story’s odious details offer another hint into what might have set in motion Tony’s savage, sometimes uncontrollable rage.

  Something happened to Tony, but whether it was his brain chemistry, genetic makeup, or the events of his childhood, we can’t definitively know. However, current research suggests it was a combination of all three. While the truth died with him, to the end Tony tried to frame Cory Devereaux for the murders, attributing to Cory a confession that likely reveals his own dark despair.

  “It was a compulsion, I had to do it.… But I don’t know why.”5

  * * *

  And finally, there were the women who disappeared and were presumed to be among those he killed—Diane Federoff, Bonnie Williams, and Barbara Spalding. In writing about these three women, we were unwilling to cut and paste from previous chroniclers’ accounts the sentence, “She was never seen alive again,” since we didn’t know for a fact that it was true.

  We asked ourselves, what might have happened in 1969 when police, investigating other suspected victims of Tony Costa, knocked at the door of Spalding’s commune in Haight-Ashbury, looking for a woman and a drug addict who was already known to the welfare department and the city’s emergency rooms? Our guess was that the men in blue uniforms carrying guns on their hips were stonewalled by Barbara’s commune mates, if in fact the door was even opened.