The Babysitter
Page 27
So, fifty years later, we did our own investigation. With a combination of databases, we cross-referenced every possible Barbara, Diane, and Bonnie until we had a short list of women and their relatives, and then we began writing and calling. After nearly a year, we found out what happened to each of them and have been able to correct decades of erroneous chronicling of their murders. Here are their stories.
* * *
The evening of Bonnie Williams’s 1966 graduation from Manatee High School in Bradenton, Florida, she left a suitcase in the bushes underneath her bedroom window, and when the family had gone to bed she jumped out of the house, grabbed the bag, and hit the road with her friend Diane Federoff, their thumbs pointing north. Diane was just sixteen and Bonnie only weeks from her eighteenth birthday. By the time they got to Provincetown, they’d been on the road for a couple of weeks and were tired, hungry, and reeking of dank seaweed from sleeping in a barn near MacMillan Wharf. When Tony took them home to Avis and their cramped apartment, the girls must have felt like they were being taken to the Four Seasons Hotel.
Tony and the two young Florida women left Provincetown in early June and headed to California. After several days and as many as three thousand miles, Tony left them somewhere between Arizona and the Bay Area—exactly where will never be known. But at some point the women did make it to California and after nearly a year of panhandling around San Francisco and dropping acid in Haight-Ashbury with the members of a new rock band named Jefferson Airplane,6 Diane decided to stay, leaving Bonnie to hitchhike home to Florida alone. Among Bonnie’s wild adventures was meeting Clint Eastwood at a party, who was “a real asshole,” she later told her sister. When she finally got home to Bradenton, she fell in love twice, losing both men tragically—the first stepped on a landmine in Vietnam in 1968 and the second wrapped his sportscar around a tree. Somewhat on the rebound, she married in 1969, had three children, and died in 2010 of brittle diabetes, a rare and severe form of the disease, after a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking.7
Diane Federoff fared much worse. According to her sister and eldest daughter, Diane was a “tortured soul,”8 most likely because she was sexually abused by her stepfather and then abandoned by her mother, who chose the abusive husband over Diane.9 Beautiful, almost ethereal, she married three times and gave birth to three daughters, naming her eldest Raven in honor of Edgar Allan Poe. She died in 1995 when her husband drove their car into a retaining wall after a bitter argument.10 The man was tried and convicted of drunk and reckless driving and vehicular homicide, but inexplicably served just three years in prison.11 As horrific as Diane Federoff’s death was, Tony Costa had nothing to do with it.
Likewise with Barbara Spalding, the troubled young mother in Haight-Ashbury. When investigators tried to find her in 1969, Barbara indeed couldn’t be found, but it wasn’t because she was in a shallow grave somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway as many, including Tony’s own defense team, believed. Her daughter speculates that when the police came looking for her after Tony’s arrest, she may have been in prison or deep in the recesses of Haight-Ashbury’s drug dens.12
After her brief relationship with Tony, Barbara, who had married and divorced before she met him, went on to marry twice more, each marriage miserable and short, and in 1975 she had a daughter, Athena. Athena survived heartbreaking abuse at the hands of Barbara, who was drunk or high the entire twenty-one years Athena knew her.13 Grace, Barbara’s sister, last saw Barbara in the mid-1980s, when she arrived drunk and volatile to pick up Athena and was thrown off the naval base where Grace’s husband was stationed. That was it for Grace. She never saw her sister again.14
Athena hadn’t seen her mother in three years when, in September of 1999, the Social Security Administration sent her Barbara’s death certificate; her body had been found in a flophouse hotel in San Francisco, hanging over the edge of a trash bin.
“I’ve never even seen a picture of my mother,” Athena told us over the phone when we finally found her in 2019. “We were always moving, always on the run. We’d have to leave in the middle of the night, because the rent was due or the place had been trashed. Sometimes our boxes followed us, but most times they didn’t. I don’t even have a baby picture of myself.”
But we had pictures of both. So with Athena on the phone, we sent her images she had never seen—of herself at ages five and six and of her still-beautiful mother before the drugs had wreaked their havoc.
“Oh my God. She was so pretty.” In Athena’s voice we could hear poignant tears of all that was lost and of what might have been, if only her mother had been able to escape her demons before those demons killed her.
And so, while we know Tony Costa killed five and, according to police as well as his own defense team, was suspected in the disappearances of several more,15 fifty years after the fact we now know that Diane, Bonnie, and Barbara weren’t among them.
Some mysteries do get solved.
* * *
When the siblings and children of these three women discovered that their loved ones had been reported as “missing” fifty years ago and were assumed murdered by Tony Costa, a serial killer, they all were understandably shocked. While the women died too young—Diane at age forty-five in 1995, Barbara at fifty in 1999, and Bonnie at sixty-two in 2010—they didn’t mysteriously vanish; they went on to marry, have children who love and miss them, and live their lives for years after their encounter with Tony Costa.
Bonnie Williams’s sister shared a wonderful musing of what Bonnie’s reaction might have been upon hearing the news of her presumed murder fifty years before:
I can picture Bonnie sitting there with a scotch, a cigarette in her hand, slapping her leg and laughing hysterically saying, “You mean that wuss from Provincetown was a serial killer? No way. I could have taken him down with one arm behind my back.”16
Oh, that Bonnie had had the chance to stop a serial killer.
Courtesy of the Estate of Leo Damore
Tony, age nine
Courtesy of the Estate of Leo Damore
Tony and Avis at the Provincetown senior prom, 1962. She was thirteen years old.
Courtesy of the Estate of Leo Damore
Tony and Peter, 1964
Liza Rodman Collection
Royal Coachman Motor Lodge brochure, 1966, with Mom posing on the chaise longue
Liza Rodman Collection
Left to right: Geoff, Gail, me, and Louisa on the Royal Coachman diving board, 1968
Liza Rodman Collection
Mom and Auntie, Jekyll Island, Georgia, 1967
Liza Rodman Collection
Clockwise from the top: Geoff, Louisa, Gail, and me with Billy, 1966
Liza Rodman Collection
My portrait done by a street artist in Provincetown, 1966
Courtesy of Jonathan D. Finn
5 Standish Street, 2020
Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com
Mary Anne Wysocki and Patricia Walsh’s 1966 high school yearbook pictures
Courtesy of Ruth Ann Turbidy
Pat Walsh, 1968, in one of the last-known photos taken of her
Courtesy of William G. Smith
March 6, 1969, Tony after his arraignment (center) and Lieutenant E. Thomas Gunnery (right)
The Boston Herald
Detective Bernie Flynn and Lieutenant E. Thomas Gunnery, 1969
© USA TODAY NETWORK
Tony running from court in the rain
© USA TODAY NETWORK
Avis Costa, taken the day she testified
Courtesy of Kris Blaylock
Bonnie Lee Williams, eighteen, taken shortly before her trip West with Tony
Courtesy of Grace E. Dickey
Barbara and Bobby Spalding, taken shortly after she met Tony
Ancestry.com/Find a Grave
Susan Perry
Ancestry.com/Find a Grave
Sydney Lee Monzon
Courtesy of Fred Zimmerman and the Estate of Charles Zimmerman
Charles Zimmerman administering one of Tony’s nine lie detector tests
Boston Globe/GETTY
Tony arriving at his trial
Courtesy of the Estate of Leo Damore
Tony’s mother, Cecelia Bonaviri, at a conference with defense attorneys in 1969
Tony’s mugshot taken upon incarceration at Walpole
Tony’s mugshot, taken after eighteen months in prison
AUTHORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book percolated, on and off the front burner, for fifteen years, so there are a lot of people to thank. We urge you to read every name because, like the names of soldiers on a polished granite wall, absolutely none of this could have been accomplished without their love, expertise, tenacity, help, and sacrifice. So many kind, generous people gave the gift of their time and knowledge to us so that we could make this story come to life. We are in their debt.
First and in many ways foremost, an enormous thank-you and debt to Amanda Faehnel at Kent State University’s Special Collections Library Archive in Kent, Ohio, for her kindness, patience, and willingness to always help. Her expert curation of the voluminous Tony Costa files is every biographer’s dream.
We thank the families of Barbara Spalding, Bonnie Williams, and Diane Federoff for helping us unravel the more-than-fifty-year-old mystery of what happened to their loved ones: Grace Dickey, Athena Martinez, Robert Spalding Sr., Denise Williams Carson, Rex Williams, Kris Blaylock, Claudia Federoff Musgrove, Bruce Dean Cornwell, and Celeste Cornwell Dawson. For them, sharing the stories of what actually became of these “wild child” girls of the sixties was an often-painful reopening of old wounds, and we are eternally in their debt for their candor and bravery.
For sharing their stories, old files, newspaper clippings, faded photos, and fabled memories of the 1960s in Provincetown, we’d like to thank Dan Jarvis, Herbie van Dam, David Raboy, Charlie Souza, Bob Anthony, Jack Englert, Gretchen Neal, Channing Wilroy, Johann Englert, Frank X. Gasper, David Tankle, Fred Zimmerman, Ruth Ann Turbidy, Magnolia Turbidy, Nick Damore, Massachusetts State Police sergeant E. Thomas Gunnery (retired), Carolyn Enos De Leon, Christine Groom, John Wilson, Edith Vonnegut, James Zacharias, Donna Candish, and especially Cory Devereaux, whose brave honesty in sharing his story and some of its dark chapters was nothing short of heroic. In addition to these generous individuals, there are several more who shared their stories but preferred to remain anonymous, and we have respected that request.
Although we reached out to Avis Costa Johnson many times, we understand why she preferred not to speak to us directly about her complicated history with Tony Costa. Nevertheless, we thank her for sharing so much of her life on Facebook, where she reveals not only astonishing candor but often brilliant writing. After nearly twenty years of addiction, she stopped using and drinking in 1983 and recently celebrated thirty-seven years of sobriety.1 She reports that she hopes to one day write her story. We fervently hope that she will.
For providing their professional experience and opinions, thanks to Dr. Michael Baden; Aja Worthy-Davis, the executive director of public affairs for the New York City Chief Medical Examiner’s Office; Sergeant William Doogan of the Boston Police Department; Judge Armand Fernandes; Attorney Stephen Lipman; Dr. David Bernstein from Forensic Consultants, LLC; Dr. James Fallon; Jamie Lewis at the Massachusetts Department of Correction; Diana Gaumond and MaryPat Kane-Oropallo of the Cape Cod Medical Reserve Corps; Joseph Gordon of the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office; Dr. Kent Difiore; physician assistant Stephen Webber; Lisa Huntska with the Upsala College Archives; Dr. Noemi Mattis; Betsy Sativa with the Arizona State Library Archives; Dean DiMartino with the Massachusetts State Archives; Lieutenant Craig Danziger with the Truro Police Department; Maria with the Providence Rhode Island Records Department; Margaret Sullivan, the Boston Police Department’s Records Manager & Archivist; Dr. Mike Aamodt of Radford University’s Department of Psychology; Felicia Sanchez; Dr. Anne Dowton; Elizabeth Bouvier, Head of Archives, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; Kate Silvia, Director of Communications at the Massachusetts Department of Corrections; Hillsborough County (Florida) deputy sheriff Grita Perry (retired); Jason Dobson, Deputy Director of Communications at the Massachusetts Department of Corrections; Chloe Grinberg, Boston Globe Photo Archivist; Cara Gilgenbach, head of Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University; Lester Allen III; photographer Merrily Cassidy at the Cape Cod Times; Kim Reis at USA Network; graphic designer Kelly Nolan; and Jennifer Smith at Eco-Gals.
For availing their quiet rooms, expert staff, and carefully cataloged archives, we’d like to thank the librarians and staff at Sturgis Library in West Barnstable, Massachusetts; Cape Cod Community College; Provincetown Public Library; Boston Public Library; and the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
Jonathan D. Finn has been our friend and photographer of choice since our days at UMass Amherst together, and we thank him for hosting us during one of our research trips to Cape Cod and for the rocking photo of 5 Standish Street in Provincetown herein.
As well to Anne Bernays and Polly Kaplan, who provided what has to be the most luscious house in the most gorgeous location any writers could hope to find themselves for a chunk of the research we conducted in Truro. And to Kay and Charlie Walker who shared their casita overlooking the red rocks of southern Utah. We have been remarkably blessed by generous people sharing their spectacular homes for our research and work. Thank you all.
To Professor Christopher O’Brien of New Haven University’s Forensic Science Department, for braving the Truro woods with us and for sharing his invaluable expertise in cold-case forensics. (We hope you were able to buff the scratches out of your Pathfinder’s doors.)
Chelsea June Adams did what perhaps no one else has done in listening to and transcribing nearly fifty hours of interviews between Tony Costa, his defense counsel, lead investigators, and polygraph experts. In some ways, she now knows Tony better than anyone. God help her.
Thanks to the entire team at Simon & Schuster/Atria Books, and in particular our editor Trish Todd; every sentence you touched made this a better book. And thank you to attorney Elisa Rivlin and copyeditor Erica Ferguson for your painstaking work at getting it right.
And finally, our agents at Kneerim and Williams, Jill Kneerim and Lucy Cleland, who both adored this book from the first pitch. Thank you for making it real. And a special shout-out to Jill, for somehow always having the perfect words of encouragement, comfort, advice, and humor for two very different clients. We don’t know how you do it, but we are so very grateful you do.
In addition to our professional thanks, we both have a list of those close to our hearts without whom none of this would have been possible:
A FINAL NOTE FROM JENNIFER JORDAN
None of my books would have made it off my computer without my “perfect reader’s” careful eye and spot-on suggestions. Every writer has to have one, and I am so blessed that mine is also my oldest friend and sister—Alice Webber. Our mother, Nan Inskeep, and brother, Jeff Gear, are also endless sources of love and support, as well as being voracious readers and careful editors, even though the vagaries of this thing called the “interweb” often confound her. Hang in there, Mother. You’re doing great.
When I left Boston and moved west twenty years ago, I left a city (and region) I love, but not those whom I love in it, including the dear Marcie Saganov and Susan Maclure, who always provide a safe haven on my various trips “home,” including those to research this book. I can’t wait to walk the dogs in the arboretum and laugh like nobody else makes me laugh.
Writing is often a lonely enterprise, a lot like quarantine during a pandemic—oh wait, exactly like a quarantine during a pandemic. It requires near-total solitude, silence, endless rewriting and rereading, fact-checking and rechecking, and sometimes an entire delete and starting over. And those are the good days. When the bad days hit, and they always do, I am one of the lucky ones in having a partner and husband who knows when to keep his di
stance and when to bring me an egg-and-bacon burrito or a vodka soda, depending on whether five o’clock had arrived. He has been that sounding board, shoulder on which I’ve cried, chef, bartender, and always, unconditional support. I love you, Jeff Rhoads.
And finally, Liza. When she started having her Tony Costa nightmares and shared with me the revelation that she had been babysat by a serial killer, my first words were, “There’s your book!” Little did I know it would also become mine. After struggling for years with the very tricky (and grueling) task of separating herself from the trauma of her sad and troubled childhood in order to be a dispassionate observer of it, she agreed to let me help. And now, almost three years later and with the book finished, I am in awe—of her bravery, her honesty, her sheer will in forcing herself to “go there,” even though it was often painful and always difficult. While many of us have dark chapters in our history, we are grateful they remain buried in our past. Liza’s darkest chapters are now published in these pages. That’s courage.
Brava, my dear friend, you did it. It’s been an honor and a joy to get there with you.
AND FINALLY, A NOTE FROM LIZA RODMAN
So many collaborations had to go well for me to find myself here, in gratitude.