You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to the Mind of a Murder. I'm
Kristin Dilley and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by Liza Rodman and
Jennifer Jordan, authors of The Babysitter My Summers with a Serial Killer. Liza
and Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh thanks for
having us. We're really excited about this conversation. Great to be here.
It's too bad that we don't have a video component. Because not only have
these two women gotten completely decked out, they're holding tall drinks of some sort
or another. We have not asked them to identify what they're drinking, and
maybe we'll just leave that out of the conversation. It would be tequila if
I had my druthers. Yeah, mine does not. Mine does not.
Here I am with just playing a bottle of water, me too. Oh
we're boring, So why don't you both go ahead and start by telling us
a little bit about your educational background, which I know you have a little
bit of overlap with mister Thomas here, and then tell a little bit about
your professional background too. But Liza, we'll goad to start with you.
Okay, good. I went to the University of Massachusetts right out of high
school, where I met my friend Jennifer, and I did not finish.
Then I finished much later worked as a tax accountant for all these years this
book in my back pocket, always wanting to write. I participated for many
years in a writer's group and always writing, but never publishing, and Jenna
and I would talk about it on as we went. Finally we ended up
finding a moment in time where we were both able to come together and write
this book. Very cool, Jennifer, how about sharing. I'm trying to
edit it down because my story takes a while. After you, masks,
I ended up taking the first job offered to me, which was typing into
radio station in Boston, and within six months I had my own talk show
because my boss at the time was wonderful and said, I know you're not
here to type, but what can I do to keep you? I said,
twenty two years old, I'd like my own talk show because I think
I could do it. That led to writing, taking the radio into writing,
and then the writing into books. Found myself just in love from journalism
into a nonfiction writing. Sitting on the couch one day when I was returning
back to Boston to visit my dear friend Liza, she says to me,
I'm not sure I ever told you, but I was babyset by a serial
killer, and so full stop, I say to her, in these words,
that's your book. I know you've been wanting to write a book.
That's your book, and it's going to be called The Babysitter, which I
said no. For the next two or three years, whenever i'd come back
to Boston to visit, stay with Liza, sit in the couch, drink
our wine, toes curled underneath us, and I'd say, okay, so
how's the babysitter coming, And she'd say, I don't want to talk about
it. It's in adore somewhere. It's up to a thousand damp pages.
Oh no, I don't know, And so I am not four drafts.
I found myself between projects and I called her up and I said, how
about this? Why don't I help you do this? Because I know that
this is a tricky narrative. I know how to do it, so let
me help you. And she burst into tears. And here we are now,
Jen, At this point, had you already written your first in a
series of books. Yes, I'd written four books, so you actually were
able to turn to Liza and say, look, can actually help you with
this because I've actually birthed some books exactly. And the reason that I was
so confident about it was I had two books under my name and two books
that I ghosted, so I knew exactly how to get into another character's voice,
and I also knew how to split those voices because my third book,
third book was written with one of the Boston Marathon bombing victims. I knew
that I couldn't. I shouldn't just tell it through her story. I should
tell it through the three first responders who saved the life on Barston Street that
day. So I was able to flit from voice to voice in writing that
book, and I knew I could do it. And so when Liza presented
this story to me, and we have to obvious they tell it through the
young Liza's voice also had this serial killers horrific just ghostly, ghastly crimes on
the other side that you can't tell through a ten year old's voice. So
it was that delicate balance of the omniscient narrator and the memoir. And I
remember exactly where I was sitting when she said, Oh, that's no problem,
We're gonna do Liza Tony, Liza, Tony, Liza Tony. The
whole world opened up because the structure of it had been had dogged me for
so long, and she just I call her my literary fairy godmother because that's
what she was, and that's what she continues to be by just opening her
world to me and saying, we can do it this way, and let's
do it and that's what we did. Eliza, how much of your original
thousand pages of draft ultimately ended up in the final book? Did you have
to scrap all of it? And I thank you with Jen? Or like,
how did you ultimately make all this work? Sometime we worked independently.
Sometimes we worked, as we've described it before, shoulder to shoulder, word
to word, and then other times I worked on my chapters. Jen worked
on the serial killer chapters. And then we'd get one of us would get
stuck and we'd talk to one another. It was it was all over the
place. Oh my phone, I'm sorry, my watch is talking to me.
So now I'm going to put it down and throw it out the windows,
so I'll be right back. Hang on, I'll have to cut this
out. Anyway, we ran the gamut. We ran the gamut, We
really did. And so how much of the original draft? All of the
original draft? In terms of the stories, same stories I've been writing for
years. We just made them better, but the stories didn't really change.
And then the Tony part generally took the research. She took the research from
me, and she wrote it. We just went back and forth because I
had all I'd been researching for fifteen years before we came together, because I'd
had a series of dreams about Tony that made me ask the questions to my
mother, why am I what's going on? Why am I dreaming about this
man after all this time? And she that's her famous line from my book
of my know he became a serial killer. I know he became a patrician.
In thinking back about it, and my mother since passed away, but
in thinking back about it, I really think, even though it sounds so
outrageous, I really think she was like, he became a serial killer,
didn't have anything to do with us. It wasn't the kind of world where
we were all connected like we are now. That really was somebody else's problem.
And my mother had enough problems of her own that I think she was
just good at compartmentalizing. And we didn't have a news cycle, we didn't
have I don't know how much she actually knew other than he became a serial
killer, and she was quite close to his mother at one time, and
then his mother had passed away. And here's the other thing. We were
summer people. Oh I was wondering about that. Yeah, everything that went
on down there during the winter months we had no window on so that also
made the book a little bit difficult to write, but we work through it.
It's probably worth mentioning about Cape Cod. Can you explain a little bit
for our listeners who are not from the Cape and don't know about the Two
worlds? A little bit about that. Yeah. Sure. The provincetown is
all the way out on the tip of Cape Cod, so it's the very
last time you come to before you jump in the Atlantic Ocean, and it
is that sort of it's I wish I had the numbers in front of me,
but it's very sparsely populated except during the summer. Can be twenty five
hundred people living there in the summertime, I mean in the winter and year
round, and then thirty thousand in the summer. And that's how intense it
is. And everything closes, at least in nineteen sixty eight, nineteen sixty
nine, hotels closed, the restaurant's close. There is a lot of stuff
in our research about the people talking to one another about whether or not this
place was still open. They were always trying to find a place to be.
I think there was one local bar or two local bars. Really was
it? Everything else shut down. You could hear the wind whistle through it
down the street. So it was very it was poor, and it was
desolate in the wintertime, and in the summer it just was vibrant. And
I don't know if you guys have been to Provincetown's one of the most beautiful
places I've ever been. It has a certain quality of light there that draws
artists, and it has a vibrant gay community, where when no place else
did in the nineteen sixties it was Provincetown and San Francisco and New York.
It's sheltered. It has a long history of in the fishing industry, and
it was the first place the pilgrims came to. But it's very sparse even
now today in the wintertime. And also another thing about this summer versus the
local is that the local population, the twenty twelve month population was basically poor
and basically working just menial jobs until the summer when they could beef up there
when they made their money. And that's still true. And the summer people
were in their lily pulitzers and their yachts and their clam bakes, and so
there was a really strong divide and animosity between the locals and the summers.
And Tony was considered a summer kid for the first several years of his life
because he did live in Summerville by Boston of Boston and then would go down
to Peatown to stay with his aunt over the summer, So he was a
summer kid. So there was the divide started between him and the locals at
that point. And then when he went down to finish high school after he
was charged and convicted of attempted rape in Summerville, then he had to become
a local and that whole whatever's going on in his head, that couldn't have
helped, shall I say, that couldn't have helped his sense of place and
his sense of who he was in that place, because there was always that
divide of are you one of us or are you one of the Lily Pulitzer
crowd? In your j crew Jackies. Full disclosure, My partner, Pamela
Arnois, is from West Barnstable and so she grew up there and her perceptions
of Cape Cod are so radically different than mine. But I was a young
professional in Boston and we'd go to the Cape on weekends and we'd go to
the Cape in the summertime. Her perception of Cape Cod, and she would
have grown up there in the seventies, it was a place that she couldn't
wait to escape from. Although she recognizes the natural beauty of the place and
has a great fondness for it and the people that lived there, she's never
lived there since she left at age eighteen to go away to college. She
doesn't have a tremendous interest in going back, and she talks a lot when
I asked about the darkness of the offseason and alcohol and drug abuse, and
she wasn't necessarily drawn into that, but she saw it, and she said
she talked a lot about one of the things her father first said to her
when she first graduated from college and came back and lived at home for a
couple of months. She was applying for jobs in Boston, and then she
began commuting up there before she had enough money to get her own apartment.
And one of the things her father said, and he was in construction on
the Cape, was you really want off Cape Cod, don't you. That
was like a desperate need on her part to get out, And yet I
think off Cape Cod is this beautiful, fun bucolic summer place, and she's
sure not like that in February. No, it's not like that in February.
And for a while I lived on the Cape for fifteen years before I
moved up to Boston and raised my son youngest son. In fact, raised
all my kids there. I always described it as you drive over the bridge
in winter and it feels like someone threw a wet blanket over your head and
they're not gonna take it off until May. Now jen has a totally different
experience because she came in the summer and it was candy canes and New York
Times crossword puzzles, and her fabulous grandparents and her grandfather looked like Amwar Sadat
and she just does this amazing experience of Cape cod And my grandmother worked at
Lily Pulitzer, so it was Osterville, Jenelle, where the money was.
But there is a darkness to it that remains to this day, and that
darkness is part of we get asked. And maybe I'm fast forwarding too much
for your outline here, but Tony Costa, one of the reasons he got
away with his murders as long as he did was because he was caught up
in that darkness with everybody else in the alcohol and the drug and everybody was
drunk and everybody was high, and everybody was screwed up. He just fit
into this, into a darkness that there had been any sunshine. People said,
WHOA, what's going on over here? This is not all of Tony's
girlfriends were disappearing. But because it was part of this nasthma of the twelvemonth
capers and especially the twelve month pe Tounters, that much more removed from West
Barnstable and Austerville and Hyannis another hour away enabled him to continue his brain free
reign. Yeah free reign. I don't know if you've heard about the Lady
of the Dunes, Yes identity yea, Yeah, we've covered that. Yeah,
Oh have you? Yes? Isn't that an amazing story? It is.
Finally, there was a documentary that got done right this year, and
I think it's because of that documentary that all of a sudden it brought light
to the case that was on the back burner, and sudden these documentary showings
were selling out, and I think that was part of what pushed them to
get back in the game with this DNA, Because there was a lot of
talk about not getting back in the game. So I'm so glad she's identified.
But as part of the conversation about darkness on the Cape Post, that
stayed with Provincetown until right now as we're talking about it, and I think
much more so than the Tony Costa murders and then there were the Christa Worthington
murders. There's something about the desolation down there that allows people to get away
with things they might not be able to get away with elsewhere. As beautiful
as it is, I often have felt like Provincetown feels like the end of
the world, and it is, and it is. When you look at
the arm that is Cape Cod It's pretty much as far as you can go.
There's such a contrast between the dark part of the year and that ninety
day or so summertime, fun time. Once you hit Labor Day, it's
over, yeah, And that darkness doesn't go away in the summertime. Though
it lays really low. There's an undercurrent of it everywhere. It's in the
particularly in the bars, because it's one big problence down one big bar,
and one big party scene. At least it was for my mother and it
is now for a lot of people. I think that as the two things
rub up against one another. It was a hangout for the Boulger gang,
for Whitey Bulger's gang at the Crown and Anchor, And the more you read,
the more you find out it was a good place to get away,
where nobody helped you accountable, a good place to hide. So for our
listeners who may not be aware of the particulars of the Tony A. Coste
case, and we did cover this in our episode with Casey Sherman, but
I definitely want to get it from your perspective, How did you eventually learn,
oh my god, this guy who was looking after me was a serial
killer. How did you come to that realization and what did that do to
you to learn it? I carried memories with me into my adulthood. I
had no idea that they were memories that wrapped around Tony and to so I
always knew that there were murders that happened, but I wasn't clear on the
who, what, when, where, why. So I didn't find out
until I went back to college in two thousand and three to finish my bachelor's
degree that I had abandoned all those years ago in field dormitory, and I
started having these dreams. And because they went to a hippie dippie Vermont College,
what do we want to call it? Distance learning program? They encourage
you to journal my favorite thing. Right, I'm definitely going to do this.
There, I am journaling. These dreams started to get more and more
violent, and I was always being chased, and there was always this man
with no face, and I was always in fear of my life always.
So I started journaling them. I started writing them down, trying to figure
out what the common elements were. And then one night I had this absolute
nightmare of Tony Costa following me down the hotel. I'm getting ahead of myself,
but both my mother and her best friend owned motels as the street from
one another in promence down. So the dream was that I was in the
hallway of the motel. I was about ten years old, and he came
up to me and he put a gun to my head and he told me
to count to foreign Italian and I said I didn't know Italian, and then
when I opened my eyes, he was gone. So I went to my
mother at that point because these dreams had the same theme and had really haunt
started to haunt me to worry about myself. So I went to my mother
and I said, why am I hat did something happen to me that you're
not telling me? Because there was a lot she never told me. That's
when she said. I said, I don't understand why I'm dreaming about Tony
Costa and she said, I know he became a serial killer. Oh my
god. So that was really how I learned that he was a serial killer.
I walked him to describe it as a moment of when I don't know
who amongst us has ever had I once had somebody give me this horrible hash
oil and my whole world slowed down. That's what it was like. Everything
slowed way down. And I was like, it was just a bizarre moment,
was like a reckoning, and I knew that all of my fears and
so many of the things I was dealing with emotionally they have to do with
this time period. And so I went back and started researching, and there
was really not much of a Google at that point. Google but not much.
So I went to Kent State and I started researching a book, the
Papers of a Guy who had written a book Leo Dumour wrote in his garden.
I don't know if you're familiar with that book. It was a big
book on the case. Leo had passed away and sent his papers to Kent
State. So I went to the Special Collections and started paging through and found
it was a treasure trove. It was Tony's glasses and his bracelets, and
the trial transcript from Massachusetts, and hundreds of hours of audiotape of those interviews
in jail, and just ten thousand pieces of paper that I went through over
the fifteen years. And you say you actually they were able to listen to
Tony Costa. It must have been is nerve wracking even close to what that
was for both of you to listen to that. It was at one point
so familiar and so foreign, all at the same time, because you hear
it. We wrote a lot, Jena and I wrote a lot about his
accent, how he would flip, and you really hear it in those audio
tapes, don't you. Jenn did one minute he's British and the next minute
he's hardcore Boston. Some Ofville he just flips around. So it was quite
It was pretty much it's hard to listen to. And I have a great
transcriber out here in Utah that who's a student of mine in film school at
one point in her career, and so we sent all the tapes to her
to transcribe for us so that we could get quotes, and poor thing,
it's too little Mormon girl. And she called me at one point and I'm
not sure I can finish this. Oh wow. And I got to tell
you, she's heard more of it than I have, because even though I'm
a hardened journalist, I was like, whoa ingles while we were writing singles
from my level of stress and this poor young twenty something going through and having
to transcribe. So she had to go back and forth and back and forth
and back and forth, and she finally said, I finished it, but
it finished me. That felt so bad for her, because yeah, there's
just nothing like getting that deep as the transcriber has to into the words to
get them verbatim, because we said we're gonna be verbatim quotes. And so
yeah, she's listened to more of it than either Liza or I have because
she had to end the poor thing and to probably forever scarred it. Does
it sticks with you? And I imagine too, you've taken the time to
look through the crime scene photos and all of those things are awful. I
wouldn't do the crime scene photos. I know. I know Casey talked smart
out those crime scene photos, and I remember Jen saying to me, do
not do it, because you can't undo it exactly exactly. We don't need
them to write it. I went to a doctor friend of ours here in
Salt Lake to go through the autopsy reports with me so that I can understand
the medical jargon. Wow. Even he another sweet Mormon, looks up at
one point and goes, oh my god, this is a very angry man
who did this. They tried having just to describe to me exactly what the
autopsy reports are indicating. He's I've been a doctor for fifty years and I've
never ever Yeah, wow, how could you? Why would you ever read
an autopsy report of a deranged serial killer? And yet even after we didn't
see him, we those victims stay with us. They stay with us.
Yeah, because we've in order to write the scenes that we did, particularly
the murder scenes, we had to envision exactly what happened, what was done
to those bodies. We also had Tony's what do you want to call it?
Jen? His diary manuscript is not his man not his prison diary,
but his manuscript. He had a manuscript that never got published and there were
some pretty vivid descriptions in that. He basically had another unpublished manuscript from the
US. And so these were books by Costa and by this journalist that described
Costa's crimes but were never published. So how do you how do you gain
access to something like that? They're in the archives, they're there for the
taking. They were all there. They were. It was such a shock
when I came upon them, Remember Jen, I was like, you can't
believe what I'm holding in my hand. Because Tony's lawyer when Tony was arraigned,
the day he was arraigned, the lawyer or just days afterwards, took
Tony and his wife into the conference room at Bridgewater State Prison and had them
sign away their life rights so that Ink wasn't even ry on the arrangement before
he was exploiting these people. They were indigen they had no money for a
defense. The lawyer knew it. The lawyer was a friend of Tony's uncle
and a landowner. So he knew right from the beginning he was going to
exploit those stories. Now I'm not making a judgment. I'm just saying that's
how it worked. It wouldn't work that way today. It would never fly
with that Leo D. Moore Aunt, No, that was before leaved Moore.
Oh No, it was Jeff what's his name? No, the guy
who sat at the table and with the journalist who wrote the book and never
published it. He was an old newspaperman, Lester Allen was his name.
So Goldman tried to sell the book. He tried to sell it first to
Kurt Vonnegut, and Kurt Vonnigut said, I don't want anything to do with
this, even I can't clean up Tony Costa. That's a direct point.
So Vonnegut turned it down. And it was over money, because the lawyers
wanted to get paid and Vonnegut wanted more than the lawyers could give him.
He was approached first and walked away. And that's how I know Vonneguet didn't
he didn't want anything to do with it. After a while he tried to
peddle it to some other writers and they all turned him down except for this
one newspaperman in Hyannis named Lester Allen, who sat at the defense table and
listened to every word and then wrote this unpublished manuscript that exists in the archives
and special Collections at Kent State, and had spent untold hours interviewing Tony and
Davis before the defense before, way before a defense table, when Tony was
being held in the Barnstable jail. And then he's the interviewer on all those
audiotapes, all those audiotapes, and it's remarkable to listen to those tapes or
well read through the transcripts because again and just how much what's the word lies
it? Any attorney or any journalist conducted that kind of interview today with the
Me Too movement, because Tony's wife was involved in all of this, and
the way they trassed there was craftsman, and they totally abused her on these
tapes. Tell me about your sex with Tony, Tell me about then,
tell me again, tell me again, and did he do this to you?
And did he like to do this? Team and this poor girl she
was still she was nineteen with three babies at that point. So all by
way of saying what happened fifty years ago with Tony, with his wife,
with his attorneys, which just it's it would never happened today. Not that
he wasn't guilty, I'm not defending Tony cost but the way he was treated,
the way his wife was treated, the way the defense took total advantage
of their destitution. It's yeah, it's just mind boggling. And it's part
of the reason that he was able to continue is killing because there was so
much ineptness Keystone cops here and there, and oh, everybody looking out for
them selves and nobody looking out looking back on it. And I'm sure that
in real time it was the best they could do. It was the best
they could do, but it wasn't good enough, and it cost a lot
of women their lives. You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right
back after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at Mind over Murder.
And so the reason that all this material ended up at Kent State is
because of Leo Damore's or Leo Leo Dumour was best buddies with Bernie Flynn,
who was the state police investigator on this case. He was cracked the case.
They were best budds and so in that archive at Kent State. He
gave Leo everything. George Killen too, also from the state Police released evidence
into Leo's hands from the trial. Boxes and boxes of evidence now that would
never happen today either. And Leo sum tells me that there's even more boxes
of evidence from the cost of trial in his mother's garage that she won't let
him touchow. So somewhere there's the gun. We don't know what happened to
the gun because we never came across that. Yeah, it was really it
was the wild West of everything. You never knew him as a distic,
horrible serial killer. For you, he was just your babysitner. What are
some of the positive What are the positive memories that you have? That's the
tough part of this conversation for me, because I had to reconcile, and
it was tough in the writing process too, of that person, that cool
cousin, which is the way I looked at him, and who taught me
how to blow smoke rings, and the man I was researching. I could
not, I still can't and I probably never will be able to meld the
two to make a human being. So to me, they're two different people,
because for us, there are actually four of us that this happened too.
But I did not put everybody else in the book for privacy reasons,
and so I just made it about my experience, and I was the oldest
and I had the most memories, so it made sense for me to do
it. But to answer your question, everyone just thought he was a great
guy. That was the refrain that we heard over and over again. No
one suspected him, no one imagined this could be true. Although I think
Avis when he was arrested, I think she must have known. Yeah,
his wife. We just remembered him as it was just one big good time.
He was driving from dump to dump. He was the handyman at the
Royal Coachman Mote was driving from dump to dump and somehow he got roped into
taking the four of us with him, and so we were in this really
cool old truck. I still so many memories, even the smell of the
floor in that truck, the sand, I can still see it all.
That's how real it is. And I have a kind of a creepy memory.
I remember things I wish I could forget. Some of those are some
of my fondest memories being in the sand and the sun, and the music,
which was huge both in the book, in My Life and hopefully in
the docuseries. It's the music. Was you remember that static on the AM
radio because you couldn't get another station except w RKO out of Boston. Yes,
and we're always fiddling with just so many things, tactile things about being
in that truck, being with him, and he was nice to us,
and that was unusual because not too many people were. Everybody was always trying
to get rid of us, and we really didn't feel that way with him,
or at least I should say I didn't feel that way with him.
So it was a totally positive, for the most part experience. There are
some shadows that Jen feels very specifically that I've blocked some stuff out, and
we've had this conversation a billion times. I'm not sure I would remember him
so fondly. But don't forget, I was dealing with this crazy mother,
so there was a much bigger monster than Tony Costa. She was feeding the
hotdogs every night. That's really where my fear was with her. So when
you guys were talking about the division of work in the book, Janet sounds
like you spent a lot of your time writing the Tony Costa centric chapters.
Writing about a serial killer is not easy. But was it easier for you
to handle it than asking Liza to handle it? It was never. I
don't think it was ever a question that in the division of labor I would
tackle the omniscient narrator of Tony, because, as Liza said, one fifteen
years worth of amazing research, you just handed me these boxes, which for
me was like Mamana from heaven. And yeah, there was never. We
never had a debate about that. Liza had enough to do with really figuring
out her narrative and how much of her very troubled, very painful, very
revelatory childhood she was going to put on the page. And in fact,
one of our toughest moments as co writers was when she said to me,
I don't want to use the word abusive referring to my mother, And I
said, sweetheart, this is a mother that made you eat the cold hot
dog for breakfast if you couldn't choke it down at dinner. This is a
mother who threw you across the room for sitting on a cushion. This is
the mother who we had to at least have the reader acknowledge. And so
for me it was just gently, lovingly bring my dear friend along the process
of memoir. As I said to her early in the process, this is
the bravest thing you're ever going to do in your life, because you have
got to unzip your soul and reveal it to the world, and it is
going to be excruciating. And she came along with more grit and more bravery
and more like all right, then any of my ghost projects any had been
able to do. To answer your question, Kristen, I was very Yes,
I was busy with the tony chapters and putting on my journalistic hats,
so beyond the shingles, I didn't invade my life anymore. But it was
also in helping Liza realize that her bravery was going to be rewarded, that
in really telling the truth of this very abusive mother, that she would show
the amazing contradiction that she was more afraid of her mother than she was of
a serial killer, and that would make the book the powerful tool it is.
Today, part of me thinks that a lot of the key people in
your life, Liza, let you down on very profound levels. In other
words, we may all love our flawed, imperfect human beings that came.
We still do, but at the same time, we're talking about really profoundly
letting you down. This isn't just I'm disappointed because I don't know my parents
didn't let me go to the college I wanted to go to, or wouldn't
let me go to the high school dance or that camping trip I wanted to
go on. This is much more fundamental than that. And then we have
Tony Costa, who was by all accounts an incredibly charming, charismatic, sick
guy, but he managed to attract a crowd, and yet he's doing horrific
stuff while you guys are following behind him, like the pie piper. It's
interesting that you recount that because the pie piper thing is something Jed and I
struggled with in the book, because I had one interview which I was unable
to use because she threatened to sue me after she sat with me for four
hours, and so I just said forget it. There was one story that
she told about the Sire you remember in the book they called him Sire.
Yes, she told me that was a joke that they were all sitting around
and he was shooting pe out of his nose or some crazy shit, and
they were all doing drugs and it was a white rabbit time Grace Slick and
Jefferson airplane. He was pontificating about something in his kitchen. There were all
these much younger people sitting around, because of course Avis was so much younger
than him, and so he was this and you have to remember that,
I think that's a central factor here, is that he was so much older
than her that if he had a posse, and we believe he did,
it was more an age thing and he can sell, he can give me
drugs thing than it was that he was a spiritual leader, if you will.
The sire idea was a joke, and they called him that because he
was pontificating. He was high and he was pontificating and they were like,
all right, sire, yeah, okay, shut up now. And it
stuck and we're talking about it today. He's presented in Casey's book as almost
being like an East Coast Charlie Manson, And I'm interested if the two of
you were at this material for quite a while, do you see him as
having that same sort of Charles Manson like mystique or maybe not so much.
No, yeah, I don't either. I see Charles Manson is much more
sophisticated, smarter way smarter rumor smarter, much more in tuned with his posse
as Eliza was saying, with his acolytes, and he had no interest in
the acolytes. He had no interest in anyone around him but himself. The
teenagers that hung around him had interest in Marlin's on his robes that he didn't.
I doubt he could even name them. Yeah, Charles Manson made it,
made a study out of people, and it would never give Tony the
if you will the I know, I was thinking the same thing or the
title of a Charles Manson Tony. It's almost like Tony killed by accident.
Yeah, he couldn't help himself. Yeah, it was just for Charles Manson.
It was a design. He had something in mind with a Sharon hate
killings and the fact that he evaded prosecution for a while, whereas Tony devated
it because of the Keystone cops in Peatown and Tony went into the police station.
He went into the police station. I am innocent. I didn't do
it. What are you talking about? You and parting what Baston would have
never done that. I see them as very different. I want to push
back lightly in that Tony Costa did get away for a time. He got
away with multiple murders, not because of his intelligence. He got away with
multiple murders because of the absolute because of the times. I can't come up
where the incompetence of the Pea Town, the Truro, the provincetown, and
the Boston police, four police departments, all of whom were not talking to
each other, all of whom had cited him, and they didn't tell each
other. So Tony was able to drive to Boston in the last victim's car.
I have the car to Burlington, Vermont, drive around, get on
a bus, go. It was not Tony's intelligence, it was the cops
in competence. I don't know the particulars of the Charles Manson and how he
was finally caught and Bob, but believe me, they are very two separate.
And am I wrong in remembering that Charles Misson never actually killed, wasn't
his He never said he followers. Ye for smart enough to anyone put the
knife in their hand is a big difference, huge difference. Tony was the
killer, Charles Manson was not, and Tony's victims came to him. Charles
Manson went looking for his victims, and then people execute victims came to him.
So I think there even though the similarities, I can't it feels I
can't get the image of that Hollywood film out of my head, of him
on the farm with all those women who were serving him, and he was
like a spiritual leader of Manson when he was just sick and full of it.
It's a good tagline to sell a book, Charles Manson of peach Own
Killers for You wasn't post. I do want to get you guys to talk
to us a little bit about the I guess harassment is probably the best term
that I can come up with that both you and Casey Sherman were subjected to
during your various book events on the cape. Can you tell us a little
bit about what happened there and whether that has continued since? I can It
has not continued since because I had to shut down access, which as an
author I was really disappointed to have to do, but I had to stop
putting my email on my website. People can still find me if they want
to, but I've had to shut down a lot of access, and that's
too god, because readers had access to me and sent me some wonderful notes.
And but what happened was the bookstore owner the day before the event got
an email that was brutal, and so he sent it to me and I
said, what do you want to do? And he said, no,
I think we should go forward. So because of the brutal nature that all
of a sudden the next morning and that night, that same night, so
it's now the night before the event, and comments are starting to crop up
on the Provincetown community space page from all of these townies. Is such a
derogatory term somehow, because I wanted to be a towny. It was locals
who had been there and spent their lives in Provincetown, and we're friends of
Avis's and really felt that this was rubbing Avis's nose in what had happened,
and that her children were still there, and I can see their perspective,
I just don't share it and can see it. But the comments were ruthless,
and they got worse and worse, and there were hundreds of them,
and so The next morning, I called the Provincetown Belite Police and I got
Sergeant Enos on the line. Now Enos is an old time Provincetown name,
and I said, do you know what's going on at the bookstore tonight?
And he said, I know the story, but a backtrack, so I
knew he knew exactly what was going on. And I said, look,
I'm afraid someone's going to get hurt because there's a lot of vitriol online.
And he said, I don't have anybody on tonight. I only got one
guy on, which is what they had on the night Tony Costa killed those
women, by the way, But I'll send a guy by a couple of
times. And I wasn't really happy with the response, but I knew it
was the response I was going to get. And then it got so intense
that the bookstore owner's friends started calling him and saying so at two o'clock he
canceled. We talked and we agreed to cancel the event. And honestly,
I was so upset by that point in time and so stressed out about what
was going to happen that night. It was afraid. We live in a
world where people walk into movie theaters and blow people away for no reason.
These people had a reason, so I was afraid, and some of Avis's
sons got in on the conversation online, so I said, grate, let's
cancel. I'm done. He then, because I guess, in an effort
to be fair, canceled Casey's event. At the same time, Casey had
a very different reaction that I had. I went home and pulled the covers
over my head and said, get me out of Provincetown. Casey went after
them. So that's what happened, and I still don't support it. I
think that we should be able to talk about our work, but they shot
Salmon rushdie on the stage in New York, so I just don't want to
screw around with it. It's not important enough to me to put myself or
my family members who were going to be there and my friends in jeopardy,
let alone the people that I didn't know that we're going to be there.
We just didn't need another one of those. So would that preclude you having
a book signing or an event in New York or Boston or San Francisco or
you know. I think it was very particularly Petown. It was proximity to
Avis, his former wife and his children and grandchildren. That sparked that local's
towny fervor as and I call it the Peetown mafia that we ran into writing
the book. I think they closed ranks and circled the wagons. And no,
we wouldn't have an issue anywhere else but in p Town. We could
do it in West Barnstable, we could do it in Chathams. Just the
Petown locals that were that still knew that, the ones that knew Tony and
the ones that still defended not defended him, but really circled their wagons around
him. They some of them defended him. That that was the problem.
That was the problem, Bill. It had nothing to do with the book,
a book signing, per se. It was just it was in Petown
where the murders happened, and that there were still people alive that new Tony
and knew too much and knew too much because we got a lot of the
circling of the wagons around some of our sources started in the writing. In
the research process, we were told by numerous people. I was told not
to talk to you, and not only that, but I was told not
to talk to you and if you talk, I can't tell you what's going
to call down on your head. That's what they were told. You will
be sorry if you do over and over again. Don't contact me again.
And we knew that kind of bullying was a lot of hot air. But
as far as gathering people in a room in this day and age, as
Eliza was saying, nutcases doing all its evil because they can. It's it's
miss adds place in our society that you really have to think twice about exposing
yourself and exposing the people you love and the people you respect to crazies.
And this is a problem. Stolen story. This is a Provincetown story.
It's a local story. It's a Barnstable story, it's an east Ham story.
One of the victims was from east Ham. So it's a local story.
It's not that it's absolutely relevant there and the people who live a lot
of the people that live there don't even know the story. I had a
client on my tax practice who lives in Provincetown. They said, oh,
do you know the Tony Costa story. Don't know the Tony Costa story.
People have a right to know what happened there, but it wasn't worth it
for me to take the risk with the lives of other people. It just
wasn't. And I had gotten myself to a place where I felt brave enough
to stand up and talk about censorship before the event, but it just I
just what if I just couldn't take a chance. Yeah, as you pointed
out, Solomon Rushdi was stabbed on a stage in New York for how many
years later? Right? So many years later? Yeah, like almost three
decades. Yeah, And it's really important to remember that during as this was
going down, I was saying, this isn't going to happen to me.
You almost have magical thinking when you're threatened like that. Yeah, it'sn't really
A just can't really happen, but you know what, it can. It
took me, I think, and it took Jeff Peters some time to put
that together and say, yeah, we're not going to be jeopardizing, We're
not going to be doing this, We're not going to be doing it.
And they felt emboldened by the fact that we backed off and that he act
off. I can imagine it. Yeah, they were emboldened by that,
which is a shame. But I can't control that. Either, and yet
they were emboldened and yet frustrated because our book number, our book sales number
is shot through the roof. And the minute that they did that, because
we hit the New York Post, we hit Fox News, we hit a
couple of other national outlets that were like, what censorship to pet down after
all these years, all classes. I remember seeing the New York Post article
and going whoa, Like, that's because we had just arranged to interview Casey.
I had read your book, I had read his book. We were
arranging to interview Casey. And I saw that and I said, oh my
god, this is crazy. It's an interesting thing about that Post interview because
the same guy interviewed me that interviewed Casey's his name. But when he published
that article in the Post, it was full of inaccuracies. Really, I
got right on it on the line and said, before you published mine,
let's clear something up. And you know what, I never heard from him
again. Oh wow, it is the New York Post. It is the
New York Post. After all. What's in the future for the two of
you? Are you collaborating again on anything, or are you doing separate projects
and collaborate, which we totally are. It's unusual if we don't talk during
the day because we got so used to it during the writing costss. She's,
you know what I love about this because I'm not a phone person,
So she's I love the fact that you have to pick up the phone now
because you're writing together. Forty years you'd never take quite call, but now
she knows she has to not Right now, I'm just focusing. I'm working
on a ghost project with somebody in Salt Lake. The thing I love about
ghostwriting is I don't have to talk about it. Also, Lies and I
are negotiations for the film option for the Docusent. This would be amazing because
it's still in the process. I've spent too many years talking about my work
rather than just working, So I love saying can't talk about it, but
thanks for asking nice. I'm doing the same. I'm working on another project
inan Hampton about this story of the contracance that has been swept under the rug.
We have Williamsburg is yeah, I have what Jamestown but Hampton because it's
African American history and forgotten to talk. Yes, and it literally was the
beginning of all of it. Oh, I hope to get that story out
before too long. Yes, that's fantastic and you are right, definitely overdue.
We look forward to hearing all about your future projects, the ones you
can talk about and the ones you can't. And we just can't thank you
enough for spending time with us here on Mind of a Murder today. I've
enjoyed it so much. Thank you guys very much. Thanks for the work
you do, and thanks for your help with writers and books. That's going
to do it for this episode of Mind of a Murder. We'll see you
next time. Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog
Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art
is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod. Mind Over
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