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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder the most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 5: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 6: Good Evening. Growing up on Cape cod in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 6: Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl during the summers
Speaker 6: while her mother worked days in a local motel and
Speaker 6: dance most nights in the provincetown's bars. Her babysitter, the kind,
Speaker 6: handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked, took
Speaker 6: her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He
Speaker 6: bought them popsicles, and together they visited his secret garden
Speaker 6: in the Trueau Woods. To Eliza, he was one of
Speaker 6: the few kind and understanding adults in her life. Everyone
Speaker 6: thought he was just a great guy. But there was
Speaker 6: one thing she didn't know. Their babysitter was a serial killer,
Speaker 6: and some of the victims were buried in pieces right
Speaker 6: there in his garden in the woods. Though Tony Costa's
Speaker 6: gruesome case made screaming headlines in nineteen sixty nine and beyond.
Speaker 6: Eliza never made the connection between her friendly babysitter and
Speaker 6: the infamous killer of numerous women, including four in Massachusetts
Speaker 6: until decades later. Haunted by nightmares and horrified by what
Speaker 6: she learned, Eliza became obsessed with the case. Now, she
Speaker 6: and co writer Jennifer Jordan revealed the chilling and unforgettable
Speaker 6: true story of a charming but brutal psychopath through the
Speaker 6: eyes of a young girl who once called them her friend.
Speaker 6: The book that we were featuring this evening is The
Speaker 6: Babysitter My Summers with a Serial Killer, with my special
Speaker 6: guest authors and journalists E. Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan.
Speaker 6: Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for
Speaker 6: this interview. E. Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan, Thank you, Dan,
Speaker 6: thank you so much. This is a credible story and
Speaker 6: let's get right to this amazing story. Now, this book
Speaker 6: is written by two authors, but you guys are longtime friends.
Speaker 6: Tell us, Jennifer, how this book project originated.
Speaker 4: It originated over Wow, I'm going to date myself over
Speaker 4: forty years ago when I was percolating a pot of
Speaker 4: coffee in college, and through the door came first a
Speaker 4: coffee mug and then already e Liza asking for a
Speaker 4: cup of real coffee after you know, months of the
Speaker 4: swill served in the cafeteria. And that was the beginning
Speaker 4: of a friendship and a lifelong friendship for us. And
Speaker 4: we would hitchhike home to my dad in Vermont and
Speaker 4: to do the infamous Betty in Boston on weekends, and
Speaker 4: we spent a summer cleaning toilets on on the coast
Speaker 4: of Oregon. And you know, here we are, as I say,
Speaker 4: forty some years later.
Speaker 6: Tell us Liza about this book project and its origins.
Speaker 7: Okay, for you. I started having nightmares in two thousand
Speaker 7: and five. I was working on my thesis for my
Speaker 7: bachelor's degree, and I started having these dreams that were
Speaker 7: all kind of similar in nature. They all had an
Speaker 7: anonymous face. And during the process of working on my thesis,
Speaker 7: I was journaling and doing other things. So I started
Speaker 7: writing these dreams down and I was always being hunted
Speaker 7: in them, and you know, just near death, and I'd
Speaker 7: wake up and they really started to come faster and
Speaker 7: faster and more violent. And then one night I dreamt of,
Speaker 7: you know, the same kind of dream. But I saw
Speaker 7: Tony's face and I was stunned. He backed me right
Speaker 7: up against the wall in the motel, which you'll read
Speaker 7: about in The Babysitter, and he backed me up against
Speaker 7: the wall with a gun and he put it right
Speaker 7: to my forehead. And so when I woke up, I
Speaker 7: was like, WHOA, Now I have a face. I need
Speaker 7: to start asking some questions. And so the next time
Speaker 7: I had the opportunity, I took it with my mother
Speaker 7: and my aunt, who I refer to her as my
Speaker 7: aunt in the book, and I referred to her as
Speaker 7: my aunt in life. But she was my mother's best
Speaker 7: friend and she was the one who built the Royal
Speaker 7: Coachman Motel. So I had them both at my house
Speaker 7: for dinner, and I started asking them questions about Tony.
Speaker 7: What do you remember about Tony because I'm having these
Speaker 7: incredible nightmares. And basically they said to me, well, we
Speaker 7: know he became a serial killer. And you know, it
Speaker 7: was one of those moments where everything slows down and
Speaker 7: all of a sudden starts to align. And I said,
Speaker 7: what do you mean he became a serial killer? And
Speaker 7: so from there we went. I started researching because I
Speaker 7: couldn't let it go because now I'm saying to myself,
Speaker 7: you know, I'm fearful of this. I've got this going on.
Speaker 7: Some of this might make sense. Who was this guy
Speaker 7: I remember as a sweet guy? And how come I
Speaker 7: didn't know that somewhere along the line the murders that
Speaker 7: we knew had happened in Provincetown. I didn't. No one
Speaker 7: told me him. So that is how the whole thing
Speaker 7: started in two thousand and five. And from there I
Speaker 7: researched and wrote and tried to put it away and
Speaker 7: didn't really you know, some of the what I was
Speaker 7: finding out was really ugly, and I was trying to
Speaker 7: match who I knew him to be with who I
Speaker 7: was reading about him as an adult, who he really was.
Speaker 7: And so that's that's how we got into it.
Speaker 6: Interesting, now, Jennifer, when did you come into the process
Speaker 6: of writing this book and tell us about that Taple?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I came into the process when Lives I was
Speaker 4: visiting Boston. I had since moved to Utah, and I
Speaker 4: was visiting Boston and sitting up on sitting on Liza's
Speaker 4: couches with our toes Tuck talking as we have been
Speaker 4: doing for you know, thirty something years at that point,
Speaker 4: and she said, yeah, you know, I've started having these
Speaker 4: nightmares and it's crazy and I'm trying to write it down,
Speaker 4: she told me. And I said, oh my god. I
Speaker 4: mean there's a book there and that, and you know
Speaker 4: you've been struggling. I know you've been struggling to kind
Speaker 4: of get this out of you and onto the page.
Speaker 4: There's the book The Babysitter. And so in the ensuing years,
Speaker 4: I would say, so, how's The Babysitter coming? So how
Speaker 4: are you doing on that project? It's going to be
Speaker 4: a hell of a book. How are you doing? And
Speaker 4: she would kind of put, you know, fingers to the ears,
Speaker 4: going la la, la la. I can't talk about it.
Speaker 4: It's too convoluted, it's too troubling. It's just taking me
Speaker 4: down dark holes and rabbit holes and I don't want
Speaker 4: to go there. And I don't know about how to
Speaker 4: do the structure. And so when I got to a
Speaker 4: point in my career when I was between books, and
Speaker 4: I had just ghost written the book for actually one
Speaker 4: of the victims of the Boston marathon bombings, and that
Speaker 4: book was written in four different voices. So I knew,
Speaker 4: I knew how to tackle the structure of this book.
Speaker 4: I knew that it had to be Liza's young voice,
Speaker 4: eight nine ten year old voice in memoir form, and
Speaker 4: I knew it also had to be in the omniscient
Speaker 4: narrator voice of And meanwhile, after he took the girls
Speaker 4: for popsicles, he went out to his garden and checked
Speaker 4: on his bodies in the woods. And so I said, listen,
Speaker 4: let me help you at that point when I was
Speaker 4: between books, and Liza just kind of burst into tears
Speaker 4: and said, oh my god, I was afraid to ask
Speaker 4: you for help. And Dan, here we are. You know
Speaker 4: how many years later, three, four or five years later.
Speaker 6: Incredible. Let's talk about the process itself, the investigation that
Speaker 6: you literally undertake, but also what source materials that you used,
Speaker 6: and some of your impressions along the way in this process.
Speaker 7: Such a good question I started. So I started in
Speaker 7: two thousand and five looking around, and you know, so
Speaker 7: the Internet wasn't quite as well developed then as it
Speaker 7: is now, but there were some ways there. It pointed
Speaker 7: me in some different directions. And I started by trying
Speaker 7: to get the trial transcript from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Speaker 7: And after I waited for three months for them to
Speaker 7: get back to me, and they get back to me
Speaker 7: three months later and said, gee, we can't find it.
Speaker 7: So I went on my own search, and I found
Speaker 7: it in an archive in another author's papers after he'd
Speaker 7: passed away in Kent, Ohio. So that sort of led
Speaker 7: me down the road of this author had gotten he'd
Speaker 7: written a book on the case many many moons ago,
Speaker 7: nineteen eighty one, I think, is when it came out,
Speaker 7: and he had sort of focused on the trial and
Speaker 7: the investigation and you know, the truthful specifics of the case.
Speaker 7: And he had a great relationship with the state police
Speaker 7: because he was an old newspaper reporter. And so I
Speaker 7: found that he had boxes of evidence from the police
Speaker 7: that were in his possession when he passed away, and
Speaker 7: so I had access to everything. I had the investigator's notebooks,
Speaker 7: I had, you know, notes scratched on pieces of paper
Speaker 7: over lunch. I had interviews with every witness and even
Speaker 7: some non witnesses. As it turned out, I had all
Speaker 7: the police stuff. I had all the defense stuff because
Speaker 7: all of Maurice Goldman, who was Tony's defense attorney, I
Speaker 7: also had all of his work papers. Had I found
Speaker 7: personal effects of Tony's I found danteen gum, I found
Speaker 7: Tony's sunglasses. So over the years, and it was many
Speaker 7: at that point, so two thousand and five to probably
Speaker 7: twenty fourteen, before I wrote a first draft, I did
Speaker 7: this research in these archives, in other in libraries on
Speaker 7: the Cape, in you know, searching newspaper microfiche, because microfiche
Speaker 7: was still a big thing then, so that I could
Speaker 7: get all the newspaper articles. And what I was trying
Speaker 7: to do was match up the man I knew to
Speaker 7: the man these papers were describing because they were so
Speaker 7: opposite one another, and so it took me quite a
Speaker 7: long time.
Speaker 6: Now, Eliza, you were involved in this as well, and
Speaker 6: so you know Tony from a completely different perspective. And
Speaker 6: like you say, you found out after all of those
Speaker 6: years at this person that was your babysitter, that your
Speaker 6: friend was this heinous serial killer. So what was what
Speaker 6: was the process like for you in terms of finding
Speaker 6: out information about your friend, your babysitter.
Speaker 7: Well, that was it wasn't It was? It was looking
Speaker 7: through these archives and saying, wow, I don't recognize this
Speaker 7: person and why didn't anyone tell me? And so then
Speaker 7: I went back and I started talking to other people
Speaker 7: who were there with me at the time and trying
Speaker 7: to corroborate some of my own memories, trying to say, well,
Speaker 7: I remember it this way, what do you remember, Just
Speaker 7: so I could get a feel for where my own
Speaker 7: the validity of my own memories, and put them up
Speaker 7: against what I was finding out about this serial killer.
Speaker 7: And we were, you know, more than one time, I'd
Speaker 7: say more than ten times the phrase he was just
Speaker 7: a great guy. Everybody liked him. The guys at the
Speaker 7: front desk all liked him, My aunt and my mother
Speaker 7: certainly liked him. As children, we all liked him, And
Speaker 7: I particularly liked his mother. So you know, she was
Speaker 7: warmer than he and around more often than he. And
Speaker 7: because my mother I had such a difficult relationship with
Speaker 7: my mother, she was perfect. She was perfect. She used
Speaker 7: to wrap me up in her arms and listen to
Speaker 7: me chatter on and whatever else. So I always remembered
Speaker 7: her as well. And so you know, when Jen came
Speaker 7: on board in twenty eighteen to help me make this
Speaker 7: a real functioning book, we worked really hard to make
Speaker 7: sure that the characters were we were portraying now, so
Speaker 7: this would be Cecilia who I just spoke about, and
Speaker 7: my own mother, and Tony and my aunt and on
Speaker 7: and on and on, to make them as three dimensional
Speaker 7: as we possibly could. And the way we did that,
Speaker 7: at least in the beginning, as jen has said, is
Speaker 7: to put those two voices out there up against one
Speaker 7: another and let them do their you know, make their magic.
Speaker 7: The way that history remembers Tony and the ray that
Speaker 7: I I remember Tony you.
Speaker 6: Talk about, you write about Tony's sad and sordid history.
Speaker 6: You talk about his mother, but also his marriage early
Speaker 6: on to a woman much younger Avis, and you talk
Speaker 6: about doctor Callus again, another important character in this. But
Speaker 6: but tell us, Jennifer, some of the background that you
Speaker 6: found about Tony and his in his early history.
Speaker 4: Right, And that's one of the ironies for me, as
Speaker 4: you know, as a as an investigative journalist and as
Speaker 4: as as a writer, The irony that Tony grew up with,
Speaker 4: by all intents and purposes, a loving, nurturing woman whom
Speaker 4: Liza adored and would just you know, sit in the
Speaker 4: laundry room with Cecilia and help Ufold towels by the hour,
Speaker 4: and and Liza was raised by Betty, who was an abusive,
Speaker 4: neglectible mother. And yet Tony became the serial killer, and
Speaker 4: Liza became the generous, loving woman that she is. So
Speaker 4: there's for me looking at this and the juxtaposition of
Speaker 4: these two mothers and these two children was a fascinating
Speaker 4: look at character and what happened. And in Toni's case,
Speaker 4: I'm not sure we'll ever know what happened to him.
Speaker 4: You know, obviously, the truth itself died with him. And
Speaker 4: what Cecilia may or may not have done it to
Speaker 4: him in his childhood to create a monster, We'll never know.
Speaker 4: That we know a lot more than we ever did
Speaker 4: fifty years ago, certainly about mental health issues, about psychopathy,
Speaker 4: about what makes a monster. And we know that Tony
Speaker 4: certainly had all the characteristics of a you know, of
Speaker 4: a serial killer and of a psychopath. But we will
Speaker 4: never know exactly what broke that psyche, what broke that
Speaker 4: that little bull boys soul. And uh, you know, he
Speaker 4: tried to blame it on draw his defense, tried to
Speaker 4: blame it on drugs, and yet you know, drugs don't
Speaker 4: make a killer. So you know, it was. It was
Speaker 4: for me, just one of the most fascinating investigations I've
Speaker 4: ever done.
Speaker 6: Elijah, What are your memories of Tony? We just we
Speaker 6: alluded to them and we talked about them briefly. But
Speaker 6: what are some of the things we Jennifer just described
Speaker 6: him as this psychopathic killer, right, which you didn't. You didn't.
Speaker 6: You didn't see him as that. So what was the
Speaker 6: what was your time with him characterized by tell us
Speaker 6: a little bit about your time with Tony?
Speaker 7: Okay, So my aunt tells a great story about So
Speaker 7: Tony was looking for work. He was always all for work, Yeah,
Speaker 7: and so he came to work through his mother at
Speaker 7: the Royal Coachman, where my mother was working. And that's
Speaker 7: the same hotel that my aunt owned. And so as
Speaker 7: he started doing his handyman work in his carpentry, and
Speaker 7: he did a lot of trash hauling back and forth,
Speaker 7: because in a motel like that, you have a ton
Speaker 7: of trash. And so the dump runs were really frequent,
Speaker 7: sometimes twice a day. Now, my aunt tells a great story.
Speaker 7: She says Tony would come up the driveway either on
Speaker 7: his bicycle or in his dilapid some dilapidated old car
Speaker 7: that he was driving. I know he at one point
Speaker 7: he had a blue Bonneville, you know, in nineteen sixty
Speaker 7: something Bonneville. So he'd come up the driveway and she'd holler,
Speaker 7: here comes Tony, and we'd all throw our towels around us,
Speaker 7: and out we'd go and beg to go in the
Speaker 7: truck with Tony because it was fun and he was
Speaker 7: all over the place. I mean he was, you know.
Speaker 7: I joke about the fact that we probably went from
Speaker 7: every dump on the Lower Cape at one point or
Speaker 7: another with him. It wasn't the days when you had
Speaker 7: to have a dump pass so that you could get in.
Speaker 7: You could go anywhere. And Jen often will tell the
Speaker 7: story about Norman Mayler how he described Provincetown in those
Speaker 7: days as the wild west of the East, and that's
Speaker 7: exactly what it was. It was a place where people
Speaker 7: could get lost. The culture of the sixties was coming out.
Speaker 7: It was sort of nineteen sixties. Let it all hang
Speaker 7: out was a phrase my mother used to like to use,
Speaker 7: And so it was a free for all and kind
Speaker 7: of a wild, windy, sunny day, sand in your face
Speaker 7: free for all. And so everych opportunity we got. We
Speaker 7: wanted to go with Tony because he was fun and
Speaker 7: he always had the radio on in the utility truck
Speaker 7: from the Royal Coachman. He would then get in the truck.
Speaker 7: They had an old green truck, and he would get
Speaker 7: in the truck and we would get in the big
Speaker 7: what do you call it, the bench seat in the front.
Speaker 7: You know, there were no bucket feats in those days,
Speaker 7: and so we'd slide in there in our bathing suits
Speaker 7: and our flip flops and go along for the ride.
Speaker 7: And I will say this he as is written in
Speaker 7: the book. He used to get us ice cream. There
Speaker 7: was a soda machine right there by where the truck
Speaker 7: pulled up. We'd get a soda we'd get He took
Speaker 7: us out for ice cream. Who knows what he was doing.
Speaker 7: I don't have nefarious memories of what he was doing
Speaker 7: other than emptying trash, and thank god I don't, or
Speaker 7: at least I don't have any that I've uncovered. But
Speaker 7: for us, it was like that cousin. I used to
Speaker 7: have a female cousin and she was a few years
Speaker 7: older than me, and I wanted to be her right.
Speaker 7: I wanted her to hang around with her, to tag
Speaker 7: along after her, to do what she did, listen to
Speaker 7: what she listened to, and be who she was. And
Speaker 7: that's how it was with him. He just was fun,
Speaker 7: and so we wanted to be with fun because it
Speaker 7: wasn't so fun to be hanging around the Royal Coachman
Speaker 7: with some adult yelling at you all day long. And
Speaker 7: we had also other babysitters at the time, and some
Speaker 7: of them are really heinous, So in comparison to the
Speaker 7: heinous babysitters, when Tony would come up the driveway, we
Speaker 7: were like, let's get out of here. And we were
Speaker 7: little kids, so we just wanted to relax and be
Speaker 7: in the company of someone who wasn't screaming at us
Speaker 7: all the time.
Speaker 4: And she was that guy, and not only not screaming
Speaker 4: at you all the time, but really treating you like
Speaker 4: a peer, I mean, complimenting your music memory and complimenting
Speaker 4: your you know, long deer legs and you know, really
Speaker 4: really looking at you and making you feel like a
Speaker 4: gros making you feel like you know, some important one
Speaker 4: of He used to call his female followers his kid chicks,
Speaker 4: and Liva felt like, you know, one of the kid
Speaker 4: chicks in grooming, you know, to be and so you know,
Speaker 4: she sat there, you know, kind kind of blushing, blushing
Speaker 4: with the attention that Tony would bestow on her.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and he didn't have a father either. And it's
Speaker 7: a significant point that I remember those conversations because I
Speaker 7: when when the book describes me as a lonely little girl,
Speaker 7: lonely insomuch as I missed my father, right, and so
Speaker 7: in a lot of ways, he was like that. He
Speaker 7: was like a father figure. Or he was about the
Speaker 7: same age as my father, maybe just a little younger.
Speaker 7: He was strapping and good looking and kind and so
Speaker 7: like I imagined my father to be my absent father,
Speaker 7: and Tony also didn't have a father. And I remembered
Speaker 7: those conversations. It was one of the things that drew
Speaker 7: me in initially when I realized who Tony was to
Speaker 7: both to me and to the world. And then I
Speaker 7: suddenly was like, my god, look how close this could
Speaker 7: have been, this conversation about my father. I always remembered it,
Speaker 7: and I always remembered the kindness I thought because of it,
Speaker 7: we sort of shared that little wound, and so it
Speaker 7: was it was intoxicating to be with a guy like
Speaker 7: that who was kind to you. Really, I mean, those
Speaker 7: are the only memories I have of Tony. He took
Speaker 7: us out to those Trureau woods and any number of times.
Speaker 7: I couldn't give you a number of times, but I've
Speaker 7: pieced together the memories I have in the narrative because
Speaker 7: we were that was a place he went on a
Speaker 7: regular basis, as it turns out from the research, because
Speaker 7: he had his drugs stashed out there, He had his
Speaker 7: later on in nineteen sixty eight, he had his body
Speaker 7: stashed out there, He had his weapons stashed out there,
Speaker 7: He had coffee cans buried under the ground. In fact,
Speaker 7: that's where they found the gun that killed these last
Speaker 7: two women was at the base of a tree right
Speaker 7: out there in that secret garden, if you will. He
Speaker 7: had marijuana growing out there. Wasn't much of a garden,
Speaker 7: but he thought it was. And that was another place
Speaker 7: where he and I because my grandfather lived next door
Speaker 7: to us growing up and he was a huge gardener.
Speaker 7: So it was something I learned, like you learned to
Speaker 7: write a bike before you know that you're learning, And
Speaker 7: so knew. I thought, here I am, I'm eight, I'm nine.
Speaker 7: I know gardening. I can talk to Tony about gardening
Speaker 7: because he's talking to me about gardening, having no so
Speaker 7: when I was actually doing the research and realizing that
Speaker 7: his garden was quite a bit different than my vegetable garden.
Speaker 7: You know, all the close things as they're coming up
Speaker 7: in the research, my memories up against the research, my
Speaker 7: memories up against the research. And that went on for
Speaker 7: a good ten year period.
Speaker 6: Now, Jennifer, we haven't mentioned Liza talks about the charming
Speaker 6: personality that he exhibited to her and everyone around her
Speaker 6: and your small little world, and he used those skills
Speaker 6: as well with his followers that were fifteen to nineteen
Speaker 6: years old. You write, tell us a little bit about
Speaker 6: this the drug use, but also this doctor Tallis and
Speaker 6: his role and just a Provincetown and sort of his
Speaker 6: status among these followers.
Speaker 4: Right, as far as we know, Tony's drug USESE began
Speaker 4: with a visit to a doctor Sydney Callous in Wealthy,
Speaker 4: which is right down the highway from Petown. And he
Speaker 4: went to doctor Callous seeking a marriage consulting because he
Speaker 4: and Avis in they're very young and very dysfunctional marriage,
Speaker 4: was trying to get some help and doctor Callous, unbeknownst
Speaker 4: Tony was at the same time doing a drug trial
Speaker 4: research and funded by the pharmaceutical company. And so he
Speaker 4: gave Tony handfuls of a drug, you know, out of
Speaker 4: his drawer, samples out of his drawer, and Tony took
Speaker 4: them home and took one and the next thing Avis knew,
Speaker 4: his head was in the pudding on the on the
Speaker 4: dining room table. And so that was the beginning of it.
Speaker 4: And again, as Eliza is mentioning, you know, through the
Speaker 4: research and through doctor Callus's testimony and through different uh
Speaker 4: papers found in the archives, we you can see just
Speaker 4: this trajectory of drug use at the hands of doctor
Speaker 4: Callous and also a doctor Hebert, who was the the
Speaker 4: ubuncular town doctor who birthed Tony's you know, gave me
Speaker 4: the kind of things ABS's mother, Yes, Tony's mother, No
Speaker 4: did he did. He started in nineteen eighteen practicing, so yeah,
Speaker 4: most of the town, right, most of the town. So
Speaker 4: in any case, so that was the beginning of his
Speaker 4: drug use. And as he uh you know, became a
Speaker 4: young man after high school, he really just the drugs
Speaker 4: became his lure for even younger kids, always looking for
Speaker 4: a hero, always looking for an adult to hang out with,
Speaker 4: if you will.
Speaker 7: Many from broken homes to Jen.
Speaker 4: Right, many from broken homes. And you know, as you mentioned, Dan,
Speaker 4: Pea Town is a character in this book as well,
Speaker 4: and the pe town of the sixties was very dichotomized
Speaker 4: by the summer people and those that had to survive
Speaker 4: through the very long, very dark, very depressing winter. And
Speaker 4: so a lot of these kids grew up with too
Speaker 4: much alcohol and too much abuse and too much neglect.
Speaker 4: So anyway, Tony, like he was for Eliza, was just
Speaker 4: this charming, older, you know, hip guy who seemed to
Speaker 4: want them hanging around him. And Tony loved it. He
Speaker 4: loved being the pied piper and having this little, you know,
Speaker 4: coterie of kids following him around, like you know, the
Speaker 4: ducks in Boston Garden. And it just escalated and became
Speaker 4: kind of darker and darker as Tony became darker and darker,
Speaker 4: and uh, you know, Callous was part of that. And
Speaker 4: then Avis, of course was one of those kid chicks
Speaker 4: who then became his wife, and the you know, everything
Speaker 4: started to uh steamroll and collapse.
Speaker 7: On Tony's you know, he used to carry a physician's
Speaker 7: desk reference. He kept it in his house and he
Speaker 7: became the guy pardon yes, which he had stolen, right
Speaker 7: and and and they they started coming to him for
Speaker 7: bad overdoses or if they'd have bad trips or you know,
Speaker 7: he knew how to if you were too far down
Speaker 7: to bring you up, and if you were too far
Speaker 7: up to bring you down. And it was I mean,
Speaker 7: he boasted about it, and you know his friends boasted
Speaker 7: about it too. I mean there was a drug culture
Speaker 7: that was, you know, really just beginning, both in the
Speaker 7: real world with those doctors who were, you know, prescribing drugs.
Speaker 7: Remember the song Mother's Little Helper. I mean, that's what
Speaker 7: they did with women in those days, was prescribe valume.
Speaker 7: And that's what they did with Tony. Yeah, and we.
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Speaker 6: Sorry about that. Let's talk about the timeline of Tony
Speaker 6: Costa's murders. Sidney Monsen, Susan Perry, Christine and Pat and
Speaker 6: Maryann Weissoski and Pat Wolfsh Patricia Wolfs let's first talk
Speaker 6: about how he gets the unraveling. We just mentioned that
Speaker 6: the drugs and his upbeat and pied piper persona is
Speaker 6: now a very very dark persona. And even Liza hears
Speaker 6: his change and complaining and talking about all the people
Speaker 6: that wronged him and all the things that were owed
Speaker 6: to him. So let's talk about how he gets to
Speaker 6: the murders itself, and that timeline.
Speaker 7: So in nineteen sixty eight, in January of nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 7: I'm going to give you the longer version here, he
Speaker 7: went to Hayte Ashbury and when he came back, Avis
Speaker 7: had filed the final divorce papers. And you know, I mean,
Speaker 7: it's an opinion on my part, but I think it
Speaker 7: was part of it because she was his lifeline. She
Speaker 7: really was. She was his grounding force, and understandably had
Speaker 7: had enough and so she said enough already, and he
Speaker 7: started to down a darker path. And by May, oh,
Speaker 7: and then the doctor, doctor Callous, decided he wasn't going
Speaker 7: to treat him anymore, and he cut him off. So
Speaker 7: I think those yeah, he cut off his drug supply
Speaker 7: or his easy drug supply, certainly, and so so he
Speaker 7: those two things I think combined to create a sort
Speaker 7: of firestorm. And then he met Sydney Monson, and he
Speaker 7: met her in a bar because he was sitting in
Speaker 7: the bar because it was close to where Avis had
Speaker 7: rented a house and wanted to keep an eye on
Speaker 7: who was going in and out of the house. And
Speaker 7: Sydney was I think a waitress. And they struck up
Speaker 7: a friendship because of course Sidney had a drug problem,
Speaker 7: and they knew other people, you know, they had friends
Speaker 7: in common, and so for a short time they were
Speaker 7: seen together quite a bit. They burglar Callus's office as
Speaker 7: payback for him cutting Tony off. And when they did that, Sidney,
Speaker 7: you know, Tony did the burglary. Sydney drove the car,
Speaker 7: the getaway car, so to speak, and the two of
Speaker 7: them stashed all the drugs in the woods where he
Speaker 7: then a week later after the burglary was on the
Speaker 7: seventeenth of July. By the twenty fourth, she was gone
Speaker 7: and buried in those woods. So they must have had
Speaker 7: some falling out over drugs or love or sex or
Speaker 7: whatever they had a falling out over, or he just
Speaker 7: lost his mind, but that we think is his first victim.
Speaker 7: Sidney Monson and as far as Susan goes, gen you
Speaker 7: want to pick up the Susan, the Susan timeline and
Speaker 7: the Christine.
Speaker 4: I know, and it's so funny, not funny, but hearing
Speaker 4: hearing these stories and really going through them again Dan
Speaker 4: as we did in writing The Babysitter, it's just so
Speaker 4: heartbreaking of these women's series is just really really oh
Speaker 4: they were they were so searching for something they couldn't find,
Speaker 4: and they thought they found it in Tony and it
Speaker 4: just okay. So so Susan again, it's just a very
Speaker 4: very was a very very sad, lonely lost girl, alcoholic mother,
Speaker 4: absentee father who was out. He was a fisherman who
Speaker 4: was out to sea for weeks two months at a time,
Speaker 4: and she was the she was left in charge of
Speaker 4: I think six siblings and you know, was with barely
Speaker 4: two Nichols to rub together that she had to feed
Speaker 4: and get to school. And so she really was looking
Speaker 4: for an escape and she ran away from home. Her
Speaker 4: father told her if you leave now, don't come back.
Speaker 4: And she ended up living with Tony in he was
Speaker 4: at that point had had a construction job up and
Speaker 4: get him just south of Boston and so, and she
Speaker 4: thought she'd found.
Speaker 7: Love the way averer boyfriend.
Speaker 3: I know you're.
Speaker 4: Thirteen, right, And she told her girlfriends, I think Tony
Speaker 4: really likes me, and I think now that we've had sex,
Speaker 4: he's going to really you know, he's gonna he's gonna
Speaker 4: love me even more. And so the last anyone saw
Speaker 4: of Susan alive besides Tony, of course, were her two
Speaker 4: or three girlfriends who are heading back to Peetown from
Speaker 4: a visit in debt. Him and she and Tony were
Speaker 4: standing on the on the porch of this apartment house,
Speaker 4: and you know, she was kissing his neck and you know,
Speaker 4: glomming onto him, and that was the last anyone saw.
Speaker 4: And her murder is particularly horrific, and I really don't
Speaker 4: want to go into it on here, just because it's
Speaker 4: just something that is too almost too gruesome for even
Speaker 4: a serial killer audience. It's just the detail of her
Speaker 4: murder are are really even even worse than the other
Speaker 4: four in a way. So I leave it to your reader.
Speaker 4: I leave leave it to your listeners to go to
Speaker 4: the book and you know, have that have that darkness
Speaker 4: to themselves. But she she was the first body that
Speaker 4: was found in the woods. Hers was the first body
Speaker 4: that was found, and.
Speaker 7: We think she was killed. Yeah, we think she was
Speaker 7: killed because in part, I mean, other than Tony's psychopathy,
Speaker 7: and trying to adhere to a strict cause and effect
Speaker 7: with when you're dealing with a sociopaths impossible because we
Speaker 7: don't know what his motivation was and we don't actually
Speaker 7: understand it even, you know, as different human beings. But
Speaker 7: Christine Gallant was his muse, according to him. According to her,
Speaker 7: that's an entirely different story. But according to him, he
Speaker 7: had met up with her during that spring after he
Speaker 7: killed Sydney Monson, and he'd sort of been in touch
Speaker 7: with her on and off. But remember communication was at
Speaker 7: a minimum. There were still party lines in those days.
Speaker 7: So they'd seen each other and spoken to each other
Speaker 7: on and off when they'd see each other on the
Speaker 7: street basically, And she was involved with a married man
Speaker 7: in Provincetown, and that married man, you know, they were
Speaker 7: in and on again, off again relationship. How much of
Speaker 7: a relationship can you have with a married man, So
Speaker 7: so Sydney. Somehow Christine and Tony hooked up on that
Speaker 7: Labor Day weekend before Susan Perry was killed. So in
Speaker 7: between Susan Perry sleeping with Tony and thinking she'd found
Speaker 7: her prince charming and Susan Perry being killed, Tony hooks
Speaker 7: up again with Christine and now he thinks he's going
Speaker 7: to have a life with her. He's going to have
Speaker 7: her finally to himself, he's going, they're going to have babies,
Speaker 7: They're going She inspired him to work again. I mean,
Speaker 7: you know all of this crazy kind of meglomaniac, grandiose
Speaker 7: things that were going to happen with Christine. And so
Speaker 7: that was Labor Day weekend, and he was how to
Speaker 7: get rid of Susan Perry. So he overdosed her, we think,
Speaker 7: in an effort to be with Christine, and then went
Speaker 7: into a tailspin. And there were a lot of accounts
Speaker 7: from other people in police reports about and Tony two,
Speaker 7: who said he lost three weeks during that time. He
Speaker 7: couldn't remember three weeks. His brother talked a lot about
Speaker 7: what a tailspin he was in at that point in time.
Speaker 7: And he had gone to mass He had done a
Speaker 7: lot of things because he knew now he'd had two
Speaker 7: victims in his pocket, and he knew the road he
Speaker 7: was going down, And don't forget the other thing that
Speaker 7: was happening was that he was trying to read it.
Speaker 7: He knew what was happening in his brain. He knew
Speaker 7: what was happening in his mind. He was in an
Speaker 7: attempt to understand it. Now he's reading books on psychoneurosis
Speaker 7: and trying to diagnose himself and what was happening to him.
Speaker 7: So there was a struggle going on inside Tony that
Speaker 7: included this proclivity for violence and for you know, just
Speaker 7: horrible things, and also a Tony that was trying to
Speaker 7: figure out what was happening. So on September twenty fifth,
Speaker 7: after he killed Susan, he ended up getting arrested. And
Speaker 7: he was arrested I think for a loud muffler, wasn't it, Jim.
Speaker 4: No, No, No, he's rested for non supportive trial.
Speaker 7: Of Oh, that's what it was. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 7: And he went to jail and he was supposed to
Speaker 7: stay in jail, so the I think it was a
Speaker 7: six month sentence and he was supposed to be in
Speaker 7: jail till March nineteenth, nineteen sixty nine. And in the meantime,
Speaker 7: while he's in jail, he's writing these peppering He's peppering
Speaker 7: Avis with letters, abusive letters, and you know, really out
Speaker 7: of his mind at this point, and trying to get
Speaker 7: in touch with Christine, and she's not answering him. She's
Speaker 7: not answering him, she's not answering him. He then takes
Speaker 7: the police up on Also in nineteen sixty eight, early
Speaker 7: which I forgot to mention, was he was a stool
Speaker 7: pigeon for the police in a drug bust in Provincetown,
Speaker 7: So he felt like they owed him a favor, and
Speaker 7: I guess they must have felt that way too, because
Speaker 7: when he wrote to the sergeant involved, get me out
Speaker 7: of here, the guy did it. So on November eighth,
Speaker 7: he was released and he went directly to New York
Speaker 7: to hook up with Christine Gallant. And after that, go ahead, what.
Speaker 6: About ral Matta. You talked about the guy that was
Speaker 6: the married guy, But what was in terms of what
Speaker 6: he said later was what was the communication with him
Speaker 6: and Christine as opposed to what he was saying in
Speaker 6: terms of that they were going to get married, So
Speaker 6: what was the right? So difference in stories, right.
Speaker 7: So this is happening now as soon as Tony gets
Speaker 7: out of jail. Tony's saying he and Christine are going
Speaker 7: to get married, and Christine is saying that she's going
Speaker 7: to marry Raul, who's now gotten a divorce. And what
Speaker 7: we know for certain is that Christine wrote a letter
Speaker 7: to a friend, might have even been on the day
Speaker 7: she died, saying I'm going to marry Raul. Tony scares me,
Speaker 7: Tony freaks me out. Yeah, he's too intense, right, too intent. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and I'm in a merry Raul. And next thing we know,
Speaker 7: Tony's been at her apartment and he's given her three
Speaker 7: times the dose of nebutolee that she was used to.
Speaker 7: She actually had a prescription for thirty milligrams and he
Speaker 7: gave her one hundred milligrams and he admits this, and
Speaker 7: the next thing you know, she turns up dead. She
Speaker 7: and Jen talk about the forensics around Christine's death.
Speaker 4: Yes, I mean, one of the things that I was
Speaker 4: fascinated with in uh with Christine Galot in particular in
Speaker 4: researching and writing The Babysitter, was how much information we
Speaker 4: had from the investigators at the time, and then contacting
Speaker 4: forensic scientists and police officers and detectives since I mean
Speaker 4: fifty years later, and I remember asking a cop in
Speaker 4: Boston like, Okay, do you think that Christine Gallant having
Speaker 4: been found face down, kneeling face down in a tub
Speaker 4: with you know, a couple of inches of water with
Speaker 4: cigarette burns on her body, does that sound like a
Speaker 4: suicide to you? Because that's how it was recorded by
Speaker 4: the by the cops at the time. And the police
Speaker 4: officer said to me, no, it's a little uncomfortable. I
Speaker 4: mean as simple as that, It's not a position that
Speaker 4: is in any way normal quote unquote for suicide. I mean,
Speaker 4: most suicides in the bathtub. You you fill it up,
Speaker 4: you you take an overdose, fill it up with warm water,
Speaker 4: and slowly sink beneath the surface. And were fond and
Speaker 4: so uh us when we were looking at it and
Speaker 4: looking at the timeline of Tony's visit to New York.
Speaker 4: He arrived by buss on uh Friday afternoon. It might
Speaker 4: have even been Saturday morning. I mean, there's so many
Speaker 4: different dates. But he was back on a bus back
Speaker 4: to Peatown within less than twenty four hours. He went
Speaker 4: right back. And but before he went back to the
Speaker 4: to the bus station to go back to Peatown. He
Speaker 4: left Christine in the apartment. He went to get some
Speaker 4: drugs from a friend of hers in the village. The
Speaker 4: friend in the village says, where's Christine, And Tony said
Speaker 4: to him, oh, she's not feeling well. So he got
Speaker 4: his drugs and then from the village went back to
Speaker 4: Penn Station, caught his bus and went and left New York.
Speaker 4: So you know the time, not only that, not only
Speaker 4: Christine's physical appearance to the police when they found her
Speaker 4: body in the tub, but Tony's The timeline of Tony's
Speaker 4: visit to New York are very indicative of what the
Speaker 4: hell happened to that poor girl.
Speaker 7: And you know, I spoke to the guy who Decorner
Speaker 7: at the time, the assistant medical Examiner for the State
Speaker 7: of New York at the time, did the.
Speaker 4: Autumn by the way, was part of Jeffrey Epstein's investigation,
Speaker 4: so he wrote.
Speaker 7: His name is doctor Michael Baden, and he became eventually
Speaker 7: became the medical examiner, and now he's the medical examiner
Speaker 7: to the stars, and he's in his eighties. And he
Speaker 7: didn't obviously remember this case, and I didn't think that
Speaker 7: he would. But one of the things he told me.
Speaker 7: Which was interesting is that when a person has a
Speaker 7: bad trip or whatever, when someone one of the things
Speaker 7: they used to do, and I'm sure Tony knew this
Speaker 7: was to put them in a tub. Now he had
Speaker 7: remembered he had fed her more than she was used
Speaker 7: to of that nebutagh, he's given her three times the dose.
Speaker 7: And he said, then they when they're trying to bring
Speaker 7: you out of something, they'll put you in a cold
Speaker 7: tub of water to try and shock the system. So
Speaker 7: we think that may have been part of it as well.
Speaker 7: And when he realized he'd given her too much and oh, well,
Speaker 7: that's the way it was going to be. Maybe he
Speaker 7: was paying her back. Maybe she'd said to him, I'm
Speaker 7: gonna I'm gonna marry ral Matta, and you've got to
Speaker 7: accept this. He turned her over and let her go.
Speaker 7: So I mean he already.
Speaker 4: Put cigarette burns in her chest.
Speaker 7: Three cigarette burns, Yeah, which is very indicative of marking
Speaker 7: your victim.
Speaker 4: Exactly, of marking your victim and kind of claiming them forever.
Speaker 4: As you were kept doing them in a way, you're
Speaker 4: branding them like a like a steer.
Speaker 6: Yep, let's talk about them, Patricia, Let's talk about Patricia
Speaker 6: Walsh and Mary Anne Waisaki. How does how do they
Speaker 6: get into his sights?
Speaker 7: Okay, So pat and Maryann Orana they're also longtime friends
Speaker 7: to longtime friends, and they are coming to Provincetown for
Speaker 7: or you know, rest and R and R for the weekend.
Speaker 7: And it's a winter weekend, and they just happen to
Speaker 7: have the misfortune of going to one of the few
Speaker 7: rooming houses that was open at the time. Because Provincetown
Speaker 7: everything shuts up tight, so you your choices in places
Speaker 7: to stay are very limited, at least at that time,
Speaker 7: not now, but then. And so they ended up at
Speaker 7: the same rooming house as Tony and when they did so.
Speaker 7: Now Tony at this point in time is working back
Speaker 7: at the Royal Coachman, which is where I was, although
Speaker 7: not at this time, but that's the motel we were
Speaker 7: all at. He's working there on the construction of a
Speaker 7: new wing and so he needs and he has no wheels,
Speaker 7: and he needs a ride to get his paycheck, his
Speaker 7: last paycheck, because they fired him because he was, you know,
Speaker 7: kind of he didn't show up for work. Basically, he
Speaker 7: had he was erratic. He show up for three hours
Speaker 7: and then he disappeared. No one knew where he went.
Speaker 7: So they he left a note on their door the
Speaker 7: night before saying could you give me a ride to Truro,
Speaker 7: And so the girls unsuspecting, you know, Provincetown once again
Speaker 7: placed a wonderful place to meet people and hang out,
Speaker 7: these two nice young women from not broken homes. Now
Speaker 7: really solid backgrounds for these women, not not runaways, not
Speaker 7: nothing like that. And so they And that's not to
Speaker 7: say I don't mean to say that the other women
Speaker 7: were not from solid backgrounds or solid people. I'm just
Speaker 7: saying it was a different type of victim he picked
Speaker 7: this time, and he picked two at a time, and
Speaker 7: so he which is an escalation with a serial killer.
Speaker 7: They get braver and crazier and stupider as they go along.
Speaker 7: And so they drove them out to Truro, picked up
Speaker 7: the check, and during that trip, we think somebody shamed
Speaker 7: Tony somewhere, either from having been fired from his job
Speaker 7: or who knows what it was, but they were all
Speaker 7: He was also dropping LSD we do know that during
Speaker 7: that car trip, and somehow he talked them into taking
Speaker 7: them to those same Trurou woods where he took me
Speaker 7: and where he took everyone else who would go with him.
Speaker 7: All of his friends went there. This was not an
Speaker 7: unknown place. This was a you know, kind of a
Speaker 7: wide open, let's go hang out in the woods place.
Speaker 7: It used to be a lover's lane. So it's not
Speaker 7: as if it was really a secret only in Tony's mind, really,
Speaker 7: I think so out they went secret.
Speaker 4: As far as his you know, marijuana stash.
Speaker 7: Yes, exactly, and then and then.
Speaker 4: Becoming a burial ground. Yeah, yeah, expect them.
Speaker 7: And in his craziness too, write Jim, in his craziness,
Speaker 7: he had a secret. He had a secret, right, So yeah.
Speaker 7: So Pat Walsh was a she liked to do gravestone
Speaker 7: rubbings and she had done quite a few of them,
Speaker 7: and she'd been to Provincetown before, and so we think
Speaker 7: that may have been part of the lure out there,
Speaker 7: because these woods are adjacent to an old graveyard from
Speaker 7: the beginning of the town of Truro when there was
Speaker 7: an old church there. It's not there anymore, and so
Speaker 7: we think that might have been part of the way
Speaker 7: he got them out there. And when he did, that
Speaker 7: was the end of Pat and Marianne out in those woods.
Speaker 7: On that afternoon of January twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 4: And we don't know what the trigger was that made him,
Speaker 4: as Lila was saying, escalate from one isolated girl to
Speaker 4: taking on two grown women. These are college educated, they
Speaker 4: were employed, they were you know, on a girl's weekend
Speaker 4: from Providence, Rhode Island. These are very you know, stable
Speaker 4: girls women. And so we believe in and we've got
Speaker 4: a sense of this in from Tony's own prison diary
Speaker 4: right and talked about uh, mary Anne laughing at him.
Speaker 4: And so we think that, you know, meglomaniacs don't like
Speaker 4: to be laughed at, and meglomaniacs don't like to be told. Perhaps,
Speaker 4: come on, Tony, it's cold out here. Let's get the
Speaker 4: hell back to the car enough, you know, we want
Speaker 4: to We've bought, You've got a friend of meet in
Speaker 4: Peetown for lunch. Let's go. And so we think that
Speaker 4: that is what triggered him. And we know that he
Speaker 4: killed Pat first and mary Anne ran for her life
Speaker 4: and uh then you know he had a gun, so
Speaker 4: he was able to kill her from a distance. And
Speaker 4: it's just again, you know, in writing the death in
Speaker 4: the book, in really having to describe them and give
Speaker 4: the reader a visual image of the panic and the
Speaker 4: nightmare of those moments for those women. It was a
Speaker 4: gruesome task for me and Eliza to relive in the
Speaker 4: Babysitter what happened to his two last victims in those
Speaker 4: woods on January twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 7: And he had written about it extensively, so we had
Speaker 7: his notes, and then we had police notes, and we
Speaker 7: had autopsy reports. So we for the sake of those victims,
Speaker 7: to tell their story in this book without being too
Speaker 7: over the top. I mean, it was a real balancing
Speaker 7: act to take all of our sources, put them together,
Speaker 7: and try and recreate it in a way that made
Speaker 7: sense for the reader and that honored the deaths of
Speaker 7: those women.
Speaker 4: And that honored the death as well as not sensationalized
Speaker 4: and already sensational crime. I mean, you know, it's gruesome enough.
Speaker 4: We didn't need to make it any more mawkish or
Speaker 4: any more of a tabloid read. And as Eliza said,
Speaker 4: we had so many, so many layered sources, and one
Speaker 4: of them was you know, Tony himself gave you know, scores,
Speaker 4: maybe hundreds of hours of interviews with this one man
Speaker 4: who was trying to write the book to help pay
Speaker 4: for the defense, and so we also have that and
Speaker 4: the man doing the interviewing that everything in quotes was
Speaker 4: a direct quote, and then we had tapes to back
Speaker 4: it up, so we knew we we had a lot
Speaker 4: of information that we hope makes The Babysitter a very
Speaker 4: credible read for people who are versed in, you know,
Speaker 4: serial killer crimes, because it uh, as we said, we
Speaker 4: have a lot of sources that I don't think a
Speaker 4: lot of other serial killers have in.
Speaker 7: Their right right. Our details are pretty solid, there really are.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about how we finally got caught, and you
Speaker 6: do write about why it took so long? What's that about?
Speaker 4: It?
Speaker 6: Is that jurisdictional tell us about when he gets caught finally?
Speaker 7: Do you want to feel that one jen?
Speaker 4: Uh, he finally gets caught because he I mean talk
Speaker 4: about megalomaniac blindness. He takes Pat Walsh's car that so
Speaker 4: he kills Pat and Mary in the woods and then
Speaker 4: he looks at past Sparkley almost new Volkswagen Beetle sitting
Speaker 4: out there in the woods and says, ah, you know,
Speaker 4: why have a good car? Go to wait and he
Speaker 4: takes it, and then he tries to hide it in
Speaker 4: Boston and that doesn't work, and then he drives it
Speaker 4: to Burlington, Vermont, and that doesn't work, so he leaves
Speaker 4: it in Burlington and he calls it. By this time,
Speaker 4: people are calling him because he was last seen with
Speaker 4: them in the car and at the rooming house, so
Speaker 4: calls are going around, where's Tony, where's Tony? And so
Speaker 4: he finally calls the same guy that got him out
Speaker 4: of jail on the lack of sport rap and says, Jimmy,
Speaker 4: I'm going to come back to Pee Town. I hear
Speaker 4: people are talking a lot about me. I'm going to
Speaker 4: clear my name. And Jimmy Meath says, well, why you come?
Speaker 4: I thought you were you know why? Now why? So
Speaker 4: suddenly he goes, Jimmy, I have their car. So that
Speaker 4: was the beginning of the end. He comes back to
Speaker 4: p Town and he just tells a series of stories
Speaker 4: and versions and lies. And then you know, the great
Speaker 4: thing about the truth is you can remember the truth,
Speaker 4: but you can't remember why when you start layering them.
Speaker 4: So and then he goes he makes himself a pet
Speaker 4: in the police station.
Speaker 7: He's strung out at this point on drugs too, so
Speaker 7: he was not paying attention to what he was doing.
Speaker 4: He goes in and he blathers, and finally the chief
Speaker 4: of police puts his hand up in Tony's face and says, enough,
Speaker 4: don't say another word until you have an attorney, because
Speaker 4: this is getting ridiculous. So that was the beginning of
Speaker 4: the unraveling of Tony Costain and getting him arrested. But
Speaker 4: to answer your question, Dad about why it took so long,
Speaker 4: Liza and I were shocked that the p Town police
Speaker 4: never talked to the Truro police, and the two of
Speaker 4: them never talked to the Boston police. So all these jurisdictions,
Speaker 4: and in the Providence Rhode Island police who are looking
Speaker 4: for the two.
Speaker 7: Women, right, and then the state police from Massachusetts as well, we.
Speaker 4: Have five jurisdictions, none of whom are communicating with each other.
Speaker 4: I mean, an APV went out for the car and
Speaker 4: a cop in Boston finds it and never reports back
Speaker 4: to Providence or Thuro or Peetowns, and so we're looking
Speaker 4: at this. In fact, I called her friend of mine
Speaker 4: in the Boston Police department. I said, what do you
Speaker 4: make of this? Like Why didn't this guy, this police
Speaker 4: officer in Boston, who was charged with finding a missing vehicle,
Speaker 4: why didn't he report that he's found it? And she
Speaker 4: just you know, of course it's fifty years later, but
Speaker 4: she's just shaken her head, going there was something else
Speaker 4: going on there and that investigation and again we'll never know.
Speaker 4: So many records have been burned in this case. It's
Speaker 4: just you know, but and communication was slow, right, But no,
Speaker 4: but you know, apbs or apbs, I know they certainly
Speaker 4: they certainly did have you know, enough there was notice
Speaker 4: out there, but nobody connected the docks. Even when the
Speaker 4: car was first sighted in the woods in Truro and
Speaker 4: the police officer was on the scene finding the car,
Speaker 4: didn't didn't call pe Town five miles away, you know.
Speaker 4: So the Keythstown cops of five different jurisdictions in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty nine allowed Tony Costas to remain free, you know,
Speaker 4: another month, another six weeks passed those killings.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, let's talk about the very fascinating Defensey Costa
Speaker 6: and this attorney Goldman. I found it odd that despite
Speaker 6: him not having any funds, the county didn't agree to
Speaker 6: pay for his defense. So what does Goldman what's his
Speaker 6: plan to be able to get paid.
Speaker 7: Well, he's a buddy of one of Tony's family members,
Speaker 7: which is how he gets involved, and he decides very
Speaker 7: early on in the process. So Tony's arraigned on the
Speaker 7: sixth of March. By the twenty second, Goldman has in
Speaker 7: his possession, signed, sealed, and delivered the life rights to
Speaker 7: Tony's story and to Avis's story. So this is how
Speaker 7: Goldman thinks he's going to get paid. Now he goes
Speaker 7: to it. Then went through a series of writers, all
Speaker 7: of whom's eventually stepped away, Kurt Bonnaguet being one of them.
Speaker 7: Kurt Wonnagut being the first one who said, Okay, I'll
Speaker 7: do it, but I'm going to get this much money,
Speaker 7: and Goldman said, yeah, no, you're not, We're you know
Speaker 7: so so Sovonnie gets said I don't need this and
Speaker 7: walked away. So there were many writers involved over a
Speaker 7: period of I don't know ten years, people trying to
Speaker 7: clean it up, and no one ever did, and Goldman
Speaker 7: never got anywhere with it, and Goldman never got paid.
Speaker 7: But today, in today's world, that would never happen, That
Speaker 7: would not be allowed. That's the biggest conflict of interest
Speaker 7: going and I think it's part of why Tony's family
Speaker 7: feels he got a you know, railroaded because things like
Speaker 7: that are just not kosher. And you know, the drug defense,
Speaker 7: you know, he was he was hopped up on drugs
Speaker 7: and that's what made him do it. They just he
Speaker 7: couldn't get a medical any medical personnel to say he
Speaker 7: didn't know the difference between right and wrong. And you
Speaker 7: know what, I get that because I knew him, and
Speaker 7: he did not come across at times that he was
Speaker 7: in any way psychotic. I mean, certainly he was like
Speaker 7: any other normal person. Some days he was agitated, some
Speaker 7: days he wasn't. And I describe that agitation witnessing that
Speaker 7: agitation in the book on occasion, but he wasn't. He
Speaker 7: knew right from wrong. It was clear that he did.
Speaker 7: And you know, knowing now what we know about sociopaths,
Speaker 7: they know how they should be, and they can often
Speaker 7: create a construct of a personality to show you that
Speaker 7: they know how you should They think they know how
Speaker 7: you should see them and how you want to see them,
Speaker 7: and that's what they show you. I mean, this is
Speaker 7: such a complicated mind and it requires more study so
Speaker 7: that people don't this doesn't happen again and again and
Speaker 7: again and again. And there are people out there now
Speaker 7: studying the neuroscience and the brains of these people to
Speaker 7: be able to predict this behavior so that we don't
Speaker 7: have another Tony Costa story or a Ted Bundy story
Speaker 7: on our hands.
Speaker 4: So, and there was lots of this fact about his kind.
Speaker 4: Let me didn't drup for a minute, Liza, you no.
Speaker 7: Go ahead.
Speaker 4: The defense was trying to pin Tony's behavior on his
Speaker 4: drug abuse and addiction, and yet he never shows. So
Speaker 4: he's taken off the streets, put in jail in March
Speaker 4: of sixty nine. And so the next you know, five
Speaker 4: years of his life, he never shows a shred of withdrawal.
Speaker 4: And so we e Liza and I have since learned
Speaker 4: and writing The Babysitter and researching this with different neuroscientists
Speaker 4: and addiction experts, that there's physical and emotional addiction. Tony
Speaker 4: was not ever physically addicted to drugs. He was emotionally addicted,
Speaker 4: but he was not physically addicted.
Speaker 7: And because sociopaths can't be that can't be physically addicted
Speaker 7: to a substance, they're physically addicted to other things, and
Speaker 7: we see that in his crimes.
Speaker 4: So when Tony took the stand in his rambling defense
Speaker 4: at the close of the trial, the prosecution team looked
Speaker 4: at each other at the table and said, well, there
Speaker 4: goes their insanity defense, because Tony was very coherent, very articulate,
Speaker 4: very passionate. And so again back to this is not
Speaker 4: about drugs. This is whatever whatever caused Tony to become
Speaker 4: a monster. It was not the drug. So that defense
Speaker 4: went out the window.
Speaker 1: And it was.
Speaker 4: Interesting in reading through Goldman's papers, and this again goes
Speaker 4: back to a point Liza was making about how it
Speaker 4: wouldn't be done and Goldman probably would have been disbarred.
Speaker 4: It's he and the team really looked like they were
Speaker 4: trying to gin up Tony's crimes. They were trying to
Speaker 4: find other potential victims from this list of missing women
Speaker 4: and girls at the time from New England that were
Speaker 4: in Tony's kill docket, and Live and I were asking
Speaker 4: each other like, why would the defense be wanting more victims,
Speaker 4: And the only answer we could come up with was
Speaker 4: it would make a better book, a more sensational book.
Speaker 4: I mean, five victims wasn't enough for Goldman and the team.
Speaker 4: They wanted it. They wanted thirteen, so they added all
Speaker 4: of these, you know, air quotes possible. They were never
Speaker 4: seen alive again women into Tony's dockets.
Speaker 6: You write about Avis and her testimony at this trial too,
Speaker 6: which was very interesting her behavior as well, and also
Speaker 6: throughout this book there are instances where his followers show
Speaker 6: up and our support of Just tell us a little
Speaker 6: bit about these followers and Avis' testimony and her behavior.
Speaker 7: You know, there were followers, there were friends, there were relatives.
Speaker 7: He was beloved where he was, even though in the
Speaker 7: back of their mind, and later they copped to this,
Speaker 7: they suspected he might be involved. They just couldn't take
Speaker 7: it on and I can't I get that, so they
Speaker 7: supported him. They supported him outside his arraignment. There were
Speaker 7: two hundred people standing outside when he came out that day.
Speaker 7: We're with you, Tony, thumbs up peace sign. And when
Speaker 7: they testified, they testified under duress. They were outside the courthouse,
Speaker 7: they were in the courtroom. And Avis, I'm trying to
Speaker 7: think about what her bizarre behavior was. I know she
Speaker 7: came into the to the or I remember she came
Speaker 7: into the courtroom, holding a flower and wearing a sign,
Speaker 7: and then knitted one of those crazy knitted vests that
Speaker 7: we all had in the beginning of the seventies, Jen,
Speaker 7: what was her behavior on the stand? Do you remember?
Speaker 4: Very yes, she was. When she walked by Tony's sitting
Speaker 4: at the defense table there she blew him a kiss,
Speaker 4: and Tony showed the only emotion he did in the
Speaker 4: entire trial, and he sat there with tears streaming down
Speaker 4: his face while Avis testified. And Avis admitted later, how
Speaker 4: incredibly I mean, she was incredibly nervous, and she was
Speaker 4: giggling as you do when you're nervous, and holding up
Speaker 4: her loop sprig of lilax to her mouth, and the
Speaker 4: defense and the prosecution kept admonishing her, we can't hear
Speaker 4: you speak up and take those flowers away from your mouth.
Speaker 4: And so it was a very again, a very sad
Speaker 4: and kind of heartbreaking seen, if you will. And to
Speaker 4: her credit, still this very young woman, still very young,
Speaker 4: mother of three and looking at that father of those
Speaker 4: three children, and being tried for double murder, and not
Speaker 4: only double murder, but double gruesome, horrific murder, and so
Speaker 4: one can only imagine her state of mind and knowing
Speaker 4: that no matter what was going to happen, she was
Speaker 4: going to raise those children alone.
Speaker 7: But she was strong though she. I mean, there was
Speaker 7: all of that going on. And there was also that
Speaker 7: that woman who when the prosecutor questioned her about her
Speaker 7: sex life with Tony in open court, she said, I'm
Speaker 7: not going to answer. And I really appreciated that about her,
Speaker 7: that she had the presence of mind to say no,
Speaker 7: because they made a big deal out of that, and
Speaker 7: they embarrassed tried to embarrass her in open court, and
Speaker 7: she put them in their place, and in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 7: women didn't do that right.
Speaker 4: And she also puts one of the one of the
Speaker 4: writers who was interviewing her, in his place, and because
Speaker 4: his his questioning one of the writers interviews questioning was
Speaker 4: really I mean we read it now, we're like, holy hell,
Speaker 4: that guy I would be brought up on sexual harassment
Speaker 4: charges today, just you know, tell us about this and
Speaker 4: tell us about the I don't want to go into
Speaker 4: it now, but you know, really getting wanting to get
Speaker 4: into the weeds and the and the just the dirty
Speaker 4: little details.
Speaker 7: And they harassed her. They harassed her, right, they did.
Speaker 7: They did, and so she paid the price for his
Speaker 7: crimes as well.
Speaker 4: Oh, she definitely did. Yeah, she paid the price, and
Speaker 4: I think to a degree she still is paying the price.
Speaker 7: I do very sad. Uh.
Speaker 4: You know, how do you move on in life with
Speaker 4: this kind of a digma, with this kind of a
Speaker 4: you know, read letter on your forehead.
Speaker 7: It's a huge history to have.
Speaker 4: Right and not even your history, history that you try
Speaker 4: to walk away from and never really can because it's such.
Speaker 7: It's just because it's your family.
Speaker 4: It's your family, and it's just too big. It's just
Speaker 4: too big a story.
Speaker 6: Now, after all of this, you talk about his demise,
Speaker 6: there is some controversy, and he is in the same
Speaker 6: he was in the same prison as the Boston strangler
Speaker 6: Albert Salvo. Tell us about what happens.
Speaker 7: Well, what happens is is that DeSalvo is killed just
Speaker 7: six months before Tony commits suicide, and Dessalvo's murdered. I mean,
Speaker 7: he's point blank murdered. But the police are very clear
Speaker 7: when Tony goes in about the fact that he won't
Speaker 7: last long in there because the prison population, and I
Speaker 7: find this incredible, is conservative, so and they don't like
Speaker 7: guys like Tony. So there was some concern amongst his
Speaker 7: defense team and amongst the police, one of whom he'd
Speaker 7: actually become kind of chummy with, that he was going
Speaker 7: to find himself having the same fate as Albert DeSalvo.
Speaker 7: And so during the time he was in jail, he
Speaker 7: sort of reverted back. You know, that's when he wrote
Speaker 7: his manuscript, and that's when he did what he had
Speaker 7: to do to survive, and that's when he was convinced
Speaker 7: that he was going to get out. And he kept
Speaker 7: up with the appeals and the this and then that,
Speaker 7: and you know, peppering his lawyers with nasty letters, which
Speaker 7: didn't you know, garner him any more sympathy and change
Speaker 7: than switching up lawyers, and but convinced himself that he
Speaker 7: was he was innocent and he was going to get out.
Speaker 7: And then in shh boy, I think it was the
Speaker 7: end of nineteen seventy three, the beginning of nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 7: he was reevaluated at Bridgewater and they said, you know,
Speaker 7: they diagnosed him again as a sexually dangerous person that
Speaker 7: should not be released. And you know, we know very
Speaker 7: little about what happened after that. All we know is
Speaker 7: that on Mother's Day nineteen seventy four, he was found
Speaker 7: hanging in his cell.
Speaker 4: And I have always contended that meglomaniacs don't commit suicide,
Speaker 4: especially in Tony's case, because, as Eliza said, he really
Speaker 4: he believed his own innocence, He believed his own narrative,
Speaker 4: that he's the victim, was the victim of bad defense,
Speaker 4: and that all he needed was a was a sharp
Speaker 4: lawyer to come in and take him out of that
Speaker 4: prison on a white horse, right.
Speaker 7: And he was a victim. He was a victim.
Speaker 4: He was a victim, And victims don't megalomaniac, meglamaniacal, psychopathic.
Speaker 4: Uh people don't commit suicide. They think they are going
Speaker 4: to be rescued because they deserve rescue, and right around
Speaker 4: the corner and uh yeah, I just none of it.
Speaker 4: And it's funny because we asked some of his uh
Speaker 4: you know, some of the people that knew him, if
Speaker 4: they thought he committed suicide. And I don't remember one
Speaker 4: of those people saying to us, yes, I could I
Speaker 4: think Tony committed suicide. They all said, Nope, not Tony.
Speaker 4: Not Tony. Tony didn't have the personality of of of
Speaker 4: a suicide. He had that righteous, that self righteous indignation again,
Speaker 4: the megalomaniac, And yeah, I never believed it.
Speaker 7: And to some degree, I really think he believed he'd
Speaker 7: talked himself into believing in his own innocence, right, I mean,
Speaker 7: he really had talked himself into.
Speaker 6: It, Lija, After all of this, is there any reconciliation?
Speaker 6: Is there? How do you reconcile the difference between this person?
Speaker 6: What is your conclusion as to what made Tony become
Speaker 6: the killer that he was?
Speaker 7: We were asked, if Tony were still alive, what would
Speaker 7: you ask him? What question were you ask him? And
Speaker 7: that would be one of the things. Tony, what happened
Speaker 7: you know, what happened to you? We watched you struggle
Speaker 7: as we reach researched this story. What were you thinking?
Speaker 7: I don't know if he could answer or not, because
Speaker 7: these personalities tend to get worse, not better. So the
Speaker 7: way I reconcile it is the book that we wrote together,
Speaker 7: Jen and I about the little girl and the psychopath
Speaker 7: and how they interacted and to sort of have a
Speaker 7: takeaway about duality of personality and the duality of life
Speaker 7: and the idea that we all have a dark side,
Speaker 7: and that there is now concrete research that says that
Speaker 7: they can predict this kind of behavior and that they
Speaker 7: maybe they can't help it, you know, but they can
Speaker 7: at least perhaps prevent it. And so that's how I
Speaker 7: reconcile this. I reconcile it by saying, here's a universal
Speaker 7: thread we can all grab onto. Let's talk about mental
Speaker 7: illness a little more openly. Let's stop stigmatizing people who
Speaker 7: suffer from it, and let's see if we can prevent
Speaker 7: people from being brutally murdered because we miss the signs.
Speaker 4: Over and over and over again.
Speaker 7: Right and again. You have to contextualize that because we
Speaker 7: didn't have that kind of information in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 7: but you know what we do now. And so that
Speaker 7: is my takeaway from this book is if those kinds
Speaker 7: of conversations can happen, then it was worth every moment
Speaker 7: of research and writing.
Speaker 6: It certainly was. And I want to thank you both
Speaker 6: Jennifer Jordan and Eliza Rodman for The Babysitter My Summers
Speaker 6: with a Serial Killer. Liza, is there a website that
Speaker 6: you have and is there a Facebook page for the Babysitter?
Speaker 7: There is you can Jen and I are posting individually
Speaker 7: on our individual websites, on Liza Rodman and on Jennifer
Speaker 7: Jordan Eliza Rodman dot com, Jennifer Jordan, Jennen, what's your website?
Speaker 7: Jennifer Jordan dot net dot net. And then we both
Speaker 7: have Facebook pages as well under our names, so you
Speaker 7: can find us there, and you can also find us
Speaker 7: on the Simon and Schuster website. And we're both we
Speaker 7: both have babysitter pages on our individual on our individual sites,
Speaker 7: we're easy to find right.
Speaker 6: Now, absolutely, and this book is everywhere. So thank you
Speaker 6: so much for coming on and talking about this was
Speaker 6: just released March second, The Babysitter, My Summers with a
Speaker 6: serial Killer Eliza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan. It has been
Speaker 6: an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, and you have
Speaker 6: a great evening, and good
Speaker 7: Night you too, Thanks Dan, Thank you, Dan, thank you,
Speaker 7: good night, bye bye,