Secret Garden

offer some light. Damn, another nightmare. I've been having them for almost two years, during which they had become more and more violent and vivid, and in each I was hunted by an anonymous man with a gun or a knife. I would struggle to recognize him, but he kept his face turned away from me. Then, just as he fined my hiding place, I'd wake up with my heart pounding and in trentaline horsing through my legs until they ached

that this nightmare was different. In this dream, I was a young girl again, probably nine or ten, in my summer pajamas, walking down along hallway hotel hallway. Suddenly the elusive man blocked my path, backed me up against the wall, and pointed a gun at my head. I looked up at him, and I finally saw a space. It was a man I hadn't seen since I was a child in Provincetown, Massachusetts. That's Liza Rodman, author of The Babysitter My Summers with a Serial Killer. Liza's story involves not one,

but two very disturbed people. One well, one is the babysitter and the other the other is Liza's own mother. Liza spent her childhood toggling between two places. Her family's year around home near hacka Mock Swamp in southeastern Massachusetts and Provincetown, a village on the extreme tip of Cape Cod. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,

and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood, literally the landscape of my childhood. It was kind of swampy. We lived in a swamp, and um, I don't know if you've ever heard about of the Hackamock Swamp, but my childhood home was right on the edge of it. Hacka Mack being the Algonquin name for places where spirits dwell. So that was literally

the beginning of my life, you know, outside. And you know it's interesting too with COVID because I've found that that that landscape, that being outside, that's the only way I could comfort myself during COVID. So that remains because it was the only way I could comfort myself in my childhood. So I spent my life outside. You know, we had a tremendous amount of freedom in nineteen sixty three four five, and that went for Provincetown too, so

you know, we had no supervision. Just in context, we had no supervision and we sort of ran the neighborhood. No one was really looking after us much. My parents were married for the first I think four years of my life, and after they divorced. You know, my mother was young and she was a single mother, and she didn't get a lot of support from him, financial or otherwise. And she had a best friend who said, hey, my husband and I are building a big, gigantic motel on

the water in Provincetown on a summer job. Because my mother taught school, and didn't take her but a minute to say yes, and off we went. At that time, I think it was seven. So in the early years, we stayed local. But from the time I was seven on Yes, we went back and forth and could you describe to, you know, people listening to this podcast from all over the world. Provincetown is a very specific kind

of place. Provincetown is it's a spit of land that runs off the coast and out into a U shape almost um to the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. And they say it has the finest light for artists in the world, and it's always, at least from the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, it was an artist community. And it has a rich, rich history of um playwrights,

Eugene O'Neill, poets, fine artists, all congregated there. There was a bit of a there was a local flavor of Portuguese fishermen, and then there was this these transplants from New York, the likes of Stanley Kunits, the poet, who had a home there and beautiful gardens there, and so they these two factions sort of coexisted for many, many, many decades and happily so. So it's an artist community. It's a beach community. It's on a sand dune and it sort of juts out into the sea. It's some

of the best beaches you'll ever walk on. Tell me about your mother from your childhood. She was angry, so I put it, and I'm sure there were lots of reasons for that, but I never knew what they were. And you know, she died recently and she went to her grave with whatever had happened to her. We never did find out. Um, But she was pretty, she was funny, she was charismatic, she had a wonderful laugh. People liked her.

But she had a problem with me. I don't know whether I look too much like my father or not enough like her, or maybe I was too much like her. I don't know, but she had a problem with me, and and that anger was usually focused on me. But again, she was a hard worker. It was such a complicated relationship to begin with that. But as a child I was afraid of her. I spent most of my time hiding from her. How old was she when you were born? Good question, And your sister is younger than you, two

years younger. Her memories. She calls me the rememberer, and she's the forgetter, and she was quite a bit younger. She has some some sort of tactile memories and you know, over the years, we've had a lot of conversations about it. Your mother struck me as a complicated figure because she had this kind of almost you know, she's beautiful, she's lively, she'd go up to anyone and talk to them. She kind of had this magic about her in a certain way, the way you would describe her. And she was also

just kind of a disaster as a mother. Mm hmm. She really was, I mean in terms of in terms of warmth, in terms of I'd love you almost never. She really didn't want to be inconvenienced. She was really looking for her next good time. And I you know, honestly, I think if you were to diagnose her, you could one of her her favorite things to do or one of her addictions, as I now say, was mean to be mean at someone else's expense. There was always was

always a joke. She always had a funny name for you that was just a little bit on the mean side, and you felt it. You know, it wasn't It wasn't something where you went, oh, did she mean that or not? You knew she meant it. Even when she was young. She just to tell me about the way she used to tease her brother, and it was just something she enjoyed it. She used to like to make him cry.

And what was your father likes? I mean, I know they split up when you were really quite small, and he was kind of not really president, but would show up every once in a while, right exactly. He was I think, you know, in a lot of ways, he was equally unstable. He was a huge personality, and I just thought he was carry Grant or you know, uh, I used to think he was Clark Gable from Gone

with the Wind. He was had this big personality and very very handsome and funny and grew up in a funeral home, so he had all these funny jokes and he just found a way to deal with death early on. I think it was through humor. And he was very, very extroverted, so you know, you wanted to be around him, and he was never around and of course, as a young girl, you want to be around your dad anyway. And he just was a puzzle to me despite his absence and distance. Was he more loving than your mother

in his way? Yes, he was more nurturing. So for instance, when I was nineteen, I had a knee surgery and I had been um at his house, um for you know, I've been thrown out of my house for one reason or another, and so I was at his house recovery and he was the one to feed the ice chips and to give the pain medication and to um just sort of make sure I was okay. And that was a really that was a new experience for me, either one of them. Really. See, your mother never would have

done that, not in that way. She might have made pasta, but she would have said, you know what, get up, you're fine. And again, you have to contextualize these things, right because in that in that day, it was pull yourself up, dust yourself off, and move because we're not going to sit around here and talk about what's wrong. We're just going to go out and do. And I my mother's father was very much like that. So my

mother was very much like that. So you know, if there was, as she said, a nurse I'm not, she wasn't. I like the order of that sentence, not i'm not a nurse, A nurse i'm not Exactly, it's a finer point than it. You know, something that strikes me often on this podcast is that especially when whatever the whatever the sort of secrets at hand. Are are sort of like rooted in childhood that we have a way of imagining all children do, imagining that all other families are

like our family. You know, we don't know, we don't know anything different. Really, it's not until we grow up and get a little bit of a more wide angle of view that we that we begin to see that, oh, actually, maybe that was really not good, not good or not the way everybody else was being raised. We'll be right back. It's the summer of nineteen sixty six and Liza is seven years old. She's in Provincetown with her mother and sister.

Her mother needs to work, which means she also needs babysitters, and she's very good at getting them. She'll ask anyone to be a babysitter. She doesn't exactly vet them, you know, check references. All you need basically is to have a pulse and be able to show up. They used to call her the babysitter Finder. If you needed one, you called her. So she had this whole cadre of young women. And oh, we had some terrible babysitters at We had

car accidents with babysitters. We had babysitters that would cut our line us up and cut our nails down to the quick until they bled in some cases. And there was this little um restaurant next to the hotel and they'd send the seven and five year old across to get whatever it was, French fries in the vanilla shake, and we'd come back with it and they go, we didn't want this, and they'd throw it out the window. I mean, just crazy people. There are a lot of

crazy people in Provincetown in those days. There was some nice ones, but you know, the drug scene was already entrenched, so we had some interesting and and really we would be left with anybody. I want to say too, because I really do know that that landscape of Provincetown, that there's something about that town that really feels like it's

sort of at the edge of the world. I mean, it's surrounded by water, and it's the it's the furthest point on Cape Cod, which is already a you know, increasingly remote place as you go further and further out, and then there's this real town. You know, this kind of like ramshackle town, you know, not that small, but that is sort of just perched there like there are other places in the world like this. Key West is a little bit like this, where there is that feeling

that you can't go any further than that. Yeah, it was. It was a definite let it all hang out place. And that juxtaposition you're talking about about the ramshackle town and the tourist trade was a real two competing forces. The locals had been there for generations and they needed the summer tourists and they needed the artists. They also resented the hell out of it, and for good reason. So there was always that tension there, and it was just under the surface. And even as a child, you

wanted to be a local. You wanted to play with the local kids. The chef at the restaurant, you know, he'd come out to the back door of the restaurant. He'd come out and he'd feed us food, and we thought it was wonderful to be able to hang out with his kids, who would knew where the bike trails were, and knew where the dune trails were, and knew where the hiding places were, and you know, all of those names I still have in my head. He wanted to be part of it, and in my case, I was

really not part of anything. So I really deeply wanted to be part of Provincetown and of the kids there and the people there. There was a warmth to it in the sort of the full time, the year round residents. You know. It was transient up against really fixed and warm. Frank Gaspar, I don't know if you know who he is, but he writes a lot about this. He was he grew up there, and he writes about what it was like to grow up there, and the mother's talking over

the pens. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing in town, and Frank Gaspar, you smoked that cigarette. I'm going to tell your mother. So it was that kind of a sense and a feeling of belonging to something that I think the locals still cling to there, And I don't

blame them. I would to. As you're speaking, I'm thinking it's essentially like insiders versus outsiders in a certain way, right, And if you already feel like an outsider and you're a child, you're desperate to belong and get swept up into into other lives. Yep. So Liza has already had quite the parade of babysitters in the summer of sixty six. But one of them is a very charismatic young man named Tony Costa, whose mother, Cecilia, works for Liza's mother

at the motel. I had encountered his mother first. She was a chambermaid at the motel, so she was my first friend, and he was her son, and he was looking for work, and of course it was a wonderful thing for the year round people to have these resorts open up, because they it promised them lots of work and lots of hours. And how old was Tony when you were seven? He was born in so he would have been twenty two. So Tony is hired to babysit you. He's hired to take the trash, and he ends up

befriending all of us. He was like a pied piper, is how I describe it. And my aunt used to say, here comes Tony, and he'd be driving up the long driveway to the motel, and we'd scamper out and try and get in the truck with him and talk to him. And he's loading the trash in the truck and we're dancing around with our flip flop, using our towels as capes.

And um, we just started going with him, and I don't remember exactly how we ended up going in the truck, but we thought it was a blast to go to the dump, and so off we would go, and it was great for them because we were somewhere else. He had sort of a kind of Italian darkness to him, very dark hair, kind of a big nose, but handsome

and tall, well for me he was. He felt really tall, but I think he was about six ft And the guys at the front desk used to say he you know, he was as strong as a guy as you'd ever want or not want to meet in a dark alley. He wore glasses, as I remember, and he also had a dark beard, and he was often quite tan. And I remember his fingers quite well too. M that's interesting, what about them, Um, I just remember them. The truck that he always drove was the Royal Coachman utility truck

and it had a shift. And he was a smoker too, and I was fascinated with that. So I remember him smoking with his fingers. And you know what else is funny to this day, I look at the hands of people everyone I meet, um, and I'm just making that connection now. But anyway, his hand was always on the shift, and I was always right there were you know, my sister and I in the front seat, on the big front seat, so I was always close to that hand. So how much time did you spend with Tony over

the course of that summer? And there were subsequent summers, right, I mean he was he became kind of part of your Provincetown life for a period of time, exactly, he and his mother, and so I mean, I have no idea how many times, but many more more than I could count. And you know, every time he was around, he'd jingle his keys and we'd come running. And plus, you know, he used to buy a streets he used

to take us. You know, he just felt like you were sort of you know, the music was going, you know. I heard an interview with Paul McCartney recently, and the interviewer asked him what happens to you when you're driving along and you hear Beatles song? And Paul McCartney said two things. I start singing along, and you can I dropped right into the studio when we're laying down the tracks, and I remember everything we did that day. And so

that's the way it was. The songs of the nineteen sixties were in the front seat of that truck, and so we were always singing, We were always laughing, We were always you know, up and down that driveway. It felt like the wind in your hair. I mean, it was just a wind blown summer in the city, you know,

is what it felt like to me. And so we went with him pretty frequently, at least a couple of times a week when he was dumping trash, we would out with this condree of little kids would accompany Tony in his truck as he made his rounds to the town dumps in p Town and Truro. Tony would take them to what he called his secret garden in the woods and told Liza she could never tell anyone. Imagine how special that must have felt to a seven year old.

An adult was asking her to keep a secret. Liza, of course didn't know this, but Tony and a bunch of his friends were burglarizing pharmacies and doctors offices, making trips to Boston where they were buying drugs and stashing

them in the woods. There was all kinds of ways that they stashed the drugs in those woods and Tony and his whole crew of friends and people all knew those drugs were out there, and they also evidently stashed them at the Provincetown dump so that when somebody wanted something,

that's where they went to get it. And they had some kind of crazy system of you pay me and I'll pay you, and I mean, I don't know, and I wasn't privy to it, but I've read about it later, but at the time as a child, he made it feel special to you that he was showing you something that was a secret and that and that you mustn't tell anyone exactly. But that was See, we were talking about a garden in the We had talked a lot about a garden because I lived next door to my

grandfather and my grandfather had this amazing garden. And so when Tony said he had a garden, I thought, I can relate to this. Here's this grown up boy, and I'm going to impress him with my knowledge. And so I started talking gardening with him, and I think that's how it happened. He said, I'll show you my garden. I have a garden, and I was like, I'm in my wheelhouse now because I can impress this guy. And I think that's how it happened. And he said, I

bet you've got to keep it a secret. You can't tell anybody. But but the other of thing is this, he took everybody and anybody out to that garden. And as far as I know, he took his own kids. That has no basis in fact. But he took everybody out there. And the other weird thing was and and this is part of the whole illness, part of what

was going on. He was quite afraid to go out there, and he talked a lot about it after the fact in all of the research I did about how he was afraid because it's adjacent to a cemetery, and that would also make sense as to why he would wait till there was someone in the truck to go out there. So I think it was quite convoluted and quite I don't think his mind was working right, you know. I think he was kind of spinning all the time. He had young kids. We had three young kids, so things

were about to take a very dark turn here. Just in case you didn't suspect Tony Costa father three de facto babysitter of several more, is well let's just wait for what comes next. When you're ten, you say that, as clear as a bell. You hear his name as somehow associated with something very bad that's happened, whatever was going on down there, the place was crawling with cops. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I find so interesting

is what we remember and what we don't. And you know, sort of like what we bury, and you know, what only comes out years later, and so like you realize that something big has happened, and you overhear these little snatches of dialogue, you know, that come back to you. You overhear the phrase the murdered girls and all cut up. But there's nothing in you at that point that's associating that with Tony Costa. No, and that look so shocking.

Never in a million years did I make that association. This, what I'm about to recount is going to be pretty hard to hear. Tony Costa, though Liza as a child doesn't know that it's him, is accused and convicted of at least two horrific murders of young women, and is a suspect and more. He would become involved with them in a romantic way, and then he would kill them. He cut up their bodies and did horrific things to

those bodies. I won't get into. A neuroscientist who studies the brains of serial killers told Liza years later that these guys are so rare and hard to study because usually they kill themselves. Their brains are gone before they can figure out what happened. So when you're, you know, ten eleven years old and he's disappeared, do you have any kind of narrative for your self? Was like, why he's disappeared? No, he was just gone, and you know

that less. The other thing we need to remember is not only was my life transient with people coming in and out of it, but provincetowns and graphic transient. And my father was gone, my grandparents moved away. It just wasn't unusual. He did always talk about going, going, going, going to California, going, You're going there. He was always talking about that. And there was a big connection between Hayde Ashbury at the time and Boston Common and Provincetown.

The young people were all trying to get away, especially from a town like Provincetown that probably felt pretty remote to them. I remember how remote it it still feels remote to me. I don't know how you experienced it, but when I go out there, it feels pretty remote. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Tony sort of fades away. For Eliza, she doesn't think about him, She has no idea what happened. She moves on the way kids do, and she grows up. Life happens,

she gets married, starts a family. She has as little to do with her mother as possible. Time speeds up as time does, so let's fast forward, oh to about the time lies as oldest child, a son is graduating from high school. I went back to school to finish my bachelor's degree, which I've never been able to finish um coming from the family, I came from quite frankly, with an anxious mess most of the time. And so I went back and I said, I'm gonna do this now.

While I was doing that, I start of having these dreams, and they were very violent, and they were right in a row of about six months, and someone was always trying to kill me, and with a gun or a knife or in the case of the first dream, of

fireplace poker. And I had always written down my dreams always I had always written, and in order to figure out what was going on during this time that I was keeping a process journal anyway, um, as I was reading and writing about different you know, literature and writing poems and other things, I decided to start writing them in. And when I did that, I noticed the repeat images, and all of those repeat images were of my childhood, and I kept saying, what is going on? So I

just kept writing them down, the dreams, the poems. Then I had that final It wasn't actually the final dream, but it was fine enough because in each one of these dreams I couldn't see the face of the man in the dream, so whoever was holding the weapon I couldn't see. And it became more and more irritating to me until the day that I had the dream when I was face to face with Tony and that was in the Royal Coachman lobby in my dream, and so I said, holy sh it, I wonder if this is

what it's about. And that's when I said to my mother, did something happen to me that you have not been clear about? And that's when she told me. So she knew when you said that your mother was able to put those pieces together. Both my mother and my aunt were there that day, and I had said, I had just saw Tony Costa in the dream with a gun to my head. What do you know about him? Why would I be thinking about that? And she said, well, I know he'd be came, you know, a serial killer.

I know he became a serial killer, as if I know he became a doctor or an oncologist or a pediatrician and a serial killer. And I just stood there and I you know, there's that moment in time when something so significant, have such significant information coming your way, that everything slows down and just grinds to a halt, and you're hearing it and saying, how can how can I be hearing this information? And that's what it was like.

It was like almost like a drug flashback. It just slowed right down, and I something said to me, this is it, This is it. Until I started researching, and of course they all laughed at me, and I just kept researching and writing and researching and not really knowing I was making a book, but more trying to find out what happened to me and what those dreams meant. So is is it your sense that on some level that you always knew. I always had the images, Danny.

I always had these images of what had happened in Provincetown, and I carried them with me, and I used to tell people the story and they would go hu huh, you know, almost like when you share too much. And so we sort of carried that with us, and we would laugh about it because we didn't know, you know, this is our childhood, how did yours go? You know,

my sister has a famous line. She used to say, you know, I was at a cocktail party the other night, and I was telling some stories from our childhood, and other people don't think it's as funny as we do. And so, you know, that's how we dealt with it with humor, because it was kind of a crazy image to remember. Why did we remember that? Why did we hear about that? We knew something awful had happened, But what we did not know was that the same man who was driving us around and getting us ice cream

cones was the man who had committed that. Whatever atrocities we had in our heads because we were little, so we didn't put a narrative together about it. We were in some cases, we were barely reading it. Wasn't until I was nine or ten years old that I started reading these accounts in the paper and not understanding that they had anything to do with Tony. And at the time his name was not in the paper either. That's

important Liza's history was. Tony was of course, much less central, much briefer than the relationship she had with her mother. Both were damaging, both were indelible, but Liza had been lucky. She didn't fit the mold of Tony's victims. She was a child, a child of a woman who inflicted greater damage on her. As she writes, and here is the

deepest of those wounds. I have always felt as though there was something wrong with me, inherently deep and dirty and dark, something unlikable and unfixable and worst of all, unlovable, and I believed it. As a result, I spent my childhood more afraid of my mother than I was of a psychopathic serial killer. And then you go on. Finally, when I became a mother, and in spite of my fear, I was able to stop what had been generations of physical abuse. It ended with me mm hmm, And it

did in family secrets. I think, like every guest of mine to a person would say this ends with me. I think it's self selecting. People who are willing to have this conversation in such a public a forum. Are people who have come to a place of the way that I make meaning of this is to completely change the narrative. I think that's so important, the way that I make meaning of this. This is not a subject

we can sweep under the rug anymore. That these kinds of people are out there and they're not well, and we need to find some kind of system whereby we put back together our mental health system because we can prevent some of this. You know, in California they're screening children for trauma early trauma now under the new Attorney General. You know, they need to do that in this country in order to save some of these kids. Because I just clawed my way out and I've spent most of

my life in therapy. But you know, I think the willingness to talk about it is kind of a double edged sword when I'm doing it anyway, because I had to, because I couldn't not. Why does it feel like a double edged sword to you? Well, because it's exposing yourself, right, because in order to do it, your vulnerabilities have to get known to other people. I guess there's a certain amount of shame that goes with it until you realize it's not you. It's not you, it's other people, and

that's you know, that's a difficult transition to make. So I think it's a double edged sword coming out and talking about it. Believe me, there are people who are not happy that have done this. But that's too bad because it's given me a new freedom and I'll take it. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story

could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is one secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to know about my family's great that inspired this podcast, check

out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.