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