Ep. 54: Tony Costa

It said one day ago , so yesterday , so it would have been Tuesday and it said that Wade Wilson was sentenced to death . So I was like , oh , this is the guy that Hannah was talking about on the intro a few episodes ago .

And I went down the rabbit hole because I remembered Hannah asking about like oh , have you heard all about this ? And I hadn't . I was down the rabbit hole for like two and a half hours last night on tiktok listening and reading .

And uh , now something I texted you this morning and said did you know that he has a boyfriend , allegedly yeah , I didn't know that .

Yeah , and they're like new girlfriend for wade wilson , but like it probably was just like a fan , like quote unquote , I guess you could say a fan yeah , I mean , and somebody else had mentioned like you have to think about somebody who's you know being convicted of murdering people .

Um , the gentleman , it was the same thing that you had kind of like said that they were doing a call and it was the audio overlaid over a video and you could hear him talking and he's like calling this gentleman like babe and baby and um , but like it was kind of hard to tell what they were talking about because the other guy was talking as if he was

like way over here from the microphone .

Oh my god , the whole book talk community will love this man like who did that you know , I didn't find that in my doom scroll .

I think there was also like I thought it was just the murder charges . I say just like it's small , but there was also like the grand theft . I guess he had also stolen a car , goodness gracious . So I'll add it on . There was quite a bit of stuff there .

When was this ? I don't know ? A month ago . A month ago .

good , I'll probably be more apt to read the back and then read the book , and it was a story about a serial killer on Cape Cod and being from Massachusetts , I was like you would expect , if it was from Massachusetts I wouldn't have heard about it , and nothing rang a bell .

Um , and I read his name and it didn't ring a bell , and so I was like , all right , let's give this a try . So I finally got around to reading it on the TBR shelf . That goes on forever , um , and I just have to preface it by saying what a mess .

Um , this guy , he , he was called the Cape Cod Vampire as one of his nicknames , if you will , which , after reading the whole story , I still was kind of like I don't know if that matches what he is . Out of all the nicknames that I could have given him , that one seemed so insignificant .

I'll let you guys decide in the end , but today we're going to be talking about Antone Charles Costa . He went by Tony . Okay , so I'll refer to him as Tony . I Tony was born August 2nd 1944 , and he is deceased , passed away May 12th 1974 .

So you can see just by that he was not around for a very long time , though he did wreak havoc on Cape Cod for what feels like it should have been longer than a year , but he was pretty much active for just about a year I think it was 68 and 69 in the cape . So he is considered an american serial killer , always in the cape cod area .

And I wanted to start by listing off the victims , first as a way of recognizing um them and then referring to them by their first name throughout the rest .

So his victims were patricia walsh , mary ann wiseaki I hope I pronounced your name correctly , um and then some others that were either confirmed involved or very highly suspected involved bonnie williams , diane federoff , barbara spaulding , sydney munson , susan perry and christine gallant damn that was all in one year . Yes God , he had a really interesting story .

He was presented as a carpenter Initially . When I read the book he was presented as a carpenter who was very much a hippie . He was really into heavy drug usage , which was all important for him , Though he had a lot of friends . He really struck me as a loner when I was reading about it . Like it was very people

didn't get to know . The real him Is kind of , I guess , what I'm trying to say .

It is also important to note that After his killings but kind of looking forward to then look backwards again in 1969 , he was examined and they identified him as a schizoid personality . Okay , and they also identified him as a sexually dangerous man . To preface just some descriptors of kind of who he was , what was to come , yeah ?

Yeah , so he did have children very young . He married a woman who was incredibly young , I want to say she was like 14 or 15 when they started having kids and got married . It was a very interesting experience . She he was married at 18 , but she was much younger and they ended up having three children together .

So by the mid 1960s their marriage had pretty much fell apart and he had no contact with his kids . Is that so it felt , thrown into the book ? Is that probably a good thing , probably . I mean , I can't imagine that he would have been a stellar role model at that point .

But , um , yeah , that was kind of like , oh yeah , he has this , this , you know wife , and these kids , and it was kind of like it felt more like an afterthought because that's how little role they played .

He definitely struck me , the way he was presented in hell town , the book that I read um , as very self-absorbed , very self-driven , um , a little perseverative at times , um . So I won't get ahead of myself into exactly how I know some of those excerpts , but more to come on that .

As far as everybody could tell , november of 1961 is when he was actually like , convicted of his first crime . So he broke into his neighbor's house and he was watching a teenage girl sleep . And so she woke up to this man , teenage boy , close to man , staring at her while she was sleeping Interesting , oh , talk about cringe .

And then he doesn't do anything , he just leaves .

There was no like real lead on who it was . It was just to me . It spoke to him being a sexually dangerous man , right ? Yeah , I mean you're breaking in , you're watching a young , you know teen girl sleep and then you're trying to drag her out of the house . So obviously he didn't succeed .

You know they apprehended him as he was doing that and he had been convicted of burglary and assault . So he had one year suspended sentence and probation for three years . That's , it Seems kind of lax . Yeah , like for kidnapping a girl from her bed . Slap on the wrist , jeez . Yeah , it's believed that 1966 is when his , um , his first killing occurred .

Uh , bonnie and diane . He gave them a ride to pennsylvania when he was on a return trip from california and neither of them were ever seen again , just mysteriously . This is a trend that you'll start to see where it's like these people go missing around him and I don't understand how nobody was like .

The third incident was in Provincetown , sydney , who was 18 years old at the time . She was the youngest vanished , last seen entering Tony's car . How old is he when he's making all these crimes ? His first one that we had mentioned , when he broke into someone's home , was when he was 17 and then he was only 29 when he died . So I mean he was .

He was not very old , he was in his 20s . Yeah , the fourth incident he had a new lover named Susan who vanished and his response to but nobody had heard from her . She didn't tell anybody she was going to Mexico . You see what I mean Even by this point . You're like , hmm , okay .

It's not like he was , like you know , a businessman , yeah , and he was highly thought of um . So in late 1968 is when he officially had the divorce , um , and he was actually jailed for failing to pay child support . So this is when he um met christine , another one of his , believed to be victims . They were hippies . Together they shared drugs .

It was definitely not a positive relationship , which brings us to November of 1968 , with Christine . She was found dead in her tub and it was believed to be a barbiturate overdose .

So they arrived in provincetown for a weekend vacation . They drove up in they're both 23, . They drove up in one of their . It was a really pretty light blue Volkswagen Beetle .

They went to a shared home which it was kind of like a landlord who rented rooms , but you could be somebody who lived in Provincetown or you could be somebody visiting , kind of like Airbnb now . And so they had gone and they got a room in this kind of shared housing , which is where they met Tony .

The landlady had introduced them to Tony , who also was renting a room at the time . So the next morning Huh , I'm sorry , I'm just like sick on the landlord , the landl good at doing , like you know , maintenance , he was a carpenter so he could do odds and ends .

She was an older woman , so it was nice to have a man around who could fix things when you have tenants and people coming in and out . So he had rented one bedroom and so he happened to be in probably the area where they were coming to check in okay and was like oh , and this is tony . He's here , you know , if you need anything , blah , blah

. So the next morning the landlady goes to check on the girls and she sees that there's a note pinned to their door and it's signed from tony . It was something along the lines of when you're up , are you able to give me a ride ? You wanted to go someplace . So she didn't really think anything of it .

But the following day , after that day , she noticed the note .

There was another note left on the door , the same type of paper , the same handwriting , saying that they were appreciative for everything that she had done and that they were checking out , which she thought was odd because she was like hmm , you know , I mean they , they were quiet guests , they were nice , they were chatty , but like they just left , but the fact

that she noticed it was the same paper and same handwriting um , and I'm thinking a lot of that is like when she was being questioned by the police , she noticed like that that was the case because she didn't really like she would say , you know , I didn't really think anything of it at the time .

I was like oh , paper is paper and that was what was there . So she did go into the room just curious to kind of see if everything was gone and all of the girl's stuff was taken from the room so it was empty , as if when you check out of a hotel . Um , neither woman returned home and one of the one of the women was a teacher .

So when she didn't return to school , the school had called her family saying , hey , it's not like her to not be here . Yeah , they were like , oh well , she did go on a trip but you know she wouldn't have done an extended stay . So they ended up . The families had reported them both missing um february 2nd of 1969 .

So you're looking at the difference between january 24th and february 2nd , not not too long , but also a little bit longer than you would expect your people to go missing and not have said anything . The Volkswagen Beetle was discovered and it was sitting kind of in an area by the Turo Pine Grove Cemetery .

So it wasn't in the cemetery but it was kind of sitting next to it . Later the day Costa actually took that car and moved it to Boston . Interesting , very interesting .

And I had to do a lot of independent research because in the book Helltown there was a lot of things that were filled in and I wanted to make sure that a lot of what I had was was factual and not filled in for the point of telling a story , but in Helltown in the book they are talking a lot about how he thought so when he was in prison he actually

wrote a book called resurrection and it gave a lot of the details of these murders . but he blamed it all on his friend , carl , who the reader is led to believe it's an alter ego , especially with the schizoid personality .

So he would often in the book be , you know , committing these crimes or committing these things , and he would be like arguing back and forth with Carl , like no , you can't do that , they don't deserve this . And they'd be going back and forth on it .

So a lot of what they had described was like him moving this car around and clearly something in him must have known he was going to get caught because he was like covering his bases at a whole different level .

At this point you have to think all these other people went missing and nobody even looked at him , nobody went looking for a body , nobody stumbled upon anything . At this point you're all like what was he doing with the body ?

It's like , courtney , they're going missing but you're not even confirming that they're dead , and some of them we can't , we can just only presume so bodies weren't found for everybody , correct ? oh my god , that's insane so , february 8th , the officers found a bag of dismembered body parts belonging to female um .

They were sectioned into eight sections and they did not belong to either one of the two missing girls , which was patricia and mary that they were looking for . So they were like what the hell is this ? We were looking for two girls that were missing . We found a bag of parts , and they do not match what we were looking for .

We're seeing like maybe he's , you know , involved in all these other things . And so when they're asking him these questions , he's like as a behavior analyst , I'm like , oh my gosh , he is the least consistent person being interviewed I have possibly ever read about . So he's like no , I wasn't there , that wasn't mine .

And then they're like well , we're asking you about this . Well , that wasn't mine . I mean , I knew about it , but it wasn't mine . And then he's going , he's like admitting things and telling he kept trying to tell them it was carl , it was carl . And they're like you failed the polygraph test .

Carl did not fail a polygraph test because there was an actual man named carl but we're like back then did they believe there was a carl ? yes , he was giving a real person's name , who was , I believe , somebody from high school that he didn't get along with , and then he named his alter Carl .

He's trying to make it look like they're still alive and that look . They love me . He was trying to like put on a show and they were like you obviously sent this to yourself . You have access to the phone number that sent this telegram . So he's getting really sloppy , wow . He's getting really , really sloppy . He's grasping at straws , Correct ?

So on March 5th they were continuing to check the woods at the cemetery where they were like , okay , we found these bags of bodies . They've got to be here . The car was here , that other body was here you know what's happening and they were .

This is exactly where he had his marijuana gardens that he farmed and that was often how he lured people to the cemetery . It was like hey .

Um , patricia is probably one of the more gruesome ones . Um , so he and this wasn't mentioned in a lot of the research I found , but again , it was in hell . Um , he was really into this taxidermy book , like very into a taxidermy book .

Um , and he enjoyed um necrophilia with the bodies and he enjoyed peeling the skin off of them , and with , with great precision .

So Patricia's skin was peeled off of her chest , um , and under her body was another body , oh , cindy um , sydney munson , the 18 year old who was missing for a year and to confirm about necrophilia is not when they have sex with dead bodies , correct , okay , yeah ?

and I think a lot of that is presumed , because I'm not sure if there's ways for them to tell based off of where they find sperm cells . If it was , you know , before death or after , I mean they could probably . I don't think there's a way to age it . I guess is what I'm trying to say .

But from the book Helton it seemed like his preference was afterwards and he did sexually assault both of both Patricia and Marianne .

this is . This is where the nickname the vampire came in um . The bodies were said to have bites in them , hence his nickname , and that's the only thing that makes him the vampire of cape cod , which I find to be very anticlimactic where are these bites ?

But definitely marianne and patricia were were the two that kind of sealed the deal for him .

And while he was in prison he did write his novel resurrection , which described the details of the murder um , and placed a whole of the blame on his friend carl , which for me , especially being involved in mental health , it's like you can clearly see where mental health was a big piece of it how did someone not catch that in the schools .

And so then it's like or is that the perfect , the perfect crime ? right if you pretend that you are insane , is it the perfect crime ? Um , so I I got really into like thinking about wasn't an alter ?

Like the brief parts of it where they're talking about his mom , you can tell he like despises her and so his respect for women and that that violence towards women I think really comes from a place of trauma with with his mom .

Did he have a type young he seemed to enjoy young , um , but I do think like at some point he was an opportunist , so it was kind of like he would get the urge to .

They were on a trip , right together he had to . I was more impressed that twice , two of his crimes involved two women , so he took his first and his last were both two women .

too right , there could be open cases there that he could have been involved with absolutely and the whole time through the trial , he's like there's a maniac on the loose , there's a maniac on the loose , he's's out and it's like almost like , did he not really ? Did he really not know ? He was the one you know .

Um May 12th of 1974 , when he was 29 years old , he was found dead in his cell by a corrections officer . Um , he had hung himself with a leather belt and he is now buried in an unmarked grave next to his mother in Provincetown .

Wow , yeah , I mean , I think it's interesting that they marked it as an unmarked grave , but it's next to his mom , so I guess in a way it's kind of marked , because if you can find her marked grave , then you know he's right there too . Just a sad human .

I didn't know about it yeah , I've never heard of it I thought for sure a serial killer who so local I would have known about , that was interesting . And they compared him to Jack the Ripper .

Yeah , Huh , I don't know if I'd say that I'm glad that your response is to also be left a little bit speechless , because I just felt like his whole story was like it was very odd , very much a mess , right ?

There's another book about tony as well that I just found earlier today when we were having pizza so I purchased that too , so maybe after I binge read that I'll , I'll update the wanderers and , uh , any new information I have , we'll . We'll keep up with Tony .

a text . The link is in the show notes .

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