The first time that Lisa Rodman was taken to “secret Garden” for his babysitter, Antone Charles “Tony” Costa, at the age of 9 years, was perplexed. She had acquired considerable knowledge about gardening from her farmer grandfather, who taught her how to grow tomatoes and lettuce. Therefore, when Costa told him about her garden in the woods of Truro, Massachusetts, Liza thought her experience would be useful. However, when she arrived, she felt confused and disappointed.
“The first thing that really came to mind was, ‘What kind of garden is this?’ What are we seeing? ”She said. That question did not get an adequate answer until 2005, when Liza discovered that her beloved childhood babysitter, who had gained her trust, was actually a serial killer. That “secret garden” served as a cemetery for four of his victims. This discovery is the subject of ““The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer,” a book co-written by Rodman and his lifelong friend, Jennifer Jordan.
Rodman hadn’t thought about Tony Costa for three decades when, in 2005, A disturbing dream brought back his memory of his former babysitter.. In the 1960s, Tony had been her favorite caregiver on Cape Cod: handsome, charming, and funny. But in her nightmare, he pushed her against the wall of a long hallway and held a gun to her head.
“I had had a lot of these incredibly violent dreams, but they were always about an anonymous man armed in some way,” Rodman told the newspaper. “So when I dreamed about Tony and saw his face, I knew it meant something important.”
The woman, now 61, was not prepared for her mother’s response. when he asked what had happened to his beloved babysitter. “It was one of those moments where everything slows down, like you’ve taken bad drugs,” he recalls. His mother, while drinking gin, calmly replied: “Well, I remember he turned out to be a serial killer.”
The casual way her mother described it, as if it didn’t matter, left her cold. Rodman had vague memories of a series of murders in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where his family spent summers in the late 1960s: scary stuff about missing girls, shallow graves, and dismembered bodies. But she had no idea that Tony, the employee at the motel where her mother worked when she wasn’t teaching home economics, was involved.
For Rodman, Tony Costa was a protective figure, one of the few adults in her life who treated her kindly. He spent a lot of time with her and her little sister, Louisa, taking them out to buy ice cream, taking them for rides in her truck, and even taking them to see her “secret garden” in the woods. How could it be possible that this man, responsible for the brutal deaths of at least four women, was the same one who bought them candy and pushed them on the swings?
“I couldn’t believe it,” Rodman said. “Tony was one of the few adults who seemed to enjoy being with us. He never raised his voice. He was really gentle.” This disconcerting revelation prompted Liza to investigate more about Costa and review her own memories, trying to align her life with his.
In 1966, Liza Rodman was seven years old when she met Tony Costa. Her mother, Betty, a divorced home economics teacher, had gotten a summer job in Provincetown, and the family moved to the Royal Coachman, a seaside motel where Betty worked as housekeeping manager. Antone Charles “Tony” Costa was a 21-year-old young man with a striking appearance: tall, tanned, with dark hair and white teeth. She had arrived at the motel to visit her mother, who worked as one of the cleaners there, and to ask if she could get a job there.
Soon, Tony was not only repairing screens and fixing leaky faucets at the motel, but he was also taking care of Liza and her sister Louisa. “We had a lot of caregivers at that time,” Liza remembers. In addition to working full time, Betty also enjoyed going out drinking and dancing, and she was not very selective when choosing babysitters for her daughters. “One woman used to cut our nails until they bled,” Rodman said. “That’s why Tony Costa looked like a day at the beach.”
Tony took the girls on long rides in his truck, where they listened to Jefferson Airplane music and sang together. I bought them candy, He pushed them on the swings and asked them questions about their lives. Tony shared stories about his own father, a “war hero” who had died in World War II when he was young, and about his wife and children. “Many adults we knew simply didn’t want anything to do with children; the more invisible, the better,” Rodman commented. “Tony wasn’t like that. He seemed to really enjoy being with us. He never raised his voice. He was really gentle.”
The discovery that Tony Costa, the man who had been so kind and protective of her and her sister, was actually a serial killer, plunged Liza into deep confusion and pain. “I started researching him and going through my own memories to see where our lives coincided,” Rodman explained. “I needed to know the whole story.” This journey of “personal excavation,” as Liza describes it, was extremely difficult and often heartbreaking. However, she felt that she had no choice if she wanted to reconcile her past with the shocking reality she had discovered.
Tony Costa was born on August 2, 1944 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From an early age, his life was marked by tragedy and instability. When he was just seven years old, his father, a World War II “war hero,” died, leaving Tony without a father figure. At age 18, Tony married his teenage sweetheart, Avis, with whom he had three children before divorcing in 1968. Costa worked in construction and had established himself as the leading drug dealer in the liberal community of Provincetown.
During the summers when I cared for Liza and Louisa, Costa led a secret life full of excesses and violence. In 1960, when he was 16, he was charged with assault and battery for attempting to rape his 14-year-old neighbor. These incidents marked the beginning of a pattern of disturbing behavior. By the time he worked at the Royal Coachman, Tony was taking large quantities of drugs and, by 1967, he had begun selling them, distributing amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD and more to young people in the area.
Tensions in his personal life manifested themselves in outbursts of anger, especially against his wife Avis and their children. In 1968, Avis filed for divorce after Tony beat her and her first child on several occasions. That same year, her life began to fall apart when the doctor who gave her drugs dropped him as a patient. Desperate, Tony robbed the doctor’s office and buried the drugs in the Provincetown dump and in the woods of Truro, places where he also took Liza and Louisa.
In May 1968, a young local waitress named Sydney Monzon He disappeared. She was last seen getting into Tony’s car. In September, another young woman, Susan Perry, who was one of Tony’s problematic followers, also disappeared. Costa claimed that Sydney had gone to Europe and that Susan had followed a group of drug addicts to Mexico. Most people believed him, given the large number of runaway teenagers at the time, lost in hippie culture and drugs.
However, The disappearance of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki in January 1969 raised further suspicions. Both women, in their twenties, spent a weekend in Provincetown and stayed at the same guest house where Tony lived. On January 25, they gave Costa a ride to the city center and then disappeared. Walsh was a second-grade teacher and Wysocki was finishing her education degree at Rhode Island College. When they didn’t show up for work or school, the police began to seriously investigate.
On February 2, the women’s car was found in the woods of Truro, a place where Tony kept drugs and grew marijuana. Days after, Police discovered a shallow grave with a piece of cloth sticking out. While digging, they found the dismembered body of Susan Perry. Meanwhile, Tony had fled to Boston and then to Burlington, Vermont, in Walsh’s car.
On March 5, another search team found the mutilated bodies of Walsh and Wysocki, along with another partially decomposed body that was identified as that of Sydney Monzon. Tony was arrested and put on trial alone for the deaths of Walsh and Wysocki. During the trial, Costa maintained his innocence, blaming the crimes on real acquaintances and invented alter egos. At times, he admitted to dismembering the bodies but not killing them, suggesting that drugs had caused him to act that way. At one point he said: “I remember committing these murders. Because? “I don’t know… There are many things I don’t remember.”
Analysts were divided over the true nature of Tony Costa. Some They considered him a cold and calculating psychopath; others suggested that he was acting out a horrific drama of incest and matricide because of his mother, who “abandoned” him by remarrying and having another child. In May 1970, Costa was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He died four years later in prison, and although his death was ruled a suicide, some believe he was murdered by other inmates.
When Liza Rodman arrived in Provincetown in the summer of 1969, aged just 10, she wondered where her favorite babysitter had gone. However, she didn’t think much about it; she was used to men disappearing from her life. Her mother, Betty, seemed especially careful to protect her from any news. Eventually, Ella Liza had other concerns: Betty remarried and the family continued to spend summers in Provincetown until Ella Liza graduated from high school. Although her mother revealed to her decades later that Tony had been a serial killer, she was reluctant to talk about the case.
“So what?” Betty said to her daughter. “She didn’t kill you, did she?”
Sixteen years after discovering the truth about Tony Costa, Liza Rodman decided to tell her story. She, along with her lifelong friend, journalist Jennifer Jordan, wrote the book “The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer”, published in 2021. “It was really a personal dig,” Rodman said. “It was incredibly difficult and often devastating to do so.” However, he felt that he must do so to fully understand his past and reconcile his childhood memories with the terrifying reality of Costa’s crimes.
The process of writing the book was not easy. Rodman and Jordan plunged into a dark world of police investigations, court records and interviews with people who knew Costa and the victims. They relived memories of summers in Provincetown, rides in Tony’s truck, and visits to his “secret garden.” It was an emotionally draining journey for Rodman, but also a path to the truth.
“If I didn’t have to do it, I wouldn’t have done it this way,” Rodman admitted. But the need to understand Tony Costa’s impact on his life drove her to move forward. Every page of the book is infused with his struggle to come to terms with the duality of his nanny: the kind man he knew and the monster he later discovered.
