Tony Costa

Tony Costa was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 2, 1944.[2] He committed his first violent offense in November 1961, at age 17, when he broke into a house and attacked the occupant, a teenaged girl. Charged with burglary and assault, Costa was sentenced to three years' probation and a one-year suspended sentence.[3]

In 1966, Costa picked up two hitchhikers, Bonnie Williams and Diane Federoff, and promised to take them to Pennsylvania. The women disappeared shortly after this encounter; Costa told investigators that he had dropped them off in California. Costa was additionally thought to have murdered his girlfriend, Barbara Spaulding, while he was living in California in 1967.[3] However, all three women were later found alive.[4]

Costa was suspected of killing eight women: Diane Federoff, Bonnie Williams, Barbara Spaulding, Sydney Monzon, Susan Perry, Christine Gallant, Patricia Walsh, and Mary Anne Wysocki but convicted of killing only two: Walsh and Wysocki. Although suspected of killing Federoff, Williams and Spaulding, those women were later found alive.[5]

On February 8, 1969, while looking for the bodies of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, police discovered Susan Perry. Perry had been missing since the previous Labor Day.[6]

Perry's body had been cut into eight pieces. When Wysocki's body was found about a month later, her torso and head had been buried separately. Not long after, Walsh and the rest of Wysocki's body were found in a forest clearing that Costa had used for growing marijuana.[6] This "garden" of marijuana plants and the greater case inspired the true crime book In His Garden, by Leo Damore.[6]

The case gained international attention when district attorney Edmund Dinis, in comments to the media, claimed of Walsh and Wysocki, "The hearts of each girl had been removed from the bodies and were not in the graves…Each body was cut into as many parts as there are joints." Dinis also claimed that there were teeth marks found on the bodies. These claims, although untrue, produced a stream of national and international media outlets into local Provincetown, Massachusetts.[6]

The media attention was so great that Kurt Vonnegut (whose daughter Edith had met Costa) compared him to Jack the Ripper in an article in the July 25, 1969 issue of Life Magazine, which was included in his collection of essays Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons.[7] Vonnegut maintained a correspondence with Costa. The author said, "The message of his letters to me was that a person as intent on being virtuous as he could not possibly have hurt a fly. He believed it."[8]

On June 12, 1969, Costa was arraigned on charges of murder for three of the deaths.[10] In May 1970, he was convicted of the murders of Mary Anne Wysocki and Patricia Walsh and sentenced to life in prison at Massachusetts' Walpole Correctional Institution. Four years after his incarceration, Costa died from an apparent suicide by hanging in his cell,[2] though in later years, his suicide was questioned as a possible murder.[11]

The case was covered by the popular true-crime show Born to Kill? in season six. The episode aired on television in 2014.

In 2021, Liza Rodman wrote a book about her encounter with Costa during her childhood. He was her babysitter during summer break before the murders.[4]

• List of serial killers in the United States