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  To the women

  One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—

  —Emily Dickinson

  A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS

  This is a hybrid work of memoir and narrative nonfiction. Liza’s story is subject to the limitations of her memories from childhood. We understand that others who were there will have differing recollections. However, those events involving Tony Costa and his crimes are taken directly from the original records and source documents—police reports and detectives’ notes, prosecution and defense interviews, the trial transcript, Tony’s exhaustive medical and psychological testing, including his nine polygraphs, his prison diary as well as what he called his “factual novel” of his life and crimes, and clippings from the extensive media coverage. We were also fortunate to have more than fifty hours of digitally preserved tape recordings of interviews conducted with Tony Costa during his fifteen months in the Barnstable County Jail. Finally, we tracked down and spoke with dozens of people who knew Tony as well as those who were there and witness to the time, place, and events herein.

  While quotes are taken directly from interviews, articles, letters, transcripts, and documents, we have made minor grammatical changes for the sake of clarity and readability. And lastly, some of the names and identifying details have been changed.

  Prologue LIZA’S NIGHTMARE

  2005

  “Close your eyes and count to four,” he whispered. I felt his breath on my cheek. The barrel of the gun was hard and cold against my forehead.

  I counted, and when I opened my eyes, he was gone.

  I sat up quickly in bed, gasping, my body soaked with sweat.

  What the hell was that?

  It was pitch-dark in the room—not even a sliver of the moon to offer some light.

  Damn. Another nightmare.

  I’d been having them for almost two years, during which they had become more and more violent and vivid, and in each I was hunted by an anonymous man with a knife or a gun. I would struggle to recognize him, but he kept his face turned away from me. Then, just as he’d find my hiding place, I’d wake with my heart pounding and adrenaline coursing through my legs until they ached.

  But this nightmare was different. In this dream, I was a young girl again, probably about nine or ten and in my summer pajamas walking down a long hotel hallway. Suddenly the elusive man blocked my path, backed me up against the wall, and pointed a gun at my head. I looked up at him and I finally saw his face. It was a man I hadn’t seen since I was a child in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

  Tony Costa.

  Tony had been hired as a handyman to fix torn screens and leaky faucets in the seaside motel where my mother worked summers as a housekeeper. Everybody thought Tony was great, especially me. He was part of the revolving door of so-called babysitters my mother corralled to look after me and my younger sister, Louisa. Mom was notorious for being able to find a babysitter faster than she could say the word. She’d stop people in the supermarket or the post office or at the gas pump and ask, “Do you babysit?” Mostly the person would just stare at her, wondering why a mother would hire a random stranger to look after her children with less care than she would a plumber or a car mechanic. But sometimes they said sure. Tony was one of those, and he turned out to be one of the good ones. In fact, he was one of the few kind and gentle adults in my life during those turbulent years. But then in 1969, when I was ten years old, Tony disappeared. I didn’t know why; I just knew he was gone.

  So why was Tony Costa now in my dreams, holding a gun to my head and smiling with teeth better suited to a wolf? What I remembered about him was all good; in fact, Tony was a nice guy who never yelled, never hit, never made me feel small and ugly and unwanted. I had been afraid of my mother but never of Tony. So when he suddenly appeared, threatening and frightening in the dream, it confounded me.

  With nowhere else to turn, I did something I learned long ago not to—I asked Mom for help. I invited her to dinner, and when she arrived at Tim’s and my house, she was already teetering as she climbed the front porch. She was seventy by then, and everywhere she went, she carried a plastic sixteen-ounce water bottle of gin in her purse.

  “Those were some wild days,” she said, seated at my counter and swirling the ice around in her snifter. She was clearly enjoying the memory of those summers on Cape Cod when she was a pretty divorcée, barely thirty years old, spending most of her free time closing down the various bars and dance clubs with her own revolving door of suitors. She took a long pull on her gin and settled back into her chair while I put the last of the seasoning in the soup simmering on the stove.

  “Did something happen to me back then that you’re not telling me?” I said, suddenly wondering if it had.

  “What do you mean, happen to you?”

  “With Tony Costa.”

  “Tony Costa? Why are you still thinking about him?”

  “I wasn’t until I had a nightmare about him.”

  “Oh, Christ, you and your dreams,” she said, snort-laughing as she took a sip of her drink.

  “Well, this one was pretty horrible. But I don’t get it. He was always so nice to me,” I said. “What do you remember about him?”

  She was quiet for a moment too long, and I stopped stirring and waited. She was just staring into the bottom of her glass. Mom rarely paused to contemplate her words, so I watched, curious as to what was going to come out of her mouth.

  “Well,” she said, watching the gin swirl around the glass. “I remember he turned out to be a serial killer.” She said it calmly, as if she were reading the weather report.

  I felt sick. I had always had several disjointed memories about murders that occurred in Provincetown during the years we lived there, but no one ever told me who had committed them. The bits and pieces I remembered involved hideous crimes—shallow graves and hearts being carved out of bodies and teeth marks on corpses.

  I suddenly had an image, as clear as the pot of soup on the stove in front of me, of my two little tan feet up on the dashboard of the Royal Coachman Motel’s utility truck. Sand was stuck between my toes, and there were flecks of old red polish on my big toenails. I loved how tan my feet would get during the long, shoeless summer, and with them poised on the dash in front of me, I would turn them this way and that, admiring their smooth brown skin. I was never pretty like my mother, but, I thought, at least I had her pretty feet. Driving the motel’s truck, always, was Tony Costa.

  I shook my head to clear the image and turned back to Mom.

  “A serial killer? Tony, the babysitter?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said, “don’t be so dramatic. He wasn’t your babysitter.” Her eyes narrowed in emphasis. “He was the handyman.”

  I felt as if someone had sucker punched me in the gut.

  “Handyman at the motel…,” I said, my words trailing off as I envisioned its long hallway and recognized it from the nightmare.

  “But Louisa and I went all over the Cape with him,” I sputtered. “He took us on his errands and out to the dump and out to the Truro woods. Tony was the Cape Cod Vampire? Our Tony? A serial killer?” My words were tumbling out of me.

  “Yeah, so what?” she said, again reaching for her gin. “He didn’t kill you, did he?”
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  1 TONY

  Antone Charles “Tony” Costa was born just after midnight on August 2, 1944, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother, Cecelia, had married his father, Antone Fonseca Costa, in 1928, and they spent the next fifteen years trying to conceive. She finally got pregnant, and Antone—a US Navy Reserve carpenter’s mate—returned to the Pacific to fight the war. She would never see him again, and he would never meet his namesake. On April 21, 1945, Antone F. drowned in New Guinea while trying to rescue a fellow seaman during the final days of World War II. Tony was eight months old.

  Only five months after Antone’s death, a very much unmarried Cecelia got pregnant by a man who was fourteen years her junior. Joseph Bonaviri was the owner of a small masonry business in Somerville, a working-class neighborhood north of Boston. After all the problems she had getting pregnant with Antone, her relationship with the young mason proved immediately fruitful, if not a tad unseemly in her Catholic and largely immigrant neighborhood. They married in May 1946, and six weeks later they welcomed a son, Vincent “Vinnie” Bonaviri, born almost two years after his half brother, Tony.

  Tony grew into a bright-eyed, good-looking boy. But as he matured, he became fascinated, even obsessed, with his deceased father and begged Cecelia to tell him about brave Antone, the war hero, over and over, like a favorite bedtime story. He later said he remembered tiny details of his father’s funeral, even though he’d been only four years old when the burial was finally held. He sat for hours poring through the trunk of his father’s possessions the navy had sent home from the Pacific. Tony’s favorite items were his father’s dress uniform; his posthumous commendation for bravery, which Tony proudly took to school and showed his classmates; and a knife big enough to be called a dagger1 kept in a handmade leather sheath. Cecelia answered as many of Tony’s questions about his father as she could, but the boy’s curiosity about who the missing father was, what he was like, and most of all, how he died, seemed to haunt him.

  When he was seven, Tony told his mother “a man” was visiting him in his bedroom at night and talking to him. Cecelia showed him a picture of his father and Tony said, “That’s him.” Tony never revealed whether those visits of “a man” were pure fantasy, the obsessions of a son haunted by his absent father, a young child’s nightmares, or if Tony was in fact being “visited” by a male intruder.

  Every summer, Cecelia took Tony and Vinnie down to her sister’s house in Provincetown, where she worked cleaning motel rooms while the boys had the run of the town. Even though Cecelia was born in Provincetown, Tony and Vinnie were seen as outsiders, “wash-ashores,” and often made to feel somehow different by the local kids. The brothers were so inseparable they became known as Tonyandvinnie, Vinnieandtony,2 but Tony resented having his younger brother tag along and mocked him at every turn, chanting, “Vinnie, the skinny little ginnie [sic] with the ravioli eyes, put him in the oven and make french fries.”3

  One of the boys with whom Tony and Vinnie played those summers was Frank Gaspar, who lived in Provincetown year-round and was part of the close-knit Portuguese community where fathers worked processing fish in the Atlantic Coast Fisheries plant and mothers cooked sea clams with linguica or mackerel vinha d’alhos for Sunday dinner and yelled to each other over the back fences, sometimes in a polyglot of languages. Frank and his family lived for the summertime, when there was regular money coming in, and they dreaded the misery of the cold months, when heat and hot water were luxuries they rarely could afford.

  From the beginning, Tony was different from the other kids—somehow cooler, smarter, and more “inside himself” than anyone else. Frank Gaspar felt as if Tony were “not there, even though he was.”4

  One day, a gaggle of boys was headed to the beach, and Frank told Tony to hold up while he got something out of his yard.

  “Time and tide wait for no one,” Tony announced. First pointing to himself and then to Vinnie, he said, “I’m time and he’s tide.”

  Frank thought that was just about the smartest thing he’d ever heard.

  In those days, boys collected coupons from the back of comic books and used them to order magic kits, slingshots, X-ray glasses, kryptonite rocks, and toy soldiers. But rather than cheap comic book toys, Tony ordered a taxidermy kit from the Sears catalog. Vinnie later said Tony’s taxidermy craft was “a lot of baloney; he couldn’t stuff a sausage.”5 Nevertheless, Frank observed that Tony kept on killing and disemboweling small animals, even though he never finished a trophy that anyone saw.

  During the winter months back in Somerville, Tony kept his taxidermy kit in the basement of their triple-decker on Hudson Street in the Winter Hill neighborhood, home to infamous mobster Whitey Bulger’s eponymous gang. Tony spent untold hours experimenting with chemicals and fiddling with the instruments. Later, neighbors would claim a number of their small pets, cats in particular, went missing during those years, but no one at the time associated those mysterious disappearances with anything but bad luck, certainly not with young Tony Costa.

  Whether or not Tony spent too much time with dead animals and his taxidermy kit, he did spend enough time on his studies to become a gifted and popular student. When Tony was eleven, Joseph Bonaviri put him to work at his masonry company. Tony was able to figure in decimals in his head, balancing columns of cash income, outlay, unemployment insurance, Social Security deductions, and tax entries, all of which were accurate enough to survive an auditor’s inspection. Bonaviri nicknamed his stepson the Whiz Kid, and in school he earned commendations for “splendid cooperation and honesty.” His English teacher said he was a gentle young man and that there was something lovable about him.

  Before Tony turned twelve, when he was in Provincetown for the summer, a local teenager lured him into his basement, tied him up, and raped him.6 As with most sexual assaults of children, then and now, the attack was never reported to police, and Tony never revealed publicly who had raped him or if it happened more than once. Tony would only say it was an “older kid.” And more than fifty years later, in 2009, Tony’s ex-wife still refused to identify the attacker, saying only that the man was still alive and still living in Provincetown. However, she did disclose “it was just one of the experiences that nestled in [Tony’s] psyche.”7

  Tragically, it might not have been the only sexual assault Tony suffered during his summers in Provincetown. Cory Devereaux, a local boy who would become one of Tony’s young followers, said he and several other boys were sexually molested “every fucking Sunday”8 by Father Leo DuarteI, the parish priest at St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in Provincetown. When Devereaux was seven years old, he said the priest drugged him and the other altar boys with a shot glass of spiked wine, telling them it was “the blood of Christ.” Then, one by one, Duarte took the boys “in the back” of the church. Unlike Tony’s attack by the “older kid,” Devereaux’s alleged attack did get reported after he was found unconscious on the street and taken to the police. Then, in front of his mother; the town doctor, Dr. Daniel Hiebert; and the chief of police, Francis Marshall, the story came tumbling out.

  “They tried to pin it on my stepfather, but it was Duarte. That much I know. But the fuckers did nothing,” Cory said, his anger and hatred of the Catholic Church and the powers that protected its pedophile priests still palpable sixty years later.

  Regardless of whom Tony’s attacker was or how Tony felt about the rape, he said that it was then that he began to lose his faith in God. While Tony would marry and christen his children in the Church, he wouldn’t attend regular services until he was in prison serving time for first-degree murder. Then he went nearly every day.

  * * *

  On August 2, 1960, Tony turned sixteen, and with some of the money from his father’s death benefits, Cecelia bought him his first car, a secondhand jalopy. He adored the car and rented space in a neighbor’s garage in Somerville so he wouldn’t have to leave it on the street at night. But with the garage came the neighbor’s daughter, Donna, who, according to Tony,
was “an annoying skinny little pest,”9 a teenybopper with a crush on him.

  One could hardly blame the girl for thinking that Tony liked her. The year before, when Donna was thirteen, Tony began taking her down into his basement, where he bound her hands, laid her on a pool table, and pulled down her underpants. Tony claimed that he just “looked at her.” Then, in November 1961, according to Tony, Donna gave him a key to her house so he could come upstairs when her parents were asleep. He did, but as he stood over her bed, she screamed, and he ran out of the house. Several days later, Tony tried to drag her into his basement. She screamed again, and he slapped her hard across the face. She ran home, and when she was questioned about the bruise, she told her mother Tony “wouldn’t let me go.”10 She went on to tell her parents about how several nights before she had awoken to find him standing over her bed, fondling her through her nightgown. Despite their differing accounts, Tony was arrested and charged with assault and battery and breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony (rape). He told the court he was just trying to find out why she “hated my guts.” The judge didn’t buy it. Although there was no evidence that Tony had broken into the apartment, he nonetheless was convicted of both charges and given a one-year suspended sentence, three-year probation, and ordered to get out of Somerville for good.

  Cecelia did as the court demanded and sent him to Provincetown to live with her sister until things cooled down with the authorities. But things didn’t cool down, and several months later, Cecelia and Vinnie packed their bags and joined Tony in Provincetown. Along with Somerville, Cecelia left Joseph Bonaviri behind for good. While Bonaviri paid $50 a week for Vinnie’s child support, he never again had anything to do with the Whiz Kid.

  I. While the spelling of the priest’s name is recorded in various places as both Duarte and Duart, the most common spelling is Duarte.