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For generations, Cape Cod has provided the backdrop for summer fun and frolic.
The hook-shaped Massachusetts peninsula is packed with quaint villages that seem to reach back to the 19th century, lighthouses, seafood shacks and plentiful beaches.
Besides worker bees from around New England and Canada, parts of the Cape have also been the playground of America’s most monied, including the Kennedys.
Horror on Cape Cod
But on Feb. 8, 1969, the cold winter chill that swept over the Cape brought horror. Cops had discovered the missing VW van of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, parked in the woods. A search was launched for the two women.
First, investigators found the remains of Susan Perry, who vanished on the 1968 Labour Day weekend. She had been dismembered into eight pieces. Next, police found the remains of Wysocki and finally, Walsh.
According to cops, the killer used a knife to murder the latter two women before executing them with bullets to the head. As a bonus, cops found the dismembered body of Sydney Monzon. All four sets of the remains showed signs of necrophilia.
“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,” District Attorney Edmund Dinis told reporters in regard to the Wysocki and Walsh slayings.
Unnaturally close with his mother
But homicide detectives had their eye on one particular suspect from the start. His name was Tony Costa.
Born in 1942, his father was killed in the Second World War, and he became unnaturally close with his mother, not unlike the relationship between Norman Bates and his mom in Psycho. As a kid, Costa was fascinated by taxidermy, which soon became animal torture.
These ingredients are pointing to a toxic cocktail of depravity.
Costa married in 1963 and promptly had three children. This shot at domesticity crashed and burned over his drug use, and by 1968 after a brief sojourn in California, he was back in Cape Cod selling reefer and committing petty crimes.
Cops liked Costa because the body dump scene was where he grew marijuana, and he knew all four women.
Killer was debonair and cunning
Costa was described by cops as debonair and cunning. Ultimately, his undoing would be his own overconfidence and breathtaking ego. The times he killed in were also a boon to the serial killer.
“It greatly influenced how police investigated this case because, in 1969, Provincetown [on the Cape] and many other areas, like Greenwich Village [in New York] and San Francisco, were transient areas for hippies to live and cultivate their lifestyles,” author Casey Sherman told AETV.
“So when these young women turned up missing, the police really didn’t take it too seriously because they thought that these kids were getting into VW buses and travelling the country. And that’s what young people did at the time.”
Even the women’s families weren’t quick on the uptake. They were oblivious as to where their girls were.
She added: “Had these murders taken place in 2022, I think investigators would’ve jumped on it right away as opposed to taking weeks — and even months — to investigate these disappearances.”
Families suspected something horrific
But the disappearances and murders of Walsh and Wysocki were different. When they went radio silent, their families immediately suspected something horrific had befallen them.
One of the roadblocks in the probe was Costa playing both sides of the police fence. He was an informant and he sold drugs, currying favour with the cops.
In the pantheon of serial killers, Costa is a line item of horror. That summer of 1969, the messianic Charles Manson launched his crazed Helter Skelter in Southern California.
When he was arrested, Costa feigned innocence. No, no: It was my alter ego, Cory.
“Tony Costa was the ultimate chameleon. His greatest strength as a criminal was his charm. So he worms his way into the Provincetown Police Department and gets access to some of the investigators, especially when they started to really focus on the disappearances of Mary Anne Wysocki and Patricia Walsh,” Sherman, the author of Helltown, said.
It’s 1969, and Costa is handsome, charming and has drugs. His police ties put him in the loop and he believed he was smarter than the cops. That notion was shattered with his arrest in June 1969.
The Vampire of Cape Cod was charged with three murders and was convicted in the slayings of Wysocki and Walsh in May 1970.
Costa killed himself in prison
The killer apparently hanged himself in his prison cell on May 12, 1974.
“These weren’t romanticized killings or stranglings — these were the most brutal murders that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve covered dozens of homicides,” Sherman said.
“Tony Costa was the most brutal serial killer since Jack the Ripper. I’ve studied the autopsy photos, I’ve studied the crime scene photos. These women were shot. They were stabbed, slashed and dismembered. There’s a real brutality here that Tony Costa projected onto these women, and I think it all goes back to his relationship with his mother.”
She added: “Tony Costa wanted to keep his mother all to himself, but his mother remarried. His mother had another child, and I think the love that she had to provide to those two other people in her life created a void in Costa’s heart and brain.”
He is also suspected of at least a dozen unsolved homicides in California.
bhunter@postmedia.com
@HunterTOSun