Antone Charles Costa, known in Provincetown as Tony, was a 24-year-old carpenter when he was charged in March 1969 with killing two young women from Providence, Rhode Island. Patricia H. Walsh and Mary Ann Wysocki had driven to the tip of Cape Cod for a weekend in late January and had not come home. In February and March searchers in the town of Truro found their remains and the remains of two more young women from the Outer Cape, Sydney Monzon and Susan Perry, who had disappeared the year before.
A Barnstable County jury found Costa guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of Walsh and Wysocki at a trial in 1970 and recommended that he not be put to death. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts affirmed both convictions in November 1971. He was never tried for the deaths of Monzon and Perry, though police and later writers linked them to him. He died by suicide in a Massachusetts prison in 1974.
The case drew reporters from far beyond Massachusetts, in part because of claims made to the press by the district attorney's office that the medical examiner later contradicted. Kurt Vonnegut, then living on Cape Cod, wrote about it for Life magazine in July 1969. Decades later two books about Costa, a memoir and a work its author describes as fact told with fiction techniques, revived interest in the case and stirred resentment in Provincetown.
Provincetown sits at the far end of Cape Cod, at the tip of the peninsula that bends north into Massachusetts Bay. Its neighbor Truro lies just to the south. In the late 1960s the summer season ran from June to Labor Day, and in those months the town filled with tourists. It had also become a gathering place for young people from the counterculture, who called themselves "freaks," according to Vonnegut's Life article. Vonnegut wrote that they admired the novelist Hermann Hesse, distrusted authority over drug raids, poor housing and the Vietnam War, and could easily get marijuana, amphetamine and LSD. Local businesses made money from them, and tourists came to stare at them.
The Associated Press, reviewing a 2022 book on the case, noted that Provincetown had been nicknamed "Helltown" in the 1600s for its drinking and gambling, and that the Costa case, though sensational in early 1969, was soon overshadowed by the killings of Sharon Tate and six others by followers of Charles Manson in southern California later that year.
Vonnegut noted that the killings happened outside the tourist season.
Costa was 24 when the charges were brought.
Vonnegut's article, written while Costa was awaiting trial, gives most of what was reported about his family. His father died during the Second World War, in New Guinea, after rescuing a sailor who was drowning. His mother remarried and still lived in Provincetown in 1969; she put part of the father's insurance money in trust for her son. Vonnegut wrote that by the age of 13 Costa was keeping his stepfather's books and doing his tax returns, and that his IQ had been measured at 121. Vonnegut also described him as a spoiled boy who had never been punished.
Costa married young, and the couple had three children, two sons and a daughter. According to Vonnegut, his wife said he had been disappointed at the birth of the first son, depressed at the second, and overjoyed at the daughter. The couple had been raised Catholic but had left the church; by 1969 they spoke of reincarnation, psychedelic experience and God in nature. His wife divorced him on grounds of cruel and abusive treatment, and in 1969 she told Vonnegut that he was innocent.
Drugs ran through his adult life. The Supreme Judicial Court summarized trial evidence that from 1965 until shortly before the killings he frequently took amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD and marijuana, by mouth and by injection, and that witnesses described him as drug dependent and often "stoned" or "high." Vonnegut reported that Costa had once had a frightening reaction to amphetamine in San Francisco that sent him to an emergency room. In early 1968, Vonnegut wrote, Costa gave the Provincetown police information about a drug seller, who was then arrested.
People who knew him described a man at odds with his later reputation. Vonnegut called him gentle and quiet in manner, a tall man who was neat and clean and showered three times a day. Vonnegut's own daughter, then 19, had met him during a summer in Provincetown.
Sydney Monzon was 18 and lived in Eastham, a few towns down the Cape. She worked at a grocery store in Provincetown. According to Vonnegut, she disappeared around May 25, 1968, leaving her bicycle behind. Her sister believed she had gone to Europe with a friend, and for months no one treated her absence as a crime. Her remains were among the four found in Truro in early 1969.
Susan Perry was 17 and lived in Provincetown. She disappeared on or about September 8, 1968, just after Labor Day, according to Vonnegut. Her parents were divorced. Her father, a fisherman, did not report her missing; he assumed she had moved away, as young people in the town often did. Hers was the first body found in the Truro searches.
Patricia H. Walsh and Mary Ann Wysocki were friends from Providence, Rhode Island, each about 23 years old. Walsh was an elementary school teacher and Wysocki was a college student, according to the Associated Press. They planned a weekend in Provincetown in the off-season.
On January 24, 1969, they drove to the Cape in Walsh's light-colored Volkswagen and registered at a rooming house in Provincetown, where a room cost five dollars a night, according to Vonnegut. Costa was also a paying guest there. The landlady introduced the two women to him, and he helped carry their luggage.
The trial record, as the Supreme Judicial Court summarized it, traced what followed. On January 25 Costa was seen riding in the women's Volkswagen. That same day he picked up a paycheck from a friend. The two women missed an appointment they had made for that afternoon. On January 26 a note said they were checking out, and their belongings disappeared from the room. Costa was seen in the house that day. Walsh and Wysocki were not seen alive again.
In the days after the women vanished, Costa behaved, as the court later put it, like a man trying to make it seem that they had left Massachusetts. He asked the owner of a gas station about painting a Volkswagen. On February 2 a witness saw the Walsh car hidden in a wooded area of Truro.
He then drove the car to Boston with two friends, telling them that two girls had given it to him and were going to Canada. In Boston he asked where he could get a fake driver's license, registration and bill of sale. He also offered to sell a .22 caliber pistol, which he said was buried in Truro.
On February 7 he rented a parking space in Burlington, Vermont, and tried to register the Volkswagen there in his own name. The car's Rhode Island license plates were later found hidden inside it. Vonnegut wrote that the discovery of the car in storage that Costa had arranged in Burlington led to his arrest. On February 8 personal belongings of the two women were found in his room at the rooming house.
Police spoke with Costa more than once in February, by telephone and in person. He gave them, in the court's words, three mutually inconsistent versions of when he had last been in contact with the women and of how he had come to have Walsh's car.
On March 3, 1969, a telegram signed "Pat and Mary Ann" arrived at his mother's home. It had been sent from a New York City telephone number to which Costa had access. The jury could treat it as one more attempt to suggest that the women were alive and far away.
The remains were found in Truro in February and March 1969. The first to be found were those of Susan Perry. In early March police found the remains of Walsh and Wysocki in Truro. The remains of Sydney Monzon were also found. In all, four young women had been found in Truro in February and March, according to Vonnegut, and WBUR, recalling the case in 2022, said the same.
Police found a .22 caliber pistol in Truro, which was identified as Costa's, and three spent shell casings that expert testimony linked to that gun. The court recorded that bloodstains were found on items in his room and on his boots.
The medical evidence at trial was that both women died of gunshot wounds.
The sites drew sightseers in the weeks that followed. Vonnegut wrote that off-season visitors came out with shovels and picnic lunches, to the disgust of local officials.
Costa was arrested in early March 1969 at an apartment in the Back Bay section of Boston, according to Fox News. He was taken to the State Police barracks at Yarmouth, on Cape Cod, and arraigned the next day in Provincetown. A news photograph published with a 2022 Boston Magazine excerpt shows him at Massachusetts State Police headquarters in Boston on March 5, 1969, being charged with the murders of the two Rhode Island women.
He was held at the Barnstable County House of Correction. He was then sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for observation. Vonnegut reported that at Bridgewater he was polite but said little, except to ask to see the district attorney and to say, "There's a maniac loose out there."
The prosecutor was Edmund Dinis, the district attorney whose district then covered Barnstable County. Dinis, elected district attorney in 1959, left the office in 1970, according to the finding aid of his papers at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Vonnegut described him in 1969 as a large, earnest, unmarried man of 44 who said he would present the Commonwealth's case himself. Dinis told Vonnegut that the prosecution would not try to establish a motive. "Who knows why anybody would do such a thing?" he asked.
In the first weeks of the case, Dinis's office and some local reporters put out lurid claims about what had been done to the bodies. Vonnegut reported that the medical examiner later contradicted them. The claims brought reporters to Cape Cod, and Costa's lawyers protested the publicity. A judge then ordered the prosecution to stop making public statements. Vonnegut wrote that leaks continued anyway, some from people hoping to sell photographs or other material.
Dinis was also interested, Vonnegut wrote, in what young people in Provincetown thought of the case. He questioned Vonnegut about what his daughter had said; she had told her father by telephone from Iowa City that "anybody could be a murderer," which Vonnegut said disappointed Dinis, who had hoped for insight into the counterculture.
Vonnegut's article ran in Life on July 25, 1969, under the headline "A novelist probes the tale of four horrible murders on Cape Cod." A copy is held in the archive of the Provincetown History Project. He opened it with Jack the Ripper, whose London killings in 1888 had been described in the press as showing some anatomical skill, and he remarked that whoever had killed the four women on Cape Cod showed none. Fox News later summarized the piece as comparing Costa to the Ripper.
The article mixed reporting with reflection. Vonnegut asked young people in Provincetown which drug the killer might have been taking, and they answered "speed" every time; he doubted the killings were the product of drugs. One young man asked him whether the case was going to be bad for the freaks. Vonnegut also raised the theory, current in the town, that Costa had been framed in revenge for his tip to the police about the drug seller, and rejected it: no one, he wrote, would kill four women to frame an informer.
He recorded that two Cape Cod writers were preparing books. One was Lester Allen, a retired newspaperman who had witnessed seven executions and who had been hired by Costa's two local defense lawyers to gather information for the defense. Allen had 1,100 pages of transcribed conversations with Costa, his friends and his relatives, and none of it, Vonnegut wrote, explained how or why the killings happened. Allen told him that nearly everyone close to the case except the lawyers and police had used drugs, and that Costa had an ulcer. The other writer was Evelyn Lawson, a columnist for a weekly paper in Hyannis, who had a contract with World Publishing and help from Norman Mailer. Vonnegut doubted one story Lawson had printed, of a long-haired young man kissing Costa's manacled hands and shouting "Tony, we love you," and said it had been widely repeated though it probably never happened.
The piece closed on his daughter. She had once told her parents about a young man in Provincetown who said he wanted to kill her; she took it as a joke and never went to the police. When Vonnegut called her after the arrest and asked whether Costa was that man, she said, "Tony wasn't the one."
Costa was tried in Barnstable County in 1970 on two indictments charging him with murder in the first degree. Because the charges carried a possible death sentence, the case was handled as a capital case. The Associated Press, in 2022, described a hard-fought trial between the lawyers on each side. The photojournalist Stanley Forman covered it, according to WBUR.
The prosecution's case, as the Supreme Judicial Court later summarized it, was built on circumstance: Costa's presence at the rooming house, his ride in the women's car, the note on their door, the removal of their belongings, the hidden car, his attempts to obtain false papers and to register the car in Vermont, the property found in his room, his inconsistent accounts, the telegram, the pistol and shell casings, and the stained rope and boots.
The defense centered on his mental condition. A number of witnesses described his years of drug use. Four psychiatrists testified. Two concluded that he was a borderline schizophrenic whose capacity was further impaired by drugs. The other two found no more than a personality disorder. The judge told the jury it could infer from the fact that most people are sane that a particular man is probably sane, and left the question of criminal responsibility to the jury. The judge also refused to instruct the jury on voluntary or involuntary manslaughter.
The jury found Costa guilty of murder in the first degree on both indictments and recommended that the death penalty not be imposed.
Costa's appeal was argued before the Supreme Judicial Court in Barnstable on September 14, 1971. Maurice M. Goldman argued for him. Assistant District Attorney Richard C. Paull argued for the Commonwealth, with Philip A. Rollins, by then the district attorney, on the brief. Chief Justice Tauro and Justices Cutter, Reardon, Quirico and Hennessey heard the case, and Justice Hennessey wrote the opinion, decided November 1, 1971.
On appeal Costa conceded that he had committed the killings. His argument was about his state of mind. He said the mental-health evidence required verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity, or at least ruled out the deliberate premeditation needed for first-degree murder. The court disagreed. It found substantial evidence from which the jury could find both sanity and premeditation: that he left a note on the women's door, steered them to an isolated wooded spot where he could kill them without being found, and had a pistol hidden there in advance; and that afterward he secretly cleared their belongings from the room, hid the car, and tried to persuade police that the women had left the state.
The court rejected his other claims. There had been no evidence of provocation, assault or accidental killing to support a manslaughter instruction, and the court declined to change Massachusetts law so that mental impairment short of insanity could reduce murder to manslaughter. It found no error in the judge's refusal to give requested instructions on the effects of mind-altering drugs, noting that the drugs' effects had been explored in detail through medical testimony. Reviewing the whole record, as the law required in capital cases, the court declined to order a new trial or reduce the verdicts. The judgments were affirmed.
Costa remained in prison after the appeal. He died by suicide in a Massachusetts prison in 1974, according to the Associated Press and Fox News.
Costa was convicted only of the deaths of Patricia Walsh and Mary Ann Wysocki. The Supreme Judicial Court opinion does not mention Sydney Monzon or Susan Perry. WBUR said in 2022 that police tied the deaths of all four women found in Truro to Costa. The Associated Press said he was suspected in at least two other killings in Provincetown, and Fox News said he was suspected of killing six others. Those deaths were never tried, and they remain attributed to him rather than proven against him in court.
Costa's story has been retold many times. Liza Rodman, whom Costa looked after as a child in the 1960s, wrote "The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer" with Jennifer Jordan, published in 2021. Casey Sherman's "Helltown: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer on Cape Cod" followed in July 2022. Sherman has described it as "a work of fact told with elements of fiction storytelling," drawing in part on an unpublished manuscript Costa wrote in prison, according to the Associated Press. Vonnegut and Mailer, both Cape Cod residents at the time, appear in "Helltown" as characters.
The books were not welcomed by everyone in Provincetown. In the summer of 2022 a local bookstore canceled planned appearances by Rodman and Sherman after an online outcry, Fox News reported. Rodman said she had received threatening emails while researching her book, and Sherman said he received a threatening email that June. In October 2024 Sherman told CapeCod.com that filming of a screen version of "Helltown" was being prepared in Provincetown.
The number of victims. Costa was convicted of two killings. Four sets of remains were found in Truro, and later accounts give higher numbers of suspected victims, up to six others in one 2022 report. None of those other deaths was tried.
The prosecutor's claims. The early lurid claims about the bodies came from the district attorney's office and local reporters; the medical examiner later contradicted them, according to Vonnegut.
The date of conviction. Some 2022 reports say Costa was convicted in 1969. The Associated Press review that says so also describes a 1970 murder trial, and the Supreme Judicial Court heard his appeal in 1971.
The prison manuscript. Sherman's book draws on a manuscript Costa wrote in prison. Its account of the killings has not been tested in any court, and Sherman describes his own book as using fiction techniques.
About May 25, 1968: Sydney Monzon, 18, of Eastham disappears.
About September 8, 1968: Susan Perry, 17, of Provincetown disappears.
January 24, 1969: Patricia Walsh and Mary Ann Wysocki arrive in Provincetown and register at the rooming house where Costa is a guest.
January 25, 1969: Costa is seen riding in their Volkswagen.
January 26, 1969: A note says the women are checking out; their belongings disappear.
February 2, 1969: A witness sees the Walsh car hidden in the woods in Truro.
February 7, 1969: Costa tries to register the car in his own name in Burlington, Vermont.
February 8, 1969: The women's belongings are found in his room.
February and March 1969: The remains of four young women are found in Truro.
March 3, 1969: A telegram signed "Pat and Mary Ann" reaches his mother's home.
Early March 1969: Costa is arrested in Boston and charged; photographed at State Police headquarters on March 5.
July 25, 1969: Life publishes Kurt Vonnegut's article on the case.
1970: Trial in Barnstable County; guilty on two counts of first-degree murder, with a recommendation against the death penalty.
September 14, 1971: Appeal argued before the Supreme Judicial Court.
November 1, 1971: Convictions affirmed.
1974: Costa dies by suicide in a Massachusetts prison.
2021: Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan publish "The Babysitter."
July 2022: Casey Sherman publishes "Helltown."
October 2024: Sherman says a screen version is being prepared in Provincetown.