On Friday, January 24, 1969, two friends from Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia H. Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, each about twenty-three, drove to Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, in Walsh's light blue Volkswagen and registered for two nights at a guest house run by a Mrs. Morton. That day she introduced them to another paying guest, Antone Charles Costa, known as Tony. The next morning Mrs. Morton found a note pinned to the young women's door asking whether they could give him a ride to Truro early in the morning. It was signed Tony. The two women were not seen alive again.
Walsh's Volkswagen turned up abandoned in the woods at Truro, and on February 8, 1969, a search was organized there for the missing women. It found someone else: Susan Perry, seventeen, who had been missing since Labor Day 1968, her body cut into eight pieces. Over the following days Costa gave police three versions, each contradicting the others, of when he had last seen Walsh and Wysocki and of how he had come to have Walsh's car. On March 3 a telegram signed Pat and Mary Ann arrived at his mother's home in Provincetown; she took it to the police, and it was traced to a New York telephone number Costa had access to. From March 5 officers uncovered two graves in a wooded area of Truro holding the dismembered remains of the two women, and beneath them the dismembered body of Sydney Monzon, eighteen. A .22 caliber pistol buried nearby was identified as Costa's. Walsh had been shot in the neck and Wysocki in the head.
The clearing was where Costa grew marijuana, and his fingerprints were on the torn cover of the Volkswagen's owner's manual found in the woods. He knew all four women, and all had disappeared after he came back to the area. He was arrested in Boston in early March, and on March 6 the district attorney, Edmund Dinis, announced the arrest. Dinis then told reporters that the hearts of Walsh and Wysocki had been removed and that the bodies bore tooth marks. Neither claim was true, but they drew the national and international press to Provincetown, and the case was reported as one of cannibalism.
Costa was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 2, 1944. In November 1961, at seventeen, he broke into a house and attacked the teenage girl who lived there, and on charges of burglary and assault he was given three years' probation and a one-year suspended sentence. He married in 1963 and had three children, but the marriage broke up over his drug use, and in 1966 he left for California. He came back to Massachusetts in the summer of 1968 and stole thousands of dollars' worth of medical equipment. Investigators later considered him a possible suspect in the deaths of sixteen women on the West Coast, among them two hitchhikers he had picked up crossing the country in 1966, Bonnie Williams and Diane Federoff, and his girlfriend in San Francisco, Barbara Spaulding. All three were later found alive.
Kurt Vonnegut, whose daughter Edith had met Costa, wrote about him for the July 25, 1969, issue of Life, comparing him to Jack the Ripper, and later corresponded with him. The message of the letters, Vonnegut said, was that someone as intent on being virtuous as Costa could not possibly have hurt a fly, and that Costa believed it.
Indicted on April 8, 1969, Costa was convicted in May 1970 of the murders of Walsh and Wysocki and sentenced on May 29 to life in prison at the state prison at Walpole. In prison he wrote an unpublished novel, Resurrection, in which he and a friend he called Carl took LSD and Dilaudid with the two women, Carl shot them, and Costa, finding Wysocki still alive, finished her with a knife to end her suffering; the novel put Perry's and Monzon's deaths down to drug overdoses and blamed Carl for the dismemberment. On May 12, 1974, Costa was found hanged in his cell. The death was ruled a suicide, a finding that was later questioned.