May 20, 2021 • 35 mins
As a kid, Liza Rodman spent her summers in Provincetown, trying her best to stay out of her volatile mother’s way. Her favorite escape: running errands with family friend Tony, who soon became her de facto babysitter. One summer, Tony stopped coming around—something Liza didn’t question, until decades later, when she learned that there was something sinister hiding beneath Tony’s gentle demeanor.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio, 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
(00:20):
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've been having them
for almost two years, during which they had become more
(00:42):
and more violent and vivid, and in each I was
hunted by an anonymous man with a gun or a knife.
I would struggle to recognize him, but he kept his
face turned away from me. Then, just as he fined
my hiding place, I'd wake up with my heart pounding
and in trentaline horsing through my legs until they ached
(01:03):
that this nightmare was different. In this dream, I was
a young girl again, probably nine or ten, in my
summer pajamas, walking down along hallway 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
(01:25):
at him, and I finally saw a space. It was
a man I hadn't seen since I was a child
in Provincetown, Massachusetts. That's Liza Rodman, author of The Babysitter
My Summers with a Serial Killer. Liza's story involves not one,
(01:45):
but two very disturbed people. One well, one is the
babysitter and the other the other is Liza's own mother.
Liza spent her childhood toggling between two places. Her family's
year around home near hacka Mock Swamp in southeastern Massachusetts
and Provincetown, a village on the extreme tip of Cape Cod.
(02:20):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about
the landscape of your childhood, literally the landscape of my childhood.
It was kind of swampy. We lived in a swamp,
(02:43):
and um, I don't know if you've ever heard about
of the Hackamock Swamp, but my childhood home was right
on the edge of it. Hacka Mack being the Algonquin
name for places where spirits dwell. So that was literally
the beginning of my life, you know, outside. And you
know it's interesting too with COVID because I've found that
(03:04):
that that landscape, that being outside, that's the only way
I could comfort myself during COVID. So that remains because
it was the only way I could comfort myself in
my childhood. So I spent my life outside. You know,
we had a tremendous amount of freedom in nineteen sixty
three four five, and that went for Provincetown too, so
(03:27):
you know, we had no supervision. Just in context, we
had no supervision and we sort of ran the neighborhood.
No one was really looking after us much. My parents
were married for the first I think four years of
my life, and after they divorced. You know, my mother
was young and she was a single mother, and she
(03:47):
didn't get a lot of support from him, financial or otherwise.
And she had a best friend who said, hey, my
husband and I are building a big, gigantic motel on
the water in Provincetown on a summer job. Because my
mother taught school, and didn't take her but a minute
(04:08):
to say yes, and off we went. At that time,
I think it was seven. So in the early years,
we stayed local. But from the time I was seven
on Yes, we went back and forth and could you
describe to, you know, people listening to this podcast from
all over the world. Provincetown is a very specific kind
of place. Provincetown is it's a spit of land that
(04:29):
runs off the coast and out into a U shape
almost um to the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
And they say it has the finest light for artists
in the world, and it's always, at least from the
beginning of the nineteen hundreds, it was an artist community.
(04:51):
And it has a rich, rich history of um playwrights,
Eugene O'Neill, poets, fine artists, all congregated there. There was
a bit of a there was a local flavor of
Portuguese fishermen, and then there was this these transplants from
New York, the likes of Stanley Kunits, the poet, who
(05:12):
had a home there and beautiful gardens there, and so
they these two factions sort of coexisted for many, many,
many decades and happily so. So it's an artist community.
It's a beach community. It's on a sand dune and
it sort of juts out into the sea. It's some
of the best beaches you'll ever walk on. Tell me
(05:33):
about your mother from your childhood. She was angry, so
I put it, and I'm sure there were lots of
reasons for that, but I never knew what they were.
And you know, she died recently and she went to
her grave with whatever had happened to her. We never
(05:54):
did find out. Um, But she was pretty, she was funny,
she was charismatic, she had a wonderful laugh. People liked her.
But she had a problem with me. I don't know
whether I look too much like my father or not
enough like her, or maybe I was too much like her.
I don't know, but she had a problem with me,
(06:15):
and and that anger was usually focused on me. But again,
she was a hard worker. It was such a complicated
relationship to begin with that. But as a child I
was afraid of her. I spent most of my time
hiding from her. How old was she when you were born?
Good question, And your sister is younger than you, two
(06:38):
years younger. Her memories. She calls me the rememberer, and
she's the forgetter, and she was quite a bit younger.
She has some some sort of tactile memories and you know,
over the years, we've had a lot of conversations about it.
Your mother struck me as a complicated figure because she
had this kind of almost you know, she's beautiful, she's lively,
(07:03):
she'd go up to anyone and talk to them. She
kind of had this magic about her in a certain way,
the way you would describe her. And she was also
just kind of a disaster as a mother. Mm hmm.
She really was, I mean in terms of in terms
of warmth, in terms of I'd love you almost never.
(07:24):
She really didn't want to be inconvenienced. She was really
looking for her next good time. And I you know, honestly,
I think if you were to diagnose her, you could
one of her her favorite things to do or one
of her addictions, as I now say, was mean to
be mean at someone else's expense. There was always was
always a joke. She always had a funny name for
(07:46):
you that was just a little bit on the mean side,
and you felt it. You know, it wasn't It wasn't
something where you went, oh, did she mean that or not?
You knew she meant it. Even when she was young.
She just to tell me about the way she used
to tease her brother, and it was just something she
(08:08):
enjoyed it. She used to like to make him cry.
And what was your father likes? I mean, I know
they split up when you were really quite small, and
he was kind of not really president, but would show
up every once in a while, right exactly. He was
I think, you know, in a lot of ways, he
was equally unstable. He was a huge personality, and I
(08:32):
just thought he was carry Grant or you know, uh,
I used to think he was Clark Gable from Gone
with the Wind. He was had this big personality and
very very handsome and funny and grew up in a
funeral home, so he had all these funny jokes and
he just found a way to deal with death early on.
I think it was through humor. And he was very,
(08:56):
very extroverted, so you know, you wanted to be around him,
and he was never around and of course, as a
young girl, you want to be around your dad anyway.
And he just was a puzzle to me despite his
absence and distance. Was he more loving than your mother
in his way? Yes, he was more nurturing. So for instance,
(09:20):
when I was nineteen, I had a knee surgery and
I had been um at his house, um for you know,
I've been thrown out of my house for one reason
or another, and so I was at his house recovery
and he was the one to feed the ice chips
and to give the pain medication and to um just
(09:40):
sort of make sure I was okay. And that was
a really that was a new experience for me, either
one of them. Really. See, your mother never would have
done that, not in that way. She might have made pasta,
but she would have said, you know what, get up,
you're fine. And again, you have to contextualize these things,
right because in that in that day, it was pull
(10:02):
yourself up, dust yourself off, and move because we're not
going to sit around here and talk about what's wrong.
We're just going to go out and do. And I
my mother's father was very much like that. So my
mother was very much like that. So you know, if
there was, as she said, a nurse I'm not, she wasn't.
(10:23):
I like the order of that sentence, not i'm not
a nurse, A nurse i'm not Exactly, it's a finer
point than it. You know, something that strikes me often
on this podcast is that especially when whatever the whatever
the sort of secrets at hand. Are are sort of
like rooted in childhood that we have a way of
(10:46):
imagining all children do, imagining that all other families are
like our family. You know, we don't know, we don't
know anything different. Really, it's not until we grow up
and get a little bit of a more wide angle
of view that we that we begin to see that, oh, actually,
maybe that was really not good, not good or not
the way everybody else was being raised. We'll be right back.
(11:22):
It's the summer of nineteen sixty six and Liza is
seven years old. She's in Provincetown with her mother and sister.
Her mother needs to work, which means she also needs babysitters,
and she's very good at getting them. She'll ask anyone
to be a babysitter. She doesn't exactly vet them, you know,
(11:42):
check references. All you need basically is to have a
pulse and be able to show up. They used to
call her the babysitter Finder. If you needed one, you
called her. So she had this whole cadre of young women.
And oh, we had some terrible babysitters at We had
car accidents with babysitters. We had babysitters that would cut
(12:04):
our line us up and cut our nails down to
the quick until they bled in some cases. And there
was this little um restaurant next to the hotel and
they'd send the seven and five year old across to
get whatever it was, French fries in the vanilla shake,
and we'd come back with it and they go, we
(12:24):
didn't want this, and they'd throw it out the window.
I mean, just crazy people. There are a lot of
crazy people in Provincetown in those days. There was some
nice ones, but you know, the drug scene was already entrenched,
so we had some interesting and and really we would
be left with anybody. I want to say too, because
I really do know that that landscape of Provincetown, that
(12:45):
there's something about that town that really feels like it's
sort of at the edge of the world. I mean,
it's surrounded by water, and it's the it's the furthest
point on Cape Cod, which is already a you know,
increasingly remote place as you go further and further out,
and then there's this real town. You know, this kind
(13:08):
of like ramshackle town, you know, not that small, but
that is sort of just perched there like there are
other places in the world like this. Key West is
a little bit like this, where there is that feeling
that you can't go any further than that. Yeah, it was.
It was a definite let it all hang out place.
(13:28):
And that juxtaposition you're talking about about the ramshackle town
and the tourist trade was a real two competing forces.
The locals had been there for generations and they needed
the summer tourists and they needed the artists. They also
resented the hell out of it, and for good reason.
(13:51):
So there was always that tension there, and it was
just under the surface. And even as a child, you
wanted to be a local. You wanted to play with
the local kids. The chef at the restaurant, you know,
he'd come out to the back door of the restaurant.
He'd come out and he'd feed us food, and we
(14:11):
thought it was wonderful to be able to hang out
with his kids, who would knew where the bike trails were,
and knew where the dune trails were, and knew where
the hiding places were, and you know, all of those
names I still have in my head. He wanted to
be part of it, and in my case, I was
really not part of anything. So I really deeply wanted
(14:32):
to be part of Provincetown and of the kids there
and the people there. There was a warmth to it
in the sort of the full time, the year round residents.
You know. It was transient up against really fixed and warm.
Frank Gaspar, I don't know if you know who he is,
but he writes a lot about this. He was he
(14:54):
grew up there, and he writes about what it was
like to grow up there, and the mother's talking over
the pens. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing in town,
and Frank Gaspar, you smoked that cigarette. I'm going to
tell your mother. So it was that kind of a
sense and a feeling of belonging to something that I
think the locals still cling to there, And I don't
(15:15):
blame them. I would to. As you're speaking, I'm thinking
it's essentially like insiders versus outsiders in a certain way, right,
And if you already feel like an outsider and you're
a child, you're desperate to belong and get swept up
into into other lives. Yep. So Liza has already had
quite the parade of babysitters in the summer of sixty six.
(15:38):
But one of them is a very charismatic young man
named Tony Costa, whose mother, Cecilia, works for Liza's mother
at the motel. I had encountered his mother first. She
was a chambermaid at the motel, so she was my
first friend, and he was her son, and he was
(16:00):
looking for work, and of course it was a wonderful
thing for the year round people to have these resorts
open up, because they it promised them lots of work
and lots of hours. And how old was Tony when
you were seven? He was born in so he would
have been twenty two. So Tony is hired to babysit you.
(16:26):
He's hired to take the trash, and he ends up
befriending all of us. He was like a pied piper,
is how I describe it. And my aunt used to say,
here comes Tony, and he'd be driving up the long
driveway to the motel, and we'd scamper out and try
(16:46):
and get in the truck with him and talk to him.
And he's loading the trash in the truck and we're
dancing around with our flip flop, using our towels as capes.
And um, we just started going with him, and I
don't remember exactly how we ended up going in the truck,
but we thought it was a blast to go to
the dump, and so off we would go, and it
(17:08):
was great for them because we were somewhere else. He
had sort of a kind of Italian darkness to him,
very dark hair, kind of a big nose, but handsome
and tall, well for me he was. He felt really tall,
but I think he was about six ft And the
(17:29):
guys at the front desk used to say he you know,
he was as strong as a guy as you'd ever
want or not want to meet in a dark alley.
He wore glasses, as I remember, and he also had
a dark beard, and he was often quite tan. And
I remember his fingers quite well too. M that's interesting,
what about them, Um, I just remember them. The truck
(17:53):
that he always drove was the Royal Coachman utility truck
and it had a shift. And he was a smoker too,
and I was fascinated with that. So I remember him
smoking with his fingers. And you know what else is
funny to this day, I look at the hands of
people everyone I meet, um, and I'm just making that
(18:14):
connection now. But anyway, his hand was always on the shift,
and I was always right there were you know, my
sister and I in the front seat, on the big
front seat, so I was always close to that hand.
So how much time did you spend with Tony over
the course of that summer? And there were subsequent summers, right,
(18:36):
I mean he was he became kind of part of
your Provincetown life for a period of time, exactly, he
and his mother, and so I mean, I have no
idea how many times, but many more more than I
could count. And you know, every time he was around,
he'd jingle his keys and we'd come running. And plus,
you know, he used to buy a streets he used
(18:57):
to take us. You know, he just felt like you
were sort of you know, the music was going, you know.
I heard an interview with Paul McCartney recently, and the
interviewer asked him what happens to you when you're driving
along and you hear Beatles song? And Paul McCartney said
(19:19):
two things. I start singing along, and you can I
dropped right into the studio when we're laying down the tracks,
and I remember everything we did that day. And so
that's the way it was. The songs of the nineteen
sixties were in the front seat of that truck, and
so we were always singing, We were always laughing, We
(19:42):
were always you know, up and down that driveway. It
felt like the wind in your hair. I mean, it
was just a wind blown summer in the city, you know,
is what it felt like to me. And so we
went with him pretty frequently, at least a couple of
times a week when he was dumping trash, we would
out with this condree of little kids would accompany Tony
(20:04):
in his truck as he made his rounds to the
town dumps in p Town and Truro. Tony would take
them to what he called his secret garden in the
woods and told Liza she could never tell anyone. Imagine
how special that must have felt to a seven year old.
An adult was asking her to keep a secret. Liza,
(20:27):
of course didn't know this, but Tony and a bunch
of his friends were burglarizing pharmacies and doctors offices, making
trips to Boston where they were buying drugs and stashing
them in the woods. There was all kinds of ways
that they stashed the drugs in those woods and Tony
and his whole crew of friends and people all knew
those drugs were out there, and they also evidently stashed
(20:51):
them at the Provincetown dump so that when somebody wanted something,
that's where they went to get it. And they had
some kind of crazy system of you pay me and
I'll pay you, and I mean, I don't know, and
I wasn't privy to it, but I've read about it later,
but at the time as a child, he made it
feel special to you that he was showing you something
(21:14):
that was a secret and that and that you mustn't
tell anyone exactly. But that was See, we were talking
about a garden in the We had talked a lot
about a garden because I lived next door to my
grandfather and my grandfather had this amazing garden. And so
when Tony said he had a garden, I thought, I
can relate to this. Here's this grown up boy, and
(21:37):
I'm going to impress him with my knowledge. And so
I started talking gardening with him, and I think that's
how it happened. He said, I'll show you my garden.
I have a garden, and I was like, I'm in
my wheelhouse now because I can impress this guy. And
I think that's how it happened. And he said, I
bet you've got to keep it a secret. You can't
(21:58):
tell anybody. But but the other of thing is this,
he took everybody and anybody out to that garden. And
as far as I know, he took his own kids.
That has no basis in fact. But he took everybody
out there. And the other weird thing was and and
this is part of the whole illness, part of what
was going on. He was quite afraid to go out there,
(22:22):
and he talked a lot about it after the fact
in all of the research I did about how he
was afraid because it's adjacent to a cemetery, and that
would also make sense as to why he would wait
till there was someone in the truck to go out there.
So I think it was quite convoluted and quite I
(22:42):
don't think his mind was working right, you know. I
think he was kind of spinning all the time. He
had young kids. We had three young kids, so things
were about to take a very dark turn here. Just
in case you didn't suspect Tony Costa father three de
facto babysitter of several more, is well let's just wait
(23:06):
for what comes next. When you're ten, you say that,
as clear as a bell. You hear his name as
somehow associated with something very bad that's happened, whatever was
going on down there, the place was crawling with cops. Yeah,
I mean, one of the things I find so interesting
(23:26):
is what we remember and what we don't. And you know,
sort of like what we bury, and you know, what
only comes out years later, and so like you realize
that something big has happened, and you overhear these little
snatches of dialogue, you know, that come back to you.
(23:47):
You overhear the phrase the murdered girls and all cut up.
But there's nothing in you at that point that's associating
that with Tony Costa. No, and that look so shocking.
Never in a million years did I make that association. This,
(24:10):
what I'm about to recount is going to be pretty
hard to hear. Tony Costa, though Liza as a child
doesn't know that it's him, is accused and convicted of
at least two horrific murders of young women, and is
a suspect and more. He would become involved with them
in a romantic way, and then he would kill them.
(24:32):
He cut up their bodies and did horrific things to
those bodies. I won't get into. A neuroscientist who studies
the brains of serial killers told Liza years later that
these guys are so rare and hard to study because
usually they kill themselves. Their brains are gone before they
can figure out what happened. So when you're, you know,
(24:55):
ten eleven years old and he's disappeared, do you have
any kind of narrative for your self? Was like, why
he's disappeared? No, he was just gone, and you know
that less. The other thing we need to remember is
not only was my life transient with people coming in
and out of it, but provincetowns and graphic transient. And
(25:15):
my father was gone, my grandparents moved away. It just
wasn't unusual. He did always talk about going, going, going,
going to California, going, You're going there. He was always
talking about that. And there was a big connection between
Hayde Ashbury at the time and Boston Common and Provincetown.
The young people were all trying to get away, especially
(25:37):
from a town like Provincetown that probably felt pretty remote
to them. I remember how remote it it still feels
remote to me. I don't know how you experienced it,
but when I go out there, it feels pretty remote.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(26:13):
Tony sort of fades away. For Eliza, she doesn't think
about him, She has no idea what happened. She moves
on the way kids do, and she grows up. Life happens,
she gets married, starts a family. She has as little
to do with her mother as possible. Time speeds up
as time does, so let's fast forward, oh to about
(26:36):
the time lies as oldest child, a son is graduating
from high school. I went back to school to finish
my bachelor's degree, which I've never been able to finish
um coming from the family, I came from quite frankly,
with an anxious mess most of the time. And so
I went back and I said, I'm gonna do this now.
(26:58):
While I was doing that, I start of having these dreams,
and they were very violent, and they were right in
a row of about six months, and someone was always
trying to kill me, and with a gun or a
knife or in the case of the first dream, of
fireplace poker. And I had always written down my dreams
always I had always written, and in order to figure
(27:21):
out what was going on during this time that I
was keeping a process journal anyway, um, as I was
reading and writing about different you know, literature and writing
poems and other things, I decided to start writing them in.
And when I did that, I noticed the repeat images,
(27:42):
and all of those repeat images were of my childhood,
and I kept saying, what is going on? So I
just kept writing them down, the dreams, the poems. Then
I had that final It wasn't actually the final dream,
but it was fine enough because in each one of
these dreams I couldn't see the face of the man
(28:04):
in the dream, so whoever was holding the weapon I
couldn't see. And it became more and more irritating to
me until the day that I had the dream when
I was face to face with Tony and that was
in the Royal Coachman lobby in my dream, and so
I said, holy sh it, I wonder if this is
(28:28):
what it's about. And that's when I said to my mother,
did something happen to me that you have not been
clear about? And that's when she told me. So she
knew when you said that your mother was able to
put those pieces together. Both my mother and my aunt
were there that day, and I had said, I had
(28:50):
just saw Tony Costa in the dream with a gun
to my head. What do you know about him? Why
would I be thinking about that? And she said, well,
I know he'd be came, you know, a serial killer.
I know he became a serial killer, as if I
know he became a doctor or an oncologist or a
pediatrician and a serial killer. And I just stood there
(29:16):
and I you know, there's that moment in time when
something so significant, have such significant information coming your way,
that everything slows down and just grinds to a halt,
and you're hearing it and saying, how can how can
I be hearing this information? And that's what it was like.
It was like almost like a drug flashback. It just
(29:38):
slowed right down, and I something said to me, this
is it, This is it. Until I started researching, and
of course they all laughed at me, and I just
kept researching and writing and researching and not really knowing
I was making a book, but more trying to find
out what happened to me and what those dreams meant.
(30:01):
So is is it your sense that on some level
that you always knew. I always had the images, Danny.
I always had these images of what had happened in Provincetown,
and I carried them with me, and I used to
tell people the story and they would go hu huh,
(30:23):
you know, almost like when you share too much. And
so we sort of carried that with us, and we
would laugh about it because we didn't know, you know,
this is our childhood, how did yours go? You know,
my sister has a famous line. She used to say,
you know, I was at a cocktail party the other night,
and I was telling some stories from our childhood, and
(30:43):
other people don't think it's as funny as we do.
And so, you know, that's how we dealt with it
with humor, because it was kind of a crazy image
to remember. Why did we remember that? Why did we
hear about that? We knew something awful had happened, But
what we did not know was that the same man
who was driving us around and getting us ice cream
(31:04):
cones was the man who had committed that. Whatever atrocities
we had in our heads because we were little, so
we didn't put a narrative together about it. We were
in some cases, we were barely reading it. Wasn't until
I was nine or ten years old that I started
reading these accounts in the paper and not understanding that
they had anything to do with Tony. And at the
(31:25):
time his name was not in the paper either. That's
important Liza's history was. Tony was of course, much less central,
much briefer than the relationship she had with her mother.
Both were damaging, both were indelible, but Liza had been lucky.
She didn't fit the mold of Tony's victims. She was
(31:47):
a child, a child of a woman who inflicted greater
damage on her. As she writes, and here is the
deepest of those wounds. I have always felt as though
there was something wrong with me, inherently deep and dirty
and dark, something unlikable and unfixable and worst of all, unlovable,
and I believed it. As a result, I spent my
(32:08):
childhood more afraid of my mother than I was of
a psychopathic serial killer. And then you go on. Finally,
when I became a mother, and in spite of my fear,
I was able to stop what had been generations of
physical abuse. It ended with me mm hmm, And it
did in family secrets. I think, like every guest of
(32:31):
mine to a person would say this ends with me.
I think it's self selecting. People who are willing to
have this conversation in such a public a forum. Are
people who have come to a place of the way
that I make meaning of this is to completely change
the narrative. I think that's so important, the way that
I make meaning of this. This is not a subject
(32:54):
we can sweep under the rug anymore. That these kinds
of people are out there and they're not well, and
we need to find some kind of system whereby we
put back together our mental health system because we can
prevent some of this. You know, in California they're screening
children for trauma early trauma now under the new Attorney General.
(33:15):
You know, they need to do that in this country
in order to save some of these kids. Because I
just clawed my way out and I've spent most of
my life in therapy. But you know, I think the
willingness to talk about it is kind of a double
edged sword when I'm doing it anyway, because I had to,
because I couldn't not. Why does it feel like a
(33:36):
double edged sword to you? Well, because it's exposing yourself, right,
because in order to do it, your vulnerabilities have to
get known to other people. I guess there's a certain
amount of shame that goes with it until you realize
it's not you. It's not you, it's other people, and
that's you know, that's a difficult transition to make. So
I think it's a double edged sword coming out and
(34:00):
talking about it. Believe me, there are people who are
not happy that have done this. But that's too bad
because it's given me a new freedom and I'll take it.
(34:21):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan
Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard
is our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd
like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story
could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is
one secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero.
(34:47):
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and
Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to
know about my family's great that inspired this podcast, check
out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance. For more
(35:26):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio, 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
(00:20):
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've been having them
for almost two years, during which they had become more
(00:42):
and more violent and vivid, and in each I was
hunted by an anonymous man with a gun or a knife.
I would struggle to recognize him, but he kept his
face turned away from me. Then, just as he fined
my hiding place, I'd wake up with my heart pounding
and in trentaline horsing through my legs until they ached
(01:03):
that this nightmare was different. In this dream, I was
a young girl again, probably nine or ten, in my
summer pajamas, walking down along hallway 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
(01:25):
at him, and I finally saw a space. It was
a man I hadn't seen since I was a child
in Provincetown, Massachusetts. That's Liza Rodman, author of The Babysitter
My Summers with a Serial Killer. Liza's story involves not one,
(01:45):
but two very disturbed people. One well, one is the
babysitter and the other the other is Liza's own mother.
Liza spent her childhood toggling between two places. Her family's
year around home near hacka Mock Swamp in southeastern Massachusetts
and Provincetown, a village on the extreme tip of Cape Cod.
(02:20):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about
the landscape of your childhood, literally the landscape of my childhood.
It was kind of swampy. We lived in a swamp,
(02:43):
and um, I don't know if you've ever heard about
of the Hackamock Swamp, but my childhood home was right
on the edge of it. Hacka Mack being the Algonquin
name for places where spirits dwell. So that was literally
the beginning of my life, you know, outside. And you
know it's interesting too with COVID because I've found that
(03:04):
that that landscape, that being outside, that's the only way
I could comfort myself during COVID. So that remains because
it was the only way I could comfort myself in
my childhood. So I spent my life outside. You know,
we had a tremendous amount of freedom in nineteen sixty
three four five, and that went for Provincetown too, so
(03:27):
you know, we had no supervision. Just in context, we
had no supervision and we sort of ran the neighborhood.
No one was really looking after us much. My parents
were married for the first I think four years of
my life, and after they divorced. You know, my mother
was young and she was a single mother, and she
(03:47):
didn't get a lot of support from him, financial or otherwise.
And she had a best friend who said, hey, my
husband and I are building a big, gigantic motel on
the water in Provincetown on a summer job. Because my
mother taught school, and didn't take her but a minute
(04:08):
to say yes, and off we went. At that time,
I think it was seven. So in the early years,
we stayed local. But from the time I was seven
on Yes, we went back and forth and could you
describe to, you know, people listening to this podcast from
all over the world. Provincetown is a very specific kind
of place. Provincetown is it's a spit of land that
(04:29):
runs off the coast and out into a U shape
almost um to the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
And they say it has the finest light for artists
in the world, and it's always, at least from the
beginning of the nineteen hundreds, it was an artist community.
(04:51):
And it has a rich, rich history of um playwrights,
Eugene O'Neill, poets, fine artists, all congregated there. There was
a bit of a there was a local flavor of
Portuguese fishermen, and then there was this these transplants from
New York, the likes of Stanley Kunits, the poet, who
(05:12):
had a home there and beautiful gardens there, and so
they these two factions sort of coexisted for many, many,
many decades and happily so. So it's an artist community.
It's a beach community. It's on a sand dune and
it sort of juts out into the sea. It's some
of the best beaches you'll ever walk on. Tell me
(05:33):
about your mother from your childhood. She was angry, so
I put it, and I'm sure there were lots of
reasons for that, but I never knew what they were.
And you know, she died recently and she went to
her grave with whatever had happened to her. We never
(05:54):
did find out. Um, But she was pretty, she was funny,
she was charismatic, she had a wonderful laugh. People liked her.
But she had a problem with me. I don't know
whether I look too much like my father or not
enough like her, or maybe I was too much like her.
I don't know, but she had a problem with me,
(06:15):
and and that anger was usually focused on me. But again,
she was a hard worker. It was such a complicated
relationship to begin with that. But as a child I
was afraid of her. I spent most of my time
hiding from her. How old was she when you were born?
Good question, And your sister is younger than you, two
(06:38):
years younger. Her memories. She calls me the rememberer, and
she's the forgetter, and she was quite a bit younger.
She has some some sort of tactile memories and you know,
over the years, we've had a lot of conversations about it.
Your mother struck me as a complicated figure because she
had this kind of almost you know, she's beautiful, she's lively,
(07:03):
she'd go up to anyone and talk to them. She
kind of had this magic about her in a certain way,
the way you would describe her. And she was also
just kind of a disaster as a mother. Mm hmm.
She really was, I mean in terms of in terms
of warmth, in terms of I'd love you almost never.
(07:24):
She really didn't want to be inconvenienced. She was really
looking for her next good time. And I you know, honestly,
I think if you were to diagnose her, you could
one of her her favorite things to do or one
of her addictions, as I now say, was mean to
be mean at someone else's expense. There was always was
always a joke. She always had a funny name for
(07:46):
you that was just a little bit on the mean side,
and you felt it. You know, it wasn't It wasn't
something where you went, oh, did she mean that or not?
You knew she meant it. Even when she was young.
She just to tell me about the way she used
to tease her brother, and it was just something she
(08:08):
enjoyed it. She used to like to make him cry.
And what was your father likes? I mean, I know
they split up when you were really quite small, and
he was kind of not really president, but would show
up every once in a while, right exactly. He was
I think, you know, in a lot of ways, he
was equally unstable. He was a huge personality, and I
(08:32):
just thought he was carry Grant or you know, uh,
I used to think he was Clark Gable from Gone
with the Wind. He was had this big personality and
very very handsome and funny and grew up in a
funeral home, so he had all these funny jokes and
he just found a way to deal with death early on.
I think it was through humor. And he was very,
(08:56):
very extroverted, so you know, you wanted to be around him,
and he was never around and of course, as a
young girl, you want to be around your dad anyway.
And he just was a puzzle to me despite his
absence and distance. Was he more loving than your mother
in his way? Yes, he was more nurturing. So for instance,
(09:20):
when I was nineteen, I had a knee surgery and
I had been um at his house, um for you know,
I've been thrown out of my house for one reason
or another, and so I was at his house recovery
and he was the one to feed the ice chips
and to give the pain medication and to um just
(09:40):
sort of make sure I was okay. And that was
a really that was a new experience for me, either
one of them. Really. See, your mother never would have
done that, not in that way. She might have made pasta,
but she would have said, you know what, get up,
you're fine. And again, you have to contextualize these things,
right because in that in that day, it was pull
(10:02):
yourself up, dust yourself off, and move because we're not
going to sit around here and talk about what's wrong.
We're just going to go out and do. And I
my mother's father was very much like that. So my
mother was very much like that. So you know, if
there was, as she said, a nurse I'm not, she wasn't.
(10:23):
I like the order of that sentence, not i'm not
a nurse, A nurse i'm not Exactly, it's a finer
point than it. You know, something that strikes me often
on this podcast is that especially when whatever the whatever
the sort of secrets at hand. Are are sort of
like rooted in childhood that we have a way of
(10:46):
imagining all children do, imagining that all other families are
like our family. You know, we don't know, we don't
know anything different. Really, it's not until we grow up
and get a little bit of a more wide angle
of view that we that we begin to see that, oh, actually,
maybe that was really not good, not good or not
the way everybody else was being raised. We'll be right back.
(11:22):
It's the summer of nineteen sixty six and Liza is
seven years old. She's in Provincetown with her mother and sister.
Her mother needs to work, which means she also needs babysitters,
and she's very good at getting them. She'll ask anyone
to be a babysitter. She doesn't exactly vet them, you know,
(11:42):
check references. All you need basically is to have a
pulse and be able to show up. They used to
call her the babysitter Finder. If you needed one, you
called her. So she had this whole cadre of young women.
And oh, we had some terrible babysitters at We had
car accidents with babysitters. We had babysitters that would cut
(12:04):
our line us up and cut our nails down to
the quick until they bled in some cases. And there
was this little um restaurant next to the hotel and
they'd send the seven and five year old across to
get whatever it was, French fries in the vanilla shake,
and we'd come back with it and they go, we
(12:24):
didn't want this, and they'd throw it out the window.
I mean, just crazy people. There are a lot of
crazy people in Provincetown in those days. There was some
nice ones, but you know, the drug scene was already entrenched,
so we had some interesting and and really we would
be left with anybody. I want to say too, because
I really do know that that landscape of Provincetown, that
(12:45):
there's something about that town that really feels like it's
sort of at the edge of the world. I mean,
it's surrounded by water, and it's the it's the furthest
point on Cape Cod, which is already a you know,
increasingly remote place as you go further and further out,
and then there's this real town. You know, this kind
(13:08):
of like ramshackle town, you know, not that small, but
that is sort of just perched there like there are
other places in the world like this. Key West is
a little bit like this, where there is that feeling
that you can't go any further than that. Yeah, it was.
It was a definite let it all hang out place.
(13:28):
And that juxtaposition you're talking about about the ramshackle town
and the tourist trade was a real two competing forces.
The locals had been there for generations and they needed
the summer tourists and they needed the artists. They also
resented the hell out of it, and for good reason.
(13:51):
So there was always that tension there, and it was
just under the surface. And even as a child, you
wanted to be a local. You wanted to play with
the local kids. The chef at the restaurant, you know,
he'd come out to the back door of the restaurant.
He'd come out and he'd feed us food, and we
(14:11):
thought it was wonderful to be able to hang out
with his kids, who would knew where the bike trails were,
and knew where the dune trails were, and knew where
the hiding places were, and you know, all of those
names I still have in my head. He wanted to
be part of it, and in my case, I was
really not part of anything. So I really deeply wanted
(14:32):
to be part of Provincetown and of the kids there
and the people there. There was a warmth to it
in the sort of the full time, the year round residents.
You know. It was transient up against really fixed and warm.
Frank Gaspar, I don't know if you know who he is,
but he writes a lot about this. He was he
(14:54):
grew up there, and he writes about what it was
like to grow up there, and the mother's talking over
the pens. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing in town,
and Frank Gaspar, you smoked that cigarette. I'm going to
tell your mother. So it was that kind of a
sense and a feeling of belonging to something that I
think the locals still cling to there, And I don't
(15:15):
blame them. I would to. As you're speaking, I'm thinking
it's essentially like insiders versus outsiders in a certain way, right,
And if you already feel like an outsider and you're
a child, you're desperate to belong and get swept up
into into other lives. Yep. So Liza has already had
quite the parade of babysitters in the summer of sixty six.
(15:38):
But one of them is a very charismatic young man
named Tony Costa, whose mother, Cecilia, works for Liza's mother
at the motel. I had encountered his mother first. She
was a chambermaid at the motel, so she was my
first friend, and he was her son, and he was
(16:00):
looking for work, and of course it was a wonderful
thing for the year round people to have these resorts
open up, because they it promised them lots of work
and lots of hours. And how old was Tony when
you were seven? He was born in so he would
have been twenty two. So Tony is hired to babysit you.
(16:26):
He's hired to take the trash, and he ends up
befriending all of us. He was like a pied piper,
is how I describe it. And my aunt used to say,
here comes Tony, and he'd be driving up the long
driveway to the motel, and we'd scamper out and try
(16:46):
and get in the truck with him and talk to him.
And he's loading the trash in the truck and we're
dancing around with our flip flop, using our towels as capes.
And um, we just started going with him, and I
don't remember exactly how we ended up going in the truck,
but we thought it was a blast to go to
the dump, and so off we would go, and it
(17:08):
was great for them because we were somewhere else. He
had sort of a kind of Italian darkness to him,
very dark hair, kind of a big nose, but handsome
and tall, well for me he was. He felt really tall,
but I think he was about six ft And the
(17:29):
guys at the front desk used to say he you know,
he was as strong as a guy as you'd ever
want or not want to meet in a dark alley.
He wore glasses, as I remember, and he also had
a dark beard, and he was often quite tan. And
I remember his fingers quite well too. M that's interesting,
what about them, Um, I just remember them. The truck
(17:53):
that he always drove was the Royal Coachman utility truck
and it had a shift. And he was a smoker too,
and I was fascinated with that. So I remember him
smoking with his fingers. And you know what else is
funny to this day, I look at the hands of
people everyone I meet, um, and I'm just making that
(18:14):
connection now. But anyway, his hand was always on the shift,
and I was always right there were you know, my
sister and I in the front seat, on the big
front seat, so I was always close to that hand.
So how much time did you spend with Tony over
the course of that summer? And there were subsequent summers, right,
(18:36):
I mean he was he became kind of part of
your Provincetown life for a period of time, exactly, he
and his mother, and so I mean, I have no
idea how many times, but many more more than I
could count. And you know, every time he was around,
he'd jingle his keys and we'd come running. And plus,
you know, he used to buy a streets he used
(18:57):
to take us. You know, he just felt like you
were sort of you know, the music was going, you know.
I heard an interview with Paul McCartney recently, and the
interviewer asked him what happens to you when you're driving
along and you hear Beatles song? And Paul McCartney said
(19:19):
two things. I start singing along, and you can I
dropped right into the studio when we're laying down the tracks,
and I remember everything we did that day. And so
that's the way it was. The songs of the nineteen
sixties were in the front seat of that truck, and
so we were always singing, We were always laughing, We
(19:42):
were always you know, up and down that driveway. It
felt like the wind in your hair. I mean, it
was just a wind blown summer in the city, you know,
is what it felt like to me. And so we
went with him pretty frequently, at least a couple of
times a week when he was dumping trash, we would
out with this condree of little kids would accompany Tony
(20:04):
in his truck as he made his rounds to the
town dumps in p Town and Truro. Tony would take
them to what he called his secret garden in the
woods and told Liza she could never tell anyone. Imagine
how special that must have felt to a seven year old.
An adult was asking her to keep a secret. Liza,
(20:27):
of course didn't know this, but Tony and a bunch
of his friends were burglarizing pharmacies and doctors offices, making
trips to Boston where they were buying drugs and stashing
them in the woods. There was all kinds of ways
that they stashed the drugs in those woods and Tony
and his whole crew of friends and people all knew
those drugs were out there, and they also evidently stashed
(20:51):
them at the Provincetown dump so that when somebody wanted something,
that's where they went to get it. And they had
some kind of crazy system of you pay me and
I'll pay you, and I mean, I don't know, and
I wasn't privy to it, but I've read about it later,
but at the time as a child, he made it
feel special to you that he was showing you something
(21:14):
that was a secret and that and that you mustn't
tell anyone exactly. But that was See, we were talking
about a garden in the We had talked a lot
about a garden because I lived next door to my
grandfather and my grandfather had this amazing garden. And so
when Tony said he had a garden, I thought, I
can relate to this. Here's this grown up boy, and
(21:37):
I'm going to impress him with my knowledge. And so
I started talking gardening with him, and I think that's
how it happened. He said, I'll show you my garden.
I have a garden, and I was like, I'm in
my wheelhouse now because I can impress this guy. And
I think that's how it happened. And he said, I
bet you've got to keep it a secret. You can't
(21:58):
tell anybody. But but the other of thing is this,
he took everybody and anybody out to that garden. And
as far as I know, he took his own kids.
That has no basis in fact. But he took everybody
out there. And the other weird thing was and and
this is part of the whole illness, part of what
was going on. He was quite afraid to go out there,
(22:22):
and he talked a lot about it after the fact
in all of the research I did about how he
was afraid because it's adjacent to a cemetery, and that
would also make sense as to why he would wait
till there was someone in the truck to go out there.
So I think it was quite convoluted and quite I
(22:42):
don't think his mind was working right, you know. I
think he was kind of spinning all the time. He
had young kids. We had three young kids, so things
were about to take a very dark turn here. Just
in case you didn't suspect Tony Costa father three de
facto babysitter of several more, is well let's just wait
(23:06):
for what comes next. When you're ten, you say that,
as clear as a bell. You hear his name as
somehow associated with something very bad that's happened, whatever was
going on down there, the place was crawling with cops. Yeah,
I mean, one of the things I find so interesting
(23:26):
is what we remember and what we don't. And you know,
sort of like what we bury, and you know, what
only comes out years later, and so like you realize
that something big has happened, and you overhear these little
snatches of dialogue, you know, that come back to you.
(23:47):
You overhear the phrase the murdered girls and all cut up.
But there's nothing in you at that point that's associating
that with Tony Costa. No, and that look so shocking.
Never in a million years did I make that association. This,
(24:10):
what I'm about to recount is going to be pretty
hard to hear. Tony Costa, though Liza as a child
doesn't know that it's him, is accused and convicted of
at least two horrific murders of young women, and is
a suspect and more. He would become involved with them
in a romantic way, and then he would kill them.
(24:32):
He cut up their bodies and did horrific things to
those bodies. I won't get into. A neuroscientist who studies
the brains of serial killers told Liza years later that
these guys are so rare and hard to study because
usually they kill themselves. Their brains are gone before they
can figure out what happened. So when you're, you know,
(24:55):
ten eleven years old and he's disappeared, do you have
any kind of narrative for your self? Was like, why
he's disappeared? No, he was just gone, and you know
that less. The other thing we need to remember is
not only was my life transient with people coming in
and out of it, but provincetowns and graphic transient. And
(25:15):
my father was gone, my grandparents moved away. It just
wasn't unusual. He did always talk about going, going, going,
going to California, going, You're going there. He was always
talking about that. And there was a big connection between
Hayde Ashbury at the time and Boston Common and Provincetown.
The young people were all trying to get away, especially
(25:37):
from a town like Provincetown that probably felt pretty remote
to them. I remember how remote it it still feels
remote to me. I don't know how you experienced it,
but when I go out there, it feels pretty remote.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(26:13):
Tony sort of fades away. For Eliza, she doesn't think
about him, She has no idea what happened. She moves
on the way kids do, and she grows up. Life happens,
she gets married, starts a family. She has as little
to do with her mother as possible. Time speeds up
as time does, so let's fast forward, oh to about
(26:36):
the time lies as oldest child, a son is graduating
from high school. I went back to school to finish
my bachelor's degree, which I've never been able to finish
um coming from the family, I came from quite frankly,
with an anxious mess most of the time. And so
I went back and I said, I'm gonna do this now.
(26:58):
While I was doing that, I start of having these dreams,
and they were very violent, and they were right in
a row of about six months, and someone was always
trying to kill me, and with a gun or a
knife or in the case of the first dream, of
fireplace poker. And I had always written down my dreams
always I had always written, and in order to figure
(27:21):
out what was going on during this time that I
was keeping a process journal anyway, um, as I was
reading and writing about different you know, literature and writing
poems and other things, I decided to start writing them in.
And when I did that, I noticed the repeat images,
(27:42):
and all of those repeat images were of my childhood,
and I kept saying, what is going on? So I
just kept writing them down, the dreams, the poems. Then
I had that final It wasn't actually the final dream,
but it was fine enough because in each one of
these dreams I couldn't see the face of the man
(28:04):
in the dream, so whoever was holding the weapon I
couldn't see. And it became more and more irritating to
me until the day that I had the dream when
I was face to face with Tony and that was
in the Royal Coachman lobby in my dream, and so
I said, holy sh it, I wonder if this is
(28:28):
what it's about. And that's when I said to my mother,
did something happen to me that you have not been
clear about? And that's when she told me. So she
knew when you said that your mother was able to
put those pieces together. Both my mother and my aunt
were there that day, and I had said, I had
(28:50):
just saw Tony Costa in the dream with a gun
to my head. What do you know about him? Why
would I be thinking about that? And she said, well,
I know he'd be came, you know, a serial killer.
I know he became a serial killer, as if I
know he became a doctor or an oncologist or a
pediatrician and a serial killer. And I just stood there
(29:16):
and I you know, there's that moment in time when
something so significant, have such significant information coming your way,
that everything slows down and just grinds to a halt,
and you're hearing it and saying, how can how can
I be hearing this information? And that's what it was like.
It was like almost like a drug flashback. It just
(29:38):
slowed right down, and I something said to me, this
is it, This is it. Until I started researching, and
of course they all laughed at me, and I just
kept researching and writing and researching and not really knowing
I was making a book, but more trying to find
out what happened to me and what those dreams meant.
(30:01):
So is is it your sense that on some level
that you always knew. I always had the images, Danny.
I always had these images of what had happened in Provincetown,
and I carried them with me, and I used to
tell people the story and they would go hu huh,
(30:23):
you know, almost like when you share too much. And
so we sort of carried that with us, and we
would laugh about it because we didn't know, you know,
this is our childhood, how did yours go? You know,
my sister has a famous line. She used to say,
you know, I was at a cocktail party the other night,
and I was telling some stories from our childhood, and
(30:43):
other people don't think it's as funny as we do.
And so, you know, that's how we dealt with it
with humor, because it was kind of a crazy image
to remember. Why did we remember that? Why did we
hear about that? We knew something awful had happened, But
what we did not know was that the same man
who was driving us around and getting us ice cream
(31:04):
cones was the man who had committed that. Whatever atrocities
we had in our heads because we were little, so
we didn't put a narrative together about it. We were
in some cases, we were barely reading it. Wasn't until
I was nine or ten years old that I started
reading these accounts in the paper and not understanding that
they had anything to do with Tony. And at the
(31:25):
time his name was not in the paper either. That's
important Liza's history was. Tony was of course, much less central,
much briefer than the relationship she had with her mother.
Both were damaging, both were indelible, but Liza had been lucky.
She didn't fit the mold of Tony's victims. She was
(31:47):
a child, a child of a woman who inflicted greater
damage on her. As she writes, and here is the
deepest of those wounds. I have always felt as though
there was something wrong with me, inherently deep and dirty
and dark, something unlikable and unfixable and worst of all, unlovable,
and I believed it. As a result, I spent my
(32:08):
childhood more afraid of my mother than I was of
a psychopathic serial killer. And then you go on. Finally,
when I became a mother, and in spite of my fear,
I was able to stop what had been generations of
physical abuse. It ended with me mm hmm, And it
did in family secrets. I think, like every guest of
(32:31):
mine to a person would say this ends with me.
I think it's self selecting. People who are willing to
have this conversation in such a public a forum. Are
people who have come to a place of the way
that I make meaning of this is to completely change
the narrative. I think that's so important, the way that
I make meaning of this. This is not a subject
(32:54):
we can sweep under the rug anymore. That these kinds
of people are out there and they're not well, and
we need to find some kind of system whereby we
put back together our mental health system because we can
prevent some of this. You know, in California they're screening
children for trauma early trauma now under the new Attorney General.
(33:15):
You know, they need to do that in this country
in order to save some of these kids. Because I
just clawed my way out and I've spent most of
my life in therapy. But you know, I think the
willingness to talk about it is kind of a double
edged sword when I'm doing it anyway, because I had to,
because I couldn't not. Why does it feel like a
(33:36):
double edged sword to you? Well, because it's exposing yourself, right,
because in order to do it, your vulnerabilities have to
get known to other people. I guess there's a certain
amount of shame that goes with it until you realize
it's not you. It's not you, it's other people, and
that's you know, that's a difficult transition to make. So
I think it's a double edged sword coming out and
(34:00):
talking about it. Believe me, there are people who are
not happy that have done this. But that's too bad
because it's given me a new freedom and I'll take it.
(34:21):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan
Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard
is our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd
like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story
could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is
one secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero.
(34:47):
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and
Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to
know about my family's great that inspired this podcast, check
out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance. For more
(35:26):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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