The babysitter My summers with a serial killer

Liza Rodman

Large print - 2021

"Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter--the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked--took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He bought them popsicles and together, they visited his "secret garden" in the Truro woods. To Liza, he was one of the few kind and understanding adults in her life. Everyone thought he was just a "great guy." But there was one thing she didn't know; their babysitter was a serial killer. Some of his victims were buried-in pieces-right there, in his garden in the woods. Though Tony Costa'...s gruesome case made screaming headlines in 1969 and beyond, Liza never made the connection between her friendly babysitter and the infamous killer of numerous women, including four in Massachusetts, until decades later. Haunted by nightmares and horrified by what she learned, Liza became obsessed with the case. Now, she and cowriter Jennifer Jordan reveal the chilling and unforgettable true story of a charming but brutal psychopath through the eyes of a young girl who once called him her friend."--

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
True crime stories
Published
Thorndike, Maine : Center Point Large Print 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Liza Rodman (author)
Other Authors
Jennifer Jordan, 1958- (author)
Edition
Center Point Large Print edition
Item Description
Regular print version previously published by: Atria Books.
Physical Description
470 pages (large print) : illustrations ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 463-468)
ISBN
9781643588650
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Spending her summers in Provincetown as a child, Rodman was lonely, living in the motels where her mother found work. After her divorce, her mom was intent on taking full advantage of the swinging sixties, often leaving her two daughters with anyone willing to babysit, including Cecilia, another motel worker, who was kind and gave big, warm hugs. Rodman was particularly enthralled with Cecilia's son Tony, who bought the girls Popsicles and let them tag along to the dump and to his marijuana "garden" in the woods. Little did they know that this was also where Tony buried the women he murdered. Half of the story is in Rodman's first-person recollections of Provincetown and Tony (she did not know he was a serial killer until she was an adult), while the other half recounts Tony's disastrous marriage, drug use, and psychological breakdowns. While some parts get a bit repetitive, and the sections on Tony could have benefited from more rigorous journalism, the intimate details and easy-to-read style will keep readers glued to the page.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Rodman debuts with an engrossing memoir that focuses on her relationship with serial killer Tony Costa (aka the Cape Cod Cannibal). As children in the late 1960s, Rodman and her little sister spent summers in Provincetown, Mass., where her mother worked at a motel. A promiscuous alcoholic, the mother would fob her two children off on any willing adult so she could bar hop. One of them was handyman Tony, whom Rodman remembers as a kind man who would take Rodman and her sister along with him on errands he was doing around the Cape. In 1969, the police arrested Costa; he was convicted of two murders and sentenced to life in prison, where he killed himself in 1974. Only in 2005, when Rodman confronted her mother about what happened to Costa, did she learn to her shock that he was a drug-addled pervert and serial killer who dismembered his female victims and buried them in the woods. The authors smoothly blend Rodman's affecting account of her childhood with thorough research into Costa's crimes. This tragic tale of a dysfunctional family and a psychopath is a page-turner. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim & Williams. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A true-crime "hybrid work of memoir and narrative nonfiction." With journalist Jordan, Rodman recalls her preteen summers on Cape Cod with a younger sister and a mother "so self-absorbed that she unwittingly left her children in the care of a psychopath." For a book about vulnerable children--a topic that usually tugs the heartstrings--the narrative is not as affecting as one would expect. One strand tells the story of Antone "Tony" Costa, a handyman "who just about everybody considered the friendly, even charming guy next door"--until he was convicted of the murders of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki and believed to have killed at least three other women. A second strand involves Rodman's painful relationship with her distracted mother, who worked as a tourist-season motel housekeeper and often let Costa take her daughters for drives--including to a forest where he had buried his victims--when the author was between the ages of 8 and 10. The two threads alternate in a briskly written text that isn't for the faint of heart: Costa committed gruesome dismemberments and other sadistic acts about which the adult Rodman has understandably had nightmares. Yet the story is curiously lacking in drama, in part because the book doesn't reveal the author to have been in serious danger of harm from Costa. In the absence of high suspense, the authors try to pump up the tension with pulpy clichés ("his blood went cold"), stilted dialogue ("That kid is trouble….Mark my words"), and a deceptive-appearances theme familiar to the genre. The most noteworthy material appears in an epilogue, where, after excellent detective work, Jordan and Rodman establish conclusively that Costa did not kill three women he was suspected of murdering--a payoff that for followers of the case may be worth the 300-page wait. A grisly but low-impact tale of horrific crimes and their impact on the author. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Prologue: Liza's Nightmare 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?" Excerpted from The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer by Liza Rodman, Jennifer Jordan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.