Tony Costa: The Serial Killer Who Dismembered His Victims (Born To Kill) | Our Life

[Music] in the late 1960s her Seaside Paradise would be hit by a murderous storm there are at least two or three thousand missing females in the United States and we don't know how many may be buried in the tour or Woods the series of crimes of unimaginable cruelty underneath was a plastic bag with the head in it it was severed committed by a serial killer with a lust for death he was very proud of what he had done very proud of it what drove these heinous acts your first inclination would be this is someone who's psychotic once this Twisted perpetrator Born To Kill [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] fifties and early 60s the resort of Province Town at the at the tip of New England's Cape Cod had been a peaceful and old-fashioned Harbor Town Provincetown uh is a relatively small community it's an artist's colony people fish it's a Scenic beautiful area it was Lively in the summer July and August where we had a lot of tourists in the wintertime it was completely dead it was a fishing Village it was a place where people knew one another you could be at the opposite end of town if you've done something wrong it was such a small community somebody yell out Charlie Souza if you put that cigarette in your mouth I'm calling your father you know everybody knew everybody so it was kind of neat growing up you had the run of the town there wasn't any sense of crime at that time growing up [Music] in the second half of the 1960s the Sleepy fishing Town became a magnet to the emerging hippie counterculture Province Town has historically been a place where people can go and if you would do their own thing the pilgrims came from England to be able to escape religious persecution they landed in Provincetown first and Provincetown has always been known for a place where you could kind of Do Your Own Thing provision was a mecca for unusual people and artistic people the fishermen were very forgiving of a lot of things one of those to embrace the liberal Spirit was 18 year old local girl Sydney Monson she was the type of kid that uh very free you know I mean she would do things that were on a whim she was very pretty long brown hair and she was just an outgoing type of friendly type of person but in May of 1968 Sydney Monson suddenly disappeared off the face of the Earth suddenly went out one night and never came back [Music] and everybody was really concerned about what was happening because it was like she just vanished oh some would write Sydney's disappearance off as an innocent sign of the times this was the era that you know free people would take off and not tell their parents where they're going so it was quite common [Music] people thought you know okay Cindy's doing her thing and you know and maybe she met somebody or whatever the case may be but then as the days rolled on it was out of the ordinary [Music] and Sydney would not be the last to vanish from the Cape Cod Community eight months later two young women from Rhode island disappeared after staying at a guest house in the town two girls are reported missing Marianne wysocki and Pat Walsh these two girls from Rhode Island were apparently just staying for a weekend but they never showed up for work and that necessitated the parents reported them missing one of them was a school teacher and they had gone to Provincetown just on a lark on a vacation then just suddenly disappeared the parents were so adamant that it was totally out of character for their daughters not to call in so it wasn't a classic run away from home that you might expect with some of the young younger children at that time from Providence Rhode Island Patricia Walsh and Marianne wysocki were both in their twenties and had been friends for years as investigators looked into their disappearance a local man's name came into the picture some of the people said that they last saw the girls with Tony Casa he was the last person seen with him and that's always a good indication that he may have information that's helpful detective Bernie Flynn and state trooper Tom Gunnery were assigned the job of tracking down the missing young women we started at the roaming house whether it registered and all that and Anton Costa also had a room in this house Anton Tony Costa was a 24 year old who'd made something of an impression on the tight-knit fishing Community I remember Tony when I was a kid that he it was always off he was just a little bit off very into himself secluded he was kind of Alona he was different uh uh I do remember him being involved with taxidermy [Music] used to brag about he used to go around the streets and pick up roadkill and a person was told the other day they went on a camping trip and he showed a showed a raccoon and he preserved it because he said he was going to take it home to uh to perform Taxidermy on it and he used to drive around at night you know rabbits squirrels or whatever the case may be and take him home and you know dissect them and do whatever he did to him so he was always a click off Costa had a wife but in recent years the relationship had broken down and he'd spend some time in jail for failure to pay child support he was married and I think he had two children young children he was a carpenter he had you know on and off jobs so he was a handyman I guess at the classification now Tony Costa had checked out of the guest house where he'd been staying and left town we searched his room and in the closet we found a lot of rope which had red stains on it so that that got us going we zeroed in on him as a suspect that is the search for the missing girls continued no one had any idea of the horror that would soon be uncovered [Music] in January 1968 a young teacher Patricia Walsh and her friend Marianne wysocki had mysteriously vanished during a trip to the seaside resort of Province Town on Cape Cod Witnesses had reported them last being seen with local 24 year old Tony Coster a loner with an interest in taxidermy [Music] as police tried to trace the missing girls a clue to their whereabouts was discovered at an unlikely site deep in the woods of the neighboring Town Truro foreign [Music] Grove Cemetery yeah would you ever think there'd be a cemetery way out here the girls car was seen near the Cemetery Road a report had come in that Patricia Walsh's Volkswagen had been sighted parked on a dirt track behind the old Cemetery on the day of their disappearance please check a lot of memories the car was seen by a uh a resident in the area and you're going to understand that's pretty rural uh strange people and strange cars are easily recognized the resident had called the local police chief down to the woods to look at the empty vehicle the Volkswagen was first observed by the chief burial and he ran a signal 10 which is a stolen record and there was no report of it being stolen now days after the sighting the car was gone and there was still no sign of the two young women [Music] the car was seen but they weren't of they weren't seen the incident with the vehicle rang alarm Bells although we couldn't be sure for certain that there was Foul Play given where the car was and then the absence of the car being placed in the woods in Truro I think we were certain that something was amiss and yet again Tony Costa's name came into the picture he was seen in the car by a number of people and an inquiry Costa had made with a local garage also raised suspicions Tonya tried to determine what it would cost to have the car painted or repainted now the young handyman appeared to have skipped town an action not out of character at that time I believe he was heavy into drugs and that was the scene back then the late 60s and these people his his friends they used to jump on a plane and fly to California go to New York City I mean I mean it was nothing to leave home and take off but Tony Costa was no run-of-the-mill hippie dropout the aspiring poet and taxidermist considered himself an intellectual [Music] Tony was very intelligent is speaking in his mannerism when he wasn't high on drugs or you know he was he was an intelligent fella I recall having some conversations with him if you have a debate with him he had to be right [Music] you know that there was no middle ground with Tony it was always he had to be right in regardless no matter what you were talking about that's why he just kept to himself a lot because a lot of people didn't want to deal with that however for some younger women Tony Costa's good looks and philosophical manner proved seductive girls who are very much attracted to him because he was he was extremely handsome it looked like a porcelain portrait young local girl Bonnie Callis encountered Costa when she was working at her father's Medical Practice I'd see him as when I came in in the morning I would see him when I left for work he'd be working on a building painting the trim because I remember ducking not wanting to get painted on he was always had his eye on on the females I was probably 17 years old 18 years old and Tony asked my father who's that chick out there and it's my daughter you leave her alone don't have anything to do with her he wasn't the proper type that he wanted his daughter to be dating in the woods behind the ultra Cemetery where the missing girl's car had been sighted an extensive investigation began well at that time we were you know searching in the woods for the two missing girls we really didn't know what happened to him we had a search teams national park ranges local police a lot of State Police we had dogs we had a plane flying over the area once we started investigating it was rather quickly until we found something [Music] state trooper gunnery's attention was drawn to a suspicious depression on the Woodland floor it was it was indentation about that much it wasn't completely filled over [Music] I was about 10 feet off the road [Music] I started digging there and I came across a green duffel bag underneath the duffel bag we found these body parts it was dismembered pieces yeah yeah this was the grave that was found after probing we found the remains of an unidentified body of a girl the body had been separated into eight sections and the sexual organs had been removed but it was neither Patricia Walsh Marianne wysocki or Sydney Monson was later identified as Susan Perry nineteen-year-old Susan Perry had not been seen for five months her family lived in Provincetown she was a local girl uh and if I remember correctly Tony might have been going out or dating her during that particular time [Music] although he had left town Tony Coster learned he was being connected with The Disappearance of Patricia Walsh and her friend Marianne wysocki having been spotted in their vehicle he suddenly returned to Province Town voluntarily to assert his innocence we asked him when he last saw the girls and he said that one of the girls had to have an abortion and was going to go to Montreal when he was talking with him it was like a cat and mouse because the stories never matched his excuse was the girls gave him the car because they wanted to skip to Canada but then eventually he said that he bought the car investigators were convinced Costa had been involved in Foul Play and was trying to lead them off the scent quite frequently he uh he kept changing his story he was trying to cover his tracks in other words he was trying to out Fox the fox [Music] Tony Costa had arrived in Provincetown during the senior year at High School although he was known to many of the locals in the small fishing town he had failed to make deep connections with many of them I'm a native of Provincetown but if you came into Provincetown when you were 18 years old like he was he could live his whole life here and they still consider him a washer Shore he was washed on Shore he's not a native now I can picture Tony sitting there right now with his hands together on the desk he was big close to six foot I would think muscular kept to himself very quiet he would ride on the school bus and he was always sat in the back and was always to himself he never never got involved with the rest of us a little weird it's still somewhat of a mystery to me of why I didn't know him better being a small school I knew that many of the kids that were in freshmen so he was just a loner Tony Costa's family were from Provincetown but he had grown up in the Boston area his father had been in the Navy but had drowned on duty Costa would later be diagnosed as a schizoid personality type it tends to be people who just really like to stay alone don't have particular connections with other people they tend to find jobs where they can work alone if a person is schizoid they would tend to not value family relationships or have empathic relationships with friends they would tend to want to stay on their own and have much less interest in the mores of society but there may have been another reason Tony Coster didn't mix with his contemporaries it transpired he had left the Boston area under a cloud apparently he used to bring girls to his room and he used to take pillows and and put the pillows over their heads and try to smother them one of the stories that actually came out is that his mother went next door to visit a friend or whatever and when the mother returned he had the next door neighbor tied up just before arriving in Provincetown Tony Coster had been caught breaking into the room of a 14 year old neighbor fleeing when she awoke [Music] he also admitted that two years earlier he had bound the same girl with rope and undressed her it's the early signs of ritualistic behavior that predates a murder [Music] when you bind a victim tie your hands up you're making it so she is in your control those are major red flags for something very very ominous to occur in the future I believe he went to court on that and back in those days I'm talking the early 60s the judge more or less says you know you've got to leave town you got to get out of town so they moved to Provincetown as an 18 year old in his senior year at Provincetown high school Tony Coster began dating a 13 year old student marrying her when she was 14. he would be picking her up after school most every day and she's only in the eighth grade or whatever so that that was definitely different most of the time when we uh who are dating it was you dated your class probably one at the most two classes below that that was kind of two years difference was the red line I guess a 20 year old man could control most 14 year old girls and that's what he wanted he wanted someone very very submissive to him he didn't want a woman with her own mind her own job and her own motivation so I know he wanted someone totally under him as he grew into his twenties many of Costa's Associates remained teenagers I don't think he could stand himself in his own age group because he never hung around with people of his own age you know and Costa possessed something that several Province Town teenagers found alluring here's Hughes pot quite a bit he grew his own marijuana Anton Costa had a marijuana Garden there and it's not unusual for marijuana plots to be grown in the vast areas here on the lower Cape they were pretty free and easy with their drugs marijuana particularly everybody was smoking dope hey everybody that would be enticing to a lot of young people if he was if he was growing it you know it would be the enticement to get them out there to smoke it Tony Costa's marijuana Garden was in the woods behind the old Truro Cemetery the area where the missing Rhode Island girl's car had been spotted and where Province Town teenager Susan Perry's body had been discovered very remote and very quiet it is pretty desolate area if you were to be in there at night unless someone saw a light flashing he it's totally out of the beaten path the investigators were sure that Costa was responsible for The Disappearance of Patricia Walsh and Marianne wysocki but with no sign of the women they couldn't prove a crime had taken place the state police jumped on them and they started working them over working and working and working the case we had him on a surveillance uh because he was a prime suspect but then six weeks after the two young women had gone missing a telegram arrived in Provincetown addressed to Tony Costa that pointed to them being alive and well it read what happened we waited as planned is everything all right we'll meet you as schedule New York City love Pat and Marianne but there was more to the telegram than met the eye [Music] in 1969 The Disappearance of Rhode Island teacher Patricia Walsh and her friend Marianne wysocki had sparked an intense search in the woods of Cape Cod detectives were convinced that 24 year old Tony Costa had something to do with them going missing however a telegram addressed to the local man appeared to signal that women were alive and well detective Flynn had continually told Mr Costo that look if you didn't do it if they were okay just have him contact us and then went on and on and on eventually a telegram was sent to Tony's mother's home and she presented it to the police police determined that the telegram had been sent from New York we had another detective went down there to verify the fact how was the telegram sent or he Tony Costa actually sent the telegram to his mother in Provincetown but it was signed by the two girls from Rhode Island and still more troubling stories had begun to emerge one of the girls that he had taken down there was apparently shot in the back with a narrow uh he had taken her down there to show him his garden he was out there in his marijuana field with her and he had a bow and arrow and shot her in the back with an arrow I think that girl was very lucky you know that the arrow didn't penetrate more and really do more harm to her with fears for the safety of the missing girls Trooper Gunnery and his fellow investigators focused their efforts on the Truro Woods we were called out to participate in a search all we were told was to call the attention of anything unusual to the state police who were on the location we're searching hard because we knew this was the area where he used to bring girls we were spaced 25 30 feet apart something like that they came across this huge tree and everywhere you'd probably like to lay out a blanket for a picnic and I saw strands of rope at the base of this tree I mentioned before in his closet in his house there was a big coil of rope and it had red marks on it so when I found this tree and I saw pieces of rope around it I said I gotta stop getting in the ground so I started digging underneath it and I come across pill vials and all kinds of drug paraphernalia but underneath that I sunk my hand since a pieces of the of human flesh as the search continued so did the horror underneath the drug paraphernal was a plastic bag with the head in it it was severed you know the trooper's colleague detective Flynn continued the Dig we removed the pieces of the body her head and clean our eyes and clean her mouth and he said I recognize this to be the head of Mary Ann waisaki I mean the horror I mean God crazy taking the pieces from the Woodland grave it became clear that not all of Marianne wysocki was there it was like a puzzle we were missing parts of that puzzle in that made us to continue digging The Searchers then uncovered another grave what they found they would never forget it was a very pungent smell something that wanted to get in your nostrils that stayed there I can smell it right now as I speak in the hole they found the remaining parts of Marianne wysocki and teacher Patricia Walsh cutting half of the waist but that was not all they were about to make another shocking discovery that would solve a 10 month old mystery we found another body Sydney Monson was found in the hall and that other two girls were on top of her eighteen-year-old Sydney Monson had socialized with Tony Costa now her dismembered body had been discovered in a grave in the Truro Woods a crush me you know it's like um I just couldn't believe it you know because of her because we had a relationship there for a while and and I just couldn't believe that that would happen to her she was a real special person to me the gruesome finds in the woods immediately made national headlines after the bodies were found then it became big news the age of the of the decomposed bodies uh may go back Beyond six months eight months nine months uh we don't know what took place during that time when word gets out that there is a a crime such as a murder in a small community um it's it's almost like time stops they were shocked they were truly shocked because they couldn't believe that anybody would be so vicious to get the attention of the country and probably the world all evidence pointed to Tony Costa and he was immediately arrested there are indications that there are teeth marks on some of these parts of these dismembered bodies the details revealed at autopsy was sickening when you see pieces of the body outside and they're taken out they're set down and their photographs taken it looks like pieces of something but when they're put on a white slab in the in the mortuary and their bodies are cleaned and you look at their faces you can see the horror in their face you can see the screen as they're caught just before death and you don't forget things like that you don't forget things like that went to every autopsy that there wasn't problems down and seen a lot in my day but I would have to say that that was the worst the worst the dismemberment was evidence of a most Twisted mind at work I mean you can bury a body much more easily than you can dismembering and burying a body dismemberment takes time and a lot of effort and strength and tools so the dismemberment had to be significant to him it can't just have been utilitarian you want to own them totally what better way to own a person than to remove parts of them hold those parts what greater intimacy could there possibly be for a killer who wants to continue to commune with the victims after death I mean you can imagine the horror out here nobody would ever hear you back here along with skinning parts of the Bodies In some cases Tony Costa had attacked or moved the internal organs he was a taxidermist at one point in his life and he had an interest in dead things he had an interest in looking internally at individuals organs and their insides and taking them out and putting stuffing in and this sort of thing and he did that sort of Mutilation Behavior with his victims he mutilated them terribly always remember that someone's occupation follows their personality their personality doesn't develop as a result of their occupation their personality is there previously all of that ties together with with the morbid obsession with death and all that goes along with it the local Cape Cod Community began to recall instances of Costa's strange Behavior he lived in a in a house in North Pearl on the third floor and all of a sudden the uh it was becoming known the cats were disappearing and uh eventually it was found out that he was the one that was taking him and and I don't know what he did with him but I'm sure it wasn't pleasant for the cats but telecaster's motives for murder were driven by more than a mere lust for death one thing's for sure he killed them before he had sex with any of them as the 24 year old Provincetown man faced trial the extreme nature of the crimes Drew press from far and wide there are at least two or three thousand missing females in the United States and we don't know how many may be buried in the Truro Woods I think he enjoyed being the uh in the spotlight which he sure was the trial would mean Costa returning to Cemetery Road and the scene of the crime I remember coming here with a jury and bringing them here and this place where it was like a city at the time with all police vehicles of coroners vehicles a long lasting impression that God of him was he he was very proud of what he had done very proud of it Costa denied committing the murders nevertheless his attorneys cited his drug use as having dramatically affected his behavior it says lawyer put that defense into the court that he was insane because of the the drugs his dependence on pills had supposedly led him to commit burglary at his own doctor's office he allegedly broke into Dr callis's office and wellfully and he stole quite a bit of doctors supplies in drugs this right here emergency room and then the double doors were when the ambulance could back up into it but it was through the back window here that Tony broke into down this Hall Straight Ahead was a locked cabinet it was maybe about 10 feet long about three feet wide and that's where the medications were locked large quantities of drugs had been taken and now Costa's defense team was suggesting they could have twisted his thinking you can definitely react aggressively under a the influence of a drug we had serial killers who've done that in fact one turned himself in because his drug use had caused him to kill several people he didn't want to kill so it can happen will anybody who's taking drugs have that reaction not at all but somebody who's already thinking about killing and doing other violations once they're on drugs their inhibitions have been evaporated for the most part his lawyer is trying to find some level of mitigation to understand this you know he has a drug problem he's mentally ill and so on but his drug abuse have nothing to do with this if it had any role at all it was a secondary role in as much as the drug served as a disinhibitor many of these individuals will have a few drinks take marijuana or something before they do what they're going to do the drugs don't cause the behavior but it just loosens them up and disinhibits them that Costa's Behavior at the trial was at odds with any suggestion that he was a Madman he was Disturbed but he wasn't psychotic and I think he demonstrated that quite well in court cold cold and arrogant I'd never forget him sitting in me prisoners dark and uh taking notes taking nothing no no emotion no nothing Costa then made a decision he believed would help his cause he insisted on standing up and making a statement to the court after the discovery of four mutilated bodies in woods near Province Town local resident Tony Costa had been arrested and was facing trial his defense team had suggested that Costa's Behavior had been altered by his use of drugs the defendant then took the decision to address the court with a personal statement first of all they believe they can charm the jury secondly they want to keep control and third if they're narcissistic they don't think that anybody can speak for them as well as they can speak for themselves or defend them as well as they can defend themselves so they believe that by testifying they keep control over how they are perceived and what their legacy is going to be and how the proceedings will go and they are completely wrong about that but within their narcissistic frame they can't see beyond themselves he gave a dissertation on the evil of drugs that was as good as you wanted to hear anywhere but when he finished Lieutenant Killen moved over to me and whispered that's going to be hard to prove that he's nuts that's just what exactly what killed and said to me because it it showed that he was very rational very very it was articulate and I suspect that if I were defending him I may not have wanted him to make the statement nevertheless the way the women in the woods had been treated seemingly pointed to the work of someone insane when you look at Costa's crime scene Behavior the taking someone's heart and putting it where the genitals should be and the total mutilation of the body when you look at that you first inclination would be this is someone who's psychotic um but he's not psychotic he was abnormal there's no question about that but very doubtful if he was hearing voices or had delusions and this sort of thing but he was very very troubled if you look at Costa's Behavior it indicates an individual whose fantasy life was very very primitive it was very very regressive it was horrified by some of the Gory details and so are the jurors that everybody was except Tony Tony costs his people objected to the introduction of the photographs or the mutilated bodies and uh but he was eager to look at the photographs and see his own handiwork he just this this was part of him the part of the coldness the soullessness of this man that he could Revel and and reliving the experience ultimately the jury decided that Tony Costa knew exactly what he was doing when he murdered and mutilated the four young women found in the woods and it's believed but not proven that he was responsible for several more murders but what had made him capable of committing such atrocities was Tony Coster a Born Killer thank you it's hard for me to want to believe that people are born to kill the fact is some people are predators uh and do kill I think Tony was a he was a sick person um but I also believe he knew the difference between right and wrong the bottom line would be yes the drugs would affect his personality his actions but I still think somewhere in his mental capacity he would have to have that in his in his brain of murder and torture or whatever I mean what he did to these girls I mean he didn't just shoot him and bury him I mean he dismembered them terrible there had to be something in his head that that made him do these things psychotic no I don't think he was out of touch with reality but he was certainly very very disturbed I don't think Tony Costa was born to kill but there was a number of factors in his life here his interest in death and all that surrounds death in a very very morbid and perverse way could have remained in his fantasies his entire life but it didn't this case in his case he acted it out was he predestined to do this I don't think so um but he definitely did do it was there a strong neurobiological component with respect to what arouses him sexually I would say yes most people who have that type of abnormality contain it and never act out but Costa did act out he was the epitome of evil soulless no empathy no sympathy no compassion and I'd never seen anybody like that before he was like an automaton he was just just a walking Weirdo And as I say you just inordinately evil [Music] foreign

Channel: Our Life

Views: 631,103

Keywords: our life, documentary, world documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, documentaries, real life, born to kill, serial killer, serial killers, mass murderers, mass murder, killing spree, murder, killings, killer, crime, true crime, criminals, jail, prison, crime documentary, serial killer documentary, tony costa, cape cod killer, cape cod vampire killer, cape cod

Id: P8vt3_pwcjs

Length: 43min 30sec (2610 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2022