Keep Digging

Antone Charles Costa, called Tony, was a twenty-four-year-old handyman in Provincetown, Massachusetts, popular with the young people drifting through town in the late 1960s and the Cape’s year-round drug dealer. He rented a room in a Standish Street guest house. In late January 1969 two twenty-three-year-olds from Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia Walsh, a second-grade teacher, and Mary Anne Wysocki, a teaching student, took a room in the same house for the weekend.

They were last seen on January 25. Costa kept their Volkswagen, said the women had handed him the keys and gone to Canada, and left town. Police found their belongings in his vacated room. In early February a search of the woods near Pine Grove Cemetery in Truro turned up the dismembered remains of seventeen-year-old Susan Perry, missing since 1968. In early March investigators dug out the clearing where Costa had grown marijuana for years and found Walsh, Wysocki and a third 1968 victim, eighteen-year-old Sydney Monzon.

Costa was tried only for Walsh and Wysocki. A jury convicted him of both in May 1970 and he was sentenced to life; asked if he had anything to say, he told the court to keep digging. He was never tried over Monzon or Perry, though he was suspected in other disappearances. On May 12, 1974, he was found hanged in his cell at the state prison in Walpole.