Every Town - The Cape Cod VAMPIRE – Inside the Horrors of Tony Costa

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Today I’m taking you to Cape Cod for a story that not many people know about. It shattered the peace of this seaside haven, and revealed the monster living in its midst — a man the papers would call The Cape Cod Vampire. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/QWmddtIskZc 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY for FREE! ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s⁠ ⁠https://tubitv.com/movies/100029672/an-angry-boy⁠ International & Other Ways To Watch: ⁠https://www.anangryboy.com/⁠ 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com/ 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries⁠   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠ 👁Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠   🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Into the dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. In the late 1960s, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Peatown to the locals, was a bohemian paradise at the very tip of Cape Cod. Artists, drifters, and free spirits flocked there for its vibrant nightlife, secluded beaches, and the feeling that this far out on the sandbar, the rules of the mainland didn't quite apply. It was a place where strangers became friends overnight, and charm could get you almost anything. But that easy trust would be its undoing. Because in the middle of this tight-knit, free-willing community was a young man who seemed to belong everywhere.

with the fishermen, the hippies, the bar owners, even the cops. Some he was just Tony, the laid-back local. To others, he was sire, the magnetic figure at the center of a small circle of followers. What no one realized was that behind the charm, Tony Costa was hiding something far darker. And by the winter of 69, the sandy pine forest just outside town would become his hunting ground and his graveyard. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and welcome to another episode of Everytown Where Today. I'm taking you to Cape Cod for a story that not many people know about. And it shattered the peace of the seaside haven and revealed the monster living in its midst.

A man in the papers would call the Cape Cod vampire. 1969 was a wild time in America. The hippie movement was in full swing, and people were expending their minds, and young people were ditching their parents' rules for something freer. and looser. In Provincetown, it had become a magnet for that scene, a little seaside haven sitting at the tip of Massachusetts finger, pulling in artists, writers, and every kind of free spirit you could imagine.

Its narrow streets were crowded with long-haired kids strumming guitars, talking about peace and love while searching for another way to live. And right in the middle of all that was a young man named Tony Costa. And he looked like he'd walked straight out of his seat. 60s magazine, dark hair, smart eyes, and that laid-back charm that made the ladies take notice. He dropped quotes from Camus and Hess and casual conversation as a way to breach the topic of life's meaning and the absurdity of it all. It sounds a bit cheesy now, but back then I guess it worked.

And so to everyone around him, he appeared to be nothing more than another peaceful hippie, spreading love and consciousness. But Costa, as one new space, paperwood ride in their headlines was a quote, normal-looking guy who chopped up girls. And here's what they were talking about. Real name, Anton Charles Costa. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 2nd, 1944. When he was young, his family moved out to Provincetown, so he grew up there.

He knew the streets very well. When he was just 17 years old in November of 61, he broke into a house where a teenage girl lived. and she woke up to find him just standing over his bed watching her in the darkness. She screamed and he ran, but three days later, he came back. This time he tried to drag her down the stairs of the building. Only the neighbors heard what was happening and stopped him, so this man had a demon in him early on. Knowing what we do now, this was a major red flag that mostly got swept under the rug. He was young, so the cords barely slapped his wrist.

three years of probation and a one year suspended sentence. That was it. When he was 18, Costa had a little ceremony there in Peatown and married a 14-year-old girl that he eventually had three children with. He was trying his damnedest to act normal, but even then he was a little off. I mean, 18 and she's 14. Something's not right there, but I guess with the parents' consent, it's all good. The marriage, though, as you can guess, was a disaster. disaster from the start. His wife later described constant violence and heavy drug use from Tony. And he dabbled in it all, LSD, uppers, downers. He would disappear for days, leaving her alone with the kids. By the mid-1960s, she'd had enough and they separated. Now essentially

free from his warped experiment of a marriage, Kosto wanted to go to the heart of where all the mind-altering substances were. So he took a cross-country. trip and set his sights on San Francisco's Hayd Ashbury District, the hub of the counterculture. There's not a ton known about this particular section of this man's life, but he stayed out there for about a year and then abruptly headed back home to Peatown. And maybe he missed his old home, his family and friends, or maybe he felt the heat for something he did out there and needed something familiar to feel safe. A lot of killers returned to their hometown. or an anchor point after crimes elsewhere.

It's partly about control, and they know the area and the routines and where they can operate without drawing suspicion. And Costa fit that mold perfectly. If something violent happened in California, maybe even a murder that spooked him, the urgency to get out of there could have been immediate. Even if nobody was on to him yet,

he may have worried about being connected later. Back in Massachusetts and 67, he said, built right back down in his hometown, which at this point had morphed into a magnet for hippies, drifters, and anyone eager to slip out of mainstream society. It was the perfect camouflage. When people came and went without explanation, nobody asked too many questions and strangers could reinvent themselves overnight or disappear. And Costa blended right in with his long hair.

He passed himself off as a deep thinker, and always had the best weed and the purest LSD, whatever pills the night called for. He had a group of hippie disciples. They used to call him sire. A sort of guru figure everyone wanted to be around, and it worked. Because Costa had more than drugs. He had charm, and people genuinely liked him. What they didn't know was that Costa was also playing a very differing game, one that made

him untouchable. See, he cultivated a relationship with the province-town state. police becoming an informant and feeding them the names of other dealers. It was the perfect cover, and he'd tip off the cops. They'd make arrests, and his competition would vanish from the streets. In return, police warned him before raids, convinced he was one of the good guys in the hippie scene, someone who kept the peace. In reality, though, they were encouraging a predator to hunt. By May of 68, the cracks were showing, if anyone cared to look. 18-year-old Sidney Monson, cashier at the local A&P, was last seen slipping into Costa's car.

When friends asked about her, he didn't miss a beat. Sydney, he claimed, had gone to Mexico. And in 1968, that made perfect sense. People disappeared all the time to chase freedom, join communes, or vanish into the haze of the counterculture. A few months later, Costa was with Susan Perry, young, beautiful, and utterly charmed by the man everyone called sire. By September, she was gone too. This time, the story was that she left for California, maybe joined a commune.

In those days, it was enough to silence suspicion. Around the same time, Costa was spending a lot of time with a woman named Christine Galant. The two regularly used drugs together, nothing unusual for Provincetown scene. But in November 68, Christine was famous, down dead in her bathtub. Barbituit overdose, the coroner said. Overdoses were tragically common, so nobody looked deeper. It was ruled accidental and Costa walked away untouched. But by then,

he wasn't just getting away with it. He was getting bolder. By early 1969, he'd moved into a rooming house at Five Standish Street. A landlady was a woman named Patricia Morton, who'd just returned from a winter vacation in the Virgin Islands. And Costa paid his rent weeks in advance and charmed Morton with his polite manner and offers to help with repairs around the building. And she saw him as the perfect tenant, quiet, respectful, and handy with tools. Costa told her he spent his evenings at the library and liked to take peaceful walks along the beach. He came across as educated and well-mannered, nothing like the hippies Morton usually tried to

avoid renting to. She had no idea that her model tenant was using her boarding house as a base for hunting his next victims. On January 24, 1969, Patricia Walsh called in sick to her teaching job at Laurel Hill School in Providence. She wasn't actually sick. She just wanted to take a long weekend with her friend, Marianne Wysaki. The two women packed light for what they expected to be a short trip and climbed into Walsh's 68 light blue Volkswagen Beetle. They drove southeast through Massachusetts, pass-fall river in New Bedford, till they reached the Bourne Bridge and crossed on over to Cape Cod.

The radio was likely playing Marvin Gaze. I heard it through the grapevine, which was the number one song in America at the time. And the women were excited, laughing and planning what they wanted to do during their weekend away. They reached Peatown, around 10.30 in the morning, and drove through the nearly empty winter streets until they zeroed in on the rooming house on Standish Street. Morton greeted them warmly and showed them around

the building. The women would be staying in a small double room upstairs and sharing a bathroom with other guests. As Morton was showing the two new arrivals around, they passed Costa's door and was cracked open. Morton took the opportunity to make introductions. This is Anton, she, he said, my first guest of the winter. He's a carpenter, helps out with odd jobs. Coasta smiled, warm and disarming, and welcome the women to Provincetown. He offered to help them find their way around if they needed it. He spoke well, seemed intelligent, and carried that mysterious magnetic quality that drew people in. Both women found him engaging, neither had any idea they were meeting the man who would go on to be called the Cape Cod Vampire.

That night, Kosta knocked on their door. Patricia opened it and let him in, though Marianne hung back, guarded. He made small talk, asked where they were from, what they planned to do in town. Then he pulled out the ultimate move and asked if they smoked. When Patricia produced a pack of cigarettes, he shook his head. Marijuana, he clarified. Patricia admitted she smoked marijuana sometimes, and Marianne said she'd only tried it once or twice and wasn't interested that night.

She then left to take a shower while Patricia followed Costa downstairs to his room. From a drawer he produced a solid chunk of a sheesh, dense and aromatic. Patricia had never seen anything like it. And Costa explained it was concentrated marijuana pollen, seven to eight times stronger than the usual. He lit a pipe, inhaled deeply and passed a tour. The high hit instantly, sending her. her head spinning, and she stood pacing the room to steady herself. On the window cell, she noticed a copy of Herman Hess's Stephan Wool, the sort of book that

fits his intellectual image. Beneath it was another manual of taxidermy. Curious, she opened it and skimmed the table of contents, skinning birds, making mammal skins, preserving animal remains. She read a passage aloud about peeling away's skin and cutting through vertebrae. That's creepy, she remarked. Costa snatched the book away, sliding it back under Steffan Wolf, and told her it belonged to the previous tenant that he'd never opened it. He claimed he couldn't hurt an animal,

not even a fly. That was a lie, of course. The book was his, and he had read it thoroughly. To change the subject, he pulled out a stack of 45s and held up the Rolling Stones. She's a rainbow. When she said she liked the song, he put it on, singing along and edging closer. Patricia laughed at his theatrics, but the moment ended when Marianne returned from her shower, hair wrapped in a towel. We should get ready for dinner, Marianne said, and Costa saw them to the door, wishing them a good evening. Later that night, he wrote a note and pinned it to theirs. Can you give me a ride to Truro in the morning?

signed simply Tony. The sun came up, but the coal was hitting, and when the women went to get breakfast, they saw the note and agreed. The three of them climbed into Walsh's Volkswagen and drove out of province town with Costa. His stated destination was a patch of marijuana plants in the Truro Woods, so another chance to impress the new girls in town.

His real destination, however, was the burial site of earlier victims. Once isolated out there, the woods, winter time at the end of the world, Costa Drew a 22 caliber pistol, and there wasn't anything they could do. The two had a brief moment to pray that he wouldn't hurt them, but before they could even finish it, both women were shot in the head, quick and efficient. The killings were only the beginning. He set to work with the precision he'd studied in that taxidermy manual. It resembles the Norman Bates Carrier. in Psycho. He was an amateur taxidermist, you know, really became fascinated with dissecting animals and ultimately that grew into dissecting human beings.

He had all the tools he needed right there, saws, shovels, knives, all the things to grow a crop were right there, only now he used them on his victims. Patricia was cut in half at the waist, her skin peeled from her chest in a single piece, like removing a sweater. Marianne was decapitated, her head severed cleanly from her torso, and still, he wasn't finished. He also violated the corpses before lowering them

into the shallow graves he'd prepared in advance, ready for the moment such an opportunity came along. The mutilation was so savage that when police eventually uncovered the remains, they compared the scene not to a typical homicide, but to the aftermath of a shark attack. When his work was done, Costa drove Walsh's Volkswagen back towards Provincetown, but first, he needed to build an alibi and create the illusion that the women had left on their own.

Returning to the rooming house, he taped another note to their door. This one appeared to be from Patricia and Marianne themselves, thanking the landlady for her kindness and explaining they were checking out. The paper matched the first note exactly, and handwriting experts would later confirm what was already suspected, and Kostad forged the women's signatures. He cleared their room of all their belongings, making it look as though they'd packed up and moved on willingly. Over the next few days, he kept the charade going. He even sent a telegram to his own mother's house, posing as the women. It read, What happened? We waited as planned. Is everything all right? We'll meet you as scheduled.

New York City. Love, Pat and Marianne. The ploy was designed to suggest the women were alive and well, and it simply missed meeting up with them. But unlike his earlier victims, Patricia and Marianne had families, friends, and employers who expected them to return. When they failed to show up for work or talk to their loved ones, missing persons reports were filed immediately. It was a transient vibe where people would come and go, and as these young women start to disappear, the authorities really don't take it very seriously. till months go by and they realize there's a killer on the loose. On February 2nd, 1969, police then found Walsh's abandoned Volkswagen in a wooded patch near Pine Grove Cemetery in Truro.

The same place, Costa, was known to cultivate his marijuana garden. One question about it, he spun a web of conflicting stories contradicting himself about when he had last seen the women and what they had talked about. The cops knew the girls stayed where he stayed, and the car was found where he farmed, so the connection was certainly there, and police kept digging. Six days later, in February 8th, a police officer combing the woods spotted what looked like a disturbed patch of earth. He started literally digging, and there beneath the thin layer of soil, wrapped in a bag,

was a nightmare. Human remains cut into eight pieces. But these weren't Patricia Wall. or Marianne Wysaki. The body belonged to Susan Perry, the woman everyone thought had gone to Mexico five months earlier. That discovery shifted everything. The search was no longer for two missing persons.

It was for a potential serial killer. Investigator zeroed in on the land around Costa's marijuana farm, bringing in more officers, more dogs, and a grim determination. On March 5th, they found Marianne. The torso was buried in one spot, her severed head and another. The next day they unearthed Patricia, cut in half at the waist, the skin peeled from her chest. And buried beneath her, the decomposed remains of Sidney Monzen.

Another young woman coaxed claimed had gone to California or Mexico. I've covered 30 to 50 homicides during my career as an investigative journalist. I've never seen anything, this horrific before. The scene was unlike anything season of Michigan. investigators had ever faced in the dunes of the Cape? Some victims had bite marks, a detail that earned Costa the nickname the Cape Cod vampire. The clean, deliberate cut suggested someone with an intimate knowledge of anatomy, or at least plenty of interest in the matter.

And then came the smoking guns, a 22-caliber pistol used to kill Patricia and Marianne, confirmed by ballistics, and Costa's fingerprints on the torn cover of Walsh's Volkswagen owner's manual, discarded in the woods. On March 6th, Tony was arrested, charged with the murders of Patricia and Marianne, but even then he clung to his innocence. There's a maniac out there, he told police, weaving a bizarre tale about a mysterious friend named Carl, who, according to Costa, had done all the killing. Behind bars and awaiting trial, he still hoped he could free himself, or maybe he was just full-on crazy. But he hand-wrote, essentially a novel titled Resurrection. In it, he laid out the murders in detail, but always with Carl as the one holding the knife. It was a fantasy, a desperate

last con. Investigators never found a shred of evidence that Carl even existed. On May 29, 1970, after a grueling trial, Costa was convicted of murdering the two women and sentenced to life and wallpole correctional institution. Authorities believed he'd killed far more, possibly as many as eight women, between 1966 and 69, but only four bodies were ever found. A couple of the ones he suspected of happened when he was out on the West Coast, so it is likely he was fleeing back home before cops caught onto him. Prison was, for the most part, uneventful for Costa, until May 12 of 1974.

Tony Costa died by suicide in 1974 while serving a life sentence at Walpole State Prison. He was 29 years old, and it served less than four years of his sentence. His death sealed a coffin full of unanswered questions. Who else had he killed? Where were the other bodies? And why had he escalated so quickly? Today, Provincetown is back to postcards and clam chowder, It's narrow streets lined with art galleries and seafood shacks. Tourists wander the beaches without realizing that right under their feet,

the sand has already buried some of the darkest secrets in Cape history. And for most, the name Tony Costa means nothing. They never heard of the guy. But for those who remember, it's a name you don't say too loud. We just have to pay tribute to our history, whether it's beautiful stories that live and breathe here in Massachusetts or the dark stories. know, I mean, we know about Whitey Bulger, we know about the Boston Strangler, we know about

Lizzie Borden, we need to know about Tony Costa and what he did, and more importantly, I think, we need to remember the victims here. The Cape Cod vampire didn't just kill. He hollowed out the town's innocence and left it to Rod in the winter of 69. It happened in broad daylight and a place built on Charming Trust, which means that somewhere and some other small sunny town. Another smile like his could be waiting. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. But check out more episodes and podcasts from us if you're in a weird, true crime sort of mood. Links to everything we have to offer down below. I appreciate

you all very much for stopping by and keeping me company. And please remember to come back next week for another episode of Everytown, a little bit scary, strange and mysterious stories. Because you're know maybe your town will be next.