| 8.29.99 Drug culture's downside: Creepy killings on the Cape By JODY MCPHILLIPS & SCOTT MACKAY Journal Staff Writers Charles Manson got the headlines, but Antone C. Costa was worse. He did his own dirty work. Two Rhode Island women were unlucky enough to run across Costa in 1969. They ended up sexually abused, shot, stabbed, flayed, dismembered, and buried in shallow graves, victims of a handyman and amateur taxidermist called by his drugged-up disciples ''Lord Antone, Sire of All That Is True.'' Patricia H. Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki were both 23 that day in January 1969 when they got together in the Rhode Island College cafeteria to plan a weekend getaway. On Friday, Jan. 24, they hopped into Walsh's almost-new blue VW for a trip to Provincetown, on Cape Cod. There they checked into a guest house, where they met a fellow guest named Tony. The next day they disappeared. On their door, a note read: Mary Anne, I hate to bother you, but if you have time, I could use a ride to Truro. Tony. The women's bodies were found March 4 in woods in South Truro, along with the remains of at least two others. In 1963, Walsh and Wysocki had graduated from Providence's Classical High School and then entered Rhode Island College. By 1969 Walsh was teaching at the Laurel Hill elementary school and Wysocki, who had dropped out to work for a while, was back at RIC as a junior. Tony Costa was 24 in 1969, a divorced father of three. He had married a 14-year-old girl; she fled the marriage when his drug use spiraled out of control. She testified that he had once put a plastic bag over her head so he could have sex with her after she passed out. Psychiatrists said that Costa was a sexual sadist and necrophiliac. In Provincetown, he was at the center of a drug-addled ring of teenagers who seemed to revere him. At his trial, Costa's lawyers argued that he was too deranged by drugs to know what he was doing. The jury didn't buy it. On May 22, 1970, he was sentenced to life without parole. He blamed drugs for his descent into mania, telling the jury that he had lived ''a happy life'' before starting to abuse tranquilizers, in 1965. ''Drugs are destruction,'' said Costa. ''There is no, no way out of it. You cannot find happiness in that capsule; you cannot find happiness by shooting it into your veins; you cannot shoot reality into your veins. You can only destroy yourself.'' On May 13, 1974, he hanged himself in Walpole prison. |
A yearlong Providence Journal series about life in Rhode Island. Produced in cooperation with the Rhode Island Historical Society. Copyright © 1999 The Providence Journal Company |