Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio, Close
Speaker 1: your eyes and count to four, he whispered. I felt
Speaker 1: his breath on my cheek. The barrel of the gun
Speaker 1: was hard and cold against my forehead. I counted, and
Speaker 1: when I opened my eyes, he was gone. I sat
Speaker 1: up quickly in bed, gasping, my body soaked with sweat.
Speaker 1: What the hell was that? It was pitch dark in
Speaker 1: the room, not even a sliver of the moon to
Speaker 1: offer some light. Damn, another nightmare. I've been having them
Speaker 1: for almost two years, during which they had become more
Speaker 1: and more violent and vivid, and in each I was
Speaker 1: hunted by an anonymous man with a gun or a knife.
Speaker 1: I would struggle to recognize him, but he kept his
Speaker 1: face turned away from me. Then, just as he fined
Speaker 1: my hiding place, I'd wake up with my heart pounding
Speaker 1: and in trentaline horsing through my legs until they ached
Speaker 1: that this nightmare was different. In this dream, I was
Speaker 1: a young girl again, probably nine or ten, in my
Speaker 1: summer pajamas, walking down along hallway hotel hallway. Suddenly the
Speaker 1: elusive man blocked my path, backed me up against the wall,
Speaker 1: and pointed a gun at my head. I looked up
Speaker 1: at him, and I finally saw a space. It was
Speaker 1: a man I hadn't seen since I was a child
Speaker 1: in Provincetown, Massachusetts. That's Liza Rodman, author of The Babysitter
Speaker 1: My Summers with a Serial Killer. Liza's story involves not one,
Speaker 1: but two very disturbed people. One well, one is the
Speaker 1: babysitter and the other the other is Liza's own mother.
Speaker 1: Liza spent her childhood toggling between two places. Her family's
Speaker 1: year around home near hacka Mock Swamp in southeastern Massachusetts
Speaker 1: and Provincetown, a village on the extreme tip of Cape Cod.
Speaker 1: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 1: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about
Speaker 1: the landscape of your childhood, literally the landscape of my childhood.
Speaker 1: It was kind of swampy. We lived in a swamp,
Speaker 1: and um, I don't know if you've ever heard about
Speaker 1: of the Hackamock Swamp, but my childhood home was right
Speaker 1: on the edge of it. Hacka Mack being the Algonquin
Speaker 1: name for places where spirits dwell. So that was literally
Speaker 1: the beginning of my life, you know, outside. And you
Speaker 1: know it's interesting too with COVID because I've found that
Speaker 1: that that landscape, that being outside, that's the only way
Speaker 1: I could comfort myself during COVID. So that remains because
Speaker 1: it was the only way I could comfort myself in
Speaker 1: my childhood. So I spent my life outside. You know,
Speaker 1: we had a tremendous amount of freedom in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: three four five, and that went for Provincetown too, so
Speaker 1: you know, we had no supervision. Just in context, we
Speaker 1: had no supervision and we sort of ran the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: No one was really looking after us much. My parents
Speaker 1: were married for the first I think four years of
Speaker 1: my life, and after they divorced. You know, my mother
Speaker 1: was young and she was a single mother, and she
Speaker 1: didn't get a lot of support from him, financial or otherwise.
Speaker 1: And she had a best friend who said, hey, my
Speaker 1: husband and I are building a big, gigantic motel on
Speaker 1: the water in Provincetown on a summer job. Because my
Speaker 1: mother taught school, and didn't take her but a minute
Speaker 1: to say yes, and off we went. At that time,
Speaker 1: I think it was seven. So in the early years,
Speaker 1: we stayed local. But from the time I was seven
Speaker 1: on Yes, we went back and forth and could you
Speaker 1: describe to, you know, people listening to this podcast from
Speaker 1: all over the world. Provincetown is a very specific kind
Speaker 1: of place. Provincetown is it's a spit of land that
Speaker 1: runs off the coast and out into a U shape
Speaker 1: almost um to the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: And they say it has the finest light for artists
Speaker 1: in the world, and it's always, at least from the
Speaker 1: beginning of the nineteen hundreds, it was an artist community.
Speaker 1: And it has a rich, rich history of um playwrights,
Speaker 1: Eugene O'Neill, poets, fine artists, all congregated there. There was
Speaker 1: a bit of a there was a local flavor of
Speaker 1: Portuguese fishermen, and then there was this these transplants from
Speaker 1: New York, the likes of Stanley Kunits, the poet, who
Speaker 1: had a home there and beautiful gardens there, and so
Speaker 1: they these two factions sort of coexisted for many, many,
Speaker 1: many decades and happily so. So it's an artist community.
Speaker 1: It's a beach community. It's on a sand dune and
Speaker 1: it sort of juts out into the sea. It's some
Speaker 1: of the best beaches you'll ever walk on. Tell me
Speaker 1: about your mother from your childhood. She was angry, so
Speaker 1: I put it, and I'm sure there were lots of
Speaker 1: reasons for that, but I never knew what they were.
Speaker 1: And you know, she died recently and she went to
Speaker 1: her grave with whatever had happened to her. We never
Speaker 1: did find out. Um, But she was pretty, she was funny,
Speaker 1: she was charismatic, she had a wonderful laugh. People liked her.
Speaker 1: But she had a problem with me. I don't know
Speaker 1: whether I look too much like my father or not
Speaker 1: enough like her, or maybe I was too much like her.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but she had a problem with me,
Speaker 1: and and that anger was usually focused on me. But again,
Speaker 1: she was a hard worker. It was such a complicated
Speaker 1: relationship to begin with that. But as a child I
Speaker 1: was afraid of her. I spent most of my time
Speaker 1: hiding from her. How old was she when you were born?
Speaker 1: Good question, And your sister is younger than you, two
Speaker 1: years younger. Her memories. She calls me the rememberer, and
Speaker 1: she's the forgetter, and she was quite a bit younger.
Speaker 1: She has some some sort of tactile memories and you know,
Speaker 1: over the years, we've had a lot of conversations about it.
Speaker 1: Your mother struck me as a complicated figure because she
Speaker 1: had this kind of almost you know, she's beautiful, she's lively,
Speaker 1: she'd go up to anyone and talk to them. She
Speaker 1: kind of had this magic about her in a certain way,
Speaker 1: the way you would describe her. And she was also
Speaker 1: just kind of a disaster as a mother. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: She really was, I mean in terms of in terms
Speaker 1: of warmth, in terms of I'd love you almost never.
Speaker 1: She really didn't want to be inconvenienced. She was really
Speaker 1: looking for her next good time. And I you know, honestly,
Speaker 1: I think if you were to diagnose her, you could
Speaker 1: one of her her favorite things to do or one
Speaker 1: of her addictions, as I now say, was mean to
Speaker 1: be mean at someone else's expense. There was always was
Speaker 1: always a joke. She always had a funny name for
Speaker 1: you that was just a little bit on the mean side,
Speaker 1: and you felt it. You know, it wasn't It wasn't
Speaker 1: something where you went, oh, did she mean that or not?
Speaker 1: You knew she meant it. Even when she was young.
Speaker 1: She just to tell me about the way she used
Speaker 1: to tease her brother, and it was just something she
Speaker 1: enjoyed it. She used to like to make him cry.
Speaker 1: And what was your father likes? I mean, I know
Speaker 1: they split up when you were really quite small, and
Speaker 1: he was kind of not really president, but would show
Speaker 1: up every once in a while, right exactly. He was
Speaker 1: I think, you know, in a lot of ways, he
Speaker 1: was equally unstable. He was a huge personality, and I
Speaker 1: just thought he was carry Grant or you know, uh,
Speaker 1: I used to think he was Clark Gable from Gone
Speaker 1: with the Wind. He was had this big personality and
Speaker 1: very very handsome and funny and grew up in a
Speaker 1: funeral home, so he had all these funny jokes and
Speaker 1: he just found a way to deal with death early on.
Speaker 1: I think it was through humor. And he was very,
Speaker 1: very extroverted, so you know, you wanted to be around him,
Speaker 1: and he was never around and of course, as a
Speaker 1: young girl, you want to be around your dad anyway.
Speaker 1: And he just was a puzzle to me despite his
Speaker 1: absence and distance. Was he more loving than your mother
Speaker 1: in his way? Yes, he was more nurturing. So for instance,
Speaker 1: when I was nineteen, I had a knee surgery and
Speaker 1: I had been um at his house, um for you know,
Speaker 1: I've been thrown out of my house for one reason
Speaker 1: or another, and so I was at his house recovery
Speaker 1: and he was the one to feed the ice chips
Speaker 1: and to give the pain medication and to um just
Speaker 1: sort of make sure I was okay. And that was
Speaker 1: a really that was a new experience for me, either
Speaker 1: one of them. Really. See, your mother never would have
Speaker 1: done that, not in that way. She might have made pasta,
Speaker 1: but she would have said, you know what, get up,
Speaker 1: you're fine. And again, you have to contextualize these things,
Speaker 1: right because in that in that day, it was pull
Speaker 1: yourself up, dust yourself off, and move because we're not
Speaker 1: going to sit around here and talk about what's wrong.
Speaker 1: We're just going to go out and do. And I
Speaker 1: my mother's father was very much like that. So my
Speaker 1: mother was very much like that. So you know, if
Speaker 1: there was, as she said, a nurse I'm not, she wasn't.
Speaker 1: I like the order of that sentence, not i'm not
Speaker 1: a nurse, A nurse i'm not Exactly, it's a finer
Speaker 1: point than it. You know, something that strikes me often
Speaker 1: on this podcast is that especially when whatever the whatever
Speaker 1: the sort of secrets at hand. Are are sort of
Speaker 1: like rooted in childhood that we have a way of
Speaker 1: imagining all children do, imagining that all other families are
Speaker 1: like our family. You know, we don't know, we don't
Speaker 1: know anything different. Really, it's not until we grow up
Speaker 1: and get a little bit of a more wide angle
Speaker 1: of view that we that we begin to see that, oh, actually,
Speaker 1: maybe that was really not good, not good or not
Speaker 1: the way everybody else was being raised. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: It's the summer of nineteen sixty six and Liza is
Speaker 1: seven years old. She's in Provincetown with her mother and sister.
Speaker 1: Her mother needs to work, which means she also needs babysitters,
Speaker 1: and she's very good at getting them. She'll ask anyone
Speaker 1: to be a babysitter. She doesn't exactly vet them, you know,
Speaker 1: check references. All you need basically is to have a
Speaker 1: pulse and be able to show up. They used to
Speaker 1: call her the babysitter Finder. If you needed one, you
Speaker 1: called her. So she had this whole cadre of young women.
Speaker 1: And oh, we had some terrible babysitters at We had
Speaker 1: car accidents with babysitters. We had babysitters that would cut
Speaker 1: our line us up and cut our nails down to
Speaker 1: the quick until they bled in some cases. And there
Speaker 1: was this little um restaurant next to the hotel and
Speaker 1: they'd send the seven and five year old across to
Speaker 1: get whatever it was, French fries in the vanilla shake,
Speaker 1: and we'd come back with it and they go, we
Speaker 1: didn't want this, and they'd throw it out the window.
Speaker 1: I mean, just crazy people. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: crazy people in Provincetown in those days. There was some
Speaker 1: nice ones, but you know, the drug scene was already entrenched,
Speaker 1: so we had some interesting and and really we would
Speaker 1: be left with anybody. I want to say too, because
Speaker 1: I really do know that that landscape of Provincetown, that
Speaker 1: there's something about that town that really feels like it's
Speaker 1: sort of at the edge of the world. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's surrounded by water, and it's the it's the furthest
Speaker 1: point on Cape Cod, which is already a you know,
Speaker 1: increasingly remote place as you go further and further out,
Speaker 1: and then there's this real town. You know, this kind
Speaker 1: of like ramshackle town, you know, not that small, but
Speaker 1: that is sort of just perched there like there are
Speaker 1: other places in the world like this. Key West is
Speaker 1: a little bit like this, where there is that feeling
Speaker 1: that you can't go any further than that. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was a definite let it all hang out place.
Speaker 1: And that juxtaposition you're talking about about the ramshackle town
Speaker 1: and the tourist trade was a real two competing forces.
Speaker 1: The locals had been there for generations and they needed
Speaker 1: the summer tourists and they needed the artists. They also
Speaker 1: resented the hell out of it, and for good reason.
Speaker 1: So there was always that tension there, and it was
Speaker 1: just under the surface. And even as a child, you
Speaker 1: wanted to be a local. You wanted to play with
Speaker 1: the local kids. The chef at the restaurant, you know,
Speaker 1: he'd come out to the back door of the restaurant.
Speaker 1: He'd come out and he'd feed us food, and we
Speaker 1: thought it was wonderful to be able to hang out
Speaker 1: with his kids, who would knew where the bike trails were,
Speaker 1: and knew where the dune trails were, and knew where
Speaker 1: the hiding places were, and you know, all of those
Speaker 1: names I still have in my head. He wanted to
Speaker 1: be part of it, and in my case, I was
Speaker 1: really not part of anything. So I really deeply wanted
Speaker 1: to be part of Provincetown and of the kids there
Speaker 1: and the people there. There was a warmth to it
Speaker 1: in the sort of the full time, the year round residents.
Speaker 1: You know. It was transient up against really fixed and warm.
Speaker 1: Frank Gaspar, I don't know if you know who he is,
Speaker 1: but he writes a lot about this. He was he
Speaker 1: grew up there, and he writes about what it was
Speaker 1: like to grow up there, and the mother's talking over
Speaker 1: the pens. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing in town,
Speaker 1: and Frank Gaspar, you smoked that cigarette. I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell your mother. So it was that kind of a
Speaker 1: sense and a feeling of belonging to something that I
Speaker 1: think the locals still cling to there, And I don't
Speaker 1: blame them. I would to. As you're speaking, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: it's essentially like insiders versus outsiders in a certain way, right,
Speaker 1: And if you already feel like an outsider and you're
Speaker 1: a child, you're desperate to belong and get swept up
Speaker 1: into into other lives. Yep. So Liza has already had
Speaker 1: quite the parade of babysitters in the summer of sixty six.
Speaker 1: But one of them is a very charismatic young man
Speaker 1: named Tony Costa, whose mother, Cecilia, works for Liza's mother
Speaker 1: at the motel. I had encountered his mother first. She
Speaker 1: was a chambermaid at the motel, so she was my
Speaker 1: first friend, and he was her son, and he was
Speaker 1: looking for work, and of course it was a wonderful
Speaker 1: thing for the year round people to have these resorts
Speaker 1: open up, because they it promised them lots of work
Speaker 1: and lots of hours. And how old was Tony when
Speaker 1: you were seven? He was born in so he would
Speaker 1: have been twenty two. So Tony is hired to babysit you.
Speaker 1: He's hired to take the trash, and he ends up
Speaker 1: befriending all of us. He was like a pied piper,
Speaker 1: is how I describe it. And my aunt used to say,
Speaker 1: here comes Tony, and he'd be driving up the long
Speaker 1: driveway to the motel, and we'd scamper out and try
Speaker 1: and get in the truck with him and talk to him.
Speaker 1: And he's loading the trash in the truck and we're
Speaker 1: dancing around with our flip flop, using our towels as capes.
Speaker 1: And um, we just started going with him, and I
Speaker 1: don't remember exactly how we ended up going in the truck,
Speaker 1: but we thought it was a blast to go to
Speaker 1: the dump, and so off we would go, and it
Speaker 1: was great for them because we were somewhere else. He
Speaker 1: had sort of a kind of Italian darkness to him,
Speaker 1: very dark hair, kind of a big nose, but handsome
Speaker 1: and tall, well for me he was. He felt really tall,
Speaker 1: but I think he was about six ft And the
Speaker 1: guys at the front desk used to say he you know,
Speaker 1: he was as strong as a guy as you'd ever
Speaker 1: want or not want to meet in a dark alley.
Speaker 1: He wore glasses, as I remember, and he also had
Speaker 1: a dark beard, and he was often quite tan. And
Speaker 1: I remember his fingers quite well too. M that's interesting,
Speaker 1: what about them, Um, I just remember them. The truck
Speaker 1: that he always drove was the Royal Coachman utility truck
Speaker 1: and it had a shift. And he was a smoker too,
Speaker 1: and I was fascinated with that. So I remember him
Speaker 1: smoking with his fingers. And you know what else is
Speaker 1: funny to this day, I look at the hands of
Speaker 1: people everyone I meet, um, and I'm just making that
Speaker 1: connection now. But anyway, his hand was always on the shift,
Speaker 1: and I was always right there were you know, my
Speaker 1: sister and I in the front seat, on the big
Speaker 1: front seat, so I was always close to that hand.
Speaker 1: So how much time did you spend with Tony over
Speaker 1: the course of that summer? And there were subsequent summers, right,
Speaker 1: I mean he was he became kind of part of
Speaker 1: your Provincetown life for a period of time, exactly, he
Speaker 1: and his mother, and so I mean, I have no
Speaker 1: idea how many times, but many more more than I
Speaker 1: could count. And you know, every time he was around,
Speaker 1: he'd jingle his keys and we'd come running. And plus,
Speaker 1: you know, he used to buy a streets he used
Speaker 1: to take us. You know, he just felt like you
Speaker 1: were sort of you know, the music was going, you know.
Speaker 1: I heard an interview with Paul McCartney recently, and the
Speaker 1: interviewer asked him what happens to you when you're driving
Speaker 1: along and you hear Beatles song? And Paul McCartney said
Speaker 1: two things. I start singing along, and you can I
Speaker 1: dropped right into the studio when we're laying down the tracks,
Speaker 1: and I remember everything we did that day. And so
Speaker 1: that's the way it was. The songs of the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties were in the front seat of that truck, and
Speaker 1: so we were always singing, We were always laughing, We
Speaker 1: were always you know, up and down that driveway. It
Speaker 1: felt like the wind in your hair. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was just a wind blown summer in the city, you know,
Speaker 1: is what it felt like to me. And so we
Speaker 1: went with him pretty frequently, at least a couple of
Speaker 1: times a week when he was dumping trash, we would
Speaker 1: out with this condree of little kids would accompany Tony
Speaker 1: in his truck as he made his rounds to the
Speaker 1: town dumps in p Town and Truro. Tony would take
Speaker 1: them to what he called his secret garden in the
Speaker 1: woods and told Liza she could never tell anyone. Imagine
Speaker 1: how special that must have felt to a seven year old.
Speaker 1: An adult was asking her to keep a secret. Liza,
Speaker 1: of course didn't know this, but Tony and a bunch
Speaker 1: of his friends were burglarizing pharmacies and doctors offices, making
Speaker 1: trips to Boston where they were buying drugs and stashing
Speaker 1: them in the woods. There was all kinds of ways
Speaker 1: that they stashed the drugs in those woods and Tony
Speaker 1: and his whole crew of friends and people all knew
Speaker 1: those drugs were out there, and they also evidently stashed
Speaker 1: them at the Provincetown dump so that when somebody wanted something,
Speaker 1: that's where they went to get it. And they had
Speaker 1: some kind of crazy system of you pay me and
Speaker 1: I'll pay you, and I mean, I don't know, and
Speaker 1: I wasn't privy to it, but I've read about it later,
Speaker 1: but at the time as a child, he made it
Speaker 1: feel special to you that he was showing you something
Speaker 1: that was a secret and that and that you mustn't
Speaker 1: tell anyone exactly. But that was See, we were talking
Speaker 1: about a garden in the We had talked a lot
Speaker 1: about a garden because I lived next door to my
Speaker 1: grandfather and my grandfather had this amazing garden. And so
Speaker 1: when Tony said he had a garden, I thought, I
Speaker 1: can relate to this. Here's this grown up boy, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to impress him with my knowledge. And so
Speaker 1: I started talking gardening with him, and I think that's
Speaker 1: how it happened. He said, I'll show you my garden.
Speaker 1: I have a garden, and I was like, I'm in
Speaker 1: my wheelhouse now because I can impress this guy. And
Speaker 1: I think that's how it happened. And he said, I
Speaker 1: bet you've got to keep it a secret. You can't
Speaker 1: tell anybody. But but the other of thing is this,
Speaker 1: he took everybody and anybody out to that garden. And
Speaker 1: as far as I know, he took his own kids.
Speaker 1: That has no basis in fact. But he took everybody
Speaker 1: out there. And the other weird thing was and and
Speaker 1: this is part of the whole illness, part of what
Speaker 1: was going on. He was quite afraid to go out there,
Speaker 1: and he talked a lot about it after the fact
Speaker 1: in all of the research I did about how he
Speaker 1: was afraid because it's adjacent to a cemetery, and that
Speaker 1: would also make sense as to why he would wait
Speaker 1: till there was someone in the truck to go out there.
Speaker 1: So I think it was quite convoluted and quite I
Speaker 1: don't think his mind was working right, you know. I
Speaker 1: think he was kind of spinning all the time. He
Speaker 1: had young kids. We had three young kids, so things
Speaker 1: were about to take a very dark turn here. Just
Speaker 1: in case you didn't suspect Tony Costa father three de
Speaker 1: facto babysitter of several more, is well let's just wait
Speaker 1: for what comes next. When you're ten, you say that,
Speaker 1: as clear as a bell. You hear his name as
Speaker 1: somehow associated with something very bad that's happened, whatever was
Speaker 1: going on down there, the place was crawling with cops. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things I find so interesting
Speaker 1: is what we remember and what we don't. And you know,
Speaker 1: sort of like what we bury, and you know, what
Speaker 1: only comes out years later, and so like you realize
Speaker 1: that something big has happened, and you overhear these little
Speaker 1: snatches of dialogue, you know, that come back to you.
Speaker 1: You overhear the phrase the murdered girls and all cut up.
Speaker 1: But there's nothing in you at that point that's associating
Speaker 1: that with Tony Costa. No, and that look so shocking.
Speaker 1: Never in a million years did I make that association. This,
Speaker 1: what I'm about to recount is going to be pretty
Speaker 1: hard to hear. Tony Costa, though Liza as a child
Speaker 1: doesn't know that it's him, is accused and convicted of
Speaker 1: at least two horrific murders of young women, and is
Speaker 1: a suspect and more. He would become involved with them
Speaker 1: in a romantic way, and then he would kill them.
Speaker 1: He cut up their bodies and did horrific things to
Speaker 1: those bodies. I won't get into. A neuroscientist who studies
Speaker 1: the brains of serial killers told Liza years later that
Speaker 1: these guys are so rare and hard to study because
Speaker 1: usually they kill themselves. Their brains are gone before they
Speaker 1: can figure out what happened. So when you're, you know,
Speaker 1: ten eleven years old and he's disappeared, do you have
Speaker 1: any kind of narrative for your self? Was like, why
Speaker 1: he's disappeared? No, he was just gone, and you know
Speaker 1: that less. The other thing we need to remember is
Speaker 1: not only was my life transient with people coming in
Speaker 1: and out of it, but provincetowns and graphic transient. And
Speaker 1: my father was gone, my grandparents moved away. It just
Speaker 1: wasn't unusual. He did always talk about going, going, going,
Speaker 1: going to California, going, You're going there. He was always
Speaker 1: talking about that. And there was a big connection between
Speaker 1: Hayde Ashbury at the time and Boston Common and Provincetown.
Speaker 1: The young people were all trying to get away, especially
Speaker 1: from a town like Provincetown that probably felt pretty remote
Speaker 1: to them. I remember how remote it it still feels
Speaker 1: remote to me. I don't know how you experienced it,
Speaker 1: but when I go out there, it feels pretty remote.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: Tony sort of fades away. For Eliza, she doesn't think
Speaker 1: about him, She has no idea what happened. She moves
Speaker 1: on the way kids do, and she grows up. Life happens,
Speaker 1: she gets married, starts a family. She has as little
Speaker 1: to do with her mother as possible. Time speeds up
Speaker 1: as time does, so let's fast forward, oh to about
Speaker 1: the time lies as oldest child, a son is graduating
Speaker 1: from high school. I went back to school to finish
Speaker 1: my bachelor's degree, which I've never been able to finish
Speaker 1: um coming from the family, I came from quite frankly,
Speaker 1: with an anxious mess most of the time. And so
Speaker 1: I went back and I said, I'm gonna do this now.
Speaker 1: While I was doing that, I start of having these dreams,
Speaker 1: and they were very violent, and they were right in
Speaker 1: a row of about six months, and someone was always
Speaker 1: trying to kill me, and with a gun or a
Speaker 1: knife or in the case of the first dream, of
Speaker 1: fireplace poker. And I had always written down my dreams
Speaker 1: always I had always written, and in order to figure
Speaker 1: out what was going on during this time that I
Speaker 1: was keeping a process journal anyway, um, as I was
Speaker 1: reading and writing about different you know, literature and writing
Speaker 1: poems and other things, I decided to start writing them in.
Speaker 1: And when I did that, I noticed the repeat images,
Speaker 1: and all of those repeat images were of my childhood,
Speaker 1: and I kept saying, what is going on? So I
Speaker 1: just kept writing them down, the dreams, the poems. Then
Speaker 1: I had that final It wasn't actually the final dream,
Speaker 1: but it was fine enough because in each one of
Speaker 1: these dreams I couldn't see the face of the man
Speaker 1: in the dream, so whoever was holding the weapon I
Speaker 1: couldn't see. And it became more and more irritating to
Speaker 1: me until the day that I had the dream when
Speaker 1: I was face to face with Tony and that was
Speaker 1: in the Royal Coachman lobby in my dream, and so
Speaker 1: I said, holy sh it, I wonder if this is
Speaker 1: what it's about. And that's when I said to my mother,
Speaker 1: did something happen to me that you have not been
Speaker 1: clear about? And that's when she told me. So she
Speaker 1: knew when you said that your mother was able to
Speaker 1: put those pieces together. Both my mother and my aunt
Speaker 1: were there that day, and I had said, I had
Speaker 1: just saw Tony Costa in the dream with a gun
Speaker 1: to my head. What do you know about him? Why
Speaker 1: would I be thinking about that? And she said, well,
Speaker 1: I know he'd be came, you know, a serial killer.
Speaker 1: I know he became a serial killer, as if I
Speaker 1: know he became a doctor or an oncologist or a
Speaker 1: pediatrician and a serial killer. And I just stood there
Speaker 1: and I you know, there's that moment in time when
Speaker 1: something so significant, have such significant information coming your way,
Speaker 1: that everything slows down and just grinds to a halt,
Speaker 1: and you're hearing it and saying, how can how can
Speaker 1: I be hearing this information? And that's what it was like.
Speaker 1: It was like almost like a drug flashback. It just
Speaker 1: slowed right down, and I something said to me, this
Speaker 1: is it, This is it. Until I started researching, and
Speaker 1: of course they all laughed at me, and I just
Speaker 1: kept researching and writing and researching and not really knowing
Speaker 1: I was making a book, but more trying to find
Speaker 1: out what happened to me and what those dreams meant.
Speaker 1: So is is it your sense that on some level
Speaker 1: that you always knew. I always had the images, Danny.
Speaker 1: I always had these images of what had happened in Provincetown,
Speaker 1: and I carried them with me, and I used to
Speaker 1: tell people the story and they would go hu huh,
Speaker 1: you know, almost like when you share too much. And
Speaker 1: so we sort of carried that with us, and we
Speaker 1: would laugh about it because we didn't know, you know,
Speaker 1: this is our childhood, how did yours go? You know,
Speaker 1: my sister has a famous line. She used to say,
Speaker 1: you know, I was at a cocktail party the other night,
Speaker 1: and I was telling some stories from our childhood, and
Speaker 1: other people don't think it's as funny as we do.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, that's how we dealt with it
Speaker 1: with humor, because it was kind of a crazy image
Speaker 1: to remember. Why did we remember that? Why did we
Speaker 1: hear about that? We knew something awful had happened, But
Speaker 1: what we did not know was that the same man
Speaker 1: who was driving us around and getting us ice cream
Speaker 1: cones was the man who had committed that. Whatever atrocities
Speaker 1: we had in our heads because we were little, so
Speaker 1: we didn't put a narrative together about it. We were
Speaker 1: in some cases, we were barely reading it. Wasn't until
Speaker 1: I was nine or ten years old that I started
Speaker 1: reading these accounts in the paper and not understanding that
Speaker 1: they had anything to do with Tony. And at the
Speaker 1: time his name was not in the paper either. That's
Speaker 1: important Liza's history was. Tony was of course, much less central,
Speaker 1: much briefer than the relationship she had with her mother.
Speaker 1: Both were damaging, both were indelible, but Liza had been lucky.
Speaker 1: She didn't fit the mold of Tony's victims. She was
Speaker 1: a child, a child of a woman who inflicted greater
Speaker 1: damage on her. As she writes, and here is the
Speaker 1: deepest of those wounds. I have always felt as though
Speaker 1: there was something wrong with me, inherently deep and dirty
Speaker 1: and dark, something unlikable and unfixable and worst of all, unlovable,
Speaker 1: and I believed it. As a result, I spent my
Speaker 1: childhood more afraid of my mother than I was of
Speaker 1: a psychopathic serial killer. And then you go on. Finally,
Speaker 1: when I became a mother, and in spite of my fear,
Speaker 1: I was able to stop what had been generations of
Speaker 1: physical abuse. It ended with me mm hmm, And it
Speaker 1: did in family secrets. I think, like every guest of
Speaker 1: mine to a person would say this ends with me.
Speaker 1: I think it's self selecting. People who are willing to
Speaker 1: have this conversation in such a public a forum. Are
Speaker 1: people who have come to a place of the way
Speaker 1: that I make meaning of this is to completely change
Speaker 1: the narrative. I think that's so important, the way that
Speaker 1: I make meaning of this. This is not a subject
Speaker 1: we can sweep under the rug anymore. That these kinds
Speaker 1: of people are out there and they're not well, and
Speaker 1: we need to find some kind of system whereby we
Speaker 1: put back together our mental health system because we can
Speaker 1: prevent some of this. You know, in California they're screening
Speaker 1: children for trauma early trauma now under the new Attorney General.
Speaker 1: You know, they need to do that in this country
Speaker 1: in order to save some of these kids. Because I
Speaker 1: just clawed my way out and I've spent most of
Speaker 1: my life in therapy. But you know, I think the
Speaker 1: willingness to talk about it is kind of a double
Speaker 1: edged sword when I'm doing it anyway, because I had to,
Speaker 1: because I couldn't not. Why does it feel like a
Speaker 1: double edged sword to you? Well, because it's exposing yourself, right,
Speaker 1: because in order to do it, your vulnerabilities have to
Speaker 1: get known to other people. I guess there's a certain
Speaker 1: amount of shame that goes with it until you realize
Speaker 1: it's not you. It's not you, it's other people, and
Speaker 1: that's you know, that's a difficult transition to make. So
Speaker 1: I think it's a double edged sword coming out and
Speaker 1: talking about it. Believe me, there are people who are
Speaker 1: not happy that have done this. But that's too bad
Speaker 1: because it's given me a new freedom and I'll take it.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan
Speaker 1: Fagin and Bethan Macaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard
Speaker 1: is our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd
Speaker 1: like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story
Speaker 1: could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is
Speaker 1: one secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero.
Speaker 1: You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Speaker 1: Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and
Speaker 1: Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to
Speaker 1: know about my family's great that inspired this podcast, check
Speaker 1: out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.