Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of In His Garden: The Anatomy of a Murderer (Cape Cod Murders)

In His Garden: The Anatomy of a Murderer (Cape Cod Murders)
reviewed on + 1217 more book reviews


Ah, there he is.
Alone in an old black and white photograph. Hands cuffed behind his back. Slick black thick hair. Moustache, slick black too. Stretched solid above his upper lip a stray little smile just visible.

But it's the dead calmness of his eyes that catch me. Slip-slipping into nothingness. Staring blankly into a camera lens...
all those years ago. 1970 maybe...
another scary year... Nixon.
Joplin & Hendrix, dead. Vietnam...

Catch 22.

...How smug he seems ...This Mr. Antone Charles "Tony" Costa, a supposedly quiet-mannered Provincetown man... finally under arrest. Accused of brutally murdering four women and burying their remains near the Old Truro cemetery.

How unforgiving it was.

These women mutilated and shot dead.
Their bodies cut up and dumped.
Already decomposing when they were found.
...Organs missing from at least one victim.

What a hellish scene it was.

TRURO, Cape Code... 1969

Around eleven-thirty, on an embankment twenty feet from Old Proprietor's Road, two members of the Truro Rescue Squad came upon a depression some four feet long and two feet wide which had sunk eight inches below the surrounding ground; a piece of olive green cloth was protruding from the bottom of the hollow.