0:00

Family Secrets is a production of I Heart

0:02

Radio, Close

0:07

your eyes and count to four, he

0:09

whispered. I felt

0:12

his breath on my cheek. The

0:14

barrel of the gun was hard and cold

0:16

against my forehead. I

0:19

counted, and when I opened my eyes,

0:21

he was gone. I sat

0:24

up quickly in bed, gasping, my body

0:26

soaked with sweat. What the hell was

0:28

that? It was

0:30

pitch dark in the room, not even

0:32

a sliver of the moon to offer some light.

0:35

Damn, another nightmare. I've

0:38

been having them for almost two years, during

0:40

which they had become more and more violent

0:42

and vivid, and in each I was hunted

0:44

by an anonymous man with a gun or

0:47

a knife. I would struggle

0:49

to recognize him, but he kept

0:51

his face turned away from me. Then,

0:55

just as he fined my hiding place, I'd

0:57

wake up with my heart pounding and in trentaline

1:00

horsing through my legs until they ached

1:03

that this nightmare was different. In

1:05

this dream, I was a young girl again,

1:08

probably nine or ten, in my summer

1:10

pajamas, walking down along hallway

1:13

hotel hallway. Suddenly

1:16

the elusive man blocked my path,

1:19

backed me up against the wall, and pointed

1:22

a gun at my head. I

1:24

looked up at him, and I finally saw

1:27

a space. It was a man

1:29

I hadn't seen since I was a child

1:31

in Provincetown, Massachusetts. That's

1:37

Liza Rodman, author of The

1:39

Babysitter My Summers with a Serial

1:42

Killer. Liza's story

1:44

involves not one, but two

1:46

very disturbed people. One

1:49

well, one is the babysitter and

1:51

the other the other is Liza's

1:53

own mother. Liza spent

1:55

her childhood toggling between two

1:57

places. Her family's year

2:00

around home near hacka Mock Swamp

2:02

in southeastern Massachusetts and

2:04

Provincetown, a village on the extreme

2:07

tip of Cape Cod. I'm

2:20

Danny Shapiro, and this is family

2:23

secrets, the secrets that are kept

2:25

from us, the secrets we keep from others,

2:27

and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

2:33

Tell me about the landscape of your childhood,

2:36

literally the landscape of my childhood.

2:39

It was kind of swampy. We lived in

2:41

a swamp, and

2:44

um, I don't know if you've ever heard about of

2:46

the Hackamock Swamp, but my

2:49

childhood home was right on the edge

2:51

of it. Hacka Mack being the Algonquin

2:54

name for places where spirits dwell.

2:56

So that was literally the

2:59

beginning of my life, you know, outside.

3:01

And you know it's interesting too with COVID because

3:04

I've found that that that

3:06

landscape, that being outside,

3:09

that's the only way I could comfort myself during

3:11

COVID. So that remains because it was the only way

3:13

I could comfort myself in my childhood.

3:16

So I spent my life outside. You know,

3:18

we had a tremendous amount of freedom in nineteen

3:21

sixty three four five, and

3:24

that went for Provincetown too, so you

3:27

know, we had no supervision. Just in

3:29

context, we had no supervision and

3:32

we sort of ran the neighborhood. No

3:34

one was really looking after us much. My

3:36

parents were married for the first I think four years

3:39

of my life, and after they divorced.

3:42

You know, my mother was young and

3:45

she was a single mother, and

3:47

she didn't get a lot of support from him,

3:50

financial or otherwise. And she

3:52

had a best friend who said, hey, my

3:55

husband and I are building a

3:57

big, gigantic motel on the

4:00

water in Provincetown on a

4:02

summer job. Because my mother taught school,

4:06

and didn't take her but a

4:08

minute to say yes, and off we went.

4:11

At that time, I think it was seven. So

4:13

in the early years, we stayed local. But

4:15

from the time I was seven on Yes, we went

4:17

back and forth and could you describe

4:20

to, you know, people listening to this podcast

4:22

from all over the world. Provincetown is

4:24

a very specific kind of place. Provincetown

4:27

is it's a spit of land that runs

4:30

off the coast and out into a

4:33

U shape almost um to the

4:35

tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

4:38

And they say it has the finest

4:41

light for artists

4:43

in the world, and it's

4:45

always, at least from the beginning

4:47

of the nineteen hundreds, it was

4:49

an artist community. And it

4:52

has a rich, rich history of

4:54

um playwrights, Eugene O'Neill, poets,

4:58

fine artists, all congregated

5:00

there. There was a bit of a there

5:02

was a local flavor of Portuguese

5:05

fishermen, and then there was this these

5:07

transplants from New York, the likes

5:09

of Stanley Kunits, the poet, who

5:12

had a home there and beautiful gardens there,

5:14

and so they these two factions

5:17

sort of coexisted for many, many, many

5:19

decades and happily so.

5:21

So it's an artist community. It's a

5:23

beach community. It's on

5:25

a sand dune and it sort

5:27

of juts out into the sea. It's some

5:30

of the best beaches you'll ever walk on. Tell

5:33

me about your mother from

5:35

your childhood. She

5:38

was angry, so I

5:40

put it, and I'm

5:42

sure there were lots of reasons for

5:44

that, but I never knew what they were.

5:47

And you know, she died recently and she

5:50

went to her grave with whatever

5:52

had happened to her. We never did find out. Um,

5:56

But she was pretty, she was funny,

5:59

she was charismatic, she had a wonderful

6:02

laugh. People liked

6:04

her. But she had a problem with

6:06

me. I don't know whether

6:08

I look too much like my father or not enough

6:10

like her, or maybe I was too much like

6:12

her. I don't know, but she had

6:14

a problem with me, and and that anger

6:17

was usually focused on me. But

6:20

again, she was a hard worker. It

6:22

was such a complicated relationship to begin

6:25

with that. But as a child

6:27

I was afraid of her. I spent most of

6:29

my time hiding from her. How old

6:31

was she when you were born? Good

6:33

question, And your sister

6:36

is younger than you, two

6:38

years younger. Her memories. She

6:41

calls me the rememberer, and she's the

6:43

forgetter, and she was quite a bit

6:45

younger. She has some some sort of tactile

6:48

memories and you know, over

6:50

the years, we've had a lot of conversations

6:52

about it. Your mother

6:55

struck me as a complicated figure because

6:58

she had this kind of almost you

7:00

know, she's beautiful, she's lively,

7:03

she'd go up to anyone and talk to them. She

7:05

kind of had this magic about

7:07

her in a certain way, the way you would describe her. And she

7:09

was also just kind of a disaster

7:12

as a mother. Mm hmm. She

7:14

really was, I mean in terms

7:17

of in

7:19

terms of warmth, in terms of

7:22

I'd love you almost never. She

7:24

really didn't want to be inconvenienced. She

7:26

was really looking for her next good time.

7:28

And I you know, honestly, I think

7:30

if you were to diagnose her, you

7:33

could one of her her favorite

7:35

things to do or one of her addictions, as

7:37

I now say, was mean to

7:39

be mean at someone else's expense.

7:42

There was always was always a joke. She always

7:44

had a funny name for

7:46

you that was just a little bit

7:49

on the mean side, and

7:52

you felt it. You know, it

7:54

wasn't It wasn't something where you went, oh,

7:56

did she mean that or not? You knew she meant it.

7:59

Even when she was young. She just to

8:01

tell me about the way she used to tease her

8:03

brother, and it was

8:06

just something she

8:08

enjoyed it. She used to like to make

8:10

him cry. And what

8:12

was your father likes? I mean, I know they split

8:15

up when you were really quite small,

8:17

and he was kind of not

8:19

really president, but would show up every once

8:21

in a while, right exactly.

8:23

He was I think,

8:26

you know, in a lot of ways, he was equally unstable.

8:30

He was a huge personality, and

8:32

I just thought he was carry Grant or

8:34

you know, uh, I used to think he was

8:37

Clark Gable from Gone with the Wind.

8:39

He was had this big personality

8:42

and very very handsome and funny

8:45

and grew up in a funeral home, so

8:47

he had all these funny jokes and he just

8:49

found a way to deal with death early

8:52

on. I think it was through humor.

8:55

And he was very, very extroverted,

8:58

so you know, you wanted to be around

9:00

him, and he was never around and of course, as a young

9:03

girl, you want to be around your dad anyway.

9:06

And he just was a puzzle to

9:08

me despite his absence

9:11

and distance. Was he more loving

9:13

than your mother in his

9:16

way? Yes, he was more

9:18

nurturing. So for instance, when I was

9:20

nineteen, I had a knee surgery and

9:22

I had been um at his house,

9:26

um for you know, I've been thrown out

9:28

of my house for one reason or another, and so I was at

9:30

his house recovery and

9:32

he was the one to feed the ice chips

9:35

and to give the pain medication and

9:38

to um just

9:40

sort of make sure I was okay. And that

9:42

was a really that was a new experience

9:46

for me, either one of them. Really. See, your

9:48

mother never would have done that, not

9:50

in that way. She might have made pasta,

9:53

but she would have said, you know what, get up, you're

9:56

fine. And again, you have to contextualize

9:58

these things, right because in

10:01

that in that day, it was pull yourself

10:03

up, dust yourself

10:05

off, and move because

10:07

we're not going to sit around here and talk about what's

10:09

wrong. We're just going to go out and do. And I

10:12

my mother's father was very much like that. So

10:14

my mother was very much like that. So

10:17

you know, if there was, as she said, a nurse

10:19

I'm not, she

10:21

wasn't. I like the order

10:23

of that sentence, not i'm not a nurse, A nurse

10:26

i'm not Exactly, it's

10:28

a finer point than it. You know, something

10:30

that strikes me often on this podcast

10:33

is that especially

10:36

when whatever the whatever the

10:38

sort of secrets at hand. Are are

10:40

sort of like rooted in childhood that

10:43

we have a way of

10:46

imagining all children do, imagining

10:48

that all other families are

10:51

like our family. You know, we don't know, we

10:53

don't know anything different. Really, it's

10:55

not until we grow up and get a

10:57

little bit of a more wide angle of view

10:59

that we that we begin to see that, oh,

11:02

actually, maybe that was really not

11:04

good, not good or not the way everybody

11:06

else was being raised. We'll

11:11

be right back. It's

11:22

the summer of nineteen sixty six and

11:25

Liza is seven years old. She's

11:27

in Provincetown with her mother and sister. Her

11:30

mother needs to work, which means

11:32

she also needs babysitters, and

11:34

she's very good at getting them.

11:36

She'll ask anyone to be a babysitter.

11:39

She doesn't exactly vet them,

11:42

you know, check references. All

11:44

you need basically is to have a pulse and

11:46

be able to show up. They

11:49

used to call her the babysitter Finder. If

11:52

you needed one, you called her. So she

11:54

had this whole cadre of young women.

11:56

And oh, we had some terrible babysitters

11:59

at We had car accidents with babysitters.

12:02

We had babysitters that would cut

12:04

our line us up and

12:06

cut our nails down to the quick

12:09

until they bled in some cases. And

12:12

there was this little um restaurant

12:14

next to the hotel and they'd send the seven

12:16

and five year old across to

12:19

get whatever it was, French fries in the

12:21

vanilla shake, and we'd come back with it

12:23

and they go, we didn't want this, and they'd throw it

12:26

out the window. I mean, just crazy

12:28

people. There are a lot of crazy people

12:30

in Provincetown in those days. There

12:32

was some nice ones, but you know, the drug scene was

12:34

already entrenched,

12:37

so we had some interesting and and

12:39

really we would be left with anybody. I

12:42

want to say too, because I really do know that

12:44

that landscape of Provincetown, that there's something

12:46

about that town that

12:48

really feels like it's sort of at the

12:50

edge of the world. I mean, it's surrounded

12:53

by water, and it's the it's the

12:55

furthest point on Cape

12:57

Cod, which is already a

13:00

you know, increasingly remote place as you go

13:02

further and further out, and then there's

13:05

this real town. You

13:07

know, this kind of like ramshackle

13:11

town, you know, not that small,

13:13

but that is sort of just perched there

13:16

like there are other places in the world like this. Key

13:18

West is a little bit like this, where

13:20

there is that feeling that you

13:23

can't go any further than that. Yeah,

13:25

it was. It was a definite let it all hang

13:27

out place. And that juxtaposition

13:30

you're talking about about the ramshackle

13:32

town and the tourist trade

13:35

was a real two competing

13:37

forces. The locals

13:40

had been there for generations and

13:42

they needed the summer tourists

13:45

and they needed the artists. They

13:47

also resented the hell out of it, and

13:50

for good reason. So there

13:52

was always that tension there, and it was just

13:54

under the surface. And even

13:57

as a child, you

14:00

wanted to be a local. You

14:02

wanted to play with the local kids. The

14:05

chef at the restaurant, you know, he'd

14:07

come out to the back door of the restaurant.

14:09

He'd come out and he'd feed us food, and

14:11

we thought it was wonderful to be able to hang out with

14:13

his kids, who would knew

14:15

where the bike trails were, and knew where the dune

14:18

trails were, and knew where the hiding places

14:20

were, and you know, all

14:22

of those names I still have in my head.

14:25

He wanted to be part of it, and in

14:27

my case, I was really not part

14:29

of anything. So I really

14:32

deeply wanted to be part of Provincetown

14:35

and of the kids there and the people there.

14:37

There was a warmth to it in

14:40

the sort of the full time, the year

14:42

round residents. You know. It was

14:45

transient up against really

14:48

fixed and warm. Frank

14:50

Gaspar, I don't know if you know who he is, but he

14:52

writes a lot about this. He was he

14:54

grew up there, and he writes about what

14:56

it was like to grow up there, and the mother's

14:59

talking over the pens. Everybody

15:01

knew what everybody else was doing in town, and

15:03

Frank Gaspar, you smoked that cigarette.

15:06

I'm going to tell your mother. So it was

15:08

that kind of a sense and

15:10

a feeling of belonging to something that

15:12

I think the locals still cling to there, And

15:15

I don't blame them. I would to. As

15:17

you're speaking, I'm thinking it's essentially like insiders

15:20

versus outsiders in a certain way, right, And

15:22

if you already feel like an outsider and

15:24

you're a child, you're desperate to belong

15:27

and get swept up into into

15:29

other lives. Yep. So

15:33

Liza has already had quite the parade

15:35

of babysitters in the summer of sixty six.

15:38

But one of them is a very charismatic

15:40

young man named Tony Costa, whose

15:43

mother, Cecilia, works for Liza's

15:45

mother at the motel. I

15:49

had encountered his mother first. She

15:52

was a chambermaid at the motel, so

15:54

she was my first friend, and

15:57

he was her son,

16:00

and he was looking for work, and

16:02

of course it was a wonderful

16:05

thing for the year round people to

16:07

have these resorts open up, because

16:10

they it promised them lots of work and

16:12

lots of hours. And

16:14

how old was Tony when you were seven? He

16:17

was born in so

16:19

he would have been twenty two. So

16:22

Tony is hired to

16:25

babysit you. He's hired

16:27

to take the trash, and he ends

16:29

up befriending all of us.

16:32

He was like a pied piper, is how

16:34

I describe it. And my

16:37

aunt used to say, here comes

16:39

Tony, and he'd be driving

16:41

up the long driveway to the motel,

16:44

and we'd scamper out and

16:46

try and get in the truck with him and talk to him.

16:48

And he's loading the trash in the truck and

16:51

we're dancing around with our flip

16:53

flop, using our towels as capes.

16:56

And um, we just started going with

16:58

him, and I don't remember exactly

17:01

how we ended up going in

17:03

the truck, but we thought it was a blast to

17:05

go to the dump, and so off we

17:07

would go, and it was great for

17:09

them because we

17:12

were somewhere else. He

17:14

had sort of a kind of Italian darkness

17:17

to him, very dark hair, kind

17:20

of a big nose, but handsome

17:22

and tall, well for me he

17:25

was. He felt really tall,

17:27

but I think he was about six ft And

17:29

the guys at the front desk used to say he you

17:31

know, he was as strong as a guy

17:34

as you'd ever want or not want to meet in a

17:36

dark alley. He wore glasses,

17:38

as I remember, and he also

17:41

had a dark beard, and he was often quite

17:43

tan. And I remember

17:45

his fingers quite well too. M

17:48

that's interesting, what about them,

17:50

Um, I just remember them. The truck

17:53

that he always drove was the Royal Coachman

17:55

utility truck and it had a

17:58

shift. And he was a smoker too,

18:00

and I was fascinated with that. So I

18:02

remember him smoking with his fingers.

18:05

And you know what else is funny to this day,

18:08

I look at the hands

18:10

of people everyone I meet,

18:13

um, and I'm just making that connection now. But anyway,

18:15

his hand was always on the shift, and

18:18

I was always right there were you know, my sister

18:20

and I in the front seat, on the big front seat,

18:23

so I was always close to that hand.

18:26

So how much time did

18:29

you spend with Tony over the course

18:31

of that summer? And

18:34

there were subsequent summers, right, I

18:36

mean he was he became kind of part

18:38

of your Provincetown life for

18:40

a period of time, exactly, he and

18:42

his mother, and so I

18:45

mean, I have no idea how many times,

18:47

but many more more than I could count.

18:50

And you know, every time he was around,

18:53

he'd jingle his keys and we'd come running. And plus,

18:55

you know, he used to buy a streets he used to take

18:58

us. You know, he just felt like you were

19:01

sort of you know, the music

19:03

was going, you know. I heard an

19:05

interview with Paul McCartney recently, and

19:08

the interviewer asked him what happens

19:10

to you when you're driving along

19:12

and you hear Beatles

19:15

song? And Paul

19:17

McCartney said two things.

19:20

I start singing along, and

19:24

you can I dropped right into the

19:26

studio when we're laying down the tracks,

19:29

and I remember everything we did that day.

19:32

And so that's the way it was. The

19:34

songs of the nineteen sixties were in

19:36

the front seat of that truck, and

19:39

so we were always singing, We were

19:41

always laughing, We were always

19:44

you know, up and down that driveway. It

19:46

felt like the wind in your hair. I mean, it

19:48

was just a wind blown

19:51

summer in the city, you know, is

19:53

what it felt like to me. And so

19:55

we went with him pretty frequently, at least

19:57

a couple of times a week when he was dumping trash,

19:59

we would out with this

20:02

condree of little kids would accompany Tony in

20:04

his truck as he made his rounds to

20:07

the town dumps in p Town and Truro.

20:10

Tony would take them to what he called his

20:12

secret garden in the woods

20:15

and told Liza she could never tell

20:17

anyone. Imagine

20:19

how special that must have felt to

20:22

a seven year old. An adult was

20:24

asking her to keep a secret. Liza,

20:27

of course didn't know this, but

20:29

Tony and a bunch of his friends were burglarizing

20:31

pharmacies and doctors offices, making

20:33

trips to Boston where they were buying drugs

20:36

and stashing them in the woods. There

20:39

was all kinds of ways that they stashed the drugs

20:41

in those woods and Tony

20:44

and his whole crew of friends and people all

20:46

knew those drugs were out there, and

20:49

they also evidently stashed them at

20:51

the Provincetown dump so that when

20:53

somebody wanted something, that's where they went to get

20:55

it. And

20:57

they had some kind of crazy system of you pay

21:00

me and I'll pay you, and I mean, I

21:02

don't know, and I wasn't privy to it, but

21:04

I've read about it later, but at

21:06

the time as a child, he

21:10

made it feel special to you that he

21:12

was showing you something that was a secret

21:15

and that and that you mustn't tell anyone

21:18

exactly. But that was

21:21

See, we were talking about a garden in

21:23

the We had talked a lot about a garden

21:25

because I lived next door to my grandfather

21:28

and my grandfather had this amazing garden.

21:31

And so when Tony said he had a garden, I

21:33

thought, I can relate to this. Here's

21:36

this grown up boy, and I'm going to impress

21:38

him with my knowledge. And so

21:41

I started talking gardening with him,

21:43

and I think that's how it happened. He said,

21:45

I'll show you my garden. I have a garden, and

21:48

I was like, I'm in my wheelhouse now

21:50

because I can impress this guy.

21:53

And I think that's how it happened. And

21:56

he said, I bet you've got to keep it a secret. You can't

21:58

tell anybody. But but the other of thing is this, he

22:01

took everybody and anybody out to

22:03

that garden. And as far as I know, he

22:05

took his own kids. That has

22:07

no basis in fact. But he

22:09

took everybody out there. And

22:12

the other weird thing was and and

22:14

this is part of the whole illness, part

22:17

of what was going on. He

22:19

was quite afraid to go out there, and

22:22

he talked a lot about it after the fact

22:24

in all of the research I did about

22:27

how he was afraid because it's adjacent to a

22:29

cemetery, and

22:32

that would also make sense as to why

22:34

he would wait till there was someone in the truck

22:37

to go out there. So I think

22:39

it was quite convoluted and quite I

22:42

don't think his mind was working right, you know.

22:44

I think he was kind of spinning all the

22:46

time. He had young kids.

22:50

We had three young kids, so

22:52

things were about to take a very dark

22:55

turn here. Just in case you didn't suspect

22:58

Tony Costa father three

23:00

de facto babysitter of several more, is

23:04

well let's just wait for what comes

23:06

next. When

23:09

you're ten, you say

23:11

that, as clear as a bell. You hear his name

23:14

as somehow associated with

23:17

something very bad that's happened, whatever

23:20

was going on down there, the place was crawling

23:22

with cops. Yeah, I mean,

23:24

one of the things I find so interesting is what

23:26

we remember and what we don't. And you

23:29

know, sort of like what we bury, and

23:32

you know, what only comes out years later, and

23:34

so like you realize that

23:37

something big

23:40

has happened, and you overhear these

23:42

little snatches of dialogue,

23:45

you know, that come back to you. You overhear

23:48

the phrase the murdered girls

23:51

and all cut up. But

23:53

there's nothing in you

23:55

at that point that's associating that with

23:57

Tony Costa. No, and

24:00

that look so shocking.

24:03

Never in a million years did

24:05

I make that association. This,

24:10

what I'm about to recount is going

24:12

to be pretty hard to hear. Tony

24:15

Costa, though Liza as

24:17

a child doesn't know that it's him,

24:19

is accused and convicted of at least two

24:22

horrific murders of young women, and

24:24

is a suspect and more. He

24:26

would become involved with them in a romantic

24:29

way, and then he would kill them.

24:32

He cut up their bodies and did horrific

24:34

things to those bodies. I won't get into. A

24:37

neuroscientist who studies the brains of serial

24:39

killers told Liza years later

24:42

that these guys are so rare and

24:44

hard to study because usually

24:47

they kill themselves. Their brains

24:49

are gone before they can figure out what happened.

24:53

So when you're, you know, ten

24:55

eleven years old and he's disappeared, do

24:58

you have any kind of narrative for your self? Was like,

25:00

why he's disappeared? No, he

25:03

was just gone, and you know that less.

25:05

The other thing we need to remember is not only was my

25:07

life transient with

25:09

people coming in and out of it, but provincetowns

25:12

and graphic transient. And

25:15

my father was gone, my grandparents

25:17

moved away. It just wasn't unusual. He

25:20

did always talk about going, going, going,

25:22

going to California, going, You're going there.

25:25

He was always talking about that. And

25:27

there was a big connection between Hayde Ashbury

25:29

at the time and Boston Common and

25:32

Provincetown. The young people

25:34

were all trying to get away, especially

25:37

from a town like Provincetown that probably

25:39

felt pretty remote to them.

25:41

I remember how remote it it still feels

25:43

remote to me. I don't know how you experienced

25:46

it, but when I go out there, it feels pretty

25:48

remote. We'll

25:51

be back in a moment with more family secrets.

26:13

Tony sort of fades away. For Eliza, she

26:15

doesn't think about him, She has no

26:17

idea what happened. She moves on

26:20

the way kids do, and she grows

26:22

up. Life happens, she

26:25

gets married, starts a family. She

26:27

has as little to do with her mother as possible.

26:30

Time speeds up as time does,

26:33

so let's fast forward, oh

26:35

to about the time lies as oldest

26:38

child, a son is graduating

26:40

from high school. I

26:42

went back to school to finish

26:44

my bachelor's degree, which I've never been

26:47

able to finish um

26:49

coming from the family, I came from

26:51

quite frankly, with an anxious mess most of the

26:53

time. And so

26:55

I went back and I said, I'm gonna do this now.

26:58

While I was doing that, I start of having these

27:00

dreams, and they were

27:02

very violent, and they were right in a row of

27:05

about six months, and

27:07

someone was always trying to kill me, and with

27:09

a gun or a knife or in the case

27:11

of the first dream, of fireplace poker. And

27:14

I had always written down my dreams

27:16

always I had always written, and

27:19

in order to figure out what was going on

27:23

during this time that I was keeping a process

27:25

journal anyway, um,

27:27

as I was reading and writing about different you

27:30

know, literature and writing poems

27:32

and other things, I decided to

27:34

start writing them in. And

27:37

when I did that, I

27:39

noticed the repeat images, and

27:43

all of those repeat images were

27:45

of my childhood, and

27:48

I kept saying, what is going on?

27:51

So I just kept writing them down, the

27:53

dreams, the poems. Then

27:56

I had that final It wasn't actually

27:58

the final dream, but it was fine enough because

28:01

in each one of these dreams I

28:03

couldn't see the face of the man in the dream,

28:06

so whoever was holding the weapon I couldn't

28:08

see. And it became more

28:10

and more irritating to me until the day

28:14

that I had the dream when I was face

28:16

to face with Tony and that was in

28:18

the Royal Coachman lobby in my dream,

28:22

and so I

28:24

said, holy sh it, I

28:27

wonder if this is what it's about. And that's when

28:29

I said to my mother, did something happen to

28:31

me that you have not been clear about? And

28:35

that's when she told me. So

28:37

she knew when

28:40

you said that your mother

28:42

was able to put those pieces

28:45

together. Both my mother

28:47

and my aunt were there that day, and I had

28:49

said, I had just saw Tony Costa in

28:51

the dream with a gun to my head. What

28:54

do you know about him? Why

28:56

would I be thinking about that? And

28:58

she said, well, I know he'd be came, you know, a

29:01

serial killer. I

29:04

know he became a serial killer, as if

29:06

I know he became a doctor or an

29:08

oncologist or a pediatrician

29:11

and a serial killer. And

29:14

I just stood there and I

29:17

you know, there's that moment in time when

29:19

something so significant, have such significant

29:21

information coming your way,

29:23

that everything slows down and just grinds

29:26

to a halt, and

29:28

you're hearing it and saying, how can

29:30

how can I be hearing this information?

29:34

And that's what it was like. It was like almost like

29:36

a drug flashback. It

29:38

just slowed right down, and I something

29:41

said to me, this is

29:43

it, This is it. Until

29:45

I started researching, and

29:48

of course they all laughed at me, and

29:50

I just kept researching and writing

29:53

and researching and not really knowing I was making

29:55

a book, but more trying to find out what happened

29:57

to me and what those dreams

29:59

meant. So is

30:01

is it your sense that on

30:04

some level that you

30:06

always knew. I

30:09

always had the images, Danny.

30:12

I always had these images of what

30:14

had happened in Provincetown, and

30:17

I carried them with me, and I used to

30:19

tell people the story and they would go hu

30:22

huh, you know, almost

30:24

like when you share too much. And

30:27

so we sort of carried that with us, and we

30:29

would laugh about it because we didn't know, you

30:31

know, this is our childhood, how did yours go?

30:34

You know, my sister has

30:36

a famous line. She used to say, you

30:38

know, I was at a cocktail party the other night, and I

30:40

was telling some stories from our childhood,

30:43

and other people don't think it's as funny as

30:45

we do. And so, you

30:48

know, that's how we dealt with it with humor, because

30:50

it was kind of a crazy image to remember.

30:52

Why did we remember that? Why did we hear

30:54

about that? We knew something awful had happened,

30:57

But what we did not know was

31:00

that the same man who was driving us

31:02

around and getting us ice cream

31:04

cones was the man who had committed

31:07

that. Whatever atrocities we had in

31:09

our heads because we were little, so we didn't

31:11

put a narrative together about it. We were in

31:14

some cases, we were barely reading it. Wasn't

31:16

until I was nine or ten years old that I started

31:18

reading these accounts in the paper and

31:20

not understanding that they

31:23

had anything to do with Tony. And

31:25

at the time his name was not in the paper

31:27

either. That's important Liza's

31:31

history was. Tony was of course, much less

31:33

central, much briefer than

31:35

the relationship she had with her mother. Both

31:38

were damaging, both were indelible,

31:41

but Liza had been lucky. She

31:44

didn't fit the mold of Tony's victims.

31:47

She was a child, a child

31:49

of a woman who inflicted greater damage on

31:51

her. As she writes, and

31:54

here is the deepest of those wounds.

31:56

I have always felt as though there was something wrong with

31:58

me, inherently deep and dirty

32:01

and dark, something unlikable and

32:03

unfixable and worst of all, unlovable,

32:05

and I believed it. As a result,

32:08

I spent my childhood more afraid of

32:10

my mother than I was of a psychopathic

32:13

serial killer. And then

32:15

you go on. Finally, when I became a mother, and

32:17

in spite of my fear, I was able

32:19

to stop what had been generations

32:21

of physical abuse. It ended with

32:23

me mm hmm, And

32:26

it did in family secrets.

32:29

I think, like every guest

32:31

of mine to a person would

32:33

say this ends with me.

32:36

I think it's self selecting. People who are willing to

32:38

have this conversation in such a public a

32:40

forum. Are people who have come to a

32:42

place of the way that I make

32:44

meaning of this is to completely

32:47

change the narrative. I

32:49

think that's so important, the way that I make

32:51

meaning of this. This is not a

32:53

subject we can sweep under the rug anymore.

32:56

That these kinds of people are out there and

32:59

they're not well, and

33:02

we need to find some kind of system whereby

33:04

we put back together our mental health

33:06

system because we can prevent some of

33:08

this. You know, in California

33:10

they're screening children for trauma early trauma

33:13

now under the new Attorney General.

33:15

You know, they need to do that in this country

33:18

in order to save some of these kids. Because

33:20

I just clawed my way out and

33:23

I've spent most of my life in therapy. But

33:26

you know, I think the willingness to talk about

33:28

it is kind of a double edged sword when

33:30

I'm doing it anyway, because I

33:32

had to, because I couldn't

33:34

not. Why does it feel like

33:36

a double edged sword to you? Well,

33:38

because it's exposing yourself, right,

33:41

because in order to do it, your vulnerabilities

33:43

have to get known to other people. I

33:46

guess there's a certain amount of shame that goes

33:48

with it until you realize it's not you.

33:51

It's not you, it's other people, and

33:54

that's you know, that's a difficult transition

33:56

to make. So I think it's a double edged sword

33:59

coming out and talking about it. Believe

34:01

me, there are people who are not happy that have done

34:03

this. But that's too bad

34:06

because it's given me a new freedom

34:09

and I'll take it. Family

34:21

Secrets is a production of I Heart Media.

34:24

Dylan Fagin and Bethan Macaluso

34:26

are the executive producers. Andrew

34:28

Howard is our audio editor. If

34:31

you have a secret you'd like to share, leave

34:33

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