Tony Costa, the Cape Cod Vampire, and his friend 'Carl'
Robert Ben Rhoades was born in 1945 in rural Iowa. After high school, he joined the military following his father's suicide while awaiting trial for the sexual assault of a 12 year old girl. In 1964, Rhoades found himself in similar trouble and was dishonorably discharged from the Marines. After being rejected from a position in law enforcement, he went on to long distance trucking across the US and seemingly lived a mundane life for the next 20 years.
Tony Costa was born in 1944 in a small town in Massachusetts. He married right out of high school and had three children before his drug use and violent behavior led to a divorce. By 1963, he had abandoned his wife and children to live a transient lifestyle in California. In the few years he lived on the west coast, multiple women were reported missing after last being seen with him - two young women who were hitchhiking and a third was his former girlfriend. He skipped town again and spent the latter half of the 1960s backpacking across the country before heading back to Massachusetts to start a marijuana farm.
In 1969, police unearthed the bodies of Susan Perry, Sydney Monzon, Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki on Costa's farm in a case that shocked the world. Perry and Monzon had gone missing while backpacking and Walsh and Wysocki went missing while vacationing together in Cape Cod. The salacious headlines of violence and rumors of cannibalism created a media frenzy. The young women had all been hitchhiking or traveling at the time of their disappearances, and all had experienced extreme torture over the course of days before being killed.
While serving a life sentence for the crimes, Tony wrote a biography explaining the murders before committing suicide. In his book, he referred to his friend, under the pseudonym Carl, who participated in the crimes and carried out the bulk of the violence. Due to the violent nature of his crimes and the time period, his book and accusations were largely ignored and the case drifted into history.
Two decades later in 1989, a different Patricia Walsh and her husband, Douglas Zyskowski, went missing while hitchhiking in Utah. According to later accounts, the husband was quickly killed and his body discarded, while Patricia was kept alive for up to a week being tortured before she was ultimately killed. Their murders had initially gone unsolved and due to the violent nature of the deaths, had become highly publicized.
A year later, Regina Kay Walters and Ricky Lee Jones, who were 14 at the time, ran away from home and began hitchhiking to Mexico. They were picked up and Ricky was killed immediately, while Regina was kept and tortured for up to a month in a dilapidated barn at a rural farm.
These deaths were later linked to Robert Ben Rhoades when another victim was found chained up in his truck. During the investigation, they found what would go on to become a famous photograph of Regina Walters.
There were other strange aspects of the photograph itself, aside from it being moments before her death, that contributed to its infamy. She was in a rigid, unnatural stance that seemed posed, in a dated dress and heels, and her long hair had been shored off into a pixie cut. He never explained these decisions, but it seemed clear that the photo was replicating something.
It seems we will never truly know who Carl was or if he even exists. We will also never know how many more women were killed by Rhoades, why he dressed Regina the way he did or cut her hair for the photograph. All we know, is both men were highly transient in the late 1960s, both found guilty of abducting and murderding pairs of travelers, both killed a woman named Patricia Walsh, exactly 20 years apart, and both killed women in black dresses with brunette pixie cuts.
So, who is Carl?