May 12, 1974. Walpole State Prison, Massachusetts. Inmate Tony Costa sits down at a typewriter and bangs out the following: “Truth demands courage, and rather than live a life of illusion, together we persistently sought the spiritual truth of life. And our search is only beginning.” He always thought that what he wrote could be just as good as anything by Norman Mailer or Kurt Vonnegut. He felt he was on his way to cementing his legacy as one of Cape Cod’s great writers.

Regrettably, writing is not what Costa will be remembered for as we learn in HELLTOWN, a fascinating true crime work from Casey Sherman, who last collaborated with James Patterson on the terrific THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN LENNON.

"HELLTOWN does a tremendous job of piecing together who Tony Costa was while providing the motivations and inner voice you would expect from a work of fiction, making it compulsively readable."

If Vonnegut had not been such a good father, his attractive teenage daughter, Edie, might have run with the wrong crowd in the Cape Cod area during the late 1960s. Instead, it was a young woman named Sydney Monzon who had become enamored of Costa, a local drug dealer who fed her just enough drugs to addle her mind. He then took her to his favorite spot, the ancient cemetery in Truro, MA, and savagely stabbed her to death.

Both Mailer and Vonnegut happened to be in the Cape Cod area during the time of Costa’s infamous reign as a serial killer. Mailer was actually the one who slapped Provincetown with the tag “Helltown,” and we get to see how each writer took his own hand at covering both the murder spree and Costa’s eventual trial. It makes for some incredibly unique reading as I was completely unaware of this story.

Costa met his next victim, Susan Perry, while bicycling home from the local library after borrowing Manual of Taxidermy. I cannot fathom a more gruesome irony. He fueled Susan with some tabs of acid while he played “The Spider and the Fly” by The Rolling Stones, his favorite band. He then reached for the knife he referred to as his “pig stabber” and murdered her. Having been encouraged by his recent reading, Costa then proceeded to dismember Susan and took her remains to the trunk of his car. Her body joined Sydney’s in the North Truro Woods.

Costa considered himself well-read and actually did spend a lot of time in the library. His latest literary obsession was STEPPENWOLF. Like Hermann Hesse’s protagonist, Harry Haller, Costa had entered his own magic theater, one designed “for madmen only.” He fought with an evil alter ego whom he named after rival drug dealer Cory Devereaux. When he did his part as an informant with the local police force, he continuously threw them tips leading to Cory.

Wanting some space from living with his mother, Costa moved into a local boarding house. There he met his next victims, Patricia Walsh and Mary Ann Wysocki. He left a note that supposedly came from the young ladies, who said they were leaving. He then took their car and filled out a fake bill of sale, selling the vehicle to himself, which he drove to his brother’s place in Boston. Of course, he had killed and dismembered them.

Although the police knew that something bad must have happened to Patricia and Mary Ann and that Costa had to have been involved, they just didn’t have anything to go on. When they finally caught up with Costa, he informed them that the two women sold him their car because one of them needed to get an abortion in Montreal. This all seemed fishy. Of course, every time they spoke to him, something in his story changed. Eventually, police in Boston apprehended him, brought him back to Cape Cod and put him in jail. During this time, the remains of his previous victims had been dug up and were in the process of being identified.

While Mailer was busy covering the Apollo 11 mission, Vonnegut had penned an article for Life magazine about the Costa case and the trial that was about to start. At the same time, Mailer was announcing his candidacy for mayor of New York City. When the Life piece reached newsstands, the cover story featured Neil Armstrong and his trip to the moon. The trial quickly became overshadowed by the Manson Family murders that claimed the life of actress Sharon Tate, among others. Costa was quoted as saying that he should have murdered someone famous.

HELLTOWN does a tremendous job of piecing together who Tony Costa was while providing the motivations and inner voice you would expect from a work of fiction, making it compulsively readable. It is quite graphic and does not pull any punches to that effect. That Costa shares these pages with Vonnegut and Mailer is doubly unique and adds a touch of credibility you don’t normally get from a true crime book.