Remembering Women in True Crime

Abstract

Remembering Women in True Crime Catherine Ross Nickerson (bio) We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence Becky Cooper Grand Central Publishing www.grandcentralpublishing.com 512 Pages; Cloth, $25.99 The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan Simon & Schuster www.simonandschuster.com 352 Pages; Print, $28.00 Towards the end of We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper describes a bulletin board that she uses to organize the threads of her story. “‘What is a good story?’ one index card says, good underlined to emphasize the moral connotation of the word as much as its strict traditional sense.” That question is one that haunts the whole genre of true crime, which is both wildly popular and widely scorned for its prurient appeal. Conventional true crime is especially hard on women, relegating them largely to the roles of terrorized prey, monstrous mothers, or enabling floozies — despite the fact that the audience for true crime is overwhelmingly female. In the recent explosion of true crime podcasts, longform documentaries, and episodic television series, there is an emerging trend toward a feminist re-imagining of the possibilities of crime narrative as a mode of social criticism. Cooper’s book and Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan’s The Babysitter are impressive examples of projects that move women’s experience to the center of the story, countering the misogyny that has shaped the contours of true crime. The Babysitter originates from a chilling revelation about author Liza Rodman’s childhood. Her mother owned a motel near Provincetown on Cape Cod, and the handyman, who often looked after Rodman and her sister, turned out to be serial killer Tony Costa, responsible for the deaths of at least five young women between 1968 and 1969. In alternating chapters, Rodman recounts her childhood and co-author Jennifer Jordan traces the biography and criminal history of Costa. The contrast that emerges as Rodman grows from ages eight to ten and Costa devolves from domestic abuser to murderer is not exactly what one expects. Rodman’s girlhood [End Page 9] was not all sun-splashed beaches and carefree play; her mother was so nonchalant about her children’s welfare that she would ask complete strangers to babysit her girls. When Rodman expresses shock that her mother left her in the care of the man who would soon be known as the Cape Cod Vampire, her mother shoots back, “so what … he didn’t kill you, did he?” — which tells us most of what we need to know about her mother’s neglectful, often abusive parenting style. Click for larger view View full resolution Costa was one of the few adults who took an active and affectionate interest in Rodman, taking her and her sister out for popsicles or to the beach while running errands for the hotel. He was the adult Rodman felt safest around, despite the fact he took prodigious amounts of prescription psychotropics and street drugs and had virtually abandoned his own children. The only uneasiness she ever felt was on occasions when he took her out to what he called his “garden” in the dense woods near the Truro cemetery. He swore her to secrecy, in a way that was “unfun” and “not very nice,” and we later learn that the secrets planted in this patch of woods were not only marijuana and a coffee can full of pills, but also the dismembered bodies of his victims. The chapters devoted to Costa form the clearest narrative to date of a case marked by cloudiness about basic facts from the beginning. Many early accounts allude to a total of eight named victims, so Rodman and Jordan undertake their own investigation. They discover that three putative victims did not die at Costa’s hands, but went on to live rather short, turbulent, itinerant lives marked by domestic violence, child abuse, and addiction. The fact that these women had been listed as missing by authorities and never officially found is a sign of the precarity of young women in the 1960s and 1970s...