In the spring of 1968, 18-year-old Sydney Monzon was last seen alive in Provincetown, Massachusetts, getting into a car with a man named Antone "Tony" Costa. Her disappearance in May of that year initially garnered little media attention, as she was one of several local teenagers who had vanished, and authorities believed she might have left on her own accord. Monzon, who was described as a petite woman, about four feet, eleven inches tall, was living with a local fisherman at the time but was also friends with Costa.
The grim reality of what happened to Sydney Monzon would not come to light until nearly a year later. In February 1969, while searching for two other missing women, Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, investigators uncovered shallow graves in a wooded area in Truro that Costa used as his personal marijuana garden. In these graves, they found the dismembered bodies of four women: Sydney Monzon, Susan Perry, Patricia Walsh, and Mary Anne Wysocki. The discovery sent shockwaves through the Cape Cod community and attracted national media attention.
The investigation quickly centered on Tony Costa, a charismatic but deeply troubled individual with a history of criminal behavior. He was known in the local counter-culture scene and had a magnetic personality that drew in many young women. Following the discovery of the bodies on his marijuana patch, Costa was arrested and became the prime suspect in the murders. While he was ultimately convicted for the murders of Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki, he also provided his own account of Monzon's death. Costa claimed that Sydney Monzon had died from a drug overdose and that a friend had dismembered and buried her body without his knowledge.
Tony Costa was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Walsh and Wysocki. His reign of terror left a lasting scar on the idyllic image of Cape Cod. Four years into his sentence, in May of 1974, Tony Costa took his own life in his prison cell, leaving behind a dark legacy as a serial killer.
