Meet the Author: The Babysitter: My Summers With A Serial Killer

338 Newbury Street,Boston MA 02115

05 July, 2022

Description

The Babysitter: My Summers With A Serial Killer This chilling true story and “harrowing account of the evil that can lurk around the edges of girlhood” (Carolyn Murnick, author of The Hot One)—reminiscent of Ann Rule’s classic The Stranger Beside Me—follows a little girl longing for love who finds friendship with her charismatic babysitter, unaware that he is a vicious serial killer. Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter—the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked—took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He bought them popsicles and together, they visited his “secret garden” in the Truro woods. To Liza, he was one of the few kind, understanding, and safe adults in her life. But there was one thing she didn’t know; their babysitter was a serial killer. Though Tony Costa’s gruesome case made screaming headlines in 1969 and beyond, Liza never made the connection between her friendly babysitter and the infamous killer of numerous women, including four in Massachusetts, until decades later. Haunted by nightmares and horrified by what she learned, Liza became obsessed with the case. Now, she and cowriter Jennifer Jordan reveal “a suspenseful portrayal of murderous madness in tandem with a child’s growing loneliness, neglect, and despair, a narrative collision that will haunt” (Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita) you long after you finish it. Liza Rodman has worked as a tax accountant for nearly thirty years in the Boston area. She began researching this story in 2005 when she realized her personal connection to Tony Costa, the infamous Cape Cod killer. In the years since, she has gathered thousands of documents, testimonies, and interviews, perhaps more than any other investigator or journalist who has looked into this case. She attended UMass/Amherst in the late 1970s, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Vermont College in 2005. She has been a fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and has participated in the same women’s writing group for the last eighteen years. She lives with her husband outside Boston. The Babysitter is her first book. Jennifer Jordan is an award-winning author, filmmaker and screenwriter, with over 35 years experience as a reporter, journalist, and radio and television producer, working for NPR and PBS in Boston and Salt Lake City, as well as writing for several newspapers and magazines. She has written four books; the first, Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women on K2 (William Morrow, 2005) was an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review and became a National Geographic documentary, which she also wrote and produced. Her second book, Last Man on the Mountain: The Life and Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (WW Norton, 2010) tells the story of Dudley Wolfe, the first man to die on the world’s second highest mountain in 1939, whose skeletal remains Jordan found in 2002 while on K2. Both books won the National Outdoor Book Award. In 2016 she created, directed, and produced the documentary 3000 Cups of Tea: Investigating the Rise and Ruin of Greg Mortenson, a documentary examining the deeply-flawed 60 Minutes report on the renowned philanthropist. For her most recent books she worked as a ghostwriter: Perfect Strangers: Friendship, Strength, and Recovery in the Aftermath of Boston’s Worst Day (Public Affairs, 2017) and Southern Discomfort, a coming of age story in the Jim Crow South (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018).