The Skeleton Crew Read online

  “Many of these groups suffer from a healthy dose of egomania,” complained one anonymous poster. “They feel they are being ‘attacked’ or ‘stalked’—I assume as a way of exaggerating their own self-importance.”

  I agreed with what came next: “I often wonder how any serious volunteer could put up with all this and find it remarkable that, not only do they put up with it, but they keep joining groups such as this for even more senseless heartache and extracurricular bullshit. Perhaps masochism is a prerequisite for membership in online groups.”

  Cyberbullying aside, some web sleuths struck me as purposeful and committed. Despite Wilbur Riddle’s possessiveness of the body he found, it was obvious to me why Todd Matthews, not Riddle, became associated in people’s minds with the legendary Tent Girl. To Riddle, the fact that a girl had been killed and dumped was a shame, for sure. It was also a good yarn, an attention-getter. Riddle clearly believed Tent Girl was his, a prize he had stumbled upon and collected that day in 1968, whereas Todd, not a churchgoer but a firm believer in a higher power, felt a soul-wrenching connection with the girl wrapped in the carnival tent. From the moment Riddle showed him Master Detective’s hyperbolic headline, Todd felt he had always known her. He identified with her. He, too, could have died young. He, too, lacked an unambiguous identity in a world that everyone else seemed to navigate with ease. He was convinced that a divine force impelled him to search for her name—a search that would both obsess him and sorely try him for ten long years.

  In 2010, after more than two decades as a factory worker in the small town where he grew up, Todd landed a position with an agency overseen by the U.S. Department of Justice, rallying law enforcement and volunteers to use new Internet-based tools that help match up missing persons with unidentified bodies.

  You might think this would validate Todd’s commitment and the volunteers’ efforts, but the fact that Todd was suddenly being paid to facilitate matches on the Internet—something a growing cadre of amateur sleuths did with significant investments of their own time and money—caused dissension in the ranks. While trying to enlist the beast’s strength—crowdsourcing all those neglected cases—Todd incurred its wrath.

  It had taken Todd Matthews years to accrue the power and respect that placed him at a podium in front of a sea of uniforms and gun holsters, and the journey had cost him personally. To some, Todd was a hero, a pioneer. Others considered him a traitor, a sellout, and a contemptible publicity hound. Some web sleuths accused Todd of selfish motives, pointing to his appearances on Good Morning America, his onetime radio show, his consulting gig for a TV pilot based partly on his life, his ongoing quest to launch a dramatic TV series based on web sleuthing. Todd is the subject of, or quoted within, a slew of newspaper and magazine stories, and a Memphis filmmaker is working on a documentary about him.

  “You look for things to fill that hole in your heart that you cannot ignore,” Todd once wrote to me, referring to the deaths of two of his siblings. “Others being eased from suffering does hold Rx for the soul—it does. But you have to keep going. It’s a temporary fix. There’s no real cure, you see. It’s about managing the cycle like a recovering addict.”

  I couldn’t have imagined when I met Todd that, less than two years later, he would be voted off his own island. But nothing changed the fact that Todd Matthews was at the center of a revolutionary era for law enforcement and the Internet. And there were others like him, obsessed with a nameless body.

  2

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  For decades, Provincetown police chief James J. Meads kept the skull of the Lady of the Dunes on his desk, vowing he wouldn’t retire until he uncovered her real name.

  I met Jimmy Meads in June 2010. He had retired reluctantly eighteen years earlier, the woman’s identity still unknown, but he had cemented his reputation as the gutsy, strong-willed chief who continued to champion her case. Third-generation Provincetown, Meads descended from Portuguese fishermen. He lived in a traditional Cape on a narrow lane off Commercial Street’s leather shops, art galleries, and restaurants, a short walk from the harbor where his father used to launch his boat before dawn.

  Opposite Meads’s house was one of the most chic and popular guesthouses in town. The then owner, Park Davis, with close-cropped graying hair and an engaging smile, told me a man once shot a woman execution-style in a public parking lot not far away. One of Davis’s poodles, perched at a window, was the only witness. Police eventually located that assailant, but no witnesses, not even canine ones, saw the murder of the Lady of the Dunes.

  At seventy-seven, Meads, in jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with a fire department insignia, still had an iron jaw and the physique of a bodybuilder. If I had broken the law I wouldn’t want to meet his ice-blue gaze, but retirement seemed to agree with him. Mild-mannered, he showed me his collection of antique blue glass lining the shelves along his kitchen ceiling and the birdhouses he’d built and mounted in the backyard. He’d bought and renovated the house around 1974, the year of the infamous case.

  * * *

  That year, on July twenty-sixth, a couple and their daughter visited a local artist at her primitive shack nestled among the dunes. The dune shacks had been thrown together more than a century earlier, shelters for crews who kept watch for ships running aground in storms and fog. By the 1970s the shacks had been turned into artist studios and rustic beach getaways. Isolated, with no electricity, indoor plumbing, or telephone, they promised uninterrupted solitude and refuge.

  Tooling along featureless Route 6, the Cape’s only divided highway, you’d have to have faith that the endless roadside scrub oaks and crabgrass hid something worthwhile. Even the Pilgrims had ditched Provincetown for Plymouth. But the dunes, spooky and wild and tall after all the flatness, make this tiny place alluring.

  You can disappear here, a longtime resident told me. Those seeking to distance themselves from the world make their way to Provincetown.

  That Friday, as afternoon slipped into evening, the couple’s thirteen-year-old daughter set off for a walk with her beagle. They wandered toward the Coast Guard station on Race Point, named for the fierce riptides that tear around the outermost tip of Cape Cod. On the deserted beach they would have heard crashing waves and chittering seabirds.

  Jeep tracks, bike paths, and nature trails crisscross Provincetown’s thirty miles of beach. By day, families with children play in the surf, and by night, gay men cruise Herring Cove for hookups in the tall grass, secret spaces like this one among the dunes. Shadows lengthening, the girl—and the dozens of others who likely tromped down that stretch of beach that day—didn’t immediately spot the woman hidden in a pine grove that formed a small private room with scrub brush walls and a pine-needle floor. The sea breeze might have masked the odor of the blanket’s sole occupant. But up close it would have sat heavy in the air, thick and sweet. The beagle picked up the scent.

  The dog bounded past clumps of stunted oak and beach plums into the outdoor alcove where a woven green beach blanket big enough for two had sat undisturbed, the coroner estimated later, for a week, perhaps as long as three weeks. After days in the heat and sun, putrefaction must have been in full swing, sulfurous intestinal gas and disintegrating red blood cells generating a greenish skin discoloration on the woman’s lower abdomen, chest, and upper thighs. In a week, most of the body would have turned aquamarine.

  Girl and dog ran back to the shack, where the adults, with no landline and twenty years too early for cell phones, set off on foot for the National Seashore park ranger station. Chief ranger James D. Hankins was the first official to make his way to the crime scene.

  * * *

  By 1974, Jim Hankins had spent sixteen years with the U.S. National Park Service, the last two as head ranger for the northern section of the Cape Cod National Seashore. I tracked down Hankins in his home state of Tennessee, where he had retired. Growing up there in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountain
s, he’d always wanted a career outdoors. He’d worked in stunning spots: Cape Hatteras, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. At the Cape Cod National Seashore, Hankins supervised round-the-clock patrols of the miles of woodlands and beaches that made up twenty-two thousand acres of the sublime vistas found only at land’s end. Park rangers in those days acted as police officers, firefighters, and maintenance crews rolled into one, he said. The worst troublemakers Hankins encountered were pretty harmless, like the exhibitionist who paraded nude on the upper deck of his shack just as dune buggies loaded down with unsuspecting tourists rolled by.

  Hankins seemed more peeved about the transformation of the shacks into residences. In his view the shack owners were squatters on public land who over the years accrued more privileges that, in his opinion, they didn’t earn and never should have had. He also didn’t care for the sleeping bag set—young people crashing for the night on sandy beaches or in roadside rest areas. But he conceded that if someone slipped into the dunes toting a sleeping bag and without a vehicle, he or she might evade the night patrol and get away with sleeping under the stars.

  A few weeks before the body was found, the Cape had celebrated the Fourth of July with parades and fireworks. Tens of thousands of visitors had streamed in for the holiday weekend, stretching the limits of the police force and park rangers, but things had quieted down again—Hankins had thought—when the beagle walker’s parents alerted a ranger at Race Point, who called Hankins at home. He jumped into his jeep and drove deep into the dunes, following dune buggy trails.

  He saw what the girl had found, and his earlier casual remark about slipping past the ranger station took on a sinister truth. Two people apparently had entered the dunes; one had gotten out undetected, even though every vehicle entering national parkland had to stop and buy a permit.

  Hankins made his way back to the ranger station and called Jimmy Meads at home. The two were friends; Meads trusted Hankins and had given him a bit of law enforcement authority that park rangers didn’t ordinarily have.

  Meads drove from his tidy Cape several blocks to what served as the police station those days: a dank, mold-infested labyrinth of offices and holding cells in the basement of Town Hall. He collected two detectives and drove with them to Race Point. They transferred to a jeep—a police sedan would have sunk in the sand—and drove on to the clump of scrub pines.

  Meads saw the mutilated body and immediately thought of drug dealer and former police informant Antone “Tony” Costa, although he knew that Costa couldn’t have had a hand in this murder.

  * * *

  Jimmy Meads was a sergeant in March 1969 when two young women went missing. One cold day, his boss, Chief Francis “Cheney” Marshall, was combing the woods not far from the Truro Old North Cemetery with a couple of Massachusetts police detectives and a state trooper. They were searching for the women from nearby Providence, Rhode Island, who had gone to Provincetown for a winter weekend getaway and never returned home.

  The three men left their vehicles near the road and followed a rutted dirt track three hundred yards into the woods to a clearing on the edge of a knoll. Marshall noticed a large pine tree at the edge of the mossy clearing. Six feet off the ground on the tree’s trunk, a knob and the remnant of a broken limb protruded.

  Strands of rope stuck to the bark of the knob; there were rope fibers on the trunk, and bits of stained rope on the bed of pine needles. Near the base of the tree the trooper saw something glitter in the dirt. He picked it up and brushed it off: a single gold earring with a dangling square of black onyx.

  He cleared leaves and turf, revealing the outline of a recently dug hole, then grabbed one of the shovels the men had brought. Three feet down, the cold earth softened, but the roots of the tree made for rough going. He knelt, scooping out dirt with his hands. One of the detectives knelt beside him; the others walked over. Seeing nothing but soil, a detective was about to tell the men to stop digging when suddenly the trooper yanked his hand out of the dirt as if he’d been bitten. “There’s something down there,” he said.

  Something white was visible under a layer of sandy soil. “Jesus Christ,” Marshall said. An arm protruded from the hole. A ring decorated with alternating turquoise and orange beads circled the little finger of the hand. A detective pawed the dirt aside, revealing a mat of brown hair. It came away in his hand like a Halloween fright wig. He carefully loosened the dirt around the hair and cupped his hands around the head. He lifted it from the ground.

  As author Leo J. Damore related in this scene from his 1981 book, In His Garden, the detective “cradled the head in his arm. He brushed sand and gravel clinging to the open eyes and took dirt from the gaping mouth. The face was a mask of terror, lips drawn back in a grimace of surprise and pain. The face was bluish, the left cheek discolored and swollen. The nose had been broken by the force of a powerful blow.” The detective thought he recognized Mary Anne Wysocki, one of the missing Providence women.

  In a sandy area up a slight rise around two hundred feet away, the men dug through two feet of frost before uncovering a tangle of female body parts: the lower portion of a young woman severed just above the hips, the upper half of the body. The skin of the chest had been cut open and pulled back like the front of a cardigan. The face was swollen and badly mauled, but the detective had pored over the photos of the two missing women enough to know the body in the grave was Wysocki’s companion, Patricia Walsh.

  The base of the tree was where Tony Costa hid his drug stash. That and other evidence linked the victims to Costa, who was convicted of the murders. At the time, no one imagined the intelligent, serious-looking young man with gold-framed glasses capable of such horrific crimes. Meads had known Tony Costa since the youth started spending summers in Provincetown with his aunt, a local resident, and Meads thought it was too bad the kid had married at nineteen and gotten mixed up in Provincetown’s drug scene.

  In fact, Meads had recruited Costa as a police informer for a drug bust. In return, Meads wrote a letter recommending early parole for Costa, who was serving six months in the Barnstable County Jail and House of Correction for nonpayment of child support and was due to get out in March 1969. Meads’s letter helped free Costa in November 1968.

  Two months later, Pat Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki were dead.

  In May 1970, Costa was convicted and sentenced to life in prison at the former Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Walpole. Four years after his incarceration and two months before the Lady of the Dunes was found, Costa hung himself in his cell.

  * * *

  One of the things Jim Hankins recalled about the dunes was how, despite wide-open vistas of sand and sea, the dense vegetation—taller than a man in places—created a maze of secret nooks. No one, he imagined, had ever explored all of them.

  He had now arrived at such a spot, a protected cove where the victim was laid out on a blanket. She lay on her stomach, and both of her hands had been hacked off at the wrists, which had been jammed into the sand so it looked, according to several media reports, as if she were doing push-ups. Rangers and specially trained dogs who searched for her hands for four days found nothing. One side of her head was caved in. Her head had been dealt a terrific blow with a blunt instrument, and more than likely the blow had occurred while she was asleep or someone was lying next to her, Hankins said.

  I thought nature-loving Jim Hankins was deeply affronted that the killer, in addition to senselessly ending a life, had defiled a beautiful spot that he was charged with keeping pristine. I had taken him back almost four decades, but Hankins’s memories seemed clear. I sat at my desk, phone propped at my ear, typing as quietly as I could while Hankins’s words unfurled like a ribbon.

  “The only instrument that could have been used to hack off her hands was an instrument carried by almost all dune buggies. It was common in all surplus stores; it was a handy tool for the camper. It was a folding shovel called an en
trenching tool. It was a standard-issue item for anyone in the infantry; soldiers in World War II and Korea carried them.

  “It was very sturdy, made out of heavy metal, semi-pointed, spade-like. The blade could be folded down on the handle, or it could be raised to a perpendicular like a hoe, or you could make it into a shovel with a straight handle around eighteen inches long. In hand-to-hand combat, you could use it to fight your enemy.

  “I still have a couple, as a matter of fact, and I use them quite often for gardening. We insisted that anyone who got a permit to drive on the beach carry certain equipment, such as a board to put their jack on—you can’t use a jack in the sand—and a shovel to dig out if you get stuck.

  “We never knew how she got there. Throughout the dunes at that time there were well-defined sand trails where beach buggies and sand taxis—vehicles with four-wheel-drive capability—would haul as many as eight people. They would take visitors and people would go fishing out there.

  “She could have been let out by dune buggy. It was very uncommon for people to be out in the dunes alone like that. It wasn’t unheard-of, but it wasn’t a common occurrence. It was quite possible she could have parked out in the visitor center or someone brought her. Or she could actually have walked from town, or she could have come from the beach. They discovered from the contents of her stomach that she had had a hamburger and french fries. That means she had recently been in town.