Bank Square Books and Savoy Bookshop & Café present a virtual author talk with Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan in conversation with Annie Philbrick for the book The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer.
About the Book
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.
About Jennifer Jordan
Jennifer Jordan is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and screenwriter with decades of experience as an anchor and investigative journalist. She has worked for NPR and PBS, and her work has also appeared in a variety of national and international newspapers and magazines. In 2005 she published her first book, “Savage Summit,” which chronicles the lives and deaths of the first women who climbed K2, the second highest mountain in the world. In 2010 she wrote “Last Man on the Mountain,” which examines the ill-fated 1939 American expedition on K2 in which Dudley Wolfe became the first person to die on the mountain and whose remains Jordan found at its base. Both books won a National Outdoor Book Award, and “Savage Summit” was picked as an “Editors’ Choice” by the New York Times Book Review. In 2016 she directed and produced the documentary “3000 Cups of Tea,” which investigates the flawed “60 Minutes” report on renowned philanthropist, Greg Mortenson. In addition to her own books, she has ghost written and co-written three others, most recently “The Babysitter,” which tells the true story of a girl who survived being babysat by a serial killer, which is currently under option as a limited-series documentary.
About Liza Rodman
Liza Rodman attended the University of Massachusetts/Amherst in the late 1970s and received her Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in creative writing from Vermont College in 2005. She has balanced life as a mother, stepmother, writer, and tax accountant for more than thirty-five years. Liza and her husband have three children, five grandchildren, and live outside Boston. The Babysitter is her first book.
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.
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