February 20, 2024 • 61 mins
This is the story of Penny Farmer—who lost her brother at sea in the late 1970s, and never stopped looking for him. Not for 40 years…
The Greatest True Crime Stories is a production of Diversion Audio.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Nora Batelle
Editorial Direction by Nora Batelle
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth and Jacob Bronstein
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Directed by Jacob Bronstein
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman, Mark Francis, and Jacob Bronstein
Special Thanks:
Penny Farmer, Dead in the Water, My Forty-Year Search for My Brother’s Killer
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and descriptions of
violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take
care in listening. I want to tell you about a dream.
(00:34):
It's a recurring dream that Penny Farmer had after the
disappearance of her brother, one she wrote about in her
book on the case Dead.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
In the Water.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
It starts at a family party. Everyone is so happy, Penny,
her mother Audrey, her father Charles, her brother Nigel. They're
so happy because Chris is home with them, home with
all the people who love him, where he belongs. At
(01:05):
the end of the party, Penny knocks on Chris's bedroom door, grinning,
ready to gush about how glad she is to see him,
but he's under the covers. She walks to his bed
and sits down on the edge, and then she glances
at the nightstand. Lying on the table is a rubber
mask of her brother's face. She pulls aside the sheets.
(01:31):
The man lying underneath is a stranger. Imagine having that
dream over and over from the time you were a teenager.
Penny has been literally haunted her whole life. She's haunted
by hope, then despair, then false leads, and always this
(01:57):
sense of what's missing, of something wrong for forty years
until she took her brother's cold case into her own hands.
(02:35):
Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm
Mary Kay McBriar. I'm a writer of true crime, which
means I live inside the research wormhole. I'm constantly reading
about crime, but I'm not necessarily interested in all the
headline grabbing elements, the blood and the gore and all
(02:57):
of that. I'm more interesting in the people behind these
stories and what we can learn about society by looking
at their experiences. If you want evidence of my obsession,
you can read my book America's First Female serial Killer,
Jane Toppin and the Making of a Monster. You can
(03:20):
also meet me here every week when I dig into
crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She
might be as the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner,
the criminal, or a combination of those roles. As you
(03:40):
probably already know, women can do anything. Today's episode is
the story of Penny Farmer, who lost her brother at
sea in the late nineteen seventies and never stopped looking
for him, not for forty years. There's nothing more frustrating
(04:38):
to me than watching a movie set before like two thousand,
mainly before cell phones, when information just wasn't scharable easily,
like in that scene of Zodiac when Mark Ruffalo has
to drive to the next county because they can't fax
documents to him. That always just makes me scream with
my mouth closed. Or when one cell phone calls could
(05:00):
cut all the suspense of a movie, solve the case
and unravel the plot completely. I hate that, Not to mention,
that's my reaction to just a movie. The inability to
retroactively apply new elements to old crimes in real life
is an insufferable injustice. So for a little while I
dated a private investigator. He lied about a lot of stuff,
(05:24):
as espionage workers are trained to do, but one thing
he said that struck me as very true is how
the early usage of Facebook basically did his job for him.
I'm talking about Facebook before it was mostly a boom
or healthscape full of political hot takes, back when everyone
used it, usually with their real names, posting current pictures
(05:47):
of themselves in recognizable places where people wanted to be
found in hopes of connecting to people from their past.
And if I had a dime for every time I
snooped on a friend's blind date just by reverse searching
the guy's phone number. Well, frankly, it astonishes me how
any case got closed before the technologies we use so
easily nowadays. It's one reason why so many of them
(06:09):
ran cold. That and the fact that crimes get buried
under new crimes, crimes that can be worked more easily
with our new technology and new methods of gathering evidence.
It stands to reason that happens pretty often. Penny Farmer
didn't let that happen. Officials might have gotten pulled away
(06:30):
to more recent issues, but Penny applied the technologies she
had on hand as a regular citizen and brought justice
to her beloved brother.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Penny Farmer was.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Zooming through the roads of the northern England city of
Manchester in Chevrolet. The front seat was cramped and uncomfortable
with three squeezed in, but Penny didn't care. She sat
between her elder brother Chris and his friend in the
driver's seat, Pink Floyd's wish you were here flying through
(07:17):
the speakers, as she'd reminisced decades later in her book
on her brother's case.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Dead in the water. In that moment, she.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Told herself, I've arrived. Chris was the kind of brother
who gave his kid's sister lots of moments like that.
He played music at the house that was like a
live soundtrack of seventies cool Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Jimmy Hendrix,
Jefferson Airplane. He gave her a motorcycle ride once, just once,
(07:49):
because their mother, Audrey, was not thrilled. He dressed wild too,
bell bottoms, crop tops, a patchwork leather jacket, and he
had thick, stylish Penny admired him. She admired how he
made life exciting. It was no surprise when he and
his longtime girlfriend Peta announced that they were going to
(08:11):
travel the world when they finished their studies. Both advanced degrees,
his in medicine hers in law in nineteen seventy seven.
Chris Farmer was twenty five, Peter Frampton was twenty four.
(08:32):
The couple grew up across the street from one another,
and they'd been sweethearts since childhood. Chris and Peta had
already made many trips together through Europe and down to
North Africa. This trip would be different because it would
be long and it would take them all the way
from Australia through the South Seas to South America. After
(08:56):
Chris and Peter left for their big adventure in December
nineteen seventy, Penny had to focus on the major life
events rushing toward her as a high scholer A level exams,
university applications. Every time Chris mailed the Farmer family one
of his messages, she'd get excited. They came as voice
(09:19):
recordings on cassettes and they painted these detailed, happy portraits
of his travels with Peter.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
And then went on to Guadalajara, as I say, quite
a nice towns.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Not anything's heard of the.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Marry archies, but you'reinerant Mexican musicians and that's their hometown.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
So every streetcorn you come to, you you've seen five
or six of these characters.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Playing their different size guitars and double basses, demanding a
few pay those.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
For a song.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
That's a clip of the tapes from the BBC podcast Paradise,
which did an investigative deep dive in to the case.
I think it's so cool that Chris communicated this way.
I mean, letters are great, I miss letters, but this
is pretty and genius and the cassette recordings let his
(10:13):
loved ones hear the sounds around him in the world too.
That's Pink Floyd in the background of this recording. It's
so evocative of the time. The tape really puts you
right there with Chris. Penny also tuned in for reports
from Peter's family. Peter regularly wrote long diary style letters
(10:35):
to her mother, Sammy Frampton, who passed on the news
to the Farmers. The trip sounded magical. Barbecues and shark
catching on the shores of Australia, scuba diving and snorkeling
in New Caledonia and Fiji, smoke plumes from Hawaii's volcanoes,
Aztec ruins and Wohaka, and then Belize City. Here Chris
(11:02):
and Peta met a man named Silas Dwayne Boston and
his two young sons, then thirteen year old Vince and
twelve year old Russell. Another tourist at a hotel bar
introduced them. Dwayne, he went by his middle name, was gregarious,
charming and a big drinker. But for Chris and Peta,
(11:23):
his real appeal was that he owned a boat which
he used to ferry tourists around the region. The Justin
b was a simple vessel, wooden, no bathroom or other
modern luxuries. Traveling on that thing would be a real adventure.
After a few short trips around the coast of Belize
(11:46):
and the nearby Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Peta and Chris
decide to join Dwayne on a longer sail down to
Costa Rica. Despite the fact that they hadn't planned to
travel that way, Peta said in a letter to her mother,
we thought it was an opportunity not to be missed.
More of Pete's letters trickled back to England after she
(12:09):
and Chris boarded the boat. At first, they painted the
same cheery picture as the previous letters. Quote, it's very
peaceful and we catch fish for supper. There's plenty of
snapper and grunt, not to mention catfish, which is tasty.
It's a real kick being able to catch your own supper.
(12:29):
The boat is not very comfortable, it's a bit cramped,
but during the day it's super just lying on the
hatches and soaking up the sun while the boat flies along.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
That letter arrived in.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
June nineteen seventy eight, dated June thirteenth, The Frampton and
former families devoured it, and then they waited for more,
and waited.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
And waited.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
They wondered if there was a postal strike, or maybe
Chris and Peter were sick. They began to worry, maybe
something was really wrong. They always updated their families, no
matter how far their adventures took them. But then in
August another letter. The letter was sweet relief for both families.
(13:22):
At first, it read like a usual Peta update for
the most part, although for the first time there was
a hint of tensions brewing on the boat. Peter wrote,
I wouldn't mind ending my sailing career now I find
I have no patience at all with Twain's two sons.
(13:42):
But what makes it worse is that Dwayne curses and
puts them down continually. She signed off like this, enough
of the future. I don't think there's any more news.
Nothing much happens on a boat.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Lots of love.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Dwayne and the boats. Apparently fading charm isn't what started
to worry. The family is back in England once again, though.
It's the fact that the letter was dated June twenty eighth,
with a PostScript marked June twenty ninth, and yet it
hadn't arrived in England until August. When Peter wasn't able
(14:23):
to post a letter right away, she always added to it,
dating the editions along the way. What had the couple
been doing throughout July. Then there was the fact that
no more letters arrived, nor any tapes from Chris, much
less phone calls. Neither family heard anything. The months following
(15:17):
that final August letter from Peta were a nightmare for
the Farmer and Frampton families. They got together and asked
the Foreign Office to investigate. They talked to their local
member of Parliament, asking him to look into it. Both
sets of parents wrote letters to all the British consuls
in Central and South America. Charles Farmer, Chris and Penny's
(15:42):
father was a reporter with BBC Television, so he knew
to turn to the news, taking every step possible to
get word of the disappearance out there. He and his wife,
Audrey did interviews with the BBC and ITV, A host
of national as well as local newspapers. Radio and TV
stations ran stories. The Farmers had a Spanish friend write
(16:05):
a letter to hotels and tourist spots around Guatemala. The
last place that Chris and Peter had written from. The
families and the public speculated about what could have happened.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
The young couple might have been.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Thrown in some distant jail cell or taken hostage by
a faction in the ongoing Guatemala and Civil War, but
the Farmers and the Framptons didn't think too much about
the other options.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
They couldn't not yet.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
There was still hope leads here and there throughout September
and the first half of October, but none of the
leads seemed to go anywhere. Penny walked into silent rooms
around the house to find her mother alone, wiping.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Her way tears.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Penny was still just eighteen, but she wasn't the carefree
kid she was when Chris left nine months earlier, especially
not since the British Foreign Office finally made some progress
on the case in mid October. They tracked down silas
Dwayne Boston, who left Belize with his sons soon after
Chris and Peter's disappearance and made his way back to
(17:10):
his home state of California. I don't know about you,
but that is unacceptable. I mean, you're really going and
just not say nothing to nobody. After two of your
passengers go missing in front of your two little boys,
you think the best idea is to pack up and
leave the country.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Someone from the British Consulate called Dwayne and questioned him.
Dwayne's answers were vague and unhelpful. He said he dropped
off the couple in the port across the bay from Livingston,
Guatemala Covenetris Puntas Peninsula. From there, he had no idea
where they went.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
He might have.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Seen them in Livingston around the ninth of July, but
it could have been a different couple. I just can't
buy that level of being totally out of it, not
even for the seventies. At this point, the British Consulate
was also convinced Dwayne was hiding something, or hiding a
lot of things. He was so evasive, but they had
(18:13):
no proof, so they interviewed him again in person. This time,
he was calm and collected when he started talking, but
when the questioning got into Chris and Peta, his demeanor
completely changed.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
This is a.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Quote from the report the Farmers got. On the interview,
Dwayne Boston sat up straight in his chair, his eyes
widened and his breathing became heavy, his chest notably rising
and falling. Following this, he slumped back in his chair,
placing his face into his right hand, and in a
(18:50):
softly spoken voice, he said that he thought Chris and
Peta would be back home by now. The Coate was
more convinced than ever that there was foul play at
work here and Dwayne was involved. They told the Farmers
to take the case to the Greater Manchester Police. This
was officially a criminal investigation, but still there was no proof.
(19:15):
There was nothing to go on, not even bodies, just
unshakable intuition and good sense. By now, Chris and Peter
had been missing for six months. Penny watched her parents bury,
their grief and anxiety and the investigation even as it
stalled once again. Charles Farmer actually called Dwayne Boston himself
(19:40):
and talked to him with the clearance of the Manchester Police.
He got the same kind of evasive answers that Dwayne
had already given the Consulate. Charles came away convinced that
there was foul play too, and Dwayne was involved. So
the Farmers decided to try one more. They hired a
(20:02):
private detective to look into the case on the ground
in Balize. On February first, nineteen seventy nine, Penny finished
the school day. She walked to a telephone booth in
(20:22):
Wilmslow Town Center and dialed home. She started telling her mother, Audrey,
that she was going to be late for dinner. She
wanted to go over to a friend's house, but, as
she'd later recall in her book, her mother interrupted her, no,
you need to come home now. Penny heard something in
(20:48):
Audrey's voice, a faltering distress. She didn't ask questions she
didn't need to. As she rushed through the two mile
walk home alone along the darkening road, She felt completely shattered.
She described the feeling in her book, The world felt
like it was spinning on its axis.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
At breakneck speed and in free fall.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
That night, Charles Farmer told his family word had come
in from the private investigator. Alfonso d'epinna I said before
that you have to be pretty good at lying to
be a private investigator, but that mostly applies to the
common ones, the ones who investigate selling corporate secrets and
(21:34):
other white collar crimes. D'penna is a good one, a
real white hat. Depina spoke with a local Balisian priest.
The priest said he heard about two bodies found two
hundred meters off the coast of the Guatemalan Peninsula Cabo Trees, Puntas,
back in July. The description of the bodies matched those
(21:58):
of the missing couple. The priests also told Dpenya that
these two bodies were mutilated before they were tied to
engine parts and drowned. The locals were so upset by
the bodies that after an autopsy, they immediately buried them
in the local Puerto Barrio cemetery. As harrowing as that is,
(22:19):
I have to give everyone involved credit. They got an autopsy,
they followed the protocol, and that's pretty incredible. The former
family knocked back a bottle of sherry, the only alcohol
they had in the house. Finally they knew Pete and
Chris were dead. They just didn't know how or why
(22:48):
the bodies were exhumed. I understand that exhumation needs to
happen sometimes in the name of justice, but even just
hearing about it makes my stomach hurt. There's a certain
kind of piece that comes when someone's body is laid
to rest and exhummation. It feels to me like It
(23:09):
not only undoes that piece, but it tangles up the
grieving process too. But it was necessary here. It meant
that the families got some more much needed information about
Chris and Peta. First, a dental examination confirmed what they were.
All but certain of the bodies belonged to Chris and Peta.
(23:32):
It confirmed other gruesome details too. They had both been
bound by the hands, legs, and ankles. Chris showed marks
of torture. Peta had a plastic bag over her head.
Both were tied to engine parts. Both had died by drowning.
(23:56):
That meant they'd been alive when they were thrown into
the waters off Guatemala's coast. The farmers also learned that
Silas Dwayne Boston was a criminal with a long record
with charges ranging from theft to rape. He was even
a suspect in the disappearance of one of his wives,
(24:18):
Mary Lou Boston, the mother of his two young sons,
who had been on the boat. Mary Lou's body was
never found, but the police suspected foul play. And that's it.
That is all the families knew for decades. Imagine if
(24:41):
we ended the episode here, how unsatisfied would you be?
If I was you, I would be pissed, but I'd
be even more upset obviously if it was happening to
me in real life, if I was related to the
people who died. I'm oversimplifying the emotions, but I think
the main one I would display is rage. Because even
with the bodies in hand and the knowledge of his
(25:04):
past crimes, authorities were unable to find any concrete evidence
that Silas Duayne Boston was the killer. The motor parts
Chris and Peta had been tied to were recovered from
the sea, but they were lost in the shuffle before
Dpinya found the bodies. They couldn't provide any leits. This
(25:26):
seems like another place where some contemporary technology could have
been really useful. Unfortunately, Guatemalan officials and police were also
pretty unhelpful. They had no diplomatic relations with Britain at
the time, thinks in part to a pretty brutal civil
war and general instability in Guatemala. But for the farmers,
(25:50):
basically what this all amounted to was progress in the
case just stopped, despite the fact that they felt they
knew who committed this crime. To the farmers, the Greater
Manchester Police and the British Foreign Office. The truth already
seemed clear. Dwayne had killed the young couple for money
(26:15):
for something else they didn't know. He claimed they paid
him five hundred dollars for their passage and absurd some
for that service, the time period and the region. Maybe
he had stolen that money and claimed they paid it
to cover his tracks. Some people don't need a motive
(26:36):
at all. But whatever the reason he did it, he
was the killer, and now he was living in California
without a single consequence for his barbaric crime. Audrey Farmer
paused while making dinner one night, turned to Penny and said,
I don't feel that I will ever be able to
(26:56):
feel true happiness again. In the years that followed, the
Farmers never gave up on hounding authorities for updates and
giving suggestions for potential lines of inquiry. The police and
the US were the main source of news. They did
(27:19):
their best to keep track of Dwayne, but he was
good at evading the sites of the law. When they
had him in custody for an unrelated crime, they tried
to question him on what happened in Belize. His story changed,
including important details like where exactly he dropped off Chris
and Peter, whether he left them on a beach or
(27:42):
on a quote unquote Native vote. But Dwayne wouldn't confess,
and when the other charges came to nothing, the police
released him from custody. One of the main points the
Farmers kept making to law enforcement wasn't about Duayne at all.
(28:02):
They wanted to know about his sons. Those boys who
had been on the boat when Chris and Peter were killed.
Investigators had to talk to them. They might have seen something.
They had to have some kind of information. American investigators
gave a frustrating response. They couldn't track down the boys.
(28:25):
The Boston family seemed to be constantly moving them around.
They were never able to bring the kids in for questioning.
The Farmers were told by the Greater Manchester Police, their
main point of contact, that the case would never be closed.
The updates petered out. Penny went to university and graduated.
(28:47):
She became a journalist like her father, and then switched
from news into fashion and beauty reporting. She lived in London, married,
then moved again to Oxfordshire, where she raised a family.
She never stopped wondering, never felt that lightness of knowing.
On October second, twenty fifteen, Penny was walking the dog
(29:09):
with her mother. There was an autumnal glow to the scene,
that kind of warm, soft light that's beautiful but a
little melancholy. Audrey wondered wistfully what Chris would look like now.
He'd be sixty two, hard to imagine, he'd always be
young in their eyes. As Penny heard her mother speak,
(29:32):
standing in that mellow autumn light, almost forty years after
her brother's death, she had a realization. So much had
changed since the days when Chris and Peter went missing.
Now there was Facebook and everyone was on it. Everyone
(29:55):
was using their real names, real information about where they
were and what they did, maybe even Silas Dwayne Boston,
or better yet, his two sons. Penny's intuition was spot
(30:46):
on at home that October day, it didn't take much
digging to find Vince Boston of California. He'd written publicly
on his profile about losing his mother to gun violence
when she was just twenty three years old, as part
of a post advocating for stricter gun laws in the US.
(31:07):
This was him, and if he was talking publicly about
his mother's death to gunfire, maybe he wasn't on good
terms with his father. Maybe he'd talk. Penny's hope grew
as she continued trawling through. Here was Russell Boston, and
(31:28):
here was Silas Dwayne Boston himself. She stared at the haggard,
grizzled photo at the forefront of his profile. This was
the man who had killed her brother. She had never
seen his face before, staring it down even through the screen,
(31:52):
she felt discussed, but she also felt hope. It wasn't
only that Vince seemed convinced his mother died due to
foul play, nor that he wasn't afraid to talk about
it publicly.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
There was also the fact.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
That Vince wasn't quote unquote friends with his father or
brother on the site. She didn't know what it meant yet,
but she hoped it might help. Before she had time
to doubt her instincts, she logged into the anonymous Facebook
account she'd made to keep an eye on her own
teenage kids. Then she sent each of the boys men
(32:36):
now a message, quote, please can you tell me if
you were off the coast of Central America and a
boat with your brother and father in nineteen seventy eight?
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Please reply? Then I will tell you why I am
writing to you. Why won't you reply? Because you already
know why I'm writing to you? Do you know or
remember the truth? I will not leave this matter alone.
Penny didn't get a reply to those messages. She also
(33:13):
didn't give up. On Monday morning, Penny called the Greater
Manchester Police to inform them of her discovery.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
She knew they'd been.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Looking into cold cases lately. Now, she said, they had
the information they needed to look into hers, and they agreed.
Penny's discovery was more than enough to reopen the case.
But the problem was, despite the technological revolution that had
(33:46):
occurred since the original investigation, international cases like this one
were still mired in complicated bureaucracy of jurisdiction and cooperating
between different agencies. To get back in touch with the
Sacramento Police, the California Department, last involved with the case,
the Greater Manchester Police or GMP, had to go through
(34:09):
Interpol in Washington, DC. And I should mention Interpol is
not really the international spy organization that espionage films would
have you imagine. It's basically investigators assigned by different countries
to work on international cases and coordinate between agencies. In
(34:29):
other words, they are slow. For months, Penny heard nothing.
Life went on as it had for the past four decades.
But something was different. Now She knew the case could move.
There was an urgency now too. Dwayne was old if
the justice system was going to bring him down, it
(34:52):
needed to move. On February twenty ninth, twenty sixteen, the
GMP officer looking into the case, Mikaela Clinch, spoke directly
to Detective Amy Crosby of the Missing Person Unit at
the Sacramento Police Department and learned something shocking. At almost
(35:12):
the exact time that Penny had her revelation about the
power of Facebook to crack this case. Amy was looking
into the disappearance of Mary Lou Boston, Dwayne's wife in
Vincent Russell's mother. The case was stalled, but on October thirteenth,
twenty fifteen, just eleven days after Penny sent her message
(35:34):
to Vince, he gave Amy a statement about his mother's case.
He said, it's an open family secret that my father
killed my mother in nineteen sixty eight, although no one
knows where he had buried her. But then Vince told
Amy Moore. He told her I witnessed my father murder
(35:57):
a young couple in broad daylight in Guatemala. He witnessed
Dwayne murder Chris and Peter, and he wanted to talk.
The good news kept coming. When Amy reached the other brother, Russell,
(36:21):
on January nineteenth, he wanted to talk to and considering
the brothers were estranged, that explained the lack of Facebook friendship.
That made his corroboration of the events all the more powerful.
They couldn't have colluded to concoct some story for the
police because Russell did corroborate Vince's story. It was March
(36:43):
twenty sixteen Penny, her mother Audrey, and her brother Nigel
gathered in the offices of the GMP. As Penny recounted
in her book, the officer said, you have waited long
enough to know what happened. How much would you like
to know? Penny and Nigel looked at their mother, Audrey
(37:08):
was now ninety, and she said, I would like to
know everything. I don't want to be spared any details.
The Boston Boys story started in Sacramento in the autumn
of nineteen seventy seven, when Dwayne was facing rape charges.
(37:31):
To escape the law, he fled down to Belize with
his two sons. Maybe he brought them to lend himself
an air of respectability. Who wouldn't trust a guy with
two kids? But in Belize he didn't hop on the
straight and narrow. He started drinking the cheap local rum,
lots of it, and getting both physically and verbally violent
(37:54):
when he did it. First toward the boys, Dwayne picked
Chris and Peter up as customers part of his tourist business,
and inevitably the couple witnessed Dwayne's abuse of his sons.
They stepped in. One time. After screaming at Dwayne to
stop and getting no response, Chris pulled Dwayne off twelve
(38:17):
year old Russell. Dwayne then toppled off the deck into
the sea. Vince remembered Pete and Chris laughing at the
side of the splash, and Chris told Dwayne to behave
as he hauled him back on board.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Dwayne was humiliated.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
That night, Dwayne muttered to Vince, I'm going to kill them.
Most of the time you'd assume that was an angry exaggeration,
but as I mentioned, it was an open secret in
the family that Dwayne killed Vince and Russell's mother. Vince
(38:56):
knew his father was serious. He hoped he wasn't, but
he knew he was. It didn't happen right away. Dwayne
was a seasoned criminal. He waited until the following night,
when Peter was below deck. He asked Chris to pull
up the boat's anchor, and then he came at the
(39:18):
young man from behind. He blood in Chris over the
head with the club he used to stun and kill Fish,
slamming it into Chris again and again until the club broke. Next,
he attempted to stab him in the chest with a knife,
until that also broke. When Peter heard, she came up
(39:41):
to the deck and yelled for Dwayne to stop. Dwayne
screamed back, get back down in the fucking gallery now,
or I will shoot you with the spear gun. Chris
yelled too, what's your game? What's your game? And I
give up? I give up again and again. Finally, Dwayne,
(40:07):
panting stopped. Chris was badly injured, likely with multiple broken
bones in addition to a fractured skull. Dwayne, however, was
the one complaining about the agonizing.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Pain in his back.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
In an extraordinary act, Chris actually got out his medical
bag and gave Dwayne a muscle relaxant. Maybe he was
trying to de escalate the situation. He asked Dwayne why
he'd done it, and he said it was because Chris
had tried to haggle with him about the price of
(40:45):
the journey. He wanted his money. Chris soothed him, agreeing
immediately he'd pay whatever Dwayne wanted, and all of that
did seem to de escalate things for a while. After
(41:06):
taking the muscle relaxant, Dwayne fell asleep. The boys remember
Pete and Chris whispering together through the night. They didn't
try to escape the boat. Probably Chris was unable to
considering his injuries. But maybe they thought that when Dwayne
(41:28):
woke up sober, he'd be calmer, less violent, that he'd
take their money and let them go.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
In the morning.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
That guest seemed correct. Dwayne said he would drop his
passengers off on the Cabo de Trece Peninsula near Livingstone
in Guatemala if they paid him five hundred dollars each,
an inordinance um based basically all their money. But they agreed.
(41:59):
Then Dwayne stated his condition matter of factly, giving no
choice to stop them from reporting him to the police.
Before he could get out of the area, he would
have to tie their hands and strip them naked before
releasing them. They did not resist. That's when the nightmare
(42:23):
grew darker. I want to give you all the heads
up that what follows is really violent and disturbing, so
feel free to skip forward about a minute if you
don't want to hear the details. Over the next thirty
six hours, Dwayne manipulated Chris and Peta through sadistic mind
(42:44):
games and physical violence, promising them he'd let them go,
but humiliating and degrading them in the meantime, he likely
raped Peta. The following day, he dressed his actives and
wrapped them in rope. Even now he was promising he'd
(43:05):
drop them off on shore. He just needed to put
plastic bags over their heads so they couldn't see where
he was sailing. Once the bags were on their heads,
he tied their ropes to heavy engine parts. Then he
pushed them overboard. They were fully conscious as they went over,
(43:30):
though with those engine parts and their injuries, they didn't
stand a chance. Russell remembered seeing an air bubble come
up through the sea, and then the sea was calm. Later,
(43:56):
Penny would travel to California and talk to Russell in person,
hearing many of these details from him personally. He would
add that Dwayne had found an unposted letter among Peters
things and posted it himself to create confusion about when
the couple died. That letter the Framptons received in August
of nineteen seventy nine, which temporarily staved off the family's fears.
(44:20):
Both boys would also reveal that over the years, once
they reached adulthood, they both tried to go to the
authorities in both the UK and the US about their
father's crime, but their attempts had never reached anyone with
knowledge of the case, falling victim to the same issues
of jurisdiction and poor international interagency communication that had obstructed
(44:43):
the case from the start. But back in that conference
room in Manchester at the police station, the Farmers had
heard enough. For the time being, this sounded like a
horror movie. It was almost unbelievable, but both Vince and
Russell had witnessed it. Their stories matched up. All these
(45:06):
years later, the Farmer's conviction that the boys held the
key was confirmed. Finally they knew the truth. They were
shell shocked, speechless and horrified, but they knew all they
needed now was justice. With two willing witnesses, prosecutors would
(45:50):
have a decent case against Joyne. But the problem once
again was who could prosecute that is, jurisdiction. Various countries
and justice departments went back and forth, the Brits, the Americans,
and Belize, the last port where the victims were seen alive,
although not the country where the crime took place, which
(46:12):
would be Guatemala. Finally, they determined this American prosecutors could
claim jurisdiction if the murders happened in open water and
most importantly were committed by an American on a boat
owned by an American, with registration or proof that the
American was indeed the owner of the vessel at the time.
(46:36):
What they really needed then was proof that Dwayne owned
his boat. It seemed like it would be impossible to find,
but Russell Boston had ended up with a lot of
his father's possessions because his father would dump them with
him as he fled back and forth over the border
with Mexico avoiding the law. Among those possessions he found
(46:58):
photos of the trip to police, which showed Chris and
linked him to Dwayne and his boat. He had Chris's
old records as in music records, which further linked Jain
to the crime. And on September sixteenth, twenty sixteen, wedged
among a pile of junk in his father's old briefcase,
(47:20):
he found a small creased document the title of the
Justin B. Dayne's Boat. The case was getting tighter, the
evidence was growing. All that was missing from the files
were the dental exams matching the bodies found in Guatemala
with Chris and Petis in all records. No one could
(47:41):
find the file anywhere, not in the US, not in
the UK, not with Inner Pol. The prosecution needed to
find the bodies, exhumed them again, and redo the examination. Unfortunately,
even that was easier than done. The Porto Barrio cemetery,
(48:09):
where Chris and Peter were buried back in the nineteen seventies,
was overflowing with graves. They were often unmarked, and there
was no clear map or clear organization. By the twenty tens,
the FBI searched for Chris and Peter's crosses, but did
not find them, and the search was called off in
(48:30):
early November of twenty sixteen. It was a blow to
the case. Without bodies the ultimate proof of Chris and
Peter's death, there was less proof of murder too. Still,
(48:58):
prosecutors pushed on they'd pursue the case anyway. The next
step was apprehending their suspect. For once, the California authorities
knew exactly where to make that arrest. Seventy four year
old Dwayne wasn't somewhere on the road toward Mexico. Not
these days. He was in poor health and stuck in
(49:19):
a nursing home in Eureka, California. On December one, twenty sixteen,
he was charged with the murders of Chris Farmer and
Peter Frampton and taken into custody. On December eighth, Dwayne
was indicted. The trial date was set for the autumn
(49:40):
of twenty seventeen, expedited by a few factors, one the
Farmer family's decision not to seek the death penalty and
the judge's knowledge that many participants in the case were elderly,
including the defendant, Audrey Farmer, and many of the witnesses
he called to speak about Dwayne. His parents and one
(50:00):
of her siblings had already passed. The Farmers prepared to
travel to California to give depositions on May sixth, including Audrey,
now ninety one years old. But Dwayne's health had been
deteriorating rapidly since his arrest. Around his seventy sixth birthday.
On March twentieth, twenty seventeen, things took a turn for
(50:24):
the worse. Then on April fifth, he began to refuse
medication and treatment. No kidney dialysis, no feeding tube. Two
weeks before the farmer's deposition trip to California, and five
months before the provisional trial date, on April twenty fourth,
(50:46):
twenty seventeen, Dwayne died. It was over for the law
at least there's no trial, there's no defendant. But for Penny,
this life shattering case would never really end, not now
when justice could never be served. In twenty eighteen, she
(51:11):
traveled to Guatemala with BBC reporters making a podcast about
her brother's case, and she succeeded where the FBI had failed.
Penny located Chris and Peter's graves in the Puerta Barrio cemetery,
just like she had located the entire Boston family on Facebook.
(51:33):
She made the trip to California to talk to Russell
in person too. She spoke with the prosecutors who had
fought beside her for justice, and Detective Amy Crosby of
the Missing Persons Unit at the Sacramento Police Department, thanking
them for their dedication, and then she used her training
as a journalist to write her book on the case,
(51:56):
the one I've mentioned a few times, Dead in the Water.
Penny Farmer is an extraordinary woman. We'll be back after
the break with an interview with Penny Farmer herself.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Stay with us well, Hi, Penny.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
I wanted to say, first of all, thank you so
much for agreeing to talk with us. Our listeners have
heard the story that you wrote about in your book,
so they're somewhat apprized of this situation. It's a pretty
personal account, so I wanted to ask you first what
made you decide to actually write the story.
Speaker 3 (53:02):
Despite being journalistically trained. Quite honestly, hadn't even occurred to
me at the initial outset of the investigation. It was
really only when my mother and I were constantly going
back and forth to Greater Manchester Police, you know, when
they were reopening the case after thirty eight years and
(53:23):
it was a conversation that I had with Mikayla Clinch,
detective from Mikayla Clinch, and she said to me, you know,
I assume you're going to write this up, you know,
And I just thought, well, yeah, actually, well why not,
you know, because as I say, I did train as
a journalist. But then, of course we got the terrible news,
(53:44):
you know, that Boston had committed suicide, and he did
commit suicide. There was no other way of dressing it up.
Then Russell reached out via Sacramento PD and said that
he wanted very much to be to Mom and I.
So it was at that point, you know, that we
(54:04):
got in touch and we had a very long skype
call with Russell, and obviously then it's sort of snowballed,
and so you know, I started really keeping more than
just notes, that started really writing the book at that point. Wow.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Actually, one of my questions was what was it like
to talk to those sons when we had.
Speaker 3 (54:29):
A skype call? It It was it was obviously the
most bizarre situation. And you know, all credit to my mother,
who at that stage was ninety one she's now ninety eight.
She was I mean, she's a very strong woman anyway.
But you know that there was my mother and I,
(54:49):
you know, one side of the camera and you know
when the camera went on because we hadn't aside from
his Facebook profile, we hadn't seen Russell Boston at all.
So it was a very weird experience. But it was
very pathetic, I think is probably the word. You know,
(55:11):
we both well. It was really more Russell telling us
exactly what happened on the boat, some of which has
gone in the book and some I've you know, held
back on for decency, Etceterually. You know, I think I
think I've written it enough to suggest probably you know,
(55:33):
what went on and the horror of it all without
going into too much graphic detail.
Speaker 2 (55:39):
It seems like a big component of the journey that
was writing the book and talking about the case was
get kind of giving yourself closure.
Speaker 1 (55:53):
Did it help with that?
Speaker 3 (55:54):
I suppose so in many ways. And you know, I've
I feel I've become a lot closer to my brother,
and I've learned a lot more about him, and you
know a lot of his friends have come forward, which
has been fantastic really, and especially for my mum, it's
been a bit of it's just a funny word to use,
but you know it's been a bit of a gift
in her old age to sort of reconnect with him,
(56:15):
albeit in death. So I think, you know, in that sense, yes,
I think closure is a bit of an overused cliche,
to be honest, because I don't think you ever really
get over it.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
You just sort of stir over the cracks really.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
But you know, I'm able to talk quite freely without
getting upset about it now because you know, time does
move on, and you have you can't keep looking back,
and you know, I mean it was ghastly and you
know we've not had it easy even latterly, you know.
Speaker 1 (56:49):
To get to the truth.
Speaker 3 (56:50):
But but we got there in the end and we
now know you know what's happened, and indeed Vince and
Russell as well, you know our family and the family
that we're both in the same boat, you know, I
mean that that's the extraordinary nature of this story, that
two families on either side of the Atlantic. It's like
parallel lives really. But you know, we're all victims of Boston,
(57:14):
if you like, they've been through hell and back and
you know what absolutely ghastly experience they have suffered, you know,
but both to witness their murders and to lose them
on So you know, I'm very grateful to them for
being so open. And they didn't turn out the people
(57:35):
that possibly their father would have liked them to be,
you know, they did they didn't follow history and go
the same way as him. You know that they're good,
decent people.
Speaker 2 (57:47):
Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that
we didn't ask about, or like, is there a final
word that you can get in there that you want
to make sure that we hear.
Speaker 3 (57:56):
Yeah, I mean, I just hope that no other families
have to go through what we've gone through. But I
you know, one would hope with modern day communications and
you know, I hope hopefully better reporting and better systems
in place that people wouldn't have.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
To go through all that, you know, they.
Speaker 3 (58:17):
Wouldn't have to wait forty plus years to find out
what had happened to their loved ones.
Speaker 2 (59:01):
For more information about this case and others we cover
on the show, visit Diversionaudio dot com. Sign up for
Diversion's newsletter and be among the first to hear about
special behind the scenes features with the hosts and actors
from Diversion's podcasts, more shows you'll love from Diversion and
our partners, and other exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else.
(59:26):
I'd also like to shout out a few key sources
that made it possible for me to tell this week's story.
First off, Penny Farmer's wonderful book Dead in the Water,
My forty year search for My Brother's Killer. Also the
excellent BBC podcast Paradise, which gives a ton of fascinating
detail on the case. And finally, I want to shout
(59:46):
out local news in the UK and especially around Manchester,
where the story has been covered substantially. The greatest true
crime stories ever told. Is a production of Diversion Audio.
Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer. This episode was
written by our editorial director Nora Battel. Our show was
(01:00:09):
produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our development team is
Emma Dumouth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash.
Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman.
Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
Diversion Audio
Diversion audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and descriptions of
violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take
care in listening. I want to tell you about a dream.
(00:34):
It's a recurring dream that Penny Farmer had after the
disappearance of her brother, one she wrote about in her
book on the case Dead.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
In the Water.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
It starts at a family party. Everyone is so happy, Penny,
her mother Audrey, her father Charles, her brother Nigel. They're
so happy because Chris is home with them, home with
all the people who love him, where he belongs. At
(01:05):
the end of the party, Penny knocks on Chris's bedroom door, grinning,
ready to gush about how glad she is to see him,
but he's under the covers. She walks to his bed
and sits down on the edge, and then she glances
at the nightstand. Lying on the table is a rubber
mask of her brother's face. She pulls aside the sheets.
(01:31):
The man lying underneath is a stranger. Imagine having that
dream over and over from the time you were a teenager.
Penny has been literally haunted her whole life. She's haunted
by hope, then despair, then false leads, and always this
(01:57):
sense of what's missing, of something wrong for forty years
until she took her brother's cold case into her own hands.
(02:35):
Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm
Mary Kay McBriar. I'm a writer of true crime, which
means I live inside the research wormhole. I'm constantly reading
about crime, but I'm not necessarily interested in all the
headline grabbing elements, the blood and the gore and all
(02:57):
of that. I'm more interesting in the people behind these
stories and what we can learn about society by looking
at their experiences. If you want evidence of my obsession,
you can read my book America's First Female serial Killer,
Jane Toppin and the Making of a Monster. You can
(03:20):
also meet me here every week when I dig into
crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She
might be as the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner,
the criminal, or a combination of those roles. As you
(03:40):
probably already know, women can do anything. Today's episode is
the story of Penny Farmer, who lost her brother at
sea in the late nineteen seventies and never stopped looking
for him, not for forty years. There's nothing more frustrating
(04:38):
to me than watching a movie set before like two thousand,
mainly before cell phones, when information just wasn't scharable easily,
like in that scene of Zodiac when Mark Ruffalo has
to drive to the next county because they can't fax
documents to him. That always just makes me scream with
my mouth closed. Or when one cell phone calls could
(05:00):
cut all the suspense of a movie, solve the case
and unravel the plot completely. I hate that, Not to mention,
that's my reaction to just a movie. The inability to
retroactively apply new elements to old crimes in real life
is an insufferable injustice. So for a little while I
dated a private investigator. He lied about a lot of stuff,
(05:24):
as espionage workers are trained to do, but one thing
he said that struck me as very true is how
the early usage of Facebook basically did his job for him.
I'm talking about Facebook before it was mostly a boom
or healthscape full of political hot takes, back when everyone
used it, usually with their real names, posting current pictures
(05:47):
of themselves in recognizable places where people wanted to be
found in hopes of connecting to people from their past.
And if I had a dime for every time I
snooped on a friend's blind date just by reverse searching
the guy's phone number. Well, frankly, it astonishes me how
any case got closed before the technologies we use so
easily nowadays. It's one reason why so many of them
(06:09):
ran cold. That and the fact that crimes get buried
under new crimes, crimes that can be worked more easily
with our new technology and new methods of gathering evidence.
It stands to reason that happens pretty often. Penny Farmer
didn't let that happen. Officials might have gotten pulled away
(06:30):
to more recent issues, but Penny applied the technologies she
had on hand as a regular citizen and brought justice
to her beloved brother.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Penny Farmer was.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Zooming through the roads of the northern England city of
Manchester in Chevrolet. The front seat was cramped and uncomfortable
with three squeezed in, but Penny didn't care. She sat
between her elder brother Chris and his friend in the
driver's seat, Pink Floyd's wish you were here flying through
(07:17):
the speakers, as she'd reminisced decades later in her book
on her brother's case.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Dead in the water. In that moment, she.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Told herself, I've arrived. Chris was the kind of brother
who gave his kid's sister lots of moments like that.
He played music at the house that was like a
live soundtrack of seventies cool Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Jimmy Hendrix,
Jefferson Airplane. He gave her a motorcycle ride once, just once,
(07:49):
because their mother, Audrey, was not thrilled. He dressed wild too,
bell bottoms, crop tops, a patchwork leather jacket, and he
had thick, stylish Penny admired him. She admired how he
made life exciting. It was no surprise when he and
his longtime girlfriend Peta announced that they were going to
(08:11):
travel the world when they finished their studies. Both advanced degrees,
his in medicine hers in law in nineteen seventy seven.
Chris Farmer was twenty five, Peter Frampton was twenty four.
(08:32):
The couple grew up across the street from one another,
and they'd been sweethearts since childhood. Chris and Peta had
already made many trips together through Europe and down to
North Africa. This trip would be different because it would
be long and it would take them all the way
from Australia through the South Seas to South America. After
(08:56):
Chris and Peter left for their big adventure in December
nineteen seventy, Penny had to focus on the major life
events rushing toward her as a high scholer A level exams,
university applications. Every time Chris mailed the Farmer family one
of his messages, she'd get excited. They came as voice
(09:19):
recordings on cassettes and they painted these detailed, happy portraits
of his travels with Peter.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
And then went on to Guadalajara, as I say, quite
a nice towns.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Not anything's heard of the.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Marry archies, but you'reinerant Mexican musicians and that's their hometown.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
So every streetcorn you come to, you you've seen five
or six of these characters.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Playing their different size guitars and double basses, demanding a
few pay those.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
For a song.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
That's a clip of the tapes from the BBC podcast Paradise,
which did an investigative deep dive in to the case.
I think it's so cool that Chris communicated this way.
I mean, letters are great, I miss letters, but this
is pretty and genius and the cassette recordings let his
(10:13):
loved ones hear the sounds around him in the world too.
That's Pink Floyd in the background of this recording. It's
so evocative of the time. The tape really puts you
right there with Chris. Penny also tuned in for reports
from Peter's family. Peter regularly wrote long diary style letters
(10:35):
to her mother, Sammy Frampton, who passed on the news
to the Farmers. The trip sounded magical. Barbecues and shark
catching on the shores of Australia, scuba diving and snorkeling
in New Caledonia and Fiji, smoke plumes from Hawaii's volcanoes,
Aztec ruins and Wohaka, and then Belize City. Here Chris
(11:02):
and Peta met a man named Silas Dwayne Boston and
his two young sons, then thirteen year old Vince and
twelve year old Russell. Another tourist at a hotel bar
introduced them. Dwayne, he went by his middle name, was gregarious,
charming and a big drinker. But for Chris and Peta,
(11:23):
his real appeal was that he owned a boat which
he used to ferry tourists around the region. The Justin
b was a simple vessel, wooden, no bathroom or other
modern luxuries. Traveling on that thing would be a real adventure.
After a few short trips around the coast of Belize
(11:46):
and the nearby Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, Peta and Chris
decide to join Dwayne on a longer sail down to
Costa Rica. Despite the fact that they hadn't planned to
travel that way, Peta said in a letter to her mother,
we thought it was an opportunity not to be missed.
More of Pete's letters trickled back to England after she
(12:09):
and Chris boarded the boat. At first, they painted the
same cheery picture as the previous letters. Quote, it's very
peaceful and we catch fish for supper. There's plenty of
snapper and grunt, not to mention catfish, which is tasty.
It's a real kick being able to catch your own supper.
(12:29):
The boat is not very comfortable, it's a bit cramped,
but during the day it's super just lying on the
hatches and soaking up the sun while the boat flies along.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
That letter arrived in.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
June nineteen seventy eight, dated June thirteenth, The Frampton and
former families devoured it, and then they waited for more,
and waited.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
And waited.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
They wondered if there was a postal strike, or maybe
Chris and Peter were sick. They began to worry, maybe
something was really wrong. They always updated their families, no
matter how far their adventures took them. But then in
August another letter. The letter was sweet relief for both families.
(13:22):
At first, it read like a usual Peta update for
the most part, although for the first time there was
a hint of tensions brewing on the boat. Peter wrote,
I wouldn't mind ending my sailing career now I find
I have no patience at all with Twain's two sons.
(13:42):
But what makes it worse is that Dwayne curses and
puts them down continually. She signed off like this, enough
of the future. I don't think there's any more news.
Nothing much happens on a boat.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Lots of love.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Dwayne and the boats. Apparently fading charm isn't what started
to worry. The family is back in England once again, though.
It's the fact that the letter was dated June twenty eighth,
with a PostScript marked June twenty ninth, and yet it
hadn't arrived in England until August. When Peter wasn't able
(14:23):
to post a letter right away, she always added to it,
dating the editions along the way. What had the couple
been doing throughout July. Then there was the fact that
no more letters arrived, nor any tapes from Chris, much
less phone calls. Neither family heard anything. The months following
(15:17):
that final August letter from Peta were a nightmare for
the Farmer and Frampton families. They got together and asked
the Foreign Office to investigate. They talked to their local
member of Parliament, asking him to look into it. Both
sets of parents wrote letters to all the British consuls
in Central and South America. Charles Farmer, Chris and Penny's
(15:42):
father was a reporter with BBC Television, so he knew
to turn to the news, taking every step possible to
get word of the disappearance out there. He and his wife,
Audrey did interviews with the BBC and ITV, A host
of national as well as local newspapers. Radio and TV
stations ran stories. The Farmers had a Spanish friend write
(16:05):
a letter to hotels and tourist spots around Guatemala. The
last place that Chris and Peter had written from. The
families and the public speculated about what could have happened.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
The young couple might have been.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Thrown in some distant jail cell or taken hostage by
a faction in the ongoing Guatemala and Civil War, but
the Farmers and the Framptons didn't think too much about
the other options.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
They couldn't not yet.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
There was still hope leads here and there throughout September
and the first half of October, but none of the
leads seemed to go anywhere. Penny walked into silent rooms
around the house to find her mother alone, wiping.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Her way tears.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Penny was still just eighteen, but she wasn't the carefree
kid she was when Chris left nine months earlier, especially
not since the British Foreign Office finally made some progress
on the case in mid October. They tracked down silas
Dwayne Boston, who left Belize with his sons soon after
Chris and Peter's disappearance and made his way back to
(17:10):
his home state of California. I don't know about you,
but that is unacceptable. I mean, you're really going and
just not say nothing to nobody. After two of your
passengers go missing in front of your two little boys,
you think the best idea is to pack up and
leave the country.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Someone from the British Consulate called Dwayne and questioned him.
Dwayne's answers were vague and unhelpful. He said he dropped
off the couple in the port across the bay from Livingston,
Guatemala Covenetris Puntas Peninsula. From there, he had no idea
where they went.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
He might have.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Seen them in Livingston around the ninth of July, but
it could have been a different couple. I just can't
buy that level of being totally out of it, not
even for the seventies. At this point, the British Consulate
was also convinced Dwayne was hiding something, or hiding a
lot of things. He was so evasive, but they had
(18:13):
no proof, so they interviewed him again in person. This time,
he was calm and collected when he started talking, but
when the questioning got into Chris and Peta, his demeanor
completely changed.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
This is a.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Quote from the report the Farmers got. On the interview,
Dwayne Boston sat up straight in his chair, his eyes
widened and his breathing became heavy, his chest notably rising
and falling. Following this, he slumped back in his chair,
placing his face into his right hand, and in a
(18:50):
softly spoken voice, he said that he thought Chris and
Peta would be back home by now. The Coate was
more convinced than ever that there was foul play at
work here and Dwayne was involved. They told the Farmers
to take the case to the Greater Manchester Police. This
was officially a criminal investigation, but still there was no proof.
(19:15):
There was nothing to go on, not even bodies, just
unshakable intuition and good sense. By now, Chris and Peter
had been missing for six months. Penny watched her parents bury,
their grief and anxiety and the investigation even as it
stalled once again. Charles Farmer actually called Dwayne Boston himself
(19:40):
and talked to him with the clearance of the Manchester Police.
He got the same kind of evasive answers that Dwayne
had already given the Consulate. Charles came away convinced that
there was foul play too, and Dwayne was involved. So
the Farmers decided to try one more. They hired a
(20:02):
private detective to look into the case on the ground
in Balize. On February first, nineteen seventy nine, Penny finished
the school day. She walked to a telephone booth in
(20:22):
Wilmslow Town Center and dialed home. She started telling her mother, Audrey,
that she was going to be late for dinner. She
wanted to go over to a friend's house, but, as
she'd later recall in her book, her mother interrupted her, no,
you need to come home now. Penny heard something in
(20:48):
Audrey's voice, a faltering distress. She didn't ask questions she
didn't need to. As she rushed through the two mile
walk home alone along the darkening road, She felt completely shattered.
She described the feeling in her book, The world felt
like it was spinning on its axis.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
At breakneck speed and in free fall.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
That night, Charles Farmer told his family word had come
in from the private investigator. Alfonso d'epinna I said before
that you have to be pretty good at lying to
be a private investigator, but that mostly applies to the
common ones, the ones who investigate selling corporate secrets and
(21:34):
other white collar crimes. D'penna is a good one, a
real white hat. Depina spoke with a local Balisian priest.
The priest said he heard about two bodies found two
hundred meters off the coast of the Guatemalan Peninsula Cabo Trees, Puntas,
back in July. The description of the bodies matched those
(21:58):
of the missing couple. The priests also told Dpenya that
these two bodies were mutilated before they were tied to
engine parts and drowned. The locals were so upset by
the bodies that after an autopsy, they immediately buried them
in the local Puerto Barrio cemetery. As harrowing as that is,
(22:19):
I have to give everyone involved credit. They got an autopsy,
they followed the protocol, and that's pretty incredible. The former
family knocked back a bottle of sherry, the only alcohol
they had in the house. Finally they knew Pete and
Chris were dead. They just didn't know how or why
(22:48):
the bodies were exhumed. I understand that exhumation needs to
happen sometimes in the name of justice, but even just
hearing about it makes my stomach hurt. There's a certain
kind of piece that comes when someone's body is laid
to rest and exhummation. It feels to me like It
(23:09):
not only undoes that piece, but it tangles up the
grieving process too. But it was necessary here. It meant
that the families got some more much needed information about
Chris and Peta. First, a dental examination confirmed what they were.
All but certain of the bodies belonged to Chris and Peta.
(23:32):
It confirmed other gruesome details too. They had both been
bound by the hands, legs, and ankles. Chris showed marks
of torture. Peta had a plastic bag over her head.
Both were tied to engine parts. Both had died by drowning.
(23:56):
That meant they'd been alive when they were thrown into
the waters off Guatemala's coast. The farmers also learned that
Silas Dwayne Boston was a criminal with a long record
with charges ranging from theft to rape. He was even
a suspect in the disappearance of one of his wives,
(24:18):
Mary Lou Boston, the mother of his two young sons,
who had been on the boat. Mary Lou's body was
never found, but the police suspected foul play. And that's it.
That is all the families knew for decades. Imagine if
(24:41):
we ended the episode here, how unsatisfied would you be?
If I was you, I would be pissed, but I'd
be even more upset obviously if it was happening to
me in real life, if I was related to the
people who died. I'm oversimplifying the emotions, but I think
the main one I would display is rage. Because even
with the bodies in hand and the knowledge of his
(25:04):
past crimes, authorities were unable to find any concrete evidence
that Silas Duayne Boston was the killer. The motor parts
Chris and Peta had been tied to were recovered from
the sea, but they were lost in the shuffle before
Dpinya found the bodies. They couldn't provide any leits. This
(25:26):
seems like another place where some contemporary technology could have
been really useful. Unfortunately, Guatemalan officials and police were also
pretty unhelpful. They had no diplomatic relations with Britain at
the time, thinks in part to a pretty brutal civil
war and general instability in Guatemala. But for the farmers,
(25:50):
basically what this all amounted to was progress in the
case just stopped, despite the fact that they felt they
knew who committed this crime. To the farmers, the Greater
Manchester Police and the British Foreign Office. The truth already
seemed clear. Dwayne had killed the young couple for money
(26:15):
for something else they didn't know. He claimed they paid
him five hundred dollars for their passage and absurd some
for that service, the time period and the region. Maybe
he had stolen that money and claimed they paid it
to cover his tracks. Some people don't need a motive
(26:36):
at all. But whatever the reason he did it, he
was the killer, and now he was living in California
without a single consequence for his barbaric crime. Audrey Farmer
paused while making dinner one night, turned to Penny and said,
I don't feel that I will ever be able to
(26:56):
feel true happiness again. In the years that followed, the
Farmers never gave up on hounding authorities for updates and
giving suggestions for potential lines of inquiry. The police and
the US were the main source of news. They did
(27:19):
their best to keep track of Dwayne, but he was
good at evading the sites of the law. When they
had him in custody for an unrelated crime, they tried
to question him on what happened in Belize. His story changed,
including important details like where exactly he dropped off Chris
and Peter, whether he left them on a beach or
(27:42):
on a quote unquote Native vote. But Dwayne wouldn't confess,
and when the other charges came to nothing, the police
released him from custody. One of the main points the
Farmers kept making to law enforcement wasn't about Duayne at all.
(28:02):
They wanted to know about his sons. Those boys who
had been on the boat when Chris and Peter were killed.
Investigators had to talk to them. They might have seen something.
They had to have some kind of information. American investigators
gave a frustrating response. They couldn't track down the boys.
(28:25):
The Boston family seemed to be constantly moving them around.
They were never able to bring the kids in for questioning.
The Farmers were told by the Greater Manchester Police, their
main point of contact, that the case would never be closed.
The updates petered out. Penny went to university and graduated.
(28:47):
She became a journalist like her father, and then switched
from news into fashion and beauty reporting. She lived in London, married,
then moved again to Oxfordshire, where she raised a family.
She never stopped wondering, never felt that lightness of knowing.
On October second, twenty fifteen, Penny was walking the dog
(29:09):
with her mother. There was an autumnal glow to the scene,
that kind of warm, soft light that's beautiful but a
little melancholy. Audrey wondered wistfully what Chris would look like now.
He'd be sixty two, hard to imagine, he'd always be
young in their eyes. As Penny heard her mother speak,
(29:32):
standing in that mellow autumn light, almost forty years after
her brother's death, she had a realization. So much had
changed since the days when Chris and Peter went missing.
Now there was Facebook and everyone was on it. Everyone
(29:55):
was using their real names, real information about where they
were and what they did, maybe even Silas Dwayne Boston,
or better yet, his two sons. Penny's intuition was spot
(30:46):
on at home that October day, it didn't take much
digging to find Vince Boston of California. He'd written publicly
on his profile about losing his mother to gun violence
when she was just twenty three years old, as part
of a post advocating for stricter gun laws in the US.
(31:07):
This was him, and if he was talking publicly about
his mother's death to gunfire, maybe he wasn't on good
terms with his father. Maybe he'd talk. Penny's hope grew
as she continued trawling through. Here was Russell Boston, and
(31:28):
here was Silas Dwayne Boston himself. She stared at the haggard,
grizzled photo at the forefront of his profile. This was
the man who had killed her brother. She had never
seen his face before, staring it down even through the screen,
(31:52):
she felt discussed, but she also felt hope. It wasn't
only that Vince seemed convinced his mother died due to
foul play, nor that he wasn't afraid to talk about
it publicly.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
There was also the fact.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
That Vince wasn't quote unquote friends with his father or
brother on the site. She didn't know what it meant yet,
but she hoped it might help. Before she had time
to doubt her instincts, she logged into the anonymous Facebook
account she'd made to keep an eye on her own
teenage kids. Then she sent each of the boys men
(32:36):
now a message, quote, please can you tell me if
you were off the coast of Central America and a
boat with your brother and father in nineteen seventy eight?
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Please reply? Then I will tell you why I am
writing to you. Why won't you reply? Because you already
know why I'm writing to you? Do you know or
remember the truth? I will not leave this matter alone.
Penny didn't get a reply to those messages. She also
(33:13):
didn't give up. On Monday morning, Penny called the Greater
Manchester Police to inform them of her discovery.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
She knew they'd been.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Looking into cold cases lately. Now, she said, they had
the information they needed to look into hers, and they agreed.
Penny's discovery was more than enough to reopen the case.
But the problem was, despite the technological revolution that had
(33:46):
occurred since the original investigation, international cases like this one
were still mired in complicated bureaucracy of jurisdiction and cooperating
between different agencies. To get back in touch with the
Sacramento Police, the California Department, last involved with the case,
the Greater Manchester Police or GMP, had to go through
(34:09):
Interpol in Washington, DC. And I should mention Interpol is
not really the international spy organization that espionage films would
have you imagine. It's basically investigators assigned by different countries
to work on international cases and coordinate between agencies. In
(34:29):
other words, they are slow. For months, Penny heard nothing.
Life went on as it had for the past four decades.
But something was different. Now She knew the case could move.
There was an urgency now too. Dwayne was old if
the justice system was going to bring him down, it
(34:52):
needed to move. On February twenty ninth, twenty sixteen, the
GMP officer looking into the case, Mikaela Clinch, spoke directly
to Detective Amy Crosby of the Missing Person Unit at
the Sacramento Police Department and learned something shocking. At almost
(35:12):
the exact time that Penny had her revelation about the
power of Facebook to crack this case. Amy was looking
into the disappearance of Mary Lou Boston, Dwayne's wife in
Vincent Russell's mother. The case was stalled, but on October thirteenth,
twenty fifteen, just eleven days after Penny sent her message
(35:34):
to Vince, he gave Amy a statement about his mother's case.
He said, it's an open family secret that my father
killed my mother in nineteen sixty eight, although no one
knows where he had buried her. But then Vince told
Amy Moore. He told her I witnessed my father murder
(35:57):
a young couple in broad daylight in Guatemala. He witnessed
Dwayne murder Chris and Peter, and he wanted to talk.
The good news kept coming. When Amy reached the other brother, Russell,
(36:21):
on January nineteenth, he wanted to talk to and considering
the brothers were estranged, that explained the lack of Facebook friendship.
That made his corroboration of the events all the more powerful.
They couldn't have colluded to concoct some story for the
police because Russell did corroborate Vince's story. It was March
(36:43):
twenty sixteen Penny, her mother Audrey, and her brother Nigel
gathered in the offices of the GMP. As Penny recounted
in her book, the officer said, you have waited long
enough to know what happened. How much would you like
to know? Penny and Nigel looked at their mother, Audrey
(37:08):
was now ninety, and she said, I would like to
know everything. I don't want to be spared any details.
The Boston Boys story started in Sacramento in the autumn
of nineteen seventy seven, when Dwayne was facing rape charges.
(37:31):
To escape the law, he fled down to Belize with
his two sons. Maybe he brought them to lend himself
an air of respectability. Who wouldn't trust a guy with
two kids? But in Belize he didn't hop on the
straight and narrow. He started drinking the cheap local rum,
lots of it, and getting both physically and verbally violent
(37:54):
when he did it. First toward the boys, Dwayne picked
Chris and Peter up as customers part of his tourist business,
and inevitably the couple witnessed Dwayne's abuse of his sons.
They stepped in. One time. After screaming at Dwayne to
stop and getting no response, Chris pulled Dwayne off twelve
(38:17):
year old Russell. Dwayne then toppled off the deck into
the sea. Vince remembered Pete and Chris laughing at the
side of the splash, and Chris told Dwayne to behave
as he hauled him back on board.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Dwayne was humiliated.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
That night, Dwayne muttered to Vince, I'm going to kill them.
Most of the time you'd assume that was an angry exaggeration,
but as I mentioned, it was an open secret in
the family that Dwayne killed Vince and Russell's mother. Vince
(38:56):
knew his father was serious. He hoped he wasn't, but
he knew he was. It didn't happen right away. Dwayne
was a seasoned criminal. He waited until the following night,
when Peter was below deck. He asked Chris to pull
up the boat's anchor, and then he came at the
(39:18):
young man from behind. He blood in Chris over the
head with the club he used to stun and kill Fish,
slamming it into Chris again and again until the club broke. Next,
he attempted to stab him in the chest with a knife,
until that also broke. When Peter heard, she came up
(39:41):
to the deck and yelled for Dwayne to stop. Dwayne
screamed back, get back down in the fucking gallery now,
or I will shoot you with the spear gun. Chris
yelled too, what's your game? What's your game? And I
give up? I give up again and again. Finally, Dwayne,
(40:07):
panting stopped. Chris was badly injured, likely with multiple broken
bones in addition to a fractured skull. Dwayne, however, was
the one complaining about the agonizing.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Pain in his back.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
In an extraordinary act, Chris actually got out his medical
bag and gave Dwayne a muscle relaxant. Maybe he was
trying to de escalate the situation. He asked Dwayne why
he'd done it, and he said it was because Chris
had tried to haggle with him about the price of
(40:45):
the journey. He wanted his money. Chris soothed him, agreeing
immediately he'd pay whatever Dwayne wanted, and all of that
did seem to de escalate things for a while. After
(41:06):
taking the muscle relaxant, Dwayne fell asleep. The boys remember
Pete and Chris whispering together through the night. They didn't
try to escape the boat. Probably Chris was unable to
considering his injuries. But maybe they thought that when Dwayne
(41:28):
woke up sober, he'd be calmer, less violent, that he'd
take their money and let them go.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
In the morning.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
That guest seemed correct. Dwayne said he would drop his
passengers off on the Cabo de Trece Peninsula near Livingstone
in Guatemala if they paid him five hundred dollars each,
an inordinance um based basically all their money. But they agreed.
(41:59):
Then Dwayne stated his condition matter of factly, giving no
choice to stop them from reporting him to the police.
Before he could get out of the area, he would
have to tie their hands and strip them naked before
releasing them. They did not resist. That's when the nightmare
(42:23):
grew darker. I want to give you all the heads
up that what follows is really violent and disturbing, so
feel free to skip forward about a minute if you
don't want to hear the details. Over the next thirty
six hours, Dwayne manipulated Chris and Peta through sadistic mind
(42:44):
games and physical violence, promising them he'd let them go,
but humiliating and degrading them in the meantime, he likely
raped Peta. The following day, he dressed his actives and
wrapped them in rope. Even now he was promising he'd
(43:05):
drop them off on shore. He just needed to put
plastic bags over their heads so they couldn't see where
he was sailing. Once the bags were on their heads,
he tied their ropes to heavy engine parts. Then he
pushed them overboard. They were fully conscious as they went over,
(43:30):
though with those engine parts and their injuries, they didn't
stand a chance. Russell remembered seeing an air bubble come
up through the sea, and then the sea was calm. Later,
(43:56):
Penny would travel to California and talk to Russell in person,
hearing many of these details from him personally. He would
add that Dwayne had found an unposted letter among Peters
things and posted it himself to create confusion about when
the couple died. That letter the Framptons received in August
of nineteen seventy nine, which temporarily staved off the family's fears.
(44:20):
Both boys would also reveal that over the years, once
they reached adulthood, they both tried to go to the
authorities in both the UK and the US about their
father's crime, but their attempts had never reached anyone with
knowledge of the case, falling victim to the same issues
of jurisdiction and poor international interagency communication that had obstructed
(44:43):
the case from the start. But back in that conference
room in Manchester at the police station, the Farmers had
heard enough. For the time being, this sounded like a
horror movie. It was almost unbelievable, but both Vince and
Russell had witnessed it. Their stories matched up. All these
(45:06):
years later, the Farmer's conviction that the boys held the
key was confirmed. Finally they knew the truth. They were
shell shocked, speechless and horrified, but they knew all they
needed now was justice. With two willing witnesses, prosecutors would
(45:50):
have a decent case against Joyne. But the problem once
again was who could prosecute that is, jurisdiction. Various countries
and justice departments went back and forth, the Brits, the Americans,
and Belize, the last port where the victims were seen alive,
although not the country where the crime took place, which
(46:12):
would be Guatemala. Finally, they determined this American prosecutors could
claim jurisdiction if the murders happened in open water and
most importantly were committed by an American on a boat
owned by an American, with registration or proof that the
American was indeed the owner of the vessel at the time.
(46:36):
What they really needed then was proof that Dwayne owned
his boat. It seemed like it would be impossible to find,
but Russell Boston had ended up with a lot of
his father's possessions because his father would dump them with
him as he fled back and forth over the border
with Mexico avoiding the law. Among those possessions he found
(46:58):
photos of the trip to police, which showed Chris and
linked him to Dwayne and his boat. He had Chris's
old records as in music records, which further linked Jain
to the crime. And on September sixteenth, twenty sixteen, wedged
among a pile of junk in his father's old briefcase,
(47:20):
he found a small creased document the title of the
Justin B. Dayne's Boat. The case was getting tighter, the
evidence was growing. All that was missing from the files
were the dental exams matching the bodies found in Guatemala
with Chris and Petis in all records. No one could
(47:41):
find the file anywhere, not in the US, not in
the UK, not with Inner Pol. The prosecution needed to
find the bodies, exhumed them again, and redo the examination. Unfortunately,
even that was easier than done. The Porto Barrio cemetery,
(48:09):
where Chris and Peter were buried back in the nineteen seventies,
was overflowing with graves. They were often unmarked, and there
was no clear map or clear organization. By the twenty tens,
the FBI searched for Chris and Peter's crosses, but did
not find them, and the search was called off in
(48:30):
early November of twenty sixteen. It was a blow to
the case. Without bodies the ultimate proof of Chris and
Peter's death, there was less proof of murder too. Still,
(48:58):
prosecutors pushed on they'd pursue the case anyway. The next
step was apprehending their suspect. For once, the California authorities
knew exactly where to make that arrest. Seventy four year
old Dwayne wasn't somewhere on the road toward Mexico. Not
these days. He was in poor health and stuck in
(49:19):
a nursing home in Eureka, California. On December one, twenty sixteen,
he was charged with the murders of Chris Farmer and
Peter Frampton and taken into custody. On December eighth, Dwayne
was indicted. The trial date was set for the autumn
(49:40):
of twenty seventeen, expedited by a few factors, one the
Farmer family's decision not to seek the death penalty and
the judge's knowledge that many participants in the case were elderly,
including the defendant, Audrey Farmer, and many of the witnesses
he called to speak about Dwayne. His parents and one
(50:00):
of her siblings had already passed. The Farmers prepared to
travel to California to give depositions on May sixth, including Audrey,
now ninety one years old. But Dwayne's health had been
deteriorating rapidly since his arrest. Around his seventy sixth birthday.
On March twentieth, twenty seventeen, things took a turn for
(50:24):
the worse. Then on April fifth, he began to refuse
medication and treatment. No kidney dialysis, no feeding tube. Two
weeks before the farmer's deposition trip to California, and five
months before the provisional trial date, on April twenty fourth,
(50:46):
twenty seventeen, Dwayne died. It was over for the law
at least there's no trial, there's no defendant. But for Penny,
this life shattering case would never really end, not now
when justice could never be served. In twenty eighteen, she
(51:11):
traveled to Guatemala with BBC reporters making a podcast about
her brother's case, and she succeeded where the FBI had failed.
Penny located Chris and Peter's graves in the Puerta Barrio cemetery,
just like she had located the entire Boston family on Facebook.
(51:33):
She made the trip to California to talk to Russell
in person too. She spoke with the prosecutors who had
fought beside her for justice, and Detective Amy Crosby of
the Missing Persons Unit at the Sacramento Police Department, thanking
them for their dedication, and then she used her training
as a journalist to write her book on the case,
(51:56):
the one I've mentioned a few times, Dead in the Water.
Penny Farmer is an extraordinary woman. We'll be back after
the break with an interview with Penny Farmer herself.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Stay with us well, Hi, Penny.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
I wanted to say, first of all, thank you so
much for agreeing to talk with us. Our listeners have
heard the story that you wrote about in your book,
so they're somewhat apprized of this situation. It's a pretty
personal account, so I wanted to ask you first what
made you decide to actually write the story.
Speaker 3 (53:02):
Despite being journalistically trained. Quite honestly, hadn't even occurred to
me at the initial outset of the investigation. It was
really only when my mother and I were constantly going
back and forth to Greater Manchester Police, you know, when
they were reopening the case after thirty eight years and
(53:23):
it was a conversation that I had with Mikayla Clinch,
detective from Mikayla Clinch, and she said to me, you know,
I assume you're going to write this up, you know,
And I just thought, well, yeah, actually, well why not,
you know, because as I say, I did train as
a journalist. But then, of course we got the terrible news,
(53:44):
you know, that Boston had committed suicide, and he did
commit suicide. There was no other way of dressing it up.
Then Russell reached out via Sacramento PD and said that
he wanted very much to be to Mom and I.
So it was at that point, you know, that we
(54:04):
got in touch and we had a very long skype
call with Russell, and obviously then it's sort of snowballed,
and so you know, I started really keeping more than
just notes, that started really writing the book at that point. Wow.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Actually, one of my questions was what was it like
to talk to those sons when we had.
Speaker 3 (54:29):
A skype call? It It was it was obviously the
most bizarre situation. And you know, all credit to my mother,
who at that stage was ninety one she's now ninety eight.
She was I mean, she's a very strong woman anyway.
But you know that there was my mother and I,
(54:49):
you know, one side of the camera and you know
when the camera went on because we hadn't aside from
his Facebook profile, we hadn't seen Russell Boston at all.
So it was a very weird experience. But it was
very pathetic, I think is probably the word. You know,
(55:11):
we both well. It was really more Russell telling us
exactly what happened on the boat, some of which has
gone in the book and some I've you know, held
back on for decency, Etceterually. You know, I think I
think I've written it enough to suggest probably you know,
(55:33):
what went on and the horror of it all without
going into too much graphic detail.
Speaker 2 (55:39):
It seems like a big component of the journey that
was writing the book and talking about the case was
get kind of giving yourself closure.
Speaker 1 (55:53):
Did it help with that?
Speaker 3 (55:54):
I suppose so in many ways. And you know, I've
I feel I've become a lot closer to my brother,
and I've learned a lot more about him, and you
know a lot of his friends have come forward, which
has been fantastic really, and especially for my mum, it's
been a bit of it's just a funny word to use,
but you know it's been a bit of a gift
in her old age to sort of reconnect with him,
(56:15):
albeit in death. So I think, you know, in that sense, yes,
I think closure is a bit of an overused cliche,
to be honest, because I don't think you ever really
get over it.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
You just sort of stir over the cracks really.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
But you know, I'm able to talk quite freely without
getting upset about it now because you know, time does
move on, and you have you can't keep looking back,
and you know, I mean it was ghastly and you
know we've not had it easy even latterly, you know.
Speaker 1 (56:49):
To get to the truth.
Speaker 3 (56:50):
But but we got there in the end and we
now know you know what's happened, and indeed Vince and
Russell as well, you know our family and the family
that we're both in the same boat, you know, I
mean that that's the extraordinary nature of this story, that
two families on either side of the Atlantic. It's like
parallel lives really. But you know, we're all victims of Boston,
(57:14):
if you like, they've been through hell and back and
you know what absolutely ghastly experience they have suffered, you know,
but both to witness their murders and to lose them
on So you know, I'm very grateful to them for
being so open. And they didn't turn out the people
(57:35):
that possibly their father would have liked them to be,
you know, they did they didn't follow history and go
the same way as him. You know that they're good,
decent people.
Speaker 2 (57:47):
Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that
we didn't ask about, or like, is there a final
word that you can get in there that you want
to make sure that we hear.
Speaker 3 (57:56):
Yeah, I mean, I just hope that no other families
have to go through what we've gone through. But I
you know, one would hope with modern day communications and
you know, I hope hopefully better reporting and better systems
in place that people wouldn't have.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
To go through all that, you know, they.
Speaker 3 (58:17):
Wouldn't have to wait forty plus years to find out
what had happened to their loved ones.
Speaker 2 (59:01):
For more information about this case and others we cover
on the show, visit Diversionaudio dot com. Sign up for
Diversion's newsletter and be among the first to hear about
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our partners, and other exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else.
(59:26):
I'd also like to shout out a few key sources
that made it possible for me to tell this week's story.
First off, Penny Farmer's wonderful book Dead in the Water,
My forty year search for My Brother's Killer. Also the
excellent BBC podcast Paradise, which gives a ton of fascinating
detail on the case. And finally, I want to shout
(59:46):
out local news in the UK and especially around Manchester,
where the story has been covered substantially. The greatest true
crime stories ever told. Is a production of Diversion Audio.
Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer. This episode was
written by our editorial director Nora Battel. Our show was
(01:00:09):
produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our development team is
Emma Dumouth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash.
Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman.
Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
Diversion Audio
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