True Crime Book Dead in the Water – When Life Is More Terrifying Than Fiction

Matt Nixson of Mail on Sunday: “A real life page turner more intriguing than anything on Netflix. The gripping story of a woman who turned detective to track down her brother’s killer – nearly four decades after he was brutally murdered.”

Ben Dirs, BBC News: “[A story] almost too mad to make up, too good not to tell and which one day, no doubt, will be a film.”

In July 1978, two bodies were discovered in the sea off Guatemala. They were found to be the remains of my brother – 25-year old British doctor, Christopher Farmer and his law graduate girlfriend, 24-year old Peta Frampton. Having been beaten and tortured, then thrown, still alive, into the sea, their bodies had been weighted down and dumped from the yacht on which they had been crewing. They had died from drowning. The discovery of their tortured corpses back in 1979, after they had been missing for ten months, haunted and bewildered my family for almost four decades and the pain has never left us.  We fought for 40 years to find the perpetrator of their inexplicable brutal murders.

As Chris’s sister, Dead in the Water is my personal account of how my family and I tracked down Chris and Peta’s killer. For four decades we painstakingly gathered evidence against Silas Boston, the yacht’s American owner, working alongside police in the UK and the USA, as well as the FBI and Interpol. The breakthrough came in 2015 when I found Boston on Facebook. I also found Boston’s two sons, Russell and Vince, who had witnessed their murders and whose bravery in testifying against their own father helped bring down Chris and Peta’s killer after and led to his arrest in 2016.

Talking about this case, which now stands as the oldest known international cold case ever to be solved, Martin Bottomley, Greater Manchester Police Force Review Officer, says: “In my 39-year career with GMP, this case has been one of the most fascinating and tragic that I have worked on. Every time I hear the story, it brings a private tear to my eye or strikes an emotional chord. And believe me, I’m not big on emotion.”

It is a story that will resonate with every parent the world over who has anxiously seen their children depart on gap years, wondering if they will return.  But it is also a story about how numerous law enforcement agencies failed my family not just in the pre-computer age but more shockingly, as recently as 2017. Furthermore, there is good evidence to suggest that the Sacramento Police Department only re-opened and pursued our case because they suspected in early 2016 that Boston was the Californian Golden State Killer (GSK). Once he was ruled out by DNA for those series of crimes, they finally grasped just how evil he was and they knew this time they had to find a way to prosecute. Arrested in April 2017 in Sacramento, Joseph James DeAngelo has been charged with the GSK crimes and awaits trial.

Why did I write the book? I felt it was very much my family’s story to tell, after all we are the ones who have lived this horror and, being a journalist, I wanted to take ownership. I wrote the book to stand as a lasting testimony to my beloved brother and to reflect our eternal love for him. Humanitarians in the widest sense of the word, Chris and Peta’s lives were cut short but, in some small way, I hope my book will immortalise them. 

Dead in the Water is not just a story of murder on the high seas. I hope that it succeeds in going beyond the typical true crime genre; is thought provoking and will be remembered long after the final page is turned.

It of course illustrates the devastating impact that murder has had on my family. As my now 94-year old mother says in the epilogue: “For anyone who considers taking life, let there be no doubt of its far-reaching consequences – it shatters far more than the life of the murdered. There are still large pieces of shrapnel from the bomb that hit my family four decades ago. They are evidenced at every anniversary and family milestone and for me, each and every day.”

Boston’s evil tentacles reached further than mine and Peta’s families. My book includes the account of the murderer’s youngest son, Russell Boston, whom I met in California in the summer of 2017. Like us, Russell is a victim – his father having killed his mother ten years before murdering Chris and Peta. Like it or not, the Boston family and mine are now connected by an invisible thread because we belong to that same ghastly club of being Boston’s victims. And there are many members …he is suspected of killing 33 people.

Was my book cathartic to write? Yes, but the research was also at times immensely depressing and emotionally draining. The senseless nature of their deaths and the gratuitous, heinous nature of the crime disgusts and saddens me to my core and will never leave me. Boston was the Devil personified. My family’s experience and the subsequent researching and writing of the book has certainly left me feeling jaundiced about human nature. I had never appreciated just how evil people can be. Sadly, my default position is to distrust people until they give me good reason to think otherwise. That said, I still believe in the innate goodness of people but there are fewer good people in this world than I once thought.

I would like the reader to take away the message – that no matter how bleak the situation looks, it’s imperative to never give up. For so long, it seemed that Boston had committed the perfect crime. He was a master of evasion, running up and down the Californian coast and slipping undetected over the Mexican border. Who would have ever thought that 38 years after Chris and Peta’s murders, he would be arrested? He certainly didn’t.  The fact that my family never gave up pursuing justice proves that Boston could snuff out life but he could not kill love. Chris is not forgotten and will remain forever in our hearts.

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Reviews are welcome. For more information on the case please visit www.pennyfarmer.co.uk

http://www.diversionbooks.com/books/dead-in-the-water/

 

DEAD IN THE WATER

This is the true and horrifying account of the brutal torture and murder of the author’s brother and his long-time girlfriend forty years ago. In July 1978, two bodies were found in the sea off the coast of Guatemala, and proved to be the remains of Dr Chris Farmer and his lawyer girlfriend, Peta Frampton, young graduates, aged twenty-five and twenty-four, from Greater Manchester. After suffering a three-day ordeal in which they were tortured, they were then thrown overboard while still alive from the yacht on which they had been crewing, their bodies weighted down with heavy iron engine parts and their heads covered in plastic bags. For nearly forty years, no one was charged with these savage murders, even though the name of the yacht, the Justin B., and its owner, an American named Silas Duane Boston, were known.

But this is also the story of how Chris’s sister, journalist Penny Farmer, and her family, tracked down the killer and assembled the evidence against him, leading to the arrest of Boston in California in December 2016.  At the age of 76, he was charged with two counts of maritime murder. He pleaded not guilty, but amongst the evidence that Chris Farmer’s family, the police forces in both the UK and the USA, as well as the FBI and Interpol, had so patiently collected, was the shocking eyewitness testimony of both of Boston’s two sons who, aged thirteen and twelve, had been present when the murders took place.

Regrettably, Boston will now never face justice, for he effectively took his own life in prison in April 2017. But for the families of Chris and Peta, they have at least the satisfaction of knowing that, through their own efforts over many years, this Californian serial killer did not escape being made to face his crimes.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing