Dead in the Water: My Forty-Year Search for My Brother's Killer

Diversion Books

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Copyright © 2019 by Penny Farmer

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

Book design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates.

First Diversion Books edition April 2019.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63576-619-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-576-2

First published in the United Kingdom by John Blake Publishing.

Printed in the U.S.A.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Dedicated to the loving memory of my brother,

Dr. Christopher James Burnett Farmer,

May 20, 1953–July 4, 1978,

and

Peta Ambrosine Frampton,

July 31, 1953–July 4, 1978.

Those who can no longer speak for themselves.

CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue

1 Adrift

2 Each Other’s Compass

3 New Horizons

4 A Disastrous Tack

5 Nothing Much Happens on a Boat

6 Dead Wake

7 Headwinds

8 Time and Tide Wait for No Man

9 A Voyage to My Brother

10 Edging Forward

11 On a Boat There Is Nowhere to Go

12 After the Storm

13 Beneath the Surface

14 The Pearl in the Oyster

15 Caught…Hook, Line, and Sinker

16 Land in Sight

17 Death Roll

18 Hands Across the Sea

19 The Spawning Ground

20 Boston, the Destroyer

21 The Perfect Storm

22 Journey’s End

EPILOGUE

Fair Winds and Following Seas—The Mother’s Story

APPENDIX 1: The Anglo-American A Team

APPENDIX 2: Thoughts on the Case

APPENDIX 3: Chris’s Music

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PREFACE

This is the true account of the tragedy that befell my family in July 1978 and its denouement, nearly four decades later. The turn of events, both then and now, has, at times, stretched credulity, but, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction and the best stories are always true.

I can say with full conviction: final closure only comes when the truth is known.

PROLOGUE

April 24, 2017

I couldn’t sleep. It was gone midnight and lying in bed at home in Oxfordshire, my thoughts were 5,000 miles away on the other side of the Atlantic, in a side room in UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California. A room, and a city, I had never visited, but in my mind’s eye was picture-perfect. I saw the two burly armed Marshals standing guard over the wizened seventy-six-year-old man, his grey beard recently shaved into a devilish goatee.

Lying prostrate in the bed in the clinical white-washed room, as a high-security prisoner, he was still shackled. Gasping for air as the death rattle began to lay claim to his body, he was compos mentis, remaining defiant, with a controlling, menacing glare until his very last breath.

I was one of only a handful of people permitted to know he was there.

I tossed and turned, my eyes glancing at the seconds, the minutes, the hours flashing by on my bedside alarm clock. I constantly checked my mobile for a text or an email. It was pointless, it was on loud and vibrate. Maybe I would know via some subliminal sign without even looking?

How could I want someone so evil to live? But I did.

At 02:14 the email from Detective Constable Michaela Clinch of the Greater Manchester Police Cold Case Review Unit came in: Sorry about the time Penny but I just got this from the US prosecution team and I know you are waiting: the U.S. Marshals Service reports that Silas Duane Boston died at 17:09 Pacific Daylight Time on 24th April 2017. Oh Penny . . . My heart goes out to you all, it really does. I’m devastated for you.

That simple email represented crushing finality; an abrupt full stop to my family’s thirty-eight-year quest for truth and justice. I felt physically sick. It was like hitting the buffers at 100mph.

A lot of things died with Boston that afternoon.

The route taken by the Justin B on its fateful voyage south, navigating the Belizian and Guatemalan coastline. The distance shown on the map is approximately 170 miles.

1

Adrift

Why were the tortured corpses of my brother, twenty-five-year-old Christopher Farmer, a young doctor, and his twenty-four-year-old lawyer girlfriend, Peta Frampton, found floating off the Guatemalan coast in Central America in 1978? Like so many of today’s young people, after years of academic grafting they had set off to see the world, with high hopes and expectations.

They had been found tortured, bound and weighted down with heavy engine parts from which they had come adrift and Peta had a plastic bag over her head. Receiving such devastating news was like a bomb exploding in our family.

Why such a ghastly fate should befall them haunted us for 38 interminable years. It was inexplicable and devastating.

Time blunts the intense searing pain of bereavement but what remains is a dull throbbing ache; a longing for what might have been and the knowledge that a life with them in it would have been so much richer for us all. You never lose that sense of loss, even decades on.

There was some talk of revenge being needed for closure and, while I can’t deny a strong longing for justice, there is also a desire to still the mind from constantly asking the question why? Your brain yearns to compute and make sense of such a tragic, senseless waste of life. Distracted for a while, one’s thoughts are constantly dragged back, like some beast hauling its quarry into its lair, to the nagging question, why?

There is, however, one thing worse than not knowing why a loved one has died . . . It is being stuck in limbo, not knowing if they are alive or dead but classed as missing. It’s a horrible word and one that curdles the blood and sends shivers down the spine of any parent. In our case, Chris and Peta were missing for ten months. Ten very long months in which we knew nothing of their whereabouts or what had happened to them. Ten months in which the two respective families explored every possible avenue open to them to try to find out their fate.

In amongst the pain, hope springs eternal. While there is no proof of death there’s always hope, but like a tidal wave, reality floods into one’s consciousness and logic takes over. Your hopes are dashed on the rocks of despair with the realization that you are deluding yourself.

Sleep did little to obliterate the debilitating daily grind of worry as a recurring, very disturbing nightmare played tricks with my head. I dreamt that Chris had returned home, alive and well, and we held a family celebration. When the party was over, I went into his bedroom to tell him how happy I was that he had returned. Sitting on his bed, I found to my horror a total stranger asleep under the bedclothes. A rubber mask of Chris’s face was lying on the bedside table. It was a nightmare that was to revisit me for many years.

Daylight and awake, doubts that start as a whisper steadily mount into a deafening crescendo, bombarding and assaulting every thought. Were they being held as prisoners, incarcerated in some Central American hellhole? Did they just want to cut off from their families and start life afresh? But, in our heart of hearts, we knew that would never be the case: their families meant too much to them.

I can remember the last time I saw them as vividly as if it were yesterday. Standing just 5 foot 8 inches in height, Chris made up in character what he lacked in stature. He was no introvert. His flamboyant dress reflected his colorful personality and that day he was wearing his much-loved, well-worn patchwork leather jacket. Peta was dark-haired, attractive and diminutive. I can still picture them in the doorway of their small rented house in the Birmingham suburb of Harborne, waving goodbye to Mum, Dad and me. It was the beginning of December 1977 and they had spent their last weekend in the UK saying their farewells to their respective families before embarking on their long-held plan to travel the world for a year. They were leaving the next morning for Heathrow to fly to Australia.

Fighting back tears, Mum gave Chris one last hug and said: Keep in touch, and he replied, Of course I will, and remember it isn’t for long. Please don’t worry about me, I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do. We reminded ourselves of those last words in the months to come. They planned to return to the UK by the following Christmas.

In contrast to their excitement, which was palpable, for those of us left behind there was sorrow that they were leaving before the New Year. It was going to be a quiet, less joyful Christmas with their departure. But not wishing to dampen their spirits, we rallied and said that we would raise a glass to them and we’d speak by phone on December 25. With their arms around each other, Chris and Peta were silhouetted in the light of the doorway against the dark night sky.

Did any of us have a premonition that something dreadful was to befall them? Certainly, there was none that we dared express to each other at the time. But during the 10 months they were missing, when we had no clue as to their fate, my eldest brother Nigel said he knew quite categorically when he said goodbye to Chris that it was for the last time.

It was like hearing an inner voice that I had never heard before, telling me that it would be a lifetime, if ever, before I would see him again, recalls Nigel, who, older than Chris by three years, was the more serious and sedate of my two brothers.

This experience was compounded in early July of the following year (at the same time that we were to later learn they had been murdered). Nigel was driving to an appointment in his capacity as a trading standards officer in Manchester: "I was deep in thought as to how I was going to handle a meeting; I suddenly heard a voice. It was so physical that for a moment I actually thought there was a passenger in the car with me, but they’d have had to have been sitting beside me, it felt so close. The voice sounded as though it was either Chris or myself talking, but the message was quite clear; it said that dying was no big thing, it was a bit like the shock of diving into a cold pool on a summer’s day, but it was not the end.

"It was such a surreal event that I actually had to stop and park the car to compose myself. One minute I was planning a meeting, the next my focus had taken a step-change in a totally different direction, leading to thoughts that were totally unrelated to anything happening in my life. I had never experienced anything like this before and nor have I since. I could only put it down to a very odd occurrence and after a further minute or so, I carried on driving to my meeting, but the whole event left me shaken and it became an indelible memory.

"As time passed and their disappearance became of increasing concern, I remembered my experience in the car and I was convinced that it was related, and that Chris and Peta were, in fact, dead. While I shared these thoughts with Frances, my wife, I felt I couldn’t burden the rest of the family, so I kept my own counsel. As a consequence, although I was naturally distressed, I was not shocked to hear of the discovery of their bodies. It was only as details of the tragedy unfurled that I realized my strange experience in the car appeared to have coincided with the time of their deaths.

To this day I don’t know what to make of my experience. Whatever was the basis for my heightened emotion at the time of their departure and the incident in the car, in a strange way both events helped me cope with the eventual tragic denouement and our sense of loss in the following years. The void created by Chris’s death has never been filled. He was a brother I was immensely proud of and it saddens me deeply that he has been denied the opportunity to live a life that would have enabled him to fulfil the huge potential we all know he had.

2

Each Other’s Compass

As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show, To move, but doth, if the other do.

—John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Mid-1950s to 1977

Teenage sweethearts from the age of fourteen, it seemed like Chris and Peta were always meant to be together. They were like the two feet of a compass.

The Frampton family (of which Peta was the second youngest of five siblings) lived in the big black and white house opposite ours in St. Brannocks Road in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton Cum Hardy. It was a fairly unremarkable place, save for the fact that it was made famous by the four Bee Gees brothers spending their early years there.

Peta was intelligent and of a shy disposition, but, like Chris, also strong-willed. She was family-oriented and close to her parents, John and Ambrosine (known to us all as Sammie) and her three brothers, Blaise, Toby and Justin and her older sister, Rochelle (she preferred to use the name Rocki). Chris and Peta’s was an intense romance which, unlike so many that fall by the wayside, withstood the pressures and temptations of the teen years to mature into adulthood.

It was a source of great pride to Mum and Dad that at the age of eleven, Chris won the Manchester Lord Mayor’s prize for achieving the highest grade in the 11 Plus examinations and the top scholarship to Manchester Grammar School (MGS), a selective academic school in the Northwest. This, of course, bolstered his innate self-confidence, although he wore it lightly and was never arrogant. From the age of ten he set his heart on becoming a doctor, overcoming his fear of blood after fainting at school while dissecting a frog.

A risk-taker he was not, but spirited, yes, most definitely. He had a lust for adventure and an insatiable appetite for new experiences. He exuded a sense of invincibility. His school friend, Phil Boothman, recalls how, in their first year at MGS, he and Chris went on a school trip to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Neither of them fancied looking round the house and grounds so they stowed away their fishing rods and tackle on the coach and, unbeknownst to the teacher, bunked off and went fishing for the day. All was well until on the way back, the fish they had caught to bring home to cook started smelling in the hot crowded coach and they were duly discovered.

Another time, Chris and his friends went toboganning at nearby Lyme Park in Disley, Cheshire. The lake was frozen, but Chris in his wisdom wanted to test the thickness of the ice. Doubtless he used up one of his lives when he decided to venture out across the ice and inevitably fell in. He was saved by the quick thinking of his friend, Tom Brown, who inched across the ice on his stomach and pulled him out. Undeterred, dripping with water and very cold, Chris was determined to continue on his toboganning trip with his friends.

The seeds for his love of sailing and fishing were sown annually on our family’s bucket and spade holidays in Trearddur Bay, on the Isle of Anglesey. My parents rented a cottage and for those two weeks of each summer the five of us would sail, swim, eat sand-filled sandwiches, climb rocks and go rockpool and sea fishing. They were happy days. It was the stuff nostalgia is made of, and, returning each year, Anglesey became the yardstick for measuring all that had happened to our family in the previous twelve months. Collectively acknowledged, Anglesey is our family’s spiritual home. Now, blessed with three children of my own, they have all been initiated into its charms and enjoy nothing more than returning each year for sand, sea and invariably, rain!

Nigel recalls: "Chris and I loved our days spent on the windblown beach and we were lucky that Dad built two Mirror sailing dinghies for us. Mum and Dad gave us strict guidelines as to how far we could sail. There was many an occasion when Chris and I would sail out and explore the edges of the bay to see what was around the corner. Chris found Dad curbing our explorations almost intolerable and no matter how far we ventured, it would always be a source of frustration to him when we had to turn back. He questioned boundaries.

By the time Chris approached his mid-teens he had developed a mature, strong and colorful character. I cannot recall him ever failing to achieve a goal that he set his heart on and he set his heart on many. At the age of fourteen, he told Mum and Dad that he wanted to travel to France with two school friends on their own. They forbade him from going, saying he was too young. They were confident that he wouldn’t disobey them because he didn’t have enough money. However, he got a Saturday job packing Christmas cards, saved his hard-earned cash and went with two friends for three weeks, staying in youth hostels.

Manchester was at the heart of the Swinging Sixties and Chris was a poster boy for that generation. With the city’s burgeoning club scene, sportsmen, such as the Manchester United footballer, George Best, were breaking the mold and moving from a presence on the field to wider celebrity. While Best had investments in Manchester nightclubs, he also had a unisex hairdressing salon and boutique in Deansgate, in the heart of the city. Here, Chris found Saturday employment, giving him an introduction to a broader and more diverse culture than previously experienced. Not afraid of embracing the trends, he wore bell-bottom trousers, cropped tops, had his ear pierced and spray-painted his cowboy boots silver. He enjoyed being outrageous, but he was authentic and made things his own.

Chris and Peta’s partnership crossed over into many aspects of their lives. At one stage, they turned entrepreneurs when they began producing hand-sewn unisex suede leather shoulder bags. Together they sourced the materials, sewed the bags on an old Singer sewing machine on our kitchen table and then distributed them to boutiques. They organized the negotiating, manufacturing and logistics and until school examinations became pressing, they had a lucrative cottage business.

The strength of the bond between them was demonstrated when Chris passed the entrance exam to study medicine at Cambridge University but turned it down as he and Peta had made a lovers’ pact to go to the same university together. My father, Charles, was a medical student at King’s College, Cambridge in the late 1930s before two years later giving up his studies and joining the Army to help the war effort. Meeting my mother, Audrey, and finding it hard to return to studying in 1945, he took up a career in the BBC. Dad would have undoubtedly liked to see Chris follow in his footsteps by taking up his place at Cambridge University but my parents knew their son was a resolute character. Chris wanted a more practical, hands-on medical course than Cambridge could offer, and, above all, he wanted to be with Peta. His mind was made up, so Mum and Dad knew there was no point in remonstrating with him.

Dad and Chris had a robust and occasionally confrontational relationship. My father was old school and with his fondness for tweed jackets and sturdy brown Commando shoes, he was one of a dying breed. Emotionally, Dad was as buttoned-up as the tie he insisted on wearing, whatever the temperature. The two of them would invariably lock horns over Chris’s long hair, hippy clothing and liberal views and both were equally strident, stuck in their own corners and unwilling to capitulate to the other. But scratch beneath the surface and you could see there was huge mutual love and respect. In the decades that were to follow, no father could have done more in his quest to seek justice for the unlawful killing of his son.

With their supreme intellect they were very similar. In the BBC Manchester News room, where Dad worked as a director, he was known as Mr. Fix-it. There was very little that he couldn’t turn his hand to or fix—from making his own wireless and television set (so that he and Mum could watch the Queen’s Coronation in 1953) and doing his own car mechanics (a skill he passed on to both his sons) to constructing detailed scale models of Tiger Moth planes and fishing boats and building two Mirror sailing dinghies in the garage. He taught my two brothers and me well. But far from being one-dimensional, Chris and Dad’s scientific, pragmatic exteriors belied more complex, sensitive and artistic souls and both were given to writing beautiful poetry.

They were both humanitarians. My father’s donation of his body to medical research on his death in 2013 was typical of the man. Likewise, there was no surprise in learning, some 38 years after Chris had died, that his death was brought about by altruism and defending someone less able.

Blessed with a photographic memory, Chris didn’t have to work very hard at bookwork to achieve outstanding scholarly success. A year ahead of his academic cohort, and finishing his A-levels at seventeen, he stayed back to work in the hematology department of Salford Royal Hospital while Peta finished her schooling. Working in the laboratory, he blood-matched for emergency operations. My mother recalls how, much to Chris’s amusement, he would sometimes be given a police escort to the hospital in his battered old yellow Triumph Herald to get him from home to the lab quickly in an emergency. Yes, those were the days when the police force wasn’t so stretched!

Peta having finished her schooling at Manchester’s Whalley Range High School for Girls, the two of them enrolled at Birmingham University, she in law school and he at medical school. Shunning halls of residence, they moved into a flat together. Popular, and part of the cool crowd, they were well known for their lively parties. They were certainly unconventional and had an eclectic mix of friends, drawn not just from medical and law school.

Simon Cramp, who, along with two others, shared a house with them in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston, says: "We used to go to gigs in Birmingham together—mostly pubs—and end the evenings with a curry. Chris and Peta were both great people to know, so full of life—especially Chris. He looked at life straight in the eye and went straight at it. No bullshit (excuse the term), but what you saw was what you got—there was no front to him in any way. I’m sure that he would have had a great career ahead of him. He had one huge amount of energy and dedication. I remember him on a number of occasions being knackered after a long day, then receiving a phone call late at night and not hesitating to pull himself together, without complaint, and jump on his motorbike and run to the hospital to see a patient—I don’t know how he did it! Listen to Funky Kingston by Toots and the Maytals—it was Chris’s favorite album when I knew him, and the title track has all his energy."

Sue Leigh, an old schoolfriend of Peta who also shared a house with them for a time in Birmingham, says: I have some very vivid memories of them—particularly of Chris in his silver boots, patchwork leather jacket, bear gloves, floppy hat, and leather shoulder bag. He was a remarkable, wonderful person, completely bonkers to live with but such fun. Chris was all about the music. King Crimson, Cat Stevens, and Dylan stick out the most in my mind as accompanying our evenings and crazy parties (and they really were crazy). Peta was always so demure and feminine yet strong, and Chris clearly adored her. Chris always seemed to be in search of some Eden. He could get you to do things out of your comfort zone as he was fearless.

Chris loved medicine and was convinced that he’d made the right career choice. His fear of dissection long