DEAD IN THE WATER, TRUE CRIME BOOK

A true crime story of twists, turns, highs, lows and ultimately, serendipity. It reveals the far-reaching power of the internet and a family’s boundless, undying love for one of their own.

"Teenage sweethearts, my 25-year-old junior doctor brother, Chris, and his law graduate girlfriend, Peta, did what a lot of young adults do after studying, took off to see the world.

The last letter home described them being on a fishing boat, travelling down the Belizian coastline with the skipper, Silas Duane Boston, and his 12 and 13-year-old sons, Russell, and Vince.

Missing for ten months, I still recall the paralysing shock that ricocheted through my family the day the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office confirmed that two bodies were our missing two. Hog tied with ropes, weighted down with motor engine parts, plastic bags over their heads, they had been found off the Guatemalan coast.

Despite the strenuous efforts of my parents and law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic to locate Boston, and his boys, they could not be traced. The case went stone cold.

We had to wait for 38 interminably long years before all the planets bizarrely aligned one week of October 2015, for the horrific revelations of what happened on that boat to emerge, and the ultimate solving of this most heinous crime.

After a lifetime of robbing, raping, murdering and evading law enforcement, Boston was arrested and charged with the double maritime murder of Chris and Peta in 2016.

Retired Sergeant James Kelly of the San Raphael PD: ‘Boston was one of the evillest criminals I ever encountered during my 32-year police career.’

At the age of 75, Boston ran out of road."

A true story by Penny Farmer