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- [00:07]
Mary Kay McBrayer
Diversion Audio 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. 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 in the Water. 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 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. 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 sense of what's missing, of something wrong for 40 years, until she took her brother's cold case into her own hands. Welcome to the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. 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 of that. I'm more interested 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 Toppan and the Making of a Monster. You can also meet me here every week when I dig into crimes where a woman is not just a victim. She might be the detective, the lawyer, the witness, the coroner, the criminal, or a combination of those roles. As you 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 1970s and never stopped looking for him. Not for 40.
- [04:25]
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- [05:30]
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- [05:59]
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- [06:43]
Mary Kay McBrayer
There's nothing more frustrating to me than watching a movie set before. Like 2000. Mainly before cell phones, when information just wasn't shareable 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 call could 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, 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 boomer hellscape full of political hot takes back when everyone used it, usually with their real names, posting current pictures 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 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 to more recent issues, but Penny applied the technology she had on hand as a regular citizen and brought justice to her beloved brother. Penny Farmer was zooming through the roads of the northern England city of Manchester in a pink 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 youh Were Here, flying through the speakers as she'd reminisced decades later in her book on her brother's case. Dead in the water. In that moment, she told herself, I've arrived. Chris was the kind of brother who gave his kid sister lots of moments like that. He played music at the house that was like a live soundtrack of 70s cool Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane. He gave her a motorcycle ride once, just once, because their mother, Audrey, was not thrilled. He dressed well, too, bell bottoms, crop tops, a patchwork leather jacket, and he had thick, stylish hair. 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 travel the world when they finished their studies. Both advanced degrees, his in medicine, hers in law. In 1977, Chris Farmer was 25. PETA Frampton was 24. 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 Chris and PETA left for their big adventure in December 1977. Penny had to focus on the major life events rushing toward her as a high schooler. A level exams, university applications. Every time Chris mailed the Farmer family one of his messages, she'd get excited. They came as voice recordings on cassettes and they painted these detailed happy portraits of his travels with PETA.
- [11:32]
Russell Boston
Then went on to Guadalajara, which is, as I say, quite a nice town. There's not any of the mariachis, but they're your itinerant Mexican musicians and that's their hometown.
- [11:47]
Mary Kay McBrayer
So every street corner you come to.
- [11:49]
Russell Boston
You see five or six of these characters playing their different sized guitars and double basses, demanding a few pesos for a song.
- [12:00]
Mary Kay McBrayer
That's a clip of the tapes from the BBC podcast Paradise, which did an investigative deep dive into 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 ingenious. And the cassette recordings let his 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 PETA's family. PETA regularly wrote long diary style letters 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 in Oaxaca and then Belize City. Here, Chris and PETA met a man named Silas Duane Boston and his two young sons. Then 13 year old Vince and 12 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, 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 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, Pita said in a letter to her mother, we thought it was an opportunity not to be missed. More of PETA's letters trickled back to England after she 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. 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. That letter arrived in June 1978, dated June 13. The Frampton and Farmer families devoured it, and then they waited for more. And waited and waited. They wondered if there was a postal strike or maybe Chris and PETA 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. 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 Duane's two sons. 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. Lots of love, PETA. Duane. And the boat's apparently fading charm isn't what started to worry the families back in England once again, though. It's the fact that the letter was dated June 28th with a postscript marked June 29th. And yet it hadn't arrived in England until August. When PETA wasn't able to post a letter right away, she always added to it, dating the additions 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.
- [17:00]
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- [18:01]
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- [18:34]
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- [19:22]
Mary Kay McBrayer
The months following 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 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 a letter to hotels and tourist spots around Guatemala, the last place that Chris and PETA had written from. The families and the public speculated about what could have happened. The young couple might have been thrown in some distant jail cell or taken hostage by a faction in the ongoing Guatemalan civil war. But the farmers in the Framptons didn't think too much about the other options. They couldn't. Not yet. 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 away tears. Penny was still just 18, 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 Duane Boston, who left Belize with his sons soon after Chris and PETA's disappearance and made his way back to his home state of California. I don't know about you, but that is unacceptable. I mean, you really gonna 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? Okay. Someone from the British Consulate called Duane and questioned him. Duane's answers were vague and unhelpful. He said he dropped off the couple in the port across the bay from Livingston, Guatemala, Cabo de Tres Puntas Peninsula. From there, he had no idea where they went. He might have seen them in Livingston around 9 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 70s 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 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. This is a 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 softly spoken voice, he said that he thought Chris and PETA would be back home by now. The Consulate 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. There was nothing to go on, not even bodies. Just unshakable intuition and good sense. By now, Chris and PETA had been missing for six months. Penny watched her parents bury their grief and anxiety in the investigation, even as it stalled. Once again, Charles Farmer actually called Dwayne Boston himself 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 Duane was involved. So the Farmers decided to try one more avenue. They hired a private detective to look into the case on the ground. In Belize. On February 1, 1979, Penny finished the school day. She walked to a telephone booth in 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 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 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 at breakneck speed and in free fall. That night, Charles Farmer told his family word had come in from the private investigator, Alfonso de Pena. Eisenhower. 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 other white collar crimes. Depena is a good one, a real white hat. De Pena spoke with a local Belizean priest. The priest said he heard about two bodies found 200 meters off the coast of the Guatemalan peninsula, Cabo Tres Puntas, back in July. The description of the bodies matched those of the missing couple. The priest also told de Pena 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 Barrios site cemetery. As harrowing as that is, I have to give everyone involved credit. They got an autopsy, they followed the protocol, and that's pretty incredible. The Farmer family knocked back a bottle of sherry, the only alcohol they had in the house. Finally, they knew PETA and Chris were dead. They just didn't know how or why 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 peace that comes when someone's body is laid to rest. And exhumation. It feels to me like it 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 Pita. First, a dental examination confirmed what they were all but certain of. The bodies belonged to Chris and PETA. 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. 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, 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 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 past crimes, authorities were unable to find any concrete evidence that Silas Duane 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 de Pena found the bodies. They couldn't provide any leads. This 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, thanks in part to a pretty brutal civil war and general instability in Guatemala. But for the farmers, 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, for something else they didn't know. He claimed they paid him $500 for their passage, an absurd sum 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 you don't need a motive 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 feel true happiness. 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 in the US were the main source of news. They did their best to keep track of Dwayne, but he was good at evading the sights 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 PETA, whether he left them on a beach or on a quote unquote native boat. 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 Dwayne at all. They wanted to know about his sons, those boys who had been on the boat when Chris and PETA 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. 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. 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. But she never stopped wondering, never felt that lightness of knowing. On October 2, 2015, Penny was walking the dog 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 62. Hard to imagine he'd always be young in their eyes. As Penny heard her mother speak, standing in that mellow Autumn Light, almost 40 years after her brother's death, she had a realization. So much had changed since the days when Chris and PETA went missing. Now there was Facebook and everyone was on it. Everyone was using their real names, real information about where they were and what they did. Maybe even Silas, Duane Boston, or better yet, his two sons.
- [34:27]
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- [35:30]
Penny Farmer
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- [36:52]
Mary Kay McBrayer
Penny's intuition was spot 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 23 years old as part of a post advocating for stricter gun laws in the U.S. 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 here was Silas Duane 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'd never seen his face before. Staring it down, even through the screen, she felt disgust. 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. There was also the fact 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 now a message. Please can you tell me if you were off the coast of Central America in a boat with your brother and father in 1978? Thank you. 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 didn't give up. On Monday morning, Penny called the Greater Manchester Police to inform them of her discovery. She knew they'd been 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 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 Interpol in Washington, D.C. 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 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 needed to move. On February 29, 2016, the GMP officer looking into the case, McKayla Clinch, spoke directly to Detective Amy Crosby of the Missing Person Unit at the Sacramento Police Department and learned something shocking. At almost 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 Duane's wife and Vincent Russell's mother. The case was stalled. But on October 13, 2015, just 11 days after Penny sent her message 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 1968, although no one knows where he had buried her. But then Vince told Amy more. He told her, I witnessed my father murder a young couple in broad daylight in Guatemala. He witnessed Dwayne murder Chris and PETA and he wanted to talk. The good news kept coming. When Amy reached the other brother, Russell, on January 19, he wanted to talk too. 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 2016. 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 was now 90, 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 1977, when Dwayne was facing rape charges to escape the law, he fled down to valise with his two sons. Maybe he brought them to lend himself an era 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 when he did. At first toward the boys. Dwayne picked Chris and PETA up as customers, part of his tourist business. And inevitably, the couple witnessed Duane's abuse of his sons. They stepped in one time. After screaming at Dwayne to stop and getting no response, Chris pulled Dwayne off 12 year old Russell. Duane then toppled off the deck into the sea. Vince remembered PETA and Chris laughing at the sight of the splash. And Chris told Dwayne to behave as he hauled him back on board. Dwayne was humiliated 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 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 PETA was below deck, he asked Chris to pull up the boat's anchor. And then he came at the young man from behind. He bludgeoned 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 PETA heard, she came up 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, panting, stopped. Chris was badly injured, likely with multiple broken bones in addition to a fractured skull. Dwayne, however. However was the one complaining about the agonizing pain in his back. 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 to haggle with him about the price of the journey. He wanted his money. Chris soothed him, agreeing immediately. He'd pay whatever Dwayne wanted. And all of that did seem to deescalate things for a while. After taking the muscle relaxant, Dwayne fell asleep. The boys remember PETA and Chris whispering together through the night. They didn't try to escape the boat. Probably Chris wasn't able to, considering his injuries. But maybe they thought that when Dwayne woke up sober, he'd be calmer, less violent. That he'd take their money and let them go in the morning. That guess seemed correct. Dwayne said he would drop his passengers off on the Cabo de Tres peninsula near Livingston in Guatemala if they paid him $500 each, an inordinate sum based on basically all their money. But they agreed. Then Dwayne stated his condition. 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 grew darker. I want to give you all a 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 36 hours, Duane manipulated Chris and PETA through sadistic mind 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 captives and wrapped them in rope. Even now, he was promising he'd 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, but 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, 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 PETA's things and posted it himself to create confusion about when the couple died. That letter the Framptons received in August of 1979, which temporarily staved off the family's fears. 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 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 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 just with two willing witnesses, prosecutors would have a decent case against Dwayne. 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 would be Guatemala. Finally, they determined this American prosecutors could claim jurisdiction if the murders happened in open 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. 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 photos of the trip to Belize, which showed Chris and linked him to Dwayne and his boat. He had Chris's old records, as in music records, which further linked Dwayne to the crime. And on September 16, 2016, wedged among a pile of junk in his father's old briefcase, he found a small creased document, the title of the Justin B. Duane'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 PETA's dental records. No one could find the file anywhere, not in the us not in the uk, not with Interpol. The prosecution needed to find the bodies, exhume them again, and redo the examination. Unfortunately, even that was easier said than done. The Puerto Barrios cemetery, where Chris and PETA were buried back in the 1970s was overflowing with graves. They were often unmarked and there was no clear map or clear organization. By the 2010s, the FBI searched for Chris and PETA's crosses but did not find them. And the search was called off in early November of 2016. It was a blow to the case without bodies, the ultimate proof of Chris and PETA's death. There was less proof of murder too. Still, 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. 74 year old Dwayne wasn't somewhere on the road toward Mexico, not these days. He was in poor health and stuck in a nursing home in Eureka, California. On December 1, 2016, he was charged with the murders of Chris Farmer and Peter Frampton and taken into custody. On December 8th, Dwayne was indicted. The trial date was set for the autumn of 2017, 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 Duane. PETA's parents and one of her siblings had already passed. The Farmers prepared to travel to California to give depositions on May 6, including Audrey, now 91 years old. But Duane's health had been deteriorating rapidly since his arrest. Around his 76th birthday on March 20, 2017, things took a turn for the worse. Then on April 5, 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 24, 2017, 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 2018, she 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 PETA's graves in the Puerto Barrio cemetery, just like she had located the entire Boston family. On Facebook. 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, 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. Stay with us.
- [58:36]
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- [59:41]
Penny Farmer
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- [60:10]
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- [60:52]
Mary Kay McBrayer
Well. Hi, Penny. 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 apprised of the situation. It's a pretty personal. So I wanted to ask you first, what made you decide to actually write.
- [61:15]
Russell Boston
The story despite being journalistically trained? It 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 38 years. And it was a conversation that I had with Michaela Clinch, Detective Michaela Clinch. And she, she said to me, you know, I assume you're going to write this up, you know, and, and I, I just thought, well, yeah, actually, why not? You know, because I, I, as I say, I did train as a journalist, but then of course we got the, the terrible news, you know, that, that Boston had committed suicide and he did commit suicide. There is no other way of dressing it up. Then Russell reached out via Sacramento PD and said that he wanted very much to speak to Mum and I. So it was at that point, you know, that, that we got in touch and we had a very long Skype call with Russell and obviously then it sort of snowballed and so, you know, I started really keeping more than just notes. I started really writing the book at that point.
- [62:35]
Mary Kay McBrayer
Wow. Actually, one of my questions was what was it like to talk to those.
- [62:42]
Russell Boston
Sons when we had the Skype call? It was, it was obviously the most bizarre situation. And, you know, all credit to my mother, who at that stage was 91. She's now 98. She was, I mean, she's a very strong woman anyway, but, you know, that there was my mother and I, you know, one side of the camera, you know, when the camera went on because we hadn't, you know, aside from his Facebook profile. We hadn't seen Russell Boston at all. So it was a very weird experience, but it was very cathartic. I think his. Probably the word. You know, 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, etc. You know, I think. I think I've written it enough to suggest probably, you know, what went on and the horror of it all without going into too much graphic detail.
- [63:53]
Mary Kay McBrayer
It seems like a big component of the journey that was. Writing the book and talking about the case was kind of giving yourself closure. Did it help with that?
- [64:08]
Russell Boston
I suppose so, in many ways. And 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 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, albeit in death. So I. 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. You just sort of throw the cracks, really. But, you know, I. 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, to get to the truth, but. But we got there in the end and we now know, you know, what's happened and. And indeed Vince and Russell as well, you know, our family and their family, that we're both in the same boat, you know, I mean, 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, if you like. They've been through hell and back and, you know, what. What an absolutely ghastly experience they have suffered, you know, but both to witness their murders and to lose their mom. So I, you know, I'm very grateful to them for being so open and. And they didn't turn out the people that possibly their father would have liked them to be. You know, they did. They didn't follow history and. And go the same way as him. You know, that they're good, decent people.
- [66:01]
Mary Kay McBrayer
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?
- [66:10]
Russell Boston
Yeah, I mean, I just hope that no other families have to go through what we've gone through. But I, I, you know, one would hope with modern day communications and you know, hopefully better reporting and better systems in place that people wouldn't have to go through all that. You know, they, they wouldn't have to wait 40 plus years to find out what had happened to their loved one. SA.
- [67:15]
Mary Kay McBrayer
For more information about this case and others we cover on the show, visit diversionaudio.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. 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 40 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 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 McBrayer. This episode was written by our editorial director, Nora Battelle. Our show is produced and directed by Mark Francis. Our development team is Emma demuth and Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Tyler Cash Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman. Diversion Audio.
- [69:15]
Penny Farmer
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- [69:50]
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I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room.
- [69:53]
Russell Boston
Okay, just wiped his runny nose on.
- [69:55]
Mary Kay McBrayer
My jacket and the guy next to me sitting in a pool of perspiration.
- [69:59]
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- [70:03]
Mary Kay McBrayer
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- [70:15]
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