About this item
In this shocking true-crime drama, a forty-year-old double murder brings together a grieving family and two brothers -- just kids when they witnessed their father commit the brutal act -- to track down a psychopath once suspected as being the Golden State Killer "A real-life page turner more intriguing than anything on Netflix." -Matt Nixson, Books Editor, Mail on Sunday (London) In 1978, two tortured corpses -- hooded, bound, and weighted down with engine parts -- were found in the sea off Guatemala. Junior doctor Chris Farmer and his girlfriend, Peta Frampton, were still clinging to life when they were thrown from the yacht they'd been crewing. Here is the gripping account of how Chris's family worked alongside police, the FBI, and Interpol to gather evidence against the boat's Californian skipper, Silas Duane Boston. Almost four decades later, in 2015, Chris's sister, Penny, used Facebook to track down Boston. Following the detailed, haunting testimony of his own two sons -- who also implicated their father in a string of other killings -- Boston was finally arrested and charged with two counts of maritime murder. A story of homicide on the high seas, Dead in the Water is also a tale of a family's fortitude and diligence in tracking down a monster.
About the Author
Penny was 17 when her 25-year old brother Chris, a British junior doctor, was brutally and inexplicably murdered in 1978. Missing for ten months, with his lawyer girlfriend Peta Frampton, she can still recall the sense of paralysing shock that ricocheted through her family the day they received confirmation from the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office that two tortured corpses, found off the Guatemalan coast in Central America, were those of Chris and Peta. Taking a year out to travel the world, in a chance meeting in a bar on a remote Belizian caye, they had met the charismatic 37-year old Californian skipper, Silas Duane Boston. With him, were his 12 and 13-year old sons, whose mother he had killed ten years before. Taken in by his charms, Chris and Peta agreed to crew for Boston.Two weeks later, Boston subjected them to three days of torture, including tying heavy engine parts to their limbs and necks and putting plastic bags over their heads. In this state, they were thrown overboard fully conscious. Back in England, Chris's parents, went to unbelievable lengths to try establish what had happened to them and bring their killer to justice and they succeeded in securing some crucial evidence. However, with Boston, their suspected American killer proving to be highly elusive; the victims two British citizens; the maritime murder occurring in Guatemalan waters; no scene of crime evidence, the case very quickly went cold. The international crime was deemed too complex for any law enforcement to solve and no country was prepared to pick up jurisdiction. Life, of course, moves on and eventually papers over the cracks of loss and bereavement but the pain, and the nagging perplexing question of why they were killed, and in such an horrific way, was never far from the surface. They were forgotten, but not by their respective families. Their brutal and inexplicable murders were to haunt them for almost four decades.Graduating with an English Literature degree from Lancaster University in 1982, Penny moved to London to study Journalism at City University. Experiencing something of a baptism of fire as a reporter on a North London local newspaper at the time of the Broadwater Farm Estate riots in in 1985, she learnt the trade and knew that writing was in her soul. It proved a good training ground but the appeal of attending extravagant press functions and styling photo shoots was ultimately more alluring, and she was appointed Health and Beauty Editor for Woman magazine in 1986. Working on the mainstream national title for five years, she developed a life-long passion for fashion and beauty. A freelance journalist and public-relations consultant for thirty years, it was in October 2015 that the thought came to her from out of the blue to use the internet to track down Chris and Peta's suspected killer and his two sons. Taking her evidence to Greater Manchester Police (who had investigated the crime in 1978) , she requested that the case should
