Original subtitles

[woman on radio] Well, good morning, Sacramento,

if you're just joining us it's 8:38 am,

it's a beautiful day out there so make the most of the things that...

[Vince Boston] Finally, after all these years,

we're getting something done

and I guess my patience finally paid off.

I had told the police

that me and my brother witnessed my dad murdering Chris and Peta.

I was prepared to just give my testimony,

but I knew I was putting my life in my hands.

He can kill you, he can bury you in the backyard

and he's gotten away with it more than once.

Yeah, I'm looking over my shoulder, but I have to make my dad

accountable for his crimes and stop him from hurting somebody else.

We just couldn't believe that we were in this position

after so many decades. The FBI had tracked Boston down.

[Marcus Knutson] We obtained information that he was staying

that he was staying at a senior care facility

in Eureka, California.

[Penny Farmer] I was very vengeful,

I wanted my pound of flesh off him.

He was aged 75,

and all this time he was still a free man.

[Marcus] We were going to arrest Silas Duane Boston

for the homicides of Peta and Chris.

This guy has killed multiple people before,

and I wasn't gonna take it lightly.

[Penny] We felt that justice was within our grasp.

[David Sesma] We go to his room...

and he's not there.

I don't think he can be caught, he covers his tracks too well.

My heart started beating, he's got away again.

[Vince] It made me sick to my stomach

because I'm the snitch, he might be trying to find me to come and kill me.

[theme music playing]

[Penny] Where is he?

We were assured he'd been under surveillance

and that there is no way he can move anywhere.

We determined that two days prior to us arriving in Eureka

he had transferred to another

senior care facility in Paradise, California.

We are flying along Highway 36,

probably a four or five-hour drive.

[Penny] We felt he'd slipped away again,

and we were not going to see justice again.

[Marcus] Our concern is we don't know

if the nurse is calling over there

and we don't want him to go on the run.

I come around the corner and sitting there in a wheelchair,

kind of moving his self with his legs is Duane.

You could see his eyes just got big.

We tell him that he's under arrest

for the murders of Chris Farmer and Peta Frampton.

[Marcus] He really didn't say anything,

if you didn't know what he had done to Peta and Chris

you'd be like oh that just looks like a nice old guy

sitting there in a wheelchair but just feel kind of a coldness, erm,

that was there.

He was a bad guy that needed to go to jail.

This was a win for Peta and Chris.

75-year-old Silas Duane Boston was tracked down by the FBI

and arrested in a Paradise convalescent home.

Charged with murdering a young Manchester couple

in Guatemala nearly 40 years ago.

Christopher Farmer and Peta Frampton, from Manchester are boyfriend, girlfriend,

they'd just finished at university,

they were celebrating their graduation with around the world trip.

[Reporter] Both Farmer and Frampton were tortured, and hog tied,

thrown in the middle of the ocean to drown.

[Reporter 2] The case would go cold for nearly four decades.

Someone from England had the original file

in their garden shed, you know, I mean this, does it get better than that?

Yes!

Got you, you black hearted bastard.

[Reporter 3] Silas Duane Boston was arrested

after Greater Manchester Police

reopened the case at the request of the victims' families.

[Penny] I went downstairs to tell mum the good news,

after 38 very long years he was finally in custody.

We opened a bottle of champagne and raised a glass to Chris and Peta.

[Audrey Farmer] Over 30 years of silence.

I know what it have meant to Charles to know he was arrested.

He'd always begged the police to let us speak to the two boys.

Once again, the case came alive.

Everything changed.

He's under arrest, he's in custody, now it's actually going to happen.

[Vince] When I saw that mugshot for the first time it was shocking

because I hadn't seen him in so many years, he didn't look the same.

I always knew that there was a monster beneath the mask

but now it's like the mask has been lifted, I felt physically ill,

I couldn't look at it.

[Reporter] At the time of the murders, Russell and Vince were 11 and 13

but in interviews this year they told an FBI agent

they saw their father kill the couple.

[Penny] We were very grateful

that the boys were prepared to get onto the witness stand

and testify against their father.

[Audrey] I had felt very antagonistic towards the boys

but then I hadn't realised they were obviously scared stiff of him.

If he's found guilty of killing Frampton and Farmer, he'll face the death penalty

or life in prison.

[Vince] So how do you feel? We got him?

Great you know, let's jump cartwheels and, you know, slap high fives all round.

It was a relief of a huge burden.

I didn't wanna be afraid anymore.

But I felt these mixed emotions,

I'm the one that's started the machinery to put him to his death,

that's my dad, you know?

I'm, I'm killing my dad,

the good guy with the bad guy, you can't separate the two.

[Reporter] It's an extraordinary story this, isn't it? A young couple

from Manchester disappear nearly 40 years ago

and now finally the law authorities

in the United States believe that they do know

how they were killed, how they were murdered and who was responsible.

[Penny] We wanted the world to know he was guilty.

But I was aware that being arrested didn't mean that he was convicted.

We knew we were in for a long and messy trial.

All our faith and hope was put in Matt Segal the prosecutor.

[Matthew Segal] In 2015 I was

the Chief of the Special Prosecutions Unit of the US Attorney's Office

for the Eastern District of California.

This was an extraordinary case.

Two people were murdered

and the man who did it evaded justice for 38 years

and his two sons say that they saw him kill them.

You can't kill people

and if there's a prosecutable case of murder it has to be charged.

[Lexi Nagin] It's in the United States' Constitution that people are entitled

to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

I'm a Federal Public Defender

and I was appointed to represent Duane Boston in the case against him.

I became a Public Defender because I wanted to represent people

who didn't have the money to hire, you know, fancy attorneys.

[Matthew] The Defence Attorney is straight out of central casting

for your Federal Public Defender with a lot of experience and smarts.

My job is to hold the government's feet to the fire,

and I have absolutely no problem, um, fighting that fight,

they're innocent until proven guilty and I believe in that very strongly.

If you were accused of something,

you would want me to represent you that way.

I was glad that he was gonna get the best representation,

it was a serious accusation.

But we were gonna go 100%, no matter who was representing him.

Like you can't just lock people up,

a jury of 12 regular people has to decide beyond a reasonable doubt,

yeah, that happened, he did it.

I only need one juror to have a doubt.

Could we face the awful thought of getting an innocent verdict?

[Vince] Any seed of doubt in the story,

one little chink in the armour

and he's walking out.

[Lexi] I start reading the complaint

and it's a much stranger complaint than normal.

To have a homicide case from the1970s was incredibly unusual,

to have a case that took place in, allegedly, Guatemala was highly unusual,

and Vincent and Russell's story is very compelling and it seems true

on the surface,

but when the story is being told with such creative details

it just doesn't ring true as people who are telling something 30 years later

that actually happened.

[Matthew] They corroborate each other,

they're telling substantially the same story about what they saw

because that is what they saw.

The words that were spoken,

supposedly Chris saying,

"What's your game, man? What's your game?"

The billy club broke after the beating,

even sitting with the naked person tied up, alone,

none of it read to me like facts of a case.

Those kinds of details actually raise a red flag to me as being untruthful.

[Lexi] When something very traumatic happens

your brain goes to places to protect you and you sometimes can't remember details

or can't even see details.

There's a lot of studies about eyewitness identifications of traumatic events

where one person's telling of it is completely different

from another person's telling

because their brains are just working in ways to protect them from this trauma.

[Lexi] Neither one of the boys said it's been a really long time,

I was very traumatised by it, I put it out of my mind,

or I repressed it and so I don't really remember

but I know I saw this thing happen.

If there's no contemporaneous writing or contemporaneous way of recording

people just don't remember those things.

The mind's not a tape recorder and memory's sometimes not exactly valid.

[water splashing]

But all I can do is tell the story of what I saw in front of my own eyes.

[Matthew] Any effective defence would require

a cross examination for the ages of those guys.

The motive for Russell and Vincent to lie about their dad

was very apparent to me, I mean, that was something

that just kind of screamed off the page.

The boys were convinced from a very young age that their father

had killed their mother.

Everyone knows he's killed her.

I'm gonna tell you exactly what he did to my mom.

[upbeat music playing]

[Vince] The earliest memories I have of our mom

she was in the kitchen,

playing The Beatles,

that was one of her favourite groups.

Somehow, we started calling her Mommy Mary Lou.

And I just remember this warm feeling that she loved us kids

and we were her whole world.

When she met my dad, she was 17,

which is still considered a minor

and my dad was a few years old.

The story was she ran away with him with 25 bucks in her pocket.

It scared her family that she had fallen for dad.

Dad could be very charming if he wanted to be,

especially over women.

At first, he was a caring dad,

but he turned.

He was doing drugs and partying and eventually being abusive.

She had to get away from him.

She started dating someone and filed for a divorce,

but he wouldn't let her leave.

He took her to an orchard

and told her he was going to shoot her.

While she was running, he shot her in the back.

[gunshot]

Then he buried her in a shallow grave somewhere.

We don't know where.

Grandma told us your dad showed me his hands,

he had blisters on his hands from digging her grave

and he was crying and saying, "I had to kill Mary, I had to shoot her

"because she was gonna leave me and I didn't wanna lose my kids".

When she went missing the police questioned my dad,

he said that they were separated,

she had emptied the savings account, and she was dating this radio disc jockey

and he never saw her again.

I think at the time, in the late sixties,

a woman was thought that she should be in the kitchen

just not dating anybody else when she's getting a divorce

so like, "Hey, you know, she's going on with her life."

She was getting away from his abuse.

What were they thinking back then?

He killed my mom in cold blood,

they just took everything he said as if it's the truth, they let him go.

And then meanwhile my mom's in a shallow grave somewhere.

We haven't been able to find out where my mom is,

my dad actually told us himself

that we'll never find her in a million years,

and that he buried her in or near a creek bed,

and the creek bed caved in on her.

Where could he have taken her?

He told us that he loved my mom and out of all the people that he killed,

she's the only one he regrets killing.

When you murder somebody's mother for your own selfish needs

and say, "I did it because I love you." Really? Is that love?

You sicken me.

I think this was the first time he was able to commit a murder

and talk his way out of it.

And I think it set things up for the future for him,

realising that if he did things a certain way

he could get away with murder over and over again.

[Penny] When somebody's missing, it's horrible,

you can't think about anything else, you can't come to terms with it.

Desperate, absolutely desperate, you don't know what to do,

you don't know who to turn to.

I think it's human nature to wanna know what happened,

to get some kind of a closure,

even though you know they can't come back.

If my dad's convicted,

he might finally tell me where he buried my mom.

[Lexi] Vincent spent a tremendous amount of effort

trying to get them to reopen the investigation

into their mother's disappearance, um, it's unclear whether she died,

they never found a body

and they just simply weren't getting any traction there.

They were told by family members from a young age that Peta and Chris

had gone missing and that they had last been on the boat

and that police officers were investigation Mr Boston.

So they know he's a suspect in this.

The story of Chris and Peta was always told in combination with

"Let's find him responsible for killing our mother."

I'm looking for an opportunity to raise doubt about their credibility.

In this case I'm very confident that I have a lot to say.

[Matthew] The attack on Vince and Russ is, "You just made this up

"to get back at your dad because you think he murdered your mom,"

which is crazy in itself as a defence.

So now Duane looks like a three times murderer

who, when he kills, does his best to dispose of the bodies in a way

that they'll never be found.

So, it's a tough position for the defence, in my opinion.

It's very problematic for me, except I think the way I would do that

is I would cross examine and say,

"You believe that your father was responsible for killing your mother."

"You know that he was cleared of doing that and that made you angry,

"you believed in your heart that that's what happened

"because that's what your grandmother told you."

[Director] Why did your grandma tell you that?

[Vince] Maybe in her mind she felt some guilt

and even though she would never turn in little Duaney, her son, her baby,

she wanted us to know the truth.

She knew that he was killing people,

and she would chastise him, "Duane, you can't be doing that".

But she would tell us kids, "You gotta keep the family circle intact".

That's why he committed so many crimes and got away with them.

Through this investigation back in 1981 I know that his father knew where he was,

but his father enabled him by concealing him.

[Vince] My grandpa pretty much funded the trip down to Mexico and Belize

because dad was facing charges for statutory rape.

I remember one night, I woke up and heard the young woman in distress.

[muffled scream]

It wasn't unusual for him to bring home ladies,

but this was different.

And she was saying, "Just stop", "No, please stop" in, in a crying voice.

The next morning he's like, "Hey, about last night...

"dummy up, shut the fuck up about that".

This young lady who was under the age of consent,

so they were able to press charges of statutory rape against my dad.

Next thing we know he went and got us passports

and headed down to Belize.

A few weeks later grandpa came down

and, er, brought us money and bought us a boat.

The Justin B.

The rape charges were dropped for whatever reason, I don't know.

Grandpa knew but he didn't tell dad.

I think that if dad knew we would've come back home.

[Penny] It was just so galling to think if Boston had been told

he wouldn't have met Chris and Peta.

You just think I wish you'd never been there, you know?

Their paths crossing the way they did.

They were lambs to the slaughter.

[Matthew] Duane was deep in this western outlaw culture...

doing crime, not talking about it,

and he conveyed a lot of that forcefully,

for decades, to his sons.

It was a really big deal when they finally told the police what their dad had done.

[Penny] It restored your faith in humanity

that they had tried to do something,

that they hadn't replicated his grotesque human nature,

if you can call him human.

[Vince] He's an evil guy,

that's actually killing people and hurting people.

In my mind he committed these crimes

and he deserved to face judgement, even if it was 20, 30, 40, 50 years later.

[Lexi] Obviously in a modern case we'd wanna see photographs,

we'd wanna see that rope, we would wanna see,

you know, how their hands were bound, and a modern autopsy

would document all of those things.

The evidence we had was very old documents,

lots of dead witnesses,

we didn't have the autopsy report

and there's no DNA which was strange to me.

The last time the bodies were seen was in the seventies.

By the records of the exhumation

they put the bodies under marked grave markers in Guatemala.

This makes the case very strong

if they have those bodies and they have DNA.

I assume it's coming.

We had sent some agents down to Guatemala

to locate the graves of Chris and Peta.

We had planned to exhume the skeletons

and send those up to the FBI laboratory to be held, er, for trial.

[Penny] I was told it's really important because then

it will give us the DNA match to yours,

but the cemetery was very chaotic,

and it was proving very hard.

Unfortunately, they couldn't find the grave sites,

I was extremely disappointed I couldn't make that happen.

[Penny] We were horrified. There were photographs of their graves

and it was a very well documented

and witnessed exhumation.

This was really worrying.

[Lexi] It's very complex to decide

that those bodies are Peta and Chris without DNA testing.

Peta and Chris could've gotten off the boat

and something could've happened to them after.

I don't have to prove anything, I just raise reasonable doubt.

If we could've recovered a body from that cemetery,

gotten DNA out of it, you know, and matched it to the families

then we would've absolutely known, in a completely incontrovertible way,

but I just keep returning to the fact,

that we had two eyeball witnesses to these murders,

they corroborated each other and they were corroborated by documents.

There's a Belize port document that Charles Farmer got that says,

"Hey, who was on the boat?"

"It was Duane, Chris, Peta, Russ and Vince".

But Chris and Peta weren't on the boat when they got to Livingston.

And we knew we had something when we had Peta's letter.

[Penny] 13th June 1978.

"Dear mum, all our plans have changed,

"an American called Duane, who owns a Belizean boat called the Justin B

"offered to take us up Chetumal by sail.

"We thought it was an opportunity not to be missed,

"especially as Chris wants sailing experience."

It puts her on the boat, the Justin B,

it puts her with Duane and two kids,

it's almost like she was speaking to us,

then the letter is posted on July 18th,

that was about a week after the bodies washed up,

so it wasn't Peta who sent that letter.

I remember dad looking at the envelope,

if he mails it then that gives him a few extra days,

because then they think, "Oh, they're still alive".

He ended up mailing it in Livingston.

And then it turns out that Boston saved a lot of stuff over time.

My dad kept Chris' cassette tapes.

Russ found them in my dad's belongings and handed them over to the police.

It was horrible that Boston had kept hold of Chris' much loved music tapes

that he'd cherished and put together from all his vinyl records.

It was just a further violation.

That's powerful circumstantial evidence and if the jury believes the two sons

the only verdict is "guilty",

because they are eyeball witnesses to the murders.

[Vince] I was ready for it.

I can't get wrapped up if I'm gonna be attacked personally

or discredited or thrown under the bus,

all I could do is tell the truth and be the best witness I could be.

Bring it on, I have the truth on my side.

[Penny] Boston had been in custody for two months at this point.

We were just absolutely desperate to get to trial.

We were worried.

They couldn't find the bodies.

But we felt we had a very strong case

because of Vince and Russell's testimonies

and that we would win.

We were asked if we wanted to seek the death penalty and my mother,

really without hesitation said, "No".

[Audrey] There's something absolutely abhorrent about legal death.

Although the, you know, he'd done unspeakable things,

I don't think that killing somebody really solves anything.

[Matthew] We wanted to go quickly so we could get a conviction

before anything happened to Audrey,

but the government's not in charge of that, the court is

and so we had to persuade the court

to set a speedy trial.

We ended up in district court before the trial judge.

[Reporter] The 75-year-old who wheeled into a Sacramento Federal Courtroom

this afternoon seemed feeble

and needed a listening device to hear court proceedings.

But the Silas Duane Boston described in this federal complaint was

anything but weak 38 years ago.

When I saw Boston come into the courtroom for the first time,

I noticed how awful he looked.

[Lexi] He was obviously very ill, and we could see that before our eyes,

he was in a wheelchair, he's on medication,

he was losing weight already, I mean, he was a very sick man.

If we were the last stop to being able to deliver justice for a double murder,

then that had to happen.

But the defence is trying to delay trial.

[Lexi] We just couldn't commit to a sooner trial when we're not ready.

If we needed attorney client time with him to get the case together,

he was going to have to be a little bit healthy.

[Penny] My mum wrote a letter to the judge.

[Audrey] "Dear Sir, I'm writing to ask if you will please consider setting a date

"as soon as possible for the trial of Silas Duane Boston

"for the murder of my beloved son,

"Dr Christopher Farmer and his girlfriend, Peta Frampton.

"The brutal manner in which my son's life was taken has left an enduring

"and very painful gap in my family's life, which no amount of time will heal,

"but I will derive a sense of closure from knowing that his killer

"has been apprehended and appropriately sentenced."

We were given a provisional trial date of October 2nd,

and we couldn't wait to face him in court.

[Det. Jim Kelly] I was hoping, every day, that I would get that call telling me

be in this Sacramento court on this date,

at this time and I was ready, I was ready, I would leave in a heartbeat.

I wanted to look him in the eye across the courtroom

and convey an unspoken message to him,

"Got you."

[Sue Dobson] All I kept thinking is how are they going to secure a conviction?

Will they be able to provide unequivocal evidence?

Will the jury decide to find him guilty?

He has to be guilty. I just wanted to kill him.

[Penny] Mum was 92,

I think she felt it was the last thing that she could do for Chris,

to stand in that courtroom and face Boston.

I want to draw a line under it.

After all these years...

We'd finally got him.

Now let's go convict him.

[phone buzzing]

[Vince] I get a call,

your dad has passed away.

He just died in custody

and my head just starts spinning.

[Penny] The message came through about 2:00 in the morning,

it just said, "Silas Duane Boston has died".

I went and woke mum up and just said, "He's dead".

It was just so depressing.

We were powerless, again.

When the suspect died in jail before standing trial,

what impact did that have on you and your family?

We were devastated, it was just a further blow,

err, we came two weeks away from going over to Sacramento

to give pre-trial evidence and, err,

he effectively exited life on his own terms,

he didn't want us to have justice.

[Penny] We were told by his medical team

that he refused food and his medicine,

so in effect he took his life.

He knew that we knew he'd killed them,

he couldn't face us.

Four months in custody doesn't really equate to the four decades

where we didn't know what had happened.

I knew that this case had been ever present

in their moment-to-moment daily lives,

but criminal cases and criminal trials do not necessarily bring people any peace.

He might not have been convicted and then what?

Do you have your peace? Do you have your closure

even though there's no jury conviction?

[Matthew] I'm disappointed.

It would've been a great, great trial

but what happened to him was always what I had planned for the case,

in the sense that he didn't walk free again post arrest.

The sons were essential

in providing what justice we could provide in this case.

[Vince] Death is pretty permanent,

there's no coming back from that,

no matter what feelings I had toward him this was a finality, a chapter closing,

he's never going to be on this planet again.

This evil monster is gone.

I remember we'd go to the parks here in Sacramento and fly kites

and he'd tied and he'd tied the kite onto a fishing line.

It had got so high in the air that it was just a little dot

and he was like, "Whoa, that's the highest kite in the world",

and we're like, "Yay" it's pretty cool.

[crying]

He wasn't always bad, he wasn't always a horrible person

and that's what made it rough, if he was an asshole all the time

it'd be easy to deal with.

But when...

it's just confusing as a child,

it's like this is a cool dad that you want to bond with,

but you know what he's capable of.

[Penny] The evil that he did, it had such a reach,

not just for my family but the Framptons and, and his own family.

[Vince] A lot of people have suffered,

everybody that could've known my mom,

she was an amazing artist, she could've shared that art with the world

or Chris was a doctor, 25 years old,

think of all the lives that he could've saved,

Peta was an attorney, think of all the people that she could've helped,

and it's not just that one person, it's everybody in their circle.

[Audrey] I can remember Chris was about 12,

we were out for a walk and I had a moment of complete happiness,

he and I were walking hand in hand

and I thought, you know, how lovely life is.

I do remember that, when we were just the two of us together.

It was a fleeting moment

and I don't think I've ever quite experienced that again.

[Penny] Boston never gave Vince and Russell the satisfaction of knowing

where he'd buried Mary Lou.

I'll forever have the pain of losing my mom.

I am trying to find her so I can bring her home,

as human beings we want that closure,

letting her rest in peace

instead of buried like trash in a shallow grave somewhere.

Maybe it's beautiful,

maybe it's picturesque

if there's a river there and mountains or something.

But there's an unexplainable feeling of wanting to know where she is.

[birds chirping]

[Penny] Even now, I still feel that there's somebody missing.

[Director] Do you think one of your ways of coping was this fight for justice?

Oh, absolutely.

Law enforcement failed us time and time again.

Our family was the only point of cohesion,

the only constant.

Now to an update on a story

which we have reported on North West Tonight

several times in the past, the murders of the Manchester couple

Chris Farmer and Peta Frampton on a yacht, 40 years ago in Guatemala.

Well, their families were told the remains had been lost forever

and even the FBI couldn't find them,

but new clues led Chris' sister to a remote graveyard.

[Audrey] When you lose somebody the most devastating thing is

everybody else forgets them, but you don't, and you don't want to.

[Penny] What survives after death is love.

As a hurt party you want justice.

It doesn't make amends,

but you at least feel

that you have done everything you can to have avenged their murders.

- [Penny] Found them! - [man] What?

- [Penny] I've found Chris! - That's amazing.

It's extraordinary, isn't it?

[Penny] I was just amazed to find them.

It was such a relief.

Boston never counted on us having the fortitude and strength and love

to fight back for Chris and Peta.

He thought they would be just forgotten and disappear into that ocean

never to be seen again.

But how wrong was he?

They will live on in a different sort of way, on a different plane.

[instrumental music playing]