Original subtitles

I keep having this recurring dream...

about my brother Chris coming back and being really, really happy.

We have a party to celebrate.

After the party, I go into the bedroom to go and sit on his bed and talk,

and I discover a mask of his face lying on the bedside table.

But it isn't really him.

I don't think anybody could imagine...

...what a terrible sense of absolute despair there was,

not knowing what had happened to my son.

It just didn't make sense. It didn't add up.

Where could they be?

We knew that somebody somewhere knew the truth.

It's like watching a horror movie, but it's real.

You feel like you're hiding this secret

that people would not understand.

What happened to Peta and Chris

is a nightmare that you can't wake up from.

My brother Chris and his girlfriend Peta always wanted to travel, always.

Hello, everyone. What's the date today?

It's the 30th... no, 29th May.

Chris had a tape recorder, so he would send tapes back.

Greetings from Belize. It's basically paradise.

The markets are quite lively places. We're going to travel down the coast.

Chris was my cool older brother.

There were three of us.

Nigel was the oldest, I was the youngest,

and Chris was in the middle, and I idolised him, I suppose.

My father hated Chris' long hair.

They often locked horns,

but Chris really didn't care what other people thought of him.

You know, loved his leather jacket, loved wearing silver boots, jeans.

And you could never really hold him back. He hated boundaries.

He was a very lovable little boy.

There was always a sense of excitement about him.

From the age of ten he decided to be a doctor.

I was always very proud of him.

He was very devoted to his girlfriend, Peta.

Chris and Peta met when they were 14 and became childhood sweethearts.

I met Peta in 1964, when we were 11.

She had this Mona Lisa smile, very reserved,

but underneath that exterior...

...was this mischievous character,

with this twinkle in her eye.

Soul music was the big thing.

We loved it.

She would go mental. She would.

That's what I loved about her.

That sense of fun.

And then Chris came along. They seemed to belong together.

He was probably not your conventional doctor.

He was very much a party animal,

and they were quite well-known, I think for their parties.

They were adventurous,

and they thought nothing of just getting in Chris' old banger of a car

and just taking off, and they did.

You know, they travelled across Europe and to Morocco and Tangier.

They went to Australia and were there for six months,

and then travelled down to Central America.

Well, I didn't like it at all.

I mean, I don't think many parents would.

Wasn't even too sure where Central America was, to be honest.

But you can't clip a kid's wings.

You've got to let them fly.

So, they went off with our blessings.

Sixth of June, 1978.

Dear Mum, I'm now in Sarteneja on the north coast of Belize.

Peta always wrote long letters to her mother,

usually fortnightly, maybe more often.

Life is very slow here,

and we shall probably stay until the end of the week.

The sun is warm, the sky is a little cloudy,

and the sea is emerald green.

People are very friendly indeed. You know, you've got fish in the sea,

you've got all your fruit and vegetables growing behind you, in the jungle.

We heard stories of people who'd gone out there

just for a couple of weeks and ended up staying two or three months.

It was always very exciting hearing from them.

These were strange places to us.

For me back at home, little 17-year-old,

it all seemed very exciting and exotic.

That type of travel was unusual.

They were going to completely foreign places,

right out of your comfort zone.

Chris was a risk taker.

He did go beyond what people would accept as being safe.

After that, still not quite sure.

Might be going to Jamaica, might be going down to Peru.

You know, they were all over the place, really, depending on who they met.

You know, it was all at a whim.

Always looking for the next new experience.

They were very much children of the '70s.

That whole buzz, that whole vibe, you know, free love and the music.

But, you know, I think what came with that was a certain naivety.

They couldn't conceive that anybody could harm them.

13th of June, 1978.

All our plans have changed.

An American called Duane offered to take us up to Chetumal by sail.

We thought it was an opportunity not to be missed,

especially as Chris wants sailing experience.

No more news, I don't think,

so we'll close now with all of my love, as ever. Pete.

We knew that in one of the bars in Belize they'd met this man, Duane Boston.

They were going to sail with him down the coast.

He had two boys in tow, Russell and Vince.

Can you tell me your name?

My name is Vince Boston.

You know, I had a weird childhood.

We moved around a lot.

We never stayed in one place for, like, more than a year.

I hadn't seen my mom since I was three, almost four years old.

So, it was my brother Russ, me, and my dad, Silas Duane Boston,

but everyone called him Duane.

He had a lot of girlfriends.

A lot of really good-looking women.

He had that certain charisma, I guess, you know.

They call it the Boston charm. I don't know, whatever.

I think the best way to describe my dad is he acts like a big kid.

Zero responsibilities,

just wants to have fun and party and good times, you know.

There was always these hippies in the house,

smoking pot, drinking, doing drugs.

We'd be sitting there in the living room

and somebody would pass a joint over. I'd take a little hit...

My dad didn't care. He's like, "Yeah, it's good for him. Fuck him."

I remember one Christmas we had a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree,

scrawny, but well, we decorated it.

We had Froot Loops, we strung those through a thread.

Christmas morning, under the tree, there was a brown paper bag.

I opened it up.

It was this View-Master.

You put these reels in and put a little cartridge thing to your eyes.

You saw this amazing full-colour picture in three dimensions.

And it was from Dad.

It just meant to me that he cared.

In his own little way, you know.

This stupid little View-Master in a paper bag, that meant a lot to me.

That was my favourite Christmas.

If you were to write a motto for Belize, it might be "no sweat."

One day, I'm 12 years old, we're watching this television show about Belize.

If you can't remember where Belize is, you're probably not alone.

It's in Central America all right, just the other side of the Gulf of Mexico.

And we're, you know, tripping on it and loving it,

and Dad said, "Hey, you guys wanna go to Belize?"

And we both look at each other like, "Is he bullshitting us?"

Next thing you know we got passports, got snorkels and fins,

loaded up the truck, and headed down to Belize.

Belize is a beautiful country.

The water's turquoise blue and crystal clear,

weather's perfect all the time.

Dad bought a boat, the Justin B,

and he'd been in the navy, so he knew a lot of seamanship.

We'd take tourists out on day trips,

teach people how to spearfish, how to snorkel, how to scuba.

Dad would basically turn into this devil-may-care, easy-going character,

where they would say, "Yeah, OK, this guy, he's a fucking hippie,

I can see that, but at least he's legit."

He kept calling us Pirates of the Caribbean,

and this is before the movies came out.

And he was so proud of the fact that he was a pirate of the Caribbean.

One day we pull into Belize City...

and I remember this British couple coming down the dock.

They had their duffel bags and all their gear.

They came on board and said, "Hello. Here we are. I'm Chris."

And she's like, "Hello, I'm Peta Frampton."

Nice couple, fairly young, 25.

He was a doctor, he said, and she was an attorney,

and they were gonna be on board for quite a while.

A couple of weeks, I think.

Dear Mum. We have just set off and the sea is somewhat choppy,

so my writing may go haywire. Chris has been doing a lot of sailing.

The sailing's really very good fun, except I think I need a lot more practice at it.

Chris was very fond of sailing,

which was a legacy of our holidays in Anglesey.

I always remember he and I just taking the boat out on our own,

too far, out of the bay, out of sight.

But that was Chris, pushing boundaries. He did go too far.

Chris was very easy-going, really cool guy, easy to get along with.

He was there for the ride, he loved the adventure,

he wanted to steer the boat, grab the tiller.

We taught him the ropes, literally.

"OK, this is how you sail, this is how you navigate."

Chris had this giant boombox that he loved,

and was always cranking up some mixtapes that he had

from I guess recording from his LP collection back home,

and playing Pink Floyd, or ELO, or Santana, whatever,

and it was like, "Yeah, this is groovy! We love this kind of music!"

You know, and we were dancing onboard.

It's fun when you have somebody on board that's really into it.

I really admired his adventurous spirit.

Peta was a little bit more reserved.

She would kind of hang back and sun herself, or write letters.

During the day it's super just lying on the hatches

and soaking up the sun, whilst the boat flies along.

We had a perfect sail.

Chris wants me to say this was due to his superb navigation.

I would jump into this beautiful crystal clear water and we'd spearfish.

Then at the end of the day

it would make a nice meal of rice and beans and whatever we caught.

Dad was, "Oh man, this is awesome.

We're sailing, drinking Jamaican rum, partying. This is the life."

Every now and again, you wanna go into port,

they would both come in

and she would drop off her letters and go shopping.

You get tired of a place, you just pull up anchor and go somewhere else.

Doing some coral reef diving on a little island,

and I suppose I must've seen about 400 different sorts of fish,

and lots and lots of amazingly coloured coral.

The only thing you've gotta watch out for is a few sharks,

but they shouldn't be too much problem.

They were travelling around going to all the cayes,

these little islands of Belize, just lapping it all up really,

and just really enjoying life.

I can remember, I was missing him. The house felt very flat without him.

But they'd been snorkelling, and swimming,

and really enjoying the life, so they were happy.

It's incredibly hot here, but at night the sky is absolutely amazing.

There's lightning flashing on the horizon all the time. Just looks beautiful.

We've had thunderstorms as well, which are something on a boat.

Since they'd stayed on longer, we got to know them better.

You know, we were like a little tight crew and we all had our jobs to do.

So, I think they really enjoyed it at first, yeah.

I remember that Peta asked,

"So, aren't you going to school? Aren't you missing school?"

She wanted to volunteer to be our onboard tutor.

You know, some knuckleheaded American kids that didn't know nothing,

and that was her gift to us, I guess.

Onboard, my dad was the captain, and we were just the crew.

And we were obligated to follow his every order.

The captain is the god.

You follow what the captain says, or it's called mutiny.

You had to swab the decks, you had to maintain the paint.

This boat would slowly leak,

and this ugly, smelly black water would seep in.

Every day, if you didn't bail out you could eventually sink,

so you had to be up on that.

It's a life and death thing, you know.

We didn't have any radios, no way of communicating,

so we were kind of out there on our own.

Anything that goes wrong, we're toast.

Dad would spend a lot of time getting drunk.

He would, kind of, sulk.

And then he would turn into this Jekyll-and-Hyde type character.

Alcohol, whatever it was, would activate this asshole in him.

Nothing was ever good enough for him.

You know, he would yell at Russ or I, "Why didn't you tie the knot this way?"

or, "Why didn't you pull the anchor up this way?"

It was like a storm that would come in and you weren't prepared for it.

You just had to be careful not to cross that line

and... wake up the dragon or whatever.

My dad, you've gotta understand, he was a very prolific burglar,

breaking into people's houses.

He was brought up that way.

My grandfather, his father before him, was a criminal,

running illegal hooch back in the Prohibition.

Whereas, maybe a normal dad would teach his kid how to play catch or something,

Dad would want me to go breaking into people's houses with him.

I didn't wanna do it. You know, I wasn't part of that.

Dad was pissed off about that.

He would say things like, "I don't think that you're my son.

You can't be my son, because you wanna be good."

You know, "You're just too goodie-goodie."

So, my nickname was "Goody Two-Shoes."

Peta wrote a letter.

The boat was very small, they were all pretty well living on top of one another.

We sleep in the galley, a space about four-by-five by two-and-a-half feet.

Peta was getting a little bit irritated at lack of privacy.

Like all boats, this one has cockroaches,

and it's horrible when we turn on the kerosine lamp and they come out.

We spray every day, but they come out to die.

At first it's paradise, and then after a while it's like,

"OK, another day, another day, another day."

You know, it's like every day you see the same water,

you see the same boat, you see the same person.

So, "OK, there's another sunrise, there's another sunset, OK, whatever."

Another reason I wouldn't mind ending my sailing career now

is the two sons of Duane.

They are 12 and 13 years, but behave more like eight and nine.

They squabble most of the time, and I find I just have no patience at all with them.

What makes it worse is that Duane curses and puts them down continually,

but on a boat there's nowhere you can go.

The boys were very quarrelsome.

Boston was very angry.

He would put you into a classification of

either good people, if they were criminals,

but if they were law-abiding, those are bluebloods.

"Fucking bluebloods."

He thought that they were looking down on him.

And they did, they did look down on him.

When things go wrong, little quirks in people's personality get on your nerves,

and you can't go anywhere. Where are you gonna go?

You could tell just by her expression

that Peta was a little bit over the novelty of being onboard.

Not too emotional, stiff upper lip and all that, you know,

but there's a little bit of passive aggressiveness, you could tell.

I think, yeah, she was, kind of, done.

June 29th, Peta wrote that they'd decided to change their plans

and go to Livingston in Guatemala,

and then Peta was going to catch a flight to New Orleans,

and Chris was going to go on to Trinidad.

Yeah, "We'll be glad to get away," she said.

"Nothing much happens on a boat."

We had been sailing around different islands,

just exploring, for a few weeks.

Especially, Peta was anxious to get off the boat and stretch her legs.

29th of June, 1978.

We reached Hunting Caye at about 11:00 a.m.

We're docked about 50 yards offshore and the water is perfectly clear.

It was a very beautiful island.

I think the name of it was Hunting Caye.

When we first get there, it's, of course, me and my dad and Russ,

and Chris and Peta, and the lighthouse keeper.

And he's like, "Yeah, man, we'll be having a big party here, man, later.

Yeah, you're all invited, come stay," you know, "We'll have a big party."

They were having a pig roast.

They stuck an apple in its mouth and put it on a spit,

and everyone was having roast pig.

All the adults were drinking and dancing,

and we had the music blaring,

and it's like, "Wow, really, this is cool."

Everyone's having a good time and smoking pot, doing drugs.

Quaaludes were being passed around.

There was a lot of debauchery.

I remember there was these two very drunk Guatemalan girls, they were beautiful.

They're, you know, bikinis, scantily clad,

and they were standing in the surf, kissing each other.

And I'm, like, "Russ, look at that!" We'd never seen that before, right?

Like, "Oh, two girls kissing each other,"

and then they started taking each other's top off.

And we're like, "Oh my God, how far is this gonna go?"

Dad was drunk and dancing around the bonfire, life of the party.

Chris and Peta were having a wonderful time, very drunk, and dancing.

And she let her hair down and was in the flow of the party.

Dad was talking about all these crazy ghost stories.

He had smuggled in all of this nitrous oxide cartridges,

and he had tossed one of these cartridges in the bonfire.

And after a while, they started to explode. Kaboom!

Dad was dancing around like he was conjuring up some kind of magic.

He's like, "Yes, white magic!"

At that point, I didn't know what was going to happen next.

Peta sent a letter that was dated June 29th.

That was the last we heard from them.

The letters stopped.

We didn't hear anything at all, and we started to get concerned.

It was just that inability to reach out to them.

It's hard to think nowadays that you couldn't get in touch with them,

but there was just no means of doing so.

Every day when the post came,

there was the searching for an airmail envelope,

or some news from them.

There was just nothing.

By the end of August, we were all very worried.

We went to Anglesey on holiday.

We came back from Anglesey expecting a letter, but there was nothing there.

We thought were they unwell,

that some sort of accident must have befallen them.

Weeks went by with no word.

The last letter was postmarked from Livingston, in Guatemala.

We knew it was a fairly dangerous place to be,

that there was a civil war raging.

They had got visas in Belize to go to Honduras,

so it was never their intention to go to Guatemala.

Our fears just began to grow and grow.

I felt desperate, absolutely desperate.

So helpless, really.

When Chris was three,

he fell out of the bedroom window, to the ground floor.

I remember hearing the thud and dashing downstairs.

I thought first, of course, he was dead.

But actually he fell onto a garden table, and that had broken his fall.

That's always etched in my memory.

You think you've covered every eventuality,

such as falling down stairs or, I don't know, being run over,

but an open window was nothing that had ever occurred to me.

I never forgave myself for that.

Now, they were missing.

You don't know what to do.

You don't know who to turn to.

One day I was called in to my boss' office

in special branch at police headquarters.

He explained to me how two young British people...

...had gone missing in Guatemala,

and said he would like me to try and find them.

The plain fact is that several things could've happened to them.

Guatemala were, at that time, in the middle of a violent civil war.

There was serious drug and gang problems there,

and large areas of jungle, to all intents and purposes, it's totally lawless.

They could've been kidnapped.

They could've simply got lost somewhere in the jungle.

So, I had just to keep an absolutely open mind

on what might've happened to them.

My father worked for the BBC in Manchester, in the news department.

He just threw himself into it.

Charles was in contact with newspapers and things.

The couple are doctor Chris Farmer,

and his girlfriend, law graduate Peta Frampton, who are both 25.

Peta and Chris have been friends since childhood.

They even went to the same university,

and according to Chris' mother,

it was there that the urge to travel the world was born.

It was their one idea that as soon as they graduated

that they would travel as extensively as they could.

It was headline news.

Here were these two good-looking young graduates,

with everything to live for, missing on the other side of the world.

The TV was on.

The two of them were missing. It was a terrible shock.

They travelled down through Mexico to Belize,

where they hitched a ride

on a converted fishing boat owned by an American.

It would be the letter that arrived in the middle of July

but it had been written at the end of June.

There was a gap of about,

nearly three weeks between the writing and the actual posting.

Night after night, my father would sit at the bureau,

writing letters to anyone he could think of.

We just wrote to every consul

down the coast of Central America, Guatemala, Belize.

We started thinking maybe one of them had fallen ill or,

they were in jail for something.

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office made extensive enquiries.

Dad employed a private detective to look at all the tourist haunts

along the Belizean coast, Guatemala, Honduras.

We wrote to the harbourmaster at Hunting Caye.

We contacted weather stations to see if there'd been any storms,

the boat might've been damaged.

It was all we could do to find any information

about what could've happened to Chris and Peta.

I didn't have detectives working for me in the area where they'd gone missing,

so I had to rely on the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

They were already helping Charles Farmer to try and find out

what had happened to the pair,

but it all drew a blank.

However, Charles was a very well-educated, clever man.

He'd have made a good detective, actually.

He handed over quite a large file of documents from his own enquiries.

The most important document that he handed to me

was a port document showing the Justin B leaving Belize on the 26th...

...with its captain shown as Duane Boston.

On board at the time were Christopher, Peta,

and Boston's two young sons, Vince and Russell.

The next we knew, from the port record,

it sailed into Livingston on July 6th, but Christopher and Peta were not aboard.

The harbourmaster said that he remembered

Chris and Peta being signed on this boat, the Justin B.

Something had happened to them between Hunting Caye and Livingston.

So, it was logical that we needed to find out from Boston

where they'd left the boat.

It would seem that the key to all this,

the key to the mystery of their whereabouts is the boat owner.

Well, this is what is being hoped for by the police.

They're trying to contact him to actually pin down where he landed them.

We discovered from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office

that Boston had left Livingston on July 19th.

He had sold the boat.

The next thing we knew was that he had gone back to Sacramento.

And then, in October, they interviewed him.

He said that he had put them ashore in Guatemala,

across the bay from Livingston.

He said also that Chris and Peta were drug addicts...

...drug pushers, that they'd left the boat and that was it.

The skipper of the boat alleged that they were taking drugs.

At their own request, he had dropped them off at a peninsula,

Punta de Manabique, which was largely uninhabited.

Why they should drop off at such a remote place struck me as being odd,

but Central America at the time

was certainly regarded as a major drug smuggling route.

America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

In order to fight and defeat this enemy,

it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.

Without informing the Greater Manchester Police,

the DEA opened a file on Chris and Peta as being suspected drug smugglers.

Seemingly the DEA had seen that Chris and Peta had travelled through Morocco,

another significant smuggling route,

and together with Boston's testimony, suspicions were raised.

I mean, yeah, they smoked marijuana, hands up, they did, yeah.

You know, they smoked dope.

But then I think it wasn't out of the norm in the '70s to smoke joints.

Were they drugs pushers? No. No way.

I thought they may have fallen into the hands of villains, maybe been robbed.

They could've been arrested by the authorities,

you know, where you've got drugs and money,

then sadly police officers can be corrupted.

It became an all-consuming passion for my father, really,

to find out what had happened.

My parents pleaded with the Foreign Office to interview the boys,

but they didn't.

So, he decided to get the phone number for Boston, and he made a call.

Charles recorded that conversation.

The phone rang, and Boston's father answered.

He was called Russell Boston.

You're Mr Russell Boston?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, you're the father of Mr Boston.

Yes.

So, obviously, as Duane was the last person,

I would just like to have a chat with him,

and ask him just whereabouts and this sort of thing, you see.

Has anyone ever told you to look in Colombia?

In Colombia?

Yeah.

Well, you see, the last news we had

was that Duane had dropped them just short of Livingston.

They were on dope.

He told me, he says,

"I met hundreds and hundreds of them types of people down there,"

and he says, "Some of them are brought on those poppy farms or marijuana farms,"

and he says, "They might be out there for a year or two."

You have no address for you son, though?

No. But I can get a hold of him.

If you write a letter here, I'll see that he gets the letter.

Sure thing. Many thanks indeed.

- Thank you. - Thank you. Bye-bye.

I was very suspicious of the responses. I mean, I felt, "He's hiding something.

Why would he hide something?"

But at the end of the day, Chris and Peta

had been missing for months in a country like Guatemala.

Boston and his two sons had disappeared.

There was no evidence that he had committed a crime,

and the truth of the matter, what I could do was very limited.

Because we had absolutely no jurisdiction in the matter.

Inquiries have so far produced nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

From the time that the last letter was written, just an utter blank.

All that both families can do is wait and wonder,

what has happened to Peta and Chris.

Any news would've been better than no news.

As a family, we couldn't come to terms with anything really,

not knowing where they were.

We were in limbo.

What were you going through, Audrey?

Hell, in a word.

I don't know, how can you describe it?

I just remember looking up at the stars and thinking,

"Is there no sign of anything, any reason, or..."

you just think that surely

there'll be some sign or somebody who must've seen them.

We couldn't imagine what we were about to find out.

My father took the phone call.

He just crumpled, really.

Yeah. Just didn't really cry, just crumpled.

Back in July of the previous year,

two bodies had been discovered floating

200 metres off the peninsula at Punta de Manabique.

And they'd been buried unidentified.

They'd been found with obvious signs of torture,

and Peta's body had a plastic bag over her head.

I remember I was at work at the clinic when the police rang up

and said that it was Chris and Peta.

And I can remember driving back from the clinic

and shouting to the empty car,

"My son has been murdered, my son has been murdered!"

And then the next day I went back to work as normal.

That was it, that was the end.

They were not coming back.

This was a whole new ballgame.

This was now a murder.

They had died from asphyxia due to submersion.

In other words, they were drowned.

They were bound hand and foot,

and they were attached to pieces of heavy machinery on the seabed.

I was very, very angry, I really was.

We wanted justice.

We were all grieving in our own individual ways,

but one question was in all our heads, just the question why.

It just didn't make sense, it didn't add up.

What could possibly have gone so wrong?

Why were these two kids tortured and murdered?

All I can do is tell the story of what I saw from my own eyes.

To tell the truth as I remember it.