Why were the tortured corpses of my brother, twenty-five-year-old Christopher Farmer, a young doctor, and his twenty-four-year-old lawyer girlfriend, Peta Frampton, found floating off the Guatemalan coast in Central America in 1978? Like so many of today’s young people, after years of academic grafting they had set off to see the world, with high hopes and expectations.
They had been found tortured, bound and weighted down with heavy engine parts from which they had come adrift and Peta had a plastic bag over her head. Receiving such devastating news was like a bomb exploding in our family.
Why such a ghastly fate should befall them haunted us for 38 interminable years. It was inexplicable and devastating.
Time blunts the intense searing pain of bereavement but what remains is a dull throbbing ache; a longing for what might have been and the knowledge that a life with them in it would have been so much richer for us all. You never lose that sense of loss, even decades on.
There was some talk of revenge being needed for closure and, whilst I can’t deny a strong longing for justice, there is also a desire to still the mind from constantly asking the question ‘why?’ Your brain yearns to compute and make sense of such a tragic, senseless waste of life. Distracted for a while, one’s thoughts are constantly dragged back, like some beast hauling its quarry into its lair, to the nagging question, ‘why?’
There is, however, one thing worse than not knowing why a loved one has died… It is being stuck in limbo, not knowing if they are alive or dead but classed as ‘missing’. It’s a horrible word and one that curdles the blood and sends shivers down the spine of any parent. In our case, Chris and Peta were missing for ten months. Ten very long months in which we knew nothing of their whereabouts or what had happened to them. Ten months in which the two respective families explored every possible avenue open to them to try to find out their fate.
In amongst the pain, hope springs eternal. Whilst there is no proof of death there’s always hope, but like a tidal wave, reality floods into one’s consciousness and logic takes over. Your hopes are dashed on the rocks of despair with the realisation that you are deluding yourself.
Sleep did little to obliterate the debilitating daily grind of worry as a recurring, very disturbing nightmare played tricks with my head. I dreamt that Chris had returned home, alive and well, and we held a family celebration. When the party was over, I went into his bedroom to tell him how happy I was that he had returned. Sitting on his bed, I found to my horror a total stranger asleep under the bedclothes. A rubber mask of Chris’s face was lying on the bedside table. It was a nightmare that was to revisit me for many years.
Daylight and awake, doubts that start as a whisper steadily mount into a deafening crescendo, bombarding and assaulting every thought. Were they being held as prisoners, incarcerated in some Central American hellhole? Did they just want to cut off from their families and start life afresh? But, in our heart of hearts, we knew that would never be the case: their families meant too much to them.
I can remember the last time I saw them as vividly as if it were yesterday. Standing just 5 foot 8 inches in height, Chris made up in character what he lacked in stature. He was no introvert. His flamboyant dress reflected his colourful personality and that day he was wearing his much-loved, well-worn patchwork leather jacket. Peta was dark-haired, attractive and diminutive. I can still picture them in the doorway of their small rented house in the Birmingham suburb of Harborne, waving goodbye to Mum, Dad and I. It was the beginning of December 1977 and they had spent their last weekend in the UK saying their farewells to their respective families before embarking on their long-held plan to travel the world for a year. They were leaving the next morning for Heathrow to fly to Australia.
Fighting back tears, Mum gave Chris one last hug and said: ‘Keep in touch,’ and he replied, ‘Of course I will, and remember it isn’t for long. Please don’t worry about me, I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do.’ We reminded ourselves of those last words in the months to come. They planned to return to the UK by the following Christmas.
In contrast to their excitement, which was palpable, for those of us left behind there was sorrow that they were leaving before the New Year. It was going to be a quiet, less joyful Christmas with their departure. But not wishing to dampen their spirits, we rallied and said that we would raise a glass to them and we’d speak by phone on 25 December. With their arms around each other, Chris and Peta were silhouetted in the light of the doorway against the dark night sky.
Did any of us have a premonition that something dreadful was to befall them? Certainly, there was none that we dared express to each other at the time. But during the 10 months they were missing, when we had no clue as to their fate, my eldest brother Nigel said he knew quite categorically when he said goodbye to Chris that it was for the last time.
‘It was like hearing an inner voice that I had never heard before, telling me that it would be a lifetime, if ever, before I would see him again,’ recalls Nigel, who, older than Chris by three years, was the more serious and sedate of my two brothers.
This experience was compounded in early July of the following year (at the same time that we were to later learn they had been murdered). Nigel was driving to an appointment in his capacity as a trading standards officer in Manchester: ‘I was deep in thought as to how I was going to handle a meeting; I suddenly heard a voice. It was so physical that for a moment I actually thought there was a passenger in the car with me, but they’d have had to have been sitting beside me, it felt so close. The voice sounded as though it was either Chris or myself talking, but the message was quite clear; it said that dying was no big thing, it was a bit like the shock of diving into a cold pool on a summer’s day, but it was not the end.
‘It was such a surreal event that I actually had to stop and park the car to compose myself. One minute I was planning a meeting, the next my focus had taken a step-change in a totally different direction, leading to thoughts that were totally unrelated to anything happening in my life. I had never experienced anything like this before and nor have I since. I could only put it down to a very odd occurrence and after a further minute or so, I carried on driving to my meeting, but the whole event left me shaken and it became an indelible memory.
‘As time passed and their disappearance became of increasing concern, I remembered my experience in the car and I was convinced that it was related and that Chris and Peta were, in fact, dead. Whilst I shared these thoughts with Frances, my wife, I felt I couldn’t burden the rest of the family, so I kept my own counsel. As a consequence, although I was naturally distressed, I was not shocked to hear of the discovery of their bodies. It was only as details of the tragedy unfurled that I realised my strange experience in the car appeared to have coincided with the time of their deaths.
‘To this day I don’t know what to make of my experience. Whatever was the basis for my heightened emotion at the time of their departure and the incident in the car, in a strange way both events helped me cope with the eventual tragic denouement and our sense of loss in the following years. The void created by Chris’s death has never been filled. He was a brother I was immensely proud of and it saddens me deeply that he has been denied the opportunity to live a life that would have enabled him to fulfil the huge potential we all know he had.’