Like a shaft of bright sunlight streaming through the crack of an open curtain in a darkened room, the thought came to me some thirty-seven years on from their deaths that the internet could hold the key to unlocking the mystery and give us the answers we had been searching for, for what now seemed like a lifetime.

It was a random thought that literally came from out of the blue but it was pivotal in ultimately solving Chris and Peta’s murders.

It was 2 October 2015 and savouring autumn’s last hurrah, I was sitting on the edge of a magnificent cornfield, within a stone’s throw of our Oxfordshire home. The tall, majestic trees, surrounding the field’s perimeter displayed every artist’s hue of russet, red, gold, orange and copper. A warm mellow sun was beating down from the sapphire blue, gin-clear sky, interrupted only by the crisscross of contrails from planes taking off and landing from the nearby RAF Brize Norton airfield.

Accompanying me was my ninety-year-old mother. Despite her advancing years, she is blessed with a razor-sharp intelligence and an encyclopaedic knowledge of current affairs borne out of a daily diet of Radio 4 and BBC News 24, a habit inherited from her sixty-seven-year marriage to Dad. They had met at the end of World War II in September 1945, at the BBC in Manchester, and got engaged five months later on Mum’s twenty-first birthday. Mum was a producer’s personal assistant and Dad a news reporter before later going on to direct a ground-breaking medical programme called Life In Their Hands, a subject complementing his previous medical studies.

Mum embodies the truism that in order to be interesting, you need to be interested and her enquiring mind extends well beyond the life she leads and the people she meets. A great conversationalist, with a mischievous sense of humour, she likes nothing more than engaging in a robust, contentious argument and invariably wins hands down. But, for me, what defines her is her strong denial of self and staunch stoicism, doubtless wrought from her days spent as a Wren (Women’s Royal Naval Service) in the Second World War. Intensely private at all times, to meet her you would never guess that she had lost a son in very tragic circumstances.

Making no concession to her age, she’s fiercely determined to remain independent. She still drives her own car, would not be seen without make-up, walks her dog daily, visits the hairdresser weekly and much to mine and my two daughters’ delight, she returned from her manicurist with green nails for Christmas. With her penchant for staying abreast of the times, she must be one of Zara’s oldest customers!

19 November 2013, with my three children returning home from work and studies we held a small family gathering to celebrate Dad’s 91st birthday at a restaurant in the neighbouring village of Woodstock. It was a great evening and Dad was in jovial spirits.

He was a great lover of his own home so after a brief stay they returned to Cheshire. As my father got in the car, we waved them off and I shouted:

‘See you back here for Christmas, Dad.’

To which he replied: ‘You will have a job! Christmas is for spending with Kara [the dog] by my own fire and hearth and the comfort of my own bed.’

The following morning he was in John Lewis, Cheadle, returning a ‘wireless’ (as he referred to his radio, which blasted out either the BBC World Service or Radio 4 pretty much all day) because ‘it was disappointingly not loud enough’. Some 36 hours later he was dead of pneumonia – just the way he would probably have chosen to exit this world. Some eight months later, Mum moved down to live with my family in Oxfordshire.

Not one for sitting around, idling away the hours, she has voluntarily morphed into our housekeeper and gardener. No longer Dad by her side, it was her sixteen-year-old Golden Labrador, Kara, who slowly ambled alongside her that stunning autumn day. Mum, with her trusty wooden walking stick, and Kara, with her arthritic gait and swaying hips, the two of them cut an endearing picture of life in the twilight years.

There was a tangible, melancholic sense of resignation that summer was over and days as stunning as this would now be numbered. The hush of the tranquil setting was broken only by the soothing buzz of a bumblebee, the distant hum of an aircraft and the heavy panting of Kara and my own seven-year old Golden Labrador, Mungo, who were both basking in the late autumn sunshine. It was probably that subliminal sense of joi de vivre that made Mum say wistfully: ‘I wonder what Chris would have looked like. He’d have been sixty-two now. He’s forever young in our eyes, isn’t he?’

It was this light-bulb moment on that enchanting autumn day when, on returning home from the walk, I began to scour the internet and Facebook for their suspected killer and possible witnesses to their murder. The thought grew into a conviction and was like a sapling taking root in the soil, growing leaves and bearing blossom. Aware that I had some deeply buried resentment that the case had lain unsolved for so long, I was driven by emotion, a strong sense of injustice and an unwavering self-belief that I could, if I just looked hard enough, get to the truth.

I was barely in the house five minutes before I had found the old file containing copies and some original documents that my parents had collated back in the late 1970s when they were so actively involved in trying to solve Chris and Peta’s disappearance and once their bodies were discovered, their horrific murder. The file was kept in the bottom drawer of Mum’s walnut bureau that had moved with her when she came to live with us. The large dossier tucked under my arm, I raced up to my office with a sense of anticipation and excitement. I started sifting through the papers, which must have numbered well over a hundred pages.

Never convinced about the relevance or value in divulging one’s thoughts and laying bare one’s life for potentially all and sundry to see, I hadn’t at that time got a Facebook account in my own name. However, as a mother of three, I had, some twelve years before, rightly or wrongly, made an anonymous Facebook account, using the pseudonym of Alex Fortnum, in order to keep a watchful eye on my children’s activities.

Knowing that Boston was more than strongly suspected of Chris and Peta’s murders, I started searching for him and his two sons that we knew had been on the boat at the same time. The only information I had to work on was their names and the likelihood that they were living in California, which was the last-known location for Boston and his parents in the early 1980s. I berated myself as to why I had never done this before – it seemed so obvious!

I was amazed to find that I didn’t have to dig too far to find the eldest son, Vince (then aged fifty-two). From looking at his relatively public Facebook account, his age, timeline, list of connections, friends and his posts, I could deduce that I was looking at Boston’s eldest son.

I could see that Vince was an aviation electrician and engineer, living in Tucson, Arizona, and he has a son. I was desperate to build a mental picture of his character.

I was heartened to read that Vince was anti-gun crime and opposed to the current gun laws in America. Recalling that the police had told us in 1981 that Boston’s third wife (Mary Lou Boston, the mother of Russell and Vince) had disappeared 10 years before Chris and Peta were murdered, my eyes were out on stalks when I read the following: ‘My mother was killed at 23 with a gun’. The Facebook entry read:

I did a double take. It seemed a peculiarly nonchalant way to announce to the world that his mother had been killed, or was it already common knowledge in his circles? It certainly seemed to imply that Vince had some knowledge of the circumstances surrounding her death. I presumed that in the intervening years there had been some confirmation that she was dead or, more specifically, in his words, ‘killed’.

I looked for Boston’s younger son, Russell, in Vince’s friend contacts but couldn’t see him, which, being brothers, I thought was strange but I was nonetheless, soon able to track him down. From Russell’s Facebook, I could see he was aged forty-nine, living near Laguna Beach, California, an artist and illustrator and the co-owner of a vehicle-renovation business. I got as far as tracing a phone number for him, rang it on a withheld number, but put the phone down when a male voice answered. I’m not sure why I didn’t speak, probably because I didn’t know how to open what would have been a mind-blowing conversation, and at that point I hadn’t formulated in my head what I was going to do with the information I had gleaned. My head was spinning.

The two people who all along we suspected of possessing valuable information regarding the horrific events on that small boat in 1978 were there before my eyes in glorious Technicolor! As my father and mother had said from the beginning, Vince and Russell were the two people we desperately needed to talk to and now, for the first time in 37 years, we had a way of contacting them.

We had never seen photographs of them as boys on the boat so I was fascinated to see their faces as grown men. I studied their profile pictures long and very hard, as if their faces would throw up information on their characters.

I gleaned that they were both leading busy and fulfilling lives. I surmised that whatever trauma Vince and Russell might have experienced with their father as young boys, they had, on the surface at least, got over it, but of course appearances and social media can deceive. I couldn’t help but feel a mixture of anger and envy that they were alive and Chris and Peta were dead.

By now, I had a sense that I was on the trail and I was like a dog with a bone. I was convinced that if I just drilled down far enough, I would be able to unlock Chris and Peta’s case and maybe, just maybe, get the answers we had been searching for.

The greatest revelation was, of course, tracking down and seeing Boston for the first time on his Facebook.

The picture staring back at me was of an old man. Aged seventy-four, with a white, greying beard, Boston was wearing a T-shirt under a denim shirt, a baseball cap and sunglasses and he looked like an American trucker and the sort of serial murderer you see in a horror movie. The words ‘trailer trash’ instantly came to mind. I was doubtless pre-conditioned to detest the sight of him and I, of course, did. His Facebook account was opened on 14 March 2012 (just six days before his birthday on 20 March) and gave his location as being Sacramento, California. I could see he had 32 friends, including his son Russell and his daughter Vicki, but interestingly, not Vince. My overwhelming feeling in seeing Boston’s Facebook was relief in knowing that he was still alive and thus presumably able to face justice. It would have been so painful to discover that he had just recently died. I had a strong sense though that time was of the essence and we needed to move fast.

I searched for any piece of information I could find on him, no matter how small. Tellingly, on Boston’s Facebook page in April 2012 he had added a link and commented on a NBC video report of a woman whose car had accidentally gone into a lake. She was about to drown but was ‘miraculously’ saved. The report said that all the windows were shut when the car was retrieved from the river and yet she had got out of the car and escaped alive. A religious website, GodVine, claimed it was the ‘Hand of God’ that had saved her.

I pondered over the obvious parallel with the drowning of Chris and Peta and whether the story’s presence on Boston’s Facebook page was a reflection of the inner turmoil in his psyche and an obsession with drowning. Did he perhaps wonder if Chris and Peta were still alive? But how could they be? They never stood a chance of surviving. With their legs, ankles and hands tightly bound behind their backs and heavy engine parts connected to their bindings, he had made sure of that. In that state, they would have drowned even in one foot of water.

I then started to look for Boston’s fifth wife, Kathe – the mother of Justin, who Boston had abducted in 1979 to spite her for seeking a divorce.

I also found the Facebook account of Vicki Boston, the daughter of Boston and Mary Lou and the older sister of Vince and Russell. I spent most of that weekend researching all of their Facebook posts, trying to construct a picture of their characters and the lives they now led. I then tried to reconcile this information with my preconceived ideas that I had developed over the many years that we had spent coming to terms with Chris and Peta’s deaths.

Extending my research outside of Facebook, I found this:

MARY LOU BOSTON

ABOVE: Boston, circa 1968

Vital Statistics at Time of Disappearance

MISSING SINCE: September 1, 1968 from Sacramento, California

CLASSIFICATION: Missing

DATE OF BIRTH: December 4, 1944

AGE: 23 years old

HEIGHT AND WEIGHT: 5’4, 120 pounds

DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: Caucasian female. Brown hair, brown eyes.

DETAILS OF DISAPPEARANCE: Mary Lou Boston was last seen in Sacramento, California on September 1, 1968. She has never been heard from again. Few details are available in her case. Investigating Agency. If you have any information concerning this case, please contact: Sacramento Police Department 916-808-0621I.

In 2012, I could see that Vince had lodged a missing person enquiry requesting information about his mother, Mary Lou Boston (née Venn), and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. This puzzled me – why would he be seeking information about his mother when he had made a categorical public statement on Facebook pronouncing she had been ‘killed at 23 with a gun’?

The mystery was deepening. These people all seemed alien to me, like characters from a novel, and yet here they were living real lives on the other side of the Atlantic. The burning question was how much could Vince and Russell remember about Chris and Peta and the events surrounding their murders?

It was literally as if the fog that had surrounded the case for almost four decades was beginning to clear and the pieces of the jigsaw were all beginning to come together in slow motion. By now I was starting to draw a clear mental picture of the characters of Boston, Russell and Vince. Sensing the significance of what I had stumbled across, I talked to Mum about what I should do with the information. Never, in the 37 years since the deaths of Chris and Peta, had she seen photos of Boston or his two sons and she was eager to see what they looked like. Not surprisingly, she was still highly sceptical that the information that I had found would help re-open and solve the case because nearly four decades of police inertia had elapsed. I called my brother, Nigel, and emailed him my research but he too was dubious that it would lead to anything.

In my overwhelming desire to make contact with Russell and Vince, over the course of that weekend I sent them messages on the private Facebook inbox messaging service, asking what they remembered about events on the Justin B. I sent Russell a Facebook friend request but heard nothing. With no reply, my messages became more demanding and insistent. Although she had never been on the Justin B, I messaged Boston’s daughter, Vicki, asking for her father’s contact details and confirmation that he had sailed off Central America in 1978, but again, no reply.

Having waited 37 years to make contact with Boston’s sons, and now seeing them on the internet, I was desperate to make contact, as my pseudonymous Facebook messages show:

October 2, 2015

Alex Fortnum

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.

[this message was repeated twice]

 

Alex Fortnum

Please reply then I will tell you why I am writing to you.

 

October 3, 2015

Alex Fortnum

Why won’t you reply? Because you already know why I am writing to you? Do you know or remember the truth? I will not leave this matter alone.

I neither would nor could let it go. I literally ‘sat’ on Facebook waiting for a reply, but much to my dismay, I didn’t get one from Vince, Russell or Vicki. Or rather, I didn’t immediately.

I counted down the minutes till on Monday morning, at 9am on the dot, I called Greater Manchester Police (GMP), who had handled the case in 1978. There had recently been a spate of television programmes about decades-old cold cases being solved so it seemed that the Cold Case Review Unit would be a good starting point. Even though I was fully confident in the information that I had found, I had a low expectation of the police taking it further, simply because the case was nearly four decades old and all interest had fizzled out in 1981. I reasoned if they weren’t interested in pursuing it further, why would they now take up the cudgels?

‘I know this is a very long time ago,’ I said hesitantly to Detective Constable Michaela Clinch at Greater Manchester Police, ‘but my brother, Dr Christopher Farmer, and his girlfriend, Peta Frampton, were found murdered off the coast of Guatemala in 1978 and I believe that I have some information that might lead to the solving of their case. Please can I make an appointment with you to discuss it?’