Boston waited two full days before he sailed the Justin B into the Guatemalan port of Livingston on 6 July, approximately 12 nautical miles from Punta de Manabique. It was two days spent steadying his and Vince and Russell’s nerves. Two days in which he blackmailed, threatened and made them promise that they must never utter a word to anyone about what they had witnessed.
Russell says: ‘Dad sheepishly explained that the reason he beat me, without provocation, the day before he attacked Chris was so that he could have a practice run in ambushing Chris. He wanted to judge the timing required to make an attack on Chris when he was pulling up the anchor at the front of the boat. Assaulting me was the dry run and I was the guinea pig.’
Boston told his sons that they needed to help him destroy or dispose of the evidence and if they didn’t assist him, they would all be caught and killed. He went through all of Chris and Peta’s belongings, separating into two piles the things he wanted to discard and those he wanted to keep. He weighted down Chris’s medical bag and threw it overboard, first taking out the medical tools, like a pair of surgical scissors, which were engraved with C.Farmer. Boston thought these could be useful so he got a hot piece of metal and melted Chris’s name off and kept them.
‘Chris was passionate about his music,’ says Russell. ‘All of us, including Dad, loved listening to his boombox and his pre-recorded music, which he played like a DJ, from sunrise to sunset on the boat. I remember Frank Zappa’s “Over-Nite Sensation” was a favourite of Chris’s and whenever I hear that album, it brings back fond memories of him. Because our education had been pretty hit-and-miss, Vince and I were like sponges for knowledge and culture and lapped it up.
‘Dad kept Chris’s boombox and his music tapes and played them after he killed them but one album of Chris’s that haunted him was Animals by Pink Floyd. Dad was very superstitious and the lyrics about the sad existence of someone who enjoys stabbing others behind their backs in the track “Dogs” haunted him, presumably because he saw parallels with himself. In the 1990s I made a cassette tape of music for Dad and slipped that track in deliberately so that he would contemplate the words and I remember Dad asking me why I had done that and he became angry.
‘Ironically, Chris’s boombox was lost overboard a couple of weeks later as a large freak wave hit the boat and knocked it into the sea. Dad, frantic to keep it, shouted at Vince to jump into the water and save it but he was too late, it was consumed by the waves and sunk. We all felt disappointment at watching it go under. I remember Dad superstitiously thought it was Chris reclaiming it!’
On entering the port of Livingston, Boston ran into some trouble with the port authorities. They had arrived without visas and with their last destination being Belize, a country with which Guatemala had very uneasy relations, the port officials were not happy. Boston attempted to win them over by telling them that he was seeking refuge as the boat’s motor had broken and he needed to get it repaired. After some haranguing, the Justin B was permitted entry and Boston arranged for the motor to be repaired in Livingston. Whilst there, he disposed of Chris and Peta’s clothes by taking them to a local whore house.
Russell recalls that his dad started getting very jittery because he reasoned that if the bodies were discovered then the engine parts that they had been tied to may have been recovered from the seabed and could be matched with those that were still acting as ballast in the bottom of the boat. He said he needed to get out of Livingston and as fast as he could.
‘Collecting the boat from the repair shop in the dock, he was in a great hurry to leave,’ says Russell. ‘I recall Vince had gone to buy an ice cream and had been gone quite a long time. Dad started up the motor engine and without waiting for him to return, he left! I could see Vince on the shoreline, at first strolling along and shouting to Dad to come back. Then, when he realised Dad wasn’t going to stop or turn back for him, his pace became faster and faster until he was running at full speed and crying out to Dad to wait. Still Dad motored on along the shoreline and made no effort to slow down or stop. Realising that Dad had no intention of stopping, Vince, fully clothed, started to swim furiously out to the boat. Eventually, crying his eyes out, he caught up with us but Dad made no concession in slowing down. Whether Dad would have eventually gone back for him or not, we will never know. The fact that only days before he had so callously killed Chris and Peta, I don’t think it would have been out of the question at all, had he chosen to leave him.’
Whilst in Livingston, Boston hired two male guides to help him navigate up the Dulce River and a girl Friday too. A Guatemalan outpost, the winding river is nestled between lush mountains and craggy cliffs, but its 43km are notoriously difficult to navigate, a task made even more treacherous at that time by the country being in the midst of a civil war. Boston wanted to carry out his plan to take the boat up the river to the mine at El Estor on Lake Izabal, which the manager at the party on Hunting Caye had invited him to visit. He was warned by the custom’s authorities not to sail up the river’s tributaries because it was bandit territory and highly dangerous. But that didn’t thwart Boston, who told Vince and Russell: ‘There must be something interesting up there if they are telling us not to go. Fuck it, we’re going to go and take a look!’
It was to prove a bad move. Sailing the Justin B up one of the confusing network of tributaries one evening in the pitch dark, it got stuck in a large fishing net strung across the river and came to a grinding halt. Trapped, and sitting in darkness, Russell says that they could hear machine gun fire from guerrillas in the jungle either side of them and they were scared.
‘I remember Dad saying that the guerrillas were shooting guns and I couldn’t work out how gorillas could have weapons!’
Boston demanded that they turn all the lights out on the boat and sit tight and very quiet for the night. Eventually, the guns went quiet but as the sun started rising, Russell recalls that a party of Guatemalan soldiers streamed on to the boat: ‘It was really frightening and we didn’t know what to do. Dad apologised profusely for taking a wrong turn, saying he had got lost. Eventually, after a couple of hours and much persuasion, he succeeded in winning them over.’ The soldiers eventually left the boat and the Justin B and its anxious passengers were allowed to commence their journey up the main river.
Coming to the end of the Rio Dulce and saying goodbye to the two guides and girl Friday, Boston took his sons to Castillo de San Felipe de Lara. Situated at the eastern end of Lake Izabal, it’s an impressive Spanish colonial fort and a popular tourist destination. The fort was built to stop pirates entering the lake from the Caribbean when this part of Central America was an important shipping staging point. After the traumatic murderous events of the previous week, Boston and his sons were able to enjoy some downtime. They spent a day of leisure and sightseeing, captured in photos that Russell took with his camera, They then set sail across Lake Izabal (a massive inland lake, which Russell recalls being more like a sea) to the nickel mine in El Estor on the far northwest side of the lake. Here, they met up with the manager from the Hunting Caye party.
Russell says: ‘Dad had this notion that it was going to be like Shangri-La. He thought that the adulation he had enjoyed at the party would be replicated in El Estor but it wasn’t to be. In fact, for much of the time the manager was working and we were left to our own devices. We stayed in his house, which was just like the ones in America but this was in the jungle. We played with his kids and had a great time. We didn’t want to leave but Dad, not receiving the kind of reception he was expecting at the mine, was eager to make a move.
‘We arrived back in Livingston by 16 July because I recall Dad ringing my grandmother for my sister Vicki’s birthday, and found that they had gone away on holiday.’
It was on returning to Livingston that Boston received some good news. He rang his ex-wife, Kathe, who told him that his current status in terms of Californian law enforcement had changed and changed significantly… He learnt that the statutory rape charge with a minor that he had jumped bail and fled to Belize for, had been dismissed in April of that year. His defence attorney had successfully argued that because the girl was in a bar (the legal age limit for drinking is twenty-one in California), Boston had reasonably assumed she was twenty-one. The lawyer also cited the fact that she went to his house with the intention of being intimate, therefore making it consensual sex. This, in effect, meant that with the rape charge having been thrown out of court three months before, had he been told about it, Boston could have returned to the United States without fear of being arrested as long ago as April.
Russell recalls that Boston was angry and perplexed as to why his father hadn’t given him this important piece of news when he had visited him in Belize back in April and had given him the money to buy the Justin B. ‘Dad always blamed my grandfather for not telling him that the rape charge had been dropped. He said that, had our grandfather told him, he wouldn’t have been in Belize in July to kill Chris and Peta. He would have been back home in California. So, he laid the blame for their murders at our grandfather’s feet. Dad suspected that our grandfather kept the news from him out of malice because he himself had lost visitation rights to his own children when he divorced my grandmother in the 1940s. He believed that our grandfather was jealous that he still had control of us.’
Maybe it was also borne out of anger because Boston’s father forfeited his bail bond when Boston fled California. We will never know the reason, but what we do know is that had Boston been told he was a free man and able to return to California in April, he would never have been in Belize in July to kill Chris and Peta.
Russell recalls: ‘Vince and I really loved our grandfather. He had a movie-star swagger, a deep voice and real charisma. He favoured Vince, who idolised him. When our grandfather visited us, he took Vince into Belize City to buy him a checked shirt and straw hat so he looked like a mini version of himself.’
Arriving back in Livingston, Russell recalls his father also had some other business to attend to: ‘After Dad killed Chris and Peta, and he was ransacking their possessions, he found two letters that they had written to their families. He steamed them open and read them and then put them to one side. The letters mentioned that they were on the boat but they were not happy with what was going on, with my dad drinking all the time and acting crazy. My dad posted them, saying it was better for him that their families receive the letters to make them believe that Chris and Peta were still alive in Livingston. He deliberately left posting them until just before we were leaving.’
One of these letters was the one that Peta’s parents received in early August with a Livingston postmark of 18 July, which temporarily alleviated our concerns for them. The other letter was not, as far as we know, received by anyone so was presumably lost, or maybe Boston changed his mind about sending it because it was too damning of him.
Abandoning his plans to sell the Justin B in Costa Rica, which to Chris and Peta he had claimed was the aim in going south, Boston left Livingston on 19 July and sailed back up the Belizean coast. Before the Justin B left port, like Chris and Peta before them, another couple boarded the boat.
Russell recalls: ‘In Livingston, Dad had met another couple (of Scandinavian or German origin, I can’t remember which), who wanted to travel to Belize. On the journey north, we ran into a huge storm. It was a very dark night and we were near the port of Dangriga (Stann Creek). High winds were whipping up the ocean waves and where they met the turbulent currents from the mouth of the North Stann Creek River, the boat felt like it was almost surfing over a cauldron of boiling water. We were used to storms but with the howling gale, this was frightening and eerie.
‘The foreign couple became really scared and thought our boat was going to capsize so they grabbed the oars and began to paddle on both sides of the boat towards the shore. Dad joked that they looked like Vikings because of their stature and long blonde hair and the way they paddled. They didn’t have visas to enter Belize so Dad offered to take them ashore under the cover of darkness. He took them one at a time in the boat’s small dug-out canoe, leaving Vince and I alone on the boat. It wasn’t unusual for Dad to leave us on the boat alone so I didn’t think anything more of it. I can’t even recall how long he was gone because I fell asleep.’
It was almost four decades later, during the recent investigation, Russell was to learn from the Sacramento Police Department, that his father had claimed to several people that he had murdered the ‘Vikings’ that night. He said he took them ashore, one by one, to a small, remote island off Dangriga (Stann Creek), where he tied them to a tree in the jungle, robbed them and cut their throats, leaving them to die.
By the time Boston returned to the Justin B later that night, Vince and Russell were asleep. In the morning, he chose not to enter the port of Dangriga, as might have been expected, but instead turned around and sailed south down the coast, entering the village of Placencia on 31 July. It was a fishing port that he had visited with Chris and Peta and which she had described in her last letter home as ‘very pretty’.
Having already spent Chris and Peta’s signed Travellers Cheques in Livingston, Boston wanted to cash in the unsigned ones that Chris and Peta had left over after paying him the $500 for their passage. He told Russell and Vince to practise writing their signatures on paper and to keep doing it until they got it right.
‘I remember spending hours purposely doing it wrong,’ says Russell. ‘But he wouldn’t let me go to sleep until I got it right. I can recall how to write Chris’s idiosyncratic signature even to this day. I remember Dad being so happy as he left to go into town to spend the cheques.
‘It was whilst we were in Placencia that Dad met a very shady Belizean, whose acquaintance he had previously made in Belize City. Together, they burgled a number of big boats that were anchored in the bay and got quite a haul. They agreed that the Belizean should go ahead and sell the stolen goods and they would then meet up again in Belize City to share the spoils. Dad boasted it was just like a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean.’
The Justin B then continued its journey northwards, entering once again the waters of Dangriga (Stann Creek), but this time the boat was reported by the harbour master as docking in the port on 9 August.
Arriving in Belize City on 11 August, Boston was furious because his partner in crime from Placencia didn’t show up, as they had arranged. He became paranoid that his accomplice had been caught and that he would ‘snitch’ (one of his favourite words) on him.
On my visit to the States almost four decades later, Russell recounted to me how that night, whilst anchored off Belize City, his father told him and Vince about murdering their mother: ‘Dad was paranoid about being caught and he said that once he was apprehended, Vince and I would be caught too and he couldn’t allow that to happen. He told us that we had to die and that he was going to kill Vince and I the next morning. He assured us that he would make it painless and that he was very skilled at it.
‘That night he was drinking heavily, and a lot more than normal, and he told us about all the people he had killed, including our mom. The murders ran into double figures. It was as if it didn’t matter telling us because what would we do with the knowledge when tomorrow he planned to kill us? It was like some long, weird confessional.
‘He told us that he had killed our Mom 10 years before, in 1968. This wasn’t the first time I had heard this story. Our grandma had told us when I was aged seven and Vince was nine, but this was the first time that I heard it from Dad.
‘In 1968, my parents were legally separated and Mom wanted to divorce him. Mom had an apartment in Sacramento and Vince and I were living with her. He told us that he persuaded our mom to get in the car by telling her that he wanted to talk things through with her. He took her to some remote location outside of Sacramento, but he has never told us where. While they were sitting under a tree talking, he announced that he was going to kill her. Mom begged him not to and he screamed: “Run, bitch!” She started running as Dad fired shots at her. He couldn’t remember if he hit her on the back of her skull or the base but the shot didn’t kill her. He described how Mom’s legs jerked and jumped like a deer does when it’s shot, and that he cradled her in his arms as she cried and bled. As she was dying, she said to him: “What about the kids, Duane, what about the kids?” Dad told us he “snuffed the bitch out” in a creek bed and it caved in on her and that she would not be found for a “million years”. That night, whilst anchored off Belize City, he said to us: “If there is a heaven, you can go find your mother.” He said the only person he regretted killing was our Mom.
‘Dad then gave us a roll call of all the other people he had killed. I think it was to reinforce the severity of what was about to happen to us the next day, and if we didn’t choose to escape, it would give him “permission” to kill us.
‘The next morning, Dad said that my pet parrot, Salty, did not need to die with Vince and me so he told me to take Salty into Belize City and give the bird away to the “queers” as he called them. They were a couple of gay guys who owned a hotel in Belize called the Pasada Tropicana, a place we had stayed at a couple of times, and they had both admired my Amazon parrot.
‘We were anchored near Belize City at the mouth of the river and he told me to use the boat’s dug-out canoe. As I put Salty in his cage, Dad said: “I am going to kill you and Vince quickly but if you don’t return, then I will kill Vince slowly and very painfully.”
‘“Dad, the canoe will be stolen if Vince doesn’t come with me to watch it.”
‘“No, he’s waiting here. You will have to take your chance with the canoe because he’s not going with you.”
‘As I climbed into the canoe, he grabbed my arm very firmly and with his piercing blue eyes boring into me, he said threateningly: “It’s not going to be painless for your brother so you had better come back.”
‘Full of heart-thumping fear, I took the boat and paddled it into Belize City. I hastily tied it off at our regular mooring, and ran a couple of blocks to the hotel and knocked on the door. I told them my dad wanted me to give them Salty. They thought something was wrong with my parrot and said the only reason my dad would give it away was if it was sick. To my dismay, they refused to take the bird.
‘Not knowing what to do, I took Salty back to the canoe and to my amazement it was where I had left it, probably because it was still early in the morning. As I was paddling back to the Justin B, there were lots of boats sailing against me into the market. Convinced that Vince and I were about to die because I still had Salty, I had tears streaming down my face. I was bawling my eyes out and desperately paddling at the same time. I was begging out loud for God to do something, to help me. Then I started singing the Beatles’ song “Let It Be” with the lyrics “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me.” They have special significance for me because Mom’s name was Mary. It was a cloudy morning and I remember a strong beam of light hitting me. I felt it was my mom helping me in my moment of need. I read that as a sign, so I paddled fast back to the boat because I wanted to tell Vince, before we died, that there was a heaven and Mom would be there waiting for us.
‘As I rowed around the corner, I saw another boat tied off to the Justin B and I wondered what was happening. As I boarded the boat, I discovered that it belonged to a couple of Americans that we had met previously in Belize. Dad didn’t refer to anything that had gone on before and didn’t even ask why I still had Salty, but instead said: “Hey, look at this, Russ, these guys were sailing by and recognised the boat and stopped to say hello. They always wanted to buy the boat, so fuck it, I’ve decided to sell it to them! So, pack your bags, we are heading back home to the States.”’
Boston, Russell and Vince flew from Belize City to Miami on 14 August, with Salty smuggled through customs in Chris’s old camera case, Boston having sold his camera.
Belize was behind them… or was it?