As Boston was never apprehended for Chris and Peta’s murders and the case remained unsolved for approaching four decades, we naturally assumed that both Russell and Vince had remained silent and never reported their father’s crimes. But we were wrong. Unbeknownst to us, the Framptons or Greater Manchester Police, they had contacted law enforcement agencies in America and the UK for many years. We were nothing short of astounded.
In the immediate aftermath of Chris and Peta’s murders it is true, Russell and Vince were understandably silenced by their father’s threat of death if they so much as uttered one word of what they had witnessed. Their murders, along with that of their mother, Mary Lou, were put in the same category – a family secret which should never be divulged to anyone. But, as they approached adulthood, and their father’s control lessened, they understood the enormity and evil of what they had witnessed; it lay heavily on their consciences and as responsible citizens, they acted upon it.
In 1987, Russell, now aged twenty-one, attended a series of personal development seminars with Landmark Education in California. He recalls: ‘I did an exercise where the assignment involved talking about a relationship with a girlfriend that had broken down. Randy, the forum leader, wanted to delve more deeply by asking me questions about my childhood. I answered them all, until he got to the part about my father, which I respectfully declined to answer. But Randy became like a drill sergeant, getting into my face and berating me for not opening up – I think he thought I had been molested, and by not answering, I was not going to move past it. I told him that I didn’t talk about my father in public. He started yelling at me to get me to open up, saying I was a victim, and would I rather go through life being a victim? I told him that’s not true, that I wasn’t a victim – I just don’t talk about those things. He asked me, “Do you think there’s anything you can say that hasn’t been said hundreds of times before in these seminars?” I said I didn’t know, but I still wasn’t going to talk about it. This just made him furious. He got nose-to-nose with me and started shouting and screaming, trying to break me down and open up. At one point, I heard an old lady from somewhere in the room yell, “Leave him alone!” But I still wouldn’t talk about it. Finally, I calmly said, “I’m not going to talk about it in here, but if you really want to know, I’ll tell you after class.” He calmed down, gave me the number of his hotel and told me to call him. I called him that night and told him straight up that my dad was an outlaw and a criminal, who had murdered several people, including my mother and two British tourists in front of me and my brother when we were kids.
‘Randy was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Yes, you’re right, you shouldn’t talk about that.” And then he hung up on me.
‘I had finally had the courage to tell someone outside of my inner circle, and this was his response. I felt betrayed and crushed. It was a massive thing for me to tell him. I wanted him to say, “Yes, tell everyone, tell the authorities, put your dad in jail, go into witness protection if necessary, but do what needs to be done!” But he didn’t say that.
‘The next day, several people who had witnessed him trying to get me to talk about my dad the previous day came up and asked me what he had said. I told them he said I shouldn’t talk about it. Dumbfounded, they asked me what it was about. Strangely though, after telling Randy, I felt it opened the door and was a turning point in my life. For the first time, I felt able to open up to a number of people in my life about Dad. It was liberating.
‘At the next seminar in the series I unburdened myself to an Anaheim police officer in front of one of the other seminar attendees, a girl who has remained a life-long friend. I told the cop because I knew he would be legally obliged to tell his superiors, who would then act on the information. I felt sure at this point that Dad would finally be investigated and brought to justice. I was shocked, however, when after listening to my story, he dismissed it as “family gossip and hearsay”. I felt like no one would listen to me and I discussed my frustration and disappointment with Vince at some length.’
Not put off course, the following year, in 1988, Russell was attending a yacht convention in Long Beach with Boston’s ex-wife, Kathe and Burt, her husband at that time.
‘Kathe was talking to me about the time Dad kidnapped their son Justin in 1979 for six months. She said the police had informed her at the time that my dad was suspected in the disappearance and murder of two British tourists in Belize, and she asked me if Dad ever mentioned them to us.
‘I replied, “Yes, he killed them.”
‘“What! He told you he killed them?”
‘“No, he did it in front of us.”
‘I then told her exactly what we had seen.
‘Kathe was naturally shocked and asked me if I’d be willing to tell the authorities and I said yes, of course. Later, Kathe told me she had relayed what I had told her to a friend of hers who lived in Toronto and worked for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and had previously worked for Scotland Yard. Kathe told him what I had told her. She said he called an FBI agent he knew in Washington, D.C. We were given a case number of #435035, and Kathe told me he had contacted England and they were investigating the case. I don’t know if that case number was from the FBI or Interpol, or Scotland Yard in England.
‘At this point, Vince and I fully expected the case to go forward and we discussed at great length what I would do if, in the event, Dad was questioned and released and he was made aware of the fact that I had turned him in. There was absolutely no question that he would kill me. Dad had no idea where Vince lived at that time or how to find him so, for that reason and that reason only, we agreed he should be the point person and represent us both. Astonishingly, I never received a call nor received any feedback from the RCMP, FBI nor Interpol despite them having my contact details and full information on what happened.
‘Vince has told me on numerous occasions that the police maintained that there was nothing that could be done in regard to our mother, because even with a “Jane Doe” [unidentified body] whose DNA matched Vince’s and mine, without a witness or a confession from our father, it would be just hearsay.’ It was only in becoming estranged seven years ago, following conflict over multiple family issues, that Vince and Russell stopped jointly devising ways of bringing their father to justice.
‘I think almost every meaningful friendship and relationship I have had over the last thirty or so years, I have been totally open and honest about my dad, my background and what I know. I have felt that no one in authority was ever going to apprehend my father or take mine and Vince’s allegations seriously or even just sit up and take notice. As a consequence, I have spent literally years and years searching for Chris and Peta’s families on the internet but never found you.’
In 1982, on reaching sixteen and having been on the receiving end of a severe beating from his father, Vince decided to join the Navy. This being his first opportunity to escape the clutches and influence of Boston, he contacted London’s Scotland Yard to tell them that four years previously, he had witnessed the cold-blooded murder of two British citizens and he gave Chris and Peta’s full names. Vince and Russell didn’t know that Chris and Peta were from Manchester and, as citizens of the United States, it was understandable that they assumed that Scotland Yard operated and had jurisdiction throughout the whole of England. Unbelievably, Vince was told that there was no file and they were not traceable. Up in the Northwest of England, none of this reached our ears. After Inspector Sacks was moved off the case we heard nothing more from Greater Manchester Police or Sacramento Police Department after July 1981.
Again, in 2002, and on several other occasions, Vince made several strenuous attempts on his and Russell’s behalf to alert the authorities to the fact that they were allowing a serial murderer to remain free and at large in the community but each time he contacted the Sacramento Police Department, Interpol or Scotland Yard, he was told that he needed hard evidence. It seemed no one on either side of the Atlantic was prepared to do any digging, join the dots and work out jurisdiction.
In 2012, with his health beginning to fail (a combination of advancing years and hard living) Boston had given up, for the short term, living an itinerant life split between the Baja California Peninsula in Northwestern Mexico and California, and he stayed for a couple of years in Russell’s mobile home in Roseville in Placer County, Sacramento. Russell had inherited the home from Boston’s mother when she died in 2009. Occasionally cared for by a friend of his mother’s, Boston complained to her that he had no friends. So, on 12 April 2012, just after his seventy-first birthday, she made him a Facebook account to help him locate some of his old high school friends.
It was this Facebook account which Vince spotted in 2012, just as I was to do three years later. He saw that it publicly displayed a list of Boston’s friends and it announced that his father was back living in the Sacramento area. Vince contacted Sergeant Robert McCloskey of the Sacramento Police Department and implored him to investigate. He told him in great detail about his father’s admission of killing his mother and that he and his brother had witnessed the murders of Chris and Peta.
Attempting to establish the voracity of Vince’s claims, Sergeant McCloskey contacted Interpol in London but, once again, they said they had no file or trace of Chris and Peta. In March 2013, Sergeant McCloskey wrote back to Vince saying: ‘Interpol has included London [Scotland Yard] in our requests in an attempt to determine/confirm the identities of the alleged victims, who were UK nationals; however, they too are having difficulty locating information about this case. They asked London if it was possible to initiate inquiries with the appropriate government officials to check Embassy records in order to communicate with surviving family members of the deceased, not to mention possible repatriation records of bodies to the UK. Apparently, London has completed these checks and have been unable to locate anyone that matches the descriptions with anyone reported missing in the UK. However, without more information it is difficult to know for sure. They would need date of births and/or the location the couple were from in the UK. London stated that they are doing some additional searches at the National Archives to see if there were any news reports around the time of a missing couple.’
It was England that was the stumbling block which prevented Boston’s sons from taking the case against their father forward, not just once but several times. Records show that an enquiry was also made to the UK’s National Crime Agency. Set up in 2010, it is a national law enforcement agency and, similar to the work of the FBI in America, operates across both regional and international borders. A joined-up national network, it was established with the express intention of avoiding oversights such as this from happening.
When the enquiry, initiated by Vince, came in from Sacramento Police Department in 2012, like Interpol, the National Crime Agency reported they had no trace of Chris and Peta. In their defence, the agency had only recently been established and the file which Greater Manchester Police had held in 1978 had been lost. But it was sloppy work; whoever investigated the enquiry failed to do so properly. Being a British doctor, a fact which Vince did relay to the police on several occasions, Chris was eminently traceable. All it required was a simple call to the General Medical Council, and the police would have been able to quickly confirm that Chris was removed from the register on confirmation of his death in 1979. It’s one of the greatest ironies of the case that Chris was very traceable all along.
With all the files that had once belonged to Interpol, Greater Manchester Police and Sacramento Police Department seemingly lost, and Vince quite understandably not knowing what part of England Chris and Peta came from, the investigation in 2013 once more came to a grinding halt. Clearly frustrated that his father’s heinous crimes had again been so negligently overlooked, Vince, out of desperation and to his credit, in March 2013, wrote to Sergeant McCloskey: ‘I wonder why Interpol or Belize never questioned or talked to my brother and I as we were eyewitnesses. Also, there was Chris’s blood on the boat from when Dad beat him with the club. Interpol and or the police never followed up. Doesn’t it seem like my dad is the luckiest murderer in the world? He has gotten away with all these crimes for so many years and might never be caught. I did what I could. I am not sure what to do next. Is there anything else that I can do from my end? America’s Most Wanted? Put an ad in London Times with Chris’s information and picture? Can we get a warrant and tap my dad’s phone and get him to confess? I wish there was more I could do.’
So, despite Russell and Vince’s attempts to bring their father to justice, their efforts came to nought, leaving a serial killer to roam free for decades.
It was our visit to Greater Manchester Police in October 2015 that reconnected law enforcement in this country with Sacramento Police Department and put Chris and Peta’s names back on the radar, and thus traceable. Without that, all of Sacramento’s enquiries would have resulted in nought.
At exactly the same time as we made our first visit to GMP, Detective Amy Crosby of the Sacramento Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit was looking at the case file of Mary Lou Boston from 1968 and deduced it had been very poorly investigated. I called Greater Manchester Police on 5 October and on 12 October we had a meeting and on 13 October, Amy spoke to Vince. Amy could see from her records that Boston’s sons had made several attempts to report their father over the years but it hadn’t been enough to bring about a conviction.
Amy says: ‘I started working in this unit in May of 2014. In 2012, Vince had contacted Lt McCloskey [who was at that time a homicide sergeant] to inquire into the missing person case of Mary Lou and also to report witnessing the homicides of Chris and Peta. McCloskey documented what Vince reported to him in a homicide information report. That was the report that I reviewed and started conducting my follow-up investigation on. There was enough detail in what Vince had reported to Lt McCloskey in 2012 for me to believe that he was telling the truth about the murders. If Boston was capable of murdering Mary Lou and Chris and Peta in cold blood, what else had he done? I knew he was a very bad man – I wanted to find out just how bad he was. It bothered me that Boston had got away with these murders for so long. I started digging and the more I dug, the deeper the rabbit hole became. By then, I was on a mission.’
In late February 2016, Interpol put the two police forces on either side of the Atlantic in direct touch with each other. Greater Manchester Police’s Michaela Clinch spoke with Detective Amy Crosby in Sacramento and they held weekly web conference meetings to liaise on how the investigation was progressing on both sides, in preparation for Boston’s arrest and forthcoming trial.
It was at this point that we discovered a very startling fact: Boston was on Sacramento Police Department’s radar for something totally separate from Chris, Peta and Mary Lou’s murders. And it was for this reason that Detective Amy Crosby had Mary Lou’s missing person file, dating back to 1968, on her desk in October 2015 at exactly the same time as I had made contact with GMP.
The reason was this: From 1976 through to 1986, California was plagued with an unidentified serial killer and rapist who went under the media epithet of The Original Night Stalker, the East Area Rapist, the Diamond Knot Killer, and since 2013, the Golden State Killer (GSK). He wasn’t known to be the same person until DNA connected numerous cases all over California, decades later. He is believed to have committed 50 rapes and murdered 12 people across 15 jurisdictions from Sacramento down to Orange County. Knowing they had the GSK’s DNA, the FBI decided it was time they tried to catch or identify him. In the autumn of 2015, the FBI created a task force that reached out to the police jurisdictions in all the counties where his attacks occurred, in the hope that some cold case file, which was overlooked decades ago, would hold the key to identifying the perpetrator.
Law enforcement was asked to look for crimes or a perpetrator whose modus operandi had similarities with what was known about the GSK: tying people up, specifically couples, assuring them they would ultimately be released if they complied, then killing them; rape; murder; a history of violence; blue or green eyes; lived in East Sacramento in 1976 and 1977; military training and possibly a Vietnam veteran; attendance at American River College (a community college in Sacramento); had access to several different kinds of vehicles which were spotted near the crime scenes; someone who may have had a real estate connection; painting or construction skills; a tattoo on his left forearm that looked like a bull or had horns; athletic or had skills in climbing or jumping fences; a cat burglar and skilled at breaking into homes; skilled with weapons, guns and a good marksman; spoke through clenched teeth when angry; connections and ties to not only East Sacramento but also specific areas in Southern California, etc.
Russell says: ‘When Detective Amy Crosby made contact with me in January 2016, I was completely forthright and told her everything I knew about my father with unbridled honesty. At the end of the conversation she cautiously asked if I had any samples of my father’s DNA in the things he left with me – an old toothbrush or something. I said I might have, but asked her why they needed it, because there would most likely be no DNA of Dad’s from the murders of my mom or Chris and Peta. Amy told me they were looking at him for some other unsolved crimes, rapes specifically, which happened in the mid to late seventies in Sacramento. I asked her if she was talking about the East Area Rapist and she was a bit stunned then asked me how I knew about it. I told her it was all over the news in Sacramento during that time period.’
Russell adds: ‘Because of my mom’s case and the notes pertaining to the details of Chris and Peta’s murders, my dad quickly rose to the top of the list of suspects. His modus operandi of tying Chris and Peta up, luring them into a false sense of security by assuring them that they would be OK if they just complied, they would be let go, all matched perfectly with the GSK’s technique from the same time period.
‘Throughout my upbringing, my father had lots of people who came in and out of his life. He liked to have flunkies as he called them, lookouts and assistants in his burglaries and such. Most didn’t measure up to the skill and precision he expected of them, and he’d end up running them off or threatening to kill them. He seemed constantly on the lookout for someone he could teach and join him in his endeavours. For instance, in the early 1980s, a friend of Dad’s worked for a real estate agent in Carmichael and got him a job as a handyman. Dad and his friend would go in and repair toilets, hot water heaters, decorate or fix whatever was broken. It was a good way of learning the owner’s schedule and obtaining a set of keys which they could then duplicate. Weeks later they would return to rob them.’
Russell wasn’t the only person to suspect his father. In late 1977, the East Area Rapist had phoned one of his victims and his voice was recorded on an answering machine as saying, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ This chilling message was broadcast in California, in 2013, in an attempt to flush out the identity of the rapist. On hearing this message, Vince thought that his father might indeed be the East Area Rapist: ‘The recording was really creepy. The guy was disguising his voice and it’s more like a grunt. My dad has a very deep voice and when he gets mad, he grinds his teeth together. It sent shivers down my spine and I just wondered could it be him? Dad was an accomplished burglar and used to come home with all kinds of stuff. He would break into people’s houses and he and his friend would break into trucks, steal a bunch of things and sell them. He had these Halloween masks, rubber masks, and he would wear them when breaking into people’s homes – I think one was orange and one was green, like a Frankenstein. They were rubber latex that covered the whole head with holes for eyes and the mouth. He was very crafty, he would plan it all out. He said he tied up this old lady with duct tape. Dad would come home with all kinds of stuff.’
Although the GSK originally targeted women, either alone in their homes or with children, he later preferred attacking couples. Read the description below, from Wikipedia, of the GSK’s modus operandi and it takes one back to the events on the boat and how, over the course of two days, Boston lured Chris and Peta to their deaths with his sick psychological mind games. The GSK’s standard procedure was to break in and awaken the occupants, threatening them with a handgun. He would start by assuring them he only wanted money, and if they complied, they wouldn’t be harmed. By doing this, it lulled his victims into a false sense of security. Victims were bound with rope. The female victim was made to tie up her male companion with bootlaces or ropes. He would separate the couple, often stacking dishes on the back of the male and telling him that if he heard the dishes rattle, he would kill everyone in the house. Meanwhile, he would rape the woman repeatedly, who he tied up, in another room. The intruder at times spent hours in the home, ransacking closets and drawers, eating food in the kitchen, and then coming back to utter more threats to the victims, who were often unsure as to whether he was still in the home.
With such compelling similarities, it is little wonder that in early 2016 Boston came under the microscope and rose to the top of the FBI and police’s lists of prime GSK suspects.
The cynic in me is left asking, had it not been for Sacramento Police Department pursuing Boston’s possible link with the extremely high-profile case of the Golden State Killer, would Chris and Peta’s case have ever stood a chance of being reopened, especially given that it was almost four decades old? How much were the police and FBI motivated by the thought they could solve a serious multiple crime case and reap the glory and public relations kudos? It’s a fact that despite the abomination of Chris and Peta’s murders, the case had been so easily overlooked and seemingly, so quickly forgotten on both sides of the Atlantic.
What we do know is that we were truly blessed with the calibre of the lead detective on the ground in Sacramento, Amy Crosby, and her highly skilled investigative team, who all worked the case with such diligence.
Extrovert and vivacious, with a shock of long blonde corkscrew curls, when Amy enters a room, she has presence. Growing up in a small, sleepy rural town in Northern California, she has been a police officer for 26 years. She has spent 16 of those as a detective, specialising in elder and dependent adult abuse investigations, domestic violence and child abuse cases and works now in the Missing Persons/Warrants Unit.
Fortunately blessed with a phenomenal memory, Russell sat down with Amy in early 2016 and they spent many days sifting through every event and contact of his father’s that he could recall, which Amy and her team then extensively researched. Both were determined that this time, Boston was not going to get off. Incredibly, the police have three large files totalling 2,000 pages, detailing the crimes, including numerous murders, Boston is suspected of committing over a period of five decades. A highly volatile, dangerous character, supremely clever at covering his tracks, he’d slipped the noose throughout his life.
However, Boston’s fortunes had, the previous year, thankfully started to change. Aged seventy-five, his health poor and with nowhere to live, he was low on steam and options. After a lifetime spent on the run, Boston was finally running out of road.
Exhausted from living an itinerant’s existence between Mexico and California, he had travelled to Eureka, a seaport city in Northern California, some 310 miles northwest of Sacramento. Recognising he needed to seek help, he turned up, dishevelled and dirty, on the doorstep of the ex-wife of a deceased partner in crime, whom he hadn’t seen for over 30 years. He was too incapacitated to even to take a shower so she suggested driving him to Eureka’s Seaview Rehabilitation & Wellness Center. Before he agreed to go, knowing that he wouldn’t be allowed to take them into any healthcare facility, he entrusted her with his highly treasured stun guns, saying that he would be back for them when he was better. Installed as an in-patient in the nursing home, Boston found himself, for the first time, not a prisoner but certainly exposed and a sitting duck for law enforcement.
Making the five-hour journey from Sacramento on 16 February 2016, it was to Eureka that Amy and her colleague, Detective Janine LeRose, drove to interview Boston. He was now firmly in their sights and they were armed with Vince and Russell’s damning eyewitness statements of events on the boat.
Entering the side room, they found a man who looked much older than his years. His hands and limbs were riddled with arthritis and, although he could walk, he chose to use a wheelchair. Boston must have been shocked at the announcement of the detectives’ arrival but if he was, he didn’t show it. His circumstances might have changed, but his arrogant cocky personality hadn’t. Amy described him as: ‘Cognitively sharp as a tack’.
Beset by ill health and the ravages of old age he may have been, but he was still the same hard-core evil criminal that he’d been all his life. ‘Boston was adept at playing “the game”, which is why he had evaded justice for so long,’ says Amy. ‘It is very difficult to deal with someone who shows no empathy and no remorse because you can’t tap into them in any way. Despite having full mental capacity, when I interviewed him about Chris and Peta, he at first said he didn’t know them and refused to talk about them. After further questioning, he admitted to knowing them but he laughingly and arrogantly dismissed the case as being out of the jurisdiction of the Californian law authorities. He wasn’t prepared to, and said he didn’t have to, answer to anyone.’
Amy and Janine were unsuccessful in extracting an admission of guilt from Boston but their visit to Eureka was far from wasted. Crucially, Boston admitted to owning the boat, the Justin B, in 1978, which was to prove a vital tenet of the prosecution team’s future case against him.
Moving the interview on from the events in Belize, Amy then asked him point-blank the question to which all the law-enforcement agencies throughout California wanted the answer: ‘Are you the Golden State Killer?’ Boston replied that he wasn’t.
Anticipating his denial, she continued undeterred and asked him for a saliva cheek swab for DNA matching with the known sample of the GSK’s, collected from one of the scenes of crime. Boston put up no resistance but was savvy enough to know that in California, police can take a DNA sample from any person who is arrested on probable cause for a felony offence.
The interview concluded, Amy and her colleague travelled back to Sacramento where Boston’s DNA was fast-tracked in the laboratory for DNA matching in what they felt would be an affirmation of a foregone conclusion. When the result came back, it astonished not only Russell but many in the Sacramento Police Department and the FBI: it was negative.
In June 2016, because law enforcement had still had not found or identified the GSK, the FBI launched a $50,000 reward for information that would lead to his arrest and conviction, in the hope that some member of the public would realise who he was, or have the courage to come forward.
It was, therefore, with much more than just an enquiring mind that on 25 April 2018 I read news reports that a man suspected of being California’s elusive Golden State Killer – 72-year-old former police officer, Joseph James DeAngelo – had been taken into custody after police used DNA testing and an online genealogy database to track him down at his home in Citrus Heights, in Sacramento. Even though the GSK’s crimes were committed over 5,000 miles away, because 76-year-old Boston had previously been prime suspect, I was fascinated with news of DeAngelo’s arrest.
Suffice to say that the Californian capital of Sacramento, a city built by the gritty pioneers of the Californian Gold Rush, possessed in the 1970s and 1980s a very disturbing dark underbelly of crime and violence which spawned more than its fair share of rapists, robbers and murderers.
But to return to our case, in ruling out Boston from being the GSK, the police and the FBI knew that he was a serial killer and needed to be prosecuted, but how were they going to do it now? Things were looking gloomy and once again, the appalling thought that Boston might never be brought to justice started to creep into our heads. With an entire task force of the FBI, Sacramento PD, Sacramento Sheriffs as well as Greater Manchester Police, the police had finally focused their attention on him, yet still we were back to square one. They could not leave a known serial killer free, especially when he had been allowed to commit a litany of serious crimes for five decades.
Russell once more sat down with Detective Amy Crosby and this time delved even deeper into every single crime his father had committed, in the hope of finding something that would bring him to justice or a jurisdiction that would stick. Although Boston was known to have committed multiple crimes, many of them were decades old and therefore difficult to prove. For instance, the FBI could corroborate that he was responsible for a hit-and-run traffic accident on Lemon Hill Avenue in Sacramento, in 1972. The victim had been killed and the incident was reported in the local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee. Amy Crosby was able to locate the article describing the 10 June 1972 hit-and-run traffic death of Marshal Williams, but because it had been misfiled under the traffic and not the murder crime section, it had been purged and the police did not have the jurisdiction to pursue it through the courts.
The police came to the conclusion that with two living eyewitnesses, their best chance of securing a conviction was by charging Boston with Chris and Peta’s murders. A successful prosecution would mean that he would either get a life sentence or the death penalty. But the next thorny question was, who would stand up to the plate and take jurisdiction?
Enter legal eagle, Prosecuting Assistant Attorney Matthew D. Segal. A Harvard graduate (cum laude), in 2014 he was made chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Special Prosecutions Unit for Eastern District of California. Possessing an intellectual aura, Matt is a great communicator and quick thinker; you sense every word he utters is considered and measured. Thankfully, he is also very tenacious. Others less driven might well have given up, defeated by the complexity of the case, but not him. He told Greater Manchester Police’s Martin Bottomley that the case had got a hold of him and he constantly devised ways of prosecuting Boston even when he was on the treadmill at the gym!
Greater Manchester Police went into discussions with Matt and his team about the feasibility of extraditing Boston to the UK, and Michaela Clinch and Julie Adams were put on standby to go over to California to interview him.
Lawyers for Great Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service became involved but disappointingly, reported back with their findings in April 2016: ‘The advice is pretty unequivocal that section 4 of the Suppression of Terrorism Act 1978 provides jurisdiction to try a non-British national for homicide committed abroad, where it is a European Country that has signed the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism 1977. Clearly this would not apply to Guatemala. A footnote on page 10 refers to the Territorial Waters Jurisdiction Act 1878, however again this relates to offences on the open sea or within the “waters of Her Majesty’s dominions…”, therefore has the same limitations as the Merchant Shipping Act 1995, which didn’t provide jurisdiction as it applies to international waters.’
Looking for any option open to them, they then looked at section 9 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, but again found it to be wanting. The UK neither had jurisdiction to try either the offence itself or offender. In summary, the UK did not have jurisdiction under any law that was in existence in 1978. Not only were GMP and the American prosecution team disappointed, we were crestfallen in the extreme to hit yet another brick wall. How sweet it would have been to have made Boston make the trip to England to stand trial.
Undeterred, Matt and his team then looked into extraditing Boston to Guatemala to stand trial, but again they ran into legal problems, plus a reluctance to try a near forty-year-old cold case. Belize also said they didn’t have jurisdiction because even though the murders happened on a Belizean boat, and theirs was the last port the boat departed from, the murders happened off Guatemala. The FBI also said they had no jurisdiction, because again, the murders happened in another country with no ties to the US.
The legal team concluded the only way they could claim jurisdiction was if the murders happened in open water, and most importantly, were committed by an American, on a boat owned by an American, with registration or proof that the American was indeed the owner of the vessel at the time. The FBI started searching for records in Belize for the boat and its provenance, but all their records from that time period had been destroyed by a fire and were long gone.
They were left with only one option and that was to prove that Boston had owned the boat by showing ownership through witness testimony, including, for example, Peta’s letter, the Belize harbour master’s crew list and verbal testimonies of Russell and Vince. Using this as a basis for claiming American jurisdiction, the case began to gather momentum.
Matt says: ‘Homicide cases are rare in federal court, and I was lucky enough to have an attorney in my unit, Heiko Coppola, who had been an Oregon state homicide prosecutor before joining us. Once Mr Coppola and I had assessed that we had jurisdiction and could put on a legally sufficient double-murder case, I added Jeremy Kelley to the team and we worked as quickly as possible to direct the investigators to what evidence we thought was necessary for charging Boston. We were constantly balancing the urgency of initiating prosecution against the need to ensure that we had gathered enough admissible evidence to prove our case if Boston demanded a speedy trial.’
On 26 April, the prosecuting attorneys Matt Segal and Heiko Coppola sought assistance from the FBI in helping them in their investigation and in particular, the complex task of tracing leads in the UK, Guatemala and Belize.