This book is testimony to my family’s enduring love for Chris, whose tragic death has defined and shaped us. Time moves on and heartbreak becomes heartache; the intense stabbing pain of bereavement gives way to numbness and a reluctant acceptance until finally, some sort of normality is established. My family’s life is divided between what happened before we lost Chris and what happened after.
Life goes on, as indeed it should, but scratch beneath the surface and the scars of loss and the knowledge of how much richer life would have been, had they lived, are still there to this day. Russell and Vince Boston, who grew up never knowing the love of a mother, share the same pain. Just as there is no greater love than that of a mother, there is no greater crime than a parent killing and depriving a child of its other loving parent. In choosing evil, Boston’s actions left a trail of destruction, not just for my family, the Framptons and his own two sons and daughter but also for other bereaved families who will never know the fate of their loved ones.
This book has been cathartic to write. For so long, I was unable to talk about the pain of losing Chris, preferring to keep it bottled up, but the journey of discovery has been liberating. Talking about his story still, at times, brings me to tears but I realise it is part of the human condition and it is better to let those tears flow.
Retracing Chris and Peta’s footsteps through Mexico and Belize (albeit via the internet) has been fascinating and hearing again Chris’s cassettes recording his travels and listening to all the seventies music he loved has brought me close to him again.
Sadly, there was no tidy ending. I can’t deny that we were bitterly disappointed to be cheated of justice at the last hurdle but we derive solace from the fact that Boston was charged and in custody awaiting trial when he died. Chris and Peta’s ghosts have finally been laid to rest and I am grateful that this has been within my mother’s lifetime. Coming to live with my family when my father died, I know just how much the unanswered question of why Chris was tortured and murdered has plagued her for almost half her life. I am only sorry that Dad died in 2013 without knowing. It’s the nature of life that we all die in the middle of a story, indeed many stories, but this was my family’s biggest story and my father was robbed of knowing the ending of something he had strived for, for almost four decades.
Dad was immensely proud of Chris studying medicine (as he himself had done) and seeing his degree through to completion (where he himself hadn’t). He would have been even prouder to know that his son was a humanitarian who stepped in to stop a child from being beaten and possibly killed. Chris was a doctor to the last and, despite having been badly injured by Boston, he still gave him the benefit of the doubt and treated him. Always seeing the best in people, Chris was a great exponent of how you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As Russell says: ‘Chris and Peta weren’t a couple of drug dealers that my dad killed at a whim, they were worthwhile human beings.’
Every life leaves an echo but it is only an echo and, as life moves on, it becomes increasingly faint. Very few people leave a lasting footprint on this earth; most are only remembered by the next one or two generations. In the course of researching this book, Mum and I went through drawers of dusty old sepia-tinted photographs looking for some of Chris, and I frequently asked who so and so was. With today’s digital photography and so many images now locked away on computers, it’s a sad fact that those who have died will become even more anonymous. I would like to think that telling his story will, at least, keep the memory of Chris alive for my three children, who never had the pleasure of meeting him. He would have been such a fun and exciting uncle, for sure. Whether it is a concession to Mum and I or not, they have shown great interest in Chris’s life and death, and for this I am grateful.
Gap years are now commonplace and most young people aim to travel and taste adventure before university or before they settle down, just as Chris and Peta did when they departed for Australia in 1977. If this story makes just one person think before they place themselves in a potentially exposed, vulnerable situation then it will have been worth it. There can be fewer more isolated places than a lone yacht out at sea. Literally, no one can hear you scream.
Ironically, it was Chris and Peta’s great love and appetite for life that brought them into contact with Boston: they lived their lives rather than existed. For Chris, the spirit of adventure was sown when he learnt to sail on our family holidays in Anglesey. Just as he always wanted to sail that bit further than anyone else, he was eager to venture off the beaten track. Mark Twain’s outlook on life was Chris’s: ‘Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than those you did. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.’
Adventure and exploration were in Chris’s blood and that lust for life should be embraced and encouraged in us all. Risks are part of life and it would be a very sterile existence without them. As a parent myself, I would dearly love to bind my three children to me and keep them safe. When my son, Charlie, took off on his own adventure in the sumer of 2017, backpacking in Southeast Asia, I had to steel myself from discouraging him. I remember when he was born I hoped that he would inherit some of Chris’s idiosyncrasies. In his love of travel, dedication to work and easy manner, I think he has.
Much as we want to keep our children safe, without seeking new horizons and taking some risks there can be no growth or development. The internet and social media make the globe accessible to us all but that’s not getting out there and seeing, tasting and learning about the world for oneself. Ironically, it wasn’t Chris’s love of sailing that killed him and Peta nor a native of Guatemala, but a chance meeting with a murderous itinerant psychopath. Thankfully, such people are rare, but they can be encountered anywhere.
It’s my belief that Chris and Peta signed their death warrants as soon as they stepped onto that boat. Russell and Vince should never feel any sense of blame for what happened: a deeply disturbed sadistic personality such as Boston possessed was always going to find an ‘excuse’ to kill two defenceless, innocent tourists carrying their worldly possessions. The foresight he displayed in waiting a week in Dangriga (Stann Creek) to get motor engine parts for ballast meant that he was probably planning their murders well in advance and maybe as soon as he met them.
Learning of his death and writing to my parents, Chris’s best friend, Rick Henshaw, captured the essence of my beloved brother: ‘There is no danger of me forgetting Chris. He changed the way that I saw the world. Chris’s outlook on life of: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” means he would not have wanted us to regret his whole-hearted attitude to living. It would be too easy to say “if only…” but Chris would not have been Chris without doing what he did. With his death, we are all the poorer and it is impossible for me to try to express what the loss of a trusted and admired friend, who had a lasting effect upon my outlook on life, means to me.’
As the poet John Donne said: ‘No man is an island entire of itself.’ When Boston threw Chris and Peta overboard into the deep waters of the Caribbean, he thought no one would miss them or go to the trouble of tracking down their killer. In judging others by his own grotesque character traits, he was wrong: they were two much-loved people who, even to this day, are sorely missed. What their story shows in abundance is that love never dies… even after 40 years. One man’s breathtaking act of inhumanity and evil can snuff out life and cause an unimaginable, wanton trail of destruction but it cannot extinguish love. In that, Boston miscalculated.
In a world where dreadful acts of terrorism hit our headlines weekly, if not daily, it is all too easy to become inured to man’s inhumanity to man but Boston’s actions were not driven by religious belief or political fervour, nor a hot-headed moment of madness, committed on the spur of the moment: they were premeditated. He had at least thirty-six hours to think through the consequences. His response to the human kindness shown by Chris and Peta was pure, cold-blooded evil.
Sometimes there is no meaning to what happens to us or those we love. It’s pointless asking ‘Why did it happen to my family?’ because ‘Why not my family?’ Life isn’t fair and never will be. You have to accept that death is part of life and that life moves on, as indeed it should. But what shouldn’t be accepted are injustice and the triumph of evil.
Walking a small section of the Camino de Santiago pilgrims’ way in Spain in June 2017, I visited the awe-inspiring medieval Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. In its precincts, the rhythm of life goes on unabated, but in its magnificent, hallowed interior, time stands still. The solidity of the building contrasts with the ephemeral nature of life and it made me think of Chris and Peta’s butterfly lives. In one of the small dark side chapels, I lit two candles for them. As I watched them brightly flicker but then quickly burn down and die together, it felt a fitting end to what has been a long goodbye. Now felt the right time to let go. Closure had brought acceptance.
To me, Chris was special. In death, as much as in life, he changed my heart and mind for ever. He is not forgotten