VINCENT Boston was just five years old when his grandmother revealed his father had brutally killed his mother and buried her in an unmarked, shallow grave.
Serial killer Silas Duane Boston shot his wife, Mary Lou, point-blank in the head after she said she wanted a divorce and hoped to take their two sons away.
But instead of ending up behind bars, after disposing of his wife’s body, the monster moved himself and his boys, Vincent and Russell, from California to Belize to start a new life.
It was on this tropical island, which borders the jungles of Central America and the glittering shores of the Caribbean, that Boston would commit his next sickening crime - this time in full view of his petrified sons.
In 1978, the deranged dad welcomed British couple Peta Frampton and Chris Farmer on board his boat, after they signed up for a two-week sailing experience.
However, in a sickening twist, he fell out with the pair before bludgeoning them, shackling their bodies to engine parts and throwing them to their deaths overboard.
The murders, which remained unsolved for almost four decades, are dramatised in new Prime Video series Dead In The Water, where Vince reveals how his dad pressured him into keeping silent and disturbingly confessed to dozens more murders.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, Vince, 59, says: “He told us that snitches were the worst thing a man could be, and that if we ever said anything to anyone about what we’d seen, or if the authorities found out, we’d be next to die.
“I knew he had killed my mother in cold blood, so I really feared him and, for a long time, said nothing.”
Growing up in Sacramento, Vincent was three years old when Mary Lou, 23, disappeared in 1968.
Vile Boston had convinced her to go for a drive to talk things out after she asked for a divorce. He then forced her out of the car, told her to run and shot her from behind, burying her in a nearby creek.
Vince was later told by Boston’s mother: “I don't want to lie to you kids. There is no Santa Claus and your mother is never coming back. Your dad killed her because he didn't want to lose you kids."
Tens years after his wife’s murder, Boston took his two sons to Belize as he fled rape charges in California.
The party-loving American began a tour-guide business from an old boat, where he would take visitors out to sea to spear fish and snorkel with his sons on board as crew.
It was this ‘family man’ business that attracted lawyer Peta and her newly-qualified doctor boyfriend, Chris, who were both from Manchester, to sign themselves up for a two-week experience to learn how to sail.
Vince remembers: “We were used to passengers coming on board for a day or two to go diving with us and to learn how to fish, but it was unusual to have a longer hire trip so it stood out to me.
I knew he had killed my mother in cold blood, so I really feared him and, for a long time, said nothing
Vincent Boston
“I clearly remember Peta and Chris walking down the jetty with all of their bags and introducing themselves to Russell and I - and we spent a lot of time with them that week in that cramped little boat.”
The two boys were treated more like crew than sons on board the Justin B, the sailing boat bought for Boston by his parents, who were complicit in the murder of Mary Lou.
Vince remembers Peta, 24, and Chris, 25, fondly as friendly and caring, taking time to try and teach them what they were then missing in school.
However, cracks began to appear as the couple witnessed Boston get drunk and high, and abuse his two boys.
Vince says: “At first, Peta and Chris were a buffer for us with our dad because he acted differently around new people, he was charming, he was cool and fun, the life of the party.
“But when he was drunk, he became a monster - he would become abusive, and while initially Peta and Chris tried to shrug it off as a one-off, it was soon hard for them not to intervene when it kept happening.”
One evening in June 1978, Chris stepped in as Boston made a swipe at his eldest son, Russell. When a fight broke out between the two grown men, the killer ended up in the ocean, humiliated.
Vince says: “There was a vengeful air after that. Peta and Chris said they wanted to leave the boat, but my dad vowed then to make them pay, he said he was going to get rid of them for good.”
It was never a second thought that dad would kill me if I got in his way - he’d threatened to many times.”
Vince Boston
The same night, Boston took action as the sun went down. Grabbing a baton, he beat Chris over the back and head until blood was pouring on to the deck, before tying up his wrists and ankles.
Instructing his sons to guard an unconscious Chris, Boston then went below deck with Peta - who was stripped, beaten and tied up. Vince was then sent down to the gully to guard her.
He remembers: “I was below deck with Peta, and I remember watching her and thinking over and over, ‘What can I do?’, knowing that if I untied her and let her go, I’d have to have a plan in place.
“If I’d have been able to get to Russell, maybe I could’ve come up with a way to help them to make it out alive, but I knew if I slipped up or my plan went wrong, I’d also end up dead.
“It was never a second thought that dad would kill me if I got in his way - he’d threatened to many times.”
It meant that when Boston tied Peta and Chris to weights used on board to balance the boat and threw them overboard, Vince had to watch on silently and promise to take what he’d seen to the grave.
During their time in Belize, Peta had written to her mother, saying they were going to sail to Mexico on a yacht called the Justin B, which was skippered by an American called Duane.
In one letter, she told how the sons frequently squabbled and that Boston had a short temper.
Chris's sister, Penny Farmer, says of the childhood sweethearts in the documentary: “They were children of the 70's, that whole buzz, that whole vibe, free love and the music but what came with that was a certain naivety.
“They couldn't conceive that anyone could harm them.
“The last we'd heard from them, they got on board a boat. It just didn't make sense, but the truth was far worse than we could ever have imagined.”
When Chris and Peta went quiet, their families became increasingly desperate as weeks turned to months.
Searching for answers, Peta’s parents traced Boston back to Sacramento, where he and his sons had returned to after the murders.
The killer was questioned by the British Consulate General. Though convinced of his involvement in the couple’s disappearance, they had no proof and he faced no further investigation.
Chris's father Charles Farmer, a BBC journalist, hired a private detective, who eventually learned that the unidentified bodies of a young European couple had been pulled from the water in Livingston, Guatemala.
It was not until February 1, 1979, that the families were informed of their children’s deaths.
In a further cruel blow, with no crime scene investigation and little help from the Guatemalan police, the case went cold.
Vince says: “[Dad] bragged about getting away with it, that he had plans to keep killing, and that if we ever thought about snitching, he’d separate us and put us into care.
“That was the ultimate threat because Russell was all I knew, we didn’t have a mother because he’d murdered her too, so I went along with it because sometimes it felt like better the devil I knew.”
[Dad] bragged about getting away with it, that he had plans to keep killing, and that if we ever thought about snitching, he’d separate us and put us into care.
Vince Boston
It would take five years for Vince to escape his father. Aged 17, he joined the Navy, and with coins from one of his first pay cheques, he finally made the call to the police about what he had seen.
Despite multiple calls and emails, his account was dismissed as hearsay.
Over the coming decades, Pete and Chris’s families continued to search for answers, but Boston appeared to have disappeared without a trace.
But in October 2015, Chris’s sister, Penny, was astonished to find the killer, his two sons and his fifth wife on Facebook.
She flew out to the US to talk to Russell, who opened up on the 1978 murders and claimed his father killed two more tourists, possibly from Scandinavia, only a fortnight later.
In total, he said his father had claimed he had murdered 33 people, which would make him one of the most prolific serial killers in US history.
Boston was soon traced to a nursing home in Eureka, California.
With the help of UK police and witness statements from the two sons, there was finally enough evidence to charge him over the deaths of Peta and Chris on December 1, 2016.
Tragically, the following April - just three weeks before the families were due to attend a pre-trial hearing - an ailing Boston died aged 76 by withdrawing his own right to medical treatment.
Vince says: "Finally, they were taking it seriously - but it was too late. He took the coward’s way out, and just like that, it was all over."
Other unsolved crimes linked to Boston included a possible hit-and-run homicide in Sacramento in 1972, and the murder of three drug dealers across California.
Vince concludes: “Looking back, I just wish that everything could’ve come to light sooner, that someone would’ve found out about my mother’s murder before we left for Belize, that Chris and Peta were alive.
“Because justice wasn’t served, and we all have to live with the fact that Peta, Chris, and my mother will never come back, and I will live with the effects of what I have seen forever.”
Dead In The Water is available to stream on Prime Video today.
