This being the pre-internet age, with Interpol reliant on letters, phone calls and manual cross-referencing, there was no way of identifying the bodies, so they were simply buried in a local cemetery in Guatemala under plain white crosses.
With the families growing more anxious, Chris’s father Charles hired a private detective in Belize. Six months later, in January 1979, there was a breakthrough when he tracked down a Catholic priest, living in Guatemala, who recalled the bodies of the unidentified European couple found in the water the previous summer.
The news hit the families hard. They knew it had to be them. Who else could it be, in such a remote area? There followed, says Chris’s mother Audrey, now 99, a period of ‘awful, dreadful, black despair’ as they waited for the bodies to be exhumed and dental records to be flown thousands of miles across the globe to be cross-checked.
‘I was at work when the police rang up and said it was them,’ she recalls. ‘I can remember driving home and shouting to the empty car: “My son has been murdered. My son has been murdered”.’
But their nightmare wasn’t over yet. For the next 37 years, Audrey, Charles and Penny would exhaust every avenue to find out what had happened. Why had these two fun-loving, twentysomethings been murdered in such horrific circumstances — and who could have committed such a senseless act?
It took a ‘flash of inspiration’ and some dogged online detective skills from Penny to achieve what police on both sides of the Atlantic had failed to do: she managed to track down Duane Boston, the skipper of a sailing boat called the Justin B, on which Chris and Peta had been travelling before they disappeared.
Turquoise waters, white sand beaches, leafy palms blowing in the Caribbean breeze . . . the picture painted by Penny Farmer's brother, Chris, in his messages home was of paradise...
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