Dead in the Water

“This account by Farmer is both intimate but also the dispassionate, clear version you’d expect from a journalist.”—OprahMag.com, “20 Best True Crime Books"

In this shocking true-crime drama, a forty-year-old double murder brings together a grieving family and two brothers—just kids when they witnessed their father commit the brutal act—to track down a psychopath once suspected as being the Golden State Killer.

“A real-life page turner more intriguing than anything on Netflix.” –Matt Nixson, Books Editor, Mail on Sunday (London)

In 1978, two tortured corpses—hooded, bound, and weighted down with engine parts—were found in the sea off Guatemala. Junior doctor Chris Farmer and his girlfriend, Peta Frampton, were still clinging to life when they were thrown from the yacht they’d been crewing.

Here is the gripping account of how Chris's family worked alongside police, the FBI, and Interpol to gather evidence against the boat’s Californian skipper, Silas Duane Boston. Almost four decades later, in 2015, Chris’s sister, Penny, used Facebook to track down Boston. Following the detailed, haunting testimony of his own two sons—who also implicated their father in a string of other killings—Boston was finally arrested and charged with two counts of maritime murder.

A story of homicide on the high seas, Dead in the Water is also a tale of a family’s fortitude and diligence in tracking down a monster.

Raised in Manchester, Penny Farmer graduated with an English Literature degree from Lancaster University and then moved to London to study for a Postgraduate Certificate in Journalism at City University. Experiencing something of a baptism of fire as a reporter on a North London local newspaper at the time of the Broadwater Farm Estate riots in Tottenham in 1985, she learned the trade and knew that writing was in her soul. She has also served as an editor for Woman magazine. Penny is now a freelance journalist and public-relations consultant.