'After 37 years I caught my brother's killer on Facebook'
COURTESY PENNY FARMER
Nearly 40 years after the tortured corpses of a young British couple were discovered in Caribbean waters, and the trail for the killer went cold, a breakthrough came from an unlikely source on the other side of the world, writes Ben Dirs.
You can find anything on the internet. An old schoolmate, a long-lost cousin, an ex-girlfriend. A dog that ran away.
If they're not on there, someone will be who knows how to find them. In the age of social media, there is no escape.
On the afternoon of 2 October 2015, Penny Farmer returned from a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside, flipped open her laptop, fired up Facebook and typed in the name of the man she suspected of murdering her brother, back when the world was a bigger place.
And there he was. Grey beard. Baseball cap. Sunglasses. Denim shirt. Looking, Penny thought, just like a serial killer.
"Heaven knows why I didn't look earlier," says Penny, a cheerfully frank woman who tells her story without indulging in self-pity.
"I suppose I thought he was lost to us. He just seemed so remote and hidden. But thank God I did."
In July 1978, the bodies of Penny's brother Chris and his girlfriend Peta Frampton were found floating off the coast of Guatemala. They had been tortured, bound and weighed down with engine parts. The doctor who carried out the autopsy stated that "the aspects of [both corpses] were monstrous".
In Manchester, Penny's parents awaited Chris' next letter. Chris, a 25-year-old doctor, and Peta, a 24-year-old lawyer, were childhood sweethearts on an exotic adventure. Both wrote regularly, but in that pre-digital age, especially in Central America, communication was haphazard. Lapses were to be expected.
But when days turned into weeks, turned into months, the families of both Chris and Peta began to fret. Government authorities and police were notified, searches were carried out, appeals were made, sightings were reported.
Peta's letters to her parents had revealed that she and Chris had met an American and his two young sons in Belize, shelved their original plan to catch a bus to Mexico and decided to sail on the American's small fishing boat to Honduras instead. In the last letter she sent, Peta signed off with: "Nothing much happens on a boat."
Penny's father contacted the harbour master in Belize, who revealed that the Justin B had set sail with Chris and Peta on board but returned without them.
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