BOSTON: You can't pick your family members.
I had the best mom in the world,
but then I also had the worst dad.
You don't want to believe that your dad's a monster.
At the time, you're just like, okay, he's my dad.
Yeah, he's a criminal, but you realize it's worse
than you even thought it ever could have been.
Even now, we don't know
the full extent of what he's done.
This is a...
Boston family portrait.
My brother, me, my sister, my dad.
My father was Silas Duane Boston.
He went by Duane.
He was a chameleon, he was able to put on this...
I call it a mask of charm and charisma.
It's like a typical 1970s family picture.
But looks can be deceiving sometimes.
Looking at it with hindsight, I'm thinking...
You smug son of a bitch.
How can you smirk like that when you know what you did?
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
-[knock at door] -[creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This is my mom.
It says, "Love, Mary Lou, 1962."
This probably was her senior year.
She's got the bouffant hairdo,
which was all the rage back in those days.
I remember she had really brown eyes
and, um, a beautiful face.
I remember
she was a very loving mom and worshipped us kids.
We were her whole world.
She had met my dad when she was about 17 or 18.
I think she was still in high school.
I'd describe my father
as someone who's very manipulative.
You could use the word charming,
almost like a Ted Bundy type.
He would put on this act, this charming act,
and a lot of people did fall for that,
and personally for my mom, she was one of them.
I felt really close to my mom.
I was probably about three or four years old
when I have my most vivid memories about my mother.
She was always playing music
and cooking, baking cookies and stuff for us.
When I was about four years old, September of 1968,
all I knew is that she was gone.
I mean, it's weird that she would just disappear.
She would never do that.
She would never just leave her kids and disappear.
This is my mom's missing persons report.
From 1968, right after she disappeared.
So this was filed
by my uncle, her little brother.
The husband, Duane Boston, stated that he took
the missing person to the area
of Del Paso Boulevard and El Camino Avenue,
approximately one and a half weeks ago, and dropped her off.
She has not been seen or heard from since.
My uncle stated that she could not
stand to be away from her children for any period
of time.
The husband has shown very little
concern or regard for her absence.
The husband possessed a 22-caliber rifle
with a scope mounted on it.
He stated since her disappearance,
the gun is gone, and he has not seen it since.
My dad told me at the time that she just left.
We would ask, constantly asked,
"Where's mom, where -- what happened? Where is she?"
He would change the subject or say, "I told you she ran off.
I don't know, stop [bleep] asking me questions."
It's like your heart has been ripped out.
You have this void, you know,
in your life, it's just -- it's hard to describe.
It's a wound that never heals for your whole life,
your mother, it's always there,
the sense of comfort and security, and that's
gone overnight.
I didn't know the whole scope of everything,
but as a four-year-old,
I knew something was wrong and something was twisted.
After her disappearance, I remember
mostly being with my grandmother.
Dad would get tired of us and...
fling us off onto his mom, my grandmother.
One time, the conversation was around Christmas, I think I was
about six years old, and we're talking about Santa Claus.
"I wonder what Santa's gonna bring this year."
And then grandma said, "You know what, you kids,
"I'm not gonna lie to you.
"There is no Santa Claus.
"And also, I've been lying to you about your mom.
She's never coming home."
Your mom is dead.
And we're like, why? "Because your dad killed her."
She told us...
"Your dad came to me in September of '68
"and said, 'I had to kill Mary.
I buried her where they'll never find her in a million years.'"
And he said, "Out of all the people that I killed,
she's the only one I regret murdering."
She said, "Why?" He's like, "Well, she was gonna
divorce me, and I didn't want to lose the kids."
She didn't like it, but she told us kids to not talk
about it.
You tell anybody, the authorities,
you're gonna be orphans, you're not gonna have
a father, you already lost your mom.
But the -- the horrible parts of the story are still vivid.
She did say that he
shot my mom in the back of the head, and she was running.
He said, "Run, bitch, run."
And she cried. She was crying.
"What about the kids? What about the babies, Duane?
What about the kids?" That...
You got me, sorry.
That was her last thought, not about herself,
about us kids.
This is my dad, circa 1968,
time he shot my mom.
And he's got has 22-caliber,
one of his favorite rifles,
and he was deadly accurate.
He loved to shoot all the time.
He was always taking my mom out to --
this is one of his favorite spots.
This may have very well been the same
rifle that he used to kill my mom.
This is the same year.
Could be the same rifle
and maybe the same location.
This might have been the very last
thing that she saw before he killed her.
This picture gives me the creeps.
It disgusts me to look at that photograph.
[woman] There might be people watching that would say,
"I still don't understand why you
didn't go to the police yourself."
That's not real, that's not real life.
We thought about the chain of events
that would happen.
We don't have a body, all he's gonna
do is say, "No, she ran off.
I told you guys back in 1968."
Snitches,
in his mind, don't deserve to live, and if you snitch on him,
you're as good as dead,
and you're a child, and you're gonna
put that target on your back?
You just got to suck it up.
You know that you're dealing with a homicidal monster
at that point.
He's capable of killing you at the drop of a hat.
Imagine living with
the person that killed your parent, and you --
you have to stay there until you're old enough to get out.
VINCE: A day in the life of being Silas Duane Boston's son,
every day was different, depending on his mood.
It was like the weather -- you never knew what to expect.
We were just little kids,
but he would terrorize us psychologically.
Sometimes, I think it leaves deeper scars.
Certain things stay with you for life.
I remember my dad
being really attracted to gory things.
He was an EMT, he actually did something at that point,
which was legitimate and helping people,
but he kept this scrapbook when he was an EMT.
And the coroner would take pictures, I guess.
These old black and whites of
people that had died in horrible ways.
And I remember particularly, this one old guy, he had hung
himself in his backyard,
and his eyes were bulging out, and his tongue was out.
Look -- look here. Look at his face.
VINCE: He enjoyed looking at stuff like that.
Dad was really proud of
showing these pictures like little trophies.
He reminded me of like a kid that wants
to show you his piggy bank and how many
coins he's collected or maybe some bugs that he has.
It's very fascinating to him.
I'm just like, I don't want -- I don't want to see anymore.
I've had enough. Thanks but no thanks.
And he would laugh. He would say, oh, you know...
like I was too squeamish.
It was all part of his personality
of really craving and being excited by
violence and murder and death.
He tired really quick of
working for the man, especially since he had
his kids, that was a constant,
you know, monthly supply of welfare and food stamps.
He was just like, well, why work?
I can just get stoned and drunk and party,
which is what I want to do,
and he decided to supplement
the family's income with breaking in --
what he calls tapping.
I remember one time, he brought home this
giant jar of pennies -- you know those water cooler
jugs, heavy, filled with
pennies and dimes and nickels.
Do us a favor. Start counting.
VINCE: Sorting the pennies out, it was just something that was
expected of us kids to do.
At the time,
I didn't really think of it as stolen goods.
Him and his buddy, they come in laughing and...
bragging about how they broke into this old lady's house
and tied her up.
And they were wearing these rubber Halloween masks.
[laughing]
They thought that she was having a heart attack,
but the way he was talking about it, they were laughing
and didn't give a [bleep] if she lived or died.
I guess it was a good haul for them, jewelry and whatnot.
It was a kind of a party atmosphere to them.
I thought, this is really horrible.
I felt like an outsider
that I did not want to participate
in these certain things.
My dad would feel like, what's wrong with you?
You should be enjoying this. This is...
cool fun stuff.
I was a disappointment in his eyes.
He doesn't have this thing called
compassion or guilt -- he knows it's wrong,
but it's a game to him.
[laughter]
It wasn't just all black and white.
It was -- there was some gray there, you know, and...
it was hard -- it's hard to just hate somebody.
He wasn't a monster all the time.
He hates Christmas.
He's like the original Grinch.
He'd never buy us really Christmas presents.
He'd just give us money and say,
"Yeah, go [bleep] buy whatever."
But this one year... I'm gonna...
it's kind of emotional for me, but...
He, um... He...
Ugh. Sorry.
[laughs]
I haven't thought about this in awhile.
Hu, um...he actually bought us toys that year.
It was -- remember those old View-Masters?
We didn't have any
Christmas wrapping, so he wrapped it up in a paper bag,
and, um...
God. Sorry.
You know, as kids, you know, you want to sneak and find
out what you got, and so I was like opening the bag,
and he was mad
that I found out what we were gonna get, and it's like...
you're not really the Grinch.
You really care about Christmas -- I mean,
why would you care what we -- you know, that we were peeking?
It's like...
It's like what a normal dad would do,
and, um...
God. Sorry.
That was one of my favorite Christmases of all time,
because he showed a side of him
that was human and that cared about how
we felt as kids.
I got to take a break.
Sometimes, he'll bring in a girlfriend, and things
would mellow out for a while, because he was in charming mode,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type thing.
So you have these waves and cycles of
him going through these weird personality changes.
He had a girlfriend, and she had a couple of daughters.
They decided that they were gonna
come live with us as a family.
I remember dad
had stolen a bunch of Christmas toys.
There were, like, in the -- I think they were
in the garage or something.
This girlfriend at the time said, "Hey, uh...
"just between you and me, did your dad
steal those toys?" But she's like,
"You can tell me -- you can -- you can trust me."
I was like, "Yeah, he stole those toys."
Maybe a day later, he's like you [bleep].
I know you lied. Tell me what you said!
"Did you tell her this and that," you know,
"Did you tell her I stole those toys?"
I go, "No, no, no, no."
And I was like, oh, my God,
she betrayed me.
He grabbed me by the throat and started choking me
and then lifted me up and smashed my head into
the drywall.
And I'm choking. I couldn't breathe.
I'm turning blue, and no one's helping me.
I'm dead. I know I'm dead.
He was mad that I told on him about the toys.
I was a snitch, and...
it almost got me killed by
confiding in somebody that I trusted.
Life lesson -- don't trust anybody.
Keep your mouth shut.
From my perspective, when I was younger.
I knew something was wrong,
but it's nothing you could really change.
You normalize things.
But when you get older and start to realize
this is not normal.
This is the opposite. It's abnormal.
Late '77, my brother and I were sharing a bedroom, and, um...
woke up in the middle of the night and heard some really
unsettling sounds.
[woman crying]
Sounded like a young girl crying and whimpering, "Duane,
no, stop, please, Duane, no," over and over and over.
[woman crying]
Both of us knew better than to go in there.
[woman screaming]
The next morning, a friend of my dad's came out for breakfast.
They were talking about the night
before and the girl, and I said,
"Hey, yeah, that's right, we heard some really weird
"noises last night, and it sounded like a girl was crying.
What was that all about?"
My father is like, "I don't really remember,"
kind of playing off, like, he's blacked out or something.
As soon as we were away from his friend,
he's like, "Dummy up. Don't talk about what happened."
"Dummy up" means shut up, don't talk.
Pretend like you're deaf, dumb, and mute.
You didn't hear anything.
From very early on, dad had certain rules.
You learn these lessons at an early age.
The bad guy was the good guy.
Cops were pigs.
Being a criminal was cool.
And probably the number one rule is
there's nothing worse than a snitch,
and he showed us that in many ways.
Stay out of the way.
My dad found out they were gonna press charges,
but he decided
that he wasn't going to stand trial for this.
Dad said, "Hey,
you guys want to go to Belize?"
And we're like...uh, "Yeah, I guess."
"Okay."
I think I was 13 at the time.
I pretty much figured out that we were on the run
to get away from the court case and the trial.
Dad decided that he was going to start what he called
an excursion business.
So my dad ended up meeting a English couple
from Manchester.
This is, uh,
Chris and Peta -- Chris Farmer
and Peta Frampton.
This is before we met them,
maybe after they started their vacation.
He was a doctor.
She was an attorney that had just recently graduated.
This was, uh,
only one leg of their journey of a world trip that
they had started in England and made it to
Australia and working their way through Mexico,
and then they crossed paths
with my dad in Belize.
We were in Belize on our newly, freshly-built sailboat.
They decided to come on board and, um...
hire us to take them to
down south to Roatan, Honduras.
Unfortunately, they never got there.
This is where we lived for several months,
on board this fishing boat, sailboat.
That's my brother.
I'm the blonde kid, and this is Chris Farmer.
This is in 1978.
They became
part of the crew,
especially, um, Chris.
He wanted to learn how to sail.
He was manning the boat, the tiller.
He wanted to know how to navigate, all these things.
He was -- he was down for everything,
whereas Peta was a little bit more quiet
and resigned herself to the galley and cooking
and that sort of thing, writing letters.
At this point, things were peaceful
and having a great time.
Happy dad came back,
the charming dad that he could be
to impress the new guests.
But it wasn't long until, uh...
the mood changed.
When we'd be out in long stretches sailing,
he would drink this Jamaican rum drink.
Then he would get abusive when he would drink.
He had my brother pull up the anchor.
And he went up there and clocked him
and started beating the crap out of him.
Chris and Peta said, "Stop!
"That's just -- that's enough.
He's a kid. Leave him alone."
Get off of him!
My dad was all drunk, and...
"Don't you [bleep] tell me about my kids,"
and tried to take a swing at Chris.
So dad missed.
He was just fuming.
He was very humiliated,
and that's when things really changed, I think.
You could see it in his eyes.
You can see the storm brewing,
I guess -- we knew that the party was over.
They kind of knew that he didn't want them
on the boat anymore.
He said something about offing them,
he wanted to get them off, and we just thought he meant get
them off the boat.
In hindsight,
it was easy to see that he'd been planning this for weeks
and premeditating, plotting,
planning every single detail and setting
up this murder far in advance.
We're anchored off the port of Livingston, Guatemala.
Dad had talked them into
that's where they're going to deport.
And we were just hoping that they
would just get off the boat and...
and go on their world trip that they were on.
He told Chris to go and pull up the anchor
at the front of the boat.
And he stealthily sneaks behind him
and takes this baton,
cracks him upside the head as hard as he can.
And then he keeps hitting him over and over and over.
Peta was in the aft galley, cooking or whatever
she was doing back there, and she pops up....
He says, "Get your [bleep] back down there,
or I'm gonna shoot you with a spear gun."
Get the hell out of here before I kill you.
VINCE: My brother and I, we're like, "What the [bleep]?"
And me, I'm like, what is going on?
Dad said, you know, "You need to pay me more money,"
and he's like, "Okay, that's fine.
We'll pay you. We'll pay you."
And dad took some rope
and tied up Chris.
Then he went back,
tied up Peta in the galley.
Says, "Your job is to stay awake and watch her
so she doesn't escape."
She was furious.
She looked me in the eye and said,
"You're gonna burn in hell."
And I'm thinking, yeah, she's probably right.
I said, "I wish I could let you go, but if I do,
he's gonna kill all of us."
I felt so... helpless at that point.
You're in a circle of water,
and even if you could escape,
I didn't speak Spanish at the time.
I don't even know if I could have
communicated with the authorities.
They don't speak English.
When you're on a small boat,
and you know that the guy that has your life in their hands is
a psychopath and a serial killer
and has murdered your mom,
has threatened to murder you,
where are you gonna go?
You're trapped.
The next morning,
I remember he untied
Chris, because he wanted him to
sign his -- countersign his traveler's checks.
He was tied up, but he could still move his arms.
He had us all convinced that
it was just a robbery -- he was gonna
take their traveler's checks and then let 'em go.
That was what he kept telling us and telling them.
And, uh... we all believed him.
My dad got two plastic bags,
came back,
put one over Chris's head.
Did the same thing to Peta.
Dad was telling them
that he was gonna
take them out to this one shore and then
tie 'em up to a tree, but he didn't steer towards the shore.
He steered out to the deep water.
Turns kind of inky black,
and you can't see any land.
He took Chris, or Peta, topside.
He had them tied with the wrists together,
and then their ankles were all tied together.
He went down below decks and brought out
the ballasts, the two big pieces of machinery.
It was heavy weights in the bottom of the boat.
He took another length of rope and tied it on to first Chris
then Peta, with the weight on the other end.
He said, "Okay.
"We're really close now. I'm gonna toss you overboard
and just stand right up."
And he picked up Chris and threw him
overboard and then threw the weight after him.
Went back and threw Peta over
and threw the weight overboard.
I remember watching the bubbles
when they were going down.
I'm just like, what the [bleep] just happened?
What is going on?
I remember my knees were just shaking.
After that, aside from the wind, it was dead silence.
No one said anything until about
two or three minutes later.
My dad looked at his digital watch and said, "Okay,
they're dead now."
And then he said, um...
You know I had to do that.
They left me no choice.
Of course he had a choice.
It's hard to process.
It's like having a nightmare, and you just can't
wake up, and you have no control over it.
We didn't say anything.
I was just, like, in shock.
With the benefit of hindsight, you have these fantasies
and scenarios where I'm some kind of superhero.
And I'm just a scrawny kid. What am I gonna do?
We were trapped on board with a psychopath.
You fear for your life at that point, you think,
you know, okay, he really is a serial killer.
VINCE: At that point, he needed us
to clean up his mess, so to speak.
He's trying to hide evidence,
immediately shifted into cover tracks.
He sold the boat,
took that money, bought
one-way tickets for all three of us from Belize City.
After we came back from Belize,
I wanted to distance myself as much as possible.
I knew that even being around him was dangerous.
At 17, with my dad's signature, I was able to...
to join the Navy and get away.
I stopped talking to my father.
I wasn't under his thumb anymore.
I was able to, for the first time,
feel safe about reporting him, and I tried.
So I got some quarters and went to
the pay phone in the barracks, try to call...
Scotland Yard.
That was the place to call for British police.
So I called them, and I told them
who I was and what I witnessed.
Nothing -- nothing ever followed through.
At that point, I...
had taken Spanish in high school.
I was able to converse
pretty good in Spanish, so I called
Guatemala, because that's where they found the bodies.
I said, "My name is Vince Boston.
"My father is Silas Duane Boston.
"In the year 1978, we were in Livingston,
Guatemala, and my father killed two people on our boat."
I couldn't get any traction
at all, just...dead air, just silence.
You feel like
didn't these people's lives mean anything?
For years, I tried to contact anybody
I could think of.
This is a monster that's continuing to do this.
He needs to be stopped,
and no one seemed to care.
No one stopped him, no one followed through.
I've tried contacting Belize, Guatemala, U.K. --
those were all dead ends.
Only way I could do this was starting at
home base, my hometown, with my mother's murder / disappearance.
The first time I got some traction was around 2010, 2011,
when I contacted a, at the time, Sergeant, now Lieutenant,
who was in charge of homicide and missing persons
in Sacramento Police Department.
He started the ball rolling.
There were gonna reopen the case.
Around that same time,
in the United Kingdom, the authorities there had
started their own what they call an inquest.
And so they were also looking into the double homicide.
I found out through Sacramento P.D.
that my father
knew or suspected that I was the one that
was talking to the police about what he had done.
I got word back,
"What's wrong with Vince?
"Why is he saying all this stuff
"about his mom, about these people in Belize?
Why -- why would he even say anything like that?"
Snitches should be killed.
I was warned by
my brother and my half-brother that
I need to be on the lookout.
You're always looking over your shoulder.
They had to interview people and witnesses.
They had to put all their little ducks in a row.
A couple years later, they had
enough information to make the arrest.
They finally arrested my dad, December 1st, 2016.
This is my dad's arrest picture.
His eyes are...
like piercing, and...
it's almost like a caricature of who I remember
my dad was.
It's a horrible picture.
This is like the stuff of nightmares.
He had stopped taking his medications.
And apparently, he stopped eating.
He was in the hospital.
I said, you know, he's trying to kill himself,
and you're gonna let him die before he can stand trial?
My brother was there with him,
and
asking for basically
information about the location of my mom's body.
Even though he knew that it was
the end for him, by his own terms,
he still would refuse to
let us know where we could find our mom.
What kind of person does that? I would say a monster,
a selfish, egotistical, evil monster.
My brother asked him,
how many people do you remember killing?
And he said, "Well,
"I think it's about 33.
That's much of -- that's as many as I remember."
Who are these other people?
Each person has a whole family
and loved ones and maybe children
that are grieving
because of his actions and his selfishness.
But my father died while he was awaiting trial.
We can't bring our loved ones back.
My mom was still dead, those people were still dead.
He had lived his whole life in freedom.
He died at, you know,
78 years old or whatever he was.
He took his own life
on his own terms -- is that really
justice, that he got away with it
all these years, you know, they say delayed justice
is justice denied, right?
It's not easy to deal with.
It makes me sick to my stomach.
It makes me
rethink all those questions.
What could I have done?
Could I have done something different?
With the past already happened,
the only thing you can do is try to make today
the best you can and be the best person that you can.
There isn't a day that goes by that
I don't think about my mom.
She'll always be 23 in my mind.
I have no idea where she is.
I would love to find her
and bring her home, you know, and give her a proper,
decent burial.
I've given my DNA, and they said
it was going into the CODIS database.
They said if there was a hit, they would let us know.
I'm still waiting for that phone call or an email.