By Faith Karimi, CNN
(CNN) — Collier Landry heard a piercing scream and two thuds. He pulled the covers over his face as heavy footsteps passed outside his bedroom door. The glowing Batman clock on his wall said it was 3:17 a.m.
The 11-year-old boy held his breath, a flurry of questions racing through his mind: What was going on? Who was lurking outside his door? What had caused the commotion?
The footsteps briefly paused in the hallway — as if to check whether he was awake — then faded into the night.
Young Collier came downstairs the next morning looking for his mother. It was the last day of 1989 — New Year’s Eve — and his father sat on the living room couch in their home in Mansfield, Ohio. He calmly told his son that his mother had left them and gone on a vacation.
Sensing Collier’s distrust, his father told him, “I never laid a finger on mommy.” He threatened to punish him if he called the police and reported that she’d disappeared, Landry later said.
The boy felt something was off. His mother wouldn’t just leave him — especially not during the holiday season, he said. And so began a tragedy that captivated north-central Ohio and soon unearthed one dark secret after another.
Determined to uncover the truth, Collier called a friend of his mother’s — a woman she’d urged him to contact in an emergency. The call prompted a police investigation, with Collier as a key witness. Without his father’s knowledge he provided crucial details to the lead detective, marking a turning point in the case.
Three weeks after she vanished, police exhumed Noreen Boyle’s body from the basement of a home 175 miles away in Erie, Pennsylvania. She was wrapped in a green tarp and her head was covered with a white plastic bag, which a coroner testified had been used to suffocate her.
Five months later John Francis Boyle Jr. was found guilty of aggravated murder and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
After more than three decades, the case is back in the spotlight with the release of a new podcast, “Finding Mom’s Killer,” which chronicles how the preteen boy teamed up with Mansfield police detective Dave Messmore to uncover the devastating truth about his mother’s disappearance. Collier Landry told CNN that after years of silence he now regularly talks to his father, who is incarcerated at the Marion Correctional Institute in Ohio.
Boyle is now 81, and his third parole hearing is approaching in August. His son is struggling with a new whirlwind of emotions at the possibility of his dad’s release from prison.
“I don’t feel vengeful toward my father … but it doesn’t mean that we can skip down the yellow brick road holding hands and being like, you know, everything’s great,” said Landry, who dropped the Boyle name after his father’s conviction.
Landry is 47 now — about the same age as his father when he killed his mother.
“I wonder, am I like him? Am I capable of this?” he said. “What separates my life with this person’s life? Why am I the one who will not carry on this legacy of violence?”
He discovered his dad’s secret while accompanying him on house calls
To an outsider, the Boyles’ family life in the 1980s might have appeared idyllic.
John Boyle was an osteopathic doctor who ran a family practice in Mansfield. His photogenic family looked like they’d stepped from the pages of a magazine. The couple had also adopted a younger child, Elizabeth, from China and lived in a modest home with their wire fox terrier, Gowdy.
Landry recalled some of his favorite moments during family road trips. His father played classical music in their car, and Landry would sit in the backseat, waving a straw and pretending to be the conductor.
He loved accompanying his father on his house calls — some doctors still made those back then — in the city of 50,000 people about 75 miles southwest of Cleveland.
During those visits, his father appeared especially interested in a younger woman he described as one of his patients, Landry said. He witnessed his father and the woman taking walks, holding hands and stealing kisses.
Landry became more suspicious when he noticed the woman was wearing his mom’s diamond ring. It had two tiny bars to glide the diamonds back-and-forth, a distinctive design that made it easily noticeable, he said.
He told his mom about the other woman, which led to arguments between his parents, he said. His mother filed for divorce. She began to feel unsafe and gave him the names and numbers of her friends, he said.
“She said, ‘Collier, if your father happens to say that I might have left, call all my friends and have them contact the police and have them investigate how I disappeared,’” Landry testified in court.
The boy hid the paper with the phone numbers inside a stuffed Garfield cat on his bedroom dresser — not knowing that he’d need it only weeks later.
A meeting with a detective changed the course of the investigation
Less than two months after the couple filed for divorce, Noreen Boyle disappeared.
Suspicious, Collier called her friends soon after, and they notified the police. Messmore, the Mansfield Police detective, showed up at the Boyles’ doorstep.
Messmore, who’s now retired, told CNN that it was unusual for police to rely on the word of an 11-year-old. But Collier — with his neatly coiffed brown hair, pressed slacks, polo shirt and penny loafers — seemed to the detective like a miniature adult who made it clear in no uncertain terms that something had happened to his mother.
“He was … adamant that there was something really wrong,” Messmore said. “He was close with his mother, and she took him everywhere.”
As Messmore looked deeper into Collier’s concerns, he discovered the couple was in the middle of a bitter divorce and fighting over alimony, child support, joint credit card debts and other financial issues, he said.
Messmore visited the boy at his elementary school. With permission from the principal, they would meet in an empty classroom and talk.
About two weeks after Noreen Boyle’s disappearance, Collier found photos in the console of his father’s truck that changed the course of the investigation.
They showed his father hugging the younger woman next to a fireplace inside a house the boy had never seen before. The woman appeared pregnant. Collier shared the information with Messmore, who discovered that Boyle planned to shutter his Ohio practice for a lucrative job at a company in Erie.
Messmore also learned that Boyle and the woman had bought the house in Erie together, and she had signed the real estate paperwork as his wife.
A search of the Mansfield home had not yielded any clues, so investigators got a warrant for the Erie home, Messmore said.
Authorities spotted a green carpet in one section of the home’s unfinished basement and ripped it out to reveal a fresh patch of concrete in the shape of a gravesite. They cracked it open and found her body.
Prosecutors learned Boyle had rented a jackhammer two days before his wife disappeared and cited it as evidence of premeditation.
“It wasn’t something where he just lost his temper. It was something he planned for a period of time,” Messmore said.
Boyle was indicted and went on trial in June 1990.
Collier, who was the prosecution’s star witness, described the sounds he heard that night. He also shared how his father’s demeanor changed after his mother disappeared. The morning she went missing, he took both children to McDonald’s for pancakes.
“He was acting like daddy dearest and daddy perfect and so nice and stuff like that,” he testified, according to a court transcript.
A jury found Boyle guilty. In statements to the jury, the prosecution used chilling words to describe the doctor: “Healer by day, killer by night.”
After years of silence, he recently reconnected with his father
Within months, Collier lost everything: his parents, his sister, his home, his dog. He went from a little boy whose parents doted on him to being the child of both a murderer and a victim.
He lived in foster homes — Messmore’s family briefly took him in — before he was adopted by a Mansfield couple whose child attended the same private school. His adopted sister went to a different home and like him, changed her last name. Landry has not seen her since, he said.
Still haunted by his mother’s death, Collier Landry reached out to his father in prison not long after he was found guilty. In one of his initial letters in March 1991, he got straight to the point.
“Dad, just to get things off my chest, why did you kill my mom? I know you think you didn’t do it, but if you didn’t, why are you in prison?” he wrote. “Don’t get my reasoning wrong. I do love you. Even though you have hurt me … you are my father. And I owe you a great debt.”
His father was appealing his conviction and responded with letters calling Landry a liar and urging him to recant his testimony. After he refused, his father sent him an eight-page letter in November 1992 suggesting he was delusional, Landry said.
“I will not subscribe to your petulant attitude. I will not feel sorry for poor Collier,” he wrote. “Your day is coming when all will be displayed in court. The difference will be that I will not remain silent this time. You have released me from any compulsion to protect you.”
Landry cut off communication with his father and built a new life with his adopted family. He majored in vocal performance at Ohio University before dropping out of school to move to Los Angeles, where he works as a freelance filmmaker and podcaster. Today he lives in Santa Monica, California, with his chihuahua, Marisol.
“I got out of Mansfield as fast as I could,” he said. “People always recognized me, stared and whispered. No one knew my story in LA, and I was in a place where I could do something to honor my mother as a filmmaker.”
Landry said he has struggled with his identity as the child of both a murderer and a murder victim. As part of his healing journey, he said, he took part in a 2017 documentary, “Murder in Mansfield” and hosts a podcast, “The Collier Landry Show,” which dissects his mother’s killing and sheds light on the complexities of human violence.
Some people have accused him of exploiting the tragedy for financial gain, which Landry denies.
“Profiteering is a stretch. But I would say the misery is mostly mine, so I’m entitled to use it to raise awareness,” said Landry, who added he’s sharing his story to encourage others going through similar family violence.
“I have lived every step of my life to not be defined by this or to not let myself succumb to this,” he said. “I want to lead by example … you can go through unspeakable traumatic situations and come out on the other side OK. It’s possible.”
After not talking to his father for nearly a decade, Landry reconnected with him earlier this year while making the podcast, “Finding Mom’s Killer.” The two now talk frequently by phone but have not met in person since Landry last visited his father in prison in 2015.
Their most recent conversations included a mix of topics: his father’s beloved Philadelphia Eagles and their Super Bowl run; his plans if he’s granted parole; Landry explaining how text messages work.
Landry said he still wonders what drove his dad to kill his mother just as his career as a doctor was taking off.
“You had everything — a family, a thriving business. You f***ed everything up … Why? For what?” he said. “You caused so much reciprocal damage to so many people. Not just me. Not just my mother, not just him — there were so many ancillary characters, so much collateral damage from his violence.”
After decades of denial, his father confessed to the murder
For years, Boyle denied killing his wife.
During the trial in June 1990, he denied responsibility for her death and said he didn’t know how her body got in the basement of the home in Erie, Messmore said.
He stuck to that story for decades until he appeared on “Finding Mom’s Killer.” In the podcast, he confessed to killing his wife and offered his version of how it happened, but said it was an accident.
“Noreen’s death will always remain a tragedy forever into eternity and I’m the one responsible for that — accidental or otherwise,” Boyle said on the podcast.
He said she fatally hit her head on a stool during an explosive argument and that he covered her head with the plastic bag out of guilt. He loaded her body in his car that night and drove it to his new home in Erie the next day.
“I dragged it over and put it in the hole … thinking it’s going to disappear on its own,” Boyle said in the podcast. “Thinking if I covered it up, it would never be discovered. And I would never have to see it again or think about it.”
But Messmore said he doesn’t buy Boyle’s story. As a doctor he should have treated his wife’ injuries, but he wanted to get rid of her and start a new life with his pregnant girlfriend, Messmore said.
“I’d like to see him stay in prison for the rest of his life,” he said about his upcoming parole hearing. “He’s got no business being out here.”
No attorney is listed for Boyle’s upcoming parole hearing. He declined to comment when CNN reached out to him through his son.
He wonders how his life would be different if the tragedy never happened
Landry also believes his mother’s death wasn’t an accident.
But his feelings about his father’s potential release are more complicated. He wonders how an elderly convicted murderer would re-enter a world that’s nothing like the one he left behind.
Where would his father live? How can he readjust to a society that’s mostly digital? Would he be able to work and support himself?
“It’s hard enough for anybody to get a job these days, let alone a convicted felon who’s going to be 82 years old,” he said.
On a recent phone call, his dad joked about moving into his son’s garage. Landry quickly shut that idea down.
Landry said he hasn’t listened to the new podcast because it’s overwhelming for him to revisit the grim details about his mother’s murder. He took a deep breath before clarifying that he has no hate for his father and is not against his parole.
“It’s a lot for me to think about. I’m still trying to keep my own head above water. I’m still dealing with the lingering effects of this trauma and what I’ve been through,” he said.
His dad’s potential prison release adds another layer of complexity, he said. “What makes sense? What doesn’t? What’s fair? There are so many different nuances with all of this.”
Landry said he wonders what his life would have been like if his mom wasn’t killed. He wonders what it’s like to grow up in a family with “normal” parents.
“My favorite quality about myself is I’m a genuinely nice and kind person,” he said. “I’m just grateful that this tragedy didn’t rob me of these things.”
He relishes his life in Southern California, where he can go to the beach, play pickleball with friends and pursue his photography and filmmaking passions without the burden of his father’s shadow. There, he said, he can share his story on his own terms.
The little boy who sent his father to prison is gone. In his place, he said, is a man using his platform to tell others that there’s hope beyond the trauma.
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An Ohio doctor killed his wife 36 years ago. As his parole hearing nears, his son wrestles with his emotions News Channel 3-12.
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