Collier Landry will never forget the look in his mother’s eyes when she told him what to do should she ever disappear.
Speaking with quiet urgency she handed her then 11-year-old son a list of the names and numbers of friends he should contact. It was a list that, she told him, he must keep secret from his violent and abusive father.
He crumpled up the piece of paper on which it was written, unzipped the back of his Garfield plushy and stuffed it inside for safe keeping.
Three weeks later Landry woke in the night to the sound of his mother’s terrified screams followed by two loud thumps.
His bedroom door was half open and, paralyzed by fear, the boy hid under the covers. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard his mother suffer at the hands of his father, Dr John Boyle, but it was the last.
Landry watched his father’s shoes shuffle along the hallway, too scared to call out. He didn’t know it then, but he had just overheard his mother’s brutal murder in the family home in Mansfield, Ohio.
It was the tragic end that Noreen, 42 when she was killed, had herself foreseen and it would ultimately fall to Landry to provide key testimony that saw his father convicted of the December 1989 killing and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Now, 36 years after that crime and after two failed attempts at parole, Boyle is set to make his third bid for freedom when he faces the parole board next month.
Pictured: Collier Landry as a young boy with his mother, Noreen, and father John Boyle. Boyle went on to kill Noreen in a vicious attack that Landry overheard without realizing the deadly outcome.
Pictured: Landry and his mom when he was aged around three in their neighborhood of Mansfield, Ohio. He was devoted to her and distraught when she was killed some eight years later.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail on the eve of that hearing, Landry, 47, has shared his dread that the man who has never accepted his guilt and against whom he testified at trial could be set to walk free.
‘He had all the hallmarks of a psychopath. He was not only violent but also a malignant, narcissistic liar who intimidated and belittled us at every opportunity,’ Landry, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, said.
According to Landry, he and his mother walked on eggshells throughout his childhood. The pair did everything they could to avoid Boyle’s raging temper during which he’d physically and verbally lash out.
He was also unfaithful, Landry believes, for most of the marriage. Noreen did her best to shield her son from this infidelity but in the fall of 1989, soon after the family had adopted a toddler from Taiwan, and just months before Noreen’s untimely death, Boyle crossed a line.
He took his fifth grader on his medical rounds and introduced him to a heavily pregnant women named Sherri Lee Campbell, then 27, who was later named in the court proceedings.
To Landry’s shock, his father and Campbell openly kissed and cuddled in his presence.
Worse still, he noticed that his father’s mistress was wearing one of his mother’s distinctive rings. Boyle’s infidelity would later be offered up as a motive for the murder which, police believed, was premeditated.
Landry told Noreen. She was appalled that her husband had not only likely impregnated his mistress, but he had also been thoughtless enough to involve their son. She filed for divorce in November 1989.
Boyle responded by lurching between apparent indifference and outright anger.
Landry recalled, ‘He said he would see to it that mom and I would live on the streets.
‘He said I’d never go to college or make anything of myself, while he lived this fabulous life with his girlfriend and a new family.’
Boyle’s tendency towards aggression scared his wife so much, she gave Landry that secret note along with the instructions that haunt him to this day.
Less than a month later, after hearing those ominous thumps in the early morning hours of December 31, 1989, Landry awoke to find his mother gone.
He walked downstairs to find his father sitting calmly on the couch.
‘Where’s Mommy?’ Landry, who tells his story in the new podcast series, ‘Finding Mom’s Killer,’ recalled saying.
His dad replied with the bone-chilling statement, ‘She’s taken a little vacation.’
Boyle insisted there was no need to call the cops because he’d seen his wife leave the house after an argument in an unknown car.
But Landry knew that his mother would never have left him and his new sister with his father.
True to his mother’s words, he locked himself in the bathroom and called her friends. They duly contacted the police.
Those calls led to a missing person inquiry which subsequently turned into a hunt for a killer.
Pictured: Dr. Jack Boyle at his trial for first degree murder and felony abuse of a corpse. His son, Landy, tells the Daily Mail, ‘He had all the hallmarks of a psychopath,’ referencing his abuse towards him and his mother.
Pictured: Landy, at the age of just 1 1, testified against his father in court. He helped bring him to justice by teaming up with the lead detective in the case who was something of a father figure to him.
Boyle had been interviewed by detectives. He blithely stuck to his unknown car theory and, to Landry’s frustration, the cops initially seemed to dismiss his own youthful suspicions as fanciful.
Thankfully, two days after his mother was first reported missing, lead detective, Lieutenant David Messmore, stepped in.
Messmore met Landry at his elementary school — away from Boyle’s clutches — and Landry told the officer all about his father’s abusive behaviors and the pregnant woman he’d met.
Messmore, whom Landry describes as ‘honorable, kind and a father figure,’ took the boy’s claims seriously.
Two weeks later, after a search of the Boyle home yielded no clues, Landry found some photos in the glove compartment of his dad’s car.
They showed Boyle hugging the pregnant woman inside a home he didn’t recognize.
He presented them to Messmore, who later discovered that Boyle was about to close his Mansfield practice and start a well-paid job for a firm in Erie, Pennsylvania.
A realtor confirmed that the doctor and his expectant ‘wife’ had recently bought a house in the city.
It was enough for authorities to grant detectives a warrant to search the Erie property, some 175 miles away from the Mansfield family home, which they did on January 26, 1990.
Officers found a carpet over a patch of newly laid concrete in the basement. When they cracked the floor open, they found Noreen’s decomposed body lying underneath.
Boyle was arrested the same day.
Pictured: Boyle’s house in Erie, Pennsylvania, which became a crime scene after police found the decomposing body of his missing wife under newly-laid concrete in the basement.
Pictured: Landry as a young boy clutching one of his toys. He hid the list of contact numbers given by his mom inside the back of a plushy in order to keep it away from his father.
Landry tells the Daily Mail that he was spared the details of the state of his mother’s corpse. But it was only a temporary reprieve – the horrifying facts emerged during his father’s trial in June that same year.
Noreen’s body had been wrapped in green tarp and a white plastic bag placed over her head which, a coroner testified, her husband had used to suffocate her.
The prosecution revealed that Boyle had rented a jackhammer two days before Noreen disappeared and used this act as evidence of malice aforethought, meaning the killing was premeditated.
Prosecutors argued that Boyle’s motive was his desire to start afresh with Campbell and their child.
Their star witness was Landry, who was not even 12 when he took the stand and told the jury about the years of abuse he and his mother had endured, the noises he heard on the night of his mother’s disappearance and his father’s cold reaction when asked where she’d gone.
Uncharacteristically, Boyle took his son and daughter to McDonald’s for pancakes that morning and Landry told the court that he was unnerved.
He testified, ‘He was acting like daddy dearest and daddy perfect and so nice and stuff like that.’
Pictured: Landry today at the age of 47. During his testimony against his father in court, he said he was uncharacteristically kind after the murder. ‘He was acting like daddy dearest and daddy perfect and so nice and stuff like that,’ the boy testified.
The defense suggested Landry had been too poised and articulate to have not been coached — an accusation that today he finds ridiculous.
He said, ‘I heard what happened that night and nobody planted those ideas in my mind.
‘But the easiest thing to remember is the truth. It flows out of your mouth because it’s pure honesty.’
Meanwhile Boyle took the stand and kept to his story that Noreen had left in somebody else’s car after a fight. He said another person must have murdered her and buried her body in his home.
The defense fell flat and he was found guilty of murder in the first degree and felony abuse of a corpse.
The podcast includes some of the heartbreaking letters that Landry sent to his dad in March 1991. Searching for answers, he asked, ‘Dad, just to get things off my chest, why did you kill Mom? I know you think you didn’t do it, but if you didn’t, why are you in prison?’
He goes on to say that ‘even though you have hurt me…you are my father. And I owe you a great debt.’
Boyle, who was appealing his conviction at the time, responded with letters claiming he’d lied. He tried to get his son to recant his court testimony. When he refused, Boyle sent him a typed letter in November 1992 that was full of bile.
‘I will not subscribe to your petulant attitude,’ Boyle wrote in the eight-page rant. ‘I will not feel sorry for poor Colliers. Your day is coming when all will be displayed in court.’
He appealed his conviction, but it was upheld. In desperation, Boyle tried to pressure his son to recant his testimony. When he refused the older man sent his son a furious eight-page letter.
In the letter, dated November 1992, Boyle seethed, ‘I will not feel sorry for poor Collier. Your day is coming when all will be displayed in court.’
Pictured: A letter that Landry wrote to his father in prison, seeking answers about the death of his mother. He writes, ‘You are my father and I owe you a great debt.’ He also writes above his signature, ‘I love you!’
Of course that day never came and two subsequent attempts to be released on parole both ended in failure.
Now he is set to appear before the parole board for a third time in June. Perhaps unsurprisingly Landry opposes his father’s release.
He said, ‘He took away my mother — a beautiful, gentle person with a smile that could light up a room.
‘But he has never fully admitted murdering her.’
Landry interviewed his father in prison for ‘Finding Mom’s Killer,’ and to this day, he said, Boyle’s account of what happened is full of holes.
‘One moment he describes burying the body,’ Landry explained. ‘The next he says it was an accident, or Mom came at him with a knife, and he gave her CPR.’
There is always, Landry noted, a gaping ‘accountability gap’ in his father’s version of events, one that sees him consistently refuse to take ownership of the part he played in his wife’s death.
Landry said, ‘I think it’s necessary for a person accused of such a heinous crime to take a level of responsibility that is satisfactory to the parole board.’
Today Landry’s relationship with his now 82-year-old father is more complicated than some might expect.
He doesn’t view him as a risk to society at large – believing that Boyle would be incapable of reoffending.
It might be natural to assume that he must hate the man who took his mother’s life and brought such damage and pain to his own.
Looking at the lasting effects of Boyle’s crime, his teenage years were scarred as he struggled through foster care.
None of his family offered to care for him or his sister whom Landry hasn’t seen since the murder.
Some treated him as a traitor for his testimony against his father, others, he believes, struggled to look at him because he looked physically like his mother.
But Landry doesn’t hate him, and he maintains a cordial relationship with Campbell and his half-sister, who was born 12 days before the discovery of Noreen’s body.
In fact, Landry said, he has forgiven his father. He said, ‘People ask why I did, but it’s not about my dad.
‘I choose myself and my peace over hatred because it will ultimately destroy you.’
Pictured: Noreen and Boyle with Landry as a baby. Landry tells the Daily Mail, ‘I choose myself and my peace over hatred because it will ultimately destroy you.’
Still, it wasn’t until his forties that he managed to overcome the fear that he might have inherited his father’s capacity for evil.
He explained, ‘You do a self-exploration when you grow up knowing your father is a murderer and the victim was your mother. You are worried that you could potentially carry on these same traits.’
It took time for him to realize he was his own person who no longer had to be cast as a murderer’s son.
Instead, he converted his own painful experience into something that might benefit others who are the victims of violent crime, abuse and severe trauma — particularly children of serious offenders — by running social media channels offering advice and support.
Landry said, ‘As an advocate, I want to show people that you can go through this unspeakable trauma, and despite what seems like insurmountable odds, reach the other side.
‘You’re not going to be unscathed, but you’re going to come out okay as a person who doesn’t live in fear.’
