Collier Landry Boyle awoke with a start. It was 1989, just five days after Christmas, and he heard screaming.
Then, a thud.
The 11-year-old glanced at his beloved Batman clock. It was 3:18 a.m. Petrified, he burrowed into the covers and fixed his eyes on a soothing painting of a sailboat on the wall. Footsteps echoed in the hallway, paused outside his bedroom door, and continued on.
The little boy didn’t know it then, but he'd just heard his mother, Noreen Boyle, being murdered in their Mansfield, Ohio home. The ominous footsteps came from his father, prominent osteopath Dr. John Boyle, checking to see if his son had heard anything.
It took weeks for police to discover Noreen’s body, wrapped in a tarp with a plastic bag over her head, beneath the basem*nt of a home John recently purchased in Erie, Pennsylvania. He'd broken up the floor, buried her, poured over fresh concrete, and built a shelving unit on top. John was arrested and convicted on one count of aggravated murder and one count of abuse of a corpse.
In the documentary A Murder in Mansfield, airing on Investigation Discovery on November 17 at 9 p.m., Collier Landry (he now uses his middle name as his last name)—confronts his imprisoned father nearly 30 years after the crime, hopeful at long last to learn the motive for murder by the man he calls a "sociopath and a psychopath."
Collier Landry confronted his father John Boyle in prison nearly 30 years after he was convicted of murdering his wife, Noreen. During their meeting, John said he "accidentally" killed her. Collier tells Esquire.com he thinks that’s "bullsh*t."
Noreen and John met when they were 17 and 19, respectively. They married in 1968 and had Landry 10 years later. Just six months before the murder, they adopted a little girl named Elizabeth, from Taiwan.
John, a well-to-do doctor was "always on call," Landry tells Esquire.com. "He was hardly there growing up. My relationship with my mother was the only real relationship I knew. I was always with her... She was my best friend in a lot of ways, and I think it was reciprocal."
Noreen and John Boyle got married in 1968 and welcomed their baby boy Collier ten years later. John, an osteopath, was "hardly around" when he was a child.
As he got 0lder, Landry began to suspect his father was cheating on his mother. But it wasn't until he met Sherri, John's girlfriend, in June of 1989 that "everything started to click," he says. "They kissed and she was wearing my mother's ring. I told my mom, 'I think daddy's having an affair.' " At the time, Sherri was pregnant with John's baby.
According to local newspaper Mansfield News Journal, Noreen filed for divorce in November 1989 after 22 years of marriage, citing extreme mental cruelty and gross neglect.
Landry and his mother were "best friends" when he was a child.
Just one month later, on the evening of December 30, 1989, John came home late and fell asleep on the family's living room couch. In the early hours of December 31, Noreen woke her husband up and "started hollering about different things, Mansfield, money, Sherri, everything under the sun," John says during the prison visit with his son, as seen in the ID documentary. "She picked up a knife and came at me with the knife. I pushed her and she hit her head against that wooden table."
He claims to have attempted to administer CPR, but "she was lifeless, she was dead."
"I panicked," he says in the documentary. "I put the plastic bag over her head because I was afraid to look at her, scared to look at her."
Noreen's body was discovered on Jan. 25, 1990, in the basem*nt of a home John recently purchased in Erie, Pennsylvania. She was wrapped in tarp with a plastic bag covering her head and buried two-feet below the basem*nt floor.
The story he'd recount in court during the trial a year later was quite different. According to a trial transcript obtained by Esquire.com, John testified that he "never struck her at all" during their marriage. "No I did not [cause the death]," he adds. "I did not kill Noreen; I never harmed her at all."
"It's all bullsh*t," Landry says of his father's differing accounts of that night. "It's bullsh*t because his story has changed so many times from the trial to now... There's no hiding the fact that this was a premeditated murder."
When Landry asked where his mother was, his father said, "Mommy took a vacation, we got into an argument."
The morning of December 31, Landry woke up and ran to his mother's bedroom. She wasn't there. When he asked his father where she went, John said, "Mommy took a vacation, we got into an argument," as Landry recalls. "He sat me down and gave me a whole lecture about how we weren't going to call the police. I didn't trust my father as far as I could throw him. I snuck away with the portable phone and called Shelly [Bowden, Noreen's best friend]."
Less than a month later, on January 25, 1990, police discovered Noreen's body wrapped in tarp with a plastic bag covering her head in a home John recently purchased in Erie, Pennsylvania. She was buried two-feet below the basem*nt in "soft, white clay," according to the Mansfield News Journal. A green carpet covered the floor.
"He was such a control freak," the late Richland County Prosecutor James Mayer Jr. told the newspaper. "He wanted the body right underneath his feet. That was the type of guy he was. He was diabolical."
John Boyle was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for the murder of his wife and 18 months for abuse of a corpse.
Landry was only 12 when he took the stand at his father's trial. He told the courtroom, "I was extremely afraid of my father. I always have [been]."
The jury convicted John after six hours of deliberations. One of the key pieces of evidence that led to the decision was a jackhammer John leased before the murder. It was allegedly used to tear up the basem*nt floor, where Noreen's body was found.
One of John's defense attorneys, Bob Whitney, told the Mansfield News Journal his client claimed it was for "ice on the brick sidewalk of his (local) home. He was afraid his wife and children would slip and fall."
John was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for aggravated murder and 18 months for abuse of a corpse. He is up for parole in 2020.
Collier Landry was in foster care for nine months, before he was adopted by the Zeiglers.
Landry was placed in foster care for nine months before the Zeigler family, who lived in Ontario, adopted him. He was happy in his new life, but yearned for answers from his imprisoned father. He wrote him often, even offering forgiveness in one letter:
Dear Dad, I know you’re never going to tell me why you killed mommy. I know you’ll never tell me why you cheated on her so much. I don’t think our friends and family will ever forgive you completely for killing my mommy... But if you pass on soon I want you know that I forgive you I still love you dad never forget that. I really hope you face up to what you’ve done and realize that it was wrong. Much love, Collier
His father wrote back:
I am guilty of no crime against your mother. Your poisonous “communication" is more aptly the product of some nearby cesspool… You are imbued with hate… you unctuous brat! You shameful coward! You are truly evil! We, therefore, no longer consider you a member of our family.
His father wrote him from prison calling him an "unctuous brat."
For years, Landry had a recurring nightmare that he'd "stumble upon mom's body in the middle of a snowfield and dig it up," he says. "I'd pull up a concrete placard in the snow and see her head."
It wasn't until recently, when he teamed up with two-time Academy Award winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple to make A Murder in Mansfield, that the graphic dreams finally ceased. "It brought me a degree of closure," Landry, now a 40-year-old cinematographer living in Los Angeles, says. "To be able to tell my story, to impact lives, it has changed and made me grow and evolved me into someone I think my mother would be quite proud of."
Looking for total closure, he visited his father at Ohio's Marion Correctional Institution, and allowed Kopple to film the meeting. He walked into the prison hopeful to finally understand the motive behind the murder.
"Why kill her?" he asks his father, as seen in the documentary.
"I killed her by accident," John insists.
"This is the opportunity," Landry says. "[For] the truth."
"Collier, I have told you the truth," John says. "I don't know what story you're looking for. I have told you the truth."
Collier Landry, now 40, works as a cinematographer in Los Angeles.
Landry left unsatisfied and frustrated. He's forever done with his father's "bullsh*t," he says, and doesn't plan on speaking to him ever again.
"I have no desire to," he adds. "I came in to do what I had to do and I did it. Now I'm focusing on this opportunity I've been given to do something positive with this life I’ve been forced to lead. I want to inspire and motivate people."
