ON New Year’s Eve 1989, 11-year-old Collier Landry heard two loud thuds.
The noise came from his mother Noreen’s room in the early hours where she had been sleeping with his three-year-old adopted sister.
He then kept his eyes shut as he heard his estranged father’s footsteps walking towards his bedroom.
Now 44, he told The Sun: “I knew at that moment that if I had looked up I wouldn’t be here today.”
Collier had a seemingly happy upbringing in Mansfield, Ohio, where he was raised by his dental hygienist mother Noreen and his dad Dr John Boyle, a respected family doctor.
Behind closed doors, Noreen had been forced to turn a blind eye to violent and abusive Boyle’s rampant cheating.
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He said: “Apparently my mother's agreement with him was like, ‘Look, you can do whatever the f**k you wanted to do. The moment you involve our son, it's over’."
Boyle broke the rules in June 1989 when he introduced Collier to his 26-year-old mistress Sherri Campbell, pretending she was a patient.
“She had a ring on. I recognised it as my mother's and said something about it. And then I saw him French kiss her,” Collier said.
“He asked me to lie about it to my mother and I did. That's when I felt very guilty.
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“I literally sat my mother down in our little sunroom and I said ‘Mommy, I have something to tell you. I need you to sit down’.
“I said, 'I think Daddy's having an affair’.”
The news caused Noreen to file for divorce – and soon the split became bitter.
'Your father had me killed'
Collier said: “My mother had told me about two months before she was killed that she was afraid my father would kill her.
“She said, ‘Honey if I ever disappear, your father did something to me, your father had me killed’.”
So when Noreen went missing after Collier heard two loud bangs, he was convinced his father was responsible.
He said: “When I went down stairs and confronted my father he said ‘Well, Mommy took a little vacation Collier’.”
He added: “He specifically said, 'Don’t call the FBI,' which I thought was really strange.”
In the days that followed, Noreen’s disappearance was classed as a missing person’s case.
Meanwhile Boyle was setting up a new practice more than four hours away in Erie, Pennsylvania, and would be gone for days.
Collier used his absence to push the police to investigate his mother’s death and search the house for clues.
He said: “Batman had just come out, maybe I was trying to be Batman, who knows.”
Luckily one detective, Lieutenant David Messmore, listened to Collier – and decided to keep tabs on the case.
While Boyle was in a gas station, Collier took his chance to search his father’s glove box – where he made a shocking discovery.
He said: “I found these two pictures. One was the outside of a house in the snow and another was his girlfriend Sherri – who at the time, I didn’t know, was pregnant with my soon-to-be half sister – and her two kids.
“They were sitting in front of a fireplace that was wrapped in plastic. So it looked like it was a new fireplace.”
Collier called Lt Messmore from his principal’s office at school to fill him in on his discoveries.
Double life
As police investigated Boyle’s double life, they discovered Sherri had forged Noreen’s signature on a document to buy a new house with him in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile terrified Collier was still living with his father – fearing he would be next.
When Boyle suggested he and Collier take a trip to Florida, the 11-year-old knew he needed to get out.
He said: “I thought, ‘He’s onto me, he knows something’s up, he knows I’ve been talking to people’.”
After speaking to the police, social services stepped in and placed Collier and his sister with their principal.
The first night as a foster child, Collier had a huge asthma attack and ended up in hospital.
The following day, his principal broke some terrible news to him.
"He said, 'Lieutenant Messmore found your mother and…’ I remember there was this eternal pause – probably the longest pause of my life – ‘And she was dead’," Collier recalled.
“The first words that came out of my mouth were, ‘That b*****d’.”
“You don't want it to be right, you don’t want it to be your father. You want to pretend it’s all a dream – or nightmare rather.
“There’s nothing in that situation that anyone can say that’s going to bring that person back.”
Police discovered John had placed a plastic bag over Noreen’s head and suffocated her as he smashed the back of her skull in two loud thuds.
Collier said: “That’s an intimate killing.”
'He would have gotten away with it'
Boyle had earlier rented a jackhammer to dig a cavity in the basement of his new house – where he buried Noreen in cement.
When Boyle’s case came to trial, Collier, then 12, begged prosecutors to let him testify against his father, who had pleaded not guilty.
In the televised court case, Collier’s witness testimony cleared the streets of Mansfield, Ohio as everyone avidly watched.
Boyle was found guilty and handed a 20-year sentence for murder and abuse of a corpse. He was also stripped of his medical licence.
Collier said: “I'm the reason why he's in prison. He would have gotten away with it.”
Despite his conviction, Boyle’s old patients would approach Collier in the street.
Aged 22, Collier moved to Los Angeles and started his career as a model, a music producer and now a filmmaker.
In 2017 he made a documentary, Murder in Mansfield, where he confronted Boyle over his crimes in prison.
But his dad still denies killing Noreen – claiming he was framed.
Collier said: “In the film I confront my father about the murder and my father is, what I believe, a sociopath and psychopath.
“And he just completely denies it, flat out denies it.”
Boyle was denied parole in 2020 and has been locked up now for 31 years.
Now Collier's podcast, Moving Past Murder, tells his harrowing yet courageous tale and speaks to other victims of crime.
In an upcoming episode he interviews Debra and Terra Newell – whose story inspired Netflix’s Dirty John.
He says he draws on his trauma to interview fellow victims.
“While most hosts of true crime often just discuss murders that fascinate them, I've actually lived one," he said.
"Nobody believed me except one detective. And over the course of 25 days, he and I essentially solved the case.
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“It's really using that perspective to give people hope.”
Collier’s podcast Moving Past Murder is available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other podcast providers.
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