Introducing: Finding Mom's Killer

Hi there, it's Steve Fishman. You know me as co host of the Burden. I want to recommend another hit true crime series today. It's called Finding Mom's Killer. I hosted this one too, and it's really good. Okay, Imagine an eleven year old boy teams with a middle aged detective to solve a murder. That's all I'm going to say. We're dropping the first episode for you today to hear the rest of the series. Look for Finding Mom's Killer wherever you get your podcasts.

Raison right, old lad, you swear truth, truth, and that's what the truth around you got.

Will you tell us who you are? I'm Callier Landry Boyle.

Do you tell us how old you are? Now?

I'm twelve years old.

It's nineteen ninety and we're in a courtroom in Mansfield, Ohio. The prosecution star witness has just taking the stand. He's about to describe something that happened one faithful night a few months ago.

You awoke at three to three point fifteen am. I believe it was your time, okay, and what it woke you?

I heard the two bangs, and I heard the scream okay, and that's when I heard the footsteps.

Then you got up in the morning, Yes, I did. And what was the first thing you did?

I looked at my mother's bedroom.

Were you alarmed when you got into the bedroom or yes.

I was.

Why was that the bed covers were all messed up, her bedclothes were just lying a pile.

Crazy was going through your mind at that time? What were you thinking?

Where's my mother?

Cold?

Landry Boyle wasn't your average twelve year old.

He was very smart. He was very determined.

So when his mother went missing, Collier decided it was up to him to find her. From Sony Music, Entertainment and Orbit Media, this is Finding Mom's Killer.

I'm Steve Fishman.

This is the story of how a precocious kid joined forces with a most unlikely partner. Together, they set out to solve the mystery of his mother's disappearance. Along the way, they'd unearthed one terrible family secret after another episode one a little vacation. On New Year's Day nineteen ninety six months before that twelve year old boy took the witness stand, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department was swamped with the usual holiday stuff barbrasly conduct so when a forty four year

She was listed as a missing person by some of the friends of hers, not family. But that's not unusual.

This is Lieutenant Dave Messmore of the Mansfield Police. When Noring Boyle's disappearance landed on his desk, he didn't think much of it. A couple of uniform patrolmen had been sent over to her house to check things out. Their conclusion, nothing to worry about.

Somebody will run off, they have a dispute with their spouse, and they'll run away, and they come back, and you know, there's only so much you can do with a missing person.

As you might have gathered, Lieutenant Dave miss Moore isn't exactly the excitable type in appearance. He kind of fades into the background. He's got thinning hair, a lampshade mustache, sensible glasses. He takes his time. He's methodical. He assumed Noreen Boyle was just an unhappy wife in an unhappy marriage who needed a little alone time. Then one day at his office he received a phone call from a close friend of Noreen's.

And she said, I'm telling you this is not right. Noreen would never do that, and I said, well, you know, maybe she would just upset. No, no, I'm telling it. I said, I'll stop over and see what's going on.

So on January tewod Dave climbed into his department issued used oldsmobile and drove over to Noreen Boyle's house. Now Dave was the Mansfield Police Department's head of major Crimes. He wasn't supposed to go chase down leads on low priority cases, but Dave low key, laconic, Dave is full of surprises. By this point, he'd been on the force for fifteen years, and he developed a reputation for striking out on his own, for bucking his superiors.

He once put away.

A friend, a fellow cop no less from murder. People learned it was best not to get in his way. Another time, he had a kid with a knife cornered. Other cops debated the next step.

Dave rushed him.

I black tacked him and just knocked him cold.

Dave, without blackjack, figured he'd head over to the Boyle residence have a word with Noreen's husband, a prominent local doctor named Jack Boyle. He arrived at the house, walked up the front steps, rang the doorbell.

It was like late morning, early afternoon. The doorbell rings, and is this guy in a sport coat with him bushy mustache, glasses, taggy pants named Dave were.

This is Kylier Boyle. He was the kid you had testifying at the top of the show. He's a lot older now. When Lieutenant Dave Messmore arrived at the Boyle residence, it was Collier's grandmother, that's his father's mother, who answered the door.

Klia hovered in the background.

I'm standing there over my grandmother's shoulder, and Dave was setting to my grandmother, well, you know, I likes to talk to the doctor, and you know, just kind of curious what you know. He was just very calm. It's a very calm guy, very collected, I mean, very detective, like you know what I mean, just looking around, looking at things, taking everything in just I'm going to get

Klier made an impression on Dave. This was a kid who dressed in chinos and penny loafers. He had a perfectly quaff brown bob. He looked like a tiny adult.

It was not like a little eleven or twelve year old you'd normally talk to. He was just very astute, very well spoken. Whenever his grandmother would walk away, he'd say things that make you wonder if there was something wrong.

And I say to Dave, I look him dead in the eyes and I say, my mother would never leave me.

He said, my mother would never leave without me or without me knowing where she was going.

And I think he's looking at me in a very peculiar way, like who is this kid? But I could he could just tell her was so adamant.

He said something happened, and I said, okay, I'll work on that.

Kye was surprised.

He hadn't expected this who suddenly showed up on the doorstep to actually listen to him.

I could just tell when I said to Dave, my mother would never leave me, something has happened to her. He just looked at me like he could tell that I was serious. I remember in that moment that there was this hope.

Dave did take Kyyer seriously.

Still, he didn't have any clues to follow, just the concerns of an anxious adolescent son.

Dave.

He decided to talk it over with his wife, who refers to him as Hubby by the way.

Well, she said that doesn't sound right. She said, that doesn't sound like a kid that doesn't know where his mother is. And I said, well, so I'm gonna go back and see if I can't talk to him some more.

Once again, Dave headed to the Boyle residence, where he was met once again by doctor Jack Boyle's mother, Collier's grandmother.

And she said, what do you want? And I said, what, I kind of like to talk to you and Callier again, Well, when do you come around bothering people like this? I said, I'm not bothering anybody. I just like to solve this and find out where she is. I said, when is doctor Boyle going to be home? Well, he should be back the night. This is starting to bother me.

So later that evening, yet again, Dave drove to the Boyle residence. For those keeping score, that's his third visit of the day.

On the door when I got there was a letter and it said, no one in this house has permission to talk to the police. And I was assigned by an attorney.

I know.

A note on the door wasn't going to stay, Lieutenant Dave messmore So.

When I knocked on the door, the attorney answered the door, and I said, what's going on here? Well, the doctor doesn't really have anything to say. His wife walked out and left. There's nothing he can really tell you. I said, well, I'd like to talk to him. Said, well, he doesn't want to talk.

I said, hmm hmm.

That's Dave's characteristically restrained reaction to any new suspicion. So Dave, now suspicious, decided he'd start looking into doctor Jack Boyle. As it turned out, doctor Boyle's patients really loved him.

They described him as.

Funny, intelligent, gregarious, caring, the kind of doctor who'd go above and beyond, who'd make house calls and stay up all night.

At the bedside of a sick patient.

Even at the police department, Dave discovered his fellow cops were fans.

Some of the guys that work for me were ex Marines, So they said, yeah, we know about doctor Boyle. He's the next Navy doctor, retired Navy doctor and blue Jets over in Vietnam, and he's just a great guy.

Plus, one of Jack's friends said he was devastated that Noreen left. She recalled Jack sobbing on the phone to her. She's gone, She's gone. And then Dave learned something that made Norene's disappearance seem understandable.

Apparently there was some talk of divorce, but I didn't know exactly what the circumstances were.

In fact, Noreen had filed for divorce less than two months before, and it was contentious. There were fancy cars to fight over, a lot of money in the bank, child sport alimony, joined credit cards. Maybe Dave's original hunch had been right. In the midst of a rough separation, with both parties sleeping under the same roof, Noreen just needed a few.

Days to herself.

She'd probably return home soon. Still, Dave had doubts. Why was her husband being so evasive and why did her son insist that something was wrong. Dave decided it was time to get more details from his prime source, the one inside the Boyle household. He phoned the private school that Klier attended and requested that the principal arrange a meeting. This is just what Kyler had been hoping for. I knew it was my chance right there to just get it all out right. I don't know if I'm ever

It'd make him comfortable.

You know. I had a lengthy conversation. He described to me what he heard that night that she went missing.

A little more than a week earlier, December thirtieth, Collier and his mother were sitting at a table having chili for dinner.

And we saw my father's truck coming down the driveway with my grandmother inside. Then my grandmother came in and my father stayed for a second.

He then left.

Around eight o'clock eight thirty. My mom was like a time for bad. I gave my grandmother a hugging a kiss, the good night, and I gave my mom a hugging a kiss good night.

Then Collyer headed upstairs to his bedroom.

He may have struck people as a miniature adult, but his bedroom was definitely that of a child.

I had little collectible Garfield stuffed plush toys on the dresser, and then I had my Batman clock on the wall because I loved the movie Batman.

I wanted to be Batman.

Then next to me on the wall there's a painting of a small little sailboat with a little boy inside, and it says call you that my mom had a muralist paint on the wall.

So safe in his bedroom with his Batman clock and his Garfield dolls, Colier fell asleep and then in the middle of the night something woke them.

I'm pretty sure I heard a scream and.

I was kind of frozen in my bed for a second.

I didn't get up, and then I heard this loud thud boom, and then I heard this really low muttering, and I can see my little sailboat on the wall.

And as I'm thinking of all that, the feed leave.

It's the night of Norman Boyle's disappearance, and Collier is in bed. He's heard strange noises, strange voices, strange footsteps, but when everything goes quiet, he manages to fall back to sleep. The next morning, when he wakes up, the first thing he does is run to his mother's bedroom. She isn't there. She always makes her bed first thing in the morning, but this time the sheets are a mess.

And I go downstairs and my father is sitting on the couch in the living room, watching television with a towel wrapped around his ways, like he had just got done taking a shower. I said to him, where is my mother? And he's still was watching television. He didn't answer me, and I said where is my mother? And he looked up at me so matter of factly, Well, mommy took a little vacation call here, And I said, well, what happened? Well, your mother came down. She was hollering

Kanya did hear what his father said. But he'd actually been preparing for a moment just like this. He knew his parents were going through a divorce. It was screaming in the house, tempers flaring, and Kanye, like his hero Batman, was always ready for action.

One of the things that I did is I saved my mother's friend's phone numbers. I wrote them all on a piece of paper and I stuck them in this little stuffed garfield that I had, this little Santa Claus garfield I stuck inside the hat. And my mother had just got a cordless phone, so I grabbed the phone. I run upstairs, I grabbed the list. I locked myself in my mother's bathroom and I just start calling everybody on the life US and I start telling them what happened.

Nordine's friends did call the police, and that's how word of her disappearance made its way to the Mansfield Police Department and to Dave Mesmore's desk, and now sitting in the classroom, there was one more saying.

Kylier wanted to.

Make sure Dave understood he wanted their meeting kept confidential.

Dave told me when I was speaking to him he would keep everything that we said secret because I didn't want to get in trouble and I wanted to find my mother.

For his part, as Dave interviewed Kyllier that day, he thought this kid just might be onto something.

He was beside himself. He didn't cry, but it was emotional only uh distraught, and he convinced me that there was something wrong. I had never encountered a child that young to be so well spoken. It was not like a little eleven or twelve year old you'd normally talk to. He was just very astute. At that point, I couldn't really pass it off to another detective.

The interview ended. Kyie went back to class, then home. He knew Dave would be stopping by that night.

And he was on edge.

My grandmother was making dinner. My father comes home, and then Dave comes to the door again. I was anxious, right because I've defied my father, and I'm, you know, trying to be an earshot at the door, trying to see what's going on, and also trying to see, Okay, is he going to say anything? He doesn't do is to say, oh, I've talked to the kid, or he doesn't ay, you know what I mean? So I knew

And so Kylier and Dave are now a dynamic duo, the precocious preteen and the mild mannered, middle aged detective. It's like something out of a comic book.

Did you think of Batman? I did think of Batman? What did you think? I had to find out what happened.

But I also was dreading the fact that Batman was an orphan who lost both his parents. You want to be the dark knight, the detective, but at the same time you do want to lose your family.

Right.

Kylier, of course, wasn't quite Batman, more of a Robin, you know, the boy Wonder, the junior partner, and in that role, he was determined to help Dave track down his mother.

That really galvanizes me into doing this like amateur sleuth, detective work or whatever, you know, gonna I'm gonna find, start gathering clues. I'm going to look for anything that I could find that was out of the ordinary.

And Lieutenant Dave Messmore was determined to hold up his end.

He was in despair. I just wanted to get it done and I want to be able to tell Collyer that we found his mother.

So now Dave's all in.

Jack Boyle won't talk to him. That makes Dave pretty suspicious, and so he decides his next step take a closer look at the good doctor.

The more you talk to other people that are acquainted with him, that you find out an awful lot about that person. And in his case, he had a completely different personality. You know, he was always laughing and choking around with people.

But that wasn't him, that was a facade.

Finding Mom's Killer is a production of Orbit Media creator and host Steve Fishman.

That's Me.

Our senior producer is Drew Nellis our producer and production coordinator Austin Smith. Our story editor Emil Klein, fact check by Ryan Alderman, mixing and sound design by Scott Somerville. Our lawyers are at Davis Reich Tremaine from Sony Music Entertainment. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Special thanks to Emily Rassik, Steve Ackerman, Katherine Saint Louis, Sammy Allison Fisher, stevens Ria, Julian, Dan, Bobkoff at WME. We'd like to thank Evan Krassek, Marissa Hurwitz,