Finding Mom's Killer | 1. A Little Vacation
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How does the story of Noreen Boyle's disappearance begin?
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Raise your right hole, please. Do you swear or affirm? Do you tell us who you are?
I'm Collier Landry Boyle.
Can you tell us how old you are now?
I am 12 years old.
It's 1990, and we're in a courtroom in Mansfield, Ohio. The prosecution's star witness has just taken the stand. He's about to describe something that happened one fateful night a few months ago.
You awoke at 3 to 3.15 a.m., I believe was your time. Okay. And what awoke you?
I heard the two bangs and heard the scream.
Okay.
And then I heard the footsteps.
Then you got up in the morning. Yes, I did. And what was the first thing you did?
I looked in my mother's bedroom.
Were you alarmed when you got into the bedroom or...
Collier Landry Boyle wasn't your average 12-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 unearth one terrible family secret after another. Episode one, A Little Vacation. On New Year's Day, 1990, six months before that 12-year-old boy took the witness stand, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department was swamped with the usual holiday stuff. Bar brawls, disorderly conduct. So when a 44-year-old woman named Noreen Boyle was reported missing, it was not a top priority.
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 Noreen Boyle's disappearance landed on his desk, he didn't think much of it. A couple of uniformed patrolmen had been sent over to her house to check things out. Their conclusion? Nothing to worry about.
Somebody will run off and 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 Messmore 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, maybe she was just upset. No, no, I'm telling you. I said, I'll stop over and see what's going on.
So on January 2, 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 15 years, and he'd developed a reputation for striking out on his own, for bucking his superiors. He once put away a friend, a fellow cop no less, for 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 a next step. Dave rushed him.
I blackjacked 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 it's this guy in a sport coat with a bushy mustache, glasses, khaki pants, named Dave Messmore.
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