Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Тhе Моѕt DІЅТURВІNG Ѕеrіаl Kіllеr Yоu’vе Nеvеr Hеаrd Оf | The Stocking Strangler

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Тhе Моѕt DІЅТURВІNG Ѕеrіаl Kіllеr Yоu’vе Nеvеr Hеаrd Оf | The Stocking Strangler

His first arrest was at age 17. He was, without a doubt, what people would describe as a career criminal. This was, in fact, the term that his own attorney used to describe him. During this period of time, he had about 30 months of unincarcerated freedom. During this time, he committed in Columbus alone at least seven murders. And this is one of the most fascinating stories I've ever heard. And if you sat down and tried to write a novel, You couldn't come up with some of the same strange twist in turns that this story has.

And given the racial climate of the city, the black population was up in arms saying, how are you going to blame this in black man? It's not good. And Ku Klux Klan decides, well, you know, we're going to start patrolling the neighborhood. And, of course, that, you know, that was beyond things. And it turned out that the police chief around the 1st of March gets a, letter from someone signed by the chairman of the forces of evil. And this fellow says we're a white supremacist group and we're mad that a black man is killing white women in the city of

Columbus. And so what we're going to do, we're going to kill black women to avenge the murders of white women hoping that this will pressure you to catch Australia. Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I am here with William Rawlings. We are going to be doing an interview about one of his true crime books, and he's got a really interesting story. I spoke with them for probably 30 minutes to an hour the other day, and I think you guys are really going to enjoy the interview. So check it out.

I appreciate you guys watching. This book is about the Columbus Stocking Strangler episode, briefly put during a eight-month period in late 1977, early 1978, there were a total of nine vicious attacks in the city of Columbus, Georgia, which I'll say more about at a moment. Seven women were killed, two survived. There was a massive police presence, and the case went cold in April 1978. Thereafter, it was six years later before the suspect was arrested. He was tried two years after that and eventually convicted, and there was a 32-year period between the time of his conviction and the time his sentence was carried out. A fascinating tale that spans

almost half a century. Okay. So real quick, you know, if you don't mind, like how, where were you born? You know, how did you, did you always want to be a writer? How did you get, how did you kind of get into this? No, no, no, no. I'm a good typist with too much time with my hands as my standard answer to that question. No, I am by trial a physician. I live in a very small town in Georgia. and my families lived here for the last couple of hundred years. And I went off the school and got educated and came to my senses and moved back to the family farm where I have lived for the last several decades. I practiced medicine here for a while and I'm pretty much semi-retired now.

But I've been writing for a bit more than 20 years now. Okay. What made you think? I understand you've written some fiction books, but why did this one stand out? what made you think you wanted to take this on? Because it's a lot different writing, you know. Oh, it is very different doing fiction and nonfiction. But, you know, if you write for fun, you do it because you want to accomplish something.

You know, you say, oh, I want to tell a story. And if you live in the South, the South is permeated by storytellers as a child sitting sitting around the barbershop, you know, and watching the old men get shaved and saying, let me tell you a story about selling stuff. And Southern is traditionally a storytellers. And if you and I sit there and have a glass of wine or a shot of liquor, I can sit there and tell you stories all night that are fascinating. And taking those stories and translating them into something that interests

to other people is really good. My first six books, I believe, or was it five books? I think my first five books were fiction. I think most new writers start off wanting to write fiction. I then realized that fiction is a very short half-life, so I switched to doing Southern History, basically. And this book, like the others, is actually one of Southern history. It's a very different skill set to write nonfiction versus fiction.

And this book in particular, which I'll talk more about in a moment, required a lot of hard work and special skills to make sure I did it right. It's a very complicated case. Right. I find, so I've written, you know, obviously I've written novels and true crime, but I think it's funny because nonfiction kind of writes itself. You have to have your pros have to be, you know, have to be decent. But it kind of writes itself.

You kind of just follow the evidence, right? Like you order Freedom of Information Act. Well, it is. It is. But if you simply do the facts, you know, you know, it's just a litany of. It's like like taking eighth grade history, you know? It gets kind of boring. You don't want to, you know, that kind of thing.

And so what you look for in a nonfiction piece is the same as the saying you look for in fiction. That is, say, you want a story, you want a beginning, a middle and end, you want the arc of the plot, you want the protagonist, and you want the antagonist, you want the denouement, you want conflict, you want resolution, those kind of things. And this story has everything. It is a fantastic story, and it was laid upon my doorstep, and I was fortunate enough to write it. So how did that start? Well, there was a good writer. Mercer University Press is my publisher. They're a conventional publisher.

They do academic things and a few other things as well. And there was a lady named Jackie White, Jacqueline White, who is a true crime writer. It's been, what, three years ago now, that Jackie became ill, and she was thinking about writing the story of the Columbus Strangler. She realized that her illness was progressing, and unfortunately she died before the book came out of cancer. But she told the publisher, this is a good story. And the publisher, I had written one previous true crime book. The publisher called me and said, gee, would you like to do this story? I said, well, I'll think about it, you know, that kind of thing. You know, sometimes the publisher tells you they want to do things that are really not what you like to do. And I said,

I'll think about it. So I started digging into this. And this is one of the most fascinating stories I've ever heard. And if you sat down and tried to write a novel, a suspense novel, a police detective novel or whatever, you couldn't come up with some of the same strange twist and turns that this story has. And this story's true. So you've already got your acts written out. All you've got to do is craft them into a novel. And the novel has done, I mean, the book, I'm sorry, it's not a novel. The book has done exceptionally well. I believe it was the publisher's best-selling or one of the best-selling books for 20-22. That's good.

So you, I mean, at some point, you took it on, you know, you're... I took it on. It's right in the middle of COVID. And, you know, when I was said earlier about a good typist with too much time of their hands, not only did I have too much time of my hands, there was nothing else to do during COVID. I managed to write the entire book in 10 months. You work in 12 hours a day, probably.

So tell me about the book, what was, what, or just tell me there, the story. The story basically is this. Starting in the September of 1977, there were a series of murders. These were elderly white women who lived alone, and that fact is important, as it would find out later. I want to go into more detail and tell the story more organized fashion but in essence it soon became evident that there was a similarity among these crimes

and as time progressed over a period of months it became evident that some serial killer was operating in the city there was a vast police presence I mean everything the city of Columbus could throw it at the area where these killings were taking place. Despite this, the murderer managed to elude capture. And then the case went cold in the spring of 1978. And then I'll tell more about it as I talk about the book in a few moments.

If you want me to, I can read a section from a newspaper that I found very fascinating. Sure. Okay. And the reason I say this is because, you know, in true crime novels i mean you've got a murder and so forth and what's one of the things it's so interesting and strange about this case is the terror that it visited upon the city the city of columbus is georgia's second largest city uh if you're from georgia and you go somewhere else people will say i'm from georgia they'll say Atlanta and i say no there's there are other parts of

the state believe it not Columbus is on the western part of the state right on the check Atahoochee River across the river from Phoenix City, Alabama. It's an old city, founded in 1828. It was a very wealthy city of the past, and even now, there are a lot of very, very well-to-do people that live in town. It's got a population now well above 200,000, but back in the late 70s, it was about 175,000. The population is about one-third or perhaps 40% black,

which is an issue, as I will talk about later. and it has an abominable racial history of racial discrimination. The city was totally roiled by this episode, and I want to read from the Charleston News and Courier in February in 1978. As I said, there were a total of seven murders and nine attacks, plus many burglaries by this person. And the emotional impact of this is what, makes it so good. So this is just a newspaper report, and I think it kind of summarizes things

perhaps better than I can't. Again, from the Charleston News and Currier, February 5th, and I quote, one maniac can make a difference. There's a maniac here somewhere who's made Bill Parker richer and Margaret Stevens lonelier. He's made quite suspicious of blacks and blacks angry at whites. He's cost Columbus thousands of dollars and its policemen's hundreds of hours of sleep. He's driven the crime rate up and the people behind locked doors, singing handily, the man known as the Columbus stocking strangle has altered the lifestyle of this southern Georgia city. In the last four months, five elderly women have been strangled in their homes by an intruder who sexually assaulted them. The five deaths drove the 1977 murder rate up 16% and they caused a far larger proportion of the city's 175,000 residents to nail windows shut, arm themselves, and install new locks.

Bill Park is one of the few who has profited from this. He owns the locksmith shop nearest the neighborhood with the slainings have occurred. In just two months, Parker and his brother installed 7,000 dead boat locks and sold thousands of sets of burglar bars and cans of mace. One of his biggest customers was Margaret Stevens, age 71, a retired teacher. Not only at the windows of her brick ranch home barred, but she has pins inserted into windows to secure them. A new, glassless front door was installed at a burglar alarm system and floodlights and $300 worth of deadboat locks. She was lucky. She did most of this the night before the stronger came. He tried the basement window but couldn't open it. He cut through the screens on her back porch but failed to open the sliding glass door. He tried the living room window and then left, leaving a profusion of footprints in the mud of her backyard. That was in September on a Friday. On Monday, he came back and slew her next door neighbor Jean Diamond State, age 71. The thing that still bothers her, the reason that she hasn't opened her, her door to a soul in three months as the Diamondstein had been just as prepared as she.

Her frontlights were owned, the telephone handy, the neighbors alerted, and there were new burglar-proof locks on her doors. So the Strangler and the glare of the floodlights on her carport admitted to remove the kitchen door from its hinges and murdered her in her bed. At 71, Stevens carries mace with her to the supermarket. When she comes home at night, she has someone searched the house before she enters, even the closets and the shower. Since the advent of the strangler, life has become unpleasant for a lot of people in Columbus. Perhaps Los Angeles, with its hillside strangler, a Boston, which had its notorious straggler some years ago, are better able to adjust to the knowledge that a maniac is on the loose.

Columbus is not so laid back. Now, Columbus is like the other urban areas uptight. Gun sales at numerous pawn shops have doubled. For a time after one of the attacks, people nearby took the city into their front yard. cards in the evening were loaded guns. One suspected prowler was grabbed and severely beaten by residents before police could arrive. An elderly lady put a shotgun blast through her bathroom window and shot a shadow dead. Two lives have been lost in accidents related to security precautions taken against this trailer. According to Muskogee County Coroner, Don Kilgore,

one woman was killed in an accident involving a pistol she'd obtained and the other woman died when she was unable to escape her burning house because of the special complex. slot sheet installed. Then there's an effect on race relations. Blacks make up more than a third of the population here, and their leaders say that the tensions have been, have not been as bad since the near-a-ride conditions of 1971. All the victims have been white, and there seems to be a widespread assumption that the stronger is black. Black's complaint of being stopped and questioned frequently by police, who can see only that they are frequently stopping in question in everyone. And this was in the middle of this episode of killing. It continued there.

after. But it's sort of sets the scene. You get the idea of what was happening in the town. Right. So the police were continually, I did that, what were, what leads did they have? I mean, other than, well, would you like me to go ahead and just sort of outline the old story? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, let's just start off. As I said, resolutions in Columbus are a bit problematic, and that's going to be important later at the story. As late as 1970, There were race riots and arson and so forth and so on. There was discrimination in the police department and employment and housing and so forth. And in the running up to the fall of 1977, there had been a number of violent attacks and murders.

And so when a lady named Gertrude Miller, who was a 64-year-old kindergarten operator, was attacked, beaten, raped, tied up with a stocking, she had a skull fracture, was left for dead. but during the attack he had briefly turned the light on and she had seen him and she described it as a fairly young black male as I said she was left or dead and this appeared to be just another murder among the many other murders that had been happening it occurred in the winston district of the city you never heard of it nobody has in fact but winston is a part of Columbus that has the nicer homes the older nicer homes there are many very wealthy people who are very wealthy people there, and there are some houses that are far more modest, but it's a well-defined area. Miller was a cat on September 11th, 1977.

And five days later, a lady named Fern Jackson was, she was a very prominent nurse in town. She was head of the public nursing department. She simply didn't show up for work one day, and it was found that she had been beaten, raped, and strangle with a stocky. And about eight days thereafter, in the same neighborhood nearby, another lady named Gene Diamond State, was again attacked, beaten, raped, and struggled with the stocking. The pubic hair has found that the crime scenes were described as being probably coming from a black man. and so this led to the rumor that the attacker was black. That's given also the fact that Gertrude Miller had identified him as such. Well, at this point, the police began to say, you know, these crimes kind of look alike.

You know, somebody breaks in. They're elderly white females who live alone. They are ritualistically strangle with stocking that he had gone over and gotten out of the dresser. After the killing, the bodies are covered up. And so the M.O. of these became. very very much the same and so what happened was that on june oh no october 2nd 1977 a black female named bernie's briar at her 50s was found to be beaten and raped and strangled she was in bad shape when she was picked up by the ambulance and she died a few days later her boyfriend a guy named jerome lavas who was

about half her age. He was 25 years old, was arrested. And there was some superficial similarity to the stronger cases. And according to police, Livas confessed and gave details of the killing. And they, the police department subtly announced that, well, we've got our man. We believe that we've done it and that he did it and so forth and so on. But, you know, the police have a bad history in Columbus. And so, Livas was a very very, very, you know, and he was a very limited intellectual capacity. He was illiterate. And by all accounts, he was a really pitiful fellow. And despite the fact that the police were absolutely certain they had their man, they presented this to the district attorney. He said, no, you don't have a case. You've got somebody

that you have sort of pitting the crime zone, but that's no real good evidence of this guy was a filler. So the police refused to indict him. And the newspapers at the time, which, you know, back of those, we had newspapers back in the 1970s, apparently. And at the time, they were, they were, expressed their relief that apparently this nascent crime scene had been stopped. But during this same period of time, there were also burglaries in the Winton area. There were a lot of people that get at a house broken into, which was unusual, the number of burglaries.

And it kind of appeared that maybe the person that was doing the strangling may have been the burglar. You weren't too sure. And I want to mention one in particular, which occurred on October 11, 1977, an elderly lady named Callie East, who lived with her sister, Nellie Sanderson. There were two elderly ladies, so one was in her 80s and one was there a 70s, and they normally lived alone. And someone broke in their house, but it so happened that Ms. Sanderson's son was there. And there was a thing by the burglar you found out later, the strangler, is that if he broke into a house and there was someone else, a man, particularly he would not commit his crimes, he would leave. And he did with Ms. Anderson's house, but in the process, he decided to go into the bedroom where the son was sleeping, and his wife, he got his guy's wallet out of his pocket while he was asleep in the bed, found his car outside, a Toyota stole the car.

and in the car there had been a 22-caliber Ruger automatic pistol that disappeared and that was that became important several, several years later so you have to remember that and this is one of numerous numerous burglars I won't go into any detail with so at this point late October

mid-October 1977 the police says we've got our guy things are going to be fine the newspapers of brief and relief and then in October 20th In 1977, a pitiful lady named Flores Schiabel, who was 10 days shy of being 90 years old. She managed to live by herself with difficulty. Her son checked on her every day. She walked with a walker. She was essentially deaf, and her vision was poor.

Her son came to visit her and found out that she had been beaten, raped, and strangled again with her stocking. the shoe print found at her house fit one that had a matched one from the Diamondstein residence and it appeared that the so-called strangler was there. Of course, this raises the issue of the fact that they've got Jerome Lovice in jail by having committed the crimes and so you know, the police said, well, we still think he's our guy

and this may be a cocky cat. And then that was on October 20th, Five days later, a lady named Martha Thurman, she was a widowed schoolteacher who lived alone, age 69. Her family was quite concerned about her. They had come and spent the weekend with her. Her son had changed the locks on her house and put several new locks on. And so the expiry of the weekend, they stayed till Monday afternoon and then left. Okay.

Monday morning She Nobody could find her And it so happened That Monday afternoon Monday night After the son and his family left Someone broke in

And again she was beaten Raped and Strangle The tragic thing was Why they were there No this was after they left They left Monday As you said Monday morning Nobody could find her

But she said they left Monday after So you mean Tuesday This gets complicated the family was there over the weekend they left Monday afternoon Tuesday morning she was someone called her and couldn't get her to answer they checked on her her house was obvious she'd been broken into the police found her body dead the tragic thing is that her son had put the locks on and he'd put the screw side or the outside he mounted the locks backwards so unfortunately all the Stromer had to do was just

unscrew the locks and get it in her house and by this time it became really evident that this was a serial killer and you know you had the police talking about Jerome Leibos and so forth and the district attorney said no this is not I mean we've still got some one at large and at that point Carl Cannon who at the time was a reporter for the ledger inquire of the local newspaper interviewed Jerome Livas in jail, and he described him as, quote, mentally slow, intimidated by authority and easily led into saying things. So in a jailhouse interview, Cannon got Livas to sign a

confession that he killed both President John Kennedy and William McKinley, that he was present when Charles Manson killed Sharon Tate, and that he knew beforehand about Lindbergh baby kidnapping in the 1930s. And this, of course, settled once and for all the allegation. that Livas had something had to do with it. He was still a lighter tried for his girlfriend's murder and sentenced to prison, but he was cleared, as it were, from being the strangler. So a couple of months passed, and again, the city, if you read the newspapers, that newspaper editorials back in the 70s were fascinating

because you actually found out what happened. Nobody does that anymore. They say, look online and you get, you know, you get 24 words. But the city was saying, you know, You know, maybe this crime story has stopped until December 28th, two months later, a lady named Kathleen Woodruff was murdered. You're not from Georgia, and you probably don't know the names, but the Woodruff are very prominent and generally wealthy group of people. Her husband had been the University of Georgia football coach, which is a big thing in this part of the world. In the 1920s, there was a field, a play playing field, and a building named.

in his honor. She was someone broke into her house and again strangled her this time with, ironically, a University of Georgia scarf that she'd been wearing. Apparently the burglar came in at night before she went to bed. She was found by her maid the next morning. So by this time you had five murders and the police said, well, maybe you should do something about this. So they formed toward the end of the year at task force.

It was composed of both the local, state, and federal. federal input, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation helped. The FBI had their input, but mostly it was composed of state control and, of course, local members of the constabulary from North Columbus. Around this town, perhaps a month later, there was some killings that took place in Tallahassee, Florida. There were some girls in a sorority house. They were attacked, and one of them was raped.

and strangled, and there was a superficial similarity between some of the killings in Columbus. Two detectives from the Columbus Police Department went to Tallahassee, and it turned out that the killings were not related. There were too many differences, and they sort of dismissed that, as it would turn out later, Ted Bundy, who, you know, confessed the specific killing that was brought up at the time. And so that was something that also came up later, which I will address as we'll get further off. And then there were burglars over, over New Year's weekend of 1977,

1970, oh, New Year's Eve, I'm sorry, the burglar broke into the Ilge's home. And this is the, there's a relationship here. This is the grandmother of my grandmother's, the grandmother-in-law of my brother. The illogists were an arm. prominent family in Columbus. They lived in a large house, which was referred to as the castle.

It's two stories right in the center of the Winton district. And he broke in, but it turned out Mr. Ilgers, who at the time was elderly and infirm, was sleeping in one bedroom, his wife was in the other. It was assumed that she was not attacked because of the fact the man was in the house. And again, this fits of pattern. All the things were quiet again for a little bit more than a month, And then there was what was referred to as the night of terrors, which was the night of February 11th, February 12th, 1978.

And once again, the burglar broke into the Ilges house, the castle, the two-story house. But in the interim, you have to remember that back in these days, there were no really great alarm systems. There were some pretty primitive things. And so I sent several occasions, and I didn't mention this, the burglar was able to disconnect the alarm, you know, so it didn't go off. or you've had a magnetic contact he would just take it and leave it up against the

against the contact you know and so he could get out of it and anyway the burglar broke in but the ill just that had installed there was a three-story house a basement level and a second level and a third level and the the Mr. and Ms. Ilgis was sleeping on the

topmost level well the burglar they had installed at the base of the stairway going up there pressure pad so when the burglar stepped on this it set their alarm and he was fright. So he ran, the police were called, of course, and by the time they arrived, he was out of the house.

But retrospectively, as we would find out, he was hiding in the bushes nearby, and went down the street to the house of Miss Ruth Schwab. Ms. Schwab was a very prominent lady, was a very prominent lady in Columbus. She was widowed at age 74. She had inherited quite well, and was a patron of the arts,

the museums there in the city. She had been worried about the burglar, about the strangler. So what she had done was installed an alarm next to her bed. And the idea was that if someone attacked her, she would press a button and it would call her neighbor who was named Dr. Fred Burdette. He was a physician. Well, Dr. Beret in the middle of the night, train gets alarm from his neighbor, and Ms. Schwob, and he was supposed to call

the police, but in the state, he said, I don't have had one false alarm in the past. So I'll just called her up. And so he called her, and the phone rings and it rings, and nothing happens. And said, oh, this is bad. She rings the alarm. She doesn't answer the phone. So he calls the police immediately, and by the time

they arrive, the burglar, the strangler has gone. They break into the house to find Ms. Schwob, sitting on the edge of a bed, a stocking around her neck, coughing, and saying, he's still in the house, he's still in the house, but he was, he had escaped. And again, we have helicopters at night, police everywhere, this huge presence. You really picked the wrong demographic to go

after. These are older women with means to put in earlier alarms. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, anyway, so he got away that night and this was like a, no, no, no, Saturday. I think Saturday, a Friday night, Saturday, and I forget, but on Sunday morning, the family of Ms. Mildred Borum, who lived a couple of houses down, 878, come by after church to see her and she did not answer the door. A screen at her house had been cut, and she had been raped and strangled again with the stocky, the same thing. So what he had done, he'd broke, he'd, the Ilger's house, he'd attacked Ms. Schwob, and then he managed to kill him as Boerum. And she was straddled with the sash court, I think, or I'm sorry, I said Stocking.

She was striven with the sash court. So anyway, that's seven, six murders less far. And, of course, two other attacks of people that survived. And during this time, all that strange things happened. The strike, it was pretty well assumed the strangler was black because Ms. Gertrude Miller had seen him. There were pubic hairs found that were felt to be belonged to an African-American. And given the racial climate of the city, the black population was up in art saying,

how are you going to blame this a black man? It's not good. And, of course, the police were stopping everybody. They had a huge force of monitoring the neighborhood. In fact, retrospectively, there was something like 16,000 interview cars. that were generated during this period of time. And I've seen them. There's a huge file, you know.

And so the Ku Klux Klan decides, well, you know, we're going to start patrolling the neighborhood. And, of course, you know, that was beyond, beyond things. And police said, you can't patrol the neighborhood. They said, well, you know, this is a free country. We're free citizens. And we're going to, we're going to cash this strangling for you. Well, fortunately nothing came of that. But then something even more bizarre happened.

It turned out that the police chief, around the 1st of March, gets a letter from someone signed by the chairman of the forces of evil. And this fellow says we're a white supremacist group, and we're mad that a black man is killing white women in the city of Columbus. And so what we're going to do, we're going to kill white, We're going to kill black women to avenge the murders of white women and until hoping that this will pressure you to catch the trailer. Now, if that stands bizarre, indeed it is. And over the course of about a month, the police chief got a total of six letters from this person to chamber of the forces of evil.

Well, there's a lot to be said about that, but to make a long story short, it turned out that this was, in fact, not some white supremac i believe that they said they were from chicago some it was not a white supremacist group but in fact it was a black man a private william henry hans who was an enlisted man at fort benny which is a large military i think they've changed the name recently but the large military installation there just south of columbus he in fact had killed two black women three black women actually in Columbus and had killed another one earlier in Indiana. In total, he killed four women. He himself was a second serial killer operating in Columbus at the same time. He was identified. He was tried, convicted, and eventually executed in 1994. And finally, things

calmed down. The last murder was in February, and there was a seventh murder. on April 20th, 1978, a lady named Janet Hofer, who was an elementary school teacher. And she indeed did not show up for work one day. Someone from the school set someone over to her house. It was obvious the screen had been cut. The police found her, and like the other, she had been beaten, raped, strangle with a stocking, and her body had been covered up. And so here we have seven murders.

is we have two attacks where the would-be victims survive. The only thing that is sort of known is that they presume that the killers are black man, they have no idea whatsoever who he is, and the case goes cold completely. This is in April 1978. Of course, if you read the newspaper, I mean, the news stories begin to fall off. The task force was eventually disbanded a few months later. But still, there was the idea that, you know, any time, this could happen again.

And, of course, the city of Columbus, when you talk to people around there, I've given a lot of talks on this book, and I can't tell you how many people come up to you and say, oh, God, I remember that, or my mother told me about that, or my grandmother told me about that. And I've always wanted to learn more about it, and it was a terrible time for my family because everybody was scared and so forth. It was a major point in Columbus's 100-year-old history. so in in writing the book I sort of wrote this first wrote this first part as somewhat like a you would call a police procedural everything is is factual and very well documented because they had lots and lots of old records but you have to recall people say well you know what about the DNA well this was in the 70s we didn't have DNA and then at the same time they had some fingerprints but this was before the Kodi system the national database of of DNA

and this national database of fingerprints, neither of those were available. I'm sorry, were they at least collecting the DNA? And that's important. That's going to be very important later. In fact, both fingerprints and DNA do come into the story to later. Oh, but you have to remember it in 1978, you know, they've got some specimens they've collected and so forth and so on,

but nothing is definitive as either DNA or fingerprints. Okay. so that's part one now there was a hiatus of six years until march nineteen eighty four and finally the city of columbus relaxes things are fine and around four a.m. on the morning, four o'clock in the morning of march 12th, 1984, a 26-year-old Columbus policeman named Thomas Michael Boyd, went by Spikey Boy. He was a seven-year veteran of the Columbus to the police department. He was engaged to be married. He was out patrolling by himself at night, and he gets a call from his dispatcher.

And they said, we have a silent alarm that's gone off at the Bombay Bicycle Club. was a restaurant, actually near it, not too far from where the murders took place. So he says, I'll check it out. So he drives to the Bombay Bicycle Club, and just as he's pulling in, he sees a 1977 blue Dodge Charger with its lights off, screeching out of the parking lot and heading up Alvin Avenue, which is a big street next to it. See, of course, he turns on the blue lights and gives chase. And so the car runs up Auburn Avenue, which dead ends into Edgewood Road. It takes a left on Edgewood Road at a very high rate at speed and sort of loses it and sort of crashes into the yard of residential. It's a residential neighborhood. It's in

somewhere jar. And so Boyne gets out of the car and goes over to look into the crashed car. He's got his radio in one hand. He's got his flashlight in the other. His pistol is in his holster. And when he sort of sticks his head toward the car, he gets short. shot twice in the 40. But he had called for backup before this, of course. And by the time the other officers arrived, the car was empty. Someone said that they had seen a white male exit the car and had a creek. There was a creek that runs nearby.

And so obviously, police start searching for things, hoping to find this fellow who had killed the patrolman. It turned out that he had been burglar around. or actually had tried to rob the Bombay bicycle club, and he was getting away. He didn't get anything. And anyway, they found out that the car was registered to the girlfriend of a guy named Lonnie Botz. And she said, yes, my boyfriend was driving the car.

I don't know where he is. So they go to Bolley Bott's house. He lives with his mother, start looking around. The mother says, I haven't seen him, but they start looking at a hamper there. They find some wet clothes, you know, so he'd been escaping a creek. And they also find a box for a 22-caliber Ruger automatic piston. So here comes the connection. And so, you know, they said, we know, we've got to figure this out.

And, you know, it's not necessarily the same gun. But, you know, maybe there's a connection. Maybe he did some of the burglars. So what they did, and this, several weeks past, they sent out an all-pointed bulletin to every police force of the nation. and they got one response from the state of Michigan. And Michigan at the time on tow was one of three states of the nation that required pistols to be registered.

It was a law that dates back to World War I. The people in Lansing, Michigan, kept a big card file, a little three-by-five cards, and they sold it through it, and they pound this one card and said, yes, this pistol is here. It's registered to a guy named Aaron Sanders, who lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Okay. Now, remember, we're at Columbus and this is Michigan. So they go to Aaron Sanders and said, well, yes, my sister, my sister gave me that. I'm sorry, my mother gave me that because of the possibility of burglaries. And so, and she lives in Gary, Indiana. What is her name? Her name is Lucille Gary Sanders. So the police go to Gary, Indiana. And she said, yes, I got this for my brother, whose name is Jim Gary. And what does he live? He lives in Phoenix City, Alabama, directly across the river from Columbus, so the pistol gets traced back to Columbus.

So they go to see Jim Gary, and he, in Phoenix City, he says, well, I sell a lot of pistols. I don't know, you know, I got this from maybe one I got. And the police said, well, you know, we really need to know about this because it may be associated with a murder and we'll be back on Monday. Perhaps your memory will improve. So when they come back a couple of those, oh, yeah, yeah, I remember when I got it from my nephew. And what's his name? His name is Carlton Garrett and said, where is Carlton? Well, he was in one of them prisons over in South Carolina, but they let him out, and they him out.

And said, which prison? Well, we don't know. We don't know. Well, as it turned out, Carlton, in fact, had been in prison in South Carolina, and he'd escaped. And that's not letting him out, by the way. No, no. He escaped. What happened? He'd been in prison. Actually, this gets back to why the murder stopped because Gary was arrested as being the steakhouse burglar in South Carolina and ended up in a South Carolina prison. I was wondering. I was thinking maybe he just moved out of the area. No, no, he decided that rather than rape and murder are women, he was going to rob steakhouses. And so he was eventually arrested, and it's a little bit more complicated than that. But it's in the book if anybody wants to read it. Long story short, he ends up in prison in South Carolina.

And after about five years, says, you know, I've seen the light. I want to do, quote unquote, I want to do good for my fellow man. That was a quote. And so they decided to move him to a sort of a prison farm. He stayed there two weeks and escaped. And then, but the thing was that Jim Gary said, listen, he's back in town. You know, he would come back to Columbus. Now, where is he says, well, he's been doing some, selling some cocaine down in Florida.

And he's been in Groveville. And it turned out that he had actually been arrested. He had been arrested several weeks earlier in mid-April, but didn't have an ID and gave the police a fake name, but there is in the book. There is a mugshot of the person that arrested as a suspect under an alias, and he was turned loose after, who's arrested on a marijuana charge, and they paid a little bit of a fine.

and they turned him loose. And so, anyway, long story short, they didn't know that if he, they didn't know that he was secure. So they made a few phone calls, found out which from a prison he'd been in South Carolina, got a set of his fingerprints, sent it back to the Columbus police. They were looking at the index fingerprints they had from the various killings. And there's a really good scene that told me about, by one of the offices that actually actually was there about the technician's response when he first found the fingerprint from Carlton

Gary that matched one, initially one, actually eventually matched four of the strangler killings. And they knew they had him at that point. So they went back to Carlton Gary. They went back to Jim Gary where they got the gun from. They found out that he was in Albany, Georgia, doing a. drug deal they arrested him on the night of May 3rd and brought him back to

Columbus okay and that's a fascinating part of the story how he was arrested now the next part is that Carlson Gary had a habit of doing things and that is whenever he was caught he would

try to put the blame on somebody else right right in 1970 he was arrested for in connection with a murder of a lady named nelly farmer in in syracuse new york i believe it was they've been out of albany new york and his fingerprints were there the woman had been raped and strangled and so forth and he said um he said no he didn't do this he tried to implicate someone else a guy named John Lee Mitchell. He said, yeah, I was there to cast my fingerprint,

but John Lee Mitchell, he raped and killed the woman. All I did was just burglarized the place. And this is, you know, years earlier. And so John Lee Mitchell is arrested, put in jail. He actually was in jail. He held about a year before his trial. He and Gary was arrested for the burglary. And they were both in the same jail.

It said in the notes. that I managed to come up with that Mitchell beat the hell out of Gary for ratting him out. And the main witness against John Lee Mitchell was Carlton Gary trying to blame him for this murder and rape. It turned out that there was other evidence, too,

which was a written note from Gary's settlement. Well, it turned out the written note was in fact written by Carlton Gary as further evidence to implicate John, Jolie Mitchell. It took the glancing evidence. It took the jury a very short period of time to declare that Mitchell was innocent. He was not convicted and he was turned loose, but he had a lot of animus toward Gary, which again comes up later in the story.

Anyway, Gary tried the same thing here. He owned his way back from Albany, Georgia, he started, you know, he was given his Miranda warnings, and he was properly advised about the presence of the availability of an attorney. And he says, no, I don't need an attorney. I just want to talk. And he said, I was there, yeah, but I didn't do it. It was somebody else. And he goes on, anyway, the very night that he's brought back to Columbus, he says, let me ride you around and show you everything. And so he writes around, he has all this information about these crimes that only someone who had committed them would have known.

And he said, yeah, well, I was there, but somebody, the other guy with me attacked the women. And they said, well, who is this other guy? And there's a scene here in the book, which I got from one of the guys, one of the detectives that came back about how he, he just, just, just didn't want to talk, didn't want to talk. But finally said he would admit who it was. and it was a person named Malvin ala Michael Credenden and you know if you go up like a name John Smith perhaps Melvin well Malman Al Michael Crittenden was in fact a child and friend and actually had done some crimes with Gary some of the robberies with Gary

but he didn't have anything to do with it as it would later turn out just and I'm not he's running out of Patsy's oh yes but anyway it it's interesting and I'll leap ahead one small point John Lee Mitchell, Malvin, Malichael Crutton, and Jerome Libas all ended up testifying at trial later. It was an interesting, interesting thing. Anyway, it took a jury that he was indicted for three of the rapes, murders, and burglaries in less than 24 hours. The prosecutor was a fellow named William J. Smith, Bill Smith. He later became a spirit court judge, and I asked Judge Smith,

why did you only indict him for three? He said, well, you know, they were our best cases, and I felt we had a very strong case for any one of them. But he said, the other thing is we were seeking a death penalty. How many times can you execute someone? He said he felt very confident about his cases. Gary was assigned to a court-appointed attorneys as well as a court-appointed investigator.

Within a few months, he fired them and insisted that he wanted to hire his own team. He got a guy named Bud the Seaman. And also, importantly, he got the noted attorney Bruce Harvey to represent him. Bruce Harvey is a well-known George criminal attorney. Over the next several years, there was a lot of stuff that went on. It took a period of two years to bring him to trial. He was not brought to trial until late July of 1986, more than two years after he was

arrested. During this period of time, one of the newspaper reporters, a guy named Richard High started looking at the garret's past. and there is a fascinating newspaper article that really outlines Gary's entire life. His first arrest was at age 17. He was without a doubt what people would describe as a career criminal. This was, in fact, the term that his own attorney used to describe him. He had never had a legitimate job.

He basically supported himself by robbery and selling drugs. He had a disdain thing. women, although he admitted to fathering 14 children out of wedlock. He was said to be cruel and sadistic to women. He was extremely intelligent and also articulate, well-spoken, and convincing, and he was a classic sociopath or psychopath of the Ted Bundy type. He was the classical, severe, antisocial personality disorder to use the correct term. If anyone is ever interested in reading a detailed description of this,

You can see find it on my website, which is on the front page. It says Carlton-Gerry Timeline at 1950 to 1984. It's very interesting reading that's about his background. Anyway, there were several attempts to get a trial started. One of them was where they were about to go to trial. And at the last minute, the defense attorneys demand a mental confidence here. Because Gary was a great actor. Sometimes he would sit and hope.

in the room like this and sometimes he would be disheveled and other times he'd be wearing a three-piece suit and the defense attorney said that he had been mistreated in prison that he had been fed that you know and so it was so on so forth and so on um he was set to central state hospital here for psychiatric evaluation these normally take about six weeks he returned four days later because they said he refused to cooperate. However, the people at Central State Hospital did observe him playing volleyball and said he got along very well with other people, so it was a sham, no doubt. He was scheduled to go to trial in Columbus, and then at the last moment, his lawyers, his attorney's move for a change of venue. That was another delay.

And so his trial took place in Spalding County, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. I wonder if he tried to get himself moved to the mental hospital to because maybe he thought he could escape or something like if he didn't if he got there and didn't cooperate you know something wrong is planned that that is exactly what everyone thought that it was escape attempt and he was watched closely but that they were very well aware of that what was going on but it but it was also another tactic to delay the trial because the longer you delay it the less likely the less likely that the crimes will be fresh in the public's knowledge. Right. Witnesses suddenly don't want to show up. Actually, what happened, when he found when he finally didn't come to trial, there were two witnesses that were

important that had died, and so there were a number of things that happened. The prosecution's case was based on several things. Number one, his admission of being the crime scenes. Number two, there were the vaguer prints of the three cases for which he was charged, plus one other cases. case, his fingerprints were there, four of the seven murder scenes. There was a very similar pattern of crimes that he had committed not only in Columbus,

but in Syracuse, in Albany, New York, the rape, strangle murder, and so forth. At the time, the prosecution was allowed to introduce these so-called similar transactions. I think that's still possible from a legal standpoint. So, in essence, all of his, the seven cases, murder cases were introduced, but he was only charged with three. The witness, Gertrude Miller, the first lady I mentioned that he attacked and was left for dead, but who survived, she identified him at trial. There were also testimony from John Lee Mitchell and Malvin Allen, Michael Crudenden, who said that they didn't do this, and so forth. And it was also pointed out that the murder stopped when, Gary went to prison and settled in Illinois.

On the other hand, the defense accused the prosecution of lying. They said that the police had simply chosen Gary as their scapegoat for these murders and that, in fact, there was someone else, although this person was never known. During the course of the trial, which lasted about a month, the prosecution called 135 witnesses and had more than 200 exhibits. The defense had six witnesses and five exhibits. Basically, the defense consisted of he didn't do it, and we would appreciate it if you'd believe it. So it took the jury one hour to convince Gary on all counts, three murders and four burglaries. And the next day, in Georgia, we have a separate sentencing phase for capital cases. The next day, it took the jury three hours to sentence him to death on all counts.

This was in August 1986. So that is the second part. of my book. And I divided in three parts. And the third part is, you know, from a writer stand for him, you say, well, you know, this is, it's fascinating this far, right? It's an amazing story of all that's happened. And you say, well, the guy was sentenced to be executed, and so you've got 32 years between the time that he's sentenced to die and when he's executed in March of 2018, 32 years. And from a standpoint of someone who's writing, it's like, well, what do you do with this? Do you, I mean, it's probably going to be pretty boring.

You can kind of cover it up with a couple of chapters. This was fascinating, too, all these twists and turns that you didn't expect. And his case was during this period of time was appealed to the United States Supreme Court on occasion on four separate occasions, each of which they refused to grant a resert of certainty. or R.A. I can't say that word. Right. And he, basically the old court actions were upheld every single time. But several things did happen that are worth mentioning. One of the things that propped up was a bite mold issue.

It turned out that on Ms. Jadik Koffer, the last victim, the attacker had apparently bitten her on the breast. And if you remember Ted Bundy, some of his, there was some issues about bike molds with Ted Bundy's case and others, too. And it was, there was a bite mold made of the, there was a mold made of the bite mar. But it turned out that Gary had had extensive dental work when the time Ms. Kouffer was killed in 1978 at the time he was arrested in 1984. It was felt that by several dentists that you couldn't compare the things because his teeth had changed. the defense tried very hard to make an issue of this. There was the issue of DNA testing. DNA testing was around in the 1990s

and was officially blessed by George Quartz in 2003, the idea being that if it's a reasonable chance that DNA will change the outcome of the verdict, then it's admissible evidence for a new trial. Well, the defense attorneys were aware of the material that potentially had DNA in it. And they had known about it for quite some time, and yet they had never requested DNA testing. Well, in 2009, there was several delays of the execution. And finally, in 2009, a writ of execution was signed.

Gary was headed to have lethal ejection. and so the defense attorneys at this point said we need to do DNA testing and the idea was so much as anything it was perhaps of delaying tactic or right or as one person said a hail merry pass it maybe maybe it'll turn out to be something else we don't know about so they did DNA testing and everything ground to a halt they they managed to find three of the victims two of whom he'd been charged with as that had materials suitable for DNA testing to compare with Gary's one was Ms. Woodruff but it did turn out there was not any DNA that they could get out of her out of her specimen one was Ms. Diamondstein in the DNA the vaginal washings

from Ms. Diamondstein where she'd been raped matched to those of Carlton Gary but she was not charged with that murder and the third one was Miss. Thurman, Martha Thurman. Remember the lady who was found dead right after her family had left? It turned out she had the DNA of another man in her vaginal watches. And her family had been there over the weekend and they had left in the afternoon and she was murdered that night and there's no evidence that she was seeing anyone else. And so this became an issue. And then the fit it appropriately. He had very good defense attorneys on his fields, said, listen, this is just evidence that it was a second killer. Somebody else. Perhaps it wasn't John Lee Mitchell, but it may

have been somebody else. And this was 2009. There were nine years that took place that elapsed between this and his eventual execution in 2019. It turned out to make a very long story short. It turned out that in doing this testing, the lab, Georgia State Crime Lab, used a control of DNA, a male controlled DNA. This was either contributed by technicians from the lab, their own sperm specimens, semen specimen, I'm sorry, or presumably the husbands of female technicians there. And this control specimen had not been entered in any regional or national database. So it popped up as being an unknown male. And this was the longest, longest, longest period of time.

They finally figured out what the problem was. And they identified the DNA found in Ms. Thurman as being the DNA of the control. Right. One of the lab texts or something. something right and so and those one of the really really fascinating thing before this problem this problem was solved this was part of that in april 1971 there was a dispute between neighbors in Atlanta I think one one person took a rifle and shot it through the window of another person and when the police were there they found a BB pistol that belonged to the salient

they did use the rifle and in checking this out they found DNA on it and it turned out this DNA on that pistol matched the mysterious DNA that was found in Ms. Mark the Thurmond. And yet the problem was the guy that had the pistol was 30 years old, and he was not born at the time the murders took place. You know, he wasn't born in 1977, so how can you find the DNA on, you know, something's father? Well, no, no, there was no connection at all. And so the defense attorney said this wonderful theory that since the killings took place in Columbus that he was in fact wearing an old army surplus jacket you know that this was one from fort benning that had been sold to a military surplus store and that had DNA in it the pistol had rubbed off the deal oh this is

fantastic anyway they eventually solved the problem and that's what happened so without going into a tremendous amount of detail. Finally, a death warrant was signed in February in 2018, which is, what, five years ago now, and this was followed by a series of last-minute appeals, which got nowhere. And Gary was executed by lethal injection on March 15th, 2018. And one of the things that struck me about this,

and there was several summaries about after he was executed, And one thing that stood out to me, in 1970, he was born in 1950, in 1970, he was 20 years old, and he was, and was, what, 34 years old when he was arrested in 1984, right? During this period of time, he had about 30 months of unincarcerated freedom, okay? During this time, he committed in Columbus alone at least seven murders. And there were other murders that I haven't mentioned in New York, several murders. and it's amazing that in the short period of time he could kill a dozen people at least and commit burglaries and so forth and so he was a very very very dangerous individual

so that's the case and can I talk a little bit about the book now because I want to just yeah sure yeah I have a question so yeah he denied this all the way through and even after the death warrant was signed he never said well that that's that's exactly the point i'm fixing to address and it's kind of tied in with some other things and let me just gary was articulate sociopath as it were i can use that term uh he was intelligent he was well-spoken um and if you look at interviews with people that talk to him say how could this man do this he looked me straight in the eye and told me that he was innocent. One of the things that I came up against in writing this book was the fact that some other

things had been written about it. In 2007, there was a book that was released by, written by a guy named David Rose. David Rose is a British investigative journalist who first met Gary in 1997. he was he's a death penalty opponent and is convinced that the legal system in the southern part of the United States is totally corrupt and and persons of color cannot get a fair trial so he wrote a book called the big eddy club the big eddy club is a social club a dining club in Columbus Georgia been around for quite a few years many prominent citizens are remembers of it and he and David Rose implied that this was an unholy cabal of white supremacist who hung out at the Big

80 Club, and the conspiracy included everyone from the cop of the street to the prosecutor, to the judges, to the entire court system, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States. There were a lot, and like I said, the book is well-written. It's interesting. You read it. You I almost believe the guys in us. But Gary has, I mean, Rose has a way of not mentioning things that don't coincide with

what he does support his theory. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was another book written called Happy New Year Ted, where two people, two authors allege that it was in fact, Tim Bundy who did the

killing. Okay. And then there was a third book written by a lady named Renati Solomon, which is the stocking strangle, I believe the name of it is, who that was a landscaper there in Columbus, who's now deceased, committed the killings. And there's really no evidence for any of this. And the most cogent, most somewhat believable book is that of David Rose. But when you really look at it, compare it with the facts, they don't square up. So in writing this book, I was very much limited into what I could say.

I had to be extremely truthful, extremely factual, and really, really, really seriously. So the style of this book is written in a journalistic fashion, one, two, three, four. Right. Jack Webb, just the facts now. Right. Okay. I'm I'm it's interesting that you were able to you know interview like the judge and you know the you know some of the officers because it was so long ago you know a lot of them well we with the judge in the case um actually recently died he was came to the first book signing last year in a wheelchair but um the the prosecutor um who became a judge later he turns 81 this month very sharp guy.

Some of the other policemen that I interviewed were certain in their 50s and 60s and older that were involved in the case one way or the other. So I got a lot of first-hand stuff. And the other good thing I had was a ton of police records. Right. And so I could end the detail. In all, if you include the newspaper accounts and police records and the transcripts, you're dealing between 15 and 20,000 pages of stuff I had to go through it.

And I had a copy of the video recording of the trial, which was fascinating. You know, reading trial transcript is like reading a movie script, you know, you know, and someone says it was him. But in the trial, I'll say, it was him, you know, this sort of thing. And you get the influxent and so forth. And it was fascinating to read it. yeah it's great too because like the prosecutors and the defense attorneys like they they typically have some great things that they say probably do they do but but when you when you're when you're looking at the transcript they're just kind of black and white on a piece of paper but when you see him he's sentencing and uh it was it was it was a lot of work but it was fun to do so you when was the book released book was released uh last september and it came out in both hardcover which actually sold out before the release date

and soft cover and digital version and there is an audio version that was released I believe in November so it's in all for hardcover, soft cover, digital and audio okay and what was your it was published by Mercer University Press

okay I was going to say do you have a literary agent or you just went straight to the publisher Well, my first book was written in 2003, okay? That's 20 years ago, literally. And that was a lot easier to get things published. I mean, much easier than 20 years ago. The first book was extremely successful to my great shock and amazement. You know, looking back on it, that was before I learned to write.

I've gotten a lot better since then, I promise you. But people liked the book sold 12, 15,000 copies, and it's like, oh, wow. And so then I was embarrassed after that, having to written a book that seemed to be successful. So I felt like I had to do a second one. So I did a second one. It was option for a movie. It was good. It was about the Confederate Gold.

In fact, in fact, I got a call a couple of weeks ago from a report from the Wall Street Journal who's doing an article on the Confederate Gold. And I've been on the Travel Channel and the History Channel as a quote unquote expert on the subject, all because I got interested in writing a book about the lost Confederate gold. students fiction and and and so after a while on i kind of got a pretty good reputation as a writer and my first five books that i said were suspense and then i approached mercer university press with a serious book about georgia history that has to do with the crash of the cotton economy of the 1920s and nobody in their right mind would buy such a book but um i kind of wrapped it in with my uh with a murder story so it's the books is titled kill

on ring jaw bluff and and it's really about my great uncle charlie who in 1920 was said to be one of the wealthiest men at the state of georgia in 1925 was doing a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit and so he became the avatar for the small town businessman and um he had the 1920s when the cotton economy crashed and it's a fascinating book not so much for the story with the story it's um it's like eric larson's book the double in the white city he really wanted to write about the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but he talked about a serial killer so people would read it. That's about, that's about Yuri anyway. And anyway, that book has done well.

It continues to sell well, even though it's been out 10 years ago. Okay. Well, what are you working on now? This book, I got so burned, I'd write in this book that I asked the publisher. I said, let me, let me write some, some. mystery book three so i'm doing i'm doing a i had written in 2019 i wrote a i wrote a book title uh the girl kaleidoscope is a fun suspense novel set in savannah it's about a guy named uh john wesley o two who is a disbarred attorney who when he got a prison turned into an art dealer

and he's one of these guys that bad things happened to you know and so uh that book would did very well so i wrote I asked for a three-book contract to do that, and I just hit the first of the three books was just now released last month in August. It's titled Crypto. It's the same character. The next book of the series is titled The Garden of Earthly Delights, which if you're into painting, it's a painting by Hieronymus and Bosch, and it's a neat book, and then there's one more book in that series that'll be out in 2025.

do you do all of your books take place in Georgia what is what is it ad you write what you know right I've lived I've lived here on my life I did go to school out of state a little bit I went to school I went to medical school in New Orleans and I did my residency John Hopkins in Baltimore but other than that I've lived in the south okay yeah it's just what is it is it Wayne White I forget his name, who writes in Florida, and, uh, oh, man, there's two or three of them, too. I can't, I can't recall. Uh, one of them, one of the guys was it, is it, uh, shoot, he's a reporter for the Miami Herald. Yeah, um, I, yeah, Carl, Carl, Allison, he's a great writer earlier.

Yeah. Yeah, I like it said. And it just depends. I mean, you, to, to really, to really get into writing, you really have to enjoy it. enjoy storytelling. That's what I started off this interview with, talking about storytelling. And so if you're telling the truth, as in this book and other books, I've written, the story is to take a series of facts and turn them into what become a story. If you're writing fiction, you're saying, oh, you know, you've got a blank slate. You can do just about anything in the bardsar or the better, you know? And my last couple of books, I'm sure you, I've had people,

my last two or three fiction books people inevitably say god i didn't see that coming you know when they right last chapter you know so that's fun that makes it worthwhile yeah i i just i find like writing nonfiction is is there's things that happen that i i couldn't have imagined happening well you you have to you have to really look to find those things i mean most of the time you know somebody gets drunk and shoot somebody and that's that's a murder that's not something you want to write about. But bizarre tales that involve deception. And let me talk about the other book, earlier true crime book I wrote on Six Inches Deeper, the reason the thing about that book was karma, just plain karma, because the story was that in 1972, a 34-year-old mother of three,

secretary disappeared from her place of employment. She'd call it. Case again went cold in 1988, eight years later, two farmers plow in a field, found a buried box that had the dismembered remains

of the missing woman. It finally came to trial. It had Bodily Cook, the famous defense attorney, defendant a person that was arrested for it. But anyway, the thing about that was the person that was eventually convicted of her crime was the son of a wealthy family. He was married. He had everything that

everybody could possibly want. But imagine that you have committed a crime or something. I had this theory that everybody, me, you, everybody we know, has something in their background that they're ashamed of that people don't know about. And they late at night when the lights are off and they're all alone, they say, if anybody finds out about X, whatever that thing is, my life, life will be terrible. My life will be terrible. My life will be ruined. And as long as you don't find out about it, things are okay. Imagine that you had murdered your secretary, cut her body up, buried it in a box, and you're going about your life and, you know, 10 years have passed, and everything's fine. And then all of a sudden somebody digs

the box. Right. And what, the opening, the opening, the blurb in the book is a quote from the jury, from the trial transcript, where the witnesses, asked, well, if it had been buried any deeper, and he said, yes, if it had buried only six inches deeper, we never would have found it. And that's where the book, that's where the time came from. Six inches made all the difference in multiple lives. That would do dozens of lives whose erection changed because the box was not buried six inches deeper. So that's what I found fascinated about that. Okay. Well, is there anything you feel like we haven't covered that you want to

do you feel like I didn't didn't touch on? No, no. I write a variety of books. Mainly southern history. Some of them are quite serious. I mean, I've got an academic history of the Ku Klux Klan, which is actually quite fascinating.

Klukech Klan of the 1920s. I've written an anthology of southern stories about the great Yazoo-Farral and things that you've never heard of, unless you live in Georgia, and took it in eighth grade because the whole paragraph in your eighth-grade history book about Yazoo-Farod, this kind of thing.

But anyway, if you like to know more about me, go to my website. It's something my name, William Rowling, it's in William, W-I-L-L-I-M-R-A-W-L-I-N-G-S dot com, spelled out. And I think all of my books are listed there and there's a little blurb about each one. Yeah, I will also, we'll put it in the description box so people can click on the, you know, if you, I don't know, if you watch YouTube, but, you know, there's a little box. You just click on it. It'll have a link. I love YouTube. Yeah.

It'll have a link right there. So let me give me one second. And also, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about this and tell me. Well, I'm honored that you ask, and I hope it's, I hope your audience finds it interesting. You know, it's so funny is my, you know, like sometimes I interview people and it's like, you know, my wife will say, well, what do you, you know, what do you have planned today? I'm like, ah, I'm talking to this guy. He did this. He did that.

You know, I'm like, you know, it's okay. But for the last week, I keep calling you the, you know, she doesn't know your name. I keep saying like, listen, there's this like this old Southern gentleman. He said, I said, I could listen to him talk forever. Botoxes or, you know, this morning I woke up, but I said, I'm going to talk to this guy today. So. Well, good. I hope you enjoy it. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I really appreciate you guys watching.

And if you like the interview, please share the video. Do me a favor and subscribe to the channel. Hit the bell so you get notified of videos like this. Also, please consider joining my Patreon. It's like $10 a month. If you're interested in the book or any of Williams' books, please look at the description box. We're going to leave the link there.

So you just click on the link. It'll bring you right to all of his books. Like he said, they're all hard copy, soft copy, digital, and audio. So absolutely check them out. I really do appreciate you guys watching the interview. Thank you very much. See you. Hey, it's Matt Cox, and I'm here with Collier Landry.

And Collier has an interesting story. In fact, I remember watching a documentary on this related subject. So as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, wow, I looked into it. I was like, oh, wow, I need to talk to this guy. It's super interesting. And I watch some videos. And so anyway, check this out. I was watching one of your, first I, you know, we were contacted.

Then I watched, started watching one of your videos and I was kind of like, that sounds familiar. And then I went and as you were telling the story, I remember and I remember telling my girlfriend as we were watching, I was like, oh my God, I remember watching this. Like 20, like before I even went to prison, I think I watched. Or maybe it was when I was in prison, I watched one of those, you know, one of the documentary type shows. I don't think I watched the whole,

I don't think I'd watched an entire, like a two-hour documentary. I want to say it was one of those one hour. No, you probably watched Forensic Files. Yeah, yeah, okay. Like everybody else has. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, and then I got to the part. I watched one of the shows where you actually had confronted your father. And I never, you know, I don't know what ended up happening with that. We were, like we were doing like four or five different things at the same time. And I was like, oh, I'm going to interview this guy. I've got to interview this guy. So that's my documentary.

That's a murder of Mansfield that I made when I can front him. Forensic Files is how a lot of people know me, mostly because I was this kid that was involved in this massive murder trial. And I was like the center of it, all of it, right? And that's how a lot of people know me. And then I, in my process, which we're going to get into all this, but I had made a film called a murder in Mansfield because I did all of these things to try to find out why my father murdered my mother right and it culminates in this uh you know sort of scene which it's like

right over my shoulder here do to do of me confronting my father in prison so okay so let's let's start at the beginning you were you know obviously you were born i was born i was i was i was born in so the very beginning in philadelphia pennsylvania in brinmar hospital in on february 28th and I all my family was from from Philadelphia mainline area and I grew up I guess like you know

like every other kid I guess I thought I had a really normal life I think when we're young we're you know we don't we obviously don't realize what adulting problems are or the situation that we're necessarily in

so my family right when I'm I was born, we moved from Philadelphia to Pensacola, Florida for about six months. My father was in the Navy. And then we moved to Dahlgren, Virginia when I was like one year old. And I lived on a naval base where I grew up for the next four years in Dahlgren, Virginia. And my father was a doctor. My father was a doctor on that naval base. You know, I grew up. I thought I just had like a normal life, normal kid. And it wasn't really until, you know, airplanes laying in the backyard and going to the

Chesapeake Bay and, you know, going to preschool and that was my sort of thing. And I had like, you know, I was talking about this the other day with somebody. I was just filming with Vice. And we were getting into like my backstory. And I was like, you know, I do remember like good times with my parents around that. You know, I remember really thinking that I was really in a happy family in my dad. and, you know, being home more and things like that. And it wasn't really until we moved to Mansfield, Ohio, which is where I grew up, the rest of my life, that things started to change.

And when we moved to Mansfield, my father had taken a job as a president of a hospital there. And, or not a president, but like he was like, whatever, he was running the hospital. Right. And he was a doctor who was an osteopath. He went to Penn. and as in my mother. And the thing is, is that that was a place where we didn't know anyone, right? And like I said, all my family is from, you know, Philadelphia.

So we were this sort of city folk, if you will, that is, Mansfield is now it's grown, but at that time it was a very small town. And it's in the Midwest. And it's, you know, it's, they're not used to having people like our, like, like we were, right? city folk in the country. So it was a lot for my mother to sort of relate to and my father, but one of the things that, and this is, I think that you, something you could really understand is, and this is unbeknownst to me at the time, but it was an opportunity for my parents in a place where no one knew who we were to create a life and to sort of have a little bit

of a revisionist history in their lives. or, you know, just sort of create a new character, if you will. And so I think that the persona that both of my parents projected was they came from good, wealthy families in Philadelphia and, you know, obviously we're Ivy League educated, but they sort of created this facade. And part of that facade was that we were a happy family. and I grew up spending 95% of the time with my mother. I was her constant companion.

And I just kind of thought that was normal. And my father, who was a doctor, was always, quote, working. And so I started to realize as we moved to me as well, I was five years old, six years old, seven years old. I started to realize that, like, my father was around less and less. Like he wasn't home for family meals or he would just sort of disappear at night. I would often find him sleeping on the couch later. night or if I was if I came up in the morning he was he was gone or he was watching up watching CNN Larry King in the middle of the night and I remember just sort of going I don't

something something's all off here but maybe not maybe it's just me you didn't you didn't hear then they weren't arguing in front of you or anything well but no so my my parents did argue and and my father was a very violent person growing up so my father had a massive proclivity for violence. But it didn't really start until I was around seven where he was violent with me and my mother like overtly. I'm sure he was manipulative to her. I'm sure they got in arguments and all these things. My father wasn't around a lot, you know, and he was quote, like I said, always working. And then I started noticing this change in the family dynamic. And I had kids I was going to school with that were children of doctors that were in single parent households. So their

parents were divorced. I didn't really quite understand how that worked, but I knew that it wasn't great. And I saw the pain that they were going through with the sort of manipulation between both parents and whatnot, bouncing around on weekends. But I still was grateful for this family unit that I perceived that we had. And over the years, my father was around less and less. But one of the things that we did do, we did two things together. We would go,

I would go with him with his medical rounds to the hospitals, and he would see his patients, and I would like tap dance and sing and perform for the people to entertain them, right? Because I was one of those artsy-fartsy people. So we would do that. And then we would go on ski trips,

and mostly would be myself and my father. So I learned how to ski when I was like eight years old. we would go up and one of the things I remember if my mother didn't come with us which often she didn't she would stay in the lodge if she did she didn't personally ski she did a couple times it wasn't really her thing but I noticed that when I would go with my father it would be like just father and son trip to go up there I noticed that oftentimes I wake up in the hotel room by myself or I would see my father talking to a woman and like I remember one time going to look for my father I woke up and I put my clothes on and was like walking around the hotel looking for him.

I found him in a bar, like at the ski lounge lounge, the ski lodge lounge talking to this woman. And I was like, huh, this is weird. But I didn't really think anything of it. As I was getting older, so 9, 10 years old, I started to develop asthma. And it was pretty serious. And I was not an asthma. athletic kid. I was on steroids because of asthma. I started, you know, having a lot of problems. I couldn't, like, playing in gym class. Like I could because it was exercise induced

asthma. It was just really bad, right? Especially during the winter. We're getting bronchitis a lot and things like that. But my father started getting really abusive towards me for not being athletic, calling me a stupid little fat boy. We would play catch in the yard and he'd try to, like, throw the baseball at my nuts and tell me I was a pussy, you know, things like that, abusive of things. And I noticed that things were getting more and more contentious between my parents. And there were situations where my father was apoplectic, right? And he would literally at the drop of a snap of a finger could just, he was a rageaholic, just, you know, everything would just hit the fan. I remember we were making breakfast on a Saturday and I dropped an egg on the

floor and he just lost it. And he threatened to kill me and then my mother begged for mercy. and slammed the door and shattered all the windows um he he was just he was just that type of person so i i also grew up in this situation where besides the trauma that happens later i grew up in a very contentious household of like you know i had a tiptoe around didn't want to set my dad off right and i never really understood why that why he was that way and he was very jackal and hide so sometimes he'd be really really nice right so or he would have the these rage fits and then he would apologize as most you know as most abusers manipulators narcissists do i just kind of thought that was normal right right no i know i i look i understand

i mean one being in a very similar household and two i was just thinking i was i was uh as you were saying it i was thinking it's funny like you don't notice that's you don't know there's anything wrong i i'm actually working on a story with my uh my girlfriend and we're and as we're kind of going through it and like everybody involved in the stories on drugs well you know when you're surrounded by water you don't realize you're in water you know what I mean like a fish doesn't know it's in water so it's the same thing when all you when your only reference is you know you've got a sweet mother and a father who's abusive you kind of assume well that's how it is with everybody right yeah absolutely absolutely so you don't realize how odd it is until you get

into a normal situation, and you go, wow, my family's fucked off. You know, but, so I know exactly what you're saying. You just don't see it. No, you don't at all. And it's a, it is a situation where you just, yeah, you just, you can't see the forest for the trees, right? You don't know your water. When you're in water, you don't know your way.

I love that. I'm going to use that, by the way. So I am, I kind of, but still thought that I was grateful for my life, right? And my mother was just the kindest, most gentle, a beautiful woman, by the way, and just a kind person to everyone and just really taught me the foundation of kindness. And also my parents didn't suffer fools. Like I was the kid who, education was a very high priority in my household. And I was a kid who was, who would, school would end, would get to play with his friends, like, get a week off from school, school, and then go back to summer school and take summer classes in science, art, math, whatever it was, right? Right.

And I loved to learn. So I was like into that, right? And that's how I grew up. And I think a lot of it was, I often wonder what I think back on things is maybe my mother was trying to put me in these things. so I wouldn't see certain situations. So if I'm away with friends or at school and doing activities that I'm not seeing what lies beneath the surface of their relationship,

which was my father was a manipulative, consistent womanizer and abuser. And I ended up finding out much later in life that my father was having affairs on my mother, even before they got married in 1968. And they had been together since they were in high school. He was like maybe 19, I think she was like 17 when they met, and they had had a relationship, like from the very early stages of their relationship, he was a womanizer. He built some of the nation's largest banks out of an estimated $55 million because $50 million wasn't enough.

And 60 million seemed excessive. He is the most interesting man in the world. I don't typically commit crimes, but when I do, It's bank fraud. Stay greedy, my friends. Support the channel. Join Matthew Cox's Patreon. Things really started to change when my grandparents started dying.

So my mother's mother passed away in November of 1987. Her father, who was my pop-up, who I was probably closest to out of all my grandparents, was he passed away January, 1988. And he had come to stay with us at the end of his life. And then my father's father passed away in May or June of 1988. And the only person left was my grandmother, who was my father's mother. Now, my father's mother had three children. My father, a middle child who was my aunt, obviously, and then a younger son, who

was my uncle, who was my godfather, who was very close to my mother. And my mother was extremely close with her mother-in-law, because she didn't really have a relationship, a very good relationship with her daughter. A daughter was a little bit of a tomboy. My mother was a traditional, beautiful woman, into fashion, into art, into like the high society type of things, you know, loved going to museums. And that was something she really shared in common with my, with my grandmother. Now, both of my family's backgrounds were poor working class people, you know.

And but in this town of Mansfield, they had sort of portrayed that they had different lives. You know, they came from wealthy families and relationships, relationships. to famous people and things like that, which a lot of it was not true. My father also portrayed this persona that he was a naval war hero. And my father would tell these stories to patients, to girlfriends, to people

of things like going. And I remember we were at this country club that we had joined in Katava Island, which is northern part of the state of Ohio. And I remember that we were at this dinner. My father was telling this whole story about how he was in his fighter jet in the South China Sea and he had to eject because he got shot down. He ejected and the ejection latch wouldn't work. So the plane went down in the South China Sea and he had to take his trusty Boeing knife, military issue and cut him his way out of the cockpit and then swim a couple miles to shore and get picked up by a search and rescue team. days later it's great story it's not true

you look yeah happen but I grew up thinking that my dad because he was in the Navy and I used to watch airplanes laying in our backyard when we lived in Dalgrin and I thought that my father had flown airplanes and this is like around the time the top gun comes out so like 19

it was talking 87 86 something like that so my father was very into top gun and I thought oh and he would tell me these stories right because that was something my father was really proud of Of course, when you're trying to relate to your father, I was like, oh, okay. And I bought it, of course. And I remember his call sign, he said was bumper, which was my nickname growing up, because when we lived on the naval base, I used to point to the nose cone of the airplanes and call it

a bumper. I used to say bumper. So he said his call sign was bumper. And I remember him telling me, he's like, oh, they found my helmet. I'm going to get my helmet. I remember asking my father for like years. Did you get your helmet? You get your fighter helmet?

Because I thought that would be cool to have, right? I could wear my dad's fighter helmet. It's obviously bullshit. My father even told people he flew for the blue angels, which is like the Navy's color guard. Right. Like the most elite, elite fighter pilots in the world.

And there are photographs of my father that he would even have in his office of him with probably more medals on his jacket, on his officer's jacket, than the joint chiefs of staff for the president. I mean, it was just absurd. But again, I didn't know any of these things. Now, I do remember going to the Army surplus store with my father, where they sell those

medals. And I do remember getting some for myself because I was a green beret one year for Halloween. I think the last Halloween I was in there, you know. But it was, I grew up in this sort of facade. And, but I kind of didn't believe it. But really when things started to unravel was around. around my mother wanted to have my mother wanted to adopt a baby from china from Taiwan specifically like a like a two-year-old girl and I was supposed to go over this is February of 1989 I was supposed

to go over with her to China and I got really really sick the night like a few days before really bad asthma and I didn't go because I probably would have died on the airplane and my I was left with my father and I had never been alone with my father for more than a brief period of time, right? Or with other people around. That was two weeks that I was with him. And it was absolute hell. He was so abusive to me. And I remember so my father had a real proclivity for violence and he loved violent movies. And I remember he was watching Commando and I didn't really like watching those movies growing up. I didn't like to see. see people getting shot and murdered and things like that. So I would cover my eyes and he would

call me a pussy, smack me, you know, don't uncover your eyes. You need to see this. This is war. I was in the Vietnam War, like all this crazy shit. My father was, let me be very clear. My father was in the Navy in the ROTC program. He never was a fighter pilot. He never saw combat. He was, yes, he was in the Navy around when the Vietnam War occurred. He never was in, in Vietnam. He never did any of these things and he never left the united states apparently so but he would tell me these stories i mean just you know and as a war hero decorated war hero and i'm just but i you know i felt bad i believe that i was doing something wrong right so this time very specifically he would say to me he he was watching these movies i was in playing a computer game on the computer and i had

plug the speakers to the computer. So I wouldn't disturb him. Literally, it was just like trying to be considerate of my father. He comes into the office where I'm playing the video game. It was like Math Blaster or something, if you remember that. And he, he says, why is there no sound coming through a computer? And I told him, I told him, why I unplug the speakers? And he just lost it.

He grabs the speaker wire and he shoves it in my face. base. He's like, I'm going to fucking stick this in you. He sticks to the back of the computer and he starts screaming at me. He starts taking books and computer games and throwing them at me off the shelf and screaming at the top of the lungs. Now, also my father is six foot four, a good 225 pounds. He's a big dude, you know, and I'm a kid, an asthmatic little chubby kid. He starts chasing me around the house, making me stop and salute him every time he said, what are you? And I'd have to stop and salute him and say, a stupid little fat boy, sir. and run around and do all these choices.

He's just screaming at me. He's throwing things at me. He's whipping me with a belt. And he did that for a period of about two weeks. And I remember he, and then he would stop. And then he would apologize and say, it's okay. Daddy, sorry, and all this stuff. Like, you know, the master manipulator, right?

Is he drunk? I can see you know so okay so everybody says that so I want to be very clear my father never drank my father was not an alcoholic and as far as I knew didn't abuse drugs like I you know I only saw my parents drink on very limited occasions my mother liked in Arametto sour I think my father maybe drank scotch but like they weren't drinkers you know alcohol wasn't something I noticed in my house he went now his father was an alcoholic but he wasn't so he was just a rage-filled human. And I, I, um, so this was a time I was without my mother, you know, and then it's this apologizing back and forth, right? So finally my mother comes back and I'm now aware of like why she's ever like, let me be with my father for longer than certain periods of time. And I thought, you know, okay, there's like some real issues here.

So she comes back from China. And then flash forward a few months later, it's Memorial Day weekend, 1989. And I go with my father to this barbecue party. And we go like out the outskirts of Mansfield into the country, country. And go to these people's house and they're like racing quads and they're barbecuing and people are drinking beer and playing volleyball and stuff. And I had never seen anything like this as a kid because my mother was very preppy, very property as was my father

we didn't really like no offense but like we didn't quote associate with people like that like you know they're there and not that there's anything wrong with it I had a blast by the way like riding a quad but I never seen anything like that dirt bikes all this I wasn't aware that those things like this I would you know I raced bikes when I was a kid it was like BMX

kid and all that stuff like I never I never saw that right and there was a woman there a young woman and I met her her name was Sherry Campbell and I towards the end of the evening I'm walking with her daughter

who's a couple years younger than me and we're walking around the lake and we're like skipping stones and all this I look back and my father has his arm around this woman. I was like, huh, that's kind of interesting. And we're getting ready to leave and he gives her a kiss on the cheek, which wasn't like necessarily totally out of character

because my parents kind of did the thing that you do with, you know, friends and whatever. But I took note of it. And I asked my father on the ride back home, I said, who was that woman? And he explained to me that she was a patient and that she was terminally ill and that he was there to comfort her in her health problems.

And that's why he had his arm around her because he was consoling her. I was like, oh, that's, you know, horrible, you know. I didn't really think anything of it. That was satisfactory enough answer for me. on school ends and in June of 1989, it's Father's Day. And my father goes, it takes me to his office and he says, or go to his office, we pick up some stuff and he stops to go get a suntan. You know, this is like the late 80s, so the sun tanning is in.

And this woman, again, Sherry Campbell, is at the suntan place. It just happens to run into us. and she has two radio control cars, and she, you know, says, hey, happy Father's Day. I got these for you guys and all this. It's like, oh, yay. And I'm like, of course, you get a kid, radio control car. You're his best friend.

But I noticed something that's kind of odd. I see a ring on her finger that I recognize my mother was wearing at one point. And it was a diamond slide ring. It was very unique. Like it wasn't a standard ring. And I said, oh, my mommy has a ring like that. And she just kind of giggles and she looks at my father. I don't pay it any mind.

And as we're getting ready to leave, I get in the car and I look up and my father is full on making out with this woman. And I had never seen that other than movies, right? I thought, oh, okay, something's up. And my father gets in the car. And so I ask him and he goes, I need you to tell your mother that I took you to the office and I gave you the radio control cars and not tell her about meeting Sherry or anything like that.

I need you to do me that favor. And, of course, I'm afraid of my father, so I don't want to say anything to him. But I know that something is seriously wrong with this. And I lied to my mother out of fear from my father. Right. So we go to dinner that night. And then in the middle of the night, I get very sick and obviously racked with guilt as a kid. Because I never lied to my mother.

And the next day, I'm playing with the radio control car. My father is not there. And I come in the porch. I'm just so overwhelmed with guilt. and I say, Mommy, I need you to sit down. And I tell her, I say, I think, I'm hungry now.

Now? What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O. Henry bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating.

Swing by a gas station. and get an O'Henry today. Oh, hungry, oh, Henry. Daddy's having an affair. How old are you at this point? I was 11 years old. Okay. And I say to her, this is, yeah, 1988.

And I say to her, I said, I think Daddy's having an affair. And I tell her the whole story of meeting Sherry, meeting Sherry back in Memorial Day. You know, she got the cars and how she had the ring and how they were making out and all this stuff. my mother said thank you for telling me she was she was upset that i lied to her but she was thankful and she understood why i why my father put me in that position and it wasn't fair to me and she's grateful that i told her the truth she goes in she makes a phone call and it's a lot

a lot of screaming and that was when i i realized that like oh my god like some of these other kids I'm going to be a child of divorce. I don't have this particular, I don't have this perfect family that I thought I had. Despite my father's behavior, and despite my father not being around all the time, I still thought I had a family unit intact. And I realized that that's not the case.

So this is, like I said, end of June, 1989, and this is when things really started to unravel. So my parents start to engage my mother files for divorce. because unbeknownst to me at that time my mother and father had a had an understanding which was my mother had said you know my father's name was john but he went by jack she's like jack you can do whatever fuck you want don't involve our kid the moment you involve our kid that's the lie in the sand and he did he involved me by introducing me to one of his girlfriends and that was it for my mother and she'd filed for divorce and for the next several months

it was getting really ugly and my father would like leave little notes in my bed saying I love you buddy and everything will be okay and daddy like basically the victim like mommy's doing this but mommy will come to her senses type stuff that he was saying this and I'm thinking myself like I don't know what's going on but like it seems like you're at fall here buddy um because my mother was my most important person to me I spent like I said the majority my time with her but it kept getting uglier and uglier and my father i would if any time when i would spend time with my father at this period at this point this is towards the end of 1989 we would randomly run into sherry campbell and he'd be like look who's here it's sherry

you're at a kmart and and she just conveniently we would just sherry was sick yeah exactly i thought sherry was going to die i thought sherry was definitely not terminally ill no okay and because she's still around um so that was a lie and what happened is is that um uh yeah we randomly run into her and he had was like moved in with her staying there he wasn't at our house hardly at all he would come back and get things and things were just really really ugly between my parents and my father gets nastier and nastier this is like like around Thanksgiving of 1989 my father's telling me things like he's going to make sure, because I believe my mother finally filed for divorce in November of that year, November 1989, officially. And my father started telling me how he's

going to make sure that I get yanked out of the school that I'm at and go to public school, like all the other, quote, poor kids. And I'm going to, he's going to make sure that my mother and I don't have a house to live in, that he's going to make sure that my mom is working at McDonald's and that I don't have enough clothes and that we suffer. And that's how I'm going to grow up. And he's going to create a beautiful, wonderful life with Sherry and her children and give them everything. This is what he's telling me as an 11-year-old child. And I started noticing my mother's demeanor was really beaten down. Because unbeknownst to me also was the fact that my father is a doctor, but the whole reason that my father is a doctor is my mother who graduated from the University of

Pennsylvania School of Dentistry and got her dental hygienist degree was working in Philadelphia in the 60s and 70s, earning $25 an hour to put my father through medical school. And my mother ran all of his books and took care of all the accounting. for my father's practice because my father went into private practice after he left the hospital because he was asked to leave because it was womanizing and because he had so many complaints against it, which of course I didn't know any of this as a child. So my father starts telling me all these horrific things. So my mother is driving me after picking me up to school. We're going from school. We're going to a restaurant called Bob Evans to eat. And she says to me as we're driving down the road,

she says call your I want you to know something I would never leave you and I was like well of course not mommy I know that and she goes if I ever do I want you to know that your father probably had me killed and I was like well

how is that mommy and she said she starts going into this fact that you know so my father is Italian and she said you know your father has mafia connections and you know your your your father just has ways to dispose of me. Who knows if that's even true.

Yeah. Based on all the other, like, you know, who knows what he's telling her. Exactly. And, you know, my mother did know, my mother did, I ended up finding out eventually, like, my mother did know her family and there wasn't these connections, like, at least not that way. But there was, she was just in fear of her life. And I had kind of seen that at that moment, like, okay, something's up.

so the holidays are here and it's just not a great holiday you know christmas my father isn't around like he's with his new family buying them all kinds of presents and stuff like that and it's just a whole thing right and my grandmother who's my again my father's mother was supposed to come stay with us for christmas and have a wonderful holiday she doesn't come for christmas she instead comes for new year's and she arrives on new year's eve or uh December 30th 1989 and what's interesting is my mother when they were arriving she saw my father drive down the driveway we could see my grandmother was in the car and she said to her best friend who she's on the phone with well jack's here with his mother so he get i guess he can't kill me tonight

and the irony of all this is that my mother used to say things like famous last words my mother had a very sardonic sense of humor right so you know she used to say like famous last words but famous last words so i my grandmother arrives and we have dinner whatever my father leaves and my grandmother and my mom are sitting in the living room and i you know i give everybody a kiss good night i give her a hug night mommy next thing I know it's I'm startled awake by hearing a scream and I look at this clock I have this Batman clock on the wall and it's about 3.18 a.m. And then I hear two loud thuds about 60 seconds apart. And between those thuds, I hear my father muttering. I recognize his voice. And then I count 12 footsteps as they walk down the hallway. And I always always always slept with my door open. And in the doorway, I can see out of my peripheral vision, the two feet stop in my doorway. And something's telling me, don't look up. Because I firmly believe that if I had, at that point in time, there's no, it's nothing to make the whole little bigger

and say she left with the kid. Yeah. Because that's actually probably more plausible. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And the footsteps go away. I somehow go back to sleep. I wake up a few hours later. I jump out of bed. I run straight to my mother's room. And there's a bunch of sheets that are off the bed.

It's in disarray. I'm looking for blood stains. I'm looking for anything I can find. I come downstairs. My father is sitting on the couch watching CNN with a towel wrapped around his waist. I said to him, where is my mother? And he doesn't respond right away. I said to him again, I said, where is my mother?

And he looks at me and he goes, well, call your mommy took a little vacation. And I knew at that moment, it was game one motherfucker like you fucking killed her. But I don't really want to believe it, but I'm like, this is what's happened. So my grandmother comes in and my father says to me, my father says, okay, so we're not going to contact. the police. We're not going to contact the FBI. And I thought that was really bizarre when you said the FBI. I'm like, we're in Ohio, like at the FBI. And he goes into this whole story of explaining that the thuds that I heard was my mother throwing her purse at him and that she had come downstairs and attacked him and started screaming at him over the divorce, over money, and threw

her purse at him, threw all her credit cards at him, left the house, walked down the driveway in the dead of winter with no coat and got into a car that was waiting for her at the end of the driveway and left uber yeah 1989 she she pulled her iPhone and got the uber that whole story doesn't make in a town where i don't know very many people um in the middle of the night without my credit cards without anything without a yeah without a coat yeah and left her left her personal vehicle there left her personal vehicle there left her just left her children there didn't grab the kids just left and so that's already very fishy right and i know my father's lying right because i because what once the once he involved me with the sherry with the with the with the

mistress i started realizing that my all the shit that my father told me my entire life was all bullshit like my father was a liar and i was like okay so this is the type of person I'm dealing with. So I was, I became even closer to my mother during this time between when I discovered he's a womanizer and has this relationship to when she goes missing. So our bond only gets stronger because now I believe my mother. I believe and I see the pain that my mother's going through in this whole divorce and separation and divorce. And I'm just like this guy's a horrible fucking human being. My father's a real, I've already didn't really care for my father to begin with. And now I'm like, you're a fucking asshole.

And now my mother's gone. And now you're feeding me this bullshit. So my father leaves and my grandmother who's there and she's bought the whole story. And she's like, okay, you're not going to call anybody. You're not going to tell anybody because he doesn't want us to tell anybody. Like, yeah, that's fucking ridiculous. So my mother had just bought a, huh? It doesn't make sense.

Like you're going to try and track her down at the very least. Of course. And what I, what I do is I grab, my mother just bought a cordless phone. I grab this cordless phone. I'd go upstairs, and I had saved all my mother's friend's phone numbers, and I had hidden them in a Garfield that I had in my room. I grabbed that list. I'd go into the bathroom.

I locked the door. I start calling everyone. I tell them what happened. I tell them, I can't call the police. I told my father I wouldn't call the police. Call the police. Right. So a black and white shows up at the house a few hours later.

And two, you know, uniform officers come in and my grandmother is just livid with me, screaming at me, saying, your father does that not to call the police? Why did you call the police? I was like, I didn't call the police, because I didn't call the police. And they're coming around, but my grandmother is literally helicoptering. She is hovering over everything. She's telling them to get out, get out of the house. You don't have a right to talk to this kid, blah, blah, blah. And I'm trying to explain to them. My mother would never leave me. Like something has happened to her. This is the bedroom. They're just kind of looking around or whatever. Turns into a missing person's report. So I follow up the next day with my mother's friends and they say, this is a

missing person's case, you know, we filed a report. I'm like, well, it's not, like, she is missing. Yes, but something has happened to her. She's dead or she's, you know, locked in a room somewhere. And, you know, and they all knew that my mother would never leave me because my mother did have friends in town, you know, other doctors, wives and stuff. I had friends growing up, but, but she didn't have a family here, you know, and the family was all back east. And they were also very estranged, especially after my grandparents passed away, which I'll come to find out later. Why? but my um so the next day so we have this like it's new year's day by this time and my father's girlfriend shows up and we have this whole like you know pot road or pork roast dinner it was just

terrible but earlier in the day what happened is the detective showed up and his name was dave messmore knocks on the door my grandmother again is like you can't come in you can't do this and he's like well i just want to you know have a word is the doctor here no he's not here he'll come back later he's like if i just have a look around he charms his way and i'm like come on in come on him it's my grandmother again loses it and she goes to call my father on the phone i grab him i pull him aside and i say give me your card like my mother would never leave me something's happened to her give me your card i'll contact you i'm going back to school it gives me his business card the next day i go to school the first thing i do is i walk into the principal's office i give her the card

I say you need to call the Mansfield Police Department. You need to call this guy. You need to get him here. Dave Massmore comes down to my school, and over a period of like two or three hours, I lay out the entire history of my mother and father and everything that happened from our whole, the whole situation and the girlfriend and all the details,

meeting her, my father's abuse towards me, my mother, what really happened on New Year's Day, on New Year's Eve, and what I heard and everything. And I tell him, I said, I'm going to go home because my father won't be home. My grandmother will be dealing with my sister if he was adopted from Taiwan. I said, I'm going to go upstairs

and pull the bookshelves out of the wall and look into our crawl space to see if I can find my mother's body. Or I'm going to start, I'm going to start looking for clues. I'm going to see if I can find her one purse that she would never leave the house with. I'm going to see if I can find this.

And I just started laying out what I sort of plan was. I think he was looking at me like I was fucking crazy. At the time, I'm almost 12 years old, but I'm still 11. He's like this kid, but I was a very articulate child. And growing up with parents that really valued education, like I wasn't watching television and stupid shit. I was reading books and read my father's medical books for fun. And, you know, our idea of going on a family vacation was go see all these museums.

and everything. So education at a really high priority in my household. So I was a well-spoken little kid, and I begin to gather evidence against my father. And over the course of the next 25 days, and today is a very, very key anniversary date, January 25th for me. But over the next 25 days, I start gathering evidence, and myself and Dave Messmore begin to put together. and ultimately it leads to my father's arrest, which is on January 25th, 1990. But I start gathering evidence

and some of the things that are happening is my father's coming home and he has all these marks and cuts on his hand. So I report that. He is really sore and he has me rubbed Ben Gay on his shoulders because he was so sore. And he said from moving boxes

in his new practice in Erie, Pennsylvania. And I'm just telling the detective of everything, as all this is transpiring over the next several weeks. But it wasn't until mid-January, 1990. My father takes me to his office to go pick up some paperwork. And I'm watching my father like a hawk, you know, so I don't let him out of my sight, right? And every night, like, during this time, his divorce attorney is over at the house. Dave Messmore keeps coming to the house with other, and other officers do, to want to talk to my father.

He wants to question my father, but he refuses to talk to him. And I see Dave at the doorway, and mind you, I'm talking to Dave behind my father's back at school, reporting on everything that's going on inside the house. And it's like we have this like thing and he's pretending not to know me and I'm pretending not to know it. It was really weird. It was crazy. But what happens is I go with my father to get these, this paperwork in his office. And on the drive back, we stop at a gas station. walks in the gas station to purchase some stuff and pay for gas and I'm watching him through

the windshield and I start rummaging through his car. I open up the center console of his truck and I find two photographs right next to each other. One is of a house that I've never seen before. The other one is of his girlfriend, Sherry Campbell, with her two children sitting in front of a fireplace that's wrapped in plastic so it looks like a new fireplace. And I just kind of put two and two together. Like, this is a new house. She's involved. This is, this is something significant. Next day, I go to school and I tell Dave Messmore about this. Towards the end of January, so around January 21st, 1990, because I don't hear from Dave after telling him about this house for a couple of days. I noticed my father's behavior is becoming, he's becoming more and more stressed at home. But we, oddly,

My father is not angry. My father has turned actually into this sort of very passive person in a lot of ways where I was watching. I was playing a Nintendo for Christmas that year was a fighting game and he saw me playing. And he goes, I didn't know this was a violent game. I wouldn't have bought it for you. And I'm thinking to myself, who is this guy? Like, you're Mr. Violence. You're Mr.

I cover my eyes when you're watching Commando and you're angry with me. And I'm playing a beat him up double dragon game and this is what you're upset about. I was like, this is so bizarre. But my father comes to me is around January 21st, 1990, and he says, you know, Collier, I know it's been really hard on you, you know, with your mother leaving us. It was always, it was always with him over the course of this sort of investigation. It was everything that he would tell me was, your mother left us. Your mother left us. You know, hopefully she'll come back. We would pray at meals at night for her safety. I mean, it was wacky shit. And I said, I was like, okay and he said well i have a i want to take you on a like let's just do a father and son bonding trip and i have a medical conference in florida and i'll take you and we'll have it just a father and son bonding trip and they'll be really great and i'm thinking to myself okay man every year we would go to tampa clearwater beach and we would go for medical

conferences but they were always in the spring they weren't in the middle of january they weren't right after Christmas because obviously these things are structured to like families can go on spring break and the kids can go bush gardens and whatever and it's a fun trip right it's Clearwater and I knew something was up and the next day I tell Dave Messmore

I call him up and I said this is what's happening and he realizes like because I tell him I was like I'm going to drown the Gulf Mexico I'm not coming back from Florida and he knew that and as potentially the only key witness in a murder case

he was very concerned. So the morning of January 24th, I get yanked out of my house. Can I wake up? What's that? Oh yeah, of course. Please interrupt me. Is this a year later?

No, this is, no, this is a few weeks later. A few weeks later. So it's, yeah, okay. No, so this has been, so my mother goes missing on December 31st, 1989.

This is now like January 24th, 1990. Okay. I thought maybe because, you know, a lot of times, sure, homicide detectives, or cases, you know, they take forever. Of course.

And which is very interesting because now that seems to be the process. But this was not the case with my father. So what had happened is, and like I was saying, my father's behavior was becoming, he was more and more passive. He wasn't getting aggressive, but he was very nervous. So I began to think, okay,

you know i tell dave messmore you know i've been telling dave messmore all this stuff and then so they yank me out of the house children services comes in they say we're from you know child services you need you have 20 minutes to pack a bag and get your stuff and so i start packing my clothes and i say okay what about my dog and they said we'll come back for your dog i never saw my dog again i pack a bag for my sister as i coming down the stairs is when i discover the entire house and my grandma's screaming at these people the entire house is filled they're coming in with men and women in white coats and they've got all kinds of contraptions with them like they're executing a search warrant in my house for my mother's body and it was

complete mayhem i get taken to a friend's house for the family's house and i'm not going to school that day i go and i'm approached by a social worker comes and i don't know what a social worker is, you know, a caseworker, but I know it's not a good thing. And she basically explains me, I'm going to be staying here for a while. I won't be going back to my home for a while. And they're kind of looking for my father. And I'm like, okay. So that night, which is January 24th, 1990, I have what is literally the worst asthma attack in my life. And I, I'm pretty convinced and I'm going to die. And I'm in a home. I don't have my medication. I don't have the stuff that I need to breathe, really. I don't know how I made it through the night, but I did. Next morning,

they take me to the hospital because I somehow stabilize. They take me at the hospital, and I go to see a family friend who's a doctor. And as I'm walking into the hospital, they, the lobby is filled with people, and there's an honor box. You know, honor boxes where they have the newspapers. And I just, as we're walking towards it, I get kind of veered away from it. And go into the room and the doctor's there, it gives me an injection for steroids. I get a breathing treatment and I'm like, okay, I can finally breathe. And this is January 25th, 1990. And this is when, this is when they tell me, they say, call your,

Lieutenant Messmore found your mother. And then there's like this eternal pause. and she was dead. And the first thing out of my mouth was that bastard. And then that's when the circus starts. So I have a question. Did you, I mean, did you, are you still, you're still, you're 11. I'm 11, almost 12.

So did you think? were you still holding out hope that maybe she was alive or you just kind of knew i knew but in that moment man like you you have that like you have this little like glint of hope yeah in you that maybe what you really know to be true is really not true like they're going to say lieutenant sfer found your mom she was you know uh she was vacationing in the bahamas uh she was in aruba she was uh shopping in Toronto and she this and that she was you know you kind of hope that it doesn't have the ending because nobody wants to think that their mother has been murdered and their mother has been murdered by their father right so my father they leave me out of this room and of course I see the honor box which

has Boyle arrested for wife's murder wife found you know on the headlines and um this was January 25th, 1990, so 33 years ago. And I, I'm just like, and I already knew that my life was altered. I was like, this is like, I've officially crossed the Rubicon now. Like, my whole life is over as I know it, like completely over. And I just, um, I just. it's really hard to explain, or it's really hard to articulate the emotions that come through that. And I think, you know, and I think for you, maybe you can relate on a totally different level.

But I think, you know, you were convicted for, you went to prison for 12 years, right? Yeah, almost 13 years. Yeah. And you obviously, you committed a crime. You knew you were guilty. You talked about that. But, you know, there is a finality when somebody, like when the judge, you know, hands, when the judge says your sentence, right?

Your sentence to however many, you did 12, 13, but maybe it was like 20 years and you were out for good behavior or whatever it was, right? But when you hear those things, like you officially know like, okay, it's no joke. This is like reality is set in. Like there's no coming back, right? I mean, I'm sure you've had that,

you had that experience. Despite your guilt, like it still hits you like, oh, this is real. Like it puts a button on it, right? Right. So I feel like, Like, I mean, I didn't know exactly what was going to unfold, but it was a circus. So I go into the foster care system temporarily.

I'm staying with friends, actually. I'm not even in the foster care system yet. I'm temporarily staying with friends. My mother's mother's sister, my aunt Carol comes in town. My mother's, I'm sorry, my mother's sister, my aunt Carol comes in town. They have a memorial service with my mother's friends. And I testify at the grand jury. hearing to indict my father, tell them everything I know, and I help them secure his indictment

for my mother's murder. Did you know, I'm sorry, did you know any of the details at that point? Like, did you? I just knew, Sue, I knew a few things because they started asking me questions about, have you ever seen a blue tarp around? And I said, yeah, it was on our porch. Anything else? Well, there was, you know, there was this green indoor outdoor, like astroturf

carpeting that my dad had rolled up on the porch for months in 1989. You know, they started asking me, have you ever seen this? I was like, yeah, I saw this. Yeah, I saw indoor outdoor carpeting. Now, I didn't know the details of what they had found, you know. But what had happened was is while I'm having the worst asthma attack my life the night before on January 24th, they are excavated. my mother's body from underneath the basement floor of this house that I had found the photographs of that my father had purchased with his mistress, Sherry Campbell, and they dug up her body underneath the basement floor, and it was covered with green astroturf. There was new bookshelves, and they almost didn't discover it. They just happened to see a splatter of concrete on the wall that wasn't cleaned up, and then they knew that the floor had been excavated. And they ripped everything up, and then that's how they dug her body up.

And it was wrapped in a blue tarp, which I saw for months just sitting on our porch. So the charge was premeditated murder because my father had planned all of this for months. Right. He bought all this equipment, set it out. So this wasn't like a tarp that you had for 10 years for painting one time. He went out and started collecting, bought the house. Yes. All of it.

all of it and so i testified at the grand jury and a couple of things happen states like okay we're gonna go with somebody right my father's side of family wants nothing to do with me because they feel very strongly i'm the reason why my father's arrested and they're under this you know spell of my father who is a psychopath and a master manipulator and narcissist that he's innocent and now i have somehow involved police and dishonored the family. And I'm the bad guy at 11 years old. My mother's side of the family. Even though the body ends up in his mistress's basement. No, no, it's not his mistress. It's his house that he bought with her. And she forged, she wrote her name is, so her name is Sherry Campbell. She's not married to my father. My father's name is Dr. John Boyle. He's still

married to my mother. She writes on the documents to purchase the house, Sherry Boyle. And then she puts an n period because my mother's name was n smid boyle so the initials line up n as b right so if any they ever checks it looks like that right because nobody knew what my mother's mill name was really so it's this whole thing so everything was very calculated and he even asked and it comes out in trial later he even asked the real estate agent about lowering the basement floor in this house which was brand new by the way about lowering the basement floor but it was at the lake level so you can't really get underneath the floor too much because of the water level. You know, it'll fill with water, right? Right. So it ends up being this whole, it's a fiasco. So my father's side of the

family wants nothing to do with me because I feel that I'm the whole reason that this is all transpired and my father's innocent. My mother's side of the family, my godmother, says to me, verbatim, this is my mother's sister. We cannot take you in because you look like your father. okay so i was there's a whole bunch of really really logical people very very logical people involved very very logical and rational people involved in this entire situation and it's very it's it's a very peculiar situation to be in when you are the youngest person in this scenario yet you are the adult right and i'm just dumbfounded i'm completely completely devastated that my family has nothing to do with me.

And I go into the foster care system, which I don't know if anyone understands the foster care system in the United States or how it works, but it's fucking horrible, despite the circumstances in there. It's just not great. And I basically have to, while in foster care, come to terms with the fact that my father has murdered my mother, he's about to go to trial, I'm the key witness in this trial, and even though prosecutors said to me, well, you know,

we don't need you to testify if you don't want to. You don't have to testify. I was like, over my dead body. Because, you know, when it goes to trial, I'm 12 years old. So I turned 12 a month after all this happens after they take the body up and I'm in the foster care and all this stuff, right? And I really, in the nader of my life, have to somehow find the courage and the strength to go, okay, I'm going to do what's right. I've been doing what's right for the last several months

for my mother, for my family, and I'm going to tell the world what I know and face this monster in court. And a lot of people were under the impression that I was, it was like videotape testimony like you phone in. No, I was in the courtroom. And the videotape is because they were filming me in court for the news. Because the trial was televised live throughout the courtroom.

And they actually had it was such a circus that the courtrooms filled up every day. It was like the hottest ticket in town. And so they had to put television monitors out in the hallways of the courthouse. so people could line up to watch the trial and of this doctor, you know, who murdered his wife. And my father had a high power legal team and all these things. And, you know, for that time, right? There's no Johnny Cochran, but like for Mansfield, he had a high power legal team. And I just thought to myself, like, the thing is, is that you have two choices. You can tell, you can do the difficult.

thing, which is tell the truth, face this monster, and honor your mother and do what you know is right or you can do nothing. And I realize, and I don't know how I realize this, but this is all a testament to my mother and how she, her upbringing and what she instilled in me. But I realized that if I didn't do any of this, there's going to be two things that we're going to happen. One, decades later when I'm looking at myself in the mirror, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. Second thing is, if my father, you know, if my father somehow gets acquitted

and I don't do anything, I'm not going to be able to live with myself. But also the scary reality is when you're testifying against your father and you have somebody who has this type of behavior, if he gets acquitted, he's going to, my life is over. My life is already over, but now my life is over again. And I'm going to be reliving this nightmare every single day of my life. Hey, remember when you try to put me in prison for murdering your mom?

Oh, by the way, I did it because there's no double jeopardy. You know, it could be something as simple as that. So I just, I mean, it's a really hard thing to face. But I did it. And I said, I'm going to do what's right. And I'm going to go in there. And I testify for two days at trial against my father. father and he is still incarcerated to this day right um but you you still have how much time did he get

so he got 20 years for aggravated murder which is premeditated murder in ohio at that time and then a year and a half for abuse of a corpse but he's on old law so every time that he wants to be released he has to go before the parole board and plea his case and then they can and give him more time. It's not like a 20 years and you're out type thing. What do you mean give him more time? You mean, he goes to the parole board and they don't let him out on parole. Exactly.

And they keep him inside again. Nowadays, the system has changed from my understanding is where if you're charged with a crime, they just give you a flat rate. So it's a, you know, it's a one size fits all. Okay, you committed this crime, then this is what you're going to. and on 20 years and one day you're out you know

and you're on probation right that doesn't that wasn't occurring when he was when he was sentenced so he's still incarcerated 79 years old when he goes in front of the parole board what is does he still say oh I'm innocent

shouldn't be here or does he say I fucked up I does he what does he do well well so

I had a relationship my father for decades because I guess we can get into this but from what I understand is he still is in denial of it or he's responsible for her death but finally in my film

when I finally confront him because I basically I grew up in this town and I was known for this and I did not want that I didn't want anyone to know me for anything, but who Collier is. And so I basically went off to music school for a few years, dropped out and moved to Los Angeles because I wanted to be, I wanted to tell this story. And I was either like, okay, I'll become a rock star, become famous and tell my story and

change the world and help people. Or I'll become a filmmaker. I'll tell my story, change the world, help people. That's what I ended up doing. I ended up becoming a filmmaker. And this whole process, for me was trying to understand why my father murdered my mother. So in my film of murder in Mansfield, I confront my father for the first time. And I've had, you know, I had had a

relationship with my father. I come to visit him in prison all the time and over the phone, phone calls and, and I have 400 some letters. And I read them on my podcast, moving past murder to expose like narcissism and gas lighting and things like that, right? But this was the first time I've ever put it to him like you murdered my mother and I want to know why and he has this whole story of just that she came down the stairs and she confronted much like he told me in that morning but he left out but he now added the details of he pushed her she hit her head on a piece of furniture and when he came back to her body she wasn't breathing and he tried to give her CPR Now, imagine he didn't call 911 one or anything like this.

Right. But in the film, as I discovered, and through my process of healing, I end up reading the case file. I found out, I find out that the back of her skull was smashed in, most likely with a hammer. So, and my mother's principal cause of death was suffocation, because when they found my mother's body, she had a plastic bag tied around, tied over her head.

So my father had hit her in the back of the skull and tithed her up with a plastic bag and she suffocated to death. And my, but my father denies this. And I even ask him, I say, well, how does she get the plastic bag over her head? It was going, oh, I put the plastic bag over her head. And I'm like, oh, okay. He's like, I'll put the plastic bag over her head because I didn't want her to look at me. Like, oh, yeah, you didn't while you were murdering her?

Of course you didn't. So there was all these really just strange things that he has in his defense. So I guess the first time he was up for parole was in 2010. And I had actually gone to the parole board and vouched for his release for two reasons. One is I wanted to curry favor with him because I wanted to tell this story. I'd always wanted to tell a story. And I knew that he wasn't getting out because there was a laundry list of people that were going against him. And I had no means for him to come live.

me in California. I could barely take care of myself. You know, he couldn't move in with me now. I don't have the ability to take care of someone else. And I just knew it wasn't possible, but I knew that it would curry favor with him because I wanted his participation to be able to tell this story. And so I would visit him in prison and I would phone calls with him and stuff. And I had a very surface relationship with my father for 25, 26 years. I'm never really getting into the nitty gritty. When he did, when he was first up for parole, he did come to me, he did tell me that he was, quote, responsible for her death because his behavior led to my mother's murder. Because my father's always maintained as the one-armed man or somebody else did

there. He's got all these theories, like when he was in prison for years later, he was getting everyone riled up with theories that she was in a Chinese baby smuggling ring and gold smuggling ring. and had a file ring and selling sex slaves and just like crazy, crazy shit, you know, QAnon type stuff, you know, just so out there. And it's just obviously grabbing for straws. But so I don't know in the parole files what he actually has really said, but his story has always been maintained of that he's quote responsible for her death, that he pushed her, that it was an accident.

And that's been the whole thing. Now, he didn't give that story a trial. he said she left she got into a car and left they got into the fight she threw the purse out of the credit cards no jacket gets down the driveway and leaves which was of course is a lie right so and there was really no circumstantial evidence as far as like fingerprints and blood in his car as far as I know I did recently realize find out that that he had rented a cold storage for her body and because he had given his ID so he could store the body while he dug her grave in the house. Well, what about, I'm sorry, what about the, the girlfriend that signed for the house?

I mean, she signed, she, I mean, I know that's, you know, like identity, kind of a, you know, she had to know something was odd that she's signing for her. And, you know, like she was never questioned. What was her? Well, no, she was definitely a question. And she took the fifth of the trial. My father was going into business with her uncle, who was a chiropractor, you know, they were going to do disability medicine, which is like workman's comp and things like that.

That's what they were going to do together. And he was like a sketchy character from what I understood. But here's the thing is that she told me that she wrote Sherry Boyle because she thought they were going to get married. And he'd always told her that she was separated. He was separated from my mother and they were divorced and all this stuff. But when you're, you know, she was 27, 28 years old when all this happened, you know, when you're in a relationship with a narcissist and the manipulator, like, you know, it's very easy

to run mental gymnastics around someone, especially someone like her. And she, she just believed it, hook, line, and sinker. And she said that he came in before the real estate agent came back in and he told her to put that N period initial in front. And she didn't really understand why, but she just did it. And so she was always under this impression that my father, I mean, for a long time, time I had to sort of reconcile with the fact like did she know about my mother's murder because I blamed her in a lot of ways because I was like not that she caused my mother's murder and that

she was a participant in it but that she was that she was guilty by association because my father was having this relationship with her and that's why she was that's why my mother was murdered in the first place which isn't really true um my father is a psychopath and she was also pregnant so I have a half sister that was born 12 days before my father was arrested. And it's, you know, she was in a position and she thought like she had the whole world on her at her doorstep. She's going to marry this doctor. She's going to live this amazing life.

She's going to start a new life. She had already been through a series of marriages or in relationships that didn't work. She had two kids from those relationships or marriages. And she's going to marry a doctor. It's like the fairy tale for somebody, you know, who's. you know, from the Midwest. I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to have this amazing life, right? And you hit the jackpot.

The sad thing is that my father was also hitting the jackpot. He had a girlfriend that was 20 years younger than him. He's having a new baby. He's got all this money. He's getting ready to make. Somebody told me that my father was going to make $160,000 a year working 10 hours a week at this sort of consultation practice that he was doing in Erie, Pennsylvania.

I mean, he had it made. And there was no reason to murder my mother. And if anyone, it would have been flipped because my mother probably was the one who should have killed him because he was winning the divorce because he had all the money. He had restricted her accounts and was controlling everything. But my father had supposedly told my mother, and this, I believe, came out in court that he told my mother, you're coming to Erie with me one way or another. And my father wanted to have his cake and eat it too, like any good narcissist, psychopath, sociopath,

does and one of the things that uh oh no i lost my train of thought but but yeah he was able to pull the wool over sherry campbell's eyes again it took me a long time to sort of reconcile this and go okay she's not because she's not guilty she's guilty by association right do i think that they helped plan my mother's murder no i think that my father is just so good at manipulating people and gaslight people that I mean he's a psychopath and all of this was just literally premeditated and carefully thought out that's the difference between like narcissism and psychopathy or sociopathy psychopathy is it has a plan and you're very calm and it's very executed it's very methodical Jeffrey Dahmer's a psychopath people like that right

my father's the same way. So I always say sociopaths, sociopaths get into a fight in a bar and they immediately get into an argument, they immediately get into a fight. A psychopath just kind of says, oh, okay, goes to a, he gets in his car, drives to a gas station, fills up a thing of gas, goes to your house, and burns it down with you and your family in it. Correct.

Correct. Both not good. Both not good. One has a plan, though. But one has a plan that's very methodical. and very well executed. And that was my father. Now, the fault

for all these personality disorders is there also is a massive degree of hubris that is involved with these types of personalities. Like, dumb cops will never figure this out. I can do wherever the fuck I want. You know what I mean?

And that's what my father's attitude was. And ultimately, he got caught by an 11-year-old kid. Right. Because he was sloppy. because I was determined because I knew what he did and it uh yeah it's um it's fucking wild man when I talk about it and like I said today it's like been 33 years since I found out that she was murdered and and he was arrested and it was the trial this entry in my hometown I mean

in Richland County Ohio it was just I can't imagine you know I think at the top of the conversation you were bantering and we were talking about, you know, crime. And you mentioned something like, oh, it takes years, sometimes these things. I think now if this crime had been committed, you know, there'd be every YouTuber and every TikTok are talking about it, much like they're talking about the Idaho 4 and this, in a Walsh case and whatever the case is of the moment, right? And all these people speculating on forums and things, I think that that would have been, that would have been what's happening right now, you know, and all this content be floating

out there and it'd probably be years before my father would be brought to trial, right? And now, as you know, the system is all about plea bargains and things of that nature. That's how they get people, right? So who knows? And he would have probably had higher power lawyers that would have done it pro bono just for the clout of the case and this, that and the other. So there's, you know, when I think about the timing of everything, it was a very swift justice that was dealt. My father was arrested January 25th. My father was convicted on June 25th.

So, you know, so do you still speak with them? I haven't spoken to him since around 2020, around the pandemic, because his prison was the one that was taken over by the National Guard in Ohio when the guards all got COVID. So it like made international news. And so I had communicated with him to make sure he was okay. Also because my father and I shared the same blood type. And I wanted to see that was when COVID was out and everybody was talking about blood types and things like that. I thought, okay, I'm asthmatic. Is he sick? Right. And he was quarantined. He had COVID, but he had no symptoms. I was like, okay. Okay. But no, he's still incarcerated and fairly healthy for a 79-year-old guy who's been eating shitty prison food for 33 years. Do you plan on? You plan on?

Yeah, and I've been slowly like contemplating, you know, reaching out to him again. I mean, I have letters from him, recent letters. I had a stalker that just, well, I guess it would be almost a couple years ago now, January, 2021, she was starting a pen pal relationship with him. Then she would send me her correspondence with him because I would ignore her. Right.

So that was fun. There are odd people out there for sure. But it has been, you know, I have spent my life trying to cope with all of this in a way that is healthy in a way that is positive

and in a way that is you know can affect change in the world you know and I started a podcast last year and you know it's called moving past murder

and I share my personal story and I talk about how these things relate to me it's you know part true crime part mental health and I you know I share my father's letters from prison

I talk to people I play like I have all these taped interviews and my father did from prison like five years after he was convicted of like him spouting these conspiracy theories. And I have new ones that have just come to surface. I find letters. I find people that reach out to me. And, you know, being abandoned by my whole family and having to grow up in foster care. And I was finally adopted after about a year. I was adopted

by a really great family in the area. And they were strangers, pretty much. But they had a very large family of like brothers and sisters. So I had a lot of cousins. And that was a unique experience. And it was really challenging growing up with them in a lot of ways because they took on a kid. I don't think they quite realize what they were getting into, but they just wanted to help. And, um, you know, we couldn't go anywhere without people knowing who I was. So they had this relative anonymity and all of a sudden they adopt this kid. It's a whole other thing. And they, you know, so that was a rough go for them growing up, but we have a wonderful relationship now. And we have for decades, you know. Right.

And they've been very supportive and very understanding. And even, you know, I remember my adoptive father would, I would get these letters from prison from my father and my, and he would break them down and my father would be like manipulating me. He would say things like, oh, I really wish that I could have a filet of fish sandwich right now. I would give anything to have McDonald's. And he was like gaslighting me and trying to, or not gaslighting me, but trying to manipulate me to feel sorry for him because he's incarcerated.

Because my father was always constantly working on and probably still to this day would be working on trying to have me rescind my testimony. He tried for years. And I even went as far as my father had hired a lawyer while he was incarcerated for an appeal and had alleged all this new evidence that the body that was in the grave that they pulled out from the grave was not my mother's. So I gave permission to have that body exhumed when I was like 16 years old, 17 years old, and gave DNA testing to further prove that it was her.

just to give my father a benefit of the doubt just for my own piece of mind I wanted to know like is this is this real and obviously it was her and then as far as it's coming to Los Angeles becoming a filmmaker

because I was obsessed with telling the story and finding out at the core of it was to find out why my father murdered my mother and going as so far as enlisting a two-time Oscar winner to direct this project and then getting into the prison And that was years of my life. I spent going back to Ohio, seeing him in prison, getting to know the prison staff.

They had a production facility in the prison where he's at now. And I would go into that facility. I would go into the actual prison and sit and teach him. Because they had a production facility, I would teach him how to use editing software. And I would help them order cameras and show them how to shoot and show them how to do graphic design and teach inmates this. And then I would sit with my father, like, not in the visitation room and just chat with him and then be teaching these people. was just to build this whole bond so I could get in there and be able to tell this story. It was really extraordinary to be able to do that and very cathartic.

And even though confronting my father and asking him, why did you murder my mother, I ended up realizing that it was such a great discovery because even though people were like, well, you didn't get your answer, you didn't get your why. I'm like, yeah, but I did get the answer by telling me, nothing, you tell me everything because he's a psychopath. And I think that if my father had told me why, if he had said, I murdered your mother because of X, Y, and Z, that would never be good enough because I'd have even more questions. This way I'm able to put it to bed in my mind and go, no, you're just, just, you realize when you're talking to somebody like that and you're

and this is who they are, that you realize that some people are just born. evil. And my father's one of those people. Yeah, I was going to say, if he owned up to it completely, you know, then there would actually be some atonement or, you know, redemption there for him. And that's not who he is. Because the person that does this doesn't ever want that. Does I mean, you know what I'm saying? He's still trying, even to his dying breath. You know, maybe when he realize, maybe when he realizes, yeah, I'm not getting out of this. Maybe he does it. But I doubt it. But, you know, to probably go to his grave saying, you know, the one-armed man.

Well, it was always like what he did say is, and then there's a story of the knife. And that comes out halfway in me confronting him. She came at me with the knife. I didn't know what to do. I'm like with the knife. I want the knife. What are we talking about here? The golden child?

I'm just like, oh, okay. So where did this come from? So there's all these stories. There's never going to be, you know, For him, there's never going to be, I murdered her because she was in the way of me starting a new life that I wanted. Or she. I wanted to take the money I was going to be making. But she wasn't even winning the divorce.

That's the thing is she wasn't going to take all this money. And even the police were like, she had more motive to kill him than he did her. He was going to get out of it and have money and a new family and a new life. My mother was the one who was going to suffer. I was going to be the one that was going to suffer. So she, you know, him committing this. crime was not um it's not logical but this we're not dealing with a logical person and the fact that he just still has to have all these reasons and excuses just shows the psychopathy and everything behind

me because at the core of this he's a narcissist he's a psychopath and he's someone who it's their fault it's what she did to me she was going to divorce me yeah dude you impresses you impress pregnant another woman and you're going to go start and like why would she be married to you and we see this happen all the time right this is not something that's new that these people behave like this and they say well you know and him his comment of you're going to come to erie with me one way or another she did and my father ultimately wanted to be able to go down to that basement and look down and say i fucking told you so bitch or whatever he was saying You know, he wanted to know that she was right there beneath his feet.

And that's a psychopath. Right. So do you have a relationship with your step sister? So my half sister was, well, but there's two, but it's totally fine. My half sister and I had a relationship up until when I made the documentary. She was going to participate and then she decided not to. and I had offered both her and her mother a chance to be a part of it. And she was actually going to be a part of it.

And I think her mother convinced her. I don't think she did to not do it. But I wanted Sherry to be able to tell her side of the story. So people didn't look at her and go, oh, well, you're at fault. And of course, giving people these opportunities, they don't take them. And then when something comes out, then they are looked at or they're excoriated for their behavior. And then they're like, well, I didn't do this. And it's like, well, yeah, this is my adoptive parent's holder.

This is why Collier was trying to get you to participate. So you can tell her your side of the story. So they chose not to do it. That everybody's upset that people have an opinion about her. Well, guess what? You didn't tell your side of the story. And I gave you plenty of opportunity to do that. Exactly.

Listen, I have the same thing happen all the time. I contact people and they, and then, you know, no, I don't want anything to do with it. Okay. Well, then I always explained it. Then you realize that somebody else, most likely law enforcement, will tell your side of the story. Well, they'll tell your story. And they're probably not going to do it the same justice. or tell it from your you know your perspective yeah and then it comes out and they go

you made me sound this way or you this or they this or that wasn't true and that well you had a great opportunity to clear all of that up you know so it's so funny too because sometimes it's like like sometimes it's even minor like when I would read articles about myself I would get all been out of shape and upset over minor details. And of course, I was before I started writing. And once I started writing, I was like, eh, that's not a big deal. That's not a big. That's pretty accurate. I probably wouldn't have said it that way. But yeah, you know, and everybody, so I look back now and I think it's about 95% accurate. And the few things they got wrong were stupid. My Audi wasn't, wasn't white. It was silver. You know? You know what I mean?

just stupid like like you don't know anything that my outy was silver like it's really not crucial what's what's funny is so when you make a film about your life right and and i wasn't really supposed to be in it i was going to be part of it and i was going to be shooting it and then we kind of called an audible at the last minute and so i'm like i mean i look terrible like i'm wearing like set clothes type thing like like a fat grip you know anything but i was people were like oh what was he editing process like and look I work as a film editor and I edit content and I you know I make movies and shit like that but I was like I didn't want to be any part of that process because of course everything would come in vanity so like what you were saying like with the color of the

audience and there's all vanity things like I was like I look fat here I sound stupid here like don't don't put this in but it's like that doesn't serve the narrative of the story like and nobody gives a fuck what color your Audi is no one gives a shit about the sweatshirt that I was wearing what they give a shit about is the content and what we're talking about which is amazing in a lot of ways. But yeah, you know, and sometimes these things can become a solipsistic endeavor. And I'm very grateful that that's not what this turned into because it's a very powerful, powerful documentary. And it's not even true crime. I mean, I'm so new to this world of true crime, you know, discovering all these people and seeing this whole sort of underbelly that

exists. I mean, I was, like I said, I was just working with the company, you know, with Vice doing this. Well, where, where is the documentary? So you can't. And so the documentary is actually on my Patreon. Okay. But I made it with an investigation discovery. You can find it on Amazon. You can find it on Hulu. But investigation discovery has it, or Discovery Plus now.

But it's also my Patreon. People go to my Patreon. You can just subscribe and it's on there. And you can get a whole bunch of other content. I've got like, you know, I've got letters from my father in prison. I do episodes of a podcast ad free. And there's a player there. You can download all the episodes.

I think I'm on episode of 74. And there's a whole, yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a bunch of content on there and it sort of, you know, shows my life and a lot more of the stuff that I'm doing. And, uh, but yeah, that's where they can find the documentary. So you, you just said you have the episodes on the, on Patreon, but do you have your episodes on your YouTube? Yeah, so I have episodes on my YouTube and I do ad free ones on Patreon. Uh, but yeah, so my YouTube, you know, everyone can find me.

at my website, which is call your landry.com. Find me on TikTok, Instagram, wherever, at Call Your Landry. And you can join my Patreon through there. But everything is on my website, the podcast, because my podcast is called Moving Past Murder, which was something that I started as a continuation of what the documentary was,

which was, you know, I made the documentary. I made that because I was very, very passionate about growing up that when we looked at cases, because I had from a personal experience, you know, the bad guy goes to jail, the victim is dead, the state gets this restitution, the gavel hits and we say next, like what's next, right? Like, next case, next case. We never examine the consequences of violence, the consequences of communities on ancillary

victims, friends of the victim, family members of the perpetrator and what it's like. And also to expose like, this is what it's like to not only have your mother. murdered but having it done by your father so you're both the son of the victim and the perpetrator there's not a lot of people that are in this world that that can experience that and talk about it so i made the film to to show that and to show what healing is like but also i do that further in the podcast moving past murder to show my process of going through all this like i said it's part true crime part mental health you know and it's it's me exposing things that I go through and you know I do it on TikTok too but the podcast is a way to really find me how what on YouTube or just yeah it's on

YouTube it's on Apple Spotify where I get a podcast from yeah how often are you posting so I do every a new episode every week okay every Friday new episode comes out of moving past murder yeah I have a new podcast. I'm starting called Survivor Squad. We're just getting ready to release, which I host, co-host with Tara Newell from Dirty John. How, um, how, how is it getting guests? Like, um, so I have a sort of mixture. I reach out to people or people come to me. They, they've seen the film. They've heard they've watched the podcast. They've seen the story. And I have so many people, one of the things that is really, one of the things that is really powerful. about making something and being so vulnerable

is that that vulnerability and authenticity really resonates with people and so I get messages out the woodwork of people who have seen the film who've listened to the podcast that it has resonated with that just said thank you so much for telling your story because it has helped me so much in my own personal journey of healing because I never got justice or I'm a victim of sexual assault unfortunately a lot of these people are victims of child sexual abuse that reach out to me because they they haven't healed from that trauma you know that the adverse childhood

effects the ACEs as they call it and they say to me you know watching you do this first of all they're they're horrified by what by what happened to me and they're like well i what i do what has happened to me is pales in comparison to you and i'm like well yeah but it's not it's not it's it's not a contest right it's like everyone's trauma affects them only uniquely like no like yeah my shit is so horrific but like that's the exception not the rule that doesn't discount the way that somebody's been through through their own trauma but i'm so glad that the message helps them and helps them heal and get on that journey and feel reassured of that journey that they're on to heal themselves because that's a really powerful thing. And I know my mother would love that I was doing

that for people. So yeah, it's been, it's been a really amazing journey. But as far as guests, you know, just people reach out to me. They say, I'd love to be on the program. Or I reach out to like, like you. I reach out to them and I say, hey, I love to have you on the podcast, you know, and I think people have interesting stories. And I like to, you know, like I said, it's true crime mental health. But I'm trying to steer away from necessarily true crime as this, you know, know, the salaciousness of it all, it's more of, I want to talk to people who've been through extraordinary circumstances because we've all experienced trauma. We all have. If you were born before 2020, we have all experienced some sort of trauma with COVID, right? That's

a traumatic event that the world experienced unless you live in a cave in Afghanistan or something like that. So there is a, there, we all have had to deal with certain tremendous circumstances in our life, or extraordinary circumstances in our life, and how to come through and build resilience. And, you know, I tell people all the time, I say, you know, it's not what you've been through that defined you. And this is what I aim to show through all the work that I do is it's not what you've been through that defined you. It's what you take from that and what you do next that defines you. And some people can go through, you know, I had a psychologist tell me when she goes, you know you're the outlier

if you were sitting under a bridge in east L.A. with a needle in your arm saying fuck the world no one would blame you you have every right to do that but you don't live you that way and you know there are people that can just literally take this up

and they're angry they hate the world this injustice happened to them they've been through all this trauma they bottle it up inside they say fuck the world I'm just it's not fair I'm just getting in the and they can be they they self-harm they they harm others they continue the cycle of abuse not only

on themselves but others or you can take that and you can say this i've been through this shit and i'm not going to let this affect those around me negatively i'm going to turn it into a positive and look i'm up here talking about this i'm far from a perfect person absolutely but i am someone who I feel can look themselves in the mirror every day and go, I've done the best I can. The best I could. Do the best I could when I was younger to honor my mother

and carry that through my life and try to be positive. But I'm also a perpetual optimist, which I found out was a trait my mother had, so it's an apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Yeah, I was going to say, it's definitely perspective. Yeah, life is going to use it as a crutch

to fail for the rest of your life. No, but listen, so many people do. Yeah. So many people do. Look at what you're doing. You're literally taking something that is, I mean, granted, it was something of your own creation, but still, you could also come. I mean, how many people come out of prison and reoffend? You know, recidivism is a real thing, you know, and you chose.

Yeah, exactly. Fraud is actually the highest recidivism, right? Really? Yeah. Murder is the lowest. Yeah. Yeah, because most of them get out and they never reoffend that, you know, it's usually it's very circumstantial and, and, you know, of course they're under the microscope the

rest of their life and, you know, so, you know, very few people do, they actually get out and commit them or murder again. I mean, they're out there, but very seldom when does that happen. Yeah. I'm talking about the people that get out. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And then there's, you know, then drugs, then, you know, so it keeps going.

But yeah, fraud's the worst. interesting you know because especially because the people that commit fraud have such psychological problems like it it is all just it's narcissism and just straight arrogance and it's so hard to know how to easily manipulate the system and then not do it because you're so desperate to prove how smart you are you know which is also why most people get caught you know it's it's hard to just shut your mouth like commit the crime shut your mouth it's not really so much about the money as it is about letting everybody know how smart I am. Interesting.

So then you get caught. Well, there you go. Stupid. The same thing that gave you the guts to pull it off is the same thing that is your detriment. Yeah. You know, which was definitely, you know, my, you know, definitely my undoing was that I just allowed, you know, just shot my mouth off, allowed too many people to know what was going on and included too many people and was not, you know, nearly as.

careful and, you know, it just kept, just caught up with me and caught out with me and caught out with me, you know. And then, of course, every time I got lucky and got away with it, I just became more brazen. I didn't get away with it because I was lucky. I got away with it because I was just that good. And I'm like, once again, oh, this is bad. This is bad. You just got lucky. Walk away. No, no. I'm just that good. Okay. Okay. So I thought I was pretty clever right up until the judge said yeah you're not so clever buddy no not that clever yep my youtube channel is uh youtube dot com forward slash call your landry my podcast is called moving past murder i post new episodes every friday on youtube and on apple spotify wherever you get your podcast from

i also create individual content for youtube shorts and on my youtube channel i'm offering a membership soon you can find all things call your landry at www www call your landry dot call your landry dot com I have a large TikTok following as well. Find me on TikTok at Collierlandry. Everything is at Collierlandry. So check it out. And thanks for having me, man.