The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Finding Mom's Killer | 1. A little Vacation

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Noreen Boyle’s son, Collier, is desperate to find his mom. His only hope is to team up with Lieutenant Dave Messmore. Binge all episodes of Finding Mom's Killer, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access.  The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Finding Mom’s Killer is part of The Binge - subscribe to listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free right now. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. Follow The Binge Crimes and The Binge Cases wherever you get your podcasts to get new stories on the first of the month, every month. Hit ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Finding Mom’s Killer show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment and Orbit Media production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by June's Journey, an exciting new procedural detective video game. Use your observation skills to find hidden clues and uncover dark secrets. Explore stunning hidden object scenes from New York parlors to Parisian sidewalks. Join June as she unravels the truth behind her sister's mysterious death. And you can get creative by designing a luxurious island estate complete with sprawling gardens and stunning architecture. You can join a detective club to chat and play with other gamers or compete in the detective league, escape reality and immerse yourself in a gripping tale where every clue brings you closer to the truth. And you can enjoy seasonal content with changing

challenges and exclusive rewards year round. I love this game as a fan of true crime, mystery shows, procedurals. It has these incredibly detailed scenes and takes me on the hunt through an investigation. Do you think you can unmask the truth? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Listen to all episodes of Finding Mom's Killer ad free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge, feed your true crime obsession.

The Bench. Raise your right hand, please. Do you swear or affirm test? What about the truth of the truth and nothing but the truth around the end? Will you tell us who you are? I'm Collier Landry Boyle. Can you tell us how old you are now? I am 12 years old.

It's 1990 and we're in a courtroom in Mansfield, Ohio. The prosecution's star witness has just taken the stand. He's about to describe something that happened one fateful night a few months ago. You awoke at 3 to 3.15 a.m. I believe was your time. Yes. Okay. And what awoke you? I heard the two bangs and heard the scream.

Okay. And then I heard the footsteps. Then you got up in the morning. Yes I did. And what was the first thing you did? I looked at my mother's bedroom. Were you alarmed when you got into the bedroom? Yes I was. Why was that? The bed covers were all messed up and her bedclothes were just lying in a pile. What was going through your mind at that time?

What were you thinking? Where's my mother? Collier Landry Boyle wasn't your average 12-year-old. He was very smart. He was very determined. So when his mother went missing, Collier decided it was up to him to find her. From Sony Music Entertainment and Orbit Media, this is Finding Mom's Killer. I am Steve Fishman. This is the story of how a precocious kid joined forces with a most unlikely partner. Together,

they set out to solve the mystery of his mother's disappearance. Along the way, they'd unearth one terrible family secret after another. Episode 1, A Little Vacation. I love when the sponsors of our programs are selling products I already use, and that's why I'm very happy to say that Quince is the sponsor of the show. Finding the perfect gift can be really overwhelming, especially at this time of year. I like to give people things that they actually want. And so this year, check out Quince. It's a perfect spot for timeless gifts made from premium materials.

I absolutely love the iconic Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I have them in every color. And they're affordable too. They start at $50. No matter what you're looking for, all Quince items are priced 50-80% less than similar brands. By partnering directly with top factories and cutting out the cost of the middlemen, Quince passes the savings on to you. Quince is on the nice list. They only work with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices. And they use premium

fabrics and finishes for that luxury feel in every piece. Gift luxury this holiday season. When it comes to weight loss, noince.com slash cases. When it comes to weight loss, no two people are the same. That's why Noom builds personalized plans based on your unique psychology and biology. Take Brittany, after years of unsustainable diets, Noom helped her lose 20 pounds and keep it off. I was definitely in a yo-yo cycle for years of just losing weight gaining weight and it was exhausting And Stephanie, she's a former D1 athlete who knew she couldn't out train her diet and she lost 38 pounds

My relationship to food before Noom was never consistent and Evan he can't stand salads But he still lost 50 pounds with Noom. I've never really was a salad guy That's just not who I am salads, but he still lost 50 pounds with Noom. I never really was a salad guy. That's just not who I am. Even through the pickiness, Noom taught me that building better habits builds a healthier lifestyle. I'm not doing this to get to a number. I'm doing this to feel better.

Get your personalized plan today at Noom.com. Real Noom users compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, the typical Noom user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary. On New Year's Day 1990, six months before that 12-year-old boy took the witness stand, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department was swamped with the usual holiday stuff. Bar brawls, disorderly conduct. So when a 44-year-old woman named Noreen Boyle was reported missing, it was not a top priority.

She was listed as a missing person by some of the friends of hers, not family, but that's not unusual. This is Lieutenant Dave Messmore of the Mansfield Police. When Noreen Boyle's disappearance landed on his desk, he didn't think much of it. A couple of uniformed patrolmen had been sent over to her house to check things out. Their conclusion? Nothing to worry about. Somebody will run off, they have a dispute with their spouse, and they'll run away and

they come back and, you know, there's only so much you can do with a missing person. As you might have gathered, Lieutenant Dave Messmore isn't exactly the excitable type. In appearance, he kind of fades into the background. He's got thinning hair, a lampshade mustache, sensible glasses. He takes his time. He's methodical. He assumed Noreen Boyle was just an unhappy wife in an unhappy marriage, who needed a little alone time. Then one day at his office, he received a phone call from a close friend of Noreen's.

And she said, I'm telling you, this is not right. Noreen would never do that. And I said, well, you know, maybe she was just upset. No, no, I'm telling you. I said, I'll stop over and see what's going on. So on January 2nd, Dave climbed into his department-issued used Oldsmobile and drove over to Noreen Boyle's house.

Now Dave was the Mansfield Police Department's head of major crimes. He wasn't supposed to go chase down leads on low-priority cases. But Dave, low-key laconic Dave, is full of surprises. By this point, he'd been on the force for 15 years, and he'd developed a reputation for striking out on his own, for bucking his superiors. He once put away a friend, a fellow cop, no less, for murder.

People learned it was best not to get in his way. Another time, he had a kid with a knife cornered. Other cops debated a next step. Dave rushed him. I blackjacked him and just knocked him cold. Dave, without blackjack, figured he'd head over to the Boyle residence, have a word with Noreen's husband, a prominent local doctor named Jack Boyle.

He arrived at the house, walked up the front steps, rang the doorbell. It was like late morning, early afternoon. The doorbell rings, and it's this guy in a sport coat with a bushy mustache, glasses, khaki pants, named Dave Messmore. This is Collier Boyle. He was the kid you heard testifying at the top of the show.

He's a lot older now. When Lieutenant Dave Messmore arrived at the Boyle residence, it was Collier's grandmother, that's his father's mother, who answered the door. Collier hovered in the background. I'm standing there over my grandmother's shoulder and Dave was saying to my grandmother, well, you know, I'd like to talk to the doctor

and, you know, just kind of curious what you know. He was just very calm. He's a very calm guy, very collected. I mean, very detective-like, you know what I mean? Just looking around, looking at things, taking everything in. Just, I'm going to get to the bottom of this type of thing. And I remember he kind of charms his way in

and my grandmother's like, I'm going to call my son. And she goes and she leaves to go make the phone call in the kitchen. And I knew at that point that that was like my one shot, because here I am alone with a police officer. Collier made an impression on Dave. This was a kid who dressed in chinos and penny loafers. He had a perfectly coiffed brown bob.

He looked like a tiny adult. It was not like a little 11 or 12-year-old you'd normally talk to. He was just very astute, very well spoken. Whenever his grandmother would walk away, he'd say things that make you wonder if there was something wrong. I say to Dave, I look him dead in the eyes and I say, my mother would never leave me. He said my mother would never leave without me or without me knowing where she was going. And I think he's looking at me in a very peculiar way

like who is this kid? He could just tell I was so adamant. He said something happened and I said okay I'll work on that. Caillou was surprised. He hadn't expected this cop who suddenly showed up on the doorstep to actually listen to him. I could just tell when I said to Dave, my mother would never leave me. Something has happened to her. He just looked at me like he could tell that I was serious. I remember in that moment that there was this hope. Dave did take Collier seriously.

Still, he didn't have any clues to follow. Just the concerns of an anxious adolescent son. Dave, he decided to talk it over with his wife, who refers to him as hubby, by the way. Well, she said, that doesn't sound right. She said, that doesn't sound like a kid that doesn't know where his mother is. And I said, well, so I'm going to go back and see if I can't talk to him some more. So once again, Dave headed to the Boyle residence, where he was met once again Dave headed to the Boyle residence where he was met once again by dr Jack Boyle's mother Collier's grandmother and She said what do you want and I said what I kind of like to talk to you and Collier again

Well, what do you come around bothering people like this? I said, I'm not bothering anybody I just like to solve this and find out where she is. I said, when is Dr. Boyle going to be home? Well, he should be back tonight. This is starting to bother me. So later that evening, yet again, Dave drove to the Boyle residence. For those keeping score, that's his third visit of the day. On the door when I got there was a letter that said, no one in this house has permission

to talk to the police. And it was signed by an attorney I know. A note on the door wasn't going to stop Lieutenant Dave Messmore. So when I knocked on the door, the attorney answered the door. And I said, what's going on here? Well, the doctor doesn't really have anything to say. His wife walked out and left. There's nothing he can really tell you. I said, well, I'd like to talk to him.

He said, well, he doesn't want to talk. I said, hmm. Hmm. That's Dave's characteristically restrained reaction to any new suspicion. So Dave, now suspicious, decided he'd start looking into Dr. Jack Boyle. As it turned out, Dr. Boyle's patients really loved him. They described him as funny, intelligent,

gregarious, caring. The kind of doctor who'd go above and beyond, who'd make house calls and stay up all night at the bedside of a sick patient. Even at the police department, Dave discovered his fellow cops were fans. Some of the guys that worked for me were ex-Marines. So they said, yeah, we know about Dr. Boyle. He's an ex-Navy doctor, retired Navy doctor, and flew jets over in Vietnam, and he's just a great guy. Plus, one of Jack's friends said he was devastated

that Noreen left. She recalled Jack sobbing on the phone to her. She's gone, she's gone. And then Dave learned something that made Noreen's disappearance seem understandable. Apparently, there was some talk of divorce, but I didn't know exactly what the circumstances were. In fact, Noreen had filed for divorce less than two months before.

And it was contentious. There were fancy cars to fight over, a lot of money in the bank, child support, alimony, joint credit cards. Maybe Dave's original hunch had been right. In the midst of a rough separation, with both parties sleeping under the same roof, Noreen just needed a few days to herself. She'd probably return home soon. Still, Dave had doubts.

Why was her husband being so evasive? Hmm. And why did her son insist that something was wrong? Dave decided it was time to get more details from his prime source, the one inside the Boyle household. He phoned the private school that Collier attended and requested that the principal arrange a meeting. This is just what Collier had been hoping for. I knew it was my chance right there to just get it all out, right?

I don't know if I'm ever gonna get this opportunity again. Wanna own part of the company that makes your favorite burger? Now you can. With partial shares from TD Direct Investing, you can own less than one full share. So expensive stocks are within reach. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares.

TD, ready for you On January 8th 1990 Collier Landry Boyle sat down with lieutenant Dave Messmore in an elementary school classroom The kind with those small chairs Dave is six feet tall, but he figured it'd be good to be on the same level as Collier. It'd make him comfortable. You know, I had a lengthy conversation. He described to me what he heard that night that she went missing.

A little more than a week earlier, December 30th, Collier and his mother were sitting at a table having chili for dinner. And we saw my father's truck come down the driveway with my grandmother inside. Then my grandmother came in and my father stayed for a second, he then left. Around eight o'clock, 8.30, my mom was like, it's time for bed.

I gave my grandmother a hug and a kiss, good night.. I gave my grandmother a hug and a kiss good night and I gave my mom a hug and a kiss good night. Then Collier headed upstairs to his bedroom. He may have struck people as a miniature adult, but his bedroom was definitely that of a child. I had little collectible Garfield stuffed plush toys on the dresser and then I had my Batman clock on the wall because I loved the movie Batman. I wanted to be Batman. Then next to me on the wall,

there's a painting of a small little sailboat with a little boy inside. And it says Collier that my mom had a muralist paint on the wall. So safe in his bedroom with his Batman clock and his Garfield dolls, Collier fell asleep. And then in the middle of the night something woke him. I'm pretty sure I heard a scream and I was kind of frozen in my bed for a second.

It didn't get up. And then I heard this loud thud. Boom. And then I heard this really low muttering. The the the And I can see my little sailboat on the wall. And I look to the dresser with the little garfields and I

see the Batman clock up on the wall and it's like 317 318am. And then another 30, 60 seconds later I hear another one of those loud thuds. And I remember thinking something terrible is happening. I then started hearing these footsteps

creak slowly down the hall. Oh, oh. And I always slept with my door open. So I'm curled up, but I can see out of my peripheral vision the edge of the door into the hallway. And I'm counting the footsteps. And all I want to do is look up, but I'm just staying still. And then the footsteps stop and I can see two feet in the doorway.

I can see them out of my peripheral vision. And I can see my sailboat mural on the wall, and then I can see the Batman clock. And everything inside my body was screaming, don't look up. As I was laying there, the feet still in the doorway, I was telling myself if I can just make it through this moment, that I'm going to be okay. And as I'm thinking about all that, the feet leave.

It's the night of Norman Boyle's disappearance, and Collier is in bed. He's heard strange noises, strange voices, strange footsteps. But when everything goes quiet, he manages to fall back to sleep. The next morning when he wakes up, the first thing he does is run to his mother's bedroom. She isn't there. She always makes her bed first thing in the morning, but this time the sheets are a mess. And I go downstairs and my father is sitting on the couch in the living room watching television with a towel wrapped around his waist like he had just got done taking a shower. And I said to him, where is my mother? And he still was watching television. He didn't answer me.

And I said, where is my mother? And he looked up at me. So matter of factly, well, Mommy took a little vacation call here. And I said, well, what happened? Well, your mother came down. She was hollering at me and she got so angry at me. She threw her credit cards at me. And then he said, I saw these headlights come through.

I reached for my glasses. Your mother left. She starts walking away. She walks through the kitchen, leaves out the back door, and she goes down the driveway, and I rush to go to the window, and I see her get into that car, and the car drives away. He goes, okay, so we're not going to call the police. We're going to let her come back.

We're not going to call the FBI. He leaves. And at that point, my grandmother has gotten up. My grandmother says to me, OK, well, you heard what your father said. Kanya did hear what his father said, but he'd actually been preparing for a moment just like this. He knew his parents were going through a divorce.

There was screaming in the house, tempers flaring, and Collier, like his hero Batman, was always ready for action. One of the things that I did is I saved my mother's friends' phone numbers. I wrote them all on a piece of paper and I stuck them in this little stuffed Garfield that I had, this little Santa Claus Garfield,

I stuck inside the hat. And my mother had just got a cordless phone. So I grabbed the phone, I could run upstairs, I grabbed the list, I locked myself in my mother's bathroom and I just start calling everybody on the list. And I start telling them what happened myself in my mother's bathroom and I just start calling everybody on the list. And I start telling them what happened and I said, my father said not to call the police, but I'm telling you, call the police.

Noreen's friends did call the police. And that's how word of her disappearance made its way to the Mansfield Police Department and to Dave Messmore's desk. And now, sitting in the classroom, there was one more thing Collier wanted to make sure Dave understood. He wanted their meeting kept confidential. Dave told me when I was speaking to him that he would keep everything that we said secret because I didn't want to get in trouble. And I wanted to find my mother.

For his part, as Dave interviewed Collier that day, he thought, this kid just might be onto something. He was beside himself. He didn't cry, but he was emotionally distraught. And he convinced me that there was something wrong. I had never encountered a child that young to be so well-spoken. He was not like a little 11 or 12-year-old you'd normally talk to. He was just very astute.

At that point, I couldn't really pass it off to another detective. The interview ended. Kaia went back to class, then home. He knew Dave would be stopping by that night, and he was on edge. My grandmother was making dinner. My father comes home, and then Dave comes to the door again. I was anxious, right, because I've defied my father, and I'm trying to be an earshot of the door,

trying to see what's going on, and also trying to see, okay, is he going to say anything? He doesn't. He doesn't say, oh, I've talked to the kid, or he doesn't say anything, you know what I mean? So I knew that I could trust him then. I got a partner now. I got somebody who's going to help me find out

what happened to my mother. Me and Dave. And so Collier and Dave are now a dynamic duo. The precocious preteen and the mild-mannered middle-aged detective. It's like something out of a comic book. Did you think of Batman? I did think of Batman.

What'd you think? I had to find out what happened, but I also was dreading the fact that Batman was an orphan who lost both his parents. You want to be the dark knight, the detective, but at the same time, you don't want to lose your family, right? Collier, of course, wasn't quite Batman. More of a Robin.

You know, the boy wonder, the junior partner. And in that role, he was determined to help Dave track down his mother. And in that role, he was determined to help Dave track down his mother. That really galvanizes me into doing this, like, amateur sleuth detective work or whatever. You know, I'm going to find, start gathering clues. I'm going to look for anything that I could find that was out of the ordinary. And Lieutenant Dave Messmore was determined to hold up his end. He was in despair. I just wanted to get it done and I wanted to be able to tell Collier that we found his mother.

So now Dave's all in. Jack Boyle won't talk to him. Hmm. That makes Dave pretty suspicious. And so he decides his next step, take a closer look at the good doctor. The more you talk to other people that are acquainted with him, you find out an awful lot about that person.

And in his case, he had a completely different personality. You know, he was always laughing and choking around with people. But that wasn't him. That was a facade. Finding Lums Killer is a production of Orbit Media. Creator and host, Steve Fishman, that's me. Our senior producer is Drew Nellis. Our producer and production coordinator, Austin Smith. Our story editor, Emile Klein.

Fact check by Ryan Alderman. Mixing and sound design by Scott Somerville. Our lawyers are at Davis Wright Tremaine. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Special thanks to Emily Rassick, Steve Ackerman, Katherine St. Louis, Sammy Allison, Fisher Stevens, Rhea Julian, Dan Bobkoff.

At WME, we'd like to thank Evan Krasik, Marissa Hurwitz, and Ben Davis. We want to also thank Carl Hunnell at The Richland Source for the generous use of his podcast studio. And a really warm thank you to Collier Landry for sharing his story and for his production assistance. Music