When Collier Landry was 12 years old, he became a media sensation as the star witness in a small-town murder trial like no other. With uncommon poise and precision for someone so young, he told a jury in Ohio how, months earlier, he’d woken up in the middle of the night and overheard his father killing his mother in the next room.
The town of Mansfield – and much of the rest of the country – was riveted as Collier’s father, Jack Boyle, a charming, highly intelligent osteopath with a thriving local medical practice, was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to 20 years to life. Much of that was Collier’s doing, not just because of his testimony but also because he had alerted the police and fed them enough information to warrant a murder investigation in the first place.
