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.
Despite Boyle’s initial insistence that his wife, Noreen, had left on an impromptu trip, the evidence showed that he had smashed her skull with a blunt instrument and suffocated her with a plastic bag about 15 feet from where Collier was lying. Later, Boyle took a jackhammer to the basement of a newly purchased house across the Pennsylvania state line, where he was planning to move with his pregnant mistress, and buried Noreen’s corpse under a layer of fresh concrete.
That much of the story was widely reported at the time. Much less well known, though, is what happened next.
Collier lost almost everything he had ever known – not just his parents but also his house, his dog, the three-year-old sister his parents had adopted a few months before the murder, and the entirety of his extended family.
His father’s relatives could not forgive him for testifying for the prosecution, while his mother’s relatives did not want to take him in for fear that he might have inherited his father’s worst traits. The one person who seemed to believe in Collier was the lead detective on the case, Dave Messmore, but a family court judge rejected an application by Messmore and his wife to adopt him, saying it would constitute a conflict of interest.
Instead, Collier was placed in foster care, then with a different adoptive family, and had to deal with the aftermath of an unspeakable tragedy largely on his own. He was haunted by the idea that his father could easily have murdered him, too. “It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to make the hole in the concrete a little bit bigger,” he now says. He was haunted, too, by the questions he still had about what motivated the crime and why his father, even after his conviction, kept insisting he had done nothing wrong.
“Already as a teenager, I started to think about the ramifications and consequences of violence,” a 45-year-old Landry said in a recent interview. “How society is concerned only with the bad guy going to jail. The state gets its restitution, the gavel comes down, the judge calls ‘next!’, and people have no idea how events have affected the families and the ancillary victims.”
A year or two after the murder, Collier wrote to his father and told him, with the same poise and maturity he’d shown on the stand, that he loved him and forgave him. And he added: “I really hope you face up to what you’ve done and realize that it was wrong.” In a furious response, Jack Boyle called the letter “the product of some nearby cesspool” and said Collier was an “unctuous brat” and “imbued with hate”. “You shameful coward!” he wrote. “You are truly evil!”
That, too, he had to absorb largely on his own.
One important insight Landry has acquired is that within every high-profile story of violence and survival there is a second, less visible, less well understood story – the one that follows on, the one that forces survivors to ask: “How am I going to deal with this for the rest of my life?” The timeline may be less compressed but, as he sees it, the stakes are just as high. “If you don’t get a handle on these events,” he said, “they will destroy you.”
After years of continuing to investigate his mother’s murder and telling the story in a variety of formats, Landry now has a new project, a podcast designed to throw a spotlight on the question of long-term survival and profile people who, like him, have been through the wringer and struggled to put their lives back together afterward.
The project is called The Survivor Squad, which he is co-hosting with another figure familiar to fans of the true crime genre, Terra Newell, who came close to being murdered by her mother’s abusive husband but managed to kill him instead in a gruesome knife fight in a residential parking lot in Orange county, south of Los Angeles. (The story was told in a popular podcast, Dirty John, and later turned into a television drama series.)
Newell was not a child when she was attacked – she was 25, and a fan of the zombie-horror TV show The Walking Dead, which inspired her to save herself by prying the knife out of her attacker’s hands and plunging the blade into his eye. Many aspects of her survival story are similar to Landry’s, though, starting with the agony they both experienced watching their mothers suffer at the hands of an abusive partner and, after that abuse turned violent, their struggle to find the support they needed.
After her fatal encounter with “Dirty John” Meehan in August 2016, Newell found that some of her oldest friends wouldn’t believe that the reason she was rushed to the hospital was that the same man had jabbed at her repeatedly with a knife, leaving gashes in her left arm and chest, before she was able to overpower and kill him.
One of the underlying problems, Newell now says, was that she’d experienced way too many toxic relationships in and around her family. The mindset in the suburban communities where she grew up was too often to excuse or apologize for abuse and to pressure victims to stay silent.
Having once been susceptible to the same sort of abuse – she described a man she dated on and off for years as a narcissist who cheated on her without remorse and once sideswiped her with a car – Newell now describes herself as a “whistleblower on narcissists” and refuses to stay silent, whatever the price of that silence. “I’m trying to break a generational pattern of trauma in my family, to tell people to stop putting themselves in the jaws of the shark,” she said. “I’m still ostracized in certain circles. I don’t get invited to events. Where I’m from, in Orange county, wealth is very prevalent and narcissism is very prevalent. With a lot of money comes a lot of control.”
Landry and Newell have also learned to expect unexpected, sometimes unwelcome reactions from people because of what they have gone through. Landry said he made a point of not talking much about his childhood trauma when he first moved to Los Angeles in the early 2000s, because he worried about who might be drawn to him. “I wanted people to like me because of who I am, not where I came from,” he said.
Some people would be scared of getting too close to him once they learned the details. One girlfriend grew so alarmed when he started to work on a documentary about his story in 2016 that she broke up with him. Another girlfriend proved toxic in ways that reminded him of his father and he quickly broke up with her.
Newell, for her part, said she spent years being so unnerved by certain men who approached her – “white men who remind me of John” – that she would often run away from them, hyperventilating. More recently, a man came up to her and said: “My wife is like that. My wife is like Dirty John.” She had to fight an old instinct to feel sorry for him before recognizing that this was someone she wanted nothing to do with.
What has empowered both of them, over the years, has been to tell their story and to share it with others who have been through similarly traumatic events and are likely to listen to their accounts constructively and without judgment.
One of the things that powered Landry through the hardest parts of his life was the conviction that his story could serve as an inspiration to others. He’d been aware, when he took the witness stand, that he was testifying for his life because anything short of a conviction would put him back in his father’s custody and at risk of suffering the same fate as his mother. But he also felt he had no choice. “I knew that if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” he said. “I have friends and acquaintances who hesitated to speak up and to do what’s right, and it haunts them.”
Landry saw, even as a youth leader in high school, how younger kids looked up to him because of what he’d done, and that gave him an unwavering sense of purpose that he retains to this day. “I want to speak to that one kid in foster care who is facing a monster with no support,” he said. “I want to say, brother, you’ll make it. I did, and you will too.”
Newell has a similar sense of higher purpose and has banded together with other survivor-advocates, many of whom are now guests on the podcast. They include Lenora Claire, a Hollywood casting professional who has spent years fending off a stalker and works with entertainment productions to ensure they are sensitive to issues of abuse and abuse survival; Jimanekia Eborn, whose mother was murdered when she was very young and works as a therapist to other survivors of trauma; and Amanda Knox, who spent four years in an Italian prison for a murder she did not commit and now speaks and writes about miscarriages of justice around the world.
When Newell started telling her story, she saw that it did more than turn off some of her old friends. It also inspired other women to leave abusive relationships and to band together and support each other. “It turned into something beautiful,” she said.
She and Landry both know many people who have been unable to overcome past trauma and have succumbed to alcohol, drugs, depression or other illnesses. “If we don’t talk, it lives in our bodies,” Newell said. Recognizing that others have been through similar experiences can often be a first step toward a more productive path forward.
“The fact is, we’re not alone with our stories,” she added. “They’re all unique and they are not as shameful as we sometimes think they are. There is a power in our vulnerability.”
