John “Jack” Boyle Creates a Bistate Horror Show
(“Foundation of Lies,” Forensic Files)
Note: Updated with a new parole eligibility date and link to a movie
Noreen Boyle’s murder sounds more like a page from an Edgar Allan Poe short story than an episode of Forensic Files.
After killing Noreen, her husband decided on a macabre way to conceal her body. Dr. John “Jack” Boyle created a grave beneath the concrete basement floor of their new house in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Amateur job. The story surrounding the homicide, however, is pretty typical as true-crime tales go: A spouse finds a new love and murders the old one to avoid a battle over the kids and money.
But Jack Boyle, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who was a tremendous success as a physician, failed miserably as a hitman, and landed himself in a crypt of his own — a cell at the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio.
The murder took place in the hours before New Year’s 1990 struck, but people from the Boyles’ old hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, have never stopped talking about the case. The Investigation Discovery channel produced a documentary about it in 2018.
Imperfect union. Jack Boyle is still alive, so for this week, I looked for an epilogue for him as well as his and Noreen’s children. But first here’s a recap of “Foundation of Lies” along with extra information drawn from internet research:
Noreen Schmid Boyle, an elegant mother of two, managed to cope with her husband’s various affairs over the years. Maybe she cared more about maintaining a stable home for Collier, 11, and Elizabeth 3, than she did about her own hurt feelings.
Or perhaps she soothed her pride with shopping trips and her Range Rover and BMW. Her husband’s medical practice, which specialized in Medicaid and Medicare cases, was a money machine. One in every 13 residents of Richland County, Ohio, was a patient there, according to Forensic Files.
Surely, Noreen enjoyed Jack Boyle’s status in the community.
Gatsby gal. According to the Akron Beacon Journal, Noreen was something of a Holly Golightly. She came from a working-class background, the daughter of a secretary and a machinist.
But she liked people to think otherwise.
Noreen told friends that she grew up in a mansion and had an M.B.A. from the Wharton School.
She really did, however, graduate from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry, as a dental hygienist (and supported Jack Boyle while he went to medical school).
At some point before New Year’s Eve 1989 rolled around, Noreen had decided that being the wife of a rich doctor wasn’t worth the pain. She found out that Collier had witnessed his father kissing another woman.
Secret agenda. Citing mental cruelty and neglect, Noreen, 44, filed for divorce. But Jack, then 46, persuaded her to make a fresh start with him in Erie, Pennsylvania. He bought a house there and arranged for the sellers to vacate it right away.
All along, however, Jack planned to make Noreen disappear so he could marry his girlfriend, Sherri Campbell, and live with her and the kids in Erie, where he intended to establish a new medical practice.
On December 31, 1989, Jack struck Noreen and suffocated her to death after an argument at their residence in Mansfield, Ohio.
Heavy equipment. Over the course of the next few days, the doctor began driving the three hours from Mansfield to Erie, saying he was preparing the new house for their big move. He didn’t mention that he was renovating the basement into a cemetery.
He used a rented jackhammer to make a hole in the concrete floor. Then he secreted Noreen’s body inside, filled in the opening, repainted the floor, and covered it with indoor-outdoor carpeting.
In what must have been a strenuous job, Jack gathered up the pieces of broken concrete and dumped them on property owned by Mark Davis, a business associate who was also Sherri Campbell’s uncle.
Deluded. Now Jack was free to move in with Sherri Campbell, who was 26 years old and very pregnant with his child. He told Collier that Noreen had gone on a little jaunt out of town. Jack would later contend that he saw his wife leave the house and that she was picked up by someone in a car.
Why did Jack Boyle think that his wife’s disappearance would quickly fall off the radar screen?
Maybe he figured the new friends and associates he planned to acquire in Erie would know nothing of Noreen and have no reason to inquire about her.
Jane Imbody, a local Mansfield news anchor who appeared on the Forensic Files episode, said that the doctor considered his deceptions good enough for not only the public and his family but also for himself. “He was such a good liar he believed his own lies,” Imbody said.
But 11-year-old Collier wasn’t having any of it.
Semi-forgery. Collier told investigators everything: Jack’s affair with Sherri Campbell, the thumps he heard while his parents were arguing New Year’s Eve, the trips to Erie, and how his father complained of being sore when he returned. His 3-year-old sister reportedly told police she saw her father strike Noreen.
The authorities found the patch of newly paved basement flooring in the Erie house and discovered Noreen’s decomposing body beneath it. She had a plastic bag over her head.
The real estate agent who handled the $300,000 house deal told investigators about the woman who accompanied Jack to his office. She signed her name “N. Sherri Boyle,” in an apparent effort to impersonate Noreen. (When asked about it in court later, Sherri Campbell pleaded the Fifth Amendment.)
Ice overkill. The prosecution ordered forensic tests to make sure the discarded concrete fragments dumped in Mark Davis’ yard came from the concrete in the Erie basement.
They matched, but the real smoking gun was the rental receipt from the jackhammer.
Jack said he used it to break up ice on his property. I grew up near Erie, with the lake effect and six-month-long winters, but never saw a homeowner use a jackhammer to get rid of ice. People either left the ice alone, put rock salt on it, or ruined their shovel blades hacking away at it.
Prosecutor takes aim. By the end of the month, authorities had arrested Jack and were holding him on $5 million bond. The trial kicked off just a few months after the murder in 1990, and the doctor testified on his own behalf — for nine hours.
It came out during questioning that Jack had arranged for Sherri Campbell to cook a pork roast and bring it over on New Year’s day — evidence that he knew there was no chance Noreen would show up at home, according to Richland County prosecutor James Mayer Jr.
Stories published in the Mansfield News Journal on June 26, 1990, gave extensive coverage of Jack Boyle’s various evasions under oath.
Witness for the prosecution. In addition to the lies he told to cover up the murder plot — for example, he denied purchasing concrete mix at a local Busy Beaver store — there were self-aggrandizing claims regarding his military service.
He said that he was a former Navy man (true), he flew an F-14 during the Vietnam War and logged more flight time than any other pilot (false), a sniper shot him during the Iranian hostage crisis (false), and that he was a flight surgeon (false).
The trial’s real sensation was Collier Boyle, age 12 by then, who impressed the courtroom with his articulate testimony about his parents. Collier revealed that he and Noreen feared Jack’s nastiness and temper.
Cruel tactic. Jack received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for 20 years for aggravated murder and a consecutive 18 months for abuse of a corpse.
As if losing his mother once didn’t hurt enough, Collier had to go through it again in 1994, when Jack Boyle claimed the body found underneath his basement didn’t belong to Noreen and that she might still be alive.
Some of the autopsy details, including her eye color, were wrong, and the doctor’s brother claimed he’d received a phone call from Noreen after the night she officially disappeared.
Trash talk. Around the same time that Jack was pushing for a new trial, his aforementioned brother, Charles “C.J.” Boyle, began a smear campaign against Noreen.
A lengthy account appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal on July 25, 1994.
Charles Boyle claimed that Noreen’s adoption of Elizabeth from Taiwan was illegitimate.
He also alleged the adoption was “the ‘first operation test’ of a baby-selling organization for which Noreen Boyle became an agent” and that she and an associate had nabbed “several hundred thousand dollars in clear profits” from the illegal enterprise.
A job for DNA. What’s more, Noreen was an international gold jewelry smuggler, according to Charles. And she had planned to burn down the new house in Erie out of jealousy — and she had multiple affairs of her own with men, including a contractor and a police officer, Charles claimed.
He also suggested that Noreen staged her own death and then disappeared on her own volition.
Noreen wasn’t around to defend herself from the character assassination, but at least the authorities were able to refute the story that she had fled on her own accord.
They exhumed Noreen’s body, and a mitochondrial DNA tested reconfirmed its identity.
The misinformation on the coroner’s report was human error.
Stay inside, pal. On June 2, 1994, Jack Boyle lost his appeal of the case, when a panel of circuit judges ruled that evidence of his guilt was “overwhelming.”
In 2000, the Mansfield News Journal reported that Boyle was making noise about his attorneys’ not representing him competently. He said they failed to advise him against testifying on his own behalf. That effort went nowhere, and he remained behind razor wire.
In 2010, he failed in his first bid to win parole. As of this writing, he’s still in Marion, with his next parole hearing scheduled for Oct. 01, 2025.
He has reportedly changed his story about Noreen’s death. He acknowledges that he killed her, but says it happened by accident: After she tried to attack him with a knife, he pushed her to defend himself and then he blacked out, he said. When he woke up, he claimed, Noreen was dead.
Okay, whatever you say, Jack.
More about him in a minute. What about Elizabeth and Collier?
‘Colliver’ Twist. Elizabeth was adopted by the family of a local school principal. No other information about her came up in internet searches. She might prefer to remain uncontacted.
Collier found himself alone after the murder. As a Daily Mail story from November 10, 2017, quoted the A Murder in Mansfield filmmaker:
“He … had a lot of rejection from both sides of his family,” documentary director Barbara Kopple tells DailyMail.com. “His father’s family probably felt that he betrayed them, and they didn’t want to adopt him or have him live with them, and the mother’s family probably had some trouble embracing a murderer’s son — in a way, a sense of further rejection.”
Fortunately, a local couple named Susan and George Zeigler eventually adopted Collier. He credits them with helping him recover from the traumatic events of his childhood.
Today, he goes by the name Collier Landry and works as a cinematographer out of Los Angeles.
Return to Mansfield. As of 2016, Collier was seeking to reconnect with his sister Elizabeth, whom he lost track of after the trial.
He conceived of the idea for A Murder in Mansfield, which was produced by Cabin Creek Films.
It shows Collier’s homecoming to Mansfield and his reunion with his mother’s best friend as well as with lead detective Dave Messmore, who also appeared on the Forensic Files episode. Messmore and his wife actually wanted to adopt Collier but legal problems prevented it, according to a review of the movie on the filmint.nu website.
Back to Jack: The movie also showed a reunion between him and his son. Somehow, Collier has managed not to hate him.
Photo motherlode. The Hollywood Reporter gave A Murder in Mansfield a good review, and the movie appeared at a number of film festivals and had “explosive ticket sales” for its showing in Mansfield. For now, you can watch it via Amazon Prime.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Update: Read about Collier’s life today.
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime.
P.S. Read a Q&A with the Mansfield native who reported on the case for the Mansfield News Journal
To order the book:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound
