Father's Dark Secret: He Killed My Mom! | Collier Landry DSH #578

And I come downstairs and my father is sitting on the couch.

He had a towel wrapped around his waist.

He had just taken a shower and I said, where is my mother?

He didn't look at me.

He was watching television.

I said, where is my mother?

And he looks up at me, stone cold, and he goes, well, Collier, mommy took a little vacation.

And right then I knew that he had killed my mother.

Oh my gosh.

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And here's the episode.

All right, guys, Collier Landry, one of the craziest stories I think I've ever seen, man.

Thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah,

it is an interesting one for sure.

Very interesting.

And you were 12 years old when that incident happened, right?

It was 11 when the murder occurred, and I was 12 when it went to trial.

Yeah.

So walk everyone through, for those that don't know your story, what exactly happened?

So when I was 11 years old,

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of two loud thuds.

And

I knew, see, my parents were going through a really nasty divorce, and my father was a very violent person.

And

I was completely paralyzed in my bed.

And I was thinking to myself, do I get up?

Do I run to my mother's bedroom?

Or do I just wait?

And I counted 12 footsteps as they walked down the hall.

And I'm laying in bed and I'm and my eyes are wide open and I'm saying to myself

and I can see out of my peripheral vision two feet in the doorway

and all I can think is there's like this voice screaming inside don't look up

and

the feet left and I woke up the next morning and went straight to my mother's bedroom She was gone and I'm literally rummaging through her sheets and looking for blood.

And I come downstairs and my father's sitting on the couch.

He had a towel wrapped around his waist.

He had just taken a shower and I said, where is my mother?

And he didn't look at me.

He was watching television.

I said, where is my mother?

And he looks up at me, stone cold, and he goes, well, Collier, mommy took a little vacation.

And right then I knew that he had killed my mother.

Oh, my gosh.

And

he goes into this whole he launches into this whole spiel of we're not going to call the cops.

We're not going to call the FBI We're not going to do this.

She's going to come back.

And he starts explaining to me

how

they got into a fight the night before, or they got in the fight in the middle of the night, and the thuds, and I said, well, what about the thuds?

And he said, well, the thuds was my mother throwing her purse at him and hitting the wall.

And I was like, no, that's not it.

But I'm listening to him.

My father is a psychopath, right?

Did you know that at the time?

I knew my father was very violent.

He had a massive proclivity for violence, and he was very violent with us growing up.

He, yeah, he was just one of those people, you know,

intimidating force.

I mean, my father's six foot three, 225 pounds, you know what I mean?

And I was a little asthmatic kid.

But

he starts, you know, he starts telling you this whole story on how my mother came downstairs and they got into an argument and she threw her purse at him and threw her credit cards at him.

And literally, this is the dead of winter.

This is New Year's Eve in Ohio.

Okay, dead of winter.

And literally leaves the house and goes down the driveway to a car that was waiting on the end of the driveway.

That was his story.

And I didn't believe him.

And

my father had a mistress at the time

that I had met.

And I didn't know until much later that my father

had many mistresses throughout my parents' marriage.

And my mother always knew, but she didn't give a shit.

But at that time, the reason why she filed for divorce from my father is because he introduced me to his girlfriend.

And that was like the line in the sand.

That was like the crossing of the Rubicon for my mother.

So I,

you know, so I'm talking to my father and he's explaining, you know, don't call the cops, don't call the FBI.

And as soon as he said, don't call the FBI.

I remember thinking to myself,

okay,

why do we go there?

I mean, we're in a small town in Ohio.

And this isn't like when

CSI is on television or anything like that.

That just was,

it was just struck me as really odd.

Right.

And I wasn't going to listen to my father.

And he left that day.

And I immediately grabbed, my mother just bought a cordless phone.

And what I had done, because they were in this contentious divorce is I had taken down all of my mother's friends' phone numbers.

And I hid them in a stuffed Garfield that I had in my room.

Wow.

I locked myself in the bathroom and I called all those numbers because my father told me not to call the police.

He didn't say I couldn't call my mom's friends and tell them to call the police.

So I told them to call the police.

And two uniformed officers showed up a couple hours later.

And at that time, the night before,

my grandmother, my father's mother, who was very close with my mother, had arrived.

She was supposed to come for Christmas and she was coming for New Year's.

It was very strange.

And

I,

my grandmother was like, no, listen to your father or whatever.

So when the cops show up, she just loses it.

And two uniformed officers, and I'm walking them through the house and I'm telling them, I'm trying to tell them what happened, but I can't because

my grandmother's hovering over me.

So I managed to pull one of them aside and my grandmother's talking to one of them in my mother's bedroom.

I said, look, I said, I don't know what happened,

but I don't trust my father as far as I could throw him.

And he's done something to my mother.

And you need to look into this.

And he just kind of looked at me like I was a crazy little kid.

So my father comes home that night.

No police come back.

His divorce lawyer comes over and they're talking about stuff.

I can't quite hear what's going on.

And the next day, which was New Year's Day,

I call my mother's friends again.

I'm like, okay, what's going on?

Like, no police came.

And they were like, well, they're treating it as a missing person's case.

I'm like, no.

She's not missing.

Like, we know something has happened to her.

You know, it's not like she just went off in the middle of the night.

So by the grace of God, divine intervention, whatever you want to call it,

because it's a New Year's Day in a sleepy small town in Ohio, A gentleman by the name of Detective David Messmore happened to see the missing person's report.

Didn't have anything to do that day and came out to my house.

He knocks on the door.

My grandmother answers.

She loses it again because he's a detective asking questions.

She runs, he gets him.

He comes inside.

I'm like, come on in, come on in.

And she goes, I'm going to call my son.

My son's a doctor.

You're going to be in big trouble.

Don't harass us, bro.

And she goes to call

my father.

Now, growing up, my mother had always told me stories about, she was raised in Philadelphia.

She would go to the carousel when she was a child, and she would talk about when you go around the carousel, you try to grab the brass ring and you win a prize.

She always told me, she's like, Collier,

you want to grab the brass ring in life.

You want to look for those moments that you can seize an opportunity.

And I knew when my grandmother left for that moment, when I had the one-on-one the detective, that that was the brass ring moment.

moment and I looked him straight in the eye I said look my mother would never leave me my father's done something to her I think he's killed her give me your business card and tomorrow I go back to school and I'll call you he gave me his card and he's kind of looking at me like who is this kid yeah so she comes back and she says my son is blah blah blah he goes okay you know I'll come back and I'll talk to the doctor later on tonight and Dave Messmore actually came back that night my father wouldn't talk to him yet as a lawyer there so I go to school the next day January 2nd and immediately I go right to the principal's office and I say, I need you to call this man and have him come down here.

And for two or three hours, I lay out the entirety of my parents' relationship, my father's proclivity for violence,

all the

mistress that I knew of,

the divorce, the contentious, because they had been in this divorce for about six months.

Because

when he introduced me to his girlfriend, She said, I'm violent divorce.

That's done.

And when you're dealing with a psychopath, like that's, you're like, no, you're not going to win.

Doesn't matter what they have.

Yeah.

They need to win.

And when you draw the line with them, that's like it.

It's narcissistic personality.

And I'm, look, I'm not, I always say on my YouTube show, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a law enforcement, I'm just a guy who's been through a lot of.

But that's the thing that I had to learn.

And

so...

Over the course of the next 25 days, myself and this detective put together the pieces and I found photographs of a house in another state where they dug my mother's body up from.

Whoa, that's crazy.

So, I was gathering all this evidence.

So, my father was coming home every night.

I was home from school, and I was watching him like a hawk.

And during that initial meeting with Dave Messmore at the school, I told him, look, I said, I'm going to go home, and when my grandmother's downstairs making dinner, I'm going to go upstairs and I'm going to pull the bookcases out of the wall and look in the crawl space for my mother's body.

I'm going to look to see if her purse is somewhere because she wouldn't have left the purse with,

left without this one purse that she has.

I'm gonna start doing this.

And so over the course of like this, like I said, 25 days, my father was coming home with like cuts on his arm, bruises.

His whole demeanor was a very violent guy and had just a very macho, you know, you had a guest on earlier talking about like the measuring contest.

That was my dad.

Machismo, sort of Italian, no offense, but you know, like had that pride.

Yeah, just kind of, but he was arrogant, you know what I mean?

And so he,

you know, was just that type of guy.

And his whole demeanor had changed after this.

And, you know, this was a guy who used to beat me up for, and, and, and abuse me for covering my eyes when there was a violent part in a movie or there was a sex scene.

And all of a sudden, like, I had just gotten a Nintendo that year for Christmas.

And it was the last kid I'm I blocked in a Nintendo.

And I'm playing Double Dragon 2.

And he goes, what is this game you're playing?

This is violent.

What do you, I'm like,

wait, who are you?

who are you you're the guy that beats me up for like not looking at violent films so anyways all this played out they um uh

police come to my house um

the day before they discovered my mother's body yeah because over the course of this three weeks you know i'm investigating my father and i can see his demeanor like i said changing and he's becoming more and more under duress because every night lieutenant muscomber is coming to the house knocking on the door saying i want to talk to the doctor right

and um i could tell that my father's like where is this heat coming from

so in on January 21st so this is 1990 my father says to me he goes he goes you know what because he was always saying you know your mother's left us your mother's left us we would have dinner he'd be like I wonder what your mom what mommy's doing he would call her mommy mommy's doing now and I'm like you're you you killed her like what do you mean what she's doing now I'm gonna find her yeah

but he says to me he goes you know it's I know things have been really rough on you call here since mommy left us in this state, but I think we should go on this father-and-son trip.

I have a medical conference in Florida, and I think we should do a father-and-son bonding trip.

And that's when I knew I wasn't coming back from Florida.

Damn.

And I called Dave Massimore the next day when I go to school, I said, He's going to take me to Florida, and I'm not coming back.

I'm going to drown the Gulf of Mexico.

And that was when they really accelerated the case.

And the morning of January 24th, 1992,

two members from Child Protective

Services come, they wake me up, they yank me out of my bed, they say, you got 20 minutes to pack a bag for you and your sister.

I had an adopted sister that was adopted from Taiwan about six months before my mother was killed.

Wow.

And I packed her bags.

I said, can I take my dog?

They're like, well, come back for your dog.

I never saw my dog again.

And

I went into

to stay with the principal of my school.

And that night was the night that they dug up my mother's body.

It was under the house?

And it was underneath the house, not the house house in ohio a house that my father had purchased in eerie pennsylvania for cash wow and he had forged my had his girlfriend forge my mother's name on the on the documents on the closing documents on the deal geez

so um

yeah and it uh i got wrapped up into a whirlwind of what was the largest murder case at that time in ohio history and my father's a doctor my mother's a beautiful woman it you know it looked like they had this perfect life but he was a chronic womanizer and an abuser and

what ended up happening is I testified at the grand jury and secured my father's indictment, which led to his

arrest.

And he hasn't been released from custody since 30 years.

Yeah, he got

life

with parole.

So he goes up.

So he's going off parole this year and he probably will get paroled.

I mean, he's 80 now.

But

so what happened was, is because

I was the one who, you know, who put the case on my father, who talked to police, my father's side of the family disowned me.

They didn't want anything to do with me.

They wanted me to actually go to the cops and tell them I was lying and making all this up.

And I was like, yeah, that's not happening.

My mother's side of the family, they also didn't want anything to do with me because,

and unbeknownst to me at this time, but my father had been accused of molesting their two daughters under the guise of giving them physicals a couple of years prior.

Dang.

And he, I ended up finding all this out later when I made my film,

that he was going to be arrested for that a year before he killed my mother.

Whoa.

But the girls couldn't testify.

I mean, it's such a traumatic thing for a child to be sexually abused.

I mean, it's awful.

Yeah, and they're young and they were teenagers, but it's heavy.

But that was taken out on me.

So my...

My mother's side of the family said, we don't want anything to do with you either.

And I was remanded to the foster care system.

Oh, my gosh.

And I had to figure out

while living in foster care with nobody in my life.

Adoptive sister, was she with you?

She was with me, yeah.

You know, she was three years old.

I had to,

because I was the

witness against my father at trial, and I testified for two days at my father's trial for the prosecution, and my father was convicted for the aggravated murder of my mother and abuse of a corpse, and he is still incarcerated to this day.

And you were 12 years old when you testified?

I was 12 years old.

Wow, that is crazy.

So, that night when your mother was murdered, if you lifted your head up in that bedroom,

we wouldn't be sitting here.

You think he would have killed you?

Oh, 100%.

I mean, let's just keep it real.

It's nothing to make the hole a little bit bigger and say she left with the kid.

Right.

I mean, you're a psychopath.

It's not like, you know what I mean?

So, oh, yeah,

absolutely 100%.

And I ended up finding out on my podcast, I interviewed

a couple years ago, I interviewed

the judge for my father's trial.

And he told me that they brought someone to court who was my father's fixer in Florida.

So that ultimately would have been the guy that probably would have, you know, dunked my head underneath the water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Wow.

Because my father was stalking his ex-girlfriends that were down there in Florida that had escaped.

Jeez.

Yeah, my father was a bad, bad, bad dude.

Man, did you ever have an emotional connection with him?

I mean, yes.

And so therein lies the whole, there's the rub, right?

Because I lose everything in the blink of an eye, and I don't know how to, where to even begin, right?

Yeah.

But, you know, my father,

who commits this horrible crime, I had to grow up sort of reconciling with all sorts of, you know, obviously heavy, serious trauma.

Yeah.

But also, you know,

he's the only surviving link that I have to my mother and to my family.

And

how do I navigate a relationship with him?

Is that even possible?

Am I capable of doing something like this, even?

Because, you know, when you grow up in a small town and something like this, because I was later adopted after

being in foster care for about a year, I was adopted and I was awarded custody to a family that I didn't really know.

They were in my

school system, but I didn't really know them.

I met them a couple times.

I wanted to be adopted by the detective who helped me find my mother.

And we had bonded after the trial, and I thought

they were going to try to adopt me, but they were not awarded custody of me.

But.

Wait, so why wouldn't he be able to, why wasn't he able to get custody of you?

Well,

because

two years prior, the judge who was in charge of awarding custody in the

children's courts,

he had investigated him for some illegal activities and he held a grudge and he literally looked me in the eye in the courtroom and he goes, you don't think I'm going to send you to live with the guy who put your dad in jail, do you?

Did you really think that?

And I got really upset and I left the courtroom and I was like, I was just, it sucks because it was like, I've been through all this shit.

I've bonded with a family that really loves me and now I can't even have that.

So I've lost like literally everything, right?

But

you know, everything happens for a reason and everything works out the way it should.

But

yeah, it was it was a tough, it was a tough go.

And you know, growing up and trying to sort of reconcile that, could I be that person?

Is that in me?

That's been a journey that I'm, you know, that I went on for many years.

Yeah, and you had to revisit, right, making your documentary.

And you went back to interview your dad.

Yeah.

So

really, so my way, and I like I said, I did a TED talk about this, but I

my way of dealing with all of this and in trauma and my sort of outlook on all of this was immediately, okay, so that next morning that I wake up, okay, I know my mother's gone, I know she's probably not coming back.

Okay, so now we're gonna go into action, and now I'm gonna find her, and I'm going to put this motherfucker in jail, right?

So I was in action, and I talk about like, you know, a lot of times when you're in traumatic situations, you

get into this, like, why did this happen to me?

Why are we at this moment?

What did I, you know, why, why, why?

And I argue it's no,

what now?

Like, instead of trying to focus on like understanding, because we as humans are natural empaths, right?

Yeah.

Let's try to understand like why this affects us.

What are we going to do about it that's going to lead us out of this?

Like, what is our action plan, right?

And so for me, that was, I'm going to find my mother, right?

When I was in high school, and you know, so after this, I'm adopted.

And,

you know, I was, I stayed in the same community that all of this happened.

Wow.

So I grew up in Mansfield,

a suburb called Ontario, but, you know, it's like Burbank and Glendale.

Yeah.

For those of you who know Los Angeles.

But

so

I,

this is the thing.

When you grow up with this circumstance, like I was, you know, I talk about it now like I was like a child actor that grew up because

the trial trial was televised.

So everybody saw me on television testifying against my father.

Because it was a big deal in your town, right?

It was a massive deal.

And it was on, you know, it was out here on the news.

It was all, I mean,

you know, if it was a couple of years later and then the internet was around, it would have been a whole different, it would have been a fiasco.

You know, it was like the O.J.

Simpson trial in our small town.

Yeah.

So a lot of kids were probably kind of scared of you, right?

Oh, yeah.

And just all of it.

And people, you know, know uh you know i was bullied a lot because of it i was um you know but people were also fascinated with me i couldn't go anywhere without people wanting to come up and talk to me about and that was a great thing because people would come up to me they want to talk and ask me about it and i'm like great

you're my therapy so i'll tell you oh you want to know i'll i'll tell you about it like i'll stand in a walmart aisle and by the laundry detergent i'm just laying it out these people and they're like oh okay maybe i shouldn't ask this kid like yeah maybe you should leave me alone and let me be a kid.

But I always,

I was very impassioned from a very young age.

And this is long before I even knew what true crime was or any of that nonsense.

I realized that we

don't examine the impacts of violence on the ancillary victims, the communities, the best friend, the friends of the kids,

the schoolmates,

the community, the police officers, everybody else that's involved.

You know,

the bad guy goes to prison the the victim is dead the state gets us restitution the gavel hits and we say next and we don't really examine that if we don't look at those consequences we will not understand how to not have these things happen right right um you know and this is now uh nowadays it's like everybody's talking about this but back then nobody was talking about this but um but i was determined I'm going to get out of this place the first chance I get.

And for me, it was music was my thing I could sing.

And so I ended up, you know, I was like, I want to do something with this story.

And I need to be in a creative environment, in a creative atmosphere.

So I ended up going to music school for a couple of years.

And I said, you know, I don't want to be, because it was, I just didn't want to do that.

And I was like, I want to be in LA.

And I moved to LA.

And I came out here with nothing.

And I just said to myself, okay, look.

I'm going to tell this story because this is my process.

Like, this is how I'm going to get through this.

Is by doing something with the story.

I had no idea what it was.

Was I going to make a television show?

Was I going to, you know, am I going to be a rock star and

blow up and

share my story with the world and change people's lives, or am I going to be a filmmaker?

And I ended up becoming a filmmaker.

And

that was

the thing that I pursued for,

you know, so I came out here when I was 22, 21, and I, yeah, 21.

And

it took me a long time, but I learned everything I could about filmmaking.

I worked on really big projects.

I mean, I worked as a model, and I worked in front of the camera as an actor, and that, but I became a cinematographer.

And

there was a film that I had seen when

I was like 19, 20 that came out.

It was called American History X.

Started Edward Norton, Beverly DiAngelo, Elliot Gould, and Edward Furlong.

And Edward Norton plays a neo-Nazi.

It's a fantastic film.

It's one of my top five of all time.

Oh, I got to change the films.

Yeah, that and Shaw Shanker Dempster, which is shot in Mansfield as well.

Yeah, it was shot in my hometown as well.

But

I left the theater with a friend of mine who's black, and we went to college together.

And

we were just tripping on it.

I said, look, man, I said, whoever did that film,

whoever made that film, I want to help me tell my story.

Flash forward, you know, eight, nine years later, I'm sitting in my office, like tinkering, doing some editing on some videos.

And my girlfriend at the time comes in and she goes, some guy reached out to me on MySpace.

He wants to photograph me.

But he's a film producer.

And I was like, oh, what has he done?

She's like, oh, he did Booty Call.

She's reading his movies off the MySpace.

Booty Call, 1114, Havoc,

American History.

I said, American History X?

And she said, yeah.

And I said, we need to meet this guy.

And

his name was John Morrissey.

And he was the producer of American History X.

He and I became friends, and I was starting on my filmmaking journey, and he was, you know, we were talking about projects one day, and he wanted to do something like really stupid.

And I said, no, I said, I got an idea.

I want to do a docuseries about the consequences of violence in America.

And the best news is,

I have the rights to the pilot.

And I gave him this book of newspaper clippings that somebody had given me when I was a kid of all the trial and everything,

my dad's paroles, appeals, everything because my father's claimed it was my mother's body.

I actually gave DNA evidence and had my mother's body exhumed to make sure that that was the case to, you know, when there was the mid to late 90s, because I wanted to make sure all this was actually true.

And

along this whole journey, because I was very angry with my father as a child, but I realized that that would do me no good.

And I learned at a very young age, like when I was a teenager, that I needed to forgive my father.

Wow.

And I needed to move on.

And

what I learned about forgiveness is it's, you know,

it's not about

them.

It's about you.

Because I knew that if I couldn't let that go in a way, that I would never move forward, right?

Yeah.

And

yeah, so I flashed forward to LA and I handed him this thing because I, you know, I was working working out here and I had a circle of friends, but nobody really knew my story.

People were like, oh, Collier's from Ohio.

Oh, yeah, he's adopted.

His dad killed his mom.

Like, that's all they knew.

They didn't know any of the stuff that came out in the film.

As I kept it very, not because I was embarrassed of it, but I wanted to come to a place where nobody knew who I was.

And I wanted to know,

can you like me for me?

Can you like me for the person I am?

Or can you dislike me for the person I am?

Like, you don't need to know anything about me.

I don't want you to feel sorry for me.

I I want you to be like, oh my God, that story.

I want you to be like, oh, I like Collier.

He's a cool dude.

Or, oh, I don't like Collier, you know?

Yeah.

And that became the mission and the driver.

So John and I, like, he reads all this and he goes, I had no idea.

This is just like, what the, he's like, what the f ⁇ ?

Yeah.

And I was like, yeah, I was like, this is a story.

I was like, crazy.

I told you.

And

he said, you know, I've got somebody who I think would be interested in this, two-time Oscar winner Barbara Coppel, who won for two documentaries.

And we started putting it together and yeah rest is history and it was yeah and you won awards for it right yeah we won awards and uh not an oscar or anything like that but you know i traveled around and honestly you know i know you have a lot of people on this show you know that have like various levels of you know huge financial success and yeah all that i'm that person who

walked through that fire and did that thing that was that like

I'm gonna put a bookend on this I'm gonna put a button on this right and I cultivated a relationship and had a relationship with my father while he was in prison and I even so much as like would go into the prison and teach the inmates because they had a production department yeah how to use cameras I helped them order their cameras I taught them editing Photoshop all this to curry a favor because I knew I didn't know what was going to happen but I knew I needed my father's cooperation

and yeah I made this film a murder in Mansfield I got the cameras in and I was able able to finally sit down because, like I said, I forgave my father.

I had gotten to a place in my life where I was comfortable with what happened to me.

I mean, it's my reality, right?

Everybody, you know, everybody's reality is their own.

Perspective.

You know, exactly.

Life is a matter of perspective.

And

I was able to sit down with him.

and ask the one burning question that I really wanted to know.

Why'd you do it?

Which is, why did you kill my mother?

Because he had no reason to.

He was, you know, had impregnated.

I have a half-sister.

Like, he had a mistress who was pregnant, who was 25 years younger than him.

He was about ready to make a ton of money.

He had just bought a house in another state.

Like, there was no reason for him to murder my mother.

Weird timing.

Other than the fact that he's a psychopath.

And that's

that's it.

You know what I mean?

So it wasn't planned.

It was just it was premeditated.

No, it was premeditated.

No, that's the whole point.

Is he planned it?

So there were

so when they discovered my mother's body

they were asking me questions they didn't tell me like oh we found her wrapped in this but they said did you guys ever see a blue tarp on your on your porch and I was like oh yeah I was like I went with my dad and bought that at Kmart that was my mom's burial shroud wow like I went with my father to a Kmart and he bought the blue tarp that he wrapped my mother's body in to bury her underneath the floor crazy uh blue indoor outdoor carpeting that was sitting out yeah it was it was premeditated i think that's one of the things that people don't understand in the film is that it was premeditated.

That my father planned this from the moment that my mother said he was getting a divorce, he was like, no, you're not doing that

because his ego.

And because, you know,

people who have, you know, psychopathy as part of a narcissistic personality disorder.

Yep.

Again, I'm not diagnosing anyone, but

when those people are the most dangerous is when you say, I'm done and I'm leaving you.

That's when they become really dangerous.

And my father was, you know,

and that's the thing is, so when I'm sitting down with him in prison, I pull out this letter that I wrote him.

And, you know, he comes in, he sits down, he's in this very jovial mood.

And he's like, oh, bump, my name is Bumper.

And he's like, oh, bump, how are you?

I was like, oh, yeah, we're talking about the weather a little bit.

And I say to him for the first time, and again, I had seen my father hundreds of times and, you know, had phone calls, interactions, emails.

I sit down with him and I say, one of the things I've always been interested in ever since you murdered my mother and as soon as I say ever since you murdered my mother that's the first time that I ever said that to him and his whole demeanor changes so he goes and he just starts to tense up and you see it on film and I said I'm interested in the consequences of violence and I and I pull out this letter that I wrote him when I was 13 years old and that letter was me

Asking him to come clean about the murder.

Asking him because I told him, look, you know, I wanted his girlfriend and my half-sister to move on.

I wanted my family to move on.

I wanted to move on.

I was like, I know you did it.

I heard you do it.

I just come clean because he kept denying it, right?

He's in court denying it.

And it's really.

Even after he was denying it in prison?

Oh, he denied it to the parole board.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

And he denies it in the film.

But his story has changed because my father testified

on his own behalf and

in his trial for like two and a half days.

and my father is a is a you know pathological liar right and he just gets caught in lie after lie after lie and so when you see in the film like his story is totally different than it was yeah in the trial that's crazy it was the story that he gave me the morning that she was murdered

but yeah I read him this letter and I and I and I'm and I'm really breaking down with it and I and I just say to him

And he and what the reason why I had this letter that I sent him is because he had opened it.

He put it back in the envelope envelope, and he wrote, refused, and he sent it back to me when I was 13 years old.

Wow.

And I kept it.

And I said, Why did you send this back to me?

And that's how the whole thing.

And he just broke.

One last question because I'm curious on this answer.

So you forgave him, right?

Yeah.

Do you think he forgave you?

Oh, I don't think no.

He still has all that resentment.

That's an interesting question.

But yes, I do think

he's going to probably get paroled this year.

I mean, he's 80.

He'll be 81.

I definitely wonder that for sure.

I know that he expressed anger

after the film and everything.

You don't like how it.

Well, no, no, he just, everything is about him.

He's a narcissist.

He's a malignant narcissist, a psychopath, right?

And

I know that he had expressed some anger to people, but yeah, I think he still feels that there's a betrayal, maybe.

But I think that my father also envies me

because he has written me, he wrote to the parole board, like, my son is my role model because he did X, Y, and Z.

And it's interesting when that whole role reversal happens in life, right?

Yeah.

Where you end up being the responsible parent, but you're the child, right?

And I mean, there's many people that have this, maybe not to that extreme, but they have these types of relationships with their parents.

Absolutely.

And,

but, you know, the thing is, is at the end, and I haven't seen him since, since I've made the film, but I get up, and I remember I was being interviewed by the New York Times, and they were saying, a guy says to me, he goes, he goes, there's three minutes, there's three seconds in the film that sum up everything I need to know about you.

I said, what is that?

And he goes, he goes, after your father tells you all these lies and you're sitting there and you say, I don't believe, you know, I believe that you believe that.

And then you get up and you hug him and you say, I love you, pop.

He's like, I don't know anybody that would ever say that.

After this man just lies to them and just goes through all this and it's just

and won't tell them the truth.

I was like, well, he's like, but that tells me what I need to know about you, man, because you're not him.

And I was like, well, that was the whole point of doing.

Wow.

The story continues.

25-year journey, yeah.

Well, what are you working on next, man?

And where can people find you?

So I host a podcast, the Call Your Landry Show.

I work on true crime projects.

I work on documentary projects.

I have a YouTube channel.

I have a pretty large TikTok following.

You can check me out every social media, Call Your Landry at Call Your Landry, my YouTube channel, my TikTok.

Boom.

We'll link it all below.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Yeah, man.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you next time.