In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.
He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.
Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit.
Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.
For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.
This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Murder in Boston podcast and associate editor and columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe, we bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few White people in power wanted to confront.
This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.
Dig Deeper
Read: Nightmare in Mission Hill (The Boston Globe)
Listen: Murder in Boston: The untold story of the Charles and Carol Stuart shooting, a 10-part podcast from The Boston Globe
Watch: Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning (Max)
Credits
Reporters: Evan Allen, Elizabeth Koh, Andrew Ryan, and Adrian Walker | Project manager: Brendan McCarthy | Editors: Kate Howard and Kristin Nelson | Fact checkers: Matt Mahoney and Nikki Frick | General counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Show mixer: Reza Dahya | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson
Support for Reveal is provided by The Reva and David Logan Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, The Hellman Foundation, and Reveal listeners.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today, we’re starting the show by going back a few decades to a notorious crime that holds lessons for today, lessons about race, class, crime, and punishment. |
| It’s October 23rd, 1989 in Boston. Charles Stuart makes a 911 call from his car phone. | |
| 911: | Boston recorded emergency 510. |
| Chuck Stuart: | My wife’s been shot. I’ve been shot. |
| 911: | Where is this, sir? |
| Chuck Stuart: | I have no idea. I’m off, I was just coming from Brigham and Women’s Hospital. |
| Al Letson: | Chuck and Carol Stuart started the night at a birthing class. Carol is seven months pregnant. Chuck tells the dispatcher there was a man with a gun and he forced him to drive to an abandoned area in Mission Hill. It’s not far from the birthing class, but it’s across an important dividing line between White Boston and everyone else. Mission Hill is a mixed-race neighborhood that people from the suburbs avoid. |
| 911: | The people that shot you, were they in the area right there? |
| Chuck Stuart: | No, they took off. No, they left. |
| 911: | Okay. |
| Al Letson: | The details are fuzzy. The dispatcher needs to know exactly where they are. And he tries to keep Chuck talking. Chuck says it’s too dark. No one’s around. He insists he can’t see anything. |
| 911: | Chuck, we’re on the way, but you’ve got to tell me a little better where you are. I need a little better location to find you immediately. Chuck, can you open the door? |
| Chuck Stuart: | Yes. Oh. |
| 911: | Where are you shot, Chuckie? Hello, Chuck? |
| Chuck, can you hear me, Chuck? I lost him. I lost him. | |
| Al Letson: | Police fan out to comb the neighborhood. One of the first emergency vehicles to arrive is carrying a film crew from an old reality show called Rescue 911. A newspaper photographer finds the scene too, almost immediately. This gruesome footage is all over the national news. After Chuck’s stretcher is loaded into the ambulance, a police officer leans over and speaks with him. |
| Officer: | Do you know who did this? |
| Who did this? | |
| Chuck Stuart: | Black man. |
| Al Letson: | It’s hard to make out, but the officer asks, “Who did this?” |
| Chuck says, “Black man.” | |
| Chuck Stuart: | Black man. |
| Officer: | Any stripes on it? What color? |
| Red? | |
| He had a mustache? | |
| Al Letson: | Chuck, who is White, tells the cop the shooter was wearing a tracksuit with stripes on it. He doesn’t offer much else, but it’s enough to cement the image of the main suspect. |
| 911: | For that shooting at McGreevey and St. Alphonsus, it’s Black male, 30 years of age, black running suit with a white stripe. |
| Al Letson: | Chuck and Carol Stuart are rushed to the hospital. And right away, the City’s Mayor is treating the shooting like a citywide emergency. |
| Mayor Raymond L…: | I’ve asked the Commissioner, just, I was talking to him a little while ago, I’ve asked him to put every single available detective in the City of Boston on this case to find out who the people or person who is responsible for this cowardly, senseless tragedy. |
| Al Letson: | The Stuarts are not the only people shot in Boston that night, but their story is one that captures the attention of the police force and the nation for weeks. And the two words from Chuck, “Black man,” trigger a police dragnet in a case that will alter the image of Boston forever. |
| It’s been more than 30 years since the Stuart shooting, and the narrative Boston told itself about this case was largely unchanged. That is, until The Boston Globe began investigating. | |
| This week, we’re partnering with the Murder in Boston Podcast to bring you a story that exposes truths about race and crime, that few White people in power wanted to confront. It’s an episode we first brought you earlier this year, one that contains descriptions of violence and suicide that may not be appropriate for all listeners. | |
| Adrian Walker, a columnist at The Boston Globe and host of the Murder in Boston Podcast takes it from here. | |
| Adrian Walker: | It was the ultimate urban nightmare, an innocent White couple, with a baby on the way, shot in the heart of the City. I was here when this happened. I saw it on the 11:00 news that night. People were talking about race wars, martial law, the death penalty, all kinds of crazy stuff. They called the shooter an animal. |
| As a transplant from Miami, I’d already been told that my experience in Boston would be different because I’m Black. Back then, colleagues warned me to be careful going into certain neighborhoods, like South Boston. I’d covered crime in the city already, but this was different. | |
| On the night of the shooting in late October 1989, Boston was seized by panic and rage. | |
| TV Reporter 1: | The police presence on the streets of Roxbury tonight was perhaps unprecedented. |
| TV Reporter 2: | From Boston tonight, we have a nightmare story of random crime and violent death. |
| TV Reporter 3: | The all-American couple, that’s how neighbors describe the Stuarts. They lived in a comfortable house with two dogs and a baby on the way. |
| TV Reporter 4: | Carol Stuart was a lawyer for a publishing company in Newton and was loved by everyone who knew her. |
| Adrian Walker: | The Boston Herald called them The Camelot Couple, a direct reference to Jackie O. and JFK, arguably Massachusetts’ most beloved duo. Next to many of those Camelot headlines was a picture from their wedding day. It’s a portrait of happiness. Carol, whose maiden name was DiMaiti, is all grin, blue eyeshadow, and pink lipstick. Her head crowned by a white veil. |
| Chuck, he’s prim and proper, black tux, white bow tie, and piercing blue eyes. The media ran with this image and the Camelot Couple title, too. | |
| The night of the shooting, doctors worked on Carol for hours, but they couldn’t save her. She died just hours after her baby, Christopher, was delivered by C-section. He was immediately put on life support. | |
| Carol’s friend, Barbara Williamson, had known her for years. | |
| Barbara William…: | I said, “What? Carol Stuart, she’s dead. She’s been shot.” |
| And just saying that I have goosebumps. I was stunned. | |
| Adrian Walker: | When she was murdered, Carol’s pregnancy became part of the headline. But while she was alive, it had been intimate and beautiful, and the fact that she was pregnant made her death that much harder to comprehend. |
| Barbara William…: | Having a child is a life-changing undertaking. And feeling something growing inside of you, something that’s part of you but isn’t you, there’s a sacredness about it, as well. |
| Adrian Walker: | Chuck, meanwhile, was lucky to be alive. He had a gaping wound in his lower back. The bullet had traveled upwards, and diagonally, and torn through his liver and intestines. It missed his aorta by a fraction of an inch. After six hours in surgery, he made it to the ICU. |
| In the morning, the full horror of the crime was on display on the front page of The Boston Herald. Chuck and Carol in the front car seats, covered in blood. Carol, in the process of dying. Even by tabloid standards, the picture is extraordinarily graphic. | |
| TV Reporter 5: | The emotional toll the rash of violence is taking on our residents, our communities, and on our City. |
| Speaker 14: | I got a lump in my throat and tears roll up in my eyes. |
| Speaker 15: | It just really hits home. It’s something that can happen to you anytime, and I think it causes terror. |
| Adrian Walker: | Soon, police will knock down doors and strip search young men. They’ll lead a massive manhunt. With Chuck’s description, virtually every Black male in Mission Hill is a suspect. |
| DonJuan Moses: | I was afraid in the night, that night, I heard a lot of sirens. Police going on early in the night. |
| Adrian Walker: | On the night Chuck and Carol Stuart were shot, DonJuan Moses was 11 years old, just a kid in Mission Hill. |
| DonJuan Moses: | And we was wondering why cops running in each building. |
| I’m observing, looking outside because I see all the lights and everything going crazy, and my Mom was like, “Mind your business. Get away from the window. Ain’t got nothing concerning you.” | |
| Adrian Walker: | DonJuan was at home with his Mom, Grandma, and older cousin. The grownups were playing spades. |
| DonJuan Moses: | I’m watching the game, learning the game. I’m just standing over his shoulder watching, trying to learn the game. I was like, “Oh, man, trying to count the books.” |
| Adrian Walker: | They had no idea about the shooting nearby. But then, there was this noise in the hallway. |
| His Mom said it was nothing. | |
| DonJuan Moses: | She didn’t pay no mind to it until it came to our door and “Boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom.” |
| Didn’t answer fast enough. | |
| “Boom, boom, boom.” | |
| She’s like, “What the hell is that?” | |
| And before she can even ask or look through the peek hole, I opened the door. | |
| Adrian Walker: | It’s the Boston Police. And they were looking for DonJuan’s cousin. |
| DonJuan Moses: | They came rushing in, like he was like a key witness, a key person to their case. Looking around the house, everybody’s freaking out and yelling like, “What’s going on?,” and they just grabbed my cousin. They grabbed him, threw his face to the table. He’s struggling like, “What are you doing? Da da, da, that you know?” |
| Boom, take him, slam him against the side of the wall, bust his face up on the wall, snatch him up. He’s telling my Mom to call his Mom. They throw the cuffs on him, basically drag him down three flights of stairs. | |
| Adrian Walker: | His cousin wasn’t some key witness. Quite simply, he fit the description of Chuck and Carol Stuart’s shooter, Black male. Those two simple words described tens of thousands of people in this City. And they launched a manhunt throughout Black Boston that ensnared hundreds, including DonJuan’s cousin. |
| The police didn’t charge DonJuan’s cousin with anything. And he was back home the next day. And sure, this exchange could seem small in the grand scheme of things, but not to DonJuan. It changed his understanding of the world and his place in it. He’s in his 40s now, and he still doesn’t trust the police. | |
| DonJuan Moses: | I got a camera in my car, on my windshield, because I’m feared of what can happen. If anything was ever happened to me, I’m good enough with technology where I have that sent to my hard drive, to send to people to be aware of what happened to me last. I can’t trust their word over mine, ever. |
| Adrian Walker: | The police response in late 1989, would shaped the way an entire generation of Black men would look at law enforcement. |
| DonJuan Moses: | I feel like when they first heard this case, one, two, three, they just knew that you was near the projects. You said a Black man did it. That’s all we need to know. Raid the project, flood the projects. That’s all they was in mindset for. Put somebody to the case. |
| Adrian Walker: | Chuck had described the shooter as a grown man, but it seemed like the police had a liberal view of that. |
| Tito Jackson: | I was a 13 to 14-year-old, skinny, tall, goofy kid. |
| Adrian Walker: | The first time Tito Jackson was stopped by the cops, he had just finished playing a game of basketball. |
| Tito Jackson: | It wasn’t a large group. It was like three or four of us. And we weren’t wild, whatever. |
| Adrian Walker: | Today, Tito is a successful entrepreneur and local politician. But in 1989, he was this gangly teenager with a crush on a girl he was desperate to impress. She was also out on the street that day. |
| Tito Jackson: | And we were approached by two officers who got out of a squad car and told us to face the fence, put our hands up against the fence. |
| Adrian Walker: | So there he is in front of this girl. He’s scared, but he doesn’t want to show it. |
| Tito Jackson: | “Get up against the fence.” |
| We were facing the fence. And they patted us down. And now, “Drop them.” | |
| And we knew what that meant. This was a situation where you know it’s life or death. It is very, very apparent that if you do the wrong thing, very real consequences. | |
| Adrian Walker: | So right there in the middle of the sidewalk on Tremont Street, Tito drops his sweatpants. He stood there with his hands on the fence in his underwear. |
| Tito Jackson: | And at the time, the thing I was most worried about was not being dehumanized. I was a kid. So I was worried that the girl who was there that I had a crush on, saw that I did not put lotion on my kneecaps. And they were making fun of me because I had to drop my pants and my knees had a lot of dry skin, they were ashy. The burn that I had was anger at the police officers, but it was mostly because they embarrassed me. |
| Adrian Walker: | He can’t say how long it lasted. |
| Tito Jackson: | Considering that the young lady was laughing at me, it felt like an eternity. And then they left. And we went on. |
| Adrian Walker: | Tito would be stopped four or five more times in the weeks that followed. |
| Tito Jackson: | And by the way, we weren’t special. They were doing this to everybody. |
| Adrian Walker: | We wanted to get a full picture of exactly what the police did in Mission Hill in the days and weeks following the Stuart shooting. We reached out to almost all of the cops involved in the investigation. Most of them declined to talk. So that leaves us with old police records, TV news footage, newspaper clips, and the memories of Mission Hill residents. When you compare those things with what the police say, they don’t match up. |
| Al Letson: | The mistreatment of the Black community by those in power in Boston started long before the investigation into Chuck and Carol’s shooting. Fifteen years earlier, race had ripped the city apart. |
| TV Reporter 6: | When the buses arrived, the Black students ran into the school under a hail of verbal abuse. And the violence, of course, came in the afternoon when the buses were stoned and Black children injured. |
| Al Letson: | A flashpoint in Boston’s racial tension, coming up next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| Years before the shooting of Chuck and Carol Stewart had exposed the simmering racial tensions in Boston, another incident made them boil over. Everybody’s heard of Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that deemed segregated schools unconstitutional. The concept of separate but equal was now illegal. But Boston just didn’t bother to desegregate. In 1974, when a federal judge ordered the city start busing black kids to white schools and white kids to black schools, white parents revolted. | |
| Crowd: | East Boston says no. East Boston says no. |
| Reporter 1: | This was a white protest, with white Americans clinging to their patriotism. The speakers said it was the judges that had sold America down the river. |
| Al Letson: | Today, we’re revisiting an episode we first brought you this spring, showing how this conflict over school busing in Boston laid the groundwork for the Chuck and Carol Stewart case. Here again is Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe. |
| Adrian Walker: | When I came to Boston in the 80s, there were two things I knew about the city, birthplace of the American Revolution and busing. |
| Reporter 2: | Why Boston of all places? Why did the greatest resistance to school busing happen in the city that is the epitome of liberty, justice, and the equality of man? |
| Adrian Walker: | In my Globe columns, I’ve called it Boston’s Civil War. Screaming crowds of white adults whipped rocks at school buses full of Black children. There were stabbings, and shootings, and marches on City Hall. A lot of parents, white and Black, stopped sending their kids to school altogether. The TV footage of the conflict changed how America thought about Boston. |
| Reporter 2: | Nowhere is busing fought harder than in the Catholic neighborhoods of Boston. |
| Reporter 1: | When the buses arrived, the Black students ran into the school under a hail of verbal abuse. And the violence, of course, came in the afternoon, when the buses were stoned and Black children injured. |
| Child: | They were throwing eggs at the window and try to hit people with them. And while we was in school, they was throwing glass at Black peoples and little kids. |
| Howard Bryant: | Busing was a slap in the face to every Black person. |
| Narrator: | Howard Bryant is a journalist and author, born and raised in Boston. |
| Howard Bryant: | The modern history of Boston really begins with busing. Those images of those white parents, that’s where it really starts. I mean, Boston was Boston before that in a lot of ways, but my uncles and my parents used to say all the time, “We never knew how much they hated us until then.” |
| Narrator: | The violence spread through the city, and this went on for years. The scars of busing were barely healing when Mayor Ray Flynn was elected in 1983. And he promised new days were ahead. Flynn had opposed busing just a few years earlier. He thought of himself as someone who could bridge the divide. Flynn’s top deputy, Neil Sullivan, remembers the pressure to heal the wounds created by busing. |
| Neil Sullivan: | I’d seen Mayor Flynn in his political brilliance move quickly to hold people across racial lines, to preempt what had begun to feel like the Boston virus of racial conflict. Every time there was a incident of racial violence, the mayor and I were both informed, and Ray Flynn went to the scene to denounce racial violence. He did it over, and over, and over again. And that was as much to tell everybody, “This is what we’re doing until this settles down.” |
| Narrator: | Neil says it was starting to work. That history was going to show Flynn and his team were making things better, until the night Carol Stewart was killed. |
| Neil Sullivan: | Oh my goodness, this is going to allow our political opposition to organize the good church-going people of Boston’s neighborhoods along racial lines. Here we go again. |
| Narrator: | Immediately, mayor Flynn is taking a different approach. He’s pressing the police to find the shooter fast. People call for blood. And inside an interrogation room, police are pressuring witnesses. |
| Peter O’Malley: | Today is November 3rd. It’s a Friday. You’re at the homicide unit, which is Old District 6 at South Boston. [inaudible 00:04:46] record your name? |
| Eric Whitney: | My name is Eric Whitney, W-H-I-T-N-E-Y. |
| Narrator: | Detective Peter O’Malley is known as a closer. He solves cases. He’s almost a cliche of an old school detective, white, Irish, thick-busted accent, a bit of a punch. He’s interviewing Eric Whitney about the day after the murder. Eric says a bunch of teenagers get together regularly at a house to get high, drink, and play Nintendo. |
| Eric Whitney: | We stood down. We were smoking bong, as we were- |
| Peter O’Malley: | You’re saying bong? |
| Eric Whitney: | Yeah, bong. |
| Peter O’Malley: | B-O-N-G, which is marijuana? |
| Eric Whitney: | Yeah. |
| Peter O’Malley: | Okay. |
| Narrator: | These recordings of O’Malley’s interviews haven’t been heard widely before. We helped locate them in the basement of a retired judge. Some of the tape is hard to hear. And the homicide unit was right next to the airport, so you can hear the planes flying overhead real low. |
| Peter O’Malley: | … said wait til the plane goes by. |
| Narrator: | But if you listen closely, you can hear the story detectives were after. Eric wasn’t even at the house that day, but he’s telling police what he says he heard from his pal Derek Jackson, who goes by D. And Derek had details about the shooter, a skinny Black man in a tracksuit. |
| Peter O’Malley: | What did he tell you? |
| Eric Whitney: | He told me that he knew who did it and he would tell me who did it. |
| Narrator: | Police have already arrested one guy, a homeless man with a drug problem, squatting in an apartment, who happened to have a tracksuit soaking in the sink. He spent 10 days in jail as the prime suspect, and then police quietly let him go. |
| Now, Eric is saying there’s a different skinny Black man in a tracksuit out there, and he’s bragging about what he did. | |
| Eric Whitney: | Derek say that he said, he was in the car, he got out the car and got into the Stewart family’s car. Told them, “Give me your money and your wallet.” So he [inaudible 00:06:39], went and took that. He got out, he saw the Stewart man reach for a whatever, he thought he was 5-0. |
| Narrator: | Eric says Derek told him the suspect got into the Stewart’s car, robbed them, and then ran when he thought Chuck was a police officer, 5-0. How does Eric know all this? Well… |
| Eric Whitney: | [inaudible 00:07:00] told Derek. And then D, in turn, told me. And in turn of D telling me, I told my mother. |
| Narrator: | It was a game of telephone. But what matters to the police is that these teenagers are pointing the finger at Willie Bennett, a well-known name to just about every cop in Boston. He had legendary status in the toughest corners of Mission Hill. |
| Around the time of the Stewart shooting, Willie had recently gotten out of prison for a shootout with the cops. In fact, Willie’s name shows up, along with dozens of others, on police tip sheets collected from hotline calls from the public in the days after the killing. We found those tip sheets. One red, “Word on the street is Bennett did it.” But it’s not going to be that clean. | |
| Even though a lot of people are talking about Willie, the best evidence the cops have comes from Eric Whitney and his friend Derek, who gave his own statement to police that night. But a day later, Eric comes back and says the story he told about Willie, it wasn’t true. Here’s Eric. | |
| Peter O’Malley: | Can you tell the machine why you committed a lie to me last night? |
| Eric Whitney: | Well, my girl said you was going to put my booties, he give me 20 years in [inaudible 00:08:15]. I flipped out. I was scared. I came, not say anything. You know? |
| Peter O’Malley: | So what you telling me now, that was never said to you? |
| Eric Whitney: | That was never said to me. |
| Peter O’Malley: | But where did you get that story? |
| Eric Whitney: | I made that story up. |
| Peter O’Malley: | Why were you lying to me in a murder investigation? Tell the machine that. |
| Eric Whitney: | I told you that. I was trying to get my booty off. |
| Peter O’Malley: | No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You tell the machine very slowly why you lied to me. And you know this is a murder investigation of the woman that got shot. It was made very, very clear to you, that you tell that machine why you lied to me in this homicide case. |
| Eric Whitney: | The reason why I lied to you, because I knew I had them two warrants out. |
| Narrator: | Eric knew he had unrelated warrants out for his arrest, and he wanted to seem cooperative. |
| Eric Whitney: | So I tried to play by it. But when he was asking me questions, I was adding on and on to try and make it look good for me. You know? |
| Narrator: | So when they asked him questions, he said what he thought they wanted to hear. |
| Eric Whitney: | And I could get out this building the same day I came in. |
| Narrator: | The longer the interrogation goes, the more O’Malley presses. |
| Peter O’Malley: | Does that mean you’re nervous, that you hands are sweating? |
| Eric Whitney: | Means I’m scared. |
| Peter O’Malley: | You’re scared? Do I look like I’m going to beat you up? |
| Eric Whitney: | No. |
| Peter O’Malley: | Huh? |
| Eric Whitney: | No. |
| Peter O’Malley: | What are you scared of? |
| Eric Whitney: | Going to jail. |
| Narrator: | Derek tried to recant the same night as Eric. But the cops didn’t believe their second version. |
| Mark Weill: | Good evening, I’m Mark Weill, and welcome to this News 7 Late Update. |
| Reporter 3: | Topping News 7 tonight, Boston Police remain tight-lipped about what could be a major break in the investigation into the shootings of Chuck and Carol Stewart. |
| Narrator: | Police make their move on Willie, search warrant in hand. They raid three different homes where he’s laid his head. |
| Officer: | What happened here last night, Ms. Bennett? |
| Ms. Bennett: | What happened? They tore my house all apart. |
| Officer: | How do you feel when you see that newspaper story this morning saying your son is the number one suspect in the Stewart case? |
| Ms. Bennett: | How do I feel? Like I said, I know he didn’t do it. |
| Narrator: | Prosecutors kept Willie jailed on other unrelated charges while they continued to build their murder case. But the police are confident, they’ve got those statements from Derek and Eric. They’ve got Willie, a skinny Black man with a hell of a record in jail. All they need is a positive ID. That happens about seven weeks later on December 28th. By now, the Stewart’s infant son Christopher has died, and Chuck Stewart is recovering after a six-week hospital stay. Chuck walks into a little room in police headquarters with a big one-way mirror. |
| Chuck Stewart: | My legs were shaking, my heart was pounding. I had called all this, my attorney, Jack Darlin, to tell him that the individual that I had identified, I was 99% sure, and over [inaudible 00:11:20], that that was the man. |
| Narrator: | The tape’s a little tough on the ears, but in it, Chuck says he’s 99% sure that person number three in the lineup is the skinny Black man who was in his car that night, the man who murdered his wife and child. Chuck points to Willie Bennett. |
| The case appears solved. Willie Bennett is in jail, and the Boston police are working toward a murder charge. But Chuck Stewart’s next move is about to upend the case, and everything the people of Boston had been willing to believe. | |
| It’s January 4th, 1990. Chuck Stewart stops his car on the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge. He leaves a handwritten note on the front passenger seat and steps out. The engine is still running. TV reporter, Jack Harper was sent to the scene that day. | |
| Jack Harper: | I remember it was cold. And I was sent down to the dock because there was a report of a man that jumped in the water. And I’ll never forget it, it was the First Assistant District Attorney Leary was there. And I remember standing there with him, and I said, “Oh my God, this poor guy, how much worse going to get?” What a terrible ending. He just couldn’t take it anymore. And I understand. |
| And he said, “You have no idea. You don’t know what happened. That’s not what you think. He killed her. He set this up. He just committed suicide.” Everything stopped. | |
| Narrator: | The police theories, the media narratives, the citizen outrage, it’s all wrong. |
| Al Letson: | When Chuck Stewart killed himself, the truth came out. It was the husband all along. |
| Speaker 18: | I was just kicking myself. We all were kicking ourselves. How could we not have figured this out? How could we not have known? |
| Al Letson: | But there were people who did know. That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| In the fall of 1989, the Boston Police Department put every available detective on the hunt for the person who shot Chuck Stuart and killed his pregnant wife, Carol. When Chuck picks a black man with a long rap sheet out of a lineup, police think they’ve got their shooter. Days later, Chuck Stuart dies by suicide and the truth comes out. He was behind Carol’s murder. It seems like he duped everyone. But the Boston Globe found out there were clues all along if anyone had been looking for them. | |
| Here’s Adrian Walker. | |
| Adrian Walker: | It only took two words from Chuck as he laid bleeding on a stretcher, “black man”. And all this machinery, the police, the press, the politicians kicked into gear. These institutions did what they always did, what they always had done. Find the black man. Carol’s friend, Barbara Williamson, remembers riding waves of disbelief and guilt. |
| Barbara William…: | I had to rewrite the story in my head. I had to recapitulate the whole experience through a completely different lens. And I was just so full of shame for what happened to the African-American people in Boston. Feeling like I was a part of it. I was complicit. No, I didn’t pull the trigger. No, I didn’t point the finger at the wrong guy. But I’m white, and I’m enmeshed in this mess. |
| Adrian Walker: | Black men in Boston had spent the last two and a half months walking around with this constant helpless fear of being targeted as suspects. And now, all that pent-up anger just poured out. |
| Reverend Grayla…: | The black and Hispanic community has once again been the victim of the Ku Klux Klan type of night riding and a sensational rape of this community by public officials and by the media in particular. |
| Adrian Walker: | Reverend Graylan Ellis-Hagler was one of the most prominent voices in Boston back then. He ran a church in Mission Hill and had witnessed firsthand police violating the civil rights of young males in the neighborhood. |
| Reverend Grayla…: | This time, however, the night riding was not the action of white-robed bigots, but instead, the actions of a mayor, Mayor Raymond Flynn, who so quickly jumped to conclusions. |
| Adrian Walker: | Boston’s black community felt betrayed. |
| Audio: | I have had enough. This community has had enough. |
| Whenever a wife is killed, the first automatic suspect is the husband. Except when it happens in the black community. When it happens in the black community- | |
| Adrian Walker: | But the biggest impact was on the prime suspect, Willie Bennett and his family. The Bennett’s had spent weeks telling anybody who would listen that Willie was innocent, but nobody believed them. |
| Audio: | All the time that my son didn’t have nothing to do with it, and he was innocent all the time. |
| But I know one thing. I’m just glad (censored) over. My brother wasn’t the one that did it, and I’m glad they found out that he was the one that killed his own wife. | |
| Howard Bryant: | I remember feeling a certain sense of immediate relief that it wasn’t the black guy after all. And then I remember feeling an immediate sense of anger that it was never the black guy. |
| Adrian Walker: | Journalist Howard Bryant. |
| Howard Bryant: | I don’t think Charles Stuart had to consume a whole lot of media to believe it. It’s ingrained. Blame the black guy. It’s really easy, because it works. This was, once again, the fear of black people, the lack of regard for black people, and the lack of regard for Carol Stuart. Because getting the black guy was more important than getting her killer. |
| Adrian Walker: | Carol was a victim of domestic violence. She was murdered by her husband. And that fact is sometimes obscured or lost in the insanity of the story. The leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is homicide. That’s according to a 2022 study by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Yeah, you heard that right. A pregnant woman in this country is more likely to be killed by the father of her child than she is to die from anything related to her pregnancy. |
| We asked Carol’s family if they wanted to speak for this project. They said no. They have spent years talking about Carol, participating in documentaries and TV specials, and they told us they had nothing more to say. But before we go any further, I want to play you this tape of Carol’s dad speaking in 1990 about losing his daughter. Of all the many hours of interviews we’ve listened to, this one stands out. Because in Giusto DiMaiti’s voice, all you hear is his love for his daughter. | |
| Giusto DiMaiti: | Mere words cannot express the terrible emptiness we feel or how much we miss her now, and we’ll miss her for the rest of our lives. All she ever wanted was to be a good daughter, wife, mother, and be happy, be happy in her life. She was not given this opportunity to fulfill all those wishes, but as far as we are concerned, she exceeded in every way possible as a pure and loving human being. We pray that God has taken her and our beloved grandson Christopher into his embrace in heaven where they will be safe and happy with him until the time we will join you. Thank you. |
| Adrian Walker: | It’s been more than 30 years since the Stuart shooting in Mission Hill. The gist is always this: Chuck was a psychopathic manipulator. He planned the near perfect crime. He fooled everyone, including the police. This mythology that everyone was duped has been seemingly set in stone. But our team of investigative reporters at the Globe, we had this sense that there was more to this story, so we spent two years digging. We learned that plenty of people knew about Chuck’s involvement, and there were even Boston police detectives who had suspicions from the very beginning. |
| Robert Ahearn: | My name is Robert F. Ahearn, A-H-E-A-R-N. I’m a Boston Police detective assigned to the Homicide Unit. Present is Robert T. Tinlin, T-I-N-L-I-N. He’s also a Boston police detective assigned to the Homicide Unit. |
| Adrian Walker: | Robert Ahearn and Robert Tinlin worked hundreds of murder cases together. They were detectives to the core. They even had an autographed picture of Columbo, the famous TV gumshoe, hanging in their office. Ahearn and Tinlin were inseparable. Bob and Bob. Colleagues called them the Two Bobbies. |
| Matt Tinlin: | My father was… He was considered by people to be more on the quiet side. And Barbara Ahearn was definitely more the outgoing type and kind of a hard ticket. |
| Adrian Walker: | That’s Matt Tinlin, Bob Tinlin’s son. The Two Bobbies died years ago. Ahearn and Tinlin were working together on the night of the shooting. They were next on the homicide rotation, meaning that this was their call, their case. Almost immediately, the Two Bobbies had questions for Chuck, and when they talked to him, they found him too calm. We know what the pair were thinking because we got our hands on Ahearn’s Grand Jury testimony. |
| Audio: | He wasn’t acting as a person that just got shot and saw his wife get shot. |
| Adrian Walker: | The U.S. Attorney’s Office convened a grand jury to investigate Boston Police’s handling of the case a couple of years later. You’re hearing my colleague reading the statements Ahearn made under oath. Ahearn described a Columbo moment they had when they left Chuck’s room. |
| Audio: | I asked Bob, I said, “Does he remind you of anybody?” And Bob says, “Yeah,” and we both said at the same time, “John Jenks.” |
| Adrian Walker: | John Jenks was a cop who had staged his own shooting in 1983 after he robbed and killed a man in Boston’s Red Light District. Jenks shot himself to cover up the crime, but he was caught anyway. Tinlin talked about it with his son. |
| Matt Tinlin: | I do remember him saying something to the effect like, “He was full of (censored),” talking about Stuart. The story did not jive with him from the beginning. |
| Adrian Walker: | There were other parts of Chuck’s story that didn’t line up. Just as a reminder, Chuck called 911 at 8:43 PM on a Monday night in late October. He said that he was lost in Mission Hill, that it was pitch dark, and that there was no one around. But Bob and Bob wondered, how is Chuck so lost? He had just left the hospital and was only a couple blocks away. Why didn’t he just drive back in that direction? And how was there no one around to ask for help? |
| On three different nights, Ahearn took his own car out to Mission Hill, drove the same route and played the 911 recording on his tape deck. He found that Chuck’s details were off. There were people regularly out on the streets of that hour, and it wasn’t as dark outside as Chuck had described. The story didn’t add up, but police brass had already written off Chuck as a suspect. They had settled on the black man in a tracksuit. And that’s when the Two Bobbies got big-footed and police officials put another detective on the case. | |
| Peter O’Malley: | [inaudible 00:10:00] Peter O’Malley. I’m a detective in the Homicide Unit. |
| Adrian Walker: | Remember Detective Peter O’Malley interrogating teenagers Eric and Derek? O’Malley took over the case from the Two Bobbies. He became the lead detective, and that’s when the investigation went in a different direction. And Bobby Tinlin’s son says the outcome haunted his father for the rest of his life. |
| Matt Tinlin: | They would’ve had him. And imagine that if they allowed them to do it, none of this would’ve happened. |
| Adrian Walker: | So this all begs the question, what would’ve happened if Tinlin and Ahearn kept pursuing Chuck as a suspect? If their skepticism drove the investigation, what would they have found? Well, plenty. |
| First off, they would’ve found that much of Chuck’s life was a facade. The biggest fiction? Chuck pretending to be an excited dad-to-be. Turns out he didn’t want to be a father and didn’t want Carol to stay home with the baby. Even before their first birthing class, he was plotting to have her killed. | |
| David McLean was one of Chuck’s oldest friends. About a month and a half before Carol’s murder, the two pals had a conversation in a restaurant parking lot. Here’s David recounting it to police after Chuck’s suicide. | |
| David McLean: | He said that he had argued with his wife when she first became pregnant for a few weeks, and that he saw something in her that he never saw before, was an attitude where she had the upper hand in the relationship. And that’s when he told me that he wanted to kill his wife. He was hoping that I knew somebody or that I could help have it arranged. |
| Adrian Walker: | David told Chuck he couldn’t help him. But after Carol’s death and long before Chuck’s suicide, David told his brother, who told a friend, who called State Trooper Dan Grabowski to pass on the tip. Grabowski was one of the emergency dispatchers who took Chuck’s 911 call on the night of the shooting. He got this tip that Chuck was behind it all, and Grabowski appears to have done little to nothing with that tip. We wanted to ask Grabowski about it, but it became pretty clear that he wasn’t taking questions. |
| Dan Grabowski: | You’re a disgrace. I’m sorry that I had to relay this like that. But it just infuriates me ’cause I know who you’re after. I know what’s going to happen. You’re going to make Willie Bennett a hero just like they made George Floyd a hero. |
| Adrian Walker: | Grabowski wasn’t the only one who got this tip. Ahearn got it too, after he’d already been taken off the case. If the police department acted on it, this could have changed the whole case, could have changed history. That tip came in while officers were ripping through Mission Hill, frisking scores of black and some Latino men, and before police zeroed in on Willie Bennett as the prime suspect. |
| After Chuck struck out with his best friend, he turned to his little brother, Matthew Stuart. At the time of the shooting, Chuck’s youngest brother was 23, living with his parents, juggling small jobs. This is the tape of Matthew’s actual police interrogation, a tape that’s never been released publicly. | |
| Robert Ahearn: | Do you have a story you’d like to tell us, Matt? |
| Adrian Walker: | On the night before Chuck’s suicide, Matthew told the cops Chuck was planning an insurance scam. The brothers were going to fake a robbery. |
| Matthew Stuart: | He wanted to do this thing in town where all he had to do was drive up to him and he’d throw me a bag and I’d just drive off. |
| Adrian Walker: | This is how Matthew described it. He’d get rid of Carol’s jewelry, Chuck would file a claim, and Matthew could make up to $10,000 from the payout. He says Chuck told him exactly where to be. He borrowed a friend’s car and waited until he saw the blue Cressida, Chuck and Carol’s car. As it came around the corner toward him, Matthew said he saw something in the car, a pile of something on the seat next to Chuck. That’s how Matthew described his dying sister-in-law. |
| Matthew Stuart: | When I pulled up to the car, he said, “Matt, wait a second.” And I’m in my driver’s seat, he’s in his driver’s seat. He said, “Wait a second,” and he pulled up. He goes, “All right, get the (censored) out of here and drive slow.” And he gave it a toss with his left hand like that. |
| Robert Ahearn: | Through the open window? |
| Matthew Stuart: | Through the open window. |
| Adrian Walker: | When he got home, Matthew told police he found Carol’s wallet and ID, her engagement ring, a Gucci purse, Chuck’s watch, and a gun. He says he and his childhood friend went down to the river and tossed it, and they kept this secret from police for two and a half months. But it was hardly a secret. Matthew started telling people the day after the shooting, and they told other people. By New Year’s Day, 1990, word had spread from Matthew to some of his siblings about Chuck’s role in the murder. This extraordinary moment is captured on tape because Chuck’s brother Michael, a firefighter, talked to their sister Shelley from the firehouse on a recorded line. |
| Audio: | Hello. |
| Is Shelley there? | |
| Yeah. Hold on. | |
| Michael. | |
| Hi. What’s going to happen? | |
| We’re going to tell Mom and Dad. | |
| What are you going to tell them? | |
| We’re going to tell them we know that Chuck was involved. We’re not going to say that he killed her. | |
| Carol? | |
| Adrian Walker: | They want to tell their parents that they know Chuck was involved. They just don’t want to say that he killed Carol. |
| Audio: | Oh, Christ. |
| You okay? | |
| I’m all right. I’ll get out, I guess. | |
| All right. | |
| Maria wants to go too. | |
| You can tell her to come. You guys got to be here, I don’t know- | |
| All right. | |
| … like within 10 minutes. | |
| All right. | |
| All right. Bye. | |
| Bye. | |
| Adrian Walker: | Michael heard everything about the shooting from Matthew, but it wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Because get this, Chuck had asked Michael to help him kill Carol too, just a few weeks before she turned up dead. And yet, Michael said nothing to detectives. Michael would later claim that he didn’t fully understand what Chuck was proposing. |
| By this point, our reporting shows that at least 33 people, 33 knew in some way or another that there was no black man and that Chuck was responsible for Carol’s death. But it took Matthew’s confession to staging a robbery and disposing of what might’ve been the murder weapon for the police to focus on Chuck. | |
| About a week after Chuck’s death, the Stuart siblings, save for Matthew, held a press conference. They sat in chairs in a stuffy-looking law office lined with books. Their lawyer said most of the siblings had no clue about Chuck’s deceit. | |
| Speaker 16: | And this family, through me, want it be known that they had no information as to anything that their deceased brother Charles may have done in any way whatsoever. The appearance that has evolved in my judgment is that some type of conspiratorial scenario existed by and between all these family members sitting around talking about keeping something hidden. That is not true. They want you and the world to know they loved Carol DiMaiti. They, to use their words, are on Carol’s side. |
| Adrian Walker: | In 1992, Matthew Stuart pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and weapons charges, and served two and a half years in prison. But was that the whole story? |
| A grand jury spent more than a year considering charges against Matthew. He was never charged with firing a shot. But our team pulled medical records, police forensic reports, FBI lab notes, and a whole lot more. Eventually, we determined there’s strong evidence that someone else was there that night helping Chuck, and that person may have even pulled the trigger. Three separate witnesses told police they saw a third person in or next to Chuck’s car. Though it’s inconclusive, some medical experts don’t think Chuck’s gunshot wounds could have been self-inflicted. | |
| To this day, Matthew’s former attorney steadfastly denies he played any significant role in the shooting and says he was duped by his older brother. We can’t talk to Matthew. He struggled with drugs following his prison stint, and he died in a homeless shelter in 2011. But we talked to a lot of people who grew up in Mission Hill. There is a whole generation of black men who were shaped by these few weeks in late 1989. Listen to their voices. | |
| Audio: | Well, after October 23rd, me and a couple of friends was walking down Parker Street. A couple of unmarked police cars pulled up on us, searched us, then pulled me to the side, and asked me to take down my pants. |
| I felt like my heart dropped out of my chest. I’m like, “What the (censored) did I do?” I wasn’t doing anything but going to work. | |
| I live in Roxbury and I was walking home and they just rolled up on me and threw me against the wall and started searching me. | |
| I refused to take down my pants. They was like, “Well, then if you don’t want to take down your pants here, we’ll arrest you.” I was like, “Well, put the handcuffs on me. But before you put them on, it’s going to be a fight.” | |
| Driving home one day, I saw a whole bunch of young men with their pants and underwear down around their ankles on Dudley Street, hands against the wall, cop got his gun out. And they’re searching the kids and they’re laughing. The cops are laughing. Everyone walked around in fear. | |
| Now, how does all of this make you feel? | |
| Well, it makes me feel uncomfortable. | |
| What do you mean by uncomfortable? | |
| Uncomfortable that my rights has been violated, that this is a free land to walk on. To me, it doesn’t seem like a free land. | |
| Al Letson: | Last year, after the Globe’s investigation came out, Boston’s mayor and police chief issued a formal apology to the families of the black men who were wrongly accused. They also acknowledged the “tremendous pain that the City of Boston inflicted on black residents.” Thanks to Adrian Walker for bringing us this story. |
| To hear more of the Boston Globe’s investigation, listen to the ten-part podcast, “Murder in Boston”. The HBO documentary series, “Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning”, is also available to stream on Max. | |
| This story was reported by Evan Allen, Elizabeth Koh, Andrew Ryan, and Adrian Walker. The project was led by Brendan McCarthy. Kate Howard and Kristen Nelson edited the show. Matt Mahoney and Nikki Frick were our fact-checkers. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production managers are the Wonder Twins, Steven Rascone and Zulema Cobb. Our show was mixed by Reza Dahya. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Taki Telenidis and Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comorado, Lightning. | |
| Support for Reveal is provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |