Charles Stuart

On the night of October 23, 1989, 30-year-old Carol Ann Stuart (née DiMaiti; born March 26, 1959) was shot by her husband, Charles Michael "Chuck" Stuart Jr. (December 18, 1959 – January 4, 1990) in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.; she died in the early hours of October 24. Charles Stuart falsely claimed that a black man had shot both him and Carol after a carjacking.

His statement to police set off a months-long manhunt by the Boston Police Department for a purported black assailant. Police actions, with widespread stop and frisk of African-American residents in Mission Hill, was supported by the Suffolk County District Attorney. The hunt lasted until Charles' younger brother, Matthew, confessed that Charles killed Carol to collect her life insurance payout. Soon afterward, Charles committed suicide. Suffolk County District Attorney Newman A. Flanagan, who had supported the hoax of the killer being a black man and the actions of the police, later resigned.

Before the revelation of Charles as the killer, police arrested William "Willie" Bennett, a 39-year-old black man from Roxbury, on unrelated charges, and soon the investigation centered on Bennett. The media reported as though his guilt were certain.

Murders

In 1989, Charles Stuart was the general manager at Edward F. Kakas & Sons, an upscale fur clothing shop on fashionable Newbury Street in Boston, Massachusetts. His wife, Carol, a tax attorney, was pregnant with their first child. They lived in a comfortable two-story house in suburban Reading. On October 23, the couple attended childbirth classes at Brigham and Women's Hospital and drove through Roxbury on their way home.

While on the phone with 9-1-1, Charles never mentioned that his wife was pregnant and never spoke to her directly during the call. Although he left the crime scene, he claimed he could not see street signs and did not know where he was. Gary McLaughlin, a state police dispatcher, found their car by telling responding police cars to shut off their sirens and then having them turn them back on, one by one, until dispatchers could hear the closest siren through Charles's phone.

On the night of the murder, the CBS reality television series Rescue 911 was riding with Boston Emergency Medical Services personnel. The crew took dramatic footage of the couple being extricated from the car and wheeled to the ambulance. Other footage included Stuart straining to speak with ambulance workers, and graphic scenes of his rushed entry to the hospital's emergency room.

Carol died at 2:50 a.m. on October 24 at Brigham & Women's Hospital. Before she died, doctors delivered her baby by caesarean section. Baptized in the intensive care unit, the baby was named Christopher William. Carol's funeral took place on October 28 at St. James Church in her hometown of Medford, Massachusetts. During the funeral, Brian Parsons, a friend of Charles, read a note that Charles had written in the hospital to his wife: Good night sweet wife, my love. God has called you to his side, it began. The note asked the public to forgive the murderer. The baby Christopher was nine weeks premature and had suffered trauma and oxygen deprivation due to the shooting; he died 17 days later. Both deaths were ruled homicides. A private funeral service was held for Christopher on November 20, 1989. Both Carol and Christopher were buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden, Massachusetts, under Carol's maiden name, DiMaiti.

Investigation Boston Police detectives Robert Ahearn and Robert Tinlin immediately suspected Stuart because he seemed too calm when recounting the shootings. They were overruled by their superiors, who pursued Stuart's description of the assailant. The case was assigned to lead detective Peter O’Malley. stop and frisk tactics on young black men, which heightened racial tensions. Suffolk County District Attorney Newman Flanagan called for reinstating the death penalty, which had been abolished in Massachusetts in 1984, a proposal that received some support in the state legislature. on a breaking and entering charge unrelated to the murders. Swanson became a suspect in the Stuart case after officers found newspaper clippings about the murder in his home and a black running suit soaking in his bathroom. Ultimately, the police concluded he had been too intoxicated to have committed the crime.

Confession By early winter, the identity of the person who had murdered Carol Stuart and her unborn child had become an open secret. An analysis by the Boston Globe found that at least 33 people figured out or suspected the truth by the end of 1989.

Matthew said that in mid-October, Charles had asked for his help with an insurance fraud scam where Matthew would "steal" Carol's jewelry from the Stuarts' house, and Charles would disguise the theft as a burglary and file a false insurance claim. When that plan went awry, Matthew said Charles asked him to help with a new plan: Charles told Matthew that he would stage a false holdup. They would afterwards rendezvous in Mission Hill on October 23 late at night, and Charles would throw a bag through the window of Matthew's car. Charles promised to pay Matthew $10,000 to get rid of the bag, which he would claim to the insurance company had been stolen. Matthew said he saw something slumped next to Charles in the passenger seat of Charles's car but could not make out what it was because the street was poorly lit.

After Charles threw Matthew the bag, which turned out to be Carol's Gucci purse, Matthew said he hid the purse temporarily in the Stuart family home. After discovering a .38 revolver, her engagement ring, and wallet, he asked his best friend, John "Jack" McMahon, to check the gun to see if it had been fired. When McMahon revealed that the gun had been fired three times, they panicked and threw Carol's purse off the Dizzy Bridge into the Pine River in their hometown of Revere, Massachusetts. Most of the items were later recovered by police. His body was recovered from the river later that day. That officer passed the tip along to Boston Police detective Robert Ahearn, who earlier had doubted Charles Stuart's story. Ahearn made only a desultory effort to follow up. The purpose was to learn whether or not other people participated in Carol Stuart's murder. Three witnesses testified that they saw someone resembling Matthew Stuart in the back seat of Charles's car on the night of the murders. However, they could not say for certain it was Matthew Stuart. Some doctors involved in Charles's care after the shooting said it was unlikely that his gunshot wound was self-inflicted; ballistic evidence suggested the same.

The Boston Globe, in its 2023 series and documentary on the murders,

In September 1991, Matthew Stuart was indicted on six charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, unlawful possession of a firearm, compounding a felony, and insurance fraud. In November 1992, Matthew and the prosecution agreed to a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and insurance fraud and the prosecution withdrew the remaining charges. He was sentenced to three to five years in prison.

In a separate case, his friend Jack McMahon was also indicted on multiple charges. In November 1992, he pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact of murder, unlawful possession of a firearm, conspiracy to impede and obstruct justice, and concealing stolen property. McMahon was sentenced to one to three years for assisting Matthew Stuart in disposing of the handgun that Charles Stuart used to kill his wife.

Released on parole in 1995 , but his attorney appealed the charges. Those charges were later dropped for lack of evidence. On September 3, 2011, Matthew was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in Heading Home, a homeless shelter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Possible motives Over the course of a decade, Charles Stuart had risen from a short-order cook to a fur salon manager who made more than $100,000 a year. After his death, police and the media speculated that he may have been consumed by ambition and greed. He had spoken to several friends about needing money to open his own restaurant and he took a course on "Buying and Operating a Restaurant Successfully." He complained to his friend David MacLean that his wife refused to get an abortion and that he was worried she would not resume her career after the baby was born.

In a New York Times article, Harvard psychologist Robert Coles described Stuart as "an extreme example of a psychopath, an antisocial personality with little sense of remorse, a propensity to lie and often an ability to deceive others into believing his fantasies." In most psychopaths, said Coles, "there is cruelty and callousness, but Stuart [outdid] that." In October 1990, a jury found Bennett guilty of an armed robbery of a Brookline video store and three counts of assault with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 12 to 25 years in prison and was released in 2002.

After a lengthy lawsuit against the city and its police department for treatment of Bennett during the Stuart affair, Bennett's family was awarded $12,500 in damages, according to the Boston Globe.

City apologies On January 5, 1990, the day after Charles Stuart committed suicide, District Attorney Newman Flanagan said Willie Bennett was no longer a suspect in the murder investigation. That night, Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn stopped by the Bennetts’ home in Mission Hill to privately apologize on behalf of the city.

Memorial fund In Carol DiMaiti's memory, her family established the Carol DiMaiti Stuart Foundation to provide scholarships to Mission Hill residents and Malden High School graduates. The foundation helped students who showed leadership ability and had significant financial need, and provided recipients with mentors and summer internships. One of the beneficiaries was the daughter of William Bennett, the man falsely accused of Carol's murder. By early 2006, the foundation had awarded $1.2 million to 220 students. The DiMaitis' attorney and family spokesman, Marvin Geller, told the press: "Carol would not want to be remembered as the victim of a sensational murder, but rather as a woman who left behind a legacy of healing and compassion."

The Stuart case is mentioned in Gone Baby Gone (1998), the fourth novel of Dennis Lehane's Kenzie and Gennaro series. It is also referred to in Robert B. Parker's novel Small Vices (1997); at one point, protagonist Spenser, a private investigator, muses that he would have suspected at once that Stuart had "murdered his wife and wounded himself badly to cover it up."

The documentary TV series City Confidential covers the Stuart murder in its December 2000 episode titled "Boston: Betrayal in Beantown".

American poet Cornelius Eady ends his 2001 poem with a summary of this case.

The 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine refers to the case as contributing to false racial fears that drive gun ownership in the United States.

Puerto Rican poet Martín Espada alludes to the case in his 2018 poem "Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge."

The HBO documentary series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning (2023), directed by Jason Hehir and co-produced by The Boston Globe, presents the results of a two-year re-investigation and retrospective of the case.