Murder of Carol Stuart
Carol Ann Stuart was murdered by her husband, Charles Michael "Chuck" Stuart Jr.. Charles Stuart claimed that a Black man had carjacked their car in Boston after Stuart shot both his pregnant wife and himself.
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 Carol was killed by Charles to collect her life insurance payout. Soon afterward, Charles committed suicide.
The shooting occurred in Boston's predominantly Black Mission Hill neighborhood. It generated intense and sustained media attention both nationally and in Boston as an alleged example of black on white crime. During this period, 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, but 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. On October 23, the couple attended childbirth classes at Brigham and Women's Hospital and drove through Roxbury on their way home.Stuart later told police that a young adult African-American gunman with a raspy voice and wearing a striped tracksuit forced his way into their Toyota Cressida at a stoplight, ordered them to drive to nearby Mission Hill. There he robbed them, and shot Charles in the stomach and Carol in the head. Stuart said he managed to drive away and call the emergency number 9-1-1 on his car phone.
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:
Investigation
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.During the manhunt, the city's police indiscriminately used controversial 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.
In late October, the Boston Police arrested Alan "Albie" Swanson and his girlfriend 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.
In mid-November, the police arrested William "Willie" Bennett in Burlington on a motor vehicle violation. Their suspicions of Bennett's involvement in the murders increased after finding a bullet in his mother's home that matched the caliber of the gun used in the murders. Two days later, on November 13, Bennett was charged with the robbery of a video store several weeks earlier.
Stuart, who was released from the hospital on December 5, identified Bennett as his attacker in a police lineup on December 28, 1989.
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 knew or suspected the truth by the end of 1989.Shortly after the new year, a group of Stuart siblings decided to meet with Charles's lawyer, Jack Dawley, so that Matthew Stuart, the youngest brother, could tell him what he was about to tell the police: the carjacking story was a hoax. On the evening of January 3, 1990, Matthew told the Boston police's homicide unit what he knew.
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 file an insurance claim. When that plan went awry, Matthew said Charles asked him to help with a new plan: They would 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. 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. He asked his best friend, John "Jack" McMahon, to help him throw Carol's purse, a.38 revolver, her engagement ring and wallet off the Dizzy Bridge in their hometown of Revere, Massachusetts. Most of the items were later recovered by police.
Matthew claimed, and would continue to insist, that he did not know Charles intended to kill his pregnant wife. He also said that he did not know Carol had been murdered until he saw it reported on television the following day.
Suicide
The same evening that Matthew Stuart met with police, Charles met with his lawyer, Dawley, who dropped him as a client and reportedly told him he needed a criminal lawyer. After spending the night in a Braintree motel, Charles abandoned his car on the Tobin Bridge in Chelsea around 7 a.m. on January 4, 1990, and jumped 135 feet to his death in the Mystic River. He left a suicide note in the car that read in part, "Whatever this new accusation is, it has beaten me." His body was recovered from the river later that day.Missed leads
Matthew was not the only Stuart brother whom Charles tried to recruit in the fall of 1989. Two months before the murder, Charles approached his brother, Michael Stuart, and a high school friend, David MacLean, and implied that he wanted them to help him kill his wife. Both claimed that they did not fully understand what Charles was proposing until after the murder took place. David MacLean's brother, Michael "Dennis" MacLean, and his friend, John Carlson, approached Sergeant Dan Grabowski on October 28, 1989, with information about Charles's possible role in Carol's murder. Grabowski did not pursue the lead.They also shared their suspicions with one of Carlson's relatives, who was a police officer. 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.
Prosecution of accomplices
Shortly after the suicide, a grand jury investigating the murder of Carol Stuart was reconvened. 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 in the back seat of Charles's car on the night of the murders. 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, asked an independent forensic consultant, Lewis Gordon, whether Charles could have shot himself. “We just don’t have enough information to reach a conclusion one way or the other,” Gordon said.
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. He was not charged with participating in the murder itself due to insufficient evidence. In November 1992, Matthew pleaded guilty to obstruction and fraud charges. He was sentenced to three to five years in prison.
In a separate case, his friend Jack McMahon was 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 1997, Matthew was arrested soon afterwards for cocaine trafficking in Revere. 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.