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- <text id=90TT0123>
- <link 90TT0179>
- <link 90TT0178>
- <title>
- Jan. 15, 1990: Hero, Suspect, Suicide
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Jan. 15, 1990 Antarctica
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 30
- Hero, Suspect, Suicide
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>A bizarre murder inflames racial tension in Boston
- </p>
- <p> Only three months ago, Boston businessman Charles Stuart was
- pitied as the victim of a brutal, senseless crime. On the way
- home from a childbirth class at Brigham and Women's Hospital,
- Stuart was shot in the abdomen by a robber, but managed to use
- his car phone to summon aid for his mortally wounded,
- seven-months-pregnant wife. Last week Stuart, 29, jumped to his
- death from a bridge over Boston's Mystic River as police were
- moving in to arrest him for committing her murder. His legacy:
- a rebirth of racial tensions in a city that had seemed on the
- way to solving them.
- </p>
- <p> From the beginning there were questions about his story, but
- few would have believed that Stuart would shoot his wife in the
- head at point-blank range, then turn the gun on himself. The
- tape recording of his anguished ten-minute call to 911 from his
- Toyota Cressida, as his wife lay dying beside him, etched the
- crime in Boston's consciousness. "My wife's been shot. I've
- been shot," Stuart cried as a police dispatcher tried to keep
- him on the line long enough to determine his location. But
- Stuart gave no clues. He moaned, "Oh, man. It hurts. And my wife
- has stopped gurgling. She's stopped breathing."
- </p>
- <p> The police finally found Stuart by following the sound of
- squad-car sirens audible over his open phone line. They arrived
- too late to save Carol Stuart, 30. Her son Christopher was
- delivered by Cesarean section but lived for only 17 days.
- Hospitalized for more than a month, Stuart did not attend his
- wife's funeral. Instead, he wrote a farewell letter to her that
- was read at the service: "I will never again know the feeling
- of your hand in mine, but I will always feel you. I miss you,
- and I love you."
- </p>
- <p> According to Stuart, the prosperous couple--he managed a
- fashionable fur store, she was a lawyer--were accosted as
- they left the hospital by a black man armed with a .38-cal.
- snub-nosed revolver. The robber, Stuart claimed, ordered him
- to drive to an isolated section of the racially mixed Mission
- Hill district, where he shot and robbed them. Police mounted
- an intense search for the killer in Mission Hill and the
- predominantly black Roxbury neighborhood. Black community
- leaders in Mission Hill complained that police were
- indiscriminately stopping and frisking 200 black men a day.
- With little evidence to go on, William Bennett, 39, an
- unemployed black with a long criminal record, was arrested on
- Nov. 11. Stuart tentatively identified him in a lineup, but no
- formal charges were lodged against him.
- </p>
- <p> Then last week Stuart's younger brother Matthew, 23, told
- police that the day before the murder, Charles arranged to meet
- him after the childbirth class. When Matthew arrived for the
- rendezvous, Charles tossed a bag through his open car window
- to his brother and sped off. Later Matthew went out to the
- Pines River in Revere, outside Boston, and tossed the bag into
- the water. Last week divers recovered Carol Stuart's Gucci bag,
- wallet and makeup kit from the river. Matthew also turned over
- to the police Carol's diamond engagement ring, which supposedly
- had been stolen.
- </p>
- <p> Matthew's belated disclosure was prompted, said his lawyer,
- by his concern that an innocent man not be prosecuted. That was
- scant consolation to Boston's black community, which had felt
- persecuted for more than two months as the result of a lie.
- Boston N.A.A.C.P. president Louis Elisa decried "the lynch-mob
- mentality" ignited by the case. The Rev. Charles Stith, a
- prominent leader in the black community, accused local news
- media of "overkill" that whipped up racial tensions with biased
- accounts of "the worst of what black people are supposed to
- be." Elisa demanded an apology from Mayor Raymond Flynn, who had
- earlier called Stuart a hero. The mayor had already visited
- Bennett's mother to deliver an apology. Said he: "I've been on
- this earth 50 years, and I've read a lot of suspense stories,
- but I've not heard anything as bizarre and troubling as this."
- </p>
- <p> Three days after his wife's murder, Stuart collected an
- $82,000 insurance payment. Some reports claimed that he had
- also taken out more than $500,000 in extra life insurance;
- others alleged that Matthew and Charles had earlier plotted to
- fake a burglary of the couple's house, during which Carol would
- be killed. A Boston television station reported that on the
- night before he died Charles confided to a family friend that
- he killed his wife for the insurance money. He wounded himself
- in the abdomen when his plan to shoot himself in the foot went
- awry. Other reports suggested that he was involved with another
- woman.
- </p>
- <p> At week's end police had not divulged the contents of a note
- Stuart left in his new Nissan except to say that Stuart could
- not bear the allegations made against him. The closest thing
- to a confession the stunned community may ever get was in
- Stuart's farewell letter to his wife. "We must know that
- [God's] will was done," wrote Stuart. "In our souls, we must
- forgive the sinner, because He would."
- </p>
- <p>By Margaret Carlson. Reported by Sam Allis/Boston.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-