In an epic feat of reporting and storytelling*, a team of Boston Globe journalists examines the legacy of one of Beantown’s most infamous crimes: the 1989 shooting of Charles and Carol Stuart. Carol, who was pregnant, died of a gunshot wound to the head; her baby was delivered via emergency c-section and lived only a few days. Charles survived a bullet to the back and claimed that a Black man had attacked him and his wife, setting of a racist manhunt across Boston. But Charles was the person behind the crime, and as this project reveals, he may not have acted alone or pulled the trigger. Certainly, other people were complicit in keeping his secret—nearly three dozen, in fact:
The story of the Stuart case holds that much of the world was shocked when the truth came out that Chuck was the real killer.
On Boston’s North Shore, it was old news.
The Globe found—through an analysis based on police files, grand jury testimony, recorded phone calls, and more—that at least 33 people knew the truth by the time Matthew went to police with his story on Jan. 3, 1990.
Thirty-three people knew that—as Matthew Stuart said to Michael Stuart three days after the murder—“There’s no Black person that did this.”
And yet, almost every one of those people stayed quiet, even as Chuck identified in a lineup a man they knew to be innocent.
Much like the rumor about Willie Bennett shared by a few teens in a Mission Hill smoke session, this, too, was a perverse game of telephone. Siblings told friends, who told friends, who kept it secret.
In Mission Hill, an 18-year-old Black man told his mother, who told a detective.
But in Revere, a type of omerta took hold among some Stuarts, their friends, and friends of friends. They talked—just not to police.
The Stuart case is not just a story about institutional failures by police, politicians, and the media. It is a story about the failures of regular people, too. People who believed themselves to be good and moral and decent who watched something terrible happen and did nothing.
The Globe reached out to every person who knew the truth before the police. None of them agreed to speak.
*This story is behind a paywall.
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