DocumentaryAn HBO docuseries follows the story of a white man who killed his wife but blamed a Black man, and the reckoning that follows
“My wife’s been shot. I’ve been shot.”
On 23 October 1989 Charles “Chuck” Stuart, who was white, called 911 to report that he and his pregnant wife, Carol, had been carjacked and shot by a Black man in Boston’s Mission Hill neighbourhood. Carol died that night. Their baby died days after being born. Stuart survived and garnered nationwide sympathy.
“I remember when the murder happened and, if you lived in Boston at the time, it was all that anybody was talking about,” says film-maker Jason Hehir. “We’re mostly a sports town, but the Celtics and the Bruins and the Patriots and the Red Sox took a backseat to this case. If you were in a restaurant, on the bus, in school, hanging out with friends on the weekend, it was always a topic of conversation or about to be.”
But the murder investigation was built on a lie – a lie that the police, mayor and media wanted to believe. There had been no Black assailant. Stuart had killed his own wife and child and spun a fantasy that led police to terrorise the Black community and arrest innocent men. When he was finally exposed, Stuart killed himself by jumping off a bridge into the Mystic River.
The Stuart case, and the ways in which it enflamed decades-old racial tensions in Boston, is explored in Hehir’s docuseries Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning, the first episode of which aired on HBO on Monday.
Hehir, 47, whose credits include The Last Dance and Andre The Giant, says via Zoom from Brooklyn, New York: “I’ve never done true crime before, and I never had much of an interest in doing just a story about a murder just for the sake of sensationalism or for the lurid aspect of it.
“I am intrigued by anything where you can tell a larger story through a smaller one, so examining Boston’s racial history through the lens of this case was something that always appealed to me, and finally got the opportunity to do so with HBO a couple of years ago.”
Hehir, who grew up in the suburb of Newton, looks at the big picture and finds a city riddled with paradoxes: liberal politics and world-leading universities offset by racial tensions that had been simmering for decades.
“We are known as a bastion of liberal and progressive ideas and ‘the hub’ – Boston has that nickname for a reason. It is a hub of technology, a hub of innovation and a hub of education and Bostonians are very proud of that. But then there’s this underbelly that we’re not so proud of: there’s been years, if not decades, if not centuries, of racial injustice and bigotry in that city.
“Boston’s not alone. There is bigotry in every city and there is segregation demographically, but in Boston it seems more pronounced and the edge between those neighbourhoods are a lot sharper. It was very easy to tell what neighbourhood you were in by the demographics in Boston, more so than in other cities.”
School desegregation bussing in Boston in the mid-1970s was met with mass protests and violent resistance. Hehir continues: “If you’re a guy like Chuck Stuart, you grew up in that era and now you’re reading the news about the crack epidemic taking hold of inner-city Boston and you’re reading about the police stopping and frisking just about any young Black male that they could find because they had permission to do so.
“It wasn’t a far leap for him to take, being a sociopathic maniac, to say, you know what? I’ll just blame a Black man for this and in the city of Boston, all the attention is immediately going to be diverted from me to this phantom Black man that a lot of the city seems to be afraid of.”
Chuck and Carol Stuart were from two blue-collar suburbs of Boston and seemed to be getting ahead. He was the general manager of a furrier and making more than $100,000 a year; she was a lawyer and worked at a publishing company in Newton. After the crime, the media dubbed them the “Camelot couple”.
They attended birthing class at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Mission Hill on 23 October 1989. Then Stuart called 911 and claimed that a Black man had jumped into their blue Toyota Cressida, shooting Carol in the head and Stuart in the abdomen.
Stuart described the supposed assailant as an African American in a black Adidas tracksuit and with a raspy voice. But during the call he never mentioned his dying wife’s name, spoke directly to her, tried to comfort her or tell the 911 dispatcher that his wife was pregnant. He never rolled down the window or opened to door to shout for help.
Hehir recalls: “For years, I found it interesting as to why, in retrospect, we believed this story so readily. I certainly don’t consider myself racist but I was a resident of a suburb of Boston, and one of the people who was reading these papers and listening to these news reports and believed Chuck’s story, just because that’s the way he said it happened.
“As the years went on and I got an opportunity to tell stories, I was always interested in re-examining this story and trying to look a little bit deeper as to why we believed this guy’s tale all along.”
Carol was taken back to the hospital, where she delivered a premature son named Christopher. She died on the operating table and the wounded baby died 17 days later.
Hehir says: “There was a tremendous amount of sympathy for the couple and specifically for Chuck, who was fighting for his life in the hospital while his wife had died and his baby was soon to die right after this happened. There was very little, if any, discussion about whether or not he might be complicit.
“We’re not the police. As the public, we read what the papers and TV tells us; there was no internet back then, there were no Reddit threads to offer any kind of conspiracy theories. There were three main news stations in town and two main newspapers in town and all of them were beating the drum that this poor guy had lost his wife and his prematurely born baby was fighting for his life. Meanwhile, there is this murderer running loose and the cops had to get him by any means necessary.”
Some officials began calling for the return of the death penalty in Massachusetts. Boston’s mayor, Raymond Flynn, declared a citywide manhunt for the killer. The police took Stuart’s word in what now looks like a textbook case of systemic racism.
Hehir says: “It’s a lot more insidious than someone just coming out and saying the N-word or police being caught on tape doing horrific things to Black victims. This is something that was part of the set of beliefs of the people who were in charge of investigating this crime. There was a box that they were thinking within and that box was white and male and Irish and Italian. They had a very tough time believing any other version of the events than the one that Chuck had said occurred.”
The police dragnet was merciless. The mayor ordered more than a hundred extra police officers to scour the city’s Black neighbourhoods. There were numerous aggressive raids, in which doors were bashed down without knocking, and humiliating “stop and frisk” searches of the residents of Mission Hill.
Resident Ron Bell says in the film: “It was open season on Black people.”
Alan Swanson, squatting in an apartment building in the Mission Hill housing projects, was arrested when police found a tracksuit soaking in water in the apartment. He was held in a city jail where he could not eat because guards spat in his food and could not sleep because they banged on his cell door through the night.
But the case against Swanson fell apart. A second suspect, William Bennett, who had a long police record, was arrested and held on an unrelated charge while police gathered evidence against him.
But then everything changed. On 3 January 1990, Stuart’s brother Matthew went to police and confessed that Stuart had shot both Carol and himself for insurance money. He had staged it to look like a carjacking and wanted Matthew’s help to dispose of the gun and Carol’s jewellery.
The following morning, Stuart, leaped off the Tobin Bridge, leaving behind a suicide note that claimed he had been “sapped of strength” by an unspecified “new accusation”.
Hehir comments: “The ironic part is that once the news broke, you had people from everyday citizens who were consuming the news all the way up to some of the bosses at a place like the Boston Globe asking: was this guilt or grief? They still couldn’t wrap their heads around the reality of what had actually happened and they were still questioning whether or not Chuck could possibly have done this.
“Now we compare every case that’s similar to this to the Stuart case and it’s almost a cautionary tale. We say, OK, let’s just make sure that we don’t get Chuck Stuart-ed here. At the time, there was no precedent for it so people had a very difficult time accepting that Willie Bennett really had nothing to do with it and that Chuck had conspired this devious plan all along.”
Local media, which had few Black reporters at the time, were stunned by the revelation. The retired Boston Herald reporter Michelle Caruso admits in the documentary: “I consider it the biggest failure of my entire 27-year journalistic career. We failed the city of Boston, particularly the residents of Mission Hill.”
The Black community expressed outrage over why the frequent deaths of Black people in Mission Hill never got similar attention. In archive footage, one says: “So many of our people were killed in Mission Hill. Nothing was said about it but all of a sudden when a white woman – and it’s a shame that any life is lost – but all of a sudden when a white woman loses her life, or somebody white, it seems as if white life is more valuable than Black life.”
Bennett was never charged with the crime but served 12 years for armed robbery of a video store – a charge he denied – and was released in 2002. Hehir goes on: “The story ended in the public’s eyes sometime in January of 1990. The story for the Bennett family still isn’t over to this day.”
The third and final episode of Murder in Boston considers how four generations of Bennett’s family still shoulder the legacy of that wrongful accusation. They have never received an apology from the city or police department.
Bennett’s daughter Sharita, at times tearful, says her defining memory of being six or seven years old is the police raid on their apartment. She recalls: “Growing up, having the last name Bennett, it was just a feeling of being afraid to tell people my full name. That was a big thing for me.”
Now 73, Bennett lives alone in poor health and does not tell people he is from Boston because he knows they will work out his identity. Hehir says: “People still associate his name with that of a murderer and there are still plenty of people in Boston that I talked to who feel that Willie must have known Chuck, that Willie must be involved somehow.
“They cannot wrap their heads around the fact that this crime occurred in a ‘Black’ neighbourhood but there was no Black assailant and there was no Black perpetrator and it was it was purely an evil act by an evil man, Chuck Stuart, with nobody else.”
Only one Boston police official directly involved in the Stuart case agreed to be interviewed for the series. But Hehir hopes that his film will stop the excuses still being made for law enforcement’s conduct in those days.
“In any of these documentaries, we’re trying to show as many perspectives as possible. With painful stories like this, you’re not going to move on, you’re not going to make any progress until all sides understand the other’s pain and the other’s perspective.
“What we tried to do was give the perspective of the Mission Hill community and the Bennett family as much as we could because to me they are – besides Carol and Christopher of course – they are the victims in this case. I wanted to tell the story of that community and of that family so I hope that people have a greater understanding of just what they went through back in 1989.”
There are signs of change. Michelle Wu, elected in 2021, is the first woman and first person of colour to serve as mayor of Boston. Hehir adds: “There’s been tremendous improvement. There is now diversity at the highest levels of government in city hall, within the police department and the city council.
“The minorities who have been subject to that unfair treatment for generations are now more represented in the decision-making process and in the justice process in the city. We have a long way to go; we’re not perfect and we never will be. But the Boston of today bears very little similarity to the Boston of 34 years ago during this case.”
Murder In Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning airs on HBO on Mondays with a UK date to be announced
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