BOSTON — It was a notorious murder that rattled Boston to its core, coarsened divisions in a city long riven along racial lines, and renewed suspicion and anger directed at the Boston Police Department by the city’s Black community.
On Wednesday, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu plans to formally apologize on behalf of the city to two Black men, Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett, for their wrongful arrests following the 1989 death of Carol Stuart, whose husband, Charles Stuart, had orchestrated her killing. The Stuarts were white.
Stuart blamed his wife’s killing — and his own shooting during what he portrayed as an attempted carjacking — on an unidentified Black gunman, leading to a crackdown by police in one of the city’s traditionally Black neighborhoods in pursuit of a phantom assailant.
Charles Stuart said a Black man forced his way into their car as the couple left a birthing class at a city hospital on Oct. 23. The man ordered them to drive to the city’s Mission Hill neighborhood and robbed them before shooting Carol Stuart in the head and Charles in the chest, according to Charles.
Carol Stuart, 29, died the following morning at the same hospital where the couple had attended birthing classes. The baby, delivered by cesarean section, survived just 17 days.
Charles Stuart survived the shooting, with his description of a Black attacker eventually sparking a widespread Boston police “stop and frisk” crackdown of Black men in the neighborhood, even as some investigators had already come to doubt his story.
During the crackdown, police first arrested Swanson before ruling him out, and then took Bennett into custody. Stuart would later identify Bennett in late December. But by then, Stuart’s story had already begun to fall apart. His brother, Matthew, confessed to helping to hide the gun used to shoot Carol Stuart.
Early in the morning of Jan. 4, 1990, Stuart, 30, parked his car on the Tobin Bridge that leads in and out of Boston and jumped, plunging to his death. His body was recovered later that day.
The aggressive handling of the investigation created deep wounds in the city and further corroded relations between Boston police and the Black community.
Bennett, who denied having anything to do with Carol Stuart’s death, unsuccessfully sued the police department, claiming that officers violated his civil rights by coercing potential witnesses against him.
A recent retrospective look at the murder by The Boston Globe and an HBO documentary series has cast a new spotlight on the crime, the lingering memories of the Black community, and their treatment by the hands of police who dragged innocent residents into a futile search.
