Murder in Boston (26 page)

Since Chuck can never be tried for Carol’s murder, there apparently would be no official determination on that point. Also, while there is no law in Massachusetts prohibiting a spouse from collecting on a murdered partner’s insurance, there is what is called a “public policy,” under which spouses in such situations have been barred from collecting.

There are still some unknowns, too, which make it even more complicated. Did any or all of Carol’s policies contain double-indemnity clauses? Did any or all of Chuck’s policies contain clauses that prohibit payment in case of suicide? Which brings the question full circle: Did Chuck commit suicide? Did Chuck kill Carol and Christopher?

If a court has to step in and settle these questions—that is, if either the DiMaitis or the Stuarts file suit—a decision could take years. A final irony could be that if the case drags on indefinitely, either of the Stuarts, neither of whom is in good health, could die, and presumably their estate (which may then include Chuck’s) could go to their children, including Michael and Matthew.

Chapter 24

On the last day of January, the new twenty-three-member grand jury impaneled specifically to hear evidence in the Stuart case met in the Suffolk County Courthouse to begin its investigation. As he had done with everything else in this case, Flanagan drew a cloak of secrecy over the group, declining even to reveal its composition by sex, race, or age. However, the district attorney could not ban reporters from the courthouse corridors, so they camped out in the hallways and kept at least a running account of who went in, if not what they said.

One of the first witnesses was Special Agent William A. Tobin, a metallurgist at the FBI Laboratory in Washington. Although reporters might not immediately recognize some of the witnesses being called before the group, particularly if they were not normally in the limelight, Tobin was readily identifiable because he was lugging a green-and-white beer cooler. When the weapon suspected to have been used to shoot Chuck and Carol was recovered from the Pines River on January 9, investigators put it immediately into a container filled with river water to help preserve it until experts could run their tests. Even after the tests were completed, it continued to be stored in the water to retard deterioration as much as possible.

As if there were not enough strange coincidences in this case, ironical connections that seemed to pop up everywhere, the newspapers soon discovered that Tobin had a strong connection to Boston. He had attended grammar school in nearby Bourne when his father was stationed in the area with the U.S. Air Force. But his ties were even stronger than that; he had a legal connection to Boston because of a murder case that almost equaled the Stuart case in its luridness. In the early 1970s there were a series of gory murders of women hitchhikers in and around Boston. A man with a genius-level IQ named Anthony Jackson was charged with the killings and brought to trial. During the investigation, it had been determined that the killer had kept his victims in closets before he killed them, nailing the doors shut to keep them from escaping. Tobin was brought into the case when prosecutors asked the metallurgist to testify about the composition of the nails used to secure the closet doors and how they were linked to Jackson.

Jackson spent the weekend before Tobin testified learning as much as he could about metallurgy and then, acting as his own counsel, cross-examined the FBI agent for two days about his conclusions.

In spite of his efforts, Jackson was convicted of killing three of the women and was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. Now nearing fifty, he is still behind bars.

Whether Tobin will ever testify in court in connection with the Stuart case remained up to the grand jury. Although he refused to tell reporters what he testified about behind closed doors, it almost certainly dealt with the tests he had performed on the Pines River gun. What the grand jury would need to know to help them make their decision was how long the pistol had been in the water; had it come from the safe at Kakas & Sons; whose fingerprints were on it; and was it the weapon from which the shots that killed Carol and wounded Chuck were fired.

From what Matthew had told investigators, it could be assumed that the weapon had been handled by Chuck, Matthew, and Jack McMahon, so it would not be a surprise if all three of their fingerprints were on the pistol. However, if there were a fourth set of fingerprints, the police could then deduce that there had been a third person in the car and that that person may have fired the shots.

It also was important to determine how long the gun had been in the river. According to Matthew, he took the gun from Chuck, then went to pick up McMahon, and the two of them went immediately to the river, where McMahon tossed in the pistol. If it was determined that the weapon had not been in the water as long as Matthew had indicated, then it would have to have been kept somewhere else for an undetermined period of time. If that turned out to be the case, it might prove nothing except that Matthew had lied about a small part of the story he told investigators. And if he lied about one thing, he may have lied about others.

One of the problems facing investigators, however, was the degree of accuracy of the tests being used to determine the amount of time the gun had been in the river. Several conditions, such as temperature and salt content of the water, could affect the results. If Tobin’s analysis could pinpoint with reasonable accuracy the length of time the gun had been submerged, it could have an important bearing on the case.

Others testifying during the five-hour session that Wednesday were Dr. Edwin Hirsch, chief of surgery at Boston City Hospital; Peter Jaworski; and his wife, Kimberley. Both Jaworskis worked at Kakas & Sons; Peter was directly under Chuck. The Jaworskis also were friends of the Stuarts and socialized frequently with Chuck and Carol. When the Jaworskis were married not long before, Chuck was Peter’s best man and Carol was Kimberley’s matron of honor.

After they finished testifying, Tobin and the Jaworskis slipped out of the courthouse through a rear door to avoid reporters waiting outside. Hirsch bravely ran the gauntlet of newspeople but declined to comment on his testimony. “I’m not going to tell you anything,” he said politely but firmly. “The grand jury rules are quite clear. I will not discuss anything I discussed with the grand jury.” However, he did admit that his testimony had taken almost an hour.

The grand jury took the next day off but returned on Friday, February 2, with a long list of witnesses on its agenda. The first person to testify was Chuck’s younger brother, Mark, who had apparently been the only one of his three brothers who had not in some way known about Chuck’s involvement before Carol was killed. Matthew, of course, had told investigators that he was deeply involved in the incident days before it occurred. Michael, the oldest after Chuck, had, according to his lawyer, known for weeks that Chuck had murder on his mind. Matthew had confirmed Chuck’s involvement in a conversation with Michael within three days of the shooting. Mark, however, apparently was not aware of the situation until Michael told him, and maybe Shelly, on New Year’s Day. What Mark told the grand jury, like the testimony of all the other witnesses, was unknown.

Others appearing before the group during its six-hour session included Brian Parsons, who was Chuck’s best friend and the person with whom Chuck planned one day to have as his partner in a restaurant; Jack McMahon’s girlfriend, Dona Rosa; McMahon’s brother, Stephen; and, in an apparent repeat performance, Peter and Kimberley Jaworski.

Apparently in no hurry to complete its task and under no pressure from Flanagan or the media to do so, the grand jury did not meet again after its February 2 session for three weeks. On Friday, February 23, the group summoned three more of Chuck’s siblings—brother Michael and half sisters Shelly and Neysa—and Michael’s wife, Maria. The four arrived at the session together and left together. Afterward their lawyer, Richard Clayman, refused to say which of them had testified before the group or what they testified about. Those who had not testified at the February 23 session, he said, would appear before the group on February 26.

In a case that has never ceased to offer surprises, another revelation popped up on February 26. It came in the form of a ten-year-old boy who, up until then, the public had never heard of.

The boy, who was not identified, was brought before the grand jury to tell his story. And what he said was shocking. According to information later leaked to WBZ-TV, the boy, who lives in an apartment on St. Alphonsus Street, which is where Chuck and Carol were found by police and rescue workers, said he was alone in his room the night of October 23 when he heard a shot. Looking out the window, he saw a tall black man running away from a car that was stopped in the middle of the street. The man disappeared into the darkness. The implication was that it was Carol’s car and that this testimony was sought to give credence to Chuck’s original report that a black gunman was involved.

This was a curious development indeed. First of all, the boy was very young. Although he had told this story, according to the February 28
Globe
, the day after the shooting, investigators had disregarded it. It was not part of the testimony police used to secure the warrant for Bennett’s arrest. One of the reasons investigators apparently ignored the boy’s tale was that he was said to be a special education student.

But there are other problems with the story as well. For example, St. Alphonsus Street was where Chuck ended up after driving around lost for at least the thirteen minutes he was on the phone with Gary McLaughlin; it was
not
the spot at which he told the state police dispatcher that he and his wife were wounded. He told McLaughlin that he and Carol had been shot before he placed the 911 call and that the gunman had already fled the scene. If that were true, there would have been no third person in the car by the time Chuck drove to St. Alphonsus Street. There were no gunshots heard over the telephone while Chuck was connected to McLaughlin, so undoubtedly Chuck and Carol had already been wounded by then. Like so many other things in this case, this testimony raised many more questions than it answered.

What was even more peculiar about the boy’s story is why the district attorney’s office thought it was important enough to present to the grand jury. Perhaps Flanagan was operating under the theory that he would throw everything he had at the twenty-three jurors and let them sort it out. At least in a situation like that he could not be accused of withholding details from the panel. But whatever his motive, Flanagan kept it to himself, as he has with so many details in this case.

Judging by the jury’s snail-paced progress, its mandate from Flanagan was very loose and certainly did not include a directive to act urgently. More than six weeks after the panel was brought together, there was no indication when it would finish its job, what other witnesses would be called, or whether any indictments would be handed up. In the meantime Matthew apparently remained estranged from his siblings, and his new lawyer, Nancy Gertner, kept him well distanced from reporters.

Chapter 25

Although developments in the case were dutifully reported in the Boston media, they got very little if any mention in news reports elsewhere in the country. Sometime soon after the story’s airing in the three national magazines,
Time, Newsweek
, and
People
, it dropped out of sight for all but those in the Boston area. But it could not stay that way indefinitely. It was too hot a story to keep out of the public consciousness for too long. On February 27, four months and three days after the shooting, it was presented again to a national audience, courtesy of the program
Rescue 911
. Producers of the program said they waited so long to show it because up until the time of Chuck’s death they were negotiating with him for permission. After he died, that point became moot.

By chance, there had been a camera crew from the program riding with Boston paramedics on the night the shooting occurred. They had, in fact, been trying for several days to find a situation worth showing to a national audience when the Stuart shooting occurred. What they came up with was almost numbing in its intensity.

The program aired on February 27 and opened with a dramatic and extremely well done re-creation of the scene in the state police “bunker,” beginning when Gary McLaughlin took the call. Shots of McLaughlin on the telephone, backed up by the other two bunker personnel who were working that night, State Police Sergeant Dan Grabowski and fellow dispatcher Jack Moran, were shown with the sound track of the original tape-recorded conversation and an explanatory voice-over by an unnamed narrator. Without knowing this was a re-creation, it was almost impossible to tell that a camera crew also had not been in the bunker at the time. Skillfully, McLaughlin was shown in profile much of the time, with cradling the telephone and covering his mouth so the audience could not see from his lip movements that the voice they were hearing was from a tape. At other times the camera zoomed in on his eyes, which were as tense as they must have been on the night of the incident. McLaughlin proved to be a top-notch actor.

The real drama, however, was reserved for the footage actually taken at the scene. The camera crew arrived with the paramedics, so the film, jerkily realistic, showed workers cutting Carol’s seat belt and removing her from the car, then laying her on the street until a gurney could be brought over. The film showed her in profile, her pregnancy prominent, being wheeled to the ambulance. “We’ve got cardiac arrest here,” the narrator noted as they struggled to load her into the ambulance. They had an estimated ten minutes, the disembodied voice explained, to get her to a hospital that was equipped to deliver her child if the baby was going to have a chance at survival. “She was taken to Brigham and Women’s,” the voice explained, “where only minutes before she had been attending childbirth classes.”