Murder in Boston (5 page)

Ted Kakas, co-owner of the fur company where Chuck was general manager, went on record as calling Chuck a “terrific guy,” the kind of thoughtful person who collected donations for orphans every Christmas and at Thanksgiving organized a food collection program for the needy.

In case anyone had missed the point about random violence, Jacobs also interviewed relatives and neighbors who had warned Chuck and Carol about venturing into the inner city. Mike Stuart, one of Chuck’s younger brothers, was quoted as saying how he had warned Chuck about the dangerous neighborhood. “I told him I didn’t like parking my car around there, and I would never send my wife in there by herself.”

A neighbor of Chuck and Carol’s in Medford told the
Globe:
“I wouldn’t go into Boston if you gave me $100,000. It’s just not safe.”

Although there would be many thousands of words written and broadcast about Carol and Chuck in coming weeks and months, future news coverage would basically conform to the pattern set in those first few stories. Remarkably, too, despite efforts by scores of reporters, few hard facts would be unearthed about Chuck or Carol or the crime. When there was a change, it was a very dramatic one, but that would not occur for a long time. Meanwhile the story—and the personalities of the two main participants—became an almost daily event for Bostonians.

Chapter 4

Within hours of the incident, the shooting of Carol and Chuck Stuart had captured the attention, and the sympathy, of millions of people around the world. The story about what happened to them was on the level of the sad tale about the female jogger who was attacked in New York’s Central Park: it was horrifying, and it had happened to two such nice, innocent people.

As interest in Chuck and Carol grew, the public clamored for more details about the victims themselves. The media were happy to oblige. The
Herald
dubbed them “the Camelot couple,” and the
Globe
indulged in its own form of hyperbole. Over time, reporters began to flesh out the images of the two young people whose faces smiled out from front pages and TV screens on a daily basis.

Carol Ann was the younger of Giusto and Evelyn DiMaiti’s two children. Born in the suburb of Medford, which is just north of Boston, she grew up in a typical Italian-American household. Good Catholics, Giusto and Evelyn insisted that Carol attend parochial school, which she did until the one in her neighborhood closed and she had to transfer to public schools. She was in the sixth grade then.

Always a good student and a popular, cheerful girl, Carol made lots of friends, both among her fellow students and her teachers. In her senior year she was elected class treasurer, a tribute both to her personality and her industriousness.

Her father, Giusto, had been a workingman all his life and was a strong believer in the work ethic for his children as well. By the time Carol was in her mid-teens she got a job in a restaurant in Revere, a heavily Irish blue-collar town east of Medford. She started as a busgirl, progressed to a waitress, and then was promoted to hostess. In her spare time, she dated a classmate and fellow Italian-American from Medford, Jeff Cataldo.

Like Carol, Jeff was hardworking and eager to better himself. He too realized that the ticket to long-lasting success in the modern world was a college degree, and he was determined to get his. Giusto liked this in the young man, and he beamed whenever Carol brought him around. In Giusto’s eyes Jeff was smart, ambitious, and, not a small thing to consider, a good Italian boy. Carol dated Jeff throughout her final years of high school, and she continued dating him long after she had enrolled at Boston College, a Catholic institution, with the announced intention of becoming a high school teacher like her brother, Carl.

When she got down to the realities of a teacher’s life, however, Carol began to have second thoughts. As an extrovert supreme, she was much more interested in the “real” world than in the somewhat cloistered existence of teaching. Halfway through BC, she switched her major to political science and began considering the law. She was an honor student, one of the prizes in her class, a woman on the way up.

But although she was doing well in school, her personal life began to suffer. Perhaps fearing what marriage to a young Italian man in conservative Medford might mean to a young Italian woman—maybe an early end to a promising career—her romance with Jeff Cataldo began to cool. Giusto was disappointed, but he still had hope. If he could have waved a wand and found a husband for Carol, that man would have been Jeff Cataldo.

Exhausted by the college grind and feeling the need to earn some money before she could go on to law school, Carol decided to take a year off after she graduated. Her father was working as a night bartender at a restaurant in Revere called the Driftwood, and he found her a job there as a waitress. She accepted it gladly.

Working at the Driftwood as a cook was a young man just slightly younger than she, a tall, dark haired youth with a winning smile and a shy manner. His name was Charles Stuart, Jr., but everyone called him Chuck. When he was a kid growing up in Revere, he was “Charlie,” but now that he was on the way up he thought “Chuck” sounded more sophisticated.

Chuck Stuart’s childhood had not been that different from Carol’s. His father, Charles Sr., was a slap-’em-on-the-back, tell-’em-a-joke boisterous Irishman; like Carol, he was a highly developed extrovert who seemed to need contact with other people to survive. When he wasn’t working as a salesman for Metropolitan Life, he tended bar and emceed gatherings at the local Knights of Columbus hall. And when he wasn’t busy doing those things, he helped raise money for the Children’s Hospital or the local Little League. It was a good thing he enjoyed extracurricular activities because, in his case, an outside job probably was a necessity as well as an avocation. He had to moonlight somewhere: he had a large family to feed.

When Charles Sr. was a young man, he married a woman named Neysa Robinson. She bore him a child, a girl they named Shelly, in 1953. In 1955 she became pregnant again, but serious health complications set in. She died in childbirth a few months later, but the baby, another girl, survived. Charles Sr. named the infant Neysa, after her mother.

For a while Charles Sr. tried raising the two girls on his own and being a breadwinner at the same time. But it was a difficult life, and he decided to take another wife. The new Mrs. Stuart was Dorothy Kingston, a first-generation American of pure Irish stock. In 1959 they started their own family. A week before Christmas they had a son: Charles Jr. In fairly quick order three other sons followed. Michael came along two years after Chuck. A year after Michael there was Mark, and three years after that, the baby of the family, Matthew. Partly because of the four-year age gap between the oldest son, Chuck, and the youngest daughter, Neysa, the Stuart children grew up almost as separate families: the girls went one way, the boys another. Male bonding took an early hold among the Stuart boys, and while they were growing up, they were almost inseparable. As the oldest, Chuck had a certain responsibility to look after his brothers, which he apparently did, but he also was the shyest of the four and seemed the slowest to make new friends.

As a boy Chuck did most of the things that other Irish kids did in a town like Revere: he took a great interest in sports, and he paid tribute to the church. Like Carol, he went to parochial school. And, like Carol, he was elected class treasurer. But Immaculate Conception was only a grammar school, and when he entered the ninth grade he too transferred to a public school. Unlike Carol, however, Chuck was not a scholar, and his ambitions did not extend to educational achievement. When he was in the tenth grade, he transferred out of the academic program and enrolled at Northeastern Metropolitan Regional Vocational High School in Wakefield, popularly known as the “Voke.” He was more interested in cooking than calculus, and he signed up in the food service program.

Even though he was going to the Voke instead of a regular high school, he kept active in sports, playing organized baseball (a teammate later described him as a “weak-hitting third baseman”) and basketball. From what his friends remember, he was better at basketball than baseball, but he was hampered by weak knees, which kept him from being a skilled rebounder. He also played sandlot football and practically every other sport that came along.

When he graduated from the Voke in 1977, his first full-time job was as a cook at a hotel in the north Boston town of Danvers. The hotel was the Radisson-Ferncroft, which later became the Sheraton-Tara. Throughout this story, fate and coincidence played a strong part. It is, perhaps, coincidental that a Sheraton-Tara played an instrumental role at the beginning of Chuck’s life as an adult, and a sister hotel, the Sheraton-Tara in Braintree, which is south of Boston, played an even more important role at the end of his life.

One of the reasons Chuck took the job at the hotel was that two of his friends, brothers Bruce and Brian Parsons, were working there as well. Brian was Chuck’s best friend then and would remain so through the years.

While Chuck was working at the hotel, he seriously injured his leg during a pickup football game. As a result, it was extremely painful for him to have to stand all day. So he turned in notice at the hotel and took a few months off to give his injury time to heal. His next job was as a cook at the Driftwood.

When Carol and Chuck met at the Revere restaurant, which has since closed, they hit it off immediately, and it was not long before they began dating. Although Carol had been going out with Jeff Cataldo for several years, Chuck was a novice at romantic relationships. Until then he had devoted most of his energy to sports, and Carol was his first serious girlfriend. Although she was almost halfway through law school and he was only a cook, they continued to see each other regularly.

The fact that his daughter was dating an Irishman from Revere instead of an Italian boy from Medford did not make Carol’s father, Giusto, particularly happy. But like other fathers in similar situations, he came around eventually.

Chuck and Carol met in 1979. On Christmas Eve 1983 Chuck gave Carol a special present: a wallet adorned with her initials—except the initials carved into the leather were C.A.S., not C.A.D. Excitedly she opened the billfold, and inside was a diamond engagement ring, the same one that would, slightly more than six years later, be reported stolen by Chuck.

Carol and Chuck were married on October 13, 1985, at a mass in St. James Catholic Church in Medford, a short walk from the house in which Carol had grown up. The ceremony was performed by the Reverend Francis Gallagher. Chuck once was one of Gallagher’s altar boys. The best man was Chuck’s old friend, Brian Parsons. Chuck and Carol honeymooned in the Bahamas, and every night Carol called her mother to let her know that everything was all right.

Chuck, who never had either the discipline or the desire to go to college and use that as a ticket to a better job, made an abortive move in that direction in 1979. It was shortly after he met Carol, and perhaps to try to keep up with her, he enrolled at a small school not far from home. But his resolve lasted only two months. Before Thanksgiving he dropped out and never reenrolled. However, there were indications that he felt inferior or guilty about not trying to further his education. Sometimes he told a story about being awarded a football scholarship to Brown University but having to surrender it after suffering a leg injury. When reporters started digging into his life after the shooting, one of them called a Brown official, who denied in the first place that Chuck was ever enrolled there and, in the second place, added that Brown did not give football scholarships.

Despite his lack of interest in higher education, Chuck was nevertheless undeniably ambitious. By 1981, a couple of years after he and Carol started dating, Carol left the restaurant business behind for good and went to work as an accountant for Arthur Young & Co. in Boston. That probably fueled Chuck’s need to break out of the cook mold as well, because soon afterward he applied for a job at Kakas & Sons, which had been in business since 1868 and was
the
place to buy furs in Boston. Kakas & Sons may not sell as many mink coats as some of the sophisticated department stores, but the store has a reputation that draws the city’s old money.

Under the “education” blank on his job application, Chuck inked in, “Brown University,” spinning his yarn about the nonexistent football scholarship. In the end, even if his employers-to-be had checked his claims, it might not have made any difference. The two brothers who were running the store, Ted and Jay, liked the way Chuck presented himself and were impressed with his understated charm. He was hired on the spot as a management trainee.

Soon after that his life-style began to change. Increasingly aware of the need to present a top-notch image at the furrier, where customers paid more attention to service than price tags, Chuck began taking better care of himself. He gave up his barber in Revere for fashionable hairstyling salons. Blue jeans went to the Goodwill, and he started shopping for suits at Brooks Brothers. Casios surrendered to top-of-the-line, $600 imported watches, and his feet soon grew accustomed to finely crafted, hand-rubbed leather shoes.

But some things did not change. Chuck Stuart was effectively out of Revere, but Revere was not altogether out of him. In the world in which he grew up, it was customary for men, once they got old enough to drink, to find themselves a “local” and spend at least one night a week with the “boys,” cussin’, spittin’, fartin’, and knockin’ back beer after beer. Chuck had never been much of a drinker, but he seemed to relish his Friday nights back in his old hometown. At first Carol didn’t mind because she would spend Friday evenings with the girls. Peer bonding, the experts call it. But after Carol got pregnant she cut back on her socializing and seemed to resent Chuck’s excursions. It was one of the few constant disagreements they ever had, at least as far as anyone else could see.