Murder in Boston (7 page)

What went through Michael’s mind when he heard that is not known. What is known is that he made a decision to keep the information from the authorities. It is a mystery as to how much information he actually had. Another conundrum is whether or not he confronted Chuck with this information. As close as the Stuart siblings were, it is difficult to believe he did not force a confrontation. But once developments began taking a turn for the worse, the Stuarts withdrew into a shell and refused to discuss with anyone how much they knew or did not know and when they knew it. If that information is ever going to be revealed, it probably will have to be through an investigative authority with subpoena power and the capacity to demand testimony under oath. If Matthew and Michael made a pact of silence, it was not a terribly binding one. It held for a few weeks, and when it was broken, it was broken, ironically, by Matthew, who had the most to lose. If such a bargain existed, and it likely did, Michael kept his part until the whole world knew about it.

At the time Matthew was confiding in Michael, Chuck was confiding in no one. Still under heavy medication and close medical supervision in the intensive care unit at BCH, Chuck asked for a paper and pencil so he could write a message to be read at his wife’s funeral. In a hand so shaky Brian Parsons would barely be able to read it, Chuck scribbled a melodramatic good-bye to the woman he had known for ten years and been married to for four.

And as Chuck was penning his eulogy and Matthew was confessing to Michael, a small army of police was spreading out through Mission Hill searching for the man so minutely described by Chuck only hours earlier. At that point Chuck’s story still looked good. It had a few holes in it, but the one factor that gave it a truthful ring was the seriousness of Chuck’s wounds. If someone was going to shoot himself, the police reasoned, he certainly wouldn’t do it as Chuck had done. For weeks that one fact would continue to balance the scale in Chuck’s favor despite a growing uneasiness with the details of his story. There was one other thing that helped Chuck’s believability quotient: twenty-four hours earlier, determined searchers, eyes fixed on the ground, all but oblivious to the bright autumn sky, found the keys to Carol’s Toyota. They were lying in plain view in an empty lot precisely where Chuck had told them the shooting had taken place. After the keys were found, police summoned public service workers to search the sewers and storm drains for the weapon. It did not turn up, and it would not for many weeks. When the gun finally was found, it would be miles away from Mission Hill.

If they couldn’t find the gun right away, police at least hoped to find a suspect. From all appearances, police had bought Chuck’s story whole. And from what he had said, officers surmised that the man who had shot the two was not an amateur, that he had committed that type of crime before or one very similar to it, such as armed robbery. To them, the cold-bloodedness it took to shoot two unarmed and nonthreatening people, one of them a pregnant woman, reflected a considerable amount of desperation and lack of respect for human life.

As was becoming customary, Boston officials continued to treat the investigation as a political issue as much as a criminological one. Police Superintendent Saia, after announcing at a news conference that the list of suspects had been whittled down to “a chosen few,” used the opportunity afforded by the gathering of reporters to make a plea for stronger federal gun control legislation and urge swift passage of a bill in the state legislature to restrict the sale and use of assault weapons.

Also getting into the act were Governor Dukakis and Attorney General James Shannon, both of whom asked for additional funding for crime prevention programs. It might even take new taxes to bring in the needed revenue, Dukakis said, but it was necessary nevertheless. “Drugs and violence are part of our lives, and whether or not we’re going to control them or they’re going to control us depends on whether we have the will and the courage to commit resources to police and law enforcement.”

Attorney General Shannon made his point in an open letter to George Keverian, speaker of the state house of representatives. “We are being overwhelmed by the other side, by the guns, by the violence, and by the crime,” he wrote. “We don’t have the resources to deal with these problems.”

While Dukakis and Shannon were still able to beat the law enforcement drum, Mayor Flynn, who had been first on the find-Carol’s-killer train, was starting to take some serious flak because of his aggressive stance. Louis Elisa, president of the city’s NAACP chapter and a frequent Flynn critic, attacked the mayor for supporting a double standard in pursuing a vigorous chase for the assailant. “It clearly makes a difference that it’s a white suburban couple,” Elisa railed. “You’re looking at 101 people injured with weapons in Roxbury, and he didn’t feel it was necessary to call in all the detectives for that.”

It was only the beginning. In the following weeks Flynn would take a much heavier battering.

But Flynn was not the only target of criticism. Media bashers were beginning to raise their voices as well. Even then, as early as three days after the shooting, even before the media saturation
really
began, a number of Bostonians were already starting to question the extensive coverage being given the case. Was it just because the victims were affluent? they asked. Was it just because the crime happened in the inner city? Was it (shades of Elisa’s accusations) just because they were
white
?

The
Globe
, as a good newspaper was required to do, addressed some of these questions. But the story by staff reporter Eileen McNamara was relegated to the Metro section in the back of the newspaper. The front page was reserved for developments in the investigation.

WHEN TRAGEDY IS MEASURED BY RACE
,
CLASS
, read the headline on McNamara’s piece. The text carried the thought further: “Elements of race and class had many in Greater Boston debating yesterday why some tragedies loom larger than others, why some lives violently lost bring demands for the death penalty and others yield only private, familial grief.”

McNamara pointed out how, in contrast with the publicity over the attack against Chuck and Carol, the murder of a black man in a nearby neighborhood a few hours later rated zero on the attention scale. “There were no cameras clicking, no minicams rolling at the city morgue when Sandra Williams identified the body of the man who shared her apartment,” McNamara wrote. “No news conferences were convened to mark a lone black man’s passing.” The reporter then quoted a bitter Sandra Williams: “No mayor called about my loss.”

The story also quoted the photo editor at the competing
Herald
, Kevin Cole, who said he had been besieged with complaints about the newspaper’s decision to print a picture of Chuck and Carol slumped on the front seat of their Toyota, a picture that later would be shown around the world. But Cole said he’d got no calls when a few days previously the newspaper had printed a picture of a fifteen-year-old black boy who had been shot dead while riding his bicycle.

Ben Haith, identified as a community activist, said the media responded, as it should have, when an eleven-year-old black girl named Darlene Tiffany Moore was shot to death in a crossfire in Roxbury a year earlier. “But for most crimes,” he added, “if the victim is white, there seems to be a big difference.” For example, he asked rhetorically, where were the media more recently when members of a black gang shot up a black revival center during a service?

McNamara pointed out that the Stuart case was not the first instance where the media’s motives were questioned. In 1976, the story asked, did the media underplay an incident in which a white man was beaten by blacks because it came at a time of high racial tension? By the same token, did news reports overplay an assault on a black lawyer who was stabbed with an American flag on City Hall Plaza? And how about cases involving the slaying of a Harvard football star who was killed in a district known as the Combat Zone in 1977? And the rape/murder of a white nurse by two black men in 1981?

In the end, McNamara concluded, no one had any answers. But even if the Stuart shootings were hyped, said Haith, it may prove worth it in the long run if it spurred officials into action to help stop the spread of drugs.

In addition to the moral, the secular, the official, and the philosophical planes on which the story was by then moving, there was one more to be heard from: the religious.

The night before, a Catholic service had been held for Carol at Mission Church, a few blocks from where Chuck had pulled off to the side to wait for police and paramedics to find him. The Reverend Joseph F. Krastel, who had never met Carol or Chuck, asked the three hundred-plus Mission Hill residents who had jammed the church to pray not only for Carol and the members of her family, but for themselves as well. “This evening, as we try to console the Stuart family, we must also ask God to help us, for we are desperate,” he said, referring to the prevailing atmosphere that made such a crime possible.

His concerns were echoed by State Representative Kevin Fitzgerald, who represents Mission Hill. “We are here not only to share our concern, sadness, and prayer for the Stuart family, but to all victims of senseless violence.”

Mission Hill, as a result of the shooting of Chuck and Carol rather than past deficiencies, was being asked to accept a heavy load of guilt, to bare itself to the world as a lawless jungle. It would prove itself up to the responsibility. But other players in other scenarios would not. Not even seventy-two hours had passed since McLaughlin had answered Chuck’s call, but already the situation was fragmenting into clearly defined problem areas. As time passed, those areas would become even more sharply defined, and the situation would become even more fragmented. There were three shots fired in Carol Stuart’s Toyota that October night. Only three, but the damage they did was beyond comprehension. Not only had they taken one life (it soon would become two, then three), but like the bullet that ripped through Chuck’s abdomen, damaging everything in its path, the results of events precipitated by the shooting would rip through Boston’s social, moral, political, legal, and racial stratas, creating wounds that might never be repaired.

October 28, 1989

Saturday

The memorial service at Mission Church, as touching as it was, was only the preliminary. The main event was Carol’s funeral. More than eight hundred people turned out on the bright Saturday morning for the service at St. James Church in Medford. It was the same church in which she and Chuck had been married 1,475 days earlier. And it was the church in which Chuck and Carol’s baby would have been baptized if October 23 had not happened.

It seemed as though everyone who was anyone was there. Packed into the church along with family members and close friends were Governor Dukakis, Mayor Flynn, Police Commissioner Roache, Cardinal Bernard Law, who was dressed in full regalia complete with cope and miter, and scores of city and state officials. Off to one side, inconspicuous among the brighter lights, was a striking, athletic-looking blonde named Debbie Allen, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student who had worked with Chuck at Kakas & Sons for a couple of summers. On that day she melted into the background. In a short time she would have her picture splashed across the newspapers and flashed on TV screens.

Chuck, of course, was not there. He was still in the intensive care unit at BCH. But when the time came, Brian Parsons, looking weary and old beyond his years, read the farewell message his friend had written. “Good night, sweet wife, my love,” he read, squinting to decipher Chuck’s wavy penmanship. “God has called you to his hands, not to take you away from me…but to bring you away from the cruelty and violence that fill this world.” Among the mourners, the tears flowed copiously. Deeply moved himself, Parsons continued in a wavering voice, reading how Chuck was moved by Carol’s ability to bring joy and kindness to everyone. When he finished, the church was silent, except for sobs that rose and fell like waves on the beach.

When the brief service was over, the pallbearers marched forward. Among them, distinguished by his shoulder-length curly hair and erect bearing, was Matthew Stuart. Within hours he would depart for California. Why he left Boston is uncertain. He
said
it was a long visit to his girlfriend’s relatives. In any case, he did not return to Massachusetts until mid-December, some six weeks later. And by that time all hell was breaking loose.

Chapter 6

Late October-November 1989

While their bosses took time out to go to the funeral, the workaday cops continued their massive and relentless search for a violent, raspy-voiced suspect. The first to be publicly mentioned as a likely candidate was a recent prison escapee, but his name disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared. The next to surface was a hapless druggie and former hard-timer named Alan Swan son.

The twenty-nine-year-old Swanson, a poorly educated black who grew up in housing projects in New York and Boston, had three things going against him: 1) He was in the Mission Hill project when Chuck and Carol were shot; 2) he was living in an apartment that was not his; and 3) he owned a black sweatsuit.

Swanson was no stranger to police. In the not too-distant past he served time in Walpole State Prison for armed robbery. While there, one of the friends he made among the inmates was another black man from Boston who was doing time for pulling a gun on a police officer. That prisoner’s name was William Bennett; his friends called him “Willie.” It was a friendship that would last over the years. Before long Swanson and Bennett would be closer together than they ever wanted to be.