Murder in Boston (8 page)

Early in October, Swanson didn’t have a place to stay, so a friend said he could use his apartment in Mission Hill. Gratefully Swanson, his girlfriend, and their three children moved in.

On the day after Chuck and Carol were shot, several of Swanson’s old prison buddies came by to tell him to keep a low profile because he fit the general description of the alleged Stuart attacker and police were looking to arrest somebody. One of those who made a special trip to warn him, Swanson said later, was Willie Bennett.

“That’s cool,” Swanson told them all. “I’m going to get in that apartment, and I ain’t going nowhere.”

He didn’t have to. The police came to him. Without warning, he said, a squad of police burst through the door and told him he was under arrest on a charge of breaking and entering, apparently because he was found in an apartment in which he was not supposed to be.

Even at that stage, Swanson said, he was not too worried. But an iceball formed in his stomach when one grim-faced officer came out of the bathroom and gave him a hateful glance. “He’s the one,” the officer muttered. Soaking in a plastic bucket in the bathroom was a black jogging suit.

The suit fit the description of the clothing Chuck had said his attacker wore all right, except for one minor difference. Chuck had said the assailant’s suit had a red stripe. Swanson’s suit had a white stripe. Apparently that didn’t matter.

According to the
Globe
, the detective who ordered Swanson’s arrest, Paul J. Murphy, had to make a formal request for a search warrant before he could confiscate the garment. When Murphy drew up his request for a judge to sign, he stated that he wanted to search for a black jogging suit with “red
or white
stripes” (italics added).

Swanson was dragged off to jail, and as he explained in an interview to
Globe
staffer Sean Murphy, that is where his troubles really began.

Although he was being held for breaking and entering, not for murdering Carol and shooting Charles, the jail grapevine quickly had him pegged as the gunman. From then on, he said, it was a constant round of harassment from both guards and fellow prisoners. They taunted him ceaselessly, he said, and made sure he didn’t eat because by the time his food tray got to him he discovered that someone had always spit in it. He was saved from starvation, he figured, by a few good friends who slipped him junk food from the jail canteen.

Ten days after he was arrested, his court-appointed lawyer demanded a trial. By that time the original B&E charge had been upgraded to unarmed burglary. But just before he went into court, it was inexplicably reduced to simple trespassing. He was found not guilty, but before he could be released he was charged with another crime: armed robbery.

After another ten days he was tried on that charge. The man whom Swanson had allegedly held up refused to testify during the proceeding, claiming that police had intimidated him to make him sign the complaint against Swanson.

In the meantime, another man had been arrested, and he was considered a more likely suspect than Swanson in the Stuart shootings. Because they had someone else to focus on, police lost interest in Swanson and he was no longer considered a suspect. The armed robbery charge was dropped, and he was released.

You could have knocked him over with a match, Swanson said, when he heard the name of the new suspect. It was his old friend from Walpole and, more lately, Mission Hill: Willie Bennett.

If all of life’s losers were to be gathered in a single huge room, Willie Bennett would have a reserved seat on the first row.

A thirty-nine-year-old ne’er-do-well with a grudge against policemen, Bennett has been a problem for law enforcement officers since he was fourteen.

A not-too-bright student who was having a rough time in school to begin with, Bennett dropped out in the seventh grade and took to the streets. His first recorded arrest was in January 1964, when the fourteen-year-old was picked up for robbing parking meters. Five months later he was arrested again for stealing a woman’s purse. Over the next few years he built a sizable record for minor crimes. But in 1973 he moved into the big leagues when he was sentenced to six years for shooting a policeman in the leg.

According to a Mike Barnicle column, Bennett and another man decided to rob a taxi driver. The man had only forty-two dollars, and that apparently made Bennett angry. So he demanded the man’s shoes, too. When the driver was slow to comply, Bennett allegedly shot him in the stomach. Later he discovered that the man couldn’t give him his shoes because he didn’t have any. He was an amputee.

Two years later, in 1981, Bennett was stopped for a traffic violation and decided not to accept the ticket. When the officer offered the paper to Bennett, Bennett reached under the seat of his car and came up with a shotgun. Relieving the officer of his pistol, he shot out the front tire of the patrol car so he couldn’t be followed, threatened to shoot the cop if he tried to do anything, and sped off. Three months later police tracked Bennett to where he was staying in the apartment of a friend. When the officers burst through the door, Bennett scooped up a .357 Magnum and screamed, “You ain’t taking me alive!” Before he could fire, one of the officers, in a scene straight out of a John Wayne movie, shot Bennett in the hand. Bennett was eventually sentenced to seven years for assault and armed robbery.

In retrospect it was almost inevitable that he would not be at least questioned in connection with the Stuart incident. In the early days of the investigation, police still were thinking that the attack was perpetrated by someone who had a record of violent crimes. As a matter of routine, they combed their records for people meeting that profile. Not surprisingly, Bennett’s name surfaced very quickly. Unfortunately for Bennett, his name was already in the mill.

Three weeks before Chuck and Carol were shot, a black man wearing a red baseball cap, a blue jacket, and jeans had sauntered into a video store on Boylston Avenue in the Brookline neighborhood, which is not far from Mission Hill. Glaring at the clerk, he whipped a snub-nosed, nickel-plated revolver from his pocket. “I want everybody here,” he said, waving the terrified clerk into a corner. Summoning the store manager and a luckless customer, he ordered them, along with the clerk, to lie spread-eagle on the floor. “I’m going to kill you all,” he growled, reaching into the cash register drawer. While they trembled in anticipation of instant death, the robber scooped up the money—$642, it turned out—spun around, and dashed out the door. When asked later if the robber had any distinguishing physical characteristics, the victims said that, as a matter of fact, he did. He had a scruffy beard and a raspy voice.

Ah-ha, thought the police. Listen to this: Baseball cap. Black man. Scruffy beard. Raspy voice. Snubnosed, nickel-plated revolver. Armed robber. Little apparent regard for life. Right age bracket. Same general size and weight. He sounded like a strong suspect to them. But there was more.

Bennett had a nephew named Joey Bennett, who lived in Mission Hill. The fifteen-year-old Joey was something of a braggart. And he liked to boast about his uncle’s exploits.

Joey Bennett had a friend named Dereck Jackson. On October 24, the day after the Stuart shootings, the seventeen-year-old Jackson, who also lived in Mission Hill, went to visit his friend Joey. While he was there a man he did not know came in, and Joey introduced him as his uncle Willie. What occurred next is a little confusing because there are conflicting stories. But based on what those involved have said so far, it happened like this:

A few minutes after he arrived, Joey told Jackson he had something he wanted to show him. He took him into his bedroom and displayed some newspaper clippings detailing the more spectacular of his uncle Willie’s brushes with the law.

Jackson, remembering that morning’s news broadcasts, then asked, “Did he do the Stuarts, too?”

“Yeah,” Joey Bennett replied, laughing heartily.

The next day, Jackson recalled, he ran into another friend, eighteen-year-old Eric Whitney. Bursting with the information he had learned about Joey’s uncle, Jackson breathlessly related the details of his visit to Whitney.

It happened, however, that Whitney’s mother, Maralynda, was having a romantic relationship with a police officer named Trent Holland. Whitney told his mother about Joey’s uncle Willie. She told Holland. He passed the information on to Detective Peter J. O’Malley, who was investigating the Stuart shootings.

Soon after his unfortunate meeting with Whitney, Jackson was summoned to the homicide division headquarters to meet with O’Malley. When he arrived he found Whitney and his girlfriend also there.

Alone in a room with O’Malley, Jackson said he told the detective what had happened in Joey’s apartment, adding that he thought Joey had been joking about his uncle Willie’s involvement. According to Jackson, O’Malley called him a liar, saying he had heard a different story from Whitney. Jackson said the detective then threatened to file charges against him that could result in a twenty-year prison term.

“Let me take a lie detector test,” a frightened Jackson pleaded. “That’ll show I’m telling the truth.”

According to Jackson, O’Malley stared at him angrily and said the closest he would get to a lie detector would be to be thrown into a small room with a large policeman.

O’Malley, according to Jackson, then called, Whitney into the room. With Whitney present, Jackson said he was asked to repeat his version of what had happened in Joey’s apartment. When he denied that he had heard Willie Bennett confess, Whitney interrupted him.

“No, no, Dee,” Whitney said, implying that was not the way it happened.

Frightened by the threat of prison and a beating, and with the knowledge that his friend apparently had told a different tale, Jackson said he then told another story about hearing Willie Bennett confess. O’Malley, satisfied, asked Jackson to repeat his second story into a tape recorder. Then, he said, O’Malley gave him a twenty-dollar bill and told him to go celebrate. That, at least, was Dereck Jackson’s version of the sequence of events; O’Malley has not answered the accusations. However, District Attorney Newman Flanagan has denied the charges.

The next step was for O’Malley to get a warrant for Bennett’s arrest and a paper allowing him to search the apartment where Bennett was believed to be staying, along with his mother’s apartment in Mission Hill. In applying for the warrant, O’Malley cited the statements by Dereck Jackson and Eric Whitney that implicated Bennett. But the detective had other ammunition as well. Tucked in his jacket pocket were two additional statements, one from a twenty-year-old woman named Tony Jackson and other from a high school student named David Brimage.

According to O’Malley, the woman, Tony Jackson, told him that she had heard Bennett as much as admit shooting Chuck and Carol. What Bennett was alleged to have said was: “The bullet was not meant for the lady; it was meant for the man.”

And the high school student was said to have sworn that he heard Joey Bennett admit that his uncle had done the shooting.

But Jackson and Brimage were frosting on the cake. O’Malley was relying on what he said Dereck Jackson and Eric Whitney told him as the foundation for his request for the warrants against Bennett. In his request, O’Malley said Jackson provided a plethora of details about what Bennett was alleged to have said. For instance, Bennett was supposed to have admitted before the small group of youths in Joey Bennett’s apartment that he had ordered Stuart to keep his eyes on the road and not to look in the rearview mirror. Those were the magic words: “Do not look in the rearview mirror.” Police had not revealed that Chuck had told them that. Those words were something they were holding back to help separate the wheat from the chaff when they questioned suspects. That is normal procedure in police departments everywhere: they want to be able to say that a suspect is genuine because he could not possibly have learned a certain fact from reading the newspapers. In this case, the fact that Jackson allegedly used those particular words added considerable weight to O’Malley’s application. Jackson also was supposed to have heard Bennett claim that he had been wearing a “black Adidas jumpsuit” at the time, and this also fit with Chuck’s description of the attacker.

“Jackson also stated,” O’Malley wrote in what apparently was designed as the kicker to his request, “that Willie Bennett then demonstrated with the gun in his hand how he had shot them.”

The detective’s argument was persuasive. Suffolk Superior Court Judge John J. Irwin, Jr., signed the warrants.

By this time the case was becoming even more emotional; the roller coaster was still going up. On Thursday, November 9, at 4:34
P
.
M
., baby Christopher Stuart died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Age, seventeen days. Weight, three pounds thirteen ounces. Although it is not unusual for babies born two months premature to survive, the fact that Christopher had apparently been without oxygen for some thirty minutes before he was delivered seemed to have proved too much of a barrier to overcome. Chuck, who was still being treated at BCH, had been notified earlier that Christopher’s death seemed imminent. Apparently shaken by the news, he asked to be transported by ambulance to Brigham and Women’s so he could see his child. In a dramatic meeting in the hospital’s intensive care unit, Chuck cried over the infant before he was taken back to his own hospital bed.