Murder in Boston (9 page)

Christopher’s death was ruled a homicide to fulfill a legal requirement. If his death were to be judged a murder, then whoever killed his mother could be charged with a second slaying. The official report listed the cause of death as complications stemming from his mother’s gunshot wound.

This was almost more drama than Bostonians could take. Progress reports on Chuck’s and Christopher’s conditions and the status of the investigations were a daily staple for news junkies, who sopped up all the details provided and clamored for more. When Christopher died, the pressure on police to make an arrest magnified immensely. Undoubtedly that played some part in O’Malley’s plans. If nothing else, it made his efforts more urgent. On the night of November 11, a Saturday, about fifty-two hours after Christopher’s death, O’Malley, with warrants in hand, ordered simultaneous raids on the apartments of Bennett’s girlfriend and his mother.

The girlfriend, Faye Nelson, lived in Burlington. Bennett’s mother, a tiny white-haired woman, lived in Alton Court in Mission Hill. Police officers knew Bennett sometimes stayed there. They also knew that Alton Court was only a short walk from the spot where Chuck said he and his wife were attacked.

Officers found Bennett in his girlfriend’s place. Cuffing him quickly, they bundled him into a squad car and rushed him off to be booked, photographed, fingerprinted, and tossed into a cell. As badly as they wanted to charge him with the murders of Carol and Christopher, they had no physical evidence to do so. So they kept him instead on armed robbery charges relating to the robbery of the Brookline video store.

Bennett claimed that he was with his girlfriend on the night Carol and Chuck were shot. That would have been hard to disprove, particularly considering the fact that police had recovered neither a black sweatsuit nor a pistol. But then something happened that made it even worse for the unlucky Bennett. No sooner had he sworn to interrogators that he was with Faye Nelson when Carol and Chuck were shot than his two sisters volunteered to a reporter that he had been with
them
that night. Contradicting their brother, they alleged that the three of them were in the Parker Street Lounge, a sleazy Mission Hill bar, on an errand for their mother when Chuck and Carol were accosted a few blocks away.

To the police, it was a laugh. Sure, said the skeptical cops. Here’s a guy with a long rap sheet who fits the description of the Stuart assailant saying he was with his girlfriend in Burlington. But his
sisters
say they were somewhere else. The least they could do was get their stories straight, they must have thought. What they said was, While you work out your alibi we’re going to keep Willie Bennett in the slammer.

Chapter 7

Bennett’s arrest appeared to be the beginning of a satisfactory conclusion to a drama that had held people around the world enthralled for almost a month. In fact, it was only the beginning of a situation that would get more tangled and confused by the day. And those days would stretch into weeks, then the weeks into months. In hindsight, rather than being the first step toward an illuminating experience in which all would be explained, Bennett’s arrest was only a quick peek into a darkened warehouse; for every question it purported to answer, three more unanswered questions popped up. But at the time no one knew that was going to be the case.

Indeed, Bennett’s November 11 capture had taken a considerable load off police, who were under tremendous pressure to find a suspect. And he
did
look like a good suspect. He fit precisely the physical description Chuck had given of his attacker, a fact that still has not been not fully explained. But he not only looked like the person Chuck had said shot him and his wife, he matched the psychological profile as well. In addition, as far as the public knew, there were solid witness reports linking Bennett to the attack. Although Bennett was being held only on armed robbery charges and not for the murders of Carol and Christopher, police department leaks unquestionably implied that he was then the prime—in fact, the only remaining—suspect in the case.

Predictably, Bennett’s family leaped to his defense, claiming he was being framed because of his long criminal record and his history of violence. But it was hard to argue these claims successfully when Faye Nelson was telling one story about his whereabouts on the night of the Stuart attack and two of his sisters were telling a contradictory one. Plus, there were the statements from Dereck Jackson, Eric Whitney, Tony Jackson (who was not related to Dereck), and David Brimage. Maybe there were others, some that have not surfaced even yet. In any case, police seemed convinced that they had a good case despite the lack of physical evidence. If Bennett had been the assailant, one would expect him, after all, to get rid of the pistol and incriminating jogging suit.

How closely Bennett fit the other two criteria that made his description unique—the patchy beard and raspy voice—is still not known. When Bennett appeared to be arraigned on armed robbery charges relating to the holdup in Brookline, he was clean-shaven. And since he did not speak, it is not on the record if he talks in a raspy, singsong voice. In any case, the victims of the Brookline robbery identified Bennett as the man who held up the video store. Since they presumably saw him before his November 13 arraignment, it may be that he was not clean-shaven when they got a look at him. Whether they heard him talk or not is not known. There was speculation in the
Globe
on November 13 that investigators would seek a court order compelling Bennett to provide a sample of his voice, but whether that ever came about is not known. Such a plan may simply have fallen through the cracks in the wave of developments that were soon to come.

On October 30, a week after the shooting and almost two weeks before Bennett’s arrest, investigators visited Chuck at BCH and showed him pictures of twenty men they then regarded as suspects. It is not known whether Bennett’s picture was in that stack or what Chuck’s reaction was to the photos.

November 13, 1989

Monday

Globe
ombudsman Robert L. Kierstead, in a column that appeared on the newspaper’s op-ed page, addressed reader complaints that the
Globe
had been derelict in not immediately printing a racial description of the man who allegedly shot Chuck and Carol. An ombudsman’s duty at a newspaper is to act as a reader’s advocate on questions of editorial decision making. He is, in other words, the reader’s pipeline into the newsroom.

“A few of these [complaining] readers felt the description was left out because of the race aspect involved,” Kierstead wrote. “Not so. The
Globe
had the race, gender, and approximate height in the [initial] story, but an editor deleted the information because it failed to conform to the newspaper’s stylebook guideline.” Kierstead then proceeded to explain that the stylebook, the editorial department’s bible, specifies that race should be mentioned only when it is pertinent to the story
or
when it is part of a physical description that includes more than just height and gender.

Kierstead went on to say that the newspaper violated its own stylebook on October 25, two days after the shooting, when it published the suspect’s height, age, and race. Kierstead even quoted managing editor Thomas Mulvoy as having confessed to the violation. By October 25, Kierstead said, the
Globe
had enough details about other physical characteristics to justify printing the information that the suspect was a black man.

What makes Kierstead’s column particularly interesting is that it reflects the racial divisions that soon would become much more pronounced. One group was complaining because the suspect
was not
identified as a black man, another group was complaining because he
was
. Up until then the most vocal complaints had come from Bostonians, notably civil rights leaders and community activists, who protested because newspapers
had
described the alleged attacker as a black man, saying that this was an inflammatory, racist action.

November 15, 1989

Wednesday

A Suffolk County grand jury began its investigation into the attack on Chuck and Carol. Although grand jury proceedings are secret, word leaked out that the group was focusing intently on Willie Bennett as the assailant. Both Dereck Jackson and Eric Whitney were called to testify. Although the public would not know about it for another six weeks, the following is what Jackson and Whitney said about their roles in the proceedings and in what happened immediately before and immediately afterward:

The day after he met with O’Malley and was pressured into giving a false story, Jackson said, he called Whitney and suggested the two of them return to the detective’s office and tell them they had been lying about Bennett’s confession.

“Bottom line,” Jackson told his friend, “we got to go back there and tell the truth.”

Whitney said he would talk to Trent Holland, his mother’s policeman boyfriend, about setting up a second meeting. When it came about, he said, he was kept in one room with Holland and another officer while Whitney was closeted in a separate room with O’Malley. One of the officers brought him a chicken sandwich, and while he was eating they started telling him about things that could happen to teenagers in a state penitentiary. Later, when he and Whitney were put in a room together alone, Whitney waved under Jackson’s nose a form he claimed was a booking sheet.

“If we don’t stick to our stories, we’re under arrest,” Whitney said. He glanced around furtively, as though he were afraid of being overheard. “We’re not leaving here, Dee,” he whispered. “They’re talking about twenty years. They’re not playing games.” Then he looked at Jackson pleadingly. “Dee, I want to leave here. Don’t change your story.”

Jackson said he left without talking to O’Malley.

But for days afterward he worried about the spot he had gotten himself into. Then, just before he was to appear before the grand jury, he was called into a meeting with an assistant district attorney, who showed him a transcript of the recorded—and untrue—statement he had made to O’Malley.

“Is this true?” the prosecutor asked, brandishing the statement.

“Y-yes,” Jackson stammered.

A few minutes later he went into the grand jury room and related what he knew was “a blatant lie.”

Frightened about what he had done, Jackson asked for a lawyer. The attorney set up a meeting involving O’Malley, the assistant district attorney who had shown Jackson the statement, the county’s chief trial lawyer, and Whitney. At that meeting Whitney admitted he had never heard Bennett confess to shooting the Stuarts.

The next day, Jackson said, he returned to the grand jury and told the group that he had lied in his earlier statement. He made the admission, he said, even though he had been warned by his lawyer that he could be charged with perjury. But he figured it would be worth it if Bennett did not have to go to jail because of his false testimony.

Two days after Dereck Jackson went public with his assertions against the police, Eric Whitney was interviewed by the
Globe
. Whitney told basically the same story as Jackson—that is, that Holland and then O’Malley had threatened him if he did not say what they wanted to hear. The pressure began with Holland, who brought him pictures of Carol Stuart’s jewelry. While showing him the photos, Holland also fed Whitney details about what Chuck had said the attacker looked like.

Two days later Whitney was summoned by O’Malley, who told him that if he cooperated, he would help him with two charges pending against him, one for shoplifting and one for destruction of property. If he did not cooperate, O’Malley promised that he would see to it that Whitney got a twenty-year prison term.

When he proved reluctant to swear falsely that he had heard Willie Bennett confess, Whitney said O’Malley lost his temper and waved a paper in his face that appeared to be a form calling for his arrest. At that point he decided to cooperate.

Soon afterward he also appeared before the grand jury, and as Jackson had done, he lied. But, also as Jackson had done, he went back before the group the next day and recanted.

At this stage only Jackson’s and Whitney’s versions of these events are public. Police have declined to comment on the allegations. Later, District Attorney Flanagan said that the accusations were baseless and self-serving. The grand jury that met on that day has since been disbanded. The group did not make public anything that transpired in its meetings. But neither did it indict Willie Bennett for the murders of Carol and Christopher Stuart. However, a few days later a judge ordered Bennett held under $50,000 bail for the robbery of the Brookline video store. He wasn’t going anywhere.

November 20, 1989

Monday

A private funeral service was held for Christopher Stuart. Doctors at BCH decided that Chuck, who had undergone a second operation to help correct the damage caused by the gunshot, was too ill to attend the service.

November 21, 1989

Tuesday

News reports indicate that Chuck was shown a second group of photographs of possible suspects and that he registered a “strong physical reaction” to a picture of Bennett. The reports said that he did not make a positive identification, however.