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Shooting Incident

In 1989, 30-year-old Charles Stuart was working as a general manager at an upscale fur store on Newbury Street in Boston, Massachusetts. His beautiful wife, Carol Ann Stuart, was working as a tax attorney while she was carrying their first child.

On October 23rd, 1989, the couple attended a childbirth class at a local hospital. After leaving the class, their bonding night quickly became a nightmare.

Charles called 911 on his car phone to report that he and Carol had been shot by a black man during a carjacking and robbery.

Stuart told the operator he didn’t know his exact location, but eventually, police found him and his wife in Mission Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston.

Ambulances took both of them to the hospital.

Charles had been shot in the stomach, but his injuries weren’t life-threatening, and he survived.

Carol had been shot in the head and died at 2:50 am the next day at the same hospital she had taken the childbirth class hours earlier. Before she passed away, doctors delivered her baby via cesarean section. He was nine weeks premature and suffered from a lack of oxygen during the shooting.

The child was baptized and named Christopher William Stuart, but his time on this earth was short. He passed away 17 days later after Charles took him off life support.

On November 20th, 1989, a little over three weeks after family members laid Carol to rest, her son was buried next to her.

Investigation

When police talked to Charles, he told them that a black man wearing a tracksuit hopped into the back of their vehicle at a stoplight as they drove through Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston.

He forced them to drive to Mission Hill, robbed them, and then shot both of them. Charles claimed he managed to drive away and call for help.

The case was big news in the city, and authorities wanted to get the killer of a pregnant woman and her child off the streets immediately.

They started an aggressive stop-and-frisk campaign on black people in the Mission Hill area.

At the same time, police were hunting for the man in the tracksuit; they were getting tips that Charles had been looking for someone to kill his wife since the summer, but they didn’t bother investigating those leads.

Police arrested 39-year-old William Bennett on unrelated charges and started to focus on him as the killer. December 28th, 1989, Charles picked him out of a lineup.

Break in the case

Just after the new year, Charles’s younger brother Matthew met with Charles’s attorney. He revealed that the carjacking was a lie and a black man wasn’t behind the crime.

On January 3rd, 1990, Matthew went to police to confess.

He told them Charles wanted him to come to Mission Hill on the night of October 23rd. Charles promised to pay Matthew $10,000 to take a bag of items and get rid of them.

When Matthew showed up that night, Charles tossed him Carol’s Gucci purse. Later, Matthew and a friend threw the bag, Carol’s engagement ring, and a gun into a nearby body of water.

Mathew told police he did not know Charles planned to kill his wife. He claimed he saw something slumped next to his brother when he went to Mission Hill that night, but he didn’t know what it was.

Charles takes the easy way out

Charles quickly learned his brother had turned him in, and he hid out in a motel the night of January 3rd.

Facing the prospect of life in prison, he decided to drive to the Tobin Bridge in Chelsea at 7 am the following day and delete himself.

He left a note saying, “Whatever this new accusation is, it has beaten me.”

Matthew’s Faces the music for his role

Authorities charged Matthew with multiple felonies in September 1991. A year later, he pleaded guilty to obstruction and fraud charges and was sentenced to three to five years in prison.

His life was never the same after 1989, and he died of a drug overdose in a homeless shelter in September 2011.