Carol DiMaiti Stuart’s murder was an act of domestic violence
If Carol DiMaiti Stuart was murdered today, the immediate reaction would be, “The husband did it.” But that wasn’t the case in October 1989. When the white suburban mother-to-be was shot after a birthing class in Mission Hill, it was easier for many to believe that a random Black man killed her than to consider what turned out to be the truth — that Carol’s death was an act of domestic violence plotted and planned by her husband, Charles Stuart.
With the Globe’s renewed focus on one of Boston’s most notorious crimes, there’s been a lot of overdue attention on how Stuart, who died by suicide in January 1990 rather than face accountability for a lie that turned this city inside out, exploited the marrow-deep racism that ran through this city’s institutions from law enforcement to the media, including this newspaper.
That’s why convincing many that a Black man murdered a white woman wasn’t a heavy lift.
But Stuart also took advantage of the fact that he and his wife would be considered the antithesis of the stereotypes concerning who commits domestic violence and whose life is endangered and ended because of it.
“With the [Stuart] case, the complete public discourse just pivoted away from even considering that this was a domestic homicide,” said Hema SarangSieminski, deputy director of Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. “It was easier to blame and persecute a Black man in the midst of all this than acknowledge the harm that happened in that relationship.”
In 1989, Debra Robbin was executive director of the New Bedford Women’s Center, an anti-domestic violence organization. When Carol died — and an aggressive manhunt ensued for an unknown perpetrator Stuart identified to police as “a Black man” — Robbin wasn’t convinced they were looking for the right suspect.
“Given the work that I do, my mind did immediately think it was domestic violence,” said Robbin, now Jane Doe’s executive director. “A few years before, a woman was raped on a pool table in
New Bedford [the case that inspired the 1988 Jodie Foster film, “The Accused”] and [the Stuart case] was also close to the time when women’s bodies were being discovered in the New Bedford area. I was in a community where the most unimaginable and horrific kinds of violence [against women] was happening.”
But at the time of Carol’s murder, there wasn’t heightened public consciousness about intimate partner violence. Of course, primarily women and children were being killed. But when it was discussed — if it was discussed at all — it was usually regarded as an isolated incident rather than an epidemic that plagues families and communities nationwide.
And it had not yet been documented that the leading cause of death for pregnant women is murder, usually committed or arranged by a current or former intimate partner or that the risk for perinatal and infant mortality is 36 percent higher for women who experience domestic violence.
Delivered prematurely by caesarean section, Carol’s son, Christopher, lived for 17 days.
The deaths of Carol and Christopher fit into those dire statistics about infant mortality and fatal violence against pregnant women. But there’s also this parallel found in many cases of domestic violence — other people knew what happened to Carol and who was responsible. In the Stuart case, analysis by Globe reporters “identified dozens of regular people — people who would have called themselves good, upright, law-abiding citizens — who helped to hide the truth.”
“People knew and said nothing. I might not be surprised by that, but I’m also horrified because domestic violence thrives in silence,” Robbin said. “And that’s exactly what happened there.”
In the months between Carol’s murder and Stuart’s suicide, the public was fed a steady media diet of the Stuarts’ wedding photos, the beaming young couple stepping from a limousine and seemingly into their bright future. Add that to the fact that Stuart sustained a serious gunshot wound that night and few were willing to openly consider that he might have been involved in his wife’s death. Even after Stuart’s story unraveled, I can recall no discussions that Carol’s murder made her a victim of domestic violence.
We are raised to fear strangers, not those who claim to love us. For all its horrors, the idea of a Black man killing a white woman was more digestible than the reality of a white man from an affluent suburb murdering his wife and unborn child — then trying to frame not just Willie Bennett but Boston’s Black community, which still bears the scars of Stuart’s hideous, racist lie.
Perhaps for many, recognizing the real Charles Stuart — and the act of domestic violence that claimed the lives of Carol and her son — cut too close to home.