‘We failed the city of Boston’: how a racist manhunt led to chaos in 1989
“My wife’s been shot. I’ve been shot.”
On 23 October 1989 Charles “Chuck” Stuart, who was white, called 911 to report that he and his pregnant wife, Carol, had been carjacked and shot by a Black man in Boston’s Mission Hill neighbourhood. Carol died that night. Their baby died days after being born. Stuart survived and garnered nationwide sympathy.
“I remember when the murder happened and, if you lived in Boston at the time, it was all that anybody was talking about,” says film-maker Jason Hehir. “We’re mostly a sports town, but the Celtics and the Bruins and the Patriots and the Red Sox took a backseat to this case. If you were in a restaurant, on the bus, in school, hanging out with friends on the weekend, it was always a topic of conversation or about to be.”
But the murder investigation was built on a lie – a lie that the police, mayor and media wanted to believe. There had been no Black assailant. Stuart had killed his own wife and child and spun a fantasy that led police to terrorise the Black community and arrest innocent men. When he was finally exposed, Stuart killed himself by jumping off a bridge into the Mystic River.
The Stuart case, and the ways in which it enflamed decades-old racial tensions in Boston, is explored in Hehir’s docuseries Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning, the first episode of which aired on HBO on Monday.
Hehir, 47, whose credits include The Last Dance and Andre The Giant, says via Zoom from Brooklyn, New York: “I’ve never done true crime before, and I never had much of an interest in doing just a story about a murder just for the sake of sensationalism or for the lurid aspect of it.
“I am intrigued by anything where you can tell a larger story through a smaller one, so examining Boston’s racial history through the lens of this case was something that always appealed to me, and finally got the opportunity to do so with HBO a couple of years ago.”
Hehir, who grew up in the suburb of Newton, looks at the big picture and finds a city riddled with paradoxes: liberal politics and world-leading universities offset by racial tensions that had been simmering for decades.
“We are known as a bastion of liberal and progressive ideas and ‘the hub’ – Boston has that nickname for a reason. It is a hub of technology, a hub of innovation and a hub of education and Bostonians are very proud of that. But then there’s this underbelly that we’re not so proud of: there’s been years, if not decades, if not centuries, of racial injustice and bigotry in that city.
“Boston’s not alone. There is bigotry in every city and there is segregation demographically, but in Boston it seems more pronounced and the edge between those neighbourhoods are a lot sharper. It was very easy to tell what neighbourhood you were in by the demographics in Boston, more so than in other cities.”
School desegregation bussing in Boston in the mid-1970s was met with mass protests and violent resistance. Hehir continues: “If you’re a guy like Chuck Stuart, you grew up in that era and now you’re reading the news about the crack epidemic taking hold of innercity Boston and you’re reading about the police stopping and frisking just about any young Black male that they could find because they had permission to do so.
“It wasn’t a far leap for him to take, being a sociopathic maniac, to say, you know what? I’ll just blame a Black man for this and in the city of Boston, all the attention is immediately going to be diverted from me to this phantom Black man that a lot of the city seems to be afraid of.”
Chuck and Carol Stuart were fromtwo blue-collar suburbs of Boston and seemed to be getting ahead. He was the general manager of a furrier and making more than $100,000 a year; she was a lawyer and worked at a publishing company in Newton. After the crime, the media dubbed them the “Camelot couple”.
They attended birthing class at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Mission Hill on 23 October 1989. Then Stuart called 911 and claimed that a Black man had jumped into their blue Toyota Cressida, shooting Carol in the head and Stuart in the abdomen.
Stuart described the supposed assailant as an African American in a black Adidas tracksuit and with a raspy voice. But during the call he never mentioned his dying wife’s name, spoke directly to her, tried to comfort her or tell the 911 dispatcher that his wife was pregnant. He never rolled down the window or opened to door to shout for help.
Hehir recalls: “For years, I found it interesting as to why, in retrospect, we believed this story so readily. I certainly don’t consider myself racist but I was a resident of a suburb of Boston, and one of the people who was reading these papers and listening to these news re