Linked to Wife’s Murder, Mate Jumps to His Death : Suspect: Husband leaps off Boston bridge after police discount story of gunman attacking couple.

A man who told police his pregnant wife was fatally wounded by a robber as they left a hospital childbirth class killed himself this morning hours after becoming a suspect in the slaying, police said.

The body of Charles Stuart of suburban Reading was pulled from the harbor and positively identified, said State Police Trooper Barbara Bennett.

Stuart’s wife, Carol, was fatally wounded Oct. 23 and their son, Christopher, delivered prematurely by Cesarean section as his mother lay dying, survived just 17 days after the widely publicized shootings.

“Basically, it’s fair to say, he could not handle the allegations or statements made about him,” Suffolk County Prosecutor Newman Flanagan said, describing a handwritten suicide note found in Stuart’s car.

Stuart, who spent more than a month in the hospital after being wounded in the shootings he blamed on a robber, died after he jumped off Tobin Bridge into Boston Harbor.

Flanagan said Stuart became a suspect Wednesday after Boston police and investigators from his office interrogated several people late into the night.

The prosecutor said the dramatic story Stuart initially told about being attacked by an unknown robber “is not true.” He would not elaborate, or speculate on a motive.

Stuart, the 29-year-old manager of a fur store, had told police that he and his wife, 30, a lawyer, were leaving Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston after attending a birthing class when an assailant commandeered their car and forced them to drive into an adjacent neighborhood, where he robbed and shot them. Carol Stuart, seven months pregnant, was shot in the head, Stuart in the abdomen.

Although critically wounded, Stuart summoned help on his car telephone. His frantic 10-minute call to police and the dispatcher’s efforts to determine where the car was were broadcast nationally and prompted an outpouring of sympathy for Stuart.

Flanagan would not comment on a report by WNEV-TV that Stuart became the prime suspect after his brother Matthew went to police and offered information.

Edward Marchand, chief of police in Charles Stuart’s hometown of Reading, said Stuart’s house had been watched by police overnight after Boston police informed the suburban police that Stuart was a suspect. But Stuart never returned home.

The shootings had shocked the city and caused some racial tension; Stuart had described the attacker as a black man.