Suicide of Man Whose Wife Was Slain Stuns Boston

A man who was considered the tragic victim of a brutal, racially tinged crime in which his wife and unborn baby were fatally wounded apparently hurled himself off a bridge to his death Thursday after learning that he had become the chief suspect in the October shooting.

The drowned body of Charles Stuart was recovered from Boston Harbor on Thursday afternoon shortly after Suffolk County Dist. Atty. Newman Flanagan stunned the city with the allegation that the entire drama had been an elaborate ruse on the part of Stuart.

The focus of the case swung sharply Wednesday night, when Stuart’s brother, Matthew, told authorities that his brother had given him a bag containing a gun and some of Carol Stuart’s belongings, including an engagement ring that her husband later reported stolen during the alleged robbery. Matthew Stuart’s lawyer, John Perenyi, said in a television interview that Charles Stuart had tossed the bag to his brother at the scene of the crime, where the two had previously arranged to meet. Also among its contents was a weapon, believed to be a nickel-plated, snub-nosed revolver, Perenyi said.

Only days ago, most Bostonians believed that the murder of Carol Stuart was an open-and-shut case in which a black man with a criminal record had abducted an affluent young suburban couple as they headed home from a birthing class at a Boston hospital and shot them both in a robbery attempt. What riveted local and national attention to the Oct. 23 shooting was the fact that a camera crew for the CBS television show “Rescue 911” had captured the drama of a wounded Charles Stuart making a desperate call for help from his car phone as his wife, seven months pregnant, lay dying beside him.

For many suburban whites, the tragedy reinforced perceptions that the inner city had become a savage and dangerous place; for blacks and others who live in neighborhoods where crime is an everyday occurrence often ignored by the public and media, the unprecedented manhunt for the killer of an affluent woman lawyer only added to long-festering bitterness in a metropolitan area that has long been troubled by racial divisiveness.

If anything united the polarized city, it was sympathy for Charles M. Stuart Jr., the handsome one-time football star who was recovering from his serious gunshot wound to the abdomen and who had lost his wife and the premature baby boy, who had survived only 17 days after being delivered by Cesarean section from his unconscious mother.

Many in the racially mixed Mission Hill section where the murder occurred complained that police were indiscriminately harassing black men there, but few outside the neighborhood seemed willing to listen when the family of the chief suspect, William Bennett, contended that he was being framed. Only last week, local media cited police sources as saying that Stuart himself had picked Bennett out of a police lineup.

So it shook Boston on Thursday when Flanagan announced that the 29-year-old furrier’s story of his wife’s murder was flatly “not true” and that “the focus of the entire investigation moved onto Mr. Stuart.”

Flanagan said he had ordered Stuart’s arrest Wednesday night, but investigators could not locate the suspect. Officials retrieved Stuart’s body from Boston Harbor several hours after finding his car containing his driver’s license and a brief handwritten note on the Mystic River Tobin Bridge. “Basically, it would be fair to say that he could not accept . . . the allegations or the statements that were made about him,” Flanagan said, when asked about the contents of the note.

Perenyi said that Matthew Stuart had confided the truth to family members but did not provide the evidence to investigators until he heard media reports that Charles Stuart had singled out the 39-year-old Bennett, who was innocent of the crime, as his assailant. “It was the identification of Mr. Bennett by Chuck Stuart that pushed Matthew over the brink,” Perenyi said.

Earlier, Flanagan displayed Carol Stuart’s diamond engagement ring, which he said had been obtained by the district attorney’s office. He also said divers had recovered Carol Stuart’s Gucci bag, makeup and wallet from a nearby river bottom. But he did not mention the gun later described by Perenyi.

Charles Stuart’s initial description of his assailant did not include some of the physical characteristics matching Bennett. The suspect had been arrested and held for more than a month on an unrelated charge of armed robbery.

Though Flanagan cleared Bennett of murdering Carol Stuart and her premature baby, the public exoneration did little to mollify feelings of resentment in Mission Hill.

“From my point of view, we were mistreated,” said Nancy Negron, 33, a longtime Mission Hill resident of Puerto Rican descent. “When you said you were from Mission Hill, people looked at you like you were a criminal. We have a lot of decent people here.”

Charlie Brown, 63, a black resident of the Mission Hill public housing project near the site of the Stuart murder, said that he, like many of his neighbors, had long felt that police were looking in the wrong place for the murderer.

“All the black people here get blamed for whatever happens,” he said. “It’s tough. I felt all the time that something was wrong about what the police and the newspapers said was going on.”

Robert Sheketoff, who had been Bennett’s attorney, underscored the sentiments of Mission Hill’s residents, saying: “Whatever led them in the wrong direction--stupidity or racism or whatever it was--they just jumped right on the bandwagon to convict this guy in the press.”

Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, in remarks Thursday afternoon to reporters, made an apology of sorts to Boston’s black community, saying: “I think all of us must say to the people of Mission Hill, the black community and all the families of our neighborhoods in Boston that this terrible amount of negative attention we have faced was, in fact, unnecessary.”

The revelations also raised questions about the role the media had played in the case. Investigators pointedly noted that they had never publicly identified Bennett as the chief suspect, suggesting that the perception had been created in the media.

As recently as Dec. 29, for example, the Boston Globe had cited an unnamed source as saying that Stuart had positively identified Bennett in a police lineup. “It was absolutely crystal clear. That’s the guy,” the Globe quoted its source as saying.

Globe Editor John S. Driscoll issued a statement Thursday defending his paper’s coverage as “accurate, thorough, fair and consistent. We reported events as they occurred and as they were told to us. We relied on official statements and credible sources throughout our coverage.”

With a grand jury continuing to investigate the crime, many other questions remained unanswered. No motive was revealed, although rumors circulated that Stuart had taken out a large insurance policy on his wife. Nor was it known how Stuart himself was shot in the abdomen.

Many also were haunted by the irony of Charles Stuart’s final tribute to his wife, read at her funeral Mass, which he could not attend because he was still hospitalized.

“Now you sleep away from me. I will never again know the feeling of your hand in mine, but I will always feel you. I miss you and I love you,” he wrote.

Nonetheless, he also wrote of the murderer: “In our souls, we must forgive this sinner, because (God) would too.”