Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning, a new docuseries about the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, revisits the case with an eye toward Boston’s stark racial divisions.
In October 1991, Mark Wahlberg’s erstwhile hip-hop crew, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, released “Wildside,” the second single from their debut studio album, Music for the People. The Boston group sampled Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” reinterpreting the rock classic as a rap anthem that warned of the dangers lurking in their New England hometown. With no surplus of elegance, the song’s third verse tackled the October 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, a crime that roiled the city: “Charles and his brother came up with a plan / Kill Carol, collect a big check / Blame it on a Black man. What the heck!”
“Wildside” was arguably the most hackneyed narration of that case, in which Carol’s husband, Charles, conspired to kill her for insurance money, then told the police that they’d been attacked by a Black man. (Both of the Stuarts were white.) But the Funky Bunch wasn’t the first to use the Stuart story as entertainment fodder. In the first year after Carol’s murder, there was a “special episode” of the reality-television series Rescue 911 (which included actual footage of the dying woman’s pregnant stomach), a made-for-TV film, and a Law & Order episode referencing the story. More crime shows and docudramas would follow. Even poems have been written about the case, and of course, it’s invoked in City on a Hill, the 2019 crime drama co–executive produced by Boston’s unofficial ambassador to Hollywood, Ben Affleck.
So what else could there be left to say about the Stuart murder? I was skeptical heading into a new HBO docuseries about the case. Considering the glut of true-crime productions now spanning every imaginable artistic medium, I anticipated another exploitative repackaging of a family’s public pain. But Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning is a worthwhile addition, largely because it resists two of the most common (and most troubling) impulses of true-crime narratives: relishing the gory specifics of a real human being’s violent death, and spending much of its run time on the psychology of a murderer. Instead, the three-part series revisits the notorious case with an eye toward how Charles Stuart’s initial accusation both relied on and intensified Boston’s stark racial divisions.
Even when it retreads widely publicized facts of the original crime, the care and depth with which the director, Jason Hehir, handles his hometown’s macabre history make the series feel insightful. Today, it suggests, Boston remains a liberal bastion perennially concerned about its racist branding yet seldom committed to undoing the structural discrimination that created that public image. In repeatedly underscoring how the racism of the city’s police force and media figured into the Stuart case, Murder in Boston reveals how vigilantism neglects the victims ostensibly being avenged, especially women.
Hehir is best known for directing The Last Dance, about Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls—another docuseries about a figure whose story has been retold repeatedly over decades. Murder in Boston offers a similarly modern—and more definitive—look at its main subjects. But where The Last Dance was sometimes constrained by Jordan’s input, Murder in Boston makes no attempt to soften valid criticisms of Boston, and certainly not of Charles Stuart. The first episode opens with the 911 call that Charles made the night Carol was shot, in which he told the police that they’d been attacked by a Black man in a tracksuit while on their way home from a birthing class at a downtown hospital. The inclusion of this archival clip, which comes before Charles’s involvement in his wife’s killing is presented in the second episode, underscores the cynicism of his ploy to pin the grisly crime on a phantom.
Read: The gross spectacle of murder fandom
But Murder in Boston isn’t a close read of a killer so much as an indictment of the people and the system that nearly exonerated him. By the time Charles Stuart’s brother Matthew confessed that Charles had actually orchestrated Carol’s death, the city’s Black residents had already suffered the devastating consequences of Charles’s convenient lie. As one New York Times op-ed from January 1990 outlines, the narrative of a “mad dog Black gunman” targeting an innocent “Camelot couple” had gripped the city. Then-Mayor Ray Flynn called for “every available detective” to be assigned to the Stuart case, and pledged to “get the animals responsible” for the attack. Republican politicians called for the return of the death penalty, which had been abolished in Massachusetts in 1984. Officers ramped up their stop-and-frisk campaigns in Boston’s Black neighborhoods, especially Mission Hill, where the police had found the Stuarts’ car the night of the attack. The media echoed Charles’s claim with little pushback, even following his public suicide the morning after his brother’s confession.
The documentary includes interviews with Dereck Jackson, a Mission Hill resident who was a teenager at the time of the murder. He looks visibly shaken as he describes how Boston police pushed him to identify Willie Bennett—one of two Black men wrongfully arrested in the case—as the killer. Bennett was exonerated shortly after Matthew Stuart informed the police of his brother Charles’s guilt, but the ordeal didn’t end there. Days after Charles’s suicide, The Boston Globe’s Mike Barnicle published multiple columns praising the police for their handling of the case and suggesting that Black political leaders were opportunistic in their defenses of Bennett. Later that year, Bennett was convicted of an unrelated robbery, for which he served 12 years in prison. The Boston police never admitted to mistreating Bennett in the Stuart case, and his family’s attempts to sue the city of Boston in federal and state courts earned them only $12,500 after years of litigation. Bennett’s mother died a few months after getting the money, having never received a public apology. His younger sister told the Globe that she had heard their mother reference the Stuart case in her last moments.
The irony of Boston’s immediate uproar over falsified incidences of “Black-on-white violence” is how easily real crimes like Charles Stuart’s then go uninterrogated. Even as the city’s police, media, and concerned white citizens clamored to express concerns about the safety of women and children, their racist hysteria created a blind spot that left victims like Carol and her unborn child unprotected. On this note, Murder in Boston does sometimes lose sight of the larger phenomenon of intimate-partner violence—in the United States, homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women. This omission was a consistent feature of the case’s media coverage: In the days after Charles’s suicide, Carol’s father told The Washington Post, “With all the stuff that is being reported, I wish somebody would say something about what a wonderful daughter we lost.”
The docuseries, which was produced in conjunction with an extensive investigation (and accompanying podcast) by The Boston Globe, is most revelatory when surfacing new findings and pointing out gaps in the original coverage. It paints a troubling picture of the city’s antipathy toward Black Bostonians, and spends significant time with the people who played a hand in stoking resentment or legitimizing Charles’s account: In one interview, a retired detective who worked the Stuart case insists that he regrets nothing about the police’s approach—and seems to even suggest that he still believes that Bennett was the murderer. A former Boston Herald journalist who covered the story speaks candidly about the regret she feels over not pushing harder to find sources who would’ve implicated Charles sooner. (By the time of Matthew Stuart’s confession to the police, days after his brother had falsely identified Willie Bennett as the attacker, 33 people knew that Charles had killed his wife, according to the Globe’s new investigation.) And through archival footage, Murder in Boston contrasts Mayor Flynn’s aggressive profiling in the first days of the case with the fact that incidents of racial violence appeared to have dramatically decreased early in his tenure.
The elapsed time between the murder and the documentary’s production grants it a gravity that many previous depictions of the Stuart case have lacked. For viewers already familiar with the case, or those less inclined to be surprised by racism in policing and media coverage, the new series also offers a rare look at how Black Bostonians have attempted to recover from that damage. It’s easy to look back now and condemn public misdeeds from three decades ago, but much of the devastation wrought then remains. In some of the documentary’s more affecting moments, Murder in Boston turns its attention to Mission Hill residents, Black journalists, and members of Willie Bennett’s family. Speaking about her uncle’s arrest and the police raid of his mother’s home, Bennett’s niece echoes her relatives’ sentiments about the lack of relief they feel: “If none of that would’ve happened,” she says, “I feel like my grandmother would’ve lived longer.”
The Final Word on a Notorious Killing
14
0
14.12.2023
Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning, a new docuseries about the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, revisits the case with an eye toward Boston’s stark racial divisions.
In October 1991, Mark Wahlberg’s erstwhile hip-hop crew, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, released “Wildside,” the second single from their debut studio album, Music for the People. The Boston group sampled Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” reinterpreting the rock classic as a rap anthem that warned of the dangers lurking in their New England hometown. With no surplus of elegance, the song’s third verse tackled the October 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, a crime that roiled the city: “Charles and his brother came up with a plan / Kill Carol, collect a big check / Blame it on a Black man. What the heck!”
“Wildside” was arguably the most hackneyed narration of that case, in which Carol’s husband, Charles, conspired to kill her for insurance money, then told the police that they’d been attacked by a Black man. (Both of the Stuarts were white.) But the Funky Bunch wasn’t the first to use the Stuart story as entertainment fodder. In the first year after Carol’s murder, there was a “special episode” of the reality-television series Rescue 911 (which included actual footage of the dying woman’s pregnant stomach), a made-for-TV film, and a Law & Order episode referencing the story. More crime shows and docudramas would follow. Even poems have been written about the case, and of course, it’s invoked in City on a Hill, the 2019 crime drama co–executive produced by Boston’s unofficial ambassador to Hollywood, Ben Affleck.
So what else could there be left to say about the Stuart murder? I was skeptical heading into a new HBO docuseries about the case. Considering the glut of true-crime productions now spanning every imaginable artistic medium, I anticipated another exploitative repackaging of a family’s public pain. But Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning is a worthwhile addition, largely because it resists two of the most common (and most troubling) impulses of true-crime narratives: relishing the gory specifics of a real human being’s violent death, and spending much of its run time on the psychology of a murderer. Instead, the three-part series revisits the notorious case with an eye toward how Charles........
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