Murder in Boston Isn't Another Look at the Carol Stuart Case — It's a Reckoning

The tragic story of Carol DiMaiti Stuart has been told many times before. Perhaps you know the story even if her name doesn’t immediately ring a bell. On October 23, 1989, Carol and her husband Charles were shot on their way home from a birthing class at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Charles, who went by Chuck, told the police that a Black man in his 30s wearing an Adidas track suit had perpetrated the crime.

The heinous act made national news and sent the Boston Police and the Boston media on a dark path. Both institutions were so willing to believe Stuart’s version of events that, as is made exceedingly clear in HBO’s new three-part docuseries Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning, they didn’t follow obvious leads or ask the hard questions. As the series reveals, they didn’t even ask the not-so-hard questions. Everyone involved so desperately wanted to believe the narrative of a good-looking white man and his beautiful pregnant white wife gunned down by a bad Black man.

A 1990 made-for-TV movie starring Ken Olin as Charles Stuart and episodes of Law & Order and A&E’s City Confidential are among the TV productions that have explored this horrific crime. What sets HBO’s Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning apart is a necessary and crucial change in perspective. Stuart, who shot and killed his pregnant wife by shooting her in her head, didn’t want to be a dad, was afraid his wife wouldn’t return to work after giving birth, and much preferred to kill Carol and collect on her life insurance policy. Was he a sociopath? Probably — the whole Stuart family seems more than a little dysfunctional. But that’s not the story that needs to be told here, and producer and director Jason Hehir (The Last Dance) inherently knows this.

We, as a society, have a fascination with true crime, particularly stories like this one of husbands murdering their wives. And yes, Carol and her infant son were victims. But there were a slew of other victims in this tragedy whose stories have yet to be told in full. The predominantly Black community of Mission Hill was basically under siege by the Boston Police. “We all fit the description,” historian Dart Adams says. Willie Bennett, through a rumor gone horribly awry, was arrested for the crime. His picture and name were everywhere. Even after being exonerated, his life never returned to any sense of normalcy and he has become a recluse.

Each of the three episodes takes its name from the series title. The first episode “Roots” explores the racial climate leading up to October 23, 1989. “Most cities are naturally segregated. Boston takes it to an extreme,” Brian McGrory, former executive editor of The Boston Globe, says. From the push to integrate schools to the crack cocaine crisis, the context in which Charles Stuart made these egregious accusations is paramount. “It was open season on Black people,” community activist Ron Bell says about what transpired, as all progress that had been made in Boston race relations almost immediately evaporated.

What truly stands out is the sheer volume of interviews Hehir conducted in order to provide a more complete picture. Of particular importance are the journalists at the time who were front and center reporting on the case and now have to grapple with their role in what happened. The Boston Herald’s Michelle Caruso still regrets that she didn’t push harder at the holes in Stuart’s story. “Always be aware of the person who offers an excuse before you’ve asked the question,” she says. The Boston Globe’s associate editor Adrian Walker, reported on the story at the time and will also be a part of the nine-episode Murder in Boston podcast, which also debuts on December 4.

The family of Willie Bennett, including his sisters, his nephew, and his children, is still clearly and rightfully traumatized by what transpired. To this day, many of them still don’t like to tell people their last name. Chief Boston Mayoral Advisor Neil Sullivan admits the mayoral office lost control of the police. A few interviews do nothing more than add some color commentary to the tragic story. Like Will Zecco, who was Stuart’s hairstylist, recounting that Stuart worried about his gray hairs days after his wife and unborn son had been murdered.

The most chilling are the interviews with retired Boston Police officer Detective Bill Dunn, who was the one of the lead investigators at the time and known in the Mission Hill projects for the terror he wrought. “I liked helping the good and loved being bad to the bad,” he says. The passage of time has not softened Dunn’s perspective nor enlightened him. Instead it seems like the reverse has happened and he has doubled down on his hateful rhetoric. When discussing the raid on the home where police believed Bennett was hiding, he smirks, “I had a master key. It’s called my right foot.” And even all these years later, he deadpans to the camera, “I don’t regret the way I operated . . . we never got the chance to finish the investigation so we will never know who killed Carol Stuart.”

Just as noteworthy is who Hehir did not or was unable to interview — no one from the Stuart or the DiMaiti families participated in the docuseries. Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, who, after it was revealed that Stuart himself had committed these crimes, wrote an entire article including Bennett’s IQ and report card grades and referred to him as a “mental defective,” was also not interviewed. “The media has nothing to be defensive about but more importantly nor do the police,” he says in archival audio from a news broadcast featured in the series. (Barnicle would be forced to resign from The Boston Globe in 1998 over plagiarism charges, but that did not end his career. He still regularly appears on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where he recently celebrated his birthday.)

Murder in Boston never shies away from the heinous nature of this crime and even those accused have nothing but sympathy for the DiMaiti family and their quest to find justice for their daughter. “What that man did to his wife was a monstrous act,” Bennett’s nephew, Joey “Toot” Bennett, who was 15 at the time of the murders, says. But this series isn’t about Carol. It’s about what happened to the Black community in Boston. “Willie Bennett is a metaphor in some ways of how the Black community is treated by the institutions in this city,” journalist Howard Bryant says.

The series ends on a hopeful note. Since the murders, Boston has had two Black police chiefs. The city now has a female mayor who is Asian. McGrory says the case was a reckoning: “We just got duped by this guy into believing the very worst of what we are and we have spent years figuring out what went wrong and how we can fix it,” he says. But as Murder in Boston makes painfully clear, the cost of that reckoning was extraordinarily high.

Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning premieres December 4 at 9:00 PM ET on HBO. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Amy Amatangelo is a writer and editor. In addition to Primetimer, her work can be found in Paste Magazine, Emmy Magazine and the LA Times. She also is the Treasurer of the Television Critics Association.