Murder in Boston (13 page)

Cronin ran a quick check on the license plate and confirmed that the vehicle was registered to Chuck. Fearing that it might be a smoke screen, the watch commander at the Commonwealth Avenue headquarters ordered the detail at Logan International Airport to immediately begin checking outbound flights. So far they had no reports from anyone who said they saw a man jump off the bridge, and a staged suicide could be a clever hoax. A few minutes later, though, they got a call from a man who said he thought he saw a body in the river. But police were taking no chances. They would keep watching the airport until Chuck’s body was recovered.

Cronin peered over the bridge rail and shivered. The water was some 250 feet down, about as far as the ground would be if he were standing atop a twenty-five-story building. The river was gray and wind-whipped, not at all an inviting place. The air temperature was in the mid-thirties, and with a brisk wind blowing in off the ocean, the chill factor brought it down to the low teens.

Back at headquarters, playing the obvious, the watch commander called out the divers.

7:35
A
.
M
.

Sergeant Leo Gerstel, the dive master on the local state police diving team, was snoring away at his home in suburban Melrose after working late the night before when the telephone jangled him awake. For Gerstel, early morning calls are almost routine. On the average, one person a month jumps into the Mystic River from the Tobin Bridge. Just a week before, they had recovered the body of a young sailor.

Of course, the divers only get the ones who make it to the water. Not infrequently, if the suicide jumps off the upper level, the winds blow him or her back into the bridge and the body lands on the lower level. Gerstel recalled one time when he was called out to investigate a reported jumper. As customary, the troopers searched the roadway first to see if they could find the spot from which the man was believed to have leaped. While they had their eyes down on the pavement and were examining the rail for scuff marks or scratches, they were startled by a loud, sickening thud. Swinging around, they saw the body of a man just a few feet away. Instead of vaulting over the rail by the roadway, the man had climbed up the superstructure before leaping. He almost fell on top of them.

Then again, it is not always a dead person that police recover from the river. Gerstel remembered one woman jumper who was alive when they pulled her from the water. She was taken to a hospital, where she underwent extensive treatment for her injuries. But as soon as she was released, she went straight back to the bridge and jumped again. The second time she succeeded in killing herself.

This morning, though, Gerstel’s instincts told him the body would be in the river and the man would be dead. He proved to be right.

That morning, the water temperature in the Mystic River was 30 degrees Fahrenheit, only two degrees above that at which saltwater freezes. As he donned his dry suit, which would help insulate him from the cold, his face mask, air tank, and fins, Gerstel shivered slightly at the thought of how cold it was going to be when he leaped in. The amount of time he and his men could stay in the water would be limited. Besides the cold, another problem would be low visibility. The river is roiled by a strong current and tidal swirls. Once underwater, he knew, he and the others would not be able to see more than two feet in any direction.

He looked around at his crew. All told, there were five divers, and they would work in shifts of two for as long as they had air and didn’t freeze. As usual in such situations, each diver positioned himself at one end of a seven-foot-long tow bar. The boat that they used as a diving platform would troll slowly across a predesignated grid, towing the bar and the two divers along the bottom, which was where they almost invariably found jumpers. Sometimes if the suicides were wearing particularly fluffy clothes, they would float slightly, but in most cases they sank like stones. Days later, when accumulated body gases gave them buoyancy, they would bob to the surface.

12:35
P
.
M
.

Troopers Jerry DeCristofaro and Brian Menton, on the sixth dive of the morning, found Chuck Stuart. He was lying on the bottom twenty-five feet below the surface. There was no doubt that he was dead. The troopers maneuvered the body to the surface, where it was hauled aboard the boat and taken to shore for transfer to the morgue. As he helped pull him over the transom, Gerstel noted that Chuck had several abrasions on the side of his face, but he reckoned they resulted from his impact with the water. By the time he hit the Mystic River his body was traveling at about 120 miles per hour.

At the time he got word that Chuck’s body had been pulled from the river, Carol’s father Giusto DiMaiti, was at the pizza parlor that his son, Carl, had purchased a few years earlier. He was told that his son-in-law had jumped off the bridge because it looked as though police were closing in on him as the chief suspect in the murders of his daughter and infant grandson. A year earlier DiMaiti had undergone bypass surgery, and his heart had not yet fully recovered. “That can’t be!” he screamed when he heard the news. “He was supposed to have dinner with us tomorrow night.” Giusto said his wife, Evelyn, was preparing a special meal of lightly spiced chicken for Chuck because she knew that until his colon had healed from the bullet wound and the surgery, he had to watch his diet. With a look of confused disbelief, Giusto grabbed his chest and collapsed onto a chair. He was rushed to a hospital, but doctors said he had not suffered a heart attack. Apparently the news had, however, encouraged a spasm of angina.

How Chuck’s siblings and his parents reacted is not known. They went into seclusion and refused to talk to reporters.

Friends of the couple and some other family members, however, were not quite as reticent.

Maureen Vadjic, a neighbor of Chuck and Carol’s, told the
Herald
she never would have believed such a circumstance would be possible. “Carol never spoke of any problems between them,” she told reporter Harvey Dickson. “She was ecstatic about being pregnant. They were both very happy.”

“It’s unbelievable,” said one unidentified member of Chuck’s family. “Never in a million years would we think it. They seemed so happy.”

Another unidentified family member suggested that Chuck may have leaped because he was despondent over the death of his wife and son.

One women who grew up with Carol, and still saw her frequently, said she and Carol often exchanged confidences. Never, said the woman, had Carol indicated that she and Chuck were having problems. “She would have told me if there were any problems, but she never even hinted at any.”

Late afternoon

Another team of divers working the Pines River found the bundle containing Carol’s handbag exactly where Matthew had said he had thrown it. According to “sources,” the bundle contained Carol’s jewelry and makeup. They did not mention Chuck’s $600 watch. Whether it continues to be missing is a mystery.

Although the bundle of Carol’s possessions was recovered relatively quickly, the gun proved elusive. When divers had to quit because of the cold and swirling tides, they still had not located the weapon. It would, in fact, not be found for four days and then only after Jack McMahon was persuaded to toss off the bridge, in a reenactment of his October 23 heave, an orange-painted metal object identical in weight to a snub-nosed, .38 caliber revolver. Divers who were waiting in the river followed the highly visible weight to the bottom and began searching there for the weapon. Almost immediately they found the gun half-buried in river silt. There were three expended rounds in the cylinder, which corresponded exactly with the number of shots Chuck said had been fired in the car. A ballistics report filed weeks later would confirm that the bullets that killed Carol and wounded Chuck had come from that gun.

Just before his office closed for the day, District Attorney Newman Flanagan issued a statement confirming that the body found in the Mystic River that morning was that of Chuck Stuart. The cause of death was listed as drowning. It added, almost gratuitously, that a “spent bullet” had been recovered from Chuck’s abdomen during the autopsy. This was the bullet from the October 23 gunshot. Hospital authorities had been so secretive about Chuck’s condition and treatment that they had never mentioned it had never been removed.

The DA had one other thing to say as well, something that would prove as explosive as the fact that Chuck was dead and his brother Matthew was somehow involved in the crime. The statements from Matthew and Chuck’s other siblings, Flanagan said, “clearly exculpated Willie Bennett and clearly inculpated Charles Stuart in the murder of his wife and infant son.” But in criminal investigations, nothing is forever. Weeks later Flanagan would reveal an apparent change of heart.

Again, the known facts raise numerous questions. Just about everybody assumes that Chuck committed suicide. Although that is likely the case, there are enough variables to keep it from being a certainty. No one saw him jump. His note did not explicitly say he was going to commit suicide. His note was not a confession. Even if he had been arrested, he might not have been convicted. On the basis of Matthew’s story, Chuck became a very good suspect, but only a suspect. He did not appear to be the suicidal type, and several things in his behavior mitigated against such an act. Why did he buy a new car only hours earlier? Why did he feel it necessary to pay for a large chunk of the purchase price with a cashier’s check? Why did he go to the Sheraton-Tara? Why did he still have his room key? Whom did he call? Where was he for the five or six hours the previous evening and the two and a half hours that morning? Where did he change clothes, provided of course that the convenience store clerks had correctly identified their early morning customer? What happened to the clothes he had on? If he was contemplating suicide, why did he appear cheerful at two
A
.
M
.? Was he on drugs? Why did he leave a wake-up call? How many potential suicides leave wake-up calls because they are afraid they will oversleep their date with death? In the following days it became a great sport for psychologists and psychiatrists to make a postmortem diagnosis of Chuck Stuart’s mental state. The general consensus was that he was at best a narcissist, at worst a sociopath. But neither type is particularly suicidal, impulsive, or depressed in personality. On the contrary, psychopaths and narcissists are deliberate and rational; they believe they can charm their way out of any tight corner.

Also very important, why did Chuck leave his car on the Revere-bound tier of the Tobin Bridge? If he had been to Revere to change clothes, he would have to have crossed the Tobin Bridge on the Boston-bound upper tier to leave the community, then turned around and gone
back
across the bridge on the lower tier, where his car was found. If he had been intent on jumping, why didn’t he jump from the Boston-bound tier, which is considerably higher anyway?

There was one other extremely puzzling thing. In their efforts to get comments from persons involved with the case, reporters interviewed Carol’s uncle, Mario DiMaiti. He was quoted in the Quincy
Patriot Ledger
as saying the DiMaiti family may have taken the situation into its own hands if the members had suspected Chuck murdered Carol. “We said we’d kill him ourselves if he had anything to do with Carol’s killing,” Mario told Scott Allen.

Chapter 12

January 5, 1990

Friday

Predictably, headlines the morning after Chuck’s body was found bellowed his guilt. The
Globe
, on the top of page one, across all six of its extra-wide columns, printed the headline S
TUART DIES IN JUMP OFF
T
OBIN
B
RIDGE AFTER POLICE ARE TOLD HE KILLED HIS WIFE
. It was a great headline, but it was wrong or, at best, premature. It left no room for doubt that Chuck killed himself, and it certified that he had killed Carol. What the
Globe
did was what no newspaper should ever do: it turned an assumption, actually two assumptions, into fact. This marked the beginning of a sad saga of trial by newspaper.

The accompanying text, by writers Kevin Cullen, Sean Murphy, and Mike Barnicle, gave the headline added strength. “Charles M. Stuart killed himself yesterday,” it said, “hours after his brother told police Stuart had planned and executed the robbery and shooting of his pregnant wife and then shot himself to cover up one of the most heinous crimes in recent history, police said.” This compounded the headline writer’s error. Barring the existence of at least one witness who actually saw Chuck alone on the bridge, someone who watched him climb over the rail and leap, the assertion that he did so is only speculation. The assumption becomes even shakier considering the ambiguous language in the note found in his car.

The story was more correct than the headline regarding Chuck’s role in Carol’s shooting. The headline implied that Matthew had told police that Chuck killed Carol. Until, and if, a transcript of Matthew’s statement is divulged and additional information is disclosed, that statement is incorrect. According to his lawyer, Matthew did
not
see Chuck shoot Carol. In fact, he said he did not see Carol at all. And as far as what Matthew saw on the night of October 23, unless someone else was with Matthew to support his claims, there is only Matthew’s word since neither Chuck nor Carol can contradict him. Is it unlikely that things occurred differently from the way Matthew says they did? Maybe, but this has been a very unusual story. Matthew did not do his case any good by waiting seventy-two days to tell his side. But by readily accepting Matthew’s story, the
Globe
seemed to be making the same error it made in readily accepting Chuck’s. Of course, the
Herald
acted the same way. And so did everyone else.