Murder in Boston (22 page)

Ropeik got on to MacLean, he said, because he aired a story the day after Chuck’s death quoting an unnamed family member as saying that Chuck had confessed to shooting Carol. According to
that
source, Chuck said he’d done it for the insurance money. The family member said Chuck admitted shooting Carol, then turning the gun on himself. He planned to shoot himself in the foot, Chuck is alleged to have said, but his hand jerked when he pulled the trigger and he wounded himself in the stomach instead. If that indeed was the case, it was a twitch that almost proved fatal.

It was after this story was broadcast, Ropeik said, that he received a call from the man, who later turned out to be MacLean. Although MacLean refused to identify himself to the reporter at the time, Ropeik used clues he had gotten from his source on the Chuck-confession story to track him down and convince him to tell his tale on tape.

MacLean is believed to have repeated the story he told Ropeik to the new grand jury when it held its first session on January 12. Also called to testify at the opening meeting were Jay Kakas and Gary McLaughlin.

After a single day of testimony, the grand jury recessed indefinitely at the request of the Stuart case prosecutor, Thomas Mundy. Mundy explained that he also was involved in the Griffiths case, and since legal action was expected soon he would be appreciative if the grand jury would wait until he had taken care of that before being called back to delve again into the Stuart mystery. Jurors agreed, but before they went home they had one more task: they wanted to see for themselves the videotape of the lineup at which Chuck allegedly identified Willie Bennett as the man who looked “most like” the gunman who had assaulted him and Carol.

As it turned out, the grand jury gave Mundy plenty of time; the group did not meet again for twenty days. And then it would be only another short session.

After the series of revelations beginning with Chuck’s death and ending with Michael’s admission that Chuck had talked to him about killing Carol, the whole city seemed exhausted. It was not only the grand jury that wanted a break. While reporters tried valiantly to keep the furnace stoked, they were running out of coal. The
Globe
published its blockbuster profiles on Carol and Chuck, both by writer Sally Jacobs, on consecutive Sundays (Carol on January 21; Chuck on January 28), but neither piece added substantially to the body of knowledge. As they say in the newsroom, they didn’t move the story forward very much. The article on Carol was sycophantic, but it would have been hard to write an incisive, controversial story about a young pregnant woman killed before her prime, an apparent innocent victim whose only sin had been loving her husband too much.

The article on Chuck, however, was anything but fawning. It was, in fact, noticeably mean-spirited, apparently designed to conform to the author’s idea of narcissistic behavior. It was, however, what the public wanted to hear. No one seemed to be in the mood to listen to a repetition of the glowing terms in which Chuck had been described in stories soon after the shooting. Although every accused is entitled to an advocate, Sally Jacobs was not going to be Chuck’s.

Even the political front was relatively quiet. Mayor Flynn, the
Globe
noted in a January 19 story (another of those that lodged in the gray area separating analysis from news), might be hurting himself politically by maintaining his loyalty to Police Commissioner Roache.

And Attorney General James Shannon, who also had come under some light fire as a result of the Bennett/Stuart situation, seemed to be trying to clear his name by announcing that his office would investigate Dereck Jackson’s and Eric Whitney’s allegations of police intimidation.

Boston news junkies, accustomed to much more lively fare in the last couple of months, stifled a collective yawn.

Another flare-up of crime stories began on January 17 when Mark Belmore, a nineteen-year-old white student at Northeastern University, was accosted on the street soon after leaving his girlfriend’s dorm and, despite loud screams for assistance, was brutally beaten and stabbed to death. The incident occurred on the fringe of Mission Hill, not far from where Chuck said he and Carol were stopped. There was more than one reference to the fact that Belmore, a husky sophomore who aspired to be a federal marshal, was killed by a black gang in retaliation for what had been done to Willie Bennett.

Adding drama to the case was much finger pointing and hand wringing by the city’s news organizations, which said police conspired to keep Belmore’s murder a secret. They theorized that the murder was hushed up because it had occurred on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and the assailants appeared to be several black youths. Authorities were said to fear that if it had been announced on the country’s only holiday honoring a black civil rights leader that a group of blacks were believed responsible for a possible racially motivated killing in Roxbury, it would exacerbate the already tense situation. However, less than a week later, three black youths, including teenaged twin brothers, were arrested and charged with Mark Belmore’s death. The fears that the city’s blacks would be outraged by the arrests and use them to renew accusations of racial discrimination proved groundless.

The incident, though, said something about problems among the city’s news organizations. One veteran media watcher, reading details in the
Globe
about how police allegedly hid the details when they were contacted by reporters, shook his head sadly. “You know what that says?” he asked. “It says the
Globe
, even after all that has happened, is still covering the police department by telephone.”

While residents of Boston appeared weary (and wary) of more revelations, the Stuart case would not go away, certainly not while there were so many questions still to be answered. On January 16 the local NBC affiliate, WBZ-TV, on its noon talk show,
People Are Talking
, examined the issue through the eyes of some of the reporters who covered it. The television newsrooms were represented, with the exception of WNEV (CBS), which was mysteriously absent. A WBZ radio reporter was there, along with Ellen Hume, a former reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
and now executive director of the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, and Alan Dershowitz, a controversial and outspoken professor from Harvard Law School. Both the
Globe
and the
Herald
declined to take part.

The most remarkable thing to come out of the program was the lack of concrete information. For a case so far advanced, there was still much that was not known. As Ron Golobin, news director at WCVB-TV (ABC), pointed out dryly, even then no one could say with any certainty who had shot Carol or Chuck, exactly when it had happened, where it had happened, or why. “The only thing we know for sure is that the shooting did
not
occur while Chuck was on the line with McLaughlin,” Golobin said. “Otherwise we would have heard the shots.”

Charles Austin, an articulate and soft-spoken reporter from WBZ-TV, said one of the things that amazed him about the case was how many people knew or had reason to suspect from the beginning that Chuck had been involved. He ticked them off. There was Matthew, of course, he said, and Jack McMahon. There was Michael, who not only had been told by Matthew but had had a conversation with Chuck in which Chuck had talked about Carol’s murder. There was David MacLean. And later, even before Matthew went to the authorities, the rest of the Stuart siblings knew, as did Chuck’s parents. Attorneys Clayman and Perenyi knew something was up, and Jay Kakas, who probably should have thought of looking in the company safe to see if the snub-nosed, nickel-plated .38-caliber weapon he had bought years before was still there, may have had at least a strong suspicion.

Dershowitz raised an intriguing question, another that has never been answered. In preparing his presentation for the grand jury the previous November, had ADA Mundy planned to call Chuck to testify? Or Matthew? Or, Janet Monteforte, Matthew’s girlfriend at the time? By Christmas, with the grand jury still out, both Matthew and Monteforte had talked to Perenyi. If they had been called before the grand jury between then and January 3, when Matthew went to authorities, they would have had three choices. They could have claimed protection against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment and said nothing. They could have lied, in which case Perenyi would have been obligated to come forward. Or they could have told the truth, in which case the investigation would have blown open sooner than it did.

There also was comment about Bennett, who, they agreed, seemed a not unreasonable suspect, especially in light of his long record. A voice from the background drifted into a microphone. “He doesn’t have a record,” the voice said, “he has an album.”

Ironically, two weeks later Bennett was back into the case. On January 31 reporters discovered a document that had been filed by District Attorney Flanagan, who earlier had said that Bennett was no longer a suspect in the Stuart shooting.

The document was part of a bulky legal brief filed by Flanagan’s office in opposition to a request from WBZ-TV for a copy of the videotape of the lineup at which Chuck allegedly fingered Bennett as the man who looked “most like” the mysterious assailant. Signed by ADA Mundy, the document argued that the videotape should not be released to WBZ because “the man reportedly identified in the lineup may yet turn out to have some connection with the case.” It did not specify what the “connection” might be.

Chapter 20

One day when everything has been settled in this case, or as settled as it is likely to get, someone will be able to look at it unemotionally and study it without the tensions that have made the name “Stuart” so controversial. Perhaps they will determine that much of the sharp criticism leveled against police and the district attorney’s office for their early handling of the situation was not altogether fair. Although they hardly covered themselves with glory, they probably did not act as unprofessionally as some have indicated. Disregarding the likelihood that high-ranking police officials used poor judgment in flooding Mission Hill with officers, or that they unwisely put into operation the questionable stop-and-search tactics that already were under attack, the assumptions police made at the beginning were not unreasonable. Chuck’s story
was
credible. Mission Hill
was
a high-crime area. He and Carol
were
likely victims. His description of the assailant was detailed and unwavering. There was nothing on the surface to indicate that he would want to kill his wife. And one of the most compelling arguments of all was the seriousness of Chuck’s wound. If a man planned to kill his wife and then wound himself to make it look as though someone else had attacked the two of them, he would want to make sure that he did not kill himself in the process. But Chuck Stuart almost died. Investigators must have thought about that a lot as they paced the grim corridors at BCH waiting to see if they were going to be able to talk to Chuck or if he was going to succumb to his wound before he could give them any pertinent information.

Police later admitted, grudgingly, that they did not consider Chuck a suspect until Matthew came forward, that they never searched his home or dug too deeply into his past. Part of the criticism centers around the fact that police should have adhered to the rule that says when a wife is killed the husband must always be the prime suspect. Without having many of the details that were available to police in those first days, such as lab reports, early witness interviews, and details on the investigators assigned to the case (how experienced were they? were they veteran homicide detectives? had they seen much domestic violence?), it is difficult to make a judgment about what they should have seen or surmised. Certainly there appeared to be nothing in the physical realm to raise their suspicions. As for the accusation that police ignored reporters’ attempts to make them look at Chuck more closely, so what? Police accept journalists’ advice on how to conduct investigations about as enthusiastically as journalists accept police advice on how to run their newsrooms. As has been shown, the media did not have all the answers, either. Nor do they yet.

If there is a real weak spot in the way the police handled the case in its developmental stages, it is in the timing of the lineup. Chuck was released from BCH on December 5, but the lineup was not held until December 23, which was an unusually long time to let such a function hang fire. Just why there was such a long delay is, not surprisingly, unclear. Mundy, the chief prosecutor in the case, has said that delays were requested by Bennett’s attorneys. However, the two attorneys who represented Bennett during that period have said that was not true. According to
them
, Stuart had been out of the hospital for ten days before the district attorney’s office even mentioned the possibility of a lineup.

Critics of the police claim the long delay helped set up the situation under which Chuck was almost certain to pick Bennett as the one who looked “most like” his attacker. For one thing, they say, Chuck’s memory undoubtedly dulled during the long interval between the attack on October 23 and the lineup on December 23, making him more susceptible to error in identifying his assailant, assuming there
was
an assailant. For another, since Chuck was out of the hospital and there was no one to assure that he did not comb the newspapers or flip through the newscasts to see what he could learn about the man everyone said was the prime suspect in the shooting, there was nothing to prevent him from having seen a picture of Bennett, either in one of the newspapers or on television.