Murder in Boston (23 page)

There are, however, two potential problems with that theory. One, the two pictures of Bennett that received the most play (and possibly the only ones) were a shot of him taken over his shoulder in which his coat collar was raised to cover three-fourths of his face and a grainy profile shot that revealed next to nothing of his features. In a section of film footage he was even less visible since he wore a stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows and kept the lower part of his face hidden with his coat collar.

A second problem was that police have not said what steps Bennett may have taken either just before or just after his arrest to alter his appearance. When Chuck originally described his assailant, he said the man wore his hair in a short afro and sported a patchy beard. But in the pictures of Bennett taken at his arraignment on November 13, his head was close-cropped and his cheeks were clean-shaven; the only facial hair was a hint of a mustache.

There was one other interesting development as well. A story in the
Globe
on January 9 reported that employees of a video store in Brookline that allegedly was robbed by Bennett on October 2 had to be shown two sets of Bennett’s pictures before they made an identification. The first set of pictures were apparently old shots of Bennett, and when they were shown to the employees, who presumably got a much better look at the robber than Chuck did of his alleged assailant, they said they were not sure that he was the holdup man. Then, when officers came back a week later with color pictures of Bennett taken after he was arrested on November 11, they made a positive identification.

There was one other thing, too, that more than likely helped influence Chuck’s identification of Willie Bennett. The district attorney’s office admitted that Bennett was the only person whose photo was shown to Chuck while he was in the hospital and who also appeared later in the lineup. Under those conditions, when Chuck saw Bennett in the lineup he undoubtedly looked familiar because he had already seen his photo in two separate groups of pictures that had been shown to him in November. Criminal justice experts call that a “photo-biased identification”; it is a definite no-no if investigators expect an identification to stand up later in a courtroom.

However, according to Mundy, Chuck had already had a strong response to Bennett’s picture even before he saw him in the lineup. According to the ADA, Bennett was one of two people Chuck picked from an initial set of pictures of possible suspects shown him soon after Bennett’s arrest. Some ten days later a second group of pictures was shown to Chuck that also included pictures of Bennett. When Chuck picked up the picture of Bennett, his hand began shaking violently enough to prompt the investigator to ask him why he was so upset. Chuck replied: “This is the best photograph I’ve seen so far.”

He was shown no more pictures by police before he went into the lineup.

Although the district attorney’s office has never been effusive with information about how it handled the case, late in January ADA Mundy spoke candidly about some of the details covering not only Chuck, but the circumstances that led to the arrest of Willie Bennett. Obviously eager to defend the office against the charges of intimidation leveled by Dereck Jackson and Eric Whitney, Mundy contended that their credibility was never under serious attack until they went back to the grand jury to recant their earlier testimony. The reason, he said, was that both youths had used the magic words that seemed to indicate they knew what they were talking about. Both quoted Willie Bennett as having said that he told Chuck, when he got into Carol’s Toyota, “Don’t look in the rearview mirror.” The fact that those exact words had been accredited to the assailant was known only to police, to Chuck, and to the alleged assailant.

The prosecutor added that when he met with the youths in November before they testified for the first time before the grand jury, both gave detailed descriptions of what Bennett had said. Further strengthening the prosecution case was the fact that investigators had statements from other witnesses that implicated Bennett and dovetailed with what the two youths had said. One woman, identified as Mary Smith, had said that she saw Bennett sometime between eight and eleven
P
.
M
. with a nickel-plated pistol in his hand. The spot where Chuck and Carol was found was less than 150 yards from where Mary Smith said she saw Bennett. However, as she described him, the man she saw was not wearing a black jogging suit. Many weeks later Mary Smith would join Dereck Jackson and Eric Whitney in recanting her testimony. In February, contradicting what she had said in November, Mary Smith said she was coerced by police into giving her statement incriminating Bennett.

There was, however, still another witness, a second woman, Tony Jackson. According to a police affidavit, she said that she had heard Bennett implicate himself. According to her, she saw Bennett pounding a wall in frustration. When she asked him what was the matter, he allegedly said, “The bullet was not meant for the lady; it was meant for the man.”

Also, at that stage of the investigation no one was focusing on Chuck as a possible suspect. Even when Mundy made these statements, late in January almost three weeks after Chuck’s death, the ADA said he still had no idea what Chuck’s motive may have been in wanting to kill his wife. “We don’t know any more today than we did on January 4,” he told the
Herald
’s Charles Craig. “Nothing has been brought to us now that should have been obvious.” Despite the advantages of hindsight, the prosecutor confessed that investigators had not seen any arrows pointing toward Chuck.

“As unusual as it might seem for a mugger to jump in the backseat of a car and shoot two people who probably didn’t get a good look at him,” Craig quoted Mundy as saying, “it pales by comparison for someone who makes $105,000 [sic] a year; whose only vice is playing hockey on Wednesday nights; who likes to go to sporting events with friends; who works fifty-two hours a week; whose wife makes $50,000 [sic] a year; and who friends said was enthralled with his wife and baby—it appears to me beyond belief that he would shoot her and shoot himself and claim they were robbed.”

The major factors pointing
against
Chuck as the gunman, Mundy emphasized, were the seriousness of his wound and the fact that no gun was found either in the car or anywhere in the vicinity. He frowned. “Who could have expected the diabolical fiend made arrangements for someone to come by and get the gun to make it look like a robbery?”

Chapter 21

The Stuart case was unique, and in large part because of this uniqueness it was an extremely difficult story to tell. The ways the media chose to tell the story were unique, too. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. The Stuart case brought about some very unusual conditions that were forced upon the media; to survive they had to adapt. To cover the rapid developments in the case, they had to vary considerably from their normal routines; they had to adopt new methods and new avenues. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they did not. Whatever else may transpire with this case, it almost certainly will become a study to be pondered and debated for years in journalism schools and media think tanks.

The biggest obstacle the media faced in trying to cover developments in the case was a complete dearth of official cooperation. Pick up any newspaper or listen carefully to any newscast and one common strain can be ascertained: 99.8 percent of all the stories (excluding opinion or human-interest pieces) printed or broadcast contain some type of attribution. That is, the point being made in the particular story can be attributed specifically to some person, some group, or some document. This is what was so noticeably, and pitiably, lacking in the Stuart case. Less than a week after Carol and Chuck were shot, officials effectively shut their doors to reporters. The very first story the
Globe
wrote on the case on October 24 attributed the basic information contained therein to Boston Police Deputy Superintendent Joseph Dunford. His name never appeared again. Other early stories quoted Boston Police Superintendent Joseph V. Saia, Jr., but within three or four days his name also disappeared. In less than a week no one in an official capacity was willing to talk on the record to reporters.

Of course, this did not mean that some of the sources were not keeping lines of communication open to the media. But they had decided, seemingly in unison, that they would no longer speak for attribution. This meant that reporters were forced to use weak identifiers such as “sources,” “investigators,” “someone close to the investigation,” “unnamed police department official,” and so forth. What this did was deprive readers and listeners of the opportunity of evaluating what they were being told. Information may still have been coming from Saia, for example, who because of his job presumably had available to him reports from throughout the department and could make intelligent judgments about the status of the investigation, an advantage that was not available to the cop on the beat. Yet when a development was said to have occurred and reporters attributed this new information to “a police department source,” the public did not know if it came from Saia or rookie patrolman Mickey Murphy.

A good example was an incident surrounding the arrest of Alan Swanson, the first publicly announced suspect in the shooting. Police went to arrest Swanson not because they considered him a suspect in the Stuart shooting, but because he allegedly was squatting in someone else’s apartment. But when officers burst in to arrest him, one went into the bathroom. There, soaking in a plastic pail, was a black jogging suit. Aware that Chuck Stuart had said that the man who attacked him and his wife had been wearing a black jogging suit, the officer jumped to a conclusion. Convinced that Swanson had suddenly turned into a hot suspect as the Stuart gunman, the cop immediately went to a judge seeking a warrant to make a thorough search of the apartment. Since he had to have a good reason for getting such a warrant, he exaggerated a bit. In his request to the judge, he did not say he had found
a
black jogging suit that was similar to the one worn by the alleged attacker in the Stuart case; he said he had uncovered
the
sweatsuit worn by the man who had killed Carol Stuart. The warrant was granted, but no other evidence implicating Swanson was found. However, the point was that one relatively low ranking police officer had made a very bad assumption. Unfortunately a reporter compounded the error. Soon there was a TV news report saying that police had found the jogging suit worn by Carol Stuart’s killer and a suspect had been taken into custody. If the information about the jogging suit had gone higher up the line before a request had been filed with the judge, someone more discriminating might have said, “Hey, we’re not saying this is
the
jogging suit, but one that looks like the garment described by the victim.” The difference is subtle but significant.

This type of thing may have made a difference in the early days. Later it ceased to matter because official sources took the easy way out: they simply clammed up. And this made a huge difference in the way the public was informed about developments in the case. It paved the way for such apparent major errors as the report that Chuck was treated for drug addiction at Boston City Hospital and that Chuck had been scheduled to collect on his wife’s $480,000 insurance policy on the day he died. No one except the reporters who filed those reports knows from whence they came. But if someone in authority had been willing to come forward and say definitively that Chuck did
not
undergo treatment for addiction or that there was
no
$480,000 policy, those two claims might have been stopped before they were made public. Curiously, the two newspapers involved, the
Herald
in the detox story and the
Globe
in the insurance policy piece, are standing by their claims despite the denials. Both are taking the position that time will prove these stories true. Who knows? They may be right. In this case, stranger things have happened.

Even before the new grand jury began delving in any depth into the tangled circumstances, attempts were being made to analyze media coverage of the story. On television, the first such attempt was the
People Are Talking
segment on Boston’s WBZ-TV. However, it dealt not so much with
how
the media covered the story, but with the nitty-gritty of the story itself. Interestingly, though, at the very beginning of the program, when host Tom Bergeron asked the assembled newspeople how many of them suspected early on that Chuck was involved in the shooting, all except one raised his hand. Although not a single newspaper or radio or television station allowed these suspicions to creep into print or on the air, either as news or commentary, it may help explain the alacrity with which the Boston media later accepted, at least as unquestionably as they had accepted the first story, the contention that Chuck shot Carol and himself and later committed suicide.

Interestingly, in the days since Chuck’s death, some Boston reporters have said privately that they think the scenario may not turn out to be exactly as it has been painted, but again these doubts were not printed or aired. If, by chance, the grand jury happened to come back and say that events did not transpire at all the way they had been depicted in the newspapers and on the air in January and February, reporters could again say that they knew it all along. Why such doubts—and unquestionably some do exist—have not been made public is anybody’s guess.