Murder in Boston (6 page)

By then, though, both had come a long way from the Driftwood.

Chuck had become increasingly more indispensable at Kakas & Sons, and promotion followed promotion. By the late 1980s he had been made the store’s general manager, the owners’ right-hand man. When Ted or Jay Kakas needed something done, they went first to Chuck, who was ensconced in his own office, albeit a small one, just down the hall from theirs. With the increased reponsibility came increased pay. By 1989 he was taking home six figures, easy.

Life was not entirely trouble free, however. His father had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and deterioration in his physical condition was evident. To make matters worse, doctors had found a lump on his mother’s breast, and midway through the year she had a mastectomy. Still the devoted son, Chuck refused to abandon his responsibility. Every month he sent his parents a check for $200. It was the least he could do. There was later speculation that Carol resented these monthly checks and that they often argued about it. That, however, does not fit with Carol’s personality. The amount was piddling, considering their combined monthly income, and Carol was such a devoted daughter, she could hardly criticize her husband for helping his parents when they obviously needed assistance. Besides, his siblings were helping as well. Each gave something according to his or her ability. The youngest child, Matthew, for example, although he was twenty-three years old, decided to live at home and help his mother care for his father.

Carol, meanwhile, was also moving up the professional ladder. Although she was settling in well as a tax attorney at the firm she’d left Arthur Young to join, Cahners Publishing Co., she was still looking down the road toward an expanded career. For one thing she decided to go back to school. Someday, she said, she wanted to be a CPA, but for the time being Cahners was treating her well. One of the benefits of her new job was insurance coverage. As an employee she was entitled to an $82,000 policy on her life, which she took.

With Carol what you saw was what you got. Chuck was quiet, almost withdrawn. Even those who knew him well said they often could not tell what he was thinking. It was not uncommon for him to go an hour or so, especially when he was among strangers, and not say a word. Carol was the opposite. She could not keep anything inside; she was compelled to share her thoughts and feelings with everyone. Luckily for those around her, they were almost always happy thoughts. If she saw a pretty flower, she told everyone at work about it. If something someone said made her feel particularly good, she broadcast that as well. On the other hand, if she and Chuck had a spat, she dispensed that information as well. As one co-worker put it, “Carol was the kind of person who would always tell you what she had for breakfast and how it tasted.” Some who knew her well would later say they doubted that she and Chuck had any serious disagreements. If they had, they would not have been secrets because Carol would have revealed them.

Soon after Chuck and Carol were married, they bought a small home in Medford. But as their paychecks increased and their life-styles changed, they began thinking in more grandiose terms. When they sold the house they made a tidy $100,000 profit on the deal. Then they had to decide what to do with the money. Although Chuck was drawing a very good salary, he perceived he was about as high as he could go at Kakas & Sons. Although he had left commercial cooking far be hind him, he still harbored a desire to open a small restaurant. In his dreams, he confided to those he knew best, he envisioned himself and Brian Parsons running a cozy little eatery where service was even more important than the food and every customer was treated like a friend. He and Carol talked about investing the profit from their house in such a place, but in the end they agreed to postpone such plans. Instead they bought a large split-level home in a more distant suburb, Reading. They agreed to pay $239,000 for the house, and they took out a $177,000 mortgage to clinch the deal.

The new house had plenty of room, which was just what they needed because each had discovered a latent affinity for fancy clothing. Carol took over one room for her dresses and suits, and Chuck appropriated another for his sizable wardrobe. They acquired two frisky Labrador retrievers, Max and Midnight, and they developed an interest in landscaping. Fitness consciousness was a by-product of the yuppie life-style, and they developed their own routines. Carol ran with a neighbor. Chuck joined a health club, where he showed up every morning as religiously as he used to have to appear for early mass at Immaculate Conception when he was an altar boy. In addition to the weight training, Chuck also played in an old-boy basketball league back in Revere. That was the winter sport; in the summer, it was softball. Then, too, there was the time he spent coaching Little Leaguers and refereeing basketball games at Immaculate Conception. Once a week they would go for dinner at the DiMaitis’, or the DiMaitis and Stuarts would come to Reading. If the weather was nice, they would sit around the pool. Chuck and Carol also hosted pool parties for their friends. At such functions Chuck likely as not would do the cooking.

During the week, because of the long hours each of them worked, they ate out a lot. Invariably they picked the best restaurants. They vacationed in Europe after Carol expressed a desire to see her ancestral home. And they took less ambitious trips when the mood struck them. Sometimes they went together; sometimes Chuck went with “the boys.” Usually these were excursions to sporting events, like the Olympics in Calgary.

Not surprisingly, things changed considerably after Carol got pregnant. When she was in high school, Carol was attributed in her yearbook with having two primary ambitions: becoming a teacher and raising a family. The teacher idea had gone by the wayside, but the desire to have a family was still strong. And at thirty she heard her biological clock ticking loudly. When she discovered she was pregnant, friends said, she was so thrilled that she kept the doctor’s report certifying her fecundity for weeks, displaying it proudly to everyone as if it were an award from the pope.

Never one to do things halfway, Carol approached her pregnancy as she had the study of law: wholeheartedly. She modified her exercise program to make sure that her workouts were good for the baby as well as for herself. She gave up alcohol, coffee, and soft drinks with caffeine, developing an almost insatiable desire for caffeine-free colas. She enthusiastically enrolled in the birthing classes at Brigham and Women’s and attended the sessions religiously.

Chuck also seemed delighted with the prospect of becoming a father, particularly since Carol’s due date coincided so neatly with his own birthday. If she delivered on schedule, it could be both a birthday gift
and
a Christmas present. To show how happy he was with developments, he agreed to surrender the room he had been using to store his considerable wardrobe for a nursery. And he attended the Lamaze classes with Carol. After the shooting, some other students who had been in the class told reporters that while Chuck had been present, he did not speak at all with others in the class, choosing to remain silent while Carol bubbled about the experience. This was not out of character for Chuck; he was not given to overt displays of pseudofriendship with people he did not know.

During the early weeks of Carol’s pregnancy, however, Chuck seemed to sense a distancing in his wife’s relationship with him. Her focus was changing from him to the baby, and he probably resented it—a not uncommon reaction. And he responded in a not uncommon fashion: he spent even more time with “the guys.” His Friday nights out spilled over into Saturday mornings, a situation that Carol apparently objected to vociferously. It is, however, impossible to have a marriage totally without friction, and on the scale of things, this did not appear to be a major problem. If it had been, Carol would most likely have made her unhappiness more evident. Instead, despite the pregnancy, their feelings toward each other did not appear to have changed. Ten days before the shooting occurred, Chuck and Carol spent a long weekend at a luxurious retreat in Connecticut to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary. From all appearances they
were
the perfect couple. If they had an argument and Carol went to work sour-faced and pouty, her disposition quickly improved when the inevitable flowers arrived from a repentant Chuck.

They were so much in love, friends told the stream of reporters who came looking for chinks in the marriage; they truly cared about each other.

Despite what happened later, and all the things that were splashed in the media, it was hard to believe that there was not more fact that fiction in the closeness of their relationship. It is extremely difficult to believe that someone would not have picked up on the possibility that Chuck and Carol’s marriage was not quite as it seemed, that maybe what appeared to be the perfect match was nothing but a carefully constructed facade. Given Carol’s proclivity to talk about
everything
, it hardly seems possible that under the surface the relationship between them was seething, literally boiling with hatred. But with only three exceptions, everyone who knew them and has come forward to express their views has said that the marriage was solid. Significantly, perhaps, each of the three who had a tale to tell has been unable to substantiate their claims with witnesses. At least not yet.

Chapter 5

October 26, 1989

Thursday

Physically, Michael Stuart could almost have been Chuck’s twin, except Michael was much thinner. At least he was until Chuck went into the hospital and lost fifty pounds. After that the resemblance was startling. They were both tall, slim, reticent, seemingly taciturn men with deeply receding hairlines, thin noses, and hollow cheeks. But what was notable right off was how well Michael, a twenty-seven-year-old firefighter, wore his grief. Maybe it was because of his profession, the fact that he was accustomed to seeing tragedy firsthand; and although it was never a pleasant sight, he realized that catastrophe and contentment were two sides of the same coin. When the family learned about the shooting, Michael was the rock upon which they leaned. Although there were two other older siblings, they were both women. As the oldest male in the family—outside of Chuck, who was fighting for his life, and his father, who was fighting his own desperate battle against a different kind of enemy—it was his responsibility to be stalwart. He owed it to his siblings; he owed it to his parents; he owed it to Chuck.

Given the atmosphere that prevailed, it was not surprising that the youngest child, twenty-three-year-old Matthew, the black sheep of the family, pulled Michael aside, saying he needed to talk. Even though Chuck was the oldest brother, it was always Michael whom Matthew turned to. He was the one Matthew appeared to admire the most, the one he looked up to, the one he wanted to emulate. When Matthew graduated from high school, he had, like his brothers before him, decided that he was not interested in pursuing his education further. Instead, he said, he wanted to be a firefighter like Michael. He took the written exam and scored well, but that was only the first step. There is not much turnover in the Revere Fire Department, and the exam administrator told Matthew that, while his grade was impressive, it might be years before his number came up.

Disappointed, Matthew took a job as a stockboy with a liquor wholesaler, a position that Michael and his other older brother, Mark, had also filled at the beginning of their journey into adulthood.

Although it was a job, the pay was relatively low, and there was no challenge. So Matthew quit to work for a company that cleaned and maintained overhead lighting fixtures. And about midway through 1989 he left that job to become a paint mixer. In that slot he made about $21,000 a year. But that didn’t go far in Massachusetts’s inflated economy, even considering that he was still living at home. Matthew had other expenses. He liked to spend his evenings in heavy-metal clubs and neighborhood bars, particularly a tavern called Reardon’s, which was owned by a cousin. Matthew’s half sister, Shelly, worked part-time at Reardon’s, and it was a popular family hangout. Chuck liked to go there too whenever he was in Revere. But whereas Chuck drank only enough to be sociable, Matthew had a reputation as a heavy drinker and as somewhat of a hell-raiser when he was blitzed. According to an acquaintance quoted by the
Globe
, Matthew also did a little coke now and then. The newspaper also quoted an unnamed Revere policeman as saying that Matthew was regarded in his hometown as a known drug user.

That may have been one of the reasons that Chuck and Matthew had not gotten along very well in recent years—that and their obviously dissimilar life-styles. Chuck lived in a buttoned-down world, one of expensive suits and expensive haircuts. Matthew was not attracted by either; he seldom wore a suit, and he seldom cut his hair. Hair, in fact, was an issue between them. When Chuck and Carol were married in 1985, Chuck was so enraged by Matthew’s long locks that he threatened to kick him out of the wedding party unless he visited a barber.

That was only one of the disagreements they had. Chuck didn’t like Matthew’s life-style and warned him to shape up. Matthew told him to take a hike. In 1987 they stopped speaking to each other after Matthew failed to show up to do some work for Chuck as he had promised. As far as the meticulous and demanding Chuck was concerned, that was the ultimate irresponsible act.

Michael had thought the two brothers still were not getting along, which made him even more surprised when Matthew told him that he and Chuck had an arrangement. Exactly what Matthew told Michael that Thursday after the shooting is not clear since the two brothers have been almost completely silent on the issue. Speaking through his attorney, Michael has said only that Matthew came to him and confided that Chuck was personally, directly involved in Carol’s murder, and Matthew was involved too in a less direct way.