Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (25 page)

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He then turned to his baby brother, Matthew, offering him a

financial inducement, first $5,000, then doubling it to $10,000, for

his help—almost a year’s salary for an aimless and somewhat troubled

kid still living at home. Matthew would deny to police that Chuck

told him anything about killing his wife, claiming instead that his

brother outlined a vague insurance scam. According to Matt Stuart,

Chuck planned to stage a mugging, then file an insurance claim for

the ‘‘stolen’’ items. What he wanted his brother to do was meet him

near the crime scene and take away the property the mugger was

supposed to have stolen.

Q

Stuart set the date for the phony mugging for October 23, 1989.

The night before, he drove his brother from Brigham and Women’s

Hospital, where the birthing class would be held, to the street a short

distance away, where he told his brother to meet him at ten the

following night. He even drew a map for his brother so that he could

find his way home from the meeting site.

The morning of the murder, Stuart took three bullets from the

safe at the fur store. He hadn’t wanted to set up a paper trail by

buying ammunition, so he was forced to commit the crime with just

the three aged rounds that happened to be in the work safe.

One can only imagine how confused and terrified Carol Stuart

must have been that night after the childbirth class at Brigham and

Women’s, when instead of heading home, Chuck drove into an

unfamiliar neighborhood and suddenly parked on a desolate street

and pulled a gun on her. Gunpowder residue on both her hands

indicates that she may have grabbed the barrel or attempted to ward

off its force in a futile attempt to save her life and her baby.

After shooting Carol, Stuart fired the second round into the roof

of the car over the driver’s seat, presumably to make it look as if that

shot was directed at him. He had one bullet left, which he carefully

aimed at his back, just above the buttocks. He was presumably hoping

for a simple through-and-through wound, in through the love handle

and out through the belly without hitting any vital organs. But to

make the trajectory fit the story he was about to tell, he had to

hold the gun awkwardly behind him, as if the shooter were in the

backseat. Whether due to the adrenaline coursing through his veins,

the awkwardness of the confined space, or perhaps the interference of

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his still-not-dead wife, he ended up pumping the final bullet directly

into his intestines. He was enormously lucky. Only because the ammo

was so old did it not continue its trajectory into his spinal cord.

In enormous pain and at risk of losing consciousness from

blood loss, Stuart waited out the time until the appointed meet-ing with his brother and drove to the agreed-on rendezvous spot.

He rolled down his window and threw Carol’s Gucci purse into his

brother’s vehicle, with the gun, money, and jewelry inside—including

the one-and-a-quarter-carat diamond engagement ring and the

ruby-and-diamond band he pried off his wife’s finger. As his brother

screeched away, Chuck then called 911, remaining on the line a full

thirteen minutes, claiming that he was driving around but could

neither make out any of the street signs to help the authorities locate

him nor find anyone whom he could ask for help.

Was he stalling, waiting for his wife and baby to die? He told

the dispatcher at one point that his wife was ‘‘gurgling’’ and then

she stopped. But in all those thirteen minutes, as recorded by the

dispatcher, he never once addressed his wife or offered words of

comfort to her. He did offer up, unsolicited, the claim that he had

‘‘ducked’’ as an excuse for why he was not as seriously injured as his

wife.

At last a police cruiser spotted Stuart’s car. Ironically, a television

crew from the CBS reality show
Rescue 911
happened to be in the area

riding along with paramedics, and captured nightmarish footage of

the couple.

Q

Stuart never veered from his plan even after the unexpectedly

serious injury he had inflicted on himself. He had shown the preter-natural calm of a psychopath once before, when their dog electrocuted

himself by biting into an electric cord and Stuart barely raised an eye-brow, casually telling his wife to pull the cord out of the wall socket.

Once his wife and baby died, he rarely mentioned them. However, he

did talk excitedly about the new car he planned to buy with Carol’s

life insurance money as soon as he got out of the hospital.

Just after New Year’s he did indeed buy that car, trading in the

vehicle in which he murdered his wife. He was not the least bit

abashed about appearing to move on with his life at lightning speed.

He went out with friends to celebrate publicly on New Year’s Eve.

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He thought nothing of paying for the jewelry he bought for Debby

Allen with a check drawn on the joint bank account he had shared

with his wife. Shortly after leaving the hospital, he went to his salon

to have his hair dyed, worried about the smattering of gray that was

beginning to creep in. He actually seemed excited by all the attention

and sympathy he was getting. With the fur store continuing to pay

him full salary, he joked that he had picked a good time to take off

work.

As suspicion and ire began to spread about Stuart’s account of

events, he was content to hide behind his family and a lawyer who

had been serving as his spokesman. He did not, however, come

through with the money he had promised his brother Matthew. Even

after learning that his kin had betrayed him, Stuart seemed willing

to continue his charade. He spoke with his attorney, and the phone

numbers for several other attorneys were found in the hotel room

where he stayed to avoid arrest the last night of his life. Shortly before

jumping to his death, he visited a mini-mart for junk food in the

wee hours of the morning, telling the clerk he might see him again

‘‘because I just might get hungry again.’’ He never lost his appetite,

right up until the very end.

Q

The desire to eliminate an unwanted pregnancy by erasing the

source of the problem is not an exclusively American phenomenon,

despite what Theodore Dreiser may have believed.

Liana White, a twenty-nine-year-old medical clerk, was four

months pregnant with her second child when she disappeared on

July 12, 2005, in Edmonton, Alberta. A woman on her way to a

morning workout came across Liana’s Ford Explorer at 5:45 A.M.

in a parking lot near a baseball field a short distance from White’s

home. The driver’s door was wide open, and the contents of Liana’s

purse were spilled out in a trail leading away from the vehicle. Most

disturbingly, a pair of women’s shoes sat just outside the open door,

as if the person who had been wearing them was snatched right out

of them.

This was no false sighting or a case of someone attempting to

reconstruct a time line after the fact. The passerby was so concerned

that she called police before going on with her workout. Data from

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the key card she had to swipe to get into her gym backed up her

report that the car was in the lot before 6 A.M.

Officers quickly managed to track down Liana’s husband, Michael,

a twenty-eight-year-old mechanic who would soon become known

in the media as the ‘‘Scott Peterson of Canada,’’ at the trucking

company where he worked, and he rushed home to speak with them.

The couple met at an Edmonton nightclub in 1998 while White

was serving in the Canadian military. They had been married for five

years and had a three-year-old daughter, Ashley.

Unlike Scott Peterson and many other eraser killers, Michael White

seemed appropriately distraught for a man whose wife appeared to

have been the victim of foul play, and cried as he made a missing

persons report to police. Family and friends described him as a gentle

giant, a ‘‘teddy bear’’ incapable of violence. When asked straight out

by a detective if he had anything to do with his wife’s disappearance,

he was indignant.

‘‘How can you ask me that?’’ he said. ‘‘I love my wife. There’s no

way I could ever hurt her or anyone else.’’

White offered his own theory. Someone must have been hiding in

the back of the SUV when she left for work, he suggested, saying that

he frequently forgot to lock the garage door.

The time line he gave detectives, however, was problematic. He

said his wife had risen at her usual time of 5:55 A.M., and left home

at 6:15 for her 7:00 A.M. shift in the neonatal unit of a local hospital.

How could Liana have gone missing before she had even gotten up?

The investigators were bothered by something else White said.

Later that afternoon, when detectives asked to search his home,

White told them he had spent some time cleaning and ‘‘tidying up’’

the house after he had returned home that morning. As with Scott

Peterson’s obsessive vacuuming the day after his wife went missing,

why was White concerned with cleanliness at a time like this?

The most suspicious thing, however, was the crime scene itself.

The shoes looked as if they had been carefully arranged, one right next

to the other, not what one would expect if they had been haphazardly

cast off in a struggle. Liana’s wallet had no cash in it, which pointed to

robbery as a possible motive. But the place it was found also seemed

set up for discovery, not where a fleeing thief could have tossed it.

Detectives also noticed that, just as in the Hacking case, the driver’s

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seat and mirrors in Liana’s car were not in the position they should

have been if the car had last been driven by a five-foot four-inch

woman. They were positioned as if to accommodate someone much

taller, such as her six-foot three-inch husband.

Was this really a crime scene at all, they wondered, or something

staged to send them off in the wrong direction? The community was

already gripped with fear over the possibility that a serial killer was

operating in its midst, as the bodies of twenty murdered women,

mostly prostitutes, had been found in farmers’ fields and other rural

areas around Edmonton over the last thirteen years. Was Liana his

latest victim, or is that what someone else was hoping police would

think?

The next day, White alternated between periods of high drama and

curious detachment. Choking back tears, he pledged in a television

interview that he would find his wife. ‘‘Liana, hold tight,’’ he said,

speaking directly into the camera. ‘‘I will find you.’’ A short while

later he asked detectives if he should return to work, as if he had

nothing more important to do with his time.

Police set up surveillance of White the following day after reviewing

footage from the security camera outside a nearby bar. At around

five o’clock on the morning she disappeared, the tape picked up

a car just like Liana’s traveling away from the White home in the

direction of the parking lot. It was difficult to make out the driver,

but it was clearly not Liana. Twelve minutes later, the tape showed a

man matching Michael White’s distinctive appearance—Caucasian,

hulking build, shaved head, goatee— running back toward the house.

This was even more troubling considering that White had told them

he hadn’t gotten out of bed until after his wife left for work.

That night, police followed an unsuspecting White as he went out

to pick up his daughter from a friend’s house. On the way, he stopped

at a field and retrieved two plastic garbage bags secreted in the tall

grass. Without ever looking inside them, he brought the bags back

to his house and put them out on the curb for the morning’s trash

pickup.

An undercover officer hitched a ride on the garbage truck the next

morning and collected the bags instead. Inside, police found their

true crime scene, or rather what was left of it: clothing, paper towels,

sponges, and latex gloves, all soaked in blood, and a broken lamp

that matched one in the White’s bedroom.

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It was beyond ironic. White had gone to great pains to erase any

evidence that he had killed his wife in their home. Then, fearing that

the evidence was about to be discovered (because police had told

White the night before that they were going to begin searching in

that area), he brought it back to the scene of the crime. Exhibiting

the extraordinary hubris of an eraser killer, he thought he was still in

control, that he had everyone fooled. It never occurred to him that

the police would be watching his every move.

Detectives were now convinced that White had staged a crime that

had never occurred, to cover up one that he had committed. But they

still had no body, no definitive proof that Liana was dead. As they

awaited the results of DNA testing on the items from the trash bags,

they got a warrant and searched his home. With the heat ratcheted

up, White did something even more extraordinarily hubristic. He

stage-managed the discovery of Liana’s body.

White had insisted on conducting his own search for his wife,

claiming he had special search training in the military and enlisting

friends and family members to help him. Hoping that he might lead

them to Liana, police actually encouraged his efforts, urging him to

follow his intuition, the ‘‘psychic bond’’ between husband and wife.

On July 17, White and several members of his family, followed

surreptitiously by surveillance officers, found Liana’s body in a ditch

off an isolated road a ten-minute drive from his home. She was

lying face down, covered by leaves and branches, naked, her bra and

panties discarded nearby to make it appear as if she had been raped.

The search party had stopped their car in the area to talk, White said,

and noticed the smell of decomposing flesh. They saw a leg sticking

out of the brush, with Liana’s telltale tattoo of a blue dolphin on the

ankle.

White fell to his knees and sobbed. Then he asked someone to jot

down the license plate numbers of passing cars, saying he thought

that the killer might return to the scene of the crime.

Chillingly, he had found her just as he had promised in that

television interview. In his mind—because he had staged her corpse

to make it appear that some stranger killed her, some depraved sex

criminal—there was no harm in finding her body. In fact, he needed

her to be found, now that the focus had turned to him. He wanted the

case to be closed, to give police a different motive, one that pointed

away from him.

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