Murder in Boston (14 page)

One of the really interesting things about the
Globe
story, however, was that the two words in the first paragraph, “police said,” are the closest the text comes to official attribution. Euphemisms are scattered throughout the story—“sources familiar with the investigation” … “authorities” … “investigators” … “sources” … “detectives”—but there are no solid quotes. The only police official quoted by name anywhere in the lengthy
Globe
story is Reading Detective David Saunders, who said police did indeed go to Chuck’s house on the night of January 3.

The
Herald
coverage was almost identical. Its headline, which took up most of the right side of the tabloid’s front page, read simply,
HE DID IT FOR CASH
. The subhead read: “Probers Point to Insurance Policy.” The
Herald
also branded Chuck a suicide, and it did no better than the
Globe
in attributing its information. No names were mentioned, nor would they be in coming weeks.

Both papers also went out of their way to establish a motive: the
Herald
in its front-page headline, the
Globe
deeper into its story. The only substantiation for the
Herald
’s claim, however, came in the first paragraph in a phrase that said his motive was to “collect on her lucrative life insurance policy.”

The
Globe
was more verbose. It said: “Authorities theorize Stuart killed his wife in order to collect several insurance policies he held on her totaling a half million dollars or more.”

Eventually the newspapers would decide that Chuck had taken out policies on Carol’s life totaling almost $1 million. But in the absence of proof, that figure was speculative. If police did, indeed, have evidence of such policies, they did not share the details with the media.

Late that afternoon the phone rang in the office of District Attorney Flanagan. The caller was a male, asking to speak to the assistant district attorney handling the Stuart case. “I have some information that you may be interested in,” the voice said.

The caller was Jay Kakas, co-owner of Kakas & Sons furriers, where Chuck had worked for eight years. Kakas, apparently as shaken as everyone else by the recent turn of events, apologized for not calling sooner with the information he had to divulge.

“What is it?” the ADA asked impatiently.

“It’s about the gun,” Kakas said. “I think it’s ours.”

Kakas said the store had purchased a pistol long ago as a protection against robbery. At the time, he said, he had applied for and received a permit for the weapon. However, after the store hired an armed security firm to take over such duties, Kakas had stuck the gun in the store’s safe and forgotten about it. That had been at least ten years before, and the permit had long ago expired.

“Where’s the gun now?” the ADA wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Kakas replied. “It’s missing. It’s been stolen.”

“What kind of gun was it?”

“It was a snub-nosed, thirty-eight-caliber pistol,” Kakas said.

“Was it nickel-plated?”

“Yes,” replied the furrier.

“Did Charles Stuart have access to the safe? To the gun?”

“Of course,” said Kakas. “He was my general manager.”

Why it had taken Kakas more than two months to realize there might be a connection between the pistol kept in the shop’s safe and the shooting incident, especially when a description of the weapon allegedly used in the assault was so widely publicized, was never explained satisfactorily. Kakas said he simply had forgotten about the pistol, and the possibility that it could have been the weapon used to kill Carol did not occur to him until after Chuck’s apparent suicide.

According to the
Herald
, FBI tests on the weapon, which was recovered from the Pines River a few days after Kakas’s telephone call, determined that the saltwater-corroded pistol was indeed the same weapon that Kakas had registered a decade before. The newspaper added that tests also determined that the weapon was the one used to fire the bullets that killed Carol and wounded Chuck. However, there was room for doubt because the official report had not yet been made public.

According to the
Globe
, a reporter from the newspaper had asked Jay Kakas soon after the shooting if Chuck owned a pistol. Kakas said no. Did he carry à store-owned weapon in the van when he was on company business? Kakas replied in the negative. Did you keep a pistol in the store? “No,” Kakas said.

The first reports on the day after Chuck’s death set the tone for the media coverage in forthcoming weeks. It was, in a word, hysterical. Significantly, the early reports delineated several things that would erroneously, or prematurely, be treated as givens by practically every news organization covering the story. And that would be virtually every news organization of any size in the country. In one week the Stuart story would be on the covers of
Newsweek, Time
, and
People
magazines, a virtually unheard-of situation. Devotees of
Time
and
Newsweek
are not necessarily avid readers of
People
, but fascination with the Stuart saga was so far-reaching that everyone felt compelled to get in on the act. Newspapers from Boston to Bakersfield devoted as much space to the case as if it were a local story. For a while,
The New York Times
ran a story almost every day. Also giving it heavy play, among others, were the
Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post
, and hundreds of smaller newspapers, not to mention United Press International, the Associated Press, and the British news agency, Reuters.

The New York Times
, incidentally, was not free from error in its initial break. Its story on January 5 also unqualifiedly labeled Chuck a suicide in its headline, although the story attributed the assertion to “authorities,” which was correct. The
Times
relied heavily on Flanagan for its attribution, and that tended to give its story more credibility. But the newspaper made a major mistake when it incorrectly stated that the bullets that killed Carol and wounded Chuck came from different guns. The error was corrected in later stories.

Television was, perhaps, even more fascinated with the case. On the night Chuck’s body was found, local stations, in the words of the
Herald
’s Monica Collins, “went wall-to-wall with coverage.” All three major network affiliates broadcast District Attorney Flanagan’s news conference live. And WNEV-TV, the city’s CBS affiliate, canned the popular
Wheel of Fortune
to show a quickly assembled special on developments in the case. WNEV also scored a coup with an interview with Matthew’s lawyer, John Perenyi. Commenting on that interview, Collins wrote: “Perenyi—his eyes skittering away from the camera, his answers both pointed and vague—left the indelible impression that the Stuarts were a family in turmoil and that Charles Stuart was guilty.”

The story also was big on the networks. In addition to the regular news broadcasts on ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN, the Stuart saga was featured in special programs.
Entertainment Tonight
, the
Today
show,
Nightline, Donahue, Morton Downey, Jr
., and
Geraldo
all broadcast segments on the case. But it was in Boston, of course, that the coverage was pervasive. It was in the newspapers, on the radio, and on TV, and it was the major topic of conversation around hundreds of thousands of water coolers and private homes.

As usual, the coverage ran from the tasteful, such as that on WGBH, Boston’s famed public television station, to the tasteless, such as the radio talk show host who invited callers to share the latest “Chuck jokes.”

There was, however, no humor in the social, moral, and political upheaval that resulted from Matthew’s admissions and Chuck’s death. Literally overnight, millions of people around the country and around the world had to adjust to a 180-degree attitude flip. From everything that had been developed up until then, the Stuart case was the epitome of the dangers always present in an urban society. It showed what could happen to an innocent young white couple fro suburbia when they dared to venture into an inner-city mixed-race neighborhood, one where drug use was prevalent and crime was ubiquitous. Nowhere, naturally, was this more evident than in Boston itself. What continues to be shocking about the case, however, is the strident tone adopted by the Boston media. Until January 4 they were aggressively pushing the point of view that Chuck and Carol were victims and the villain was a black man. The implication was heavy that Willie Bennett was the man.

Then, within twenty-four hours, the view changed completely. Willie Bennett was innocent and Chuck was the fiendish perpetrator, the conscienceless degenerate who killed his pregnant wife and, indirectly, his infant son. His motive: money. What members of the media overlooked in their competitive zeal, in their blatant self-righteousness, was that neither man had proved to be what they said he was; that neither had been judged guilty except in their reports. Before January 3, when Matthew went to the authorities, Willie Bennett was regarded as the chief suspect, but he had not been convicted. After January 3 Chuck Stuart became the chief suspect. He had not been convicted, except in the media, which continued to label him a suicide and a murderer. One example of the media reaction was an article by Mike Barnicle, a
Globe
columnist who seems to want to be regarded as Boston’s answer to Jimmy Breslin. A few days after Chuck’s body was found, he wrote a memorable column that began: “When Charles Stuart, the lying murderer who will be forever infamous, jumped to his death last week…”

Barnicle, in fact, would become the
Globe
’s star in its Stuart case coverage. With a brother who is a detective for the city police, Barnicle’s tips formed the basis for much of the
Globe
’s coverage. For a time, at least, the line between opinion and unbiased reporting effectively disappeared.

Boston officials cannot be held blameless, either. By adopting a policy of strict silence, they aggravated and abetted the situation. One of the most remarkable things about the Stuart case has been the incredibly widespread policy of official silence. Virtually every official from doctors at the hospital to Mayor Flynn buried his head and refused to speak on the record, hiding instead behind time-honored claims such as the sanctity of medical records and the inability to comment on an on-going investigation. That left reporters with no other choice but to go with unidentified sources and rumor. Seldom, in any case of such magnitude and wide public interest, has there been as blatant an effort to suppress pertinent information.

But if official Boston was keeping a low profile, Willie Bennett certainly was not. As soon as Chuck’s death was announced, Robert George, Bennett’s lawyer of the moment, issued a hyperbolic statement, purportedly drafted by Bennett (who still has not allowed his voice to be heard publicly), bitterly criticizing police and prosecutors.

“It is a shame that it took the suicide of the real killer this morning to open people’s eyes to the fact that I am innocent and have always been,” the statement read. “Yet nothing anyone can say or do will ever repair the terrible damage which has been caused to myself and my loved ones. My life…has been ruined.”

It took a lot of courage for Bennett to say that—the statement that his “life had been ruined” was an especially pointed dig at Boston officials—coming as it did from a man who has averaged 1.6 arrests a year for every year of his life, including his childhood and the years he spent in prison.

George, also unable to restrain himself, elaborated upon the comments attributed to Bennett. “They have ruined somebody’s life, and someone has to take responsibility for it,” he said, adding that he was expecting the grand jury to indict his client that week for the murders of Carol and Christopher Stuart. “The prosecution twisted and adjusted the focus of the investigation,” he said. “They pushed people to testify, so they heard only bits and pieces of information. No amount of bobbing and weaving on the issues in this case can hide the fact that Bennett was a scapegoat and the prosecutors destroyed his life.”

The
Globe
story also contained quotes from members of Bennett’s family, all of which echoed the anger expressed by George and his client.

“There’s white man’s justice and black man’s justice,” Bennett’s brother, Ronald, was quoted as saying. “We were trying to tell you the first time, he didn’t do it,” said Bennett’s sister Diane, one of the sisters who gave Bennett a contradictory alibi when he was arrested in November.

The
Herald
story covered the major points in George’s news conference but couldn’t resist taking an editorial slap at police (and patting itself on the back) at the same time. Deep in the news story about George and Bennett were these two puzzling paragraphs: