Murder in Boston (15 page)

On three occasions during the two weeks following the Stuart shootings, a
Herald
reporter urged Assistant District Attorney Francis O’Meara to probe the possibility that Charles Stuart was involved in the shootings, citing numerous suspicious comments and actions by Stuart during his 15-minute-long [sic] telephone conversation with State Police.

In that tape-recorded conversation, Stuart appeared to be resisting the police dispatcher’s efforts to locate him by refusing to identify signs or other landmarks in the area. And despite the dispatcher’s urgings, Stuart refused to call out to passersby for help, even though Stuart was driving along heavily traveled Tremont St. for several minutes.

The whole world, it seemed, was caught up in the emotionalism that Chuck’s death and Matthew’s admissions had spurred. As choleric as George and Bennett were, they were not the only ones to vent their outrage at the turn of events. Civil rights advocates across the city also lambasted everyone in sight.

Chapter 13

Chief among those taking police and prosecutors to task for the way they had handled the case was Bruce Bolling, a dapper, articulate city councilman from Roxbury, who, until the latest developments occurred, had been a backer of Flynn’s stop-and-search policy—in fact had been active in a group that set up an anticrime hotline called Drop-A-Dime. The search technique did not originate with Chuck’s and Carol’s shootings. It had begun the previous spring after an outbreak of gang- and drug-related violence. Its professed goal was to make the inner-city neighborhoods safer, but what it did was make a lot of the residents of those neighborhoods very angry indeed. By October 23 the policy was already highly controversial. The previous August a judge had dismissed charges of carrying a gun against a reputed gang member who was arrested during a search, calling the police stop-and-search tactic unconstitutional. Then the judge went one step further and asked the state attorney general, James Shannon, to review the policy. On October 15, a little more than a week before the Stuart shooting, Shannon ruled in favor of the police. He had determined, he said, that there was no
official
policy to search on sight, so there was nothing he could do.

About the same time, a furor arose when an unarmed man was shot by police who had stopped him and planned to search him during a sweep in Franklin Hill, another housing project. Following that incident, the black leadership split on the efficacy of the program, and the weekly
Boston Phoenix
reported that neighborhood residents were divided almost equally on whether the program should continue or be dropped. When it took on renewed vigor after the Stuart shooting, the atmosphere was already highly charged. Police, according to critics, did not help ease the tension by their excessive belligerence in trying to find the man Chuck said had shot him and his wife. According to the
Phoenix
, which quoted critics of the program, officers adopted a crude and pointed aggressiveness, stopping everyone in sight and repeating the question, “Okay, nigger, who pulled the trigger?”

During the debate and the sweeps through Mission Hill, Bolling and others who had supported the search policy remained silent. But when Chuck died, they exploded. On the day after Chuck’s body was recovered, Bolling spoke his mind. “This case has stirred racial fears not only in Boston, but nationally,” he said angrily. “A whole community and, in some cases, a whole race has been maligned.” He called for apologies “across the board,” citing specifically Mayor Flynn, Police Commissioner Roache, District Attorney Flanagan, and Governor Dukakis. They need, he said, to admit a “major mistake has been, made” in allowing the public to believe that a black man had killed Carol and Christopher.

Another among the more vocal critics was Louis Elisa, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, who accused Flynn of instigating “national hysteria” by ordering police sweeps in Mission Hill the previous autumn. He also demanded that the mayor apologize.

The Reverend Charles Stith, a moderate and president of the Organization for a New Equality, was easier on Flynn than the others, arguing that the mayor should not be made the “fall guy” in the drama. “From where I sit,” Stith said, “the media is as culpable as anybody in this. It was the classic representation of black people as either the victims or vermin.”

These expressions from Stith, Elisa, Bolling, and others were only the beginning of thousands of words that would be printed and broadcast about the issue. Seemingly desperate to excuse their earlier apparent failure to be skeptical enough, the Boston media went overboard in trying to compensate for what it perceived to be previous poor judgment. Anyone who wanted to yell racism was given a platform, not only in Boston, but in New York, Washington, and around the country. The Stuart case was exploding on the national scene with a fervor that made the coverage in October seem minuscule. It was too good a case for the media
not
to pursue enthusiastically, incorporating, as it did, questions about race, uxoricide, infanticide, suicide, psychosis, wife abuse, police and prosecutor incompetence, sibling loyalty, official silence, and old-fashioned greed.

The immediate response in Boston’s black community to Chuck’s death was outrage, a vehement outpouring of anger by blacks who felt they had once again been subjected to abuse and discrimination by a white power structure that was looking for a convenient scapegoat. It had become, in essence, a reverse image of the Tawana Brawley case in New York. In that incident, a black teenaged girl claimed she was kidnapped, raped, tortured, and held prisoner by a group of white men, some of whom were wearing law enforcement badges. Although there are some diehards who still argue that Brawley spoke the truth, a grand jury proclaimed her claims a hoax, and she has generally, and roundly, been discredited.

Some of the arguments put forth by those who claimed that racism guided the early investigation in the Stuart case were reasoned and well put. Others were not. In a sense those who were now so quick to jump on the racist bandwagon were being just as exploitative as those, like Dukakis and Attorney General Shannon, who had earlier used the shootings to try to further their own political ends.

Anthony Walton, who lives in Portland, Maine, and writes frequently on racial issues, appeared on
The New York Times
op-ed page with a column that said the Stuart case should be used as an example for the nation because all Americans have a lot to learn about racism. “What kind of country is this, what kind of community of common ground do we have, when we are so willing to believe the worst about each other?” Walton wrote. “What if Charles Stuart hadn’t cracked? How would we, black and white, have acted? What if the perpetrator
had
been black, but not Willie Bennett, the accused? Why was it so powerful that the killer was or was not black? What if the accused had been white?”

Derrick Bell, who teaches civil rights law at Harvard, also expressed his views for the
Times
, arguing that many Americans were willing to accept Chuck’s story because it reinforced racial stereotypes. “The fear of black crime is, of course, not all based on myth,” he wrote. “Black men in Boston, as in most urban areas, commit a disproportionately large percentage of all violent crime. Mr. Stuart’s hoax was plausible because black crime is real.” But that reality, he said, went deeper than crime itself; it penetrated to the roots of American society and had its origin in economics and class. “Charles Stuart was not burdened by the racial prejudice that discourages and ultimately destroys so many African Americans. He was a white man who, from the perspective of poor blacks, had everything that so many of them turn to crime to get. The nature of his crime makes Mr. Stuart a special case, but his bold effort to shift the blame for his deed is an American tradition that virtually defines the evil that is racism.”

William Raspberry, a syndicated columnist based in Washington, wrote in the
Post
on January 8 that the Stuart case made him angry, but he was not sure whom to be angry at. “The revelation that the police no longer believe a black man was responsible for the double shooting was greeted with one part relief and ninety-nine parts outrage. I’m still outraged,” he wrote, “that Stuart, whatever his desperate reasons, fingered a black man for the murderous deed. Black America is still angry, and our anger is not moderated—may even be intensified by—the fact that we aren’t quite sure where to direct it.” At whom should he focus his anger? he asked. “At Stuart, of course, but that is an empty passion. After all, he’s dead, and at his own hand. At white America for believing his lie? But we believed it, too. At the Boston police? Well, yes, we didn’t like their stop-and-search tactic, but we would hardly have been less angry if they had gone looking for their black ‘suspect’ with utmost courtesy and professionalism.”

Fellow Washington columnist Richard Cohen, writing in the
Post
three days later, agreed that black outrage was justified to a certain extent. If it had been a black couple shot by a white man, the reaction probably would have been quite different. But he, like Bell in the
Times
, said that black crime could not be overlooked. “Too many blacks are focused entirely on racism, not noticing, it seems, that the criminals who are bopping them over the head are black themselves. So credit Charles Stuart with something. He knew his country. When he wanted to frame someone for his wife’s murder, he chose a whole category—young black men. We all—blacks and whites—believed his story until the lie was exposed. Then the bickering resumed, turning the tragedy of murder into an even greater one. If we can’t agree a problem exists, we can’t even start to agree on a solution.”

Some newspapers, the
Boston Herald
and
USA
Today
, for example, ran columns side by side giving opposing advocates the chance to express their views.

Julianne Malveaux, a California writer, economist, and former resident of Boston, argued in
USA Today
that Chuck, Mayor Flynn, and the
Globe
were members of a list of current racists that included Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater, and President Bush. “This case fans every racial fire there is, and highlights every inequality.” What particularly galled her, she said, was that “the finger-pointing of any white man can make an entire black community suspect.”

Opposing her was John Lofton, a former New England newspaper editor now living in Laurel, Maryland. “Despite the repetition of the charge, ad nauseam, by some, there was no ‘stereotyping of blacks’ in the murder of Carol Stuart and her unborn baby. In fact, if any racial stereotyping has occurred, it could be argued that it was and is by those who charge ‘racism!’ every time a white person accuses a black of anything. But such charges are also a hoax.”

In the
Herald
, Boston writer Margaret Doris argued to support charges of racism, claiming that Chuck pandered to stereotypes by telling the story he did to police. “We may never know if Charles Stuart shot his wife and unborn child, or if he was covering for the person who did. What we do know is that he intentionally created a story about that night, a story that had at its heart the cultural myth of the black bogeyman. As long as there are fine white boys who know how to sell a story,” she wrote, “there will always be an audience for the bogeyman.”

Presenting a contrary view for the
Herald
was columnist Don Feder, who claimed that the impetus for the current problems resulting from the Stuart case goes back more than a quarter of a century, that the pigeons of the 1960s are now coming home to roost. “The racialization of American justice started with the black-power movement,” he said. “Any black charged with a crime automatically was reckoned innocent, the victim of injustice. Every criminal case was turned into an us-against-them contest.” The Stuart investigation, he argued, was not about racism. “The only sinister aspect of the affair is the demand that we now grovel before the guilt-mongers.”

But most of the statements in Boston tended toward the inflammatory. A man named Tony Van Der Meer organized a boycott against the
Globe
and the
Herald
. Willie Bennett’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Nicole, said her father should “sue every one of you.” Some black leaders, feeling an apology would be insufficient, called for the resignation of Flynn and his police commissioner, Mickey Roache. The Reverend Graylan Ellis-Hagler, pastor of Roxbury’s Church of the United Community, accused Flynn, Flanagan, Dukakis, and the news media of contributing to a “lynch-mob mentality.” And Bolling, apparently carried away with his own oratory, threatened unspecified but unpleasant action. “We are not going to be trodden on anymore…We are going to dictate what the city is going to do. I have had enough! This community has had enough! We collectively are going to tell you what is good for us!”

Some were even more strident. A Roxbury community activist named Sadiki Kambon accused Flynn of ordering “a South Africa-style attack” when he sent police into Mission Hill in the hours after the shooting. He said he would not accept an apology from Flynn even if one were forthcoming. “We will not let this message die,” he said.