Murder in Boston (17 page)

It was, perhaps, only coincidence when the
Globe
’s Sally Jacobs wrote a long profile of Chuck almost two weeks after Bass’s article on narcissism, in which she highlighted the very factors that the Bass story listed as symptoms of narcissism. After opening her piece with a tale about how Chuck was so vain that he had his hairdresser touch up his few gray hairs, she stressed that he wore expensive suits and an expensive watch, that he belonged to a health club and kept a bicycle exercise machine in his basement, that he lied about having a football scholarship to Brown, and that after his surgery he asked his friends to run errands for him—all evidence of his manipulative ability and narcissistic traits. She didn’t mention his concern about his colostomy bag.

But the Bass story on narcissism was only one in the
Globe
that touched on the psychological angles of the case. The day after Bass’s story, Christina Robb wrote a long, heavy piece about Jungian thought and how that school of psychoanalysis delved into “the shadow,” with the shadow apparently being the Hyde side of Dr. Jekyll. All of this, in a way, fit with a phrase that was creeping into news reports with some regularity—the one about Chuck’s “dark side.”

In any event, Robb managed to tie the school of analytic thought (named after psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung) into the Stuart case. Robb’s primary source, a Jungian psychoanalyst from Medford named Penelope A. Tarasuk, said Chuck’s actions fit within a Jungian interpretation. “It’s always shocking,” Tarasuk was quoted as saying, “when somebody [i.e., Chuck] projects their own darkness onto somebody like William Bennett.”

The next paragraph, which was not in quotation marks and therefore presumably reflects the personal opinion of the author, Robb, reads:

If Charles Stuart actually did everything his brother and the police and other investigators are saying he did, he committed many crimes. One of the worst was treason against the city. He conned us into believing that he did nothing, when he did the worst things we can imagine. He conned many of us with our most unworthy fears, the ones we scare ourselves with after we’ve projected our worst, most unconscious impulses onto poor black men. He made us accomplices in framing an innocent man, an innocent neighborhood.

Not to be outdone, the
Herald
rebounded with another story purporting to explain Chuck’s mental health. It was headlined “A
LL
-A
MERICAN
S
OCIOPATH
” and had a subhead reading, “Meticulous Behavior a Telling Sign.” The writer, Patricia Mangan, went back to sociologist Levin and asked him to expand upon his earlier statements. The story was printed January 14, ten days after Chuck’s body was found. By then Levin had had more time to study the situation, and his thoughts were more organized. “There were so many clues,” he told Mangan. “Look at the way he manipulated public opinion by using the inner-city, drug-addicted criminal. Then there was the eulogy he wrote, his talk about the baby.”

Levin left no doubt that he still felt that Chuck was a sociopath and that his suicide (which also appeared to be a given to Levin) was motivated not by remorse, but by regret because he realized he had not committed the perfect murder. Levin added: “A sociopath lacks the capacity for remorse, but not for regret.”

To drive its point home still one more time, the
Herald
printed another story in which Chuck was painted not only as a sociopath, but as a wife abuser as well.

In an article headlined
PREGNANT AND BATTERED, STUART SHOCKER IS A CLASSIC DOMESTIC-VIOLENCE PROFILE
, reporter Jim Hight delved into a different perspective of Chuck’s life. What he found, he wrote, was that Chuck had “left a haunting question for everyone who had once mourned his loss: How could any man kill the mother of his unborn child?”

His finding:

An answer comes from people who say they’ve seen the likes of Charles Stuart before…Professionals who work with battered women, and those who counsel battering men, say the portrait of Charles Stuart that has emerged after his death matches a common profile for a perpetrator of domestic violence: a professional man with a seamless public image, driven by his business goals and secretly resentful of his family duties.

And experts say Carol Stuart was in a position that exposes women to high levels of danger for abuse: she was pregnant.

Chuck could have been considered a professional. He had a seamless public image. He may or may not have been driven by his business goals. And if he was resentful of his family duties, it was very secretive. However, one thing was certain: Carol
was
pregnant. But these things in themselves do not make Chuck a wife abuser.

A wife abuse specialist quoted in
The New York Times
said it was extremely unusual for a man to begin abusing his wife by killing her. Usually, said Dr. Richard J. Gelles, a sociologist and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rhode Island, violence against a spouse is an escalating process. “I’d say we’ve interviewed ten thousand people in the last twenty years, and that includes a reasonable number of people who used guns and knives on each other. But I have never talked to anyone or met anyone who, when they decided to be violent, did it the first time by picking up a knife or a gun. There was always a slap or a shove first.”

These allegations may one day prove to be true: that Chuck was a narcissist, a sociopath, a wife abuser, a murderer, a suicide. But if they are in fact proven, the proof did not come from the scant amount of evidence that was available when those stories were written. But the fact that they
were
written shows the feeling of desperation that must have been seeping into Boston city rooms, an apparent attempt to assuage the feeling of guilt for not having earlier been more skeptical and for not allowing that skepticism to be known. To imply that Chuck was a narcissist and a potential murderer because he had his hair touched up and wore expensive suits is as meaningless as the news report that said when police searched Chuck’s home they found a copy of Joe McGinniss’s book,
Blind Faith
. The reporter went on to explain that the plot involved a man who had had his wife killed for insurance money, implying that Chuck may have used the book as an instruction manual to help him get rid of Carol.

By writing that Chuck was a sociopath, and that sociopaths can blend so successfully into the population that even professionals have trouble detecting them, the media were attempting to excuse themselves for not having uncovered his elaborate lie to begin with.

The knowledge that they missed the
real
story from the beginning may have prompted the editors to go as overboard as they did. Aside from that, the mentally disturbed label may have been attached early to Chuck, perhaps undeservedly, for a good reason: it made it easier for the public in general to believe a man could do what he was accused of doing only because he was severely unbalanced. In reality that is not always the case. As one Boston psychologist put it, not every man who kills his wife and then lies in an attempt to cover it up is a sociopath.

In Chuck’s case, such a diagnosis is certainly open to question, subject, as are so many other issues, to the disclosure of more information, information that has not been forthcoming from authorities.

Chapter 15

January 6, 1990

Saturday

Early morning

By the weekend the Boston media were beginning to focus tightly on what Chuck’s motive may have been. The consensus was money. Jack Harper, a reporter from WCVB-TV, had gone on the air the day Chuck’s body was recovered, saying that Chuck had taken out $600,000 in life insurance on his wife. He could not substantiate his report. When the
Globe
hit the newsstands and front porches at dawn, its readers also were told the motive was insurance money. Although the headline promised revelations about Chuck’s alleged greed, the story was thin on details. That is because there were none. Kevin Cullen, whose byline was on the main story, confessed in the ninth paragraph that investigators were “frustrated” in attempts to pin down just how many policies were outstanding and what the amounts were. Initially an unidentified source said the policies totaled half a million dollars. Later that figure would be doubled. But if the police had such evidence, they didn’t share it with the media. At that stage the only policy investigators were talking about was one for $82,000, which was a group policy that Carol had taken out through her employer. Not surprisingly, Chuck was the beneficiary.

The
Herald
scored a coup by reporting that Matthew had a companion with him on October 23, when he discarded Carol Stuart’s jewelry, but then it shot itself in the foot with other stories that flew off on several tangents at once. It claimed that an unidentified witness had come forward who said Chuck had confessed to him that he’d killed his wife for the insurance money so he could pay off his gambling debts. That theory died there. And then the newspaper, in one of the apparent major reporting errors that appeared during coverage of the case, said Chuck underwent cocaine detoxification treatment at Boston City Hospital when he was admitted there after the shooting. The hospital later flatly denied the accusation, and the newspaper, while stubbornly sticking by its report, was not able to back it up. It also leveled a series of unsubstantiated charges against Chuck, saying he had a plan to rob his employer and that he had staged previous insurance scams.

In the fight to be competitive, the two newspapers were rushing into print with allegations that either would later be proved to be incorrect or could be neither proved nor disproved. Although the
Globe
had been fairly conservative up until then, it too would make its wild swings and take its share of the lumps.

By now the Chuck Stuart story totally dominated the local news, getting incredible play not only in the newspapers, but on local TV and radio stations as well. But since newspapers have more space than broadcasters have time, the sheer volume of the coverage was intimidating. To help readers find the latest developments in the case, newspapers took to grouping them on designated pages or in sections, each of which was flagged with a tagline so the reader could find the news quickly. The
Herald
initially grouped its stories under the banner
STUART MURDER
with subheads like “The Case,” “Reaction,” “Chronology,” and “Commentary.” Later it used a broader heading,
THE STUART MURDERS
, to group related stories. The
Globe
corralled its case-related stories under the encompassing headline
THE STUART MURDER CASE
. The most imaginative was the
Patriot Ledger
in suburban Quincy, which used the tagline “The Sordid Stuart Saga.”

One of the big questions still remaining at that point (and even now) is what the autopsy on Chuck’s body revealed. The
Globe
, as was by then standard practice in the case, quoted “a source familiar with the autopsy” as saying that the postmortem examination revealed no traces of narcotics, which in itself contradicted the
Herald
contention that Chuck had been a cocaine addict. The source apparently did not comment about alcohol. Having to rely on an unidentified source to reveal details from an autopsy report on an alleged suicide victim, especially when the victim was the main suspect in a sensational murder case, was an extremely unsatisfactory way of reporting the news and may have been as frustrating to
Globe
editors as it was to the public. But in this instance the
Globe
apparently had no choice. The newspaper had fought
that
legal battle a few months before. And it lost.

Late in 1988 the
Globe
went into the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court seeking an order forcing the chief medical examiner to release three autopsy reports. The reports covered patients who had died at a state hospital in 1987, all of whom were autopsied by the medical examiner. In a series of stories about the deaths, the
Globe
said that two of the patients had committed suicide and the body of the third contained large amounts of pain-relieving drugs. The newspaper apparently wanted the autopsy reports as confirmation.

The judge agreed with the newspaper that the reports should be public record. He ordered the medical examiner to turn them over, which he did. However, the medical examiner also filed a brief saying he disagreed with the court’s ruling and in the future would not turn over any other reports. Details about an autopsy, he argued, were to be treated as part of a person’s medical record and were therefore privileged information. The
Globe
went back to the judge and asked him to clarify his order. He complied, ruling explicitly that all future autopsy reports in such cases would also be treated as public record. The medical examiner appealed.