Murder in Boston (19 page)

Police, not surprisingly, refused to comment on the enigmatic “document” or say why they thought the relationship had been more serious than Allen was willing to admit.

Clearly, Allen and Dwyer intended her statement to be the last word on the subject. Whether that, indeed, will be the case remains to be seen. Conceivably Allen could be called before the grand jury or any other group with subpoena power that is charged with looking into the matter.

To rebut the
Herald
’s earlier report that Chuck had undergone treatment for drug withdrawal as well as for his gunshot wound, Boston City Hospital’s chief of surgery, Dr. Erwin Hirsch, granted an interview to the
Globe
. Although he still left a lot of questions unanswered, Hirsch revealed previously undisclosed details about Chuck’s stay. He was suffering from “a very, very serious wound,” the physician said. “He was a sick cookie.” Hirsch’s apparent goal in agreeing to the interview was to shoot down news reports that said Chuck underwent treatment for drug addiction at the same time he was being treated for his gunshot wound. The physician jumped to that subject right away. “His care had nothing to do with drugs,” Hirsch stressed, adding, however, that someone not familiar with the case may have gotten that impression because Chuck was a participant in a new pain-control program. He did not elaborate about the program or say someone may have confused it with drug detoxification.

Did he think Chuck shot himself?

The doctor thought about that, then answered slowly, “I’ve heard all the rumors, but when you ask me, ‘Did I suspect at any time that his wounds were self-inflicted?’ the answer is no.”

This was an intriguing comment. If the chief of surgery at the hospital Chuck was taken to immediately after he was found wounded in his car, the hospital where he was given emergency treatment, the hospital where he underwent two operations, and the hospital where he was kept for six weeks, if neither Hirsch nor his staff, who knew Chuck’s medical condition better than anyone before or since, never suspected that the wound was self-inflicted, then either Chuck did such a good job of turning the gun on himself that it did not attract even professional attention, or the wound was not self-inflicted. If the former is true, he was either very lucky or very skilled, more likely lucky. If the wound was not self-inflicted, then a third party was involved, and that would open up a whole new array of possibilities. Disappointingly, Hirsch was not asked to speculate on that angle. But he probably would not have answered m any case. What it means for the public, though, is that the question will never be answered, unless one of three things occurs: 1. Investigators or prosecutors suddenly become very forthcoming; 2. A grand jury investigates the issue and releases a report; 3. Someone confesses. At this stage, none of these options appears likely.

Asked if he could squelch the report that Allen visited Chuck while he was recuperating, Hirsch said there “absolutely was not” a woman fitting that description who ever visited him. The only women he remembers coming to see him were his mother and his two half sisters. Other visitors included brothers Michael and Mark, the DiMaitis, and a number of cousins. “The only one I don’t remember being there was Matthew,” said Hirsch, which made sense because Matthew had gone to California soon after the shooting and did not return until Chuck had been released. Hirsch later would be contradicted about Allen’s presence at the hospital by her best friend, who said she, Allen, and Allen’s boyfriend visited Chuck at least once.

Anxious not to be accused of doing a sloppy job of beating the bushes this time around, the
Globe
and the
Herald
went all out to give as broad a picture as possible of developments in the case. Despite their individual attempts to organize the disparate articles, readers still got the impression that they were having bits of information fired at them from a shotgun. However, pellets of fact that were scattered from one end of the respective publications to the other and had to be meticulously gathered, turned up a number of interesting items.

The
Globe:

• Reported that police had discovered Chuck’s safe in its basement hideaway and when they got inside it found a $100,000 insurance policy on his wife. This was in addition to the $82,000 policy Carol had at work.
  
• Said investigators were trying to track down a man who had told several people that Chuck had asked him to kill his wife. This allegedly happened weeks before the October shooting. But when a homicide detective went to the man before Christmas and asked him to repeat his story, the man refused. There was nothing the police could do.
  
• Published an article by its star columnist, Mike Barnicle, brother of a detective, that heaped dubious praise upon the Boston police. “When this incredibly bizarre story finally comes to an end,” he wrote, “it will be shown that detectives from the homicide unit merely covered themselves with glory.” They earned such acclamation, Barnicle said, because they charged Willie Bennett only with armed robbery and not the murder of Carol and Christopher. “Perhaps reluctance came because they knew him and understood that Bennett did not finish the seventh grade.” His IQ, Barnicle said, was 62, and he was classified by the school system as a “mental defective.” Barnicle questioned how anyone, knowing Bennett’s history, could champion his cause or, even more puzzling, use it as an example of bigotry in Boston. “Willie Bennett is a sociopath,” the columnist contended, not noting the irony in which his newspaper and its rival were jockeying to see who could get the most authoritative expert to say that Chuck was the sociopath in the case.
  
• Devoted the single remaining column at the top of page one to a heartrending story by Eileen McNamara telling about the “other suicide” on the Tobin Bridge. Just thirty-two hours before Stuart allegedly leaped to his death from the bridge, twenty-year-old Paul Horne jumped from the same structure. But his death went unheralded, and no one seemed to care except his family and a friend who had taken the time to call the newspaper. Unlike the ambiguity surrounding Chuck, there was little doubt that Horne was a suicide. Earlier on the day of his death, the twenty-year-old Horne contacted a friend, George Lyons, a counselor who helped him in high school, and told him he was going to kill himself. Lyons tried to convince him to return to the psychiatric clinic in Brookline where he had been receiving treatment. He even lent Horne train fare for the trip. Instead of returning to the hospital, Horne hailed a taxi in front of a Revere supermarket at 10:31
  P
  .
  M
  . Tuesday and asked to be taken into Boston. When the taxi stopped at the toll booth on the bridge, Horne threw open the door, jumped out of the cab, and, without hesitating, vaulted over the rail. Horne’s body was one of those that never made it to the river. He had leaped from the upper deck rather than the lower one, as Chuck allegedly had done, and his body smashed into the roadway on the lower level. As a final irony, when Horne’s aunt called from Florida to verify the death, she was told the victim couldn’t have been her nephew because the bridge jumper had been Chuck Stuart.
  

• There were, however, several major differences between Horne’s death and Chuck’s. Home had a history of mental problems and was currently under treatment. He had tried twice before, unsuccessfully, to kill himself. He was known to be deeply depressed. He told a friend what he was going to do. And he had a witness to his act.
  

The
Herald:

• Since it did not yet have the Debbie Allen angle, its main story focused on the fact that Matthew had not been alone at the Dizzy Bridge that night and that investigators appeared to be suspicious of Matthew’s story.
  
• It did not go as heavy on the “other woman” angle as the
  Globe
  had done, but it said that
  two
  women were being questioned to see if they were romantically involved with Chuck. Since the
  Herald
  had also doubled the amount of alleged insurance to $1 million, it was enough to make one wonder if there was not a campaign in the
  Herald
  newsroom simply to multiply the
  Globe
  ’s accusations by a factor of two.
  
• Reluctant to give up on its cocaine angle, the
  Herald
  also quoted unnamed prosecutors as acknowledging that they knew that Chuck had the drug in his system on the night of October 23. Since Hirsch’s denial, however, and the fact that the medical records apparently were going to be locked away forever, it looked as though the tabloid were fighting a war it could not win.
  
• It touched on an item that even it considered too far out to approach on its own. Buried deep in its main story were a couple of paragraphs quoting the
  Daily Evening Item
  in suburban Lynn as saying that a security camera at Brigham and Women’s had recorded a sequence showing Chuck beating Carol in the hospital parking lot on the night of the shooting. Prosecutors and police denied it, as did the firm contracted to provide security for the hospital.
  
• The
  Globe
  had its mystery man who said Chuck had approached him about a way to kill his wife, so the
  Herald
  found one as well. Sort of. Near the bottom of its main story, the newspaper, timidly for a publication that had already convicted Chuck of murder with terms like “his monstrous murder-for-money scheme,” said that six months before the shooting Chuck had approached “another family member” and asked him if he knew how he could go about hiring someone to kill Carol. It attributed the report to another unnamed family member. Ironically, both the
  Herald
  and the
  Globe
  would prove to be right on that issue, but it was a development that would not break for days. And when it did it would be in bold headlines, it would not be tucked away inconspicuously deep into a round-up story.
  

On the political front, Mayor Flynn and Police Commissioner Roache met on Saturday, January 6, with black leaders and representatives of the Mission Hill neighborhood to try to resolve the difficulties that had surfaced since Chuck’s body was found.

Flynn promised that he and Roache would go door to door in the poorer neighborhoods for “as long and as often” as necessary to try to ease concerns about the way the investigation was handled.

Apparently the mayor’s peace moves were meeting with some success. One of his visits had been to Mission Church in Mission Hill, where one of those he met with was Maria Sanchez, a member of a group called Puerto Rican Tenants of Mission Hill in Action. Sanchez had been particularly critical of Flynn, saying that the U.S. invasion of Panama was a skirmish compared with the Boston PD’s invasion of Mission Hill. After Flynn’s visit, though, she appeared mollified, saying she considered it an apology to the neighborhood.

Most of his other critics, however, were not so easily subdued. Cries were raised anew for his and Roache’s resignations, to which Flynn replied hotly that he was elected by the voters and had no intention of resigning. As far as Roache was concerned, he was Flynn’s appointee and still had his confidence. “There is no question in my mind about whether or not he should stay on,” he told the group, a response that failed to make anyone very happy.

Perhaps as a result of Flynn’s Saturday session, a group of moderate black leaders met on Sunday, January 7, in the home of former State Representative Melvin H. King to plan a more reasoned response to the crisis that was gripping the minority communities. More than two dozen people were present. During the three-hour session, they agreed to carry their grievances up the line from City Hall. They would ask, they said, for state and federal inquiries into the conduct not only of police, but also of prosecutors and the news media. “We’re not calling for anyone’s resignation,” said State Representative Byron Rushing. “What we’re trying to do is pause for a moment and figure out what happened. Once we have all the pieces of the puzzle, then we can make some sensible decision about what should happen next.”

What they would like to see happen, they said, was for the U.S. attorney to investigate the case and determine if the civil rights of Willie Bennett and Alan Swanson had been violated, plus determine the constitutionality of the stop-and-search policy. They also would like to see the creation of a commission to look at the case beyond the civil rights questions.

“What we’re finding out,” said Rushing, “is that reporters heard rumors, people in the community heard rumors, people in the hospital heard rumors. Why weren’t these rumors investigated?” Were reporters, he asked, discouraged from investigating the incident by their editors, police, or prosecutors? Other issues involved were whether police followed the proper investigatory procedure in the case and why Bennett was placed in a lineup when he had not been charged in connection with the Stuart shooting.

“People are asking what we want,” said Rushing. “They want to know how we can prevent this from happening again. I don’t think we can make any informed judgments about that until we know what happened.”

It was certainly a more restrained approach than any proposed so far. However, that group did not represent the more militant faction of the black community, which was still screaming for Flynn’s head. Even while the group of moderates was meeting in one section of the city, Flynn and Roache were huddled with still another, angrier, group that demanded two things from the mayor: first, that he issue a formal apology to the minority community for the way the case had been handled; and second, that he create a citizen’s review board with oversight power over the police department.