The details of Carol Stuart’s murder and the unraveling of her husband’s story were so shocking that, at the time, little attention was paid by Boston’s predominantly white media to the extraordinary collateral damage that the case wreaked on Boston’s Black communities. The sharpest of these choices is to foreground the role of race in the Stuart affair, in terms of both its backdrop and its aftermath. But the series is refreshingly nuanced, rich in context, and deftly assured in its narrative decisionmaking. Murder in Boston doesn’t break much formal ground: It hews mostly to the industry-standard mix of archival footage and talking-head interviews, and even includes Hehir’s much-memed Last Dance technique of occasionally having subjects watch footage of one another’s testimonies on an iPad. Then, after a while, the most predictable thing happened: White Bostonians moved on and stopped talking about it. By the end of 1990, there’d already been a made-for-TV movie about the case, and in 1991 Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch had a Top 10 with a song about the murder that remains one of the worst rap records ever made. The case dominated news and conversation for months as an elementary schooler living in a Boston suburb at the time, I probably heard more about Chuck Stuart in those days than about Larry Bird and Roger Clemens combined. It’s hard to overstate what a cataclysmic episode this was in the region. The following morning, Charles Stuart jumped off the Tobin Bridge, leaving behind a self-pitying suicide note that claimed he’d been “sapped of strength” by an unspecified “new accusation.” 3, 1990, Stuart’s brother Matthew went to the police and confessed that Charles had shot both Carol and himself and staged it to look like a robbery, enlisting Matthew’s help to dispose of the gun and Carol’s jewelry. All the while, the city’s newspapers and TV stations played up a sensational narrative of Black violence and white victimhood: Bennett’s arrest was covered as though it were a conviction, while the Boston Herald referred to the Stuarts as the “ Camelot couple.” Once Charles Stuart had sufficiently recovered, he promptly identified Bennett-whose image had been plastered over newspaper and television coverage for weeks-as his wife’s murderer. The police focused on a revolving door of suspects, even briefly arresting one, Alan Swanson, before settling on William Bennett, a 39-year-old resident of Roxbury, as the Stuarts’ likely assailant. A weekslong manhunt effectively terrorized large segments of Boston’s Black population Mission Hill community leaders estimated that, at the height of the search, more than 150 stop-and-frisk searches were conducted each day. Both the Boston police and, soon, the Boston media took Stuart’s version of events at face value, convulsing a city that was already mired in a panic over crime and that was little more than a decade removed from the appalling racial violence of the busing protests of the 1970s.
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