Hero, Suspect, Suicide

By MARGARET CARLSON

Only three months ago, Boston businessman Charles Stuart was pitied as the victim of a brutal, senseless crime. On the way home from a childbirth class at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Stuart was shot in the abdomen by a robber, but managed to use his car phone to summon aid for his mortally wounded, seven-months-pregnant wife. Last week Stuart, 29, jumped to his death from a bridge over Boston's Mystic River as police were moving in to arrest him for committing her murder. His legacy: a rebirth of racial tensions in a city that had seemed on the way to solving them.

From the beginning there were questions about his story, but few would have believed that Stuart would shoot his wife in the head at point-blank range, then turn the gun on himself. The tape recording of his anguished ten-minute call to 911 from his Toyota Cressida, as his wife lay dying beside him, etched the crime in Boston's consciousness. "My wife's been shot. I've been shot," Stuart cried as a police dispatcher tried to keep him on the line long enough to determine his location. But Stuart gave no clues. He moaned, "Oh, man. It hurts. And my wife has stopped gurgling. She's stopped breathing."

The police finally found Stuart by following the sound of squad-car sirens audible over his open phone line. They arrived too late to save Carol Stuart, 30. Her son Christopher was delivered by Cesarean section but lived for only 17 days. Hospitalized for more than a month, Stuart did not attend his wife's funeral. Instead, he wrote a farewell letter to her that was read at the service: "I will never again know the feeling of your hand in mine, but I will always feel you. I miss you, and I love you."

According to Stuart, the prosperous couple -- he managed a fashionable fur store, she was a lawyer -- were accosted as they left the hospital by a black man armed with a .38-cal. snub-nosed revolver. The robber, Stuart claimed, ordered him to drive to an isolated section of the racially mixed Mission Hill district, where he shot and robbed them. Police mounted an intense search for the killer in Mission Hill and the predominantly black Roxbury neighborhood. Black community leaders in Mission Hill complained that police were indiscriminately stopping and frisking 200 black men a day. With little evidence to go on, William Bennett, 39, an unemployed black with a long criminal record, was arrested on Nov. 11. Stuart tentatively identified him in a lineup, but no formal charges were lodged against him.

Then last week Stuart's younger brother Matthew, 23, told police that the day before the murder, Charles arranged to meet him after the childbirth class. When Matthew arrived for the rendezvous, Charles tossed a bag through his open car window to his brother and sped off. Later Matthew went out to the Pines River in Revere, outside Boston, and tossed the bag into the water. Last week divers recovered Carol Stuart's Gucci bag, wallet and makeup kit from the river. Matthew also turned over to the police Carol's diamond engagement ring, which supposedly had been stolen.

Matthew's belated disclosure was prompted, said his lawyer, by his concern that an innocent man not be prosecuted. That was scant consolation to Boston's black community, which had felt persecuted for more than two months as the result of a lie. Boston N.A.A.C.P. president Louis Elisa decried "the lynch- mob mentality" ignited by the case. The Rev. Charles Stith, a prominent leader in the black community, accused local news media of "overkill" that whipped up racial tensions with biased accounts of "the worst of what black people are supposed to be." Elisa demanded an apology from Mayor Raymond Flynn, who had earlier called Stuart a hero. The mayor had already visited Bennett's mother to deliver an apology. Said he: "I've been on this earth 50 years, and I've read a lot of suspense stories, but I've not heard anything as bizarre and troubling as this."

Three days after his wife's murder, Stuart collected an $82,000 insurance payment. Some reports claimed that he had also taken out more than $500,000 in extra life insurance; others alleged that Matthew and Charles had earlier plotted to fake a burglary of the couple's house, during which Carol would be killed. A Boston television station reported that on the night before he died Charles confided to a family friend that he killed his wife for the insurance money. He wounded himself in the abdomen when his plan to shoot himself in the foot went awry. Other reports suggested that he was involved with another woman.

At week's end police had not divulged the contents of a note Stuart left in his new Nissan except to say that Stuart could not bear the allegations made against him. The closest thing to a confession the stunned community may ever get was in Stuart's farewell letter to his wife. "We must know that ((God's)) will was done," wrote Stuart. "In our souls, we must forgive the sinner, because He would."

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston