An image from a newspaper article about the death of Carol Stuart is projected on to the Boston skyline at night.Erin Clark/The Boston Globe
In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.
He told a dispatcher that he and his wife Carol were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood, and shot them both. Carol Stuart would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section. Days later, her son would die, too.
Chuck Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit.
Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.
For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.
On this week’s Reveal, in a show that first aired earlier this year, Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe and the Murder in Boston podcast bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few white people in power wanted to confront.
Listen to the episode in the player below.