A 1989 Boston Globe article about the shooting of Chuck and Carol Stuart is projected in front of the Boston skyline.Erin Clark/The Boston Globe
In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.
He said he and his wife 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. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.
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.
This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Murder in Boston podcast and associate editor and columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe, we 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.
This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.
