True Crime Tuesdays: Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage and Reckoning
Review Overview
Roots
8Rampage
8Reckoning
8Helen Archer | On 16, Apr 2024
The 911 call came in on the evening of 23rd October, 1989. “My wife’s been shot, I’ve been shot.” Charles Stuart and his wife, Carol, were on their way home from a birthing class – Carol was 7 months pregnant – when, according to Charles, a man had jumped into the back of their car, forced them to drive to an unfamiliar area of Boston and shot them both, before fleeing. Emergency services eventually found the car near the Mission Hill housing project and rushed the couple to hospital. Who did it, they asked Charles. “A Black man,” he replied.
So begins this three-part HBO docuseries, directed by Jason Hehir, whose previous work includes The Last Dance and Andre the Giant. The 911 call is later broken down by one of the contributors, Michelle Caruso, a journalist whose suspicions were aroused by the story long before the truth came out. But it’s played here, almost in full, as police vehicles rush up and down the streets of Boston, trying to find the car’s location – not helped much by the maimed Charles, who remained on the line throughout. There is remarkable footage of the couple being found, before being put in ambulances – there is, too, footage of Charles on a hospital gurney, muttering about being shot as doctors work on him.
But this documentary isn’t so much about the events of that night as it is about what followed – a frenzied manhunt for a culprit who could have been any Black man in the area. It was, says Ron Bell, “open season on Black people”, as an already racist police department determined not to investigate what happened, instead ambushing men on the street, in their houses, and in high school corridors, in an effort to find the killer. What they should have been doing, it ultimately transpired, was to be questioning Charles and his family.
After arresting one man, Alan Swanson, and holding him in jail for three weeks on scant evidence, the police turned their attention to Willie Bennett, having forced a statement from a teenage friend of the family, who is interviewed for this series. It was the Bennett family who bore most of the brunt of the Boston PD’s prejudices. After ransacking his mother’s home and terrorising his extended family, they managed to jail Willie on suspicion of a different armed robbery, while they attempted to collect evidence on him for the murder of Carol and her unborn baby. That he would probably still be wrongfully imprisoned for that, had not Charles’s brother decided to give a statement on what really happened that night, seems in little doubt. And yet still, the one police department employee who agreed to take part in the film – former Detective Bill Dunn – to this day, defends their tactics, even as it is left without a shadow of a doubt that Charles murdered his wife.
It is a gripping story, one that focuses not on the incomprehensible murder, but on the overt racial tensions of Boston in the 1980s, including a brief history of the city’s racial segregation, the effects of the crack epidemic, and the ways in which the city continues to change. It never loses sight of the victims – Carol Stuart and her unborn child – but its main focus is in the way in which race can so easily be weaponised.
Though the ripples of that night, almost 35 years ago, still rock the Bennett family and the community as a whole, it ends on a note which is hopeful for Boston’s future, while holding it accountable to its past.