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Stuart, 30, played the role of tragic victim with the boyish charm of a Ted Bundy, the dazed innocence of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald. His farewell letter to his wife, composed in his bed at Boston City Hospital and read at the funeral by his best friend, was a tour de force of grief. "You have brought joy and kindness to every life you've touched. Now you sleep away from me. I will never again know the feeling of your hand in mine." Many at the crowded funeral at St. James Church in Medford, the very church where he had been married four years earlier, sobbed out loud. Among those who attended: Governor Michael Dukakis and the mayor. Lying in the hospital with tubes running in and out of his body, Stuart asked to hold his son Christopher one last time. Delivered two months prematurely by caesarean section, the baby died after 17 days. Every emotionally wrenching moment made the newspapers and nightly news.
Stuart was also protected by the enormity of his crime. Statistics show that almost a third of all women who are murdered are killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Yet the mind recoils from the notion, from the all but inhuman possibility, that a man would slaughter his pregnant wife and unborn child, whose birth he had been preparing for in childbirth class only minutes earlier.
Before Stuart was out of the hospital, the police dragnet found a suspect: William Bennett, 39, an unemployed black who had spent 13 years in prison for crimes that included shooting a police officer. According to the police, Bennett bragged to his 15-year-old nephew that he had robbed the Stuarts and taken their jewelry. In the warrant the police obtained to search Bennett's home, they underlined the recollection that Bennett said he told Stuart, ^ "Don't look in the rearview mirror." Those words were almost identical to the ones that Stuart, in a brief interview with the police right after the shooting, claimed the killer used. Already in custody on a charge of robbing a Brookline video store, Bennett was placed in a lineup as soon as Stuart was well enough to come to the station. Stuart picked out Bennett as a man who resembled the killer. With that, hope vanished that the police might look for flaws in Stuart's story.
But what Stuart did not count on in his perfect crime was that Matthew Stuart, 23, could break down. Matthew admired his brother's quick rise from slinging hash in a Revere restaurant at little more than the minimum wage to manager of a fashionable fur store on Newbury Street selling expensive coats to Back Bay dowagers. Charles may have thought that his younger brother would always be as grasping and pitiless as he was. Matthew seems to have borne out Charles' faith for two months.
No one yet fully understands the pact between the two brothers. According to some reports, they planned various schemes for moving faster up the ladder both yearned to climb. One source says that Charles had a plan to kill Carol while Matthew faked a burglary of their house.