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Just ten days before the shooting the couple traveled to an inn in Connecticut to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary. If there had been any trouble in the marriage, says a friend, "she would not have kept it to herself." Adds another: "She was the kind of person who would tell you what she had for breakfast -- and how it tasted." In hundreds of interviews with people who knew the Stuarts, only one seemingly minor complaint has emerged. Carol once confided to Maureen Vadjic, who sometimes jogged with her on Saturday mornings, that she objected to Charles' staying out late on Friday nights. Says Vadjic: "She'd tell me, 'He came home late last night. I yelled at him, why do you go out? I'm pregnant. Don't you have any concern for me?' "
There is some evidence that Charles did not want to have a baby. The Suffolk County grand jury last Friday heard testimony from a truck driver from Lowell who was a classmate of Charles' at Northeastern Vocational. According to the witness, Charles asked him to help do away with his wife. Interviewed earlier by a Boston television station, the classmate said that Charles considered Carol's pregnancy a hindrance to his plans to open a restaurant and wanted her to have an abortion. "He had plans to go into business for himself," he said. "He didn't want to spend his life busting his ass for somebody else."
The portrait of the marriage is as incomplete as the picture that has so far been painted of Charles' siblings. One of Charles' brothers was involved in a scheme that led to Carol's murder; another, who appears to have known three days after the shooting that Charles was the killer, never told the police. They all grieved publicly over Carol and the baby. Matthew even helped carry Carol's coffin to her grave. The news of Charles' suicide initally elicited ^ sorrow from his in-laws, who had been expecting him for dinner that very night. They thought he did it out of grief. Mrs. DiMaiti had planned to cook chicken because it would be easier on Charles' mangled intestines.
A psychopath requires no motive for his horrendous deeds, but that has not stopped the search for one. Looking around for some love interest, investigators stumbled upon Deborah Allen, 23, who worked with Stuart for two summers at the fur shop. After Stuart's suicide, police discovered that she had used Charles' credit card to telephone him almost daily at the hospital. They also learned that several weeks before he killed his wife, Stuart and Allen visited her former prep school.
The day before Allen's Jan. 3 birthday, Stuart bought a $250, 14-karat gold brooch at a jewelry store in Peabody. He made the purchase about the same time his family was meeting to discuss how to handle Matthew's confession. Allen says she never received the brooch and that the calls were made only after a mutual friend said Charles complained that she had never contacted him. She used the credit card so the calls would not show up on her parents' telephone bill, because they had warned her not to get involved. She, in fact, has a steady boyfriend who goes to Brown (the school Stuart faked on his resume). She was more important to Charles than Charles was to her, perhaps because she fit into Stuart's deluded vision of himself as a fashionable restaurateur -- he the proprietor and chef, she the Waspish blond out front.