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On the night of September 6th, 1987, Dora Jean Brimage, 19, accepted a ride from a birthday party in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. She was seen getting into a car with three men. The next day, construction workers renovating a vacant building a mile and a half away from the party location found her semi-clad, mutilated body; she had been severely beaten, raped, and strangled. There were no suspects, but investigators preserved the evidence, hoping that one day advances in DNA science would help them solve the vicious crime. Her family would wait nearly 30 years to find out who had killed Dora, who was active in her church and in high school athletics, and who had planned to pursue a career in nursing. Her sister said she never wore pink again. Dora was wearing a pink outfit when she was murdered.

In 2014, a federal grant enabled the Boston Police Department Cold Case Squad to re-examine “cold cases.” The DNA evidence from Dora Brimage at last yielded its secrets: a suspect was identified. It would take the Squad two years to build their case against him. When justice was finally served, Dora’s mother Doris made a dramatic declaration at the killer’s sentencing hearing which stunned the courtroom.

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October 23, 1989. It was a crime that shocked even the most jaded journalist and shook the city of Boston and beyond. Carol DiMaiti Stuart, nine months pregnant, was killed and her husband Chuck Stuart seriously wounded. They had been shot in their car after attending a birthing class at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Chuck claimed a Black man had tried to rob them at a red light in the Mission Hill section of Boston.
The subsequent media circus turned the city upside-down for three months. The Boston Police arrested a Black man, Willie Bennett, despite having no evidence beyond Chuck’s description. Chuck identified Bennett in a police line-up. Racial tensions rose dangerously high.
Then on January 4, 1990, Chuck’s car was found abandoned on the Tobin Bridge in Chelsea with a suicide note left inside. Just hours before, Matthew Stuart, his youngest brother, had gone to the police and revealed what had really happened on that terrible October night.
Today’s guest is Joe Sharkey, whose book “Deadly Greed: The Riveting True Story of the Stuart Murder Case” chronicles the disturbing crime that turned Boston on its ear and reverberated across the United States. Joe is a former business travel columnist for The New York Times. He has written six critically acclaimed true-crime books, including the thrilling “Above Suspicion” which in 2019 was turned into a movie starring Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones).
Join us while Joe shares his thoughts on looking back at the Stuart case, the challenges of writing on true crime — and his experience of surviving a mid-air jet collision at 35,000 feet over the Amazon.