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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.