American store manager, a Boston furrier, and a murderer-suicide. On the night of 10/23/1989, Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife Carol were driving home from a birthing class in Boston when Charles called the police from his cell phone stating that a black gunman forced himself into their car and demanded them to drive to the nearby Mission Hill district. After demanding the couple’s cash and jewelry, claimed Stuart, the gunman then shot Carol through the back of her head and Charles in the abdomen. Carol died of gunshot wounds four hours later in the hospital. The baby was prematurely delivered by Caesarean section and lived for nine days. To the press, police and public Stuart immediately became both hero and victim of interracial assault, fueling the controversy of social decay. Stuart survived his injuries, but his new status wouldn’t last long.
By 1/03/1990, his heroic tale began to unravel. In the testimony of his brother Matthew, Charles Stuart was no hero-victim but a cold-blooded psychopath. In Matthew’s words, Stuart not only shot his wife but used Matthew to hide the evidence. On the night of the murder, Matthew had rendezvoused on a deserted street in Mission Hill with his brother Charles, who passed him Carol’s purse and .38 revolver. Matthew then testified that he and a friend dumped the evidence into the Pines River in Revere, MA. Later confirmed testimonies from outside sources revealed that Stuart was seeking a way to get rid of his wife for several reasons: he wanted to cash in her life insurance policy, he was angry she wouldn’t get an abortion and feared that with a baby she might be inclined to give up her job, and her income, spoiling his dreams of opening a restaurant. Bitter that Carol was getting the upper hand in the relationship, Stuart had a girlfriend on the side.
With authorities rapidly closing in on Stuart, he beat them to the punch. On the morning of 1/4/1990, after parking his car on Boston’s Tobin bridge and leaving his driver’s license and a note on the passenger’s seat declaring that “the allegations have taken all my strength,” he jumped 145 feet to his death into the Mystic River below.
Link to Wikipedia biography