Please note, this episode includes some spoilers for the HBO documentary, Murder in Boston, Roots, Rampage, and Recony. Before we begin, this episode contains some offensive language and descriptions of violence. It also references suicide. It may not be appropriate for all listeners. Please take care while listening. It's January fourth, 1990. Chuck Stewart stops his car on the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge. He leaves a handwritten note on the front passenger seat and steps out. The engine's still running. Chuck walks to the concrete edge and peers down into the Mystic River, climbs over a green metal railing, and falls 145 feet into the rigid water below. In this moment, everything changes. The police theories, the media narratives, the citizen outrage, it's all wrong. It's as if everyone is peering down into the water where Chuck Stewart landed, and they see themselves in the reflection. It's ugly. Tv report of Jack Harper, was sent to the bridge that day. I remember it was cold, and I was sent down to the dock because there was a report of a man who jumped in the water. I'll never forget it. It was the first assistant district attorney, Leary, was there.

I remember standing there with him, and I said, Oh, my God, this poor guy, how much worse is going to get? What a terrible ending. He just couldn't take it anymore. I understand. And he said, You have no idea. You don't know what happened. It's not what you think. He killed her. He set this up. He just committed suicide. Everything stopped. The reporter called his newsroom. I said, The district attorney says that it is Charles Stewart, but he killed her. It was a hoax. He set it up. And they're like, silence. I was just kicking myself. We all were kicking ourselves. How could we not have figured this out? How could we not have known? Carol's friend from the accounting firm, Barbara Williamson, remembers writing waves of disbelief and guilt. How easy it had been to believe the lie. I had to rewrite the story in my head. I had to recapitulate the whole experience through a completely different lens. I was just so full of shame for what happened to the African-American people in Boston. Feeling like I was a part of it, I was complicit. No, I didn't pull the trigger. No, I didn't point the finger at the wrong guy, but I'm white and I'm enmeshed in this mess.

And this is the thing. Everyone was enmeshed in this mess. Everyone had been sucked into this drama. It only took two words from Chuck as he lay bleeding on a stretcher, Black man. And all this machinery, the police, the press, the politicians, kicked into gear. These institutions did what they always did, what they always had done, find the Black man. To pull off this racist hoax, Chuck needed everyone's help, and he knew how to get it. He knew what story to tell. And people didn't just believe it. They rallied around. That sense of complicity was uncomfortable for a lot of people. I don't like being made to feel racist and in fear of the blacks because there are just as many rotten white people as there are blacks. When Chuck jumped and the truth was revealed, some people had to confront the fact that they were exactly who Chuck thought they were. Charles Stewart played a racist game on us. We cannot forget, however, that he played out that game on a stage which was already set. It's ingrained. Blame the black guy. It's really easy because it works. It's always somehow the mysterious black man who's done the terrible thing.

I have had enough. This community has had enough. I think it's the biggest embarrassment in the city of Boston. Boston. I remember walking into the newsroom that morning. We didn't have Twitter or text or any of that, so I had no idea what had happened. I get in and it's like, Chuck jumped off the bridge? What? Two top editors gathered a bunch of us up. I remember the city editor said, Is this guilt or grief? Which I just thought was crazy. You know, like guilt, obviously. I think white people were more shocked than Black people, without a doubt. But that morning, nobody had time to think philosophically about what all this meant. It was, Who's going to go where? Who's going to do what? Everybody's heads were spinning. The cops, the politicians, the media, regular people. We were all just trying to figure out what the hell just happened. I'm a speaker part. I'm Adrian Walker, and this is Murder in Boston, the untold story of the Charles and Carol Stewart shoot. Episode 6, The mask comes off. Peter O'Malley called me at my house and he said, That fucking asshole jumped. I don't know who he was talking about.

I said, Who? He goes, Chuck Stewart just jumped off the fucking Mystic River Bridge. And I said, You're shitting me. We interrupted our regularly scheduled program has revealed this special report- This is Steve Sparazia, news said to fly at the child's town, Navy Yard. This morning, we have a rather tragic and bizarre story to report. About eight o'clock this morning- The search and a scam. A shocking twist to a highly publicized Boston crime. The husband becomes a suspect and commits suicide. I think it's fair to say that the focus of this investigation changed dramatically yesterday. That morning, as divers searched the water, district attorney, Newman Flanagan, briefed the media at the river's edge. For months, Flanagan had played, pushed, and spun reporters. Now, he tried to explain everything. Flanagan, are you confirming this morning that Mr. Stewart had become a suspect, that he have become a suspect? Did he do it? Yeah, I think that's a fair comment on the entire matter where Mr. Stewart became a suspect. Of course, we had a number of people that we were looking at. Among them was Mr. Stewart, and we made a dramatic move towards Mr. Stewart as a result of information we received yesterday.

The night before Chuck's suicide, his younger brother, Matthew, went to police with an astonishing story. There was no black man. Chuck was the killer. Matthew was there that night to help Chuck cover it up. But in recent days, Chuck got wind of what was coming. He talked to his lawyer and took off. He jumped before the police could get answers from him. In his car, Charles Stewart left a brief note, four sentences saying in part, I love my family. The last four months have been real hell. All the allegations have taken all my strength. The whole time the police were tearing apart Mission Hill, there was a completely separate drama playing out on the other side of the Mystic River, up on the north shore where the Stewart family and their friends lived. It took months, but finally, Matthew told the truth to police. These statements clearly exculpated Willy Bennett and clearly inculpated Charles Stewart in the murder of his wife and infant son. After a careful review of this new evidence, I instructed Boston police, homicide detectives to arrest Charles Stewart for the murder. But before police could arrest Chuck, he went to the bridge.

That's the body. They're telling me to stand by.. How do you want to be able to… TV cameras caught divers hoisting Chuck's body onto a search boat. You could see his jeans, white sneakers, and windbreaker. We just believe that just moments ago, divers pulled a body from… The divers put Chuck's body into a blue body bag. Chuck's cousin, Patrick Reardon, recalls the Stewards watching it happen in real time. We were sitting in my aunt's living room, and I was with her, and I can remember feeling how could this woman be bearing up on channel 5 or whatever we were watching. You could see the state police boat pulling my cousin out of the water. For Carroll's family, the Damites, it was a different type of nightmare. Shocked. It doesn't even begin to describe the feeling. Carroll's brother, Carl Damite. My initial reaction was one of deep guilt because my feeling was he had committed suicide because he just couldn't take the fact that he had lost his wife and his son. Carroll's family had never suspected a thing. They felt betrayed not just by Chuck, but by all the Stewart's. That is just mind-boggling that they could sit with us or allow us to visit Chuck, for us to cry over Chuck, to pray for Chuck's recovery, knowing that Chuck was responsible for what happened to Carol.

They'd been mourning for months with Chuck. My dad was so upset that he literally had to be hospitalized. The utter betrayal, it's beyond belief. It was, once again, the biggest news story in the country. Topping news seven tonight, a bizarre and sinister twist in the Carol Stewart murder case. A man killed himself in Boston today. That would appear to close the books on a story of tragedy, violence, and death that sparked a national outcry last fall. Many questions remain about the Stewart case. The most puzzling, why. Experienced investigators, veteran reporters, and later, the nation were fooled by a scheme so diabolical to cover up a crime so brutal that even the most skeptical among us believe the unbelievable. Among black people, the news hit differently. Let's start with Willy Bennett's family. Chuck had picked Willy out of the police lineup just a few days earlier. Willy was individual number three, the one whose profile made Chuck so nervous. Chuck told the police he was 99% sure that individual number three was the shooter. Willy was languishing in jail, unsure of his fate or if he'd be charged with Carol and Christopher's murders when Chuck went off the bridge.

The Benneets had spent weeks telling anybody who would listen that Willy was innocent, but nobody believed them. All the time that my son didn't have nothing to do with it, and he was innocent all the time. But I know one thing. I'm just glad that she's over. My brother wasn't the one that did, and I'm glad they found out that he was the one that killed his own wife. Willy's nephew, Joey Bennett was especially relieved. I was happy he jumped because I was like, Now my uncle going to go home. Now he's going to go home. If he didn't jump, he was going to go to jail. It wasn't just the Benets who were feeling this whiplash. Here's journalist, Howard Bryant. I remember feeling a certain sense of immediate relief that it wasn't the black guy after all. Then I remember feeling an immediate sense of anger that it was never the black guy. What was this all about? What was this for? Who did this serve? I don't think Charles Stewart had to consume a whole lot of media to believe it's ingrained. Blame the black guy. It's really easy because it works. There are so many examples of the racial hoax because it works.

Bryant believes there were holes in Chuck's story that police and the media should have jumped on immediately. In the course of our reporting, a lot of people, especially black people, told us that they had never believed Chuck's story. It was on the news that a black man had killed this pregnant white woman over there at Parker Street. The girl that lived upstairs said, That was no black man. That was a white man. Probably it's her husband. We just laughed about it and went on about our business. We even heard that some cops had suspicions. A couple of days after this happened, there's one woman, a female police officer, black. She walked by, she walked by. She said, That man killed his wife. And she said that she just brought it out. And people who knew Mission Hill had seen glaring inconsistencies in Chuck's story. We knew the neighborhood. It just didn't fit. Attorney Leslie Harris said people saw problems with Chuck's story on the very first night. Remember, Chuck told 911 dispatchers that he was lost and there was nobody around. People were out on the street. It was a warm evening. He could have blown his horn and got help in so many different places.

One of the things that stood out was that he parked his car perfectly. If he had gone straight, he had to know the neighborhood. He was a block from the hospital. Just a lot of things came up that just didn't make sense. Leslie went to church with some of Chuck's nurses. They were talking about the holes in Chuck's story, too. They said he was too callous and too cold towards the death of his wife. Leslie had defended the first suspect who was picked up for the case, the guy with the tracksuit, soaking in a sink. When Willy Bennett was arrested, Leslie was sure the cops had the wrong guy. I didn't think that it fit him. Even the worst thugs in the community have some code. And shooting a pregnant woman? Willy was a tough guy. That just didn't fit him, didn't fit the image that had been painted for me and for us in the community of who Willy Bennett was, a thug, but towards other thugs. People in Mission Hill felt this awful bitterness and rage. Jeff Sanchez was one of the many, many Latino males in the neighborhood to be stopped by police after the murder.

It was like, See, we told you. You didn't want to listen. I'm just saying just to people in the community. Everybody knew in the community, but everybody was forced to believe that Willy Bennett had something to do with it when people knew that that wasn't the case. But nobody wanted to listen. Nobody wanted to listen to anybody in the community. I have had enough. This community has had enough. Whenever our wife is killed, the first automatic suspect is a husband. Except when it happens in the black community. When it happens in the black community, the automatic suspect is a black man. And we're tired of that. This community has been absolutely devastated. There were cries today for the resignation of Mayor Flint and Police Commissioner Roach. Some call for some restitution for Mission Hill residents. But the bottom line among these people is that blacks in Boston, especially in Mission Hill, were dealt a grave injustice. Black men in Boston had spent the last two and a half months walking around with this constant, helpless fear of being targeted as suspects. And now, all that pent of anger just poured out. The black and Hispanic community has once again been the victim of the Ku Klux Klan type of night riding and a sensational rape of this community by public officials and by the media in particular.

Reverend Grayland Ellis Hagleer was one of the most prominent voices in Boston back then. He ran a church in Mission Hill, and had witnessed firsthand police violating the civil rights of young males in the neighborhood. This time, however, the night riding was not the action of white-robed bigot, but instead the actions of a mayor, Mayor Raymond Flint, who so quickly jumped to conclusions. Remember, Flint had called for every available detective to be put on the case. Multiple politicians had called for bringing back the death penalty. Some politicians and media figures had called the black man Chuck described an animal. Nation of Islam Minister Don Muhammad pointed out the hypocrisy. And there are some public officials who gave credence to that. I want to know now. Will you call Mr. Charles Stewart? Animal. The city suddenly felt like it was on the brink of violence. Again, police commissioner Mickey Roach. I was preparing for a riot. That's how serious it was in this city. You know why? Because of the same people who had so much compassion for the DeMadee family, Carol Stewart and the child, suddenly there was only one emotion that they could have, and that was rage.

There was no well. Mayor Flint tried to do damage control. He went to the bend at home, where just weeks earlier, police had banged down the door and ripped the place apart. He was ostensibly there to apologize. Willy's sister, Vita Bennett, says she had been knocked down the stairs during the raid, and she met with Flint when he visited. He came to the house, I brought her out, offered him a seat. He said, No, thank you. We thought our house was nasty and dirty. I looked at us like we were dirty people. I said, That's all right. God's going to punish you for that. I was locked up, so I wasn't even there. Joey Bennett was still in jail the night Flint visited, but he heard about it. Flint came in the house. They wouldn't even move. They wouldn't go into the living room, sit down or nothing. They stood in front of the same door that they let get tore down. The ram and hole was still in the door. They came in, they stood at the closet door and gave a half-ass, We're sorry, man. We're sorry. That was it. This is a memory that the Bennett family brags around.

The insult still stinks. The mayor might have been willing to apologize to the Bennett family, but he never apologized to Willy directly. Boston mayor, Ray Flint, defends the police investigation, but recognizes the irreparable harm could have been done. There's one thing, one redeeming situation out of this whole case. What would have happened if Mr. Bennett were convicted of first-degree murder and the capital punishment were implemented in that regard? What would we be saying here today? We tried repeatedly to get Mayor Flint to talk with us for this podcast. He declined. But back in 1990, as he made the rounds on TV, he didn't seem very sorry. Every investigation, every homicide in the city of Boston, no matter where it's committed, no matter who it's committed against, is always handled with the same responsibility and the same concern. Glenn acknowledged at the time that the people of Mission Hill had suffered. And I agreed that they were being singled out. It was the people of the city of Boston, and it was the Black community as well. But the mayor stopped short of taking responsibility or blaming the police. I don't say that anybody's at fault.

I think what we ought to sit... What we ought to do is we ought to use this as an example, use this as an opportunity to understand how fragile the situation really is around racial incidents in any neighborhood of the city of Boston, or crime in any neighborhood of the city of Boston. Let's begin a healing process, and let's try to work together not to place blame on anybody. In his State of the City Address, which he gave about a week after Chuck's death, Flint laid most of the blame for what had happened squarely on Chuck. It appears that Charles Stewart has perpetrated a giant fraud on this city. He hurt everyone, especially the residents of Mission Hill. Flin defended his call for every available detective to be put on the case. Now, when I ordered an aggressive police response, I think I did what any mayor would have done. I wanted to send a strong signal, as strong as I could, to show the city's outrage and to show that we would not tolerate such an act anywhere. Was I wrong? I don't think so. And the mayor ended his speech with a very Kumbaya call for healing.

Now is no time to think about the past. It's a time to move forward. It's a time for leading, and it's a time for healing. But to a lot of people, this didn't look like a sincere desire for true healing. It looked like a desperate effort to bury the ugliness in the past without having to look at squarely in the face. Black leaders call bullshit. To apologize is nothing. That's like stabbing me in the back and pulling the knife out and telling me I'm sorry. Two days after the Stewart case was found out, the mayor and his people started talking about healing. Well, they've got to be crazy. I'm sick. I don't want to be ill. I want to have time to be sick for a while if there is no cleansing of the wound, which will allow the healing to occur. Mr. Chairman, a lot of people are going to be hurt. They warrant that if the city tried to just move on and didn't do any real soul-searching, the same thing could happen again. Mayhem is already going on. Killings are happening every day. I simply say to you, Mr. Chairman, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Some in the black community worried that if the police were too harshly criticized, they would pull back on all their enforcement efforts at a time when murders were at an all-time high. We cannot allow one bizarre incident to deflect our attention from the fact that when the smoke clears and the dust settles and the Charles Stewart incident is no longer front-page news, we still have a problem with guns and gangs and drugs in our community, and that problem has got to be addressed. Inside City Hall, the mayor's closest confidants could feel whatever they had on the situation, slipping away. It was an extraordinary, damaging period for the city of Boston. It set us way back racially. Good people misunderstanding each other across racial lines and suddenly we were back in it. This is Neil Sullivan, mayor of Ray flintz, top aide. I mean, Ray was focused on being in charge, being able to tell the churchgoing people of the city, black and White, White and black, that the mayors got this, but we didn't have it. More than 30 years later, Neil still recalls the moment he learned Chuck jumped. He remembers walking into the mayor's office early that morning.

There's Ray standing up behind his desk with his hands propped up, leaning forward. He looked up and he said, Neil, Stewart did it. He just jumped off the Tobin Bridge. Neil had spent the last two months trying to manage the optics of the city's response, but he had never imagined Chuck might be the killer. I mean, who takes a gun, points it into their abdomen, and pulls the trigger as a tactic to deal with whatever he thought he was dealing with. I mean, it's a hell of a cover. It comes at a price. But that cover hadn't fooled everyone. Neil wondered how it had fooled him. Perhaps that's one of the sad effects of not having a thoroughly integrated government and society at all levels. That intelligence was not gathered. In that time, that two months, I didn't ever hear that. Suddenly, with the knowledge that it had been Chuck all along, Neil thought differently of the city's response. Flint and his team had put their faith in Flint's childhood friend, Police Commissioner Mickey Roach, and it didn't end well. It's very painful that we decided that, well, Mickey lost control of the police and civilian control of the police department is critical.

And if the commissioner doesn't have control, then the mayor doesn't have control. And that was a fissure in our ability to lead the city. And Neil saw how city officials had set the table for the police action in Mission Hill. It wasn't just Mairflin's call for every single available detective to be put on the case. It was also the stop and frisk policy that was in place before the Stewart shooting. I asked Neil about this. I mean, hell, I knew that we had started this by allowing the police, who were going to do it anyhow, damn it — stop and frisk young black men. I knew that that was the slippery slope. What I didn't see was the cliff, and that was Stewart. The Stewart atrocity just unleashed police action that was, in fact, criminal. So when the police are tearing up Mission Hill in the wake of this murder. It's the worst. Why is there nothing that could be done about it? Because nobody had control. What should have happened? There should have been a police command staff that was on the scene disciplining bad behavior in real time. There should have been a strategy that was based on intelligence, not retribution.

I got to be honest. I wish Niela told me all this shit back in the 90s. The police, Boston Police Department, I'd seen them as bullies. You bully your way into people's lives and terrorized their lives. I was just scared of them. Don Juan Moses was 11 years old when his mom's apartment got raided by the police on the night of the murder. They're the biggest gang I ever seen in my life at that age. That's what it seemed like to me. They can't do no wrong. No matter what they do, they don't do no wrong. He remembers all this the way kids remember stuff. There's a nightmare quality to some of his recollections, facts, and feelings, blint. We couldn't confirm all the details, but we do know that after Chuck jumped, officials held community events to try to make amends in Mission Hill. Don Juan remembers one such community event behind the Tobin Center. The police were trying to engage folks in the neighborhood. Everybody just gathered and trying to figure out what was this, what was going on, and what is this event for? Organizers set up a wooden stage. Don Juan says there were a few dozen people there.

What was the ruckets about? What was this? What was they doing? What was the city trying to do? And once they sat there and gathered and listened, they were not oppressed. Here, he remembers the officials were trying to make it right with the community. They were handing out Ben and Jerry's ice cream. They didn't apologize properly. That was not an apology to the to the Mission Hill residents at all. Your way of doing what you did was not apology. That was not apologetic. That was not authentic. You brought Ben and Jerry's ice cream out here to try to make a peace treaty with the people. Like, you're going to smooth it over. That didn't smooth it over. A lot of them were angered, tossed ice cream at them. They were so pissed. They just threw the ice cream. Activists is out there just going bananas looking at it now. They just angered, pissed off. You did this to my son. You did this to my son. You did this to my nephew. You did this to my husband. Don Juan's mother told him not to take the ice cream. He could tell from her face that this treat was somehow an insult.

I'm looking at the expression of the adults around me and it's like, This is bullshit. This is what you're going to do after doing that to us? What's important here isn't the details. It's what this memory tells us about how these events shaped his personality, his life, the way he sees everything. You started fires in homes that was no fires. And for these people to feel this way against authority and trust, would authority forever. That was traumatic for life. It was scarred us. For them to come back to us when they finally made clarity of it, to bring Ben and Jerry's ice cream to us, that was disgusting. That didn't do nothing. That was nothing. You couldn't do nothing. That's like somebody bringing a glass of water to a building fire and wonder why it didn't go out. Glass of water can't put out a house fired that you started. Don Juan says the fire is still burning. Yeah, it still burns. It still burns, people. This is what you got to understand about Don Juan and his story and all the other kids that lived through this. It shaped them. It never left them.

Folks, if we don't address it, we can't get it resolved. We cannot make sure things like this don't ever happen again if we don't talk about it now. Closed mouth don't get fed, grandpa said. Closed mouth don't get fed. This case, it's not just a who done it. It's a who are we. The way this whole story unfolded can tell us a whole lot about some of the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves, places we don't usually like to look. The Stewart case is the ultimate transform of the city of Boston, of who we were, and in a lot of ways, who we are. Author Howard Bryant. What is the American export when it comes to black people? Athleticism, crime, vulgarity, danger, all of those things. It makes it really, really easy to believe if you're a Charles Stewart that this is the easiest alibi I have. At the very least, it's going to buy me time because everybody wants to believe it because they already believe it. I don't even have to do any work here. This was once again, the fear of black people, the assumption of black people, the lack of regard for black people, and the lack of regard for Carol Stewart.

She was killed. She was killed. Because getting the black guy was more important than getting her killer. We've talked a lot about race, but we haven't really talked at all about gender. Carol was a victim of domestic violence. She was murdered by her husband. And that fact is sometimes obscured or lost in the insanity of the story. The leading of death for pregnant women in America is homicide. That's according to a 2022 study by Harvard's T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Yeah, you heard that right. A pregnant woman in this country is more likely to be killed by the father of her child than she is to die from anything related to her pregnancy. The thing to remember and never, ever forget is that race, class, and gender cannot be separated. They are the three-third rails of American life. Where there is one, there's the other two, somehow, some way. You saw it in the Stewart case, white woman, black male, poor black community. You see it everywhere. I've always felt like if you don't look at every issue along those three lines, you're going to miss something really important. This case was such an example of that.

You saw one thing and everybody paid for it. That's exactly what happened in this case. When people looked at Chuck Stewart, their imaginations just failed. The narrative that took hold was that Chuck was the hero, valiantly defending his wife from a savage killer. In that story, Willy and every other black man was cast as the stereotypical bogeyman. It's a story that keeps getting retold. Here's Reverend Grayland, Alice Hagleer again. Carol Stewart was a white woman that was killed by a black assailant. That story has been told all over America. Not just at Charles Stewart, but the same scenario. Tulsa riots come out of that. What happens? The Ematil comes out of that. It's the same scenario over and over again. But it's not because they value women because they still do the same old sexist crap that they've always been doing. Different. It's built upon a mythology. A mythology that is patriarchal and masculine, but it's also a mythology that is constructed to keep other people in their place. He knew that that was a plausible story. You have his wife shot to death in streets of Boston, Mission Hill, by a black assailant. It plays over and over again.

In the many tellings of this story, Carol Stewart has always been emblematic of something else. Sometimes she's an almost holy victim, pregnant and pure. Sometimes a symbol of the lengths to which a racist society will go to defend the virtue of white womanhood. She's always been a supporting character in the story of her own murder. We asked Carol's family if they wanted to speak for this project. They said no. They have spent years talking about Carol, participating in documentaries and TV specials, and they told us they had nothing more to say. But before we go any further, I want to play you this tape of Carol's dad speaking in 1990 about losing his daughter. Of all the many hours of interviews we've listened to, this one stands out. Because in Justo Damadi's voice, all you hear is his love for his daughter. Mere words cannot express the terrible emptiness we feel or how much we miss her now, and we'll miss her for the rest of our lives. All she ever wanted was to be a good daughter, wife, mother, and be happy, be happy in her life. She was not given this opportunity to fulfill all those wishes, but as far as we are concerned, she exceeded in every way possible as a pure and loving human being.

We pray that God has taken her and our beloved grandson, Christopher, into his embrace, in heaven where they will be safe and happy with him. Until the time we will join you. Thank you. In reporting this story, our team has had a lot of conversations about how to make sure we're not repeating the mistakes of the past. So many true crime stories start with the dead body of a woman, and ours does, too. But this isn't just another true crime podcast. When we look back at Carol, we want to see her as a three-dimensional person she was, not just as the perfect victim of a terrible crime. We've heard about her zany sense of humor, the way she danced on tables, and how excited she was to be a mom. We want to pay her the respect of looking at her life and her death with the nuance and depth that she always deserved. Many women die at the hands of their husbands. We rarely interrogate how or why. I always thought there's more to the story. Even when he jumps, I always said to myself, There's more to this story. It doesn't end with a hi-dive.

In this case, I agree with Billy Dunn. That's why we're doing this podcast. That's why we dug this whole thing up and started knocking on doors. In short order, we kicked a hornet's nest. Hey, Andrew, this is Dan Grubowski. You dropped off a letter at my house. You're a disgrace. It just infuriates me because I know where you're after. Now, Boston wants to make Willy Bennett the hero who is another piece of trash that's been terrorizing people and polluting people with drugs his whole life. On the next episode of Murder in Boston, we'll bring you into the Boston Globes investigation. You'll follow along with our reporters as they search for the truth. This story is far from over. Stay with us. Over the next three episodes, we'll reexamine the case and uncover new findings, ask how so many institutions failed so badly, including our own, the media, and explore the legacy of the story for Boston and beyond. There are still countless, unanswered questions in this case. For instance, no word about a motive, or did Charles Stewart shoot himself? And did he act alone? Was there a third person in the vehicle? Was there somebody else, perhaps in the backseat of that car, who was part of this?

An accomplice? It was like they were making mistakes. They were taking leaps and landing badly and then just getting up and brushing themselves off and it just kept going. It was indefensible then, it's indefensible now. We have nothing except for this story that is attached to our name. Let the people that are listening to this, give them all the facts and let them decide. I don't want to hear that you're sorry to me. After you tore up and started a war up in the black community, it's out of the news, but it's still in my head. I'm a speaker part. Murderder in Boston: The Untold Story of the Charles and Carol's dirt shooting is presented by The Boston Globe and H. B. O. Documentary Films. This podcast was recorded and written by globe journalist Evan Allen, Elizabeth Coe, Andrew Ryan, and me, your host, Associate Editor Adrian Walker. The project was led and also cowritten by Assistant Managing Editor Brendan McCarthy and the globe's head of audio, Kristen Nelson. Nelson served as senior producer. Melissa Rosales is the Associate Producer. Our theme music is Speak Upon It by Boston's own, Ed-O-G. Reza Dia is our sound designer.

Voice-over direction by Athena Carkanas. Research from Jeremiah Manion, fact-checking by Matt Mahoney. The globe's executive editor is Nancy Barnes. Thanks to former Globes, Brian McRoy and Scott Allen, and to Boston Global Media CEO Linda Henrick. Additional interviews and audio, courtesy of Jason Haier and Little Room Films. Special thanks to Michael Glockstat and Allison Cohen on the HBO podcast team. The HBO documentary series, Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Maps. This week on All There Is with Anderson Cooper. I'll sit down with President Biden in the White House for a conversation about the losses in his life and how he lives with them. I don't know anybody who welcomes grief, but you got to confront it. It is, I think, the first time any sitting US President has agreed to do an entire interview solely focused on grief. I mean this from the bottom of my heart, my word of the Biden. They're always going to be with you. Listen to all there is with Anderson Cooper wherever you get your podcasts.