Before we begin, this episode contains some offensive language and descriptions of violence. It may not be appropriate for all listeners.

You've reached Andrew Ryan from the Boston Globe. Leave a message here. Thank you. This is Dan Grabowski. You drop off a letter at my house. I just have to let you know that I have no faith in journalism any longer. I know what's going to happen. You're going to make Willie Bennett a hero, just like they made George Floyd.

A hero last year. Retired state trooper Dan Grabowski left this message on my colleague Andrew's cell phone.

There's no check and balance at all on our federal government that's out of control, completely out of control. Destroying America. And you people are a critical failsafe and you're not performing.

Andrew reached out to Grbowski because he was one of the emergency dispatchers who took Chuck Stewart's 911 call on the night of the shooting.

That night we were on duty myself, senior dispatcher Jack Moran, and Gary McLaughlin.

This is Grobowski telling a tv interviewer all about the call.

Mr. Stewart lost consciousness and faded out. He blanked out on us. At that time, I heard a siren in the background.

Bobowski told the interviewer that it was his idea to use the sirens to locate Stewart's car.

And then Boston flooded that sector with cruisers, and it was probably less than a minute before they found the blue toyota that we were looking for with the victims in it.

Dan Grabowski's involvement in the Stewart case didn't end there. In reporting this podcast, the Globe team and I uncovered a whole lot of new information, including this trooper, Dan Grubowski was told long before Chuck's suicide that Chuck was behind it all. And Grobowski appears to have done little to nothing with that tip. If Grbowski had pushed it, if the police department acted on it, well, this could have changed the whole case, could have changed history. That tip came in while officers were ripping through Mission Hill, frisking scores of black and latino men, and before police zeroed in on Willie Bennett as the prime suspect. We wanted to ask Krabowski about it, but it became pretty clear that he wasn't taking questions.

You're a disgrace. I'm sorry that I had to relay this, but it just infuriates me because I know where you're after.

Krabowski eventually helped lead the Massachusetts state police force. He retired as a major, which is a very high ranking position. In fact, when I covered the state house, I used to see Grubowski almost every day because he ran the governor's security detail. Now he's pretty unfiltered.

Now Boston wants to make Willie Bennett the hero, who is another piece of trash that's been terrorizing people and polluting people with drugs his whole life.

Grobowski had thoughts on a lot of other matters, too.

You look at the Mueller investigation, Hillary's email, Loretta lynch on the tarmac, who impeachment hunt to Biden's laptop money to favored group. The IRS scandal with Lois Lerner, guns to Mexico, border security, fentanyl cris, human trafficking, destroying Texas Covid, autocracy. It just goes on and on and on. You people question nothing.

For about eight months, Rubalski bombarded Andrew with daily insults. Some of the texts were childish, like the time he called Andrew a smelly coward. Other times they were scary, like on Christmas morning when Grubowski called him a disgrace to America or later suggested Andrew kill himself.

Everybody knows right from wrong. Everybody. And then throw in black tv. The propaganda. Like the 6% of good black people are the ones on tv with a beautiful home, two Labrador retrievers. When really their behavior and their track record is atrocious. It's propaganda. Have a great day.

It's been more than 30 years since the Stewart shooting in Mission Hill, and aside from a few panels and commissions, the story Boston has told itself about this case has largely remained unchanged. It's cemented in books, documentaries, movies and songs, and it almost always goes the same way. This content is like catnip for the true crime genre.

The dead Wives club next Sunday at eight on HLN.

The investigation was on the cusp of indicting Willie Bennett. But a shocking bombshell was about to blow everything up.

The gist is always this. Chuck was a psychopathic manipulator. He planned the near perfect crime. He fooled everyone, including the police. What else were detectives supposed to do? This mythology that everyone was duped has been seemingly set in stone. But our team of investigative reporters at the Globe, well, we had the sense that there was more to this story. So we've been digging for two years, making calls, combing through dusty records.

I mean, we were afraid that somebody was going to take the file away.

Rows and rows and rows of Manila folders that get progressively older the further back you go.

And so what we were faced with was just taking photos of every single page, which was, I mean, thousands and thousands of pages.

We've been knocking on hundreds of doors, traveling thousands of miles to talk to key players.

We are in Revere, a canoe lounge.

Parking lot in Danvers, mass.

And Cass. It's kind of like Boston's version of Skid Row.

Brookfield, New Hampshire.

Mission Hill.

Back in revere, I had to go down to Atlanta.

Actually, we are in Riverdale, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. Chuck said, don't say nothing to nobody.

This was a young man who was tortured by this. I've known since October 24, and I'm not going to keep my mouth shut.

We're never going to know who killed Carol Stewart, at least in my mind.

What we've discovered is pretty wild, and in this episode, we're going to tell you all about it. It should change how you view this case. Heck, if reporters like me had known then what I know now, who knows how this would have turned out? You're about to hear what police would have discovered if only they hadn't bungled the investigation. We'll tell you how Chuck almost got away with murder and about the accomplice who helped him. We'll also reveal a whole whisper network of people, like a ton of folks who knew Chuck was the mastermind and yet stayed quiet.

I'm a speaker. Pause. Speak upon. Speak upon.

Speak upon.

I'm Adrian Walker, and this is murder in Boston. The untold story of the Charles and Carol Stewart shooting, episode seven, the accomplice. It turns out that trooper Grubowski wasn't the only officer who could have steered the investigation in a different direction. Get this. The very first Boston police detectives assigned to the case suspected Chuck from the start.

My name is Robert F. Ahern. A-H-E-A-R-N. I'm a Boston police detective assigned to the homicide unit. Present is Robert T. Tinlan. T-I-N-L-I-N. He's also a Boston police detective assigned to the homicide unit.

Robert Ahern and Robert Tinlan worked hundreds of murder cases together. They were detectives to the core. They even had an autographed picture of Colombo, the famous tv gumshoe, hanging in their office. Urn. And Tinlan were inseparable. Bob and Bob colleagues called them the two bobbies.

My father was. He was considered by people like to be more on the quiet side, and Barbara Hearn was definitely more the outgoing type and kind of a hot ticket.

That's Matt Tinlan, Bob Tinlan's son. The two bobbies died years ago.

Barbara Hearn was almost like an uncle to me. They were fun together. I like to listen them to talk. Took their jaws very serious. But they were, like, kind of colorful. You know, what were just. They were funny to listen to.

Ahern and Tinlan were working together on the night of the shooting. They were next on the homicide rotation, meaning that this was their call, their case.

They were sent out there to investigate it. And I know from talking to my father, I do know that he went.

To the hospital almost immediately. The two bobbies had questions for Chuck, and when they talked to him, they found him too calm. We know what the pair were thinking because we got our hands on Ahern's grand jury testimony.

He wasn't acting as a person that just got shot and saw his wife get shot.

You're hearing my colleague giving voice to Ahern's statements made under oath. Ahern described a Colombo moment they had when they left Chuck's room.

I asked Bob, I said, does he remind you of anybody? And Bob says, yeah. And we both said at the same time, John Jenks. That's from another case we had that we had to go to a hospital and interview a so called victim. And it turned out that it was a self inflicted gunshot wound, and he did kill somebody in the combat zone. So we both thought he was acting the same way as this John Jenks.

John Jinx was a cop who had staged his own shooting in 1983 after he robbed and killed a man in Boston's red light district. Jinx shot himself to cover up the crime, but he was caught anyway. Tinland talked about it with his son.

I do remember he saying something to the effect like, he was full of shit, talking about Stewart. The story did not jive with them from the beginning.

There were other parts of Chuck's story that didn't line up. Just as a reminder. Chuck called 911 at 08:43 p.m. On a Monday night in late October. He said that he was lost in Mission Hill, that it was pitch dark, and that there was no one around but Bob. And Bob wondered, how was Chuck so lost? He had just left the hospital and was only a couple blocks away. Why didn't he just drive back in that direction? And how was there no one around to ask for help on three different nights? Urn, took his own car out to Mission Hill, drove the same route, and played the 911 recording on his tape deck. He found that Chuck's details were off. There were people regularly out on the streets at that hour, and it wasn't as dark outside as Chuck had described. Another thing that didn't check out. Chuck claimed that he didn't get a great look at their attacker because the dome light in his Toyota Cresseda didn't turn on when the carjacker jumped in.

I went and I tried that door in his car myself. I must have done it a hundred times, and the light came on every time. But when I questioned him on that, he said that he had turned the light off.

Even the car's backseat, where Chuck and Carol's alleged attacker sat. It just seemed too clean. The story didn't add up, but police brass had already written off Chuck as a suspect. They had settled on the black man in a tracksuit. And that's when the two bobbies got bigfooted, and police officials put another detective on the case.

12345. You know Peter O'Malley, and I'm detective in the homicide unit.

Remember Detective Peter O'Malley? Interrogating teenagers? Eric and Derek O'Malley took over the case from the two bobbies. He became the lead detective, and that's when the investigation went in a different direction. More than a year after Chuck's death, Ahern was called in front of a federal grand jury that was looking into the shooting.

And at some point, were you discouraged.

At all from pursuing Charles Stewart as a suspect?

Not in so many words, but, yes, I became discouraged.

And why was that?

I didn't like the direction of the investigation.

Okay, tell us why.

Because I still had a hunch that Charles Stewart did it.

Well, what was there to prevent you.

From pursuing Charles Stewart as a suspect?

It was almost like the investigation was taken out of my hands.

The Bobbies never played much of a role after that. And Bobby Tinlan's son says the outcome haunted his father for the rest of his life because it was hard to listen.

He said, for people knocking the police department over it, knowing that things could have been different, he was really upset about how they handled it. It was ridiculous. He was always just said that. Like, they should have let them do their know. They would have had them, and imagine that if they allowed them to do it, none of this would have happened.

So this all begs the question. What would have happened if Tinlane and Ahern kept pursuing Chuck as a suspect? If their skepticism drove the investigation, what would they have found? Well, plenty. First off, they would have found much of Chuck's life was a facade. He was telling lies. Even back when Chuck and Carol worked together at the driftwood restaurant, he told her he had a scholarship to play football for Brown University but dropped out because of his bad knee. Not true. He never even went there. And the school didn't offer football scholarships. Chuck played the doting husband, but he'd also been staying out late on Friday nights, pursuing another young blonde co worker, in addition to the one he'd flirted with in elevators the biggest fiction Chuck pretending to be an excited dad to be. Turns out he didn't want to be a father and didn't want Carol to stay home with the baby. Carol's pregnancy put his dreams of opening a restaurant on the back burner. He hated the idea of having a kid so much that even before their first birthing class, he was plotting to have her killed.

He told me about his wife being pregnant and that he didn't want to have children.

David McLean was one of Chuck's oldest friends. Chuck was the best man at his wedding. About a month and a half before Carol's murder, the two pals had a conversation in a restaurant parking lot. McClain told police about the conversation, but only after Chuck died.

He said that he had argued with his wife when she first became pregnant for a few weeks, and he saw something in there that he never saw before was an attitude where she had the upper hand in the relationship. And that's when he told me that he wanted to kill his wife.

She had the upper hand. Chuck couldn't stand not being the one in control, and having a baby, he added, would complicate things.

My reaction was disbelief. I mean, they dated for four years and they've been married for four years. But he was all business in his demeanor as far as he wasn't thinking.

Did he say how he wanted to kill his wife?

No. He was grasping at ideas and he was hoping to involve a third party. He was hoping that I knew somebody or that I could help have it arranged.

McClain told Chuck he couldn't help him. So a couple weeks later, Chuck turned to his little brother.

Things like that happen to a lot of people, and you just never think it's going to happen to you and it's reality right to the face. That's just the way it is.

At the time of the shooting, Chuck's youngest brother, Matthew, was 23, living with his parents, juggling small jobs. For most of his life, Matthew had been chasing Chuck's shadow, the driftwood restaurant where Carol and Chuck met. Matthew worked in the back as a dishwasher. Some people described him as the runt of the litter, unpolished, shaggy haired, a bit of a screw up. So perhaps it wasn't surprising when Chuck, the golden Stewart boy, needed someone to help him get rid of his wife, he turned to Matthew.

First of all, Matt is your brother Charles Stewart? Yes.

Here's what Matthew told police the night before Chuck jumped off the Tobin bridge. It's what prompted Chuck's suicide and the police interview you're about to hear is Matthew's version of events. Matthew told the cops Chuck was planning an insurance scam. The brothers were going to fake a robbery. Carol's jewelry would go missing. Then Chuck would file a claim and voila, an easy payout.

He wanted to do this thing in town where all I had to do was drive up to him and he'd throw me a bag and I'd just drive up.

Matthew's job was to get rid of the loot. In return, he'd be paid up to $10,000.

I got there early, about 08:00. I went into a store because I remember they said, maybe you should get gloves. You don't want to be handling this. So I got gloves in that store. It was around roughly around 08:00.

This is the tape of Matthew's actual police interrogation, tape that's never been released publicly. Matthew says Chuck told him exactly where to be. Matthew borrowed a friend's car and waited in a small, empty parking lot.

So I pulled in to where I was supposed to be, into that spot, and I waited. And about roughly 1015 minutes later, I saw the blue crescenta come around the.

Corner, the blue Cressida, Chuck and Carol's car. As it came around the corner toward him, Matthew said he saw something in the car on the seat next to Chuck.

I definitely saw something in the passenger side. I couldn't definitely say it was a person, but it was something about the size of that that was covered. It was a pile of something.

It looked like a pile of something. That's how Matthew described his dying sister in law.

I pulled up to the car. He said, matt, wait a second. And I'm in my driver's seat. He's in his driver's seat. He said, wait a second. He bent down a little bit. So I'm looking forward and I'm looking back over at him. I can see something just beyond him, but it's basically a glimpse, a small portion of whatever's there. And then he said, wait a second. And he pulled up. He goes, all right, get the fuck out of here. Drive slow. And he gave it a toss with his left hand like that, through the open window.

With the handoff complete, Matthew took off back to Revere.

I pulled out, and I just continued on down Huntington Avenue and home. And when I got home, I opened the contents and. What the hell is this? He mentioned anything about a gun?

What the hell is this? You didn't mention anything about a gun in his bedroom. Matthew found a gun in the bag. But that's not all. It also contained Carol's wallet and id, her engagement ring, a gucci purse, and Chuck's watch. He stashed the bag in a dresser, dropped off the borrowed car nearby, and went back to his family's house.

Then I walked in the house, and my parents, my mother, my father, my sister, my brother Mark and my sister's father in law were in the kitchen, and they were up and arms saying, carol was shot. She's in critical condition, and Chuck's in stable condition. So I'm like, oh, jesus Christ. What the hell did he get himself into?

But Matthew didn't say anything to his family about where he'd just been. Instead, he booked it to a friend's place.

I went over a friend of mine's house who I had been telling him about this stuff all along. Chuck said, don't say nothing to nobody. Whatever you do, don't say nothing to nobody. So I had gone to him and I said. I told him what happened. And he was like, jesus, what would he get himself into? So, more or less, we took the bag. This is the friend you talked to? Yeah. Who's the friend? Give his name. John McMahon. What's his name? John McMahon. John McMahon.

M-C-M-A-H-O-N-M-C-M-A-H-O-N. John and Matthew were childhood friends and grew up just blocks from each other. They were the same age and even have the same mullet. That night, around 930 or 10:00 John, whom everyone calls Jack, told the police that he was at his house watching tv with a few friends.

Matt came in the house kind of upset. He said, jack, let's go. I got to talk to you. So we left my house. We went outside. And then he started to tell me that his brother and his brother's wife had been shot. Something went wrong, and he had something to get rid of.

Matthew wanted Jack to help him get rid of the gun and everything else. Jack didn't ask a lot of questions. The pair hopped into Jack's car and grabbed the bag.

We drove to Oak island. We went to the train bridge. I examined the gun. I noticed there was three shots fired, three dead shells in the gun. And the gun smelt like gunpowder. Because we were still. Our curiosity was fired still, and I was checking it out.

Jack and Matthew walked out along the railroad trestle toward the water.

And then I put, like, rocks in the drawstring bag and put those in a plastic bag, perforated the bag and just dropped it down. The ruby ring and the watch was still in there at that point. And we kept the diamond ring and just threw the gun itself out about maybe 40, 50ft, just right out off the bridge down, and then dropped the other stuff, waited and it just went down.

Both Matthew and Jack claimed that they didn't fully understand what was happening, though that's hard to fathom. They told police that at this point they just figured Chuck's insurance scam had somehow gone horribly wrong.

We were watching the news and we saw on the news that they said that Chucky had said that he had been robbed. And he described everything that was in the purse. And then Matt and I looked at each other and it just clicked. What clicked? It clicked in that Chucky did it and he set Matt up and we know, basically threw away the murder weapon.

For two and a half months. The city was in hysterics. Mission Hill was being ransacked. And in that time, Chuck had picked Willie Bennett out of a lineup and Willie's fate seemed sealed. And for two and a half months, Matthew and Jack kept this secret from the police. They may not have told detectives what they knew, but they certainly talked to others. The morning after the killing, Matthew called his on again, off again girlfriend, Janet Monteforte, and told her to pick him up. They drove to a convenience store and bought a Boston herald, the one with that awful image of Carol and Chuck on the COVID He said, I have.

To tell you something. He was being really mysterious. And I asked what. He said, just drive. Just drive. So we're driving. And he proceeded to tell me that Chuck killed Carol. Chuck Stewart killed Carol Stewart. We were driving on Broadway Riviera and as soon as he said it, I said, I don't want to hear it. And then naturally, I wanted to hear it.

Matthew only told her the full story after breakfast about planning the insurance scam, taking the bag, seeing that pile in the front seat.

Matthew told me that he saw something next to Chuck, but it had no silhouette, it had no hair. He didn't think it was a person. He thought it was a duffel bag. He didn't know exactly what Chuck was up to.

But Janet didn't go to the police. Instead, she told her parents, her sister, her friends and some of her coworkers. Jack McMahon talked too. Within days, his parents knew. His dad's girlfriend, his brother and his brother's girlfriend. They all knew. And the game of telephone just went on and on, spreading far and wide. We know this because we got our hands on police files in which these friends and relatives confessed to knowing the whole time.

A sun filled morning masked the darkness of this autumn day. Carol Stewart is buried.

By the time of Carol's funeral, at least eleven people knew that Chuck's story was bogus. None of them went to the authorities. One of the eleven was another Stewart brother, Michael.

I did look up to my brother Chucky. He was a very good athlete. He always had a decent job, always had a nice car, nice clothes. My mother used to say, why can't I be more like him?

Michael heard everything about the shooting from Matthew. But it wouldn't have come as a surprise because, get this, Chuck had asked Michael to help him kill Carol too, just a few weeks before she turned up dead. And yet Michael said nothing to detectives. Michael would later claim that he didn't fully understand what Chuck was proposing. As Michael helped carry Carol's casket, you have to wonder what was going through his mind as he felt the weight of her body. About a week after the shooting, this game of telephone finally led to someone who told the cops Chuck's high school budy.

He told me that he didn't want to have children.

David McLean told his brother, who told a friend who called a state trooper to pass on the tip, that trooper, you're a disgrace.

It just infuriates me because I know.

Where you're after Dan Grabowski. Yup, that Dan Grabowski.

I just have to let you know that I have no faith in journalism any longer.

McLean's brother later told a grand jury that he and his pal straight out told Grubowski that Chuck was behind the shooting and Grbowski just never called back. But they didn't give up. The pair reached out to another officer, who passed the tip along to Robert Ahern. Ahern pursued the lead and called David McLean. But David told Ahern that he didn't know anything and didn't want to talk. So there you have it. One of the best potential leads in the case dried up. It took until December, the month Willie Bennett was plucked from a police lineup, for people to inch towards telling detectives the truth.

Michael Stewart told Matthew Stewart that he couldn't take it anymore, that he was going to tell Mark Stewart, okay, Michael went to Mark Stewart, told him what had happened.

Mark is the second youngest Stewart brother. He found out about Chuck's role in the murder around New year's Day 1990, and he's one of the siblings who pushed for Matthew to come clean. We know about this because Matthew's girlfriend Janet, told police about what happened. The family held a flurry of meetings.

I said, you can't push this under the rug. I said, because now I'm involved.

And she's wrapped up in it, too. At least that's what the family's lawyer told her.

He said, well, let me ask you something.

How long have you known?

I said, I've known since October 24. I said, and I'm not going to keep my mouth shut.

The Stewart siblings decided they had to tell their parents about Chuck's crime.

Hello. Show you this? Yeah. Hold on, Michael.

This extraordinary moment is captured on tape because Michael Stewart, a firefighter, talked from the firehouse on a recorded line.

What's going to happen? We're going to tell mom and dad.

It's hard to hear, but Shelley, one of the stewart'sisters. Tells him they're going to break the news to mom and dad.

We're going to tell them we know that Chuck was involved. We're not going to say that he killed Ireland.

They want to tell their parents that they know Chuck was involved. They just don't want to say that he killed Carol.

I know. Mike, get ready. Okay, we're all together. Mike. Who's there? Mark and Steven coming over and Natha coming over.

NASA is another sister.

Nathan doesn't know yet. Okay. All right. I'll get out, I guess. All right. Maria wants to go, too. Tell her to come. You guys got to be here soon, though. All right? Like within ten minutes. All right.

Okay. We did the math. Our reporting shows that at least 33 people, 33 knew in some way or another that Chuck was responsible for Carol's death. All this before Matthew confessed. Now, some of them knew for months. Some of them only knew for a couple of days. Two of them tried and failed to get the cops to act. For two and a half months. Chuck got away with murder, and 33 people knew. 33 people. This has never been reported before.

The bottom line questions, ladies and gentlemen, in this tragedy seems to have focused on who knew what when.

About a week after Chuck's death, the Stewart siblings, save for Matthew, held a press conference. They sat in chairs and a stuffy looking law office lined with books. Their lawyer said most of the siblings had no clue about Chuck's deceit.

And this family roommate wanted to be known that they had no information as to anything that their deceased brother, Charles may have done in any way whatsoever. The appearance that has evolved, in my judgment, is that some type of conspiratorial scenario existed buying between all these family members, sitting around talking about keeping something hidden. That is not true. They want you, the world, to know they love Carol domaine. They, to use their words, are on Carol's side.

We've reached out to each of the stewards who are alive today, even their cousins, and no one wanted to talk. Roughly 34 years later, their name is still synonymous with one of the most shameful chapters in Boston history. Were they morally culpable or just trying to do right by their baby brother? Of all the siblings, Matthew's hands are the dirtiest. Many see him as a villain, but some see his legacy quite differently.

Matthew Stewart was one of the few heroes in this.

Former tv reporter Jack Harper.

If you give him the benefit of the doubt, he was the brother who went along with it initially, got rid of the gun and the stolen stuff, but at least he had a conscience. Down the road, he finally said something, and he had the stones to go talk.

Matthew Stewart's lawyer, Nancy Gertner.

This was a young man who was tortured by this and was actually seeking help from every quarter he could. Here he was saying something that was going to lead to his older brother being imprisoned for the rest of his life.

And some people, like Jack McMahon's lawyer, Sarah Bantz, think if Chuck hadn't died.

Jack McMahon and Matthew Stewart would have got keys to the city, right? They were the heroes. It wasn't until the political Backlash from everything that happened into that, you know, the feelings, it was like, oh, somebody's going to pay. Someone's going to pay.

Matthew always maintained that he was a bit player in Chuck's insurance scam, helping to facilitate the heist of his sister in law's jewelry. All part of a plot to make some easy cash. Matthew swore he didn't know Carol was dead until he saw the news reports later that night. But pretty early into our reporting, we started to have our doubts. What was Matthew's deal? We started by retracing Matthew and Jack's steps. The whole globe team piled into a rented minivan, drove out to revere, and walked along the rail trestle near where the pair tossed the gun. From there, the team pulled medical records, police forensic reports, FBI lab notes, and a whole lot more. Eventually, we determined there's strong evidence that someone else was there that night, helping Chuck. And that person may have even pulled the trigger. The first clue. Three separate witnesses told police they saw a third person in Chuck's car. We took the minivan to mission Hill and drove the route that Chuck described in his 911 call, just like the detective Bobby ah Hearn did 34 years ago.

So if we start from where the police believed that call started.

Yeah. Well, let's listen.

Hit auxiliary cable. There we go. Thank you.

Okay.

Ready?

Yeah. Boston record emergency. Five 10. My wife's been shot. I've been shot. Where is this? Sir, I have no idea.

Bringing the women's hospital today. Mission Hill is a very different neighborhood, but it's still a busy place. People on the sidewalks, living in apartments densely packed together.

Huntington Avenue. Straight through Huntington Ave. Where are you right now, sir? Can you indicate to me?

Detective Ahern thought folks in the neighborhood would have seen the stewart's car that night. And we know now that at least three people did. Here's the Tobin community center. I'll tell you more about that later. This is where a bunch of kids.

Got shaken down on the street right out here.

The first witness was a basketball coach standing on the steps of the Tobin community center. He saw the blue Crescenta driving erratically with a person in the seat. The second witness was a woman in a nearby apartment, watering her plants and watching from a window.

There was a witness, a woman by the name of Faith Mickelson. And so she was looking out and.

She saw the car.

And she reported potentially seeing somebody else. Like a third person.

The third witness was David Wood, who later said that he saw a man getting out of Chuck's car.

David Wood, who was driving his car around this block a couple of times, looking for somewhere to park. And he noticed a car driving erratically on one of his kind of loops around this block. And seeing a third person get out of the back of the car, which is another eyewitness count we have that contradicts this idea that Chuck would have been the only other person in the car and have shot Carol.

Unfortunately, we can't ask any of those witnesses what they saw because all of them are dead. So there's the three witnesses. That's a start. Now, let's talk about the ballistics. This much is clear. There were three shots fired in the car that night. One bullet entered the back of Carol's head. Police found another bullet lodged in the ceiling of the car. A third bullet left a wound in Chuck's lower back. It traveled upwards and tore through his liver and intestines.

I did not believe that I was a self inflicted wound. And that was my opinion. And that's my personal opinion, and I will leave it at that.

The Boston trauma surgeon who operated on Chuck that night had served in Vietnam. Dr. Erwin Hirsch, had seen thousands of gunshot wounds before. In looking at Chuck's fresh bullet wound minutes after the shooting, Hirsch thought there was no way it could have been self inflicted. Someone else had to have shot Chuck. Hirsch's opinion had big ramifications. After all, it was one of the reasons police didn't take a closer look at Chuck. Hirsch passed away many years ago. But we found two other surgeons who treated Chuck as well. They both agreed with Hirsch's assessment. But where Hirsch thought Chuck was the victim of a gunman, the hospital's chief surgical resident said he and others in the unit thought Chuck's story didn't make sense.

I didn't think that Charles had shot himself. So if he didn't shoot himself, and who did?

Dr. Fred Millam spent countless hours around Chuck and the Stewart family. He not only examined Chuck's guts, he also watched Chuck's behavior in the weeks after the shooting.

Oftentimes, I was the only physician that he saw during the day because we.

Kept the other people out during those visits. Millen picked up some weird vibes. In a recent interview. The doctor cited patient confidentiality laws, saying there's a limit to what he can share. But given everything he saw back then, he's confident today in saying who he thinks shot shock.

Well, the reporting and what seemed to be the facts and evidence was that the brother was in the car. I'm pretty sure Carol D'Amatee didn't do it, so seemed like a reasonable conclusion to reach. That's my opinion, based on facts that everybody has. I think that the brother probably did the shooting, but I've always thought that since I saw them dragging Charles'body. Out of the harbor. That was Matthew, of course.

So let's put this together. Number one, three witnesses say there was a third person in or near the car before the shooting. Number two, three of the doctors who worked on Chuck said there was no way he could have shot himself. Number three, Matthew acknowledged that he was there in Mission Hill around the time Carol was killed. He conspired with his brother Chuck and helped get rid of the gun. And number four, Matthew helped bury the truth for at least two and a half months. When he did confess, it's not clear he told the whole truth. The evidence we uncovered suggests Matthew may have been a lot more complicit. For example, the lead prosecutor, the person who knew this case better than almost anyone, he seemed to think the same thing. We got our hands on grand jury testimony that's never been widely available until now. The transcripts include statements made under oath by Francis O'Meara of the DA's office. O'Meara said he was sure that someone else was there for the shooting and that it could only have been one of two people. Quote, there's no question in my mind, none whatsoever, that there was a third person on St.

Alfonso street that night, and it's either Matthew Stewart or Willie Bennett. There's absolutely no question in my mind. There you have it, the sworn testimony of the lead prosecutor. Of the hundreds of people we've talked to, no one, save for a few cops, believes Willie was the shooter. So then why wasn't Matthew implicated in the killing? We sought out the person who could answer that, Francis O'Mira. When my colleagues went to his house in late 2022, the retired prosecutor suggested it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. But O'Mira hadn't changed his mind. Unfortunately, he died a few months later, a couple years after the murder. The Stewart case was immortalized in this.

Song, claiming a burglar shot his wife and himself. His pregnant wife, lace lumped over the dreams corrupted a young life over Wildsat.

By Marky Mark and the funky bunch topped the charts. In 1991, it told the story of Carol Stewart's murder.

The whole plot was an insurance scam. Charles and his brother came up with a plan. Kill Carol, collect the big checks, blame it on a black man, what the heck?

And listen, Boston has a love hate relationship with the Wahlbergs. But however you feel about the funky bunch, the song was huge in the early ninety? S, and it made Matthew's role in the crime part of the cultural lore.

Today, Stewart's brother Matthew pleaded guilty to obstructing justice and other charges for disposing of the gun Charles Stewart allegedly used to shoot his wife.

In 1992, Matthew Stewart pled guilty to insurance fraud and weapons charges and served two and a half years in prison. He struggled with drugs following his prison stint, and he died in a homeless shelter in 2011. Matthew's sister NASA, was the only Stewart sibling who got back to us. Actually, she had her son call and pass on the message that she didn't want to talk. But we could hear NASA in the background saying we should portray Matthew as innocent. She believes he had nothing to do with it. There are other people who think Matthew was innocent, too, including his lawyer, Nancy Gertner.

Sometimes I wonder whether he was telling everyone in the hopes that the police would hear about it and that he thought that he was doing the rational thing, which is exchanging his information for protection from prosecution.

Gertner says Matthew would never have come forward if he had been more complicit. Plus, she noted, a grand jury interviewed nearly 100 people and poured over the case.

For years, the grand jury tried very hard to indict Matthew for murder. The prosecutors tried very hard to indict Matthew for murder, and the grand juries resisted that.

Nancy even told us the old cliche about how easy it is for a grand jury to indict someone or anything.

You know, the classic grand jury would indict a ham sandwich. So if the implication is that somehow Matthew was the person in the car, I mean, if there had been a whisper of that evidence, he would have been charged with being an accessory to murder. And that was not a charge that they could bring.

We also sought out Matthew's accomplice in ditching the gun, Jack McMahon.

It's two in the afternoon. I'm across the street from where John McMahon lives. We left a letter for him a couple of weeks ago, and I'm going to go back and see if he got that letter and if he might be willing to check with us face to face.

He wouldn't talk to us. We tried and tried and tried.

A letter?

You.

So that's another letter at Jack McMahon's house.

McMahon served a year in prison and hasn't talked publicly about the case since. After all this, we still tried to settle this once and for all. We reached out to an independent forensic consultant. But after reviewing our files and countless conversations, he unfortunately couldn't provide us with any kind of definitive answer. Lewis Gordon.

He certainly could have shot himself. He certainly could have been shot by someone else. We just don't have enough information to reach a conclusion one way or the other.

Look, it would be great if I could deliver you some kind of hair sample, some dna evidence, maybe a smoking gun, but we can't get there. At least we aren't able to pull this off on our own. But maybe someone listening to this knows the truth. Perhaps someone in the Stewart family. If 33 people knew the truth before the cops did, is there one person out there who knows who really pulled the trigger? When we started reporting this podcast, I knew there were a lot of screw ups in this case. Still, I was shocked to learn how many people were involved in covering this up for Chuck and how easily the authorities bought into the narrative. Heck, the media did, too. I've been agonizing over these failures for years. The way the media fueled public hysteria, the way it created the sense that someone had to be caught quickly. We helped create this, and it's time we owned up to it. We were feeling pressured to break the story. Like every morning, the senior editors on my team, we met, and we used to say to each other. Whoever can break the story is going to win a pulse.

Surprise.

I consider it the biggest failure of my entire 27 year journalistic career.

I think the media bought it. Hooked line and sinker. We were guilty. Sure, man.

It's been a long time. It's really weird to think about this stuff, and I'm almost surprised how kind of still angry I am about some of it.

That's on the next episode of Murder in Boston.

I'm a speak upon, speak upon, speak upon speak upon.

Murder in Boston. The untold story of the Charles and Carol Stewart shooting is presented by the Boston Globe and HBO documentary films. This podcast was reported and written by Globe journalists Evan Allen, Elizabeth Co, Andrew Ryan, and me, your host, associate editor Adrian Walker. The project was led and also co written 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 og. Reza Daya is our sound designer. Voiceover direction by Athena Karcanis Research from Jeremiah Manion fact checking by Matt Mahoney thank you to my Boston Globe colleagues Travis Anderson and Chris hooks for lending us their voices in this episode. The Globe's executive editor is Nancy Barnes. Thanks to former globeys Brian McGorry and Scott Allen, and to Boston Globe media CEO Linda Henry. Additional interviews and audio courtesy of Jason Hayer and Little Room Films. Special thanks to Michael Gluck and Alison Cohen on the HBO podcast team. The HBO documentary series murder in Boston, roots, rampage and Reckoning is available to stream on Max.