You before we begin. This episode contains some offensive language and descriptions of violence. It may not be appropriate for all listeners.

Yesterday, several members of the Stewart family sat in a crowded revere apartment, looked at one another through red rimmed eyes, and tried to make sense of the past 24 hours. But they could not. You know, I see this kind of thing all the time in my work, said Mike Stewart, a revere firefighter in the brother of the infant's father, Charles Chuck Stewart. But this doesn't happen to us. Not to us.

But it did. These words this story ran on the front page of the Boston Globe two days after Carol Stewart's murder on October 25, Eightyn. This was before Chuck jumped to his death, before the Stewart family's charade was exposed.

Over in Revere, where Chuck's brothers and his friends gathered, a moment of silence hung heavy late in the afternoon. We are numb from it, Mark Stewart whispered hoarsely numb.

Sally Jacobs wrote this article. She was a general assignment reporter with the Globe at the time. Her story was a coup. Sally had managed to get inside the Stewart's home just hours after the shooting. Today she can still see that room, still remembers the image of the grief stricken family, including Chuck's brother, Matthew.

All I remember is that couch. I remember them sitting on the couch. I remember one of them sitting on the side and there were several of them in the middle and one standing. I remember them being just profoundly upset. I felt like they were genuinely just shattered.

Sally's story was just one of many media pieces that portrayed Chuck and his family as sympathetic victims. The family was in many ways the picture of tragedy, at least through the mostly white lens of big Boston media. And by getting inside the home, Sally was able to gather intimate details about Chuck and Carol.

I was surprised they let me in there a little bit. We talked a bit. They were telling me more stuff about their relationship, how much they had loved each other. And I came up with that phrase about their relationship, so warm that it touched even those at their I live to regret that one.

It makes sally wins today. She wishes she could go back and show more, know he killed his baby.

Like, who would ever have thought that he was the killer? It was just such a violent crime. It was hard to imagine, I mean, that he could have done it. I'm saying this now. I feel sort of silly. Like, how could I have missed that? But that was the truth that day. It didn't last more than a day, but that was the truth. That day I was totally with the program. I had bought the storyline so far. And we were out there to get that story, and we got it. For better or worse.

You can't make this shit up. Oh, but they did make it up.

We went along with it. We printed it.

I want to know now.

Will you call Mr. Charles Stewart an animal?

34 years later, many reporters are still dragging the sins of their Stewart coverage around in one form or another. This includes me. To be fair, I was a small cog in this whole machine, just a low level reporter. But in the eyes of the public, all of us in the press corps shared blame. And when it comes to the Stuart debacle, no one in the media covered themselves in glory.

The city's media outlets face criticism from readers, from listeners and from viewers, from investigators, from academia, and, quite frankly, from ourselves.

And now it's time, we reckon, with that coverage. You see, at some point in 1990 or 1991, we all moved on without any corrections or apologies, but not without a gnawing sense that something had broken down and we were all part of it.

Every person involved in this on official level, including the media, failed to do their job, to look at it objectively. They went to the issue of race, came out with stereotypical idea of who this person was, and they went no further than a cup reporter.

Were we fooled? Sorta. Could we have done a whole lot better? Definitely. And this much is clear. The questions that the Stewart story raises for the media are just as relevant today. So let's dive in.

I'm a speak upon. 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 eight, setting the record straight right from the jump, all of the elements were in place for this to become a media circus. First there was Chuck's dramatic 911 call.

Oh, I'm blanking out. You can't blank out on me. I need you, man. Jack. Jack.

Right away, networks ran with it. Some even played 13 uninterrupted minutes of the call.

I think we decided it was news because of the audio tape, the 911 audio tape. We all ought to be honest. That tape is irresistible.

You even had a rescue 911 television crew in the ambulance and operating room showing paramedics trying to keep Chuck and Carol alive.

That hurt, buddy. Your belly hurt? That hurts when I press.

Is this someone you want us to call for you?

No.

You had a remarkable, gruesome snapshot of the couple bleeding out in the front seats of their car.

When you got that one push back in. You're going to jail. I'll push back.

And of course, you had the narrative of the moment. A white suburban couple in the dangerous black and brown inner city.

Here was a guy trapped in the.

Car watching his wife die.

I mean, this was a major story.

Even before we had any idea who had pulled the trigger. So I got to tell you a quick story. I know we got to go.

This is Greg Moore. He was an editor at the Globe back in 1989. And my boss, he made many of the calls about how the paper covered the Stewart shooting, starting with that first night.

Every night I would get a phone call about any breaking news.

And when I sat down with him recently, I couldn't even get a question in before he launched into this story.

So I got a phone call, right, telling me that this couple had been shot in Mission Hill. And I was like, okay, well, there'd been a lot of people shot, right? I mean, she was a pregnant woman and all that, but she wasn't dead. So I was like, yeah, talk to the page one, folks, and it should be on page one.

The next morning, Greg headed into the newsroom a little earlier than usual.

I'll never forget this. I stopped at Burger King on Ave. To get a little like sandwich, right? And I'm sitting there reading our paper, getting a sandwich and looking out the window and watching people walk by the two newspaper boxes, which were a little bit apart, right? And then they would just stop and like take two steps back, look at the Herald box, put their quarter in and get the newspaper and just stop right there.

Look. This is how newspaper wars were won back in 89, sales of the actual papers to Greg, the Herald was his main competition. Not tv news, not the national papers, the Herald, and people at the Globe. Well, we hated the Herald.

I'm like, what the hell is going on there? Right? Because I hadn't looked at the Herald. I didn't subscribe to the Herald because I wasn't giving them no money, right? But I would read it every morning. So I get up from the table and go out and look at the newspaper and go, damn. Put my quarter in, stand right there looking at that front page, and then walk back into the restaurant, grab my briefcase and go to myself, nothing's going to be the same again. That's what I said to myself. I knew at that moment it was.

That gruesome photo, the one of Carol and chuck in the front seat of their car on the front page of the Herald that caught everyone's eye and earned their twenty five cents.

I just knew from that moment on that everything was going to be different, that this story would be like no other I've ever seen. I was like, oh, shit. And when I came in the newsroom, I got there, like, probably quarter to eight. We were calling people up on the phone, okay. We were calling people up on the phone.

We got to get moving. This was the kind of story that gets everyone's juices flowing in a newsroom. Right from the first moment, it felt like the kind of story that rarely comes along.

Hey, you know, those are great times, man. Those are great times. We were rolling. Yeah, we were. Know, you just don't forget days like that.

The eyes of the nation were on Boston.

We were feeling pressure to break the story. Like every morning. 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.

People at the Herald were fired up, too.

I was one of those breaking news reporters. I had a lot of success on the street, talking to people and getting them to talk to me.

Herald reporter Gary witherspoon and I were part of the small cadre of black reporters in Boston. Both of us had been called the n word. While reporting in certain neighborhoods, covering crime kept Gary pretty darn busy. He ended up in the same spots, talking to some of the same people again and again. And even he initially bought Chuck's story.

And it was certainly plausible, we thought, that this could know. Kids were killing each other left and right in Boston.

After the shooting, Gary spent day after day in Mission Hill talking to black teens.

And they all felt like they were being rousted. And I was talking to these kids about what was going on. And almost right away, I heard two things. One was that the husband did it. And I, like most people, dismiss that notion, thinking, no, they're going to catch the guy who did it. And almost right away, folks were saying, there were cops saying, we're looking for the who pulled the trigger. I could believe that, too.

While the cops searched for the killer, reporters were working their sources, and there.

Was an intense competition between the local newspapers. The Herald and the Globe were going at it every day, trying to kill each other, really. We wanted to beat the hell out of them, and they wanted to beat the hell out of us. And we felt like the Globe had more resources. They had the money to do it.

Gary's Herald colleague, Michelle Caruso put it in blunt terms.

They paid good salaries. They were considered to be prestigious. And the Herald at that time was owned by Rupert Murdoch. It was a tabloid. And there was always a joke. If it bleeds, it leads. We wanted to be on the same playing field with the globe. This was war.

Michelle was a veteran beat reporter with great law enforcement sources and a love for gory true crime stories.

I would read like 50 books a year, true crime. And a lot of them were husbands killing wives, men killing girlfriends, or sick old men that were like kidnapped teenage girls and put them in a box or a coffin and keep it under the bed. So my mind, perhaps twisted by such a heavy diet of true crime, had no trouble. Yeah, men do some really sick shit to women.

In her telling, she was skeptical of Chuck early on.

I was very open with my bosses that I felt that Chuck did it.

There were other journalists who questioned Chuck's story, too. Former Globe editor Greg Moore remembers that the newsroom juggled hundreds of tips about Chuck from all corners.

And they were crazy. They were know he was dealing drugs, he was selling jewelry, he was selling furs.

The baby was black.

The baby was, baby was black. I mean, it was just all kinds of stuff. And we probably had like almost a dozen reporters off and on, knocking on doors, going into projects that they had never been in before, knocking on doors, saying, hey, is there a woman here that had an affair with Chuck Stewart? They go like, no, right?

But the skepticism didn't exactly bleed into the coverage. Michelle Caruso had listened to the 911 tapes and drove the same route as the Stewart's Toyota Cresseter. She sensed there were problems with the story. But when it came to nailing things down, well, she and other reporters hit wall after wall when they went to police and prosecutors.

I had figured out in my mind how to structure a story that questioned Charles Stewart's story.

Michelle says she just needed one thing, a key source to tell her that her hunch wasn't way off. She wanted some kind of confirmation. And she had the lead prosecutor, Francis O'Meara, on speed dial.

All I needed was for Francis O'Meara to say one word. Yes. When I asked him, are you investigating Charles Stewart as a potential suspect in this case? Are you looking at him? Are you looking at insurance policies, phone records, bank records? Are you looking at him? And quite the opposite. He wouldn't even hint that they were. He said, no, in fact, we're going in a different direction. The investigation is going in another direction.

So nothing came of it.

I can recall going to a cocktail party with a bunch of mid thirty s to forty ish lawyers, and they knew that I was a reporter and worked at the Herald and a couple of the wives asked me, oh, what do you think of that? Kissing it? And when I said that I thought Charles Stewart might be involved, the wives turned on me, know, oh, that's disgusting. You want to blame the victim. You want to blame the victim for this crime. And that was very sobering to me because I realized if the Boston Herald were to do a story questioning Chuck Stewart's integrity and honesty, and we turned out to be wrong, we would have been destroyed.

And then Chuck leaped to his death.

I was too pissed to cry. I was mad. I was mad at myself, like, how did you not get this in the paper? How did you let this slip through your fingers? Now he's dead. I consider it the biggest failure of my entire 27 year journalistic career. We failed the city of Boston, particularly the residents of Mission Hill.

Gary Witherspoon.

I think the media bought it hook, line and sinker. We were guilty for sure. He played us like a fiddle, and we went along for the ride. In hindsight, I wish I had done my job differently.

The media's self reflection was intense, but fairly short lived. Tonight, the Boston hoax.

Tonight, eyewitness reporter Dan press examines the way news.

It was a compelling american soap opera, a racist american.

It was a white couple, and therefore we're going to be here a lot longer. We have organized ourselves as nancy, that.

A white life is worth more than a black.

Cover urban America in the wrong way. We do not cover it.

Brought in to this Camelot image, you.

Make it sound as if the next.

Day we went to our book of.

Stereotypes, looked up, yes, they must be the Camelot couple. Go out and get Camelot.

Well, inside your head, didn't that happen?

No, it did not happen.

But you don't have to deify the dead.

We didn't deify. It was almost like Camelot.

And you put it. Two full pages streaming headlines.

Camelot.

Though many in the media pledged to do better, some of the worst offenses came in the wake of all this reflection. A lot of it appeared in the globe, and most of the bylines were from columnist Mike Barnacle. At the time, he was the biggest name in the newsroom, a self styled street poet, a columnist for the working class, and a staunch defender of nearly all white South Boston.

South Boston has managed to cling to its essential character. You can still find many, many people who know and live the meaning of the word neighbor. No other area of this town took the kind of public beating that was consistently administered to South Boston over school bussing. South Boston remains a place where more people than not make the daily effort to lead lives of honest pride and hard work.

At the same time, Barnacle was tough on crime and regularly appeared on tv to decry drugs and violence in neighborhoods like Roxbury and Mission Hill.

Something has happened in this country recently, something that's all mixed up with crack and cultural depravity, with ignorance and indifference. Something bad, something truly evil. There are too many kids in too many neighborhoods who have absolutely no fear and no respect for anything or anyone. They would just as soon shoot you as look at you. They are not damaged by juveniles. They are raped, robbed, maimed, and sometimes killed by young criminals, beasts who are growing up in a cave where there is no light, no hope, and very little future.

Barnacle had a wealth of sources within the Boston Police Department, including his own brother Paul, who happened to be a homicide detective. Baron hardly wrote about the Stewart shooting or the police manhunt in late 1989. That changed once Chuck jumped.

I mean, he was the one that broke the story about the fact that the family members knew from the beginning that Charles Stewart had killed Carol. He was the one that had the tape recording from the fire department of them on the telephone, talking about whether or not to tell their mother. I mean, he had the whole story. He had it. And whatever it took to share that with the public, even if that meant breaking some conventions. I think that at the highest levels of the globe, we felt like we had an obligation to put that information out there.

And we did. Chronicle pinned a top of the fold, page one story, saying Chuck's motive was a $482,000 insurance policy he'd taken out on Carol just weeks before her murder. But it wasn't true. The story was wrong. Yes, Chuck and Matthew plotted to profit from an insurance payout on Carol's jewelry. But Chuck didn't take out a big ticket life insurance policy from prudential in the lead up to her death, as Barnacle claimed. We know now, Chuck killed Carol for a host of reasons. He didn't want to be a dad, was eyeing other women, and didn't like how Carol, as he put it, had the upper hand in their marriage. Was there a financial incentive, too? Maybe. But a half million dollar life insurance plot didn't happen. Even the company publicly denied it. And when editor Greg Moore asked Barnacle about his source for the column, Barnacle straight out refused.

And the fact that we could not force Barnacle to produce documentation for where he got that information, that was a wake up call for me. But nobody should be bigger than the institution. And in that case, he was still.

Barnacle's most controversial column centered on Willie Bennett's 7th grade report card. It was written well after Willie had been cleared in the Stewart killing. In essence, Barnacle justified the police department's myopic focus on Willie. Barnacle wrote that 14 year old Willie had an extremely low iq, and Willie got ds in science and geography. The column read. The man's pathetic, violent history is so much a part of the unyielding issues of race, crime and drugs tearing daily at America that it is amazing how any black minister or black politician could ever stand up and howl in public that his arrest was a product of police bigotry and a volley of discrimination aimed at all black residents of Boston. Wow. I called Mike Barnacle and asked him to comment. He said, in so many words, no thanks. And he made clear that he believes there's no story here and no value in revisiting it. Barnacle has always stood by his words. Two prominent members of the Boston media.

Have been on the Stewart story from the starter at our Boston affiliate this morning.

Here he is in February 1990 on the Today show with Bryant Gumble.

Let me start with the accusation. Media partly to blame, guilty or not guilty? Mike? Well, why not blame the media? We're now blaming the media for the Vietnam War. But the answer is no. You had a made for tv movie in the process of being made that night, Brian, you had a CBS network tv crew filming the EMTs as they assisted a dying woman and a critically wounded husband. You had this enormously dramatic tape that was going to be played and replayed in every tv broadcast, news broadcast for weeks on end and reprinted in every paper in the country. So you had an unusually dramatic sequence of events occurring. But the answer is no. The media has nothing to be defensive about. But more importantly, nor do the police.

Even his editors defended him back then. In 1990, Barnacle declined many requests to appear on panels dissecting the media's coverage. Mike just didn't do that. So Greg Moore took the heat.

I guess I should direct it to the Boston Globe, Mr. Moore, because one of your columnists, Mr. Barnacle, went to great lengths to talk about Mr. Bennett, his iq and other basically negative images of William Bennett. And that became front page copy. Isn't that extraordinary that a columnist would have a column on the front page in a story like this? Well, no, I don't think so. There's a question. Why did Barnacle write about Bennett in that way? About his iq and about his criminal past, his criminal record and stuff. I haven't talked to barnacle about it. I don't know. But my guess, as a black man and as an editor of the Boston Globe, doesn't that offend you that he would cover this story on the front page in an article like that? There's some aspects of the story that I don't like, some aspects of his columns that I disagree with, but there's some things he writes that I like. There's some things that I don't like. There's some things that make me mad, but that would apply to any columnist. Did that bother you, though? Did that bother you? Did that column bother you when it talks about his iq and that he's a criminal?

He has been. He will be. So why have sympathy for William Bennett? You read that column, right? Yeah, I've read the column. Did it bother you? On a personal aspects of it, yes.

You were frequently called on to defend our honor. What was that like for you?

It was a crucible moment for me, but it was one that I relished. I mean, look, as African American charged with that responsibility, I wanted to make sure that I discharged it fully, not just in the coverage day to day that I was responsible for, but I wanted to be able to defend what we did. And even though early on there were people telling me, yay, don't go on television because they're trying to trap you, I was like, I'm the metro editor. If I can't defend the coverage that I was in charge of, who can?

This is when I realized just how deeply people mistrust the media. For so many black folks, this was confirmation of what they always believed, that the media fundamentally couldn't be trusted. To be fair.

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.

I sat down with my colleague Renee Graham recently. We've been talking about the Stewart case for 34 years.

What year did you get hired?

89, 80.

So. Damn, you've been here 34 years.

Don't remind me. I just passed the 34 year anniversary. So today Renee is a columnist on the Globe's opinion page. But at the time, she was a young black reporter in the Globe newsroom. She was from New York. She had worked at the Miami Herald. When I arrived, we just kind of naturally fell into the same social circle.

There were the black and. And a lot of us were young. No, we hung out. We went bar hopping. We went to restaurants. We went to each other's homes. We watched boxing matches.

We'd go to brunch and bitch about Greg.

We'd go to brunch and bitch about Greg.

So both of us were outsiders when the Stuart shooting happened. And I think that made it easier for us to question the official story. Right from the beginning, we didn't have relationships with these cops or with the mayor or the DA. It always looked to me like they knew they needed to go out and find a black guy, and they went out and found a black guy. And we never bought this idea that Chuck was some kind of evil genius that had everybody fooled.

It's how Charles played the fault of american history. He sort of turned that in this. And I'm not even saying he was some sort of criminal mastermind. You don't have to be in this country to do that. It's been done before. It's been done know. Susan Smith with the children in, you know, oh, my God. The black man jumped in the car, and now she killed those kids. And that was another one that never made know. But everyone was just, like, looking for this black man. It's always somehow the mysterious black man who's done the terrible thing.

In this case, the mysterious black man was Willie Bennett.

It made me think of what it was probably like in the south when there was lynching. Like, if people could have gotten their hands on Willie Bennett, he would have been know he became Boston's boogeyman. Boston's black boogeyman. It just took hold so quickly because it was intended to take hold so quickly. Everything about that story was engineered to inflame racial tensions and to distract from the facts that a lot of it didn't make sense because people reacted emotionally to that story. They didn't react to it intellectually. It was all emotion. What the coverage did was ignite white fears, which are always there, which are never far beneath the surface. But this was the nightmare for know and everything about Boston just being lawless and overrun by animals. And no one is safe. And no one always means white people aren't safe. That's what that really means.

You could feel that emotion inside the newsroom. There were a lot of tense conversations.

Let's talk about Mike Barnacle. Let's talk about my barnacle, shall we?

Renee is still angry. The barnacle never faced any accountability. Not for playing into racist tropes and not for basic reporting failures. After he got the life insurance story so wrong, even the insurance company issued a rare public statement saying it was incorrect.

Usually you get something wrong in a story, you have to write a correction. They never wrote a correction. And I don't know, I almost assumed it's because they just didn't want to make Barnacle look bad, that he'd gotten something that big and the biggest story of the year wrong. They never corrected it because in the middle of all that, you were like, okay, well, we screwed that up, but let's just move on. And that's what they did. So here we are, 34 years later, still no correction. They've never said, we got that wrong.

As far as we know, nothing ever came of those columns. Years later, Barnacle was caught plagiarizing. He left the globe in 1998. He's now a tv commentator and contributor for MSNBC.

That should end a career. When you get tagged with the two great sins of journalism, plagiarism and fabrication, that should be the end of it. But this is America, and life is never over for a white man in America. Nothing personal. Just saying.

When it comes to the Stuart case, another person Renee thinks about is Greg, our old boss. I like Greg a lot. Renee has never quite forgiven him.

I trusted Greg. Greg had hired me, and Greg was the highest ranking black person at the Globe, and he was my editor. And so I was sort of saying to Greg things that didn't feel right to me. That didn't sound right, but he wasn't listening.

He was swept up in it. I asked Greg if he had any regrets about how the globe handled the Stewart story.

No, I don't. Zero. No. And I'm not a person who is not self reflective.

That answer really surprised me. It's mind boggling to me that he doesn't regret anything about it. I have regrets. I think most reporters have regrets.

I'm really proud that almost immediately we talked about race and class. We talked about sort of white lives matter more than black lives. We talked about race. Like, one of the things that we were comfortable doing is talking about race in a very aggressive, upfront way. And that was a part of our theme in that coverage from the beginning.

And Greg is right. In the wake of the shooting, the globe did go pretty deep on race. Remember Eileen McNamara's column on James Moody, the black man who was also killed that night, but whose death got hardly any notice? The Herald didn't do anything like that. It seemed as if the Herald front pages trotted out one racist trope after another, rarely portraying mission hill as a place where good people were just trying to live their lives. I've said it wasn't a proud moment for anyone in my business, and it wasn't. But talk to black Bostonians today and you'll hear that the Herald's coverage still stings. We all learned a hard lesson about trusting official sources.

In retrospect, I don't trust anything or anybody. If somebody tells me something like that, I want to know exactly what is that based on. Again, I think that's another legacy of Stuart, at least for me.

Another legacy of the story can be seen in the city's newsrooms. Here's a taste of the conversation back then.

Would it make a difference if we consciously, all of us, made an effort to increase the representation of minorities? I think that we all benefit from editorial, from our colleagues. It's been very hard for me to sit here just now to listen to this because more than half the newspapers in this country don't have any minorities. No question.

I mean, the more culturally diverse a newsroom is, it's got to be about.

The media in this country has done a terrible job. Too many of the decision makers are white men.

It wasn't just seasoned journalists who were paying close attention.

I owe my career to the Stewart case in so many ways, because looking at the way the black community was treated during that time, I told myself, if you leave it to them, this is how you're going to look to everybody. This is how you're going to be perceived by everybody. You need to represent yourself. If you don't have a chance to speak for yourself, this is how you're going to look. And that's one of the big reasons why I got into journalism in the first place.

Today, Howard Bryan is a successful author and commentator. Back in 89, this kid from Boston was at Temple University watching the case unfold.

I felt like there were two conversations taking place. There was the case itself, and there was what we were reading in the Globe and in the Herald. And I remember my sister bringing up something that would become a story later on in media, which was, they don't do this when black people get killed. Why is this one person, Carol Stewart, God rest her soul, obviously, why is she so special? The black community in Boston just gets beaten on and told to take it and written about by everybody but us. And so essentially, when you look at what took place media wise following the case, you essentially had white people talking to each other. There were very few black voices, with the exception of Adrian Walker, maybe Derek Jackson in the Globe, who provided the counter, who provides the counterbalance to those stories, who provides the counterbalance that says, hold on, wait a minute. This doesn't quite fit.

In spite of the early 90s conversations about newsroom representation, Howard felt he couldn't make it in Boston. He had to become a success elsewhere.

First you have to make a reputation, a professional reputation, somewhere else. And then after you've done that, maybe you can come home, and then they'll claim you, because who doesn't want to claim a success story? But you're not going to be able to grow up through the ranks here. You're not going to be able to climb through the ladder, because those jobs and those opportunities are already taken, and you're not on the list. So that's the real piece of the hostility that I always felt about Boston.

I know firsthand that Howard has a point, though. Some black reporters covered the Stuart murder, and a black editor led the Globe's coverage, the so called stars of Boston media in those days were overwhelmingly white. They were the ones that police and prosecutors leaned on to sell the notion that Willie Bennett was behind this murder, and editors trusted them. That was maddening to reporters like me and Renee, who were skeptical, but didn't feel like we had the experience or credibility to get the attention of editors. Walking around Boston in those months, I heard plenty of criticism of the media, especially from black people. And after a while, I stopped pushing back on it because a lot of it rang true.

I remember Barnacle had a line in one of his columns that said something. Know, what were they supposed to do? Beat a confession out of him while he was bleeding to death? And I remember that really bothering me, because I remember thinking that you're not going to get off the hook that easily. This was not handled right. You can't tell me that this was handled properly. You can't tell me that this is how you would have handled a black person and shot another black person. So you've got to own up.

So did the media learn a lesson? Renee doesn't think so.

I don't know that journalism has gotten better since the. You know, I think that the media still is attracted to heat, not light. Like you always say, this is what changed everything. But it didn't really change anything. I mean, look, they couldn't even run a damn correction. It changed nothing.

I've said over the years that there's never been any consensus on the lessons of the Stewart case or what should have changed. But after all the media panels and analysis and self reflection, this much is clear to me. We didn't ask the right questions until it was much too late. I want to tell you about one more person who's still carrying this around.

Tough stuff really is tough stuff.

I've known Evan Richmond since we were both young journalists covering crime in Boston. He's the Herald photographer who took that infamous crime scene picture of Chuck and Carol Stewart bleeding out in their car.

It's tough to look at. It's such a gruesome picture. I didn't even know they ran it until I saw it on the front page.

Evan was young, right out of college.

I really wasn't prepared for what was about to happen.

When I called him, Evan was hesitant to talk about the picture. He felt like this was opening an old wound.

I was pretty shaken at the time, and I wasn't really following the story after know. There was a lot of negativity towards me. Hate mail?

You got hate mail?

Yeah, I got a lot of hate mail. And of course, back then, it wasn't just email. You had to write it on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope with a stamp, and mail it. And I got a lot of that mail. It was harsh. How can you sleep at night? I hope this happens to you and your family. And I thought a lot of the questions that were brought up were valid, and I took it hard.

What did you do with the hate mail?

I can show you a couple of them if you'd like. I have a file I kept I'd like to see.

Sure, sure. Absolutely. So Evan walks over to a cabinet and grabs a folder. This is something I did not see coming. The stack of letters and a few clippings, they're pristine. They're old, but not yellow, because Evan has perfectly preserved them.

Yeah, I kept a little file over the years of information regarding the story. These are some of the letters. This was the editorial page of the Herald, I think the day or two after, with some of the responses that we got from some of the readers.

I asked if he would read the letters out loud. Evan took a pass, but he said I could read them. I found your picture sick. Your publication went beyond the boundaries of journalism and sensationalism into the realm of morbid and sick. How dare you intrude on the pain and sorrow of death that this family must now endure. Wow. And there are a dozen of these.

Well, that's just one day. Yeah, just one day. That's kind of the drop in the bucket of the kind of mail and phone calls we got. A lot of people wanted to speak with me personally. I wasn't really taking calls or interviews at that point, but I got the gist of what people were feeling out there. Yeah, and like I said, there were hundreds of phone calls that first day.

Hundreds.

Hundreds. Hundreds.

Evan eventually agreed to read snippets of a couple of them. He grimaced the whole time.

I am absolutely outraged that you could put a picture like this of the shooting victims on the front page of the Boston Herald. What kind of person are you? You have absolutely no compassion for her family. It's people like you and the media that create people who have sick little twisted minds to try this. After looking and reading about this, I will never pick up a newspaper again from a very, very angry United States citizen.

Now, these letters are in pristine condition. All these years later. Why did you save them?

I mean, I knew at the time that this was probably a pretty rare occurrence and that hopefully it never wouldn't happen again. But for me it was very moving and I felt I wanted to keep some of it so I could just have it. And like I said, I'm not sure I ever read these letters before because I kind of had to knew what was in them. But maybe I knew 33 years later that Adrian Walker would come ask me about them.

This case felt that way for a lot of us. Not just a story or even a big story, but a moment that might come to define us.

I've shot a lot of pictures in the years since. And what would you be known for if today were your last day? And that might be it.

That might be it. On the next and final episode of Murder in Boston, we'll look at the long tale of this case and ask how far the city's come or not.

Here's the reason that I've been upset for a while since. If you're black in your life, but if you're white, you're on trial. Ain't nothing to it. Just like that. Chuck, Charles Stewart, they're always claiming that the devil made me do it for insurance. He killed his wife and his child and blamed it on a brother and raised his gut brought wild. He had the media believing the Esau favor and all the whites were like, I can't wait till they catch the fastest. I hope they try him. They were sure that he did it. There was no need to try him. And Willie Bennett, who was in it to win it, got fast and harassed because they were sure that he did it. Anything that really pissed me off and truly offended me. Mr. Fuckers wanted to reinstate the death penalty for a brother man, but not the other man. And when they found out he killed to himself on the other hand now. It's inhumane. Bring it back. They wouldn't bear, but his brother confessed he was with it. So give him the chair. But that won't happen with that punk top kids Lyn and Mickey Roach.

You better just watch for us. I don't want to hear that you're sorry for me after you tore up and started a war up in the black community. It's od of the news, but it's still in my head. Charles Stewart still lives even though the stuff is dead. I'm a 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 Dyer is our sound designer. Voiceover direction by Athena Karkanis Research from Jeremiah Manion fact checking by Matt Mahoney the Globe's executive editor is Nancy Barnes. Thanks to former globeies Brian McGury 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 Gluckstadt and Alison Cohen on the HBO podcast team. The HBO documentary series murder in Boston, roots, rampage and Reckoning is available to stream on maps.