Boston's notorious Charles Stuart murder case began 30 years ago
Stuart ended his own life a few months later
Stuart ended his own life a few months later
Stuart ended his own life a few months later
Thirty years ago, one of the most notorious murder cases in Boston history began.
Charles Stuart, a Reading native and Boston store manager shot, his pregnant wife in the city on Oct. 23, 1989, and blamed it on a fictitious African American assailant, inflaming racial tensions in the city.
Stuart's wife, Carol DiMaiti, a lawyer, was seven months pregnant when the shooting occurred. The pair were leaving a childbirth class when she was killed.
Their baby, delivered early, died in a hospital.
Stuart tried to finger a black man arrested by police, but Stuart's brother, Matthew, later told them his brother had shot DiMaiti. He said he himself had gone to the scene to help Charles commit what he'd been told was going to be "insurance fraud."
Matthew Stuart said he helped his brother by taking the gun and DiMaiti's wedding rings and throwing them off a bridge. Hours after his brother went to police, in January 1990, Charles Stuart committed suicide.
He leaped to his death from the Tobin Bridge in Chelsea.
