The Charles Stuart Case

When Charles Stuart told police a young Black man in a tracksuit had carjacked and shot him and his pregnant wife in Mission Hill, the Boston Police Department turned the whole neighborhood into a suspect. Roughly 100 extra officers scoured the predominantly Black neighborhood. They stopped and frisked residents on the street, and they strip-searched men they decided looked suspicious. A Washington Post account describes at least 30 African-American men, young to middle-aged, lying on the ground, stripped naked, their arms handcuffed behind their backs. The lie held for more than two months because police and reporters wanted to believe it. Police first pulled in Alan "Albie" Swanson on an unrelated charge and made him a suspect before clearing him. Then they arrested William "Willie" Bennett, a 39-year-old man from Roxbury, and built the case around him. Newspapers covered Bennett as if his guilt were settled. On December 28, 1989, Stuart picked Bennett out of a lineup. Stuart had shot his wife Carol himself. Carol died early on October 24; their son Christopher, delivered prematurely, died 17 days later. The story fell apart only when Stuart's brother Matthew told police on January 3, 1990, that the carjacking was invented and that he had helped get rid of Carol's belongings and the gun. Bennett spent years answering for a crime he did not commit while the men who terrorized his neighborhood faced no charge. Boston's apology to him, to Swanson, and to Black Boston came decades later. The injury was the state's: a Black neighborhood treated as a crime scene because a white man knew the police would take his word.