The Crime That Tore Boston Apart
January 4, 1990
I took the commuter bus from my town north of Boston to the Back Bay office where I worked like I did every morning. All roads leading into Boston were congested with commuters. The bus drove over the Tobin Bridge, which crossed over the industrial landscape of Chelsea, and the Mystic River.
The hour and a half commute was usually uneventful. The passengers read, chatted, or dozed. But on this morning, everything was different. The bus stopped on the bridge and didn’t move. Progress was always slow, but it moved forward eventually. Not this morning. We watched in shock as police choppers flew under the bridge and hovered over the harbor below. Law enforcement vehicles were everywhere, and traffic was even more snarled than usual. No one could tell us what had happened.
But when I got to work, an hour late, I found out. Charles Stuart’s car, with a note inside, had been found on the bridge. He had jumped to his death. The choppers were trying to spot his body, which was eventually recovered from the Mystic River.
October 23, 1989, the crime
Just a few months before, on October 23, 1989, Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol, had stopped at a red light in Boston’s Mission Hill…
