Boston murder hoax exposes racist city officials and police

Scan page 20

Residents of Mission Hill demonstrate against police assault on their community.

BOSTON-The unraveling of the Stuart murder case has graphically exposed the racist character of this city's political administration and police department.

The case, publicized nationally in sensational headlines that would make the National Enquirer envious, was a vivid demonstration of the double standard faced by the Black community in murder cases. Only this time, it backfired.

On Oct. 23, 1989, Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol, a white couple from the suburbs, were returning home from a childbirth class. Charles Stuart phoned police from his car and described how a Black man in the Mission Hill section had shot his wife in the head, shot him in the abdomen, robbed them and fled.

A recording of the call was played on news programs around the country. Carol Stuart died within hours, and the child, Christopher, born through emergency Caesarean, died 17 days later.

Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn, describing the attacker as an "animal," attributed the incident to the proliferation of drugs and guns in minority neighborhoods, and set off what he termed "an aggressive police response" that turned Mission Hill into a police occupation zone. Eager to jump on the racist bandwagon, some members of the Massachusetts legislature called for reinstituting the death penalty.

Grisly hoax

But Stuart's story was a hoax—one he was almost able to pull off because he understood how easy it would be for white cops, the on a Black man, ignored the fact that Stuart's story contained many contradictions and inconsistencies. After Stuart's story began to fall apart in early January, a pattern of illegal police activity—amounting to an attempted legal lynching—was uncovered.

The first suspect arrested in the Stuart murder, Al Swanson, is a homeless man who was squatting in a vacant apartment. The police falsified information on a searchwarrant request to pin the murder on Swanson. Stuart had described the assailant as wearing a black jogging suit with a red stripe. When the police found Swanson's suit with a stripe, they statement.

"If it wasn't for an aggressive [defense] attorney from the beginning," said EllisHagler, the crime "may have been hung on Al Swanson. It turns out the police went to the judge to get a search warrant," with an informant's statement "that there was this running suit in this apartment, there was the gun in this apartment, and they were going to find it all. So they went barging in" and "found none of those things. They locked him up anyway. His lawyer came out right off the bat and got some publicity which ... made them back down."

Then, "the Gestapo tactics spread far beyond Mission Hill. [The cops] thought they had carte blanche ...

Leaked information

The cops leaked information that they had apprehended a new chief suspect, William Bennett. They coached Stuart to identify him in a line-up. Black teenagers were intimidated by cops into producing stories that linked him to the murder. One was threatened with a 20-year prison sentence and a beating. When he tried to recant, he was threatened again.

The cops put words into the mouths of witnesses who testified before a grand jury. One cop coached a "witness" before he was interviewed by homicide detectives.

Ellis-Hagler told of people with information that exonerated Bennett. "They went to the police six times with the information they had, while Bennett was being held. Fi(continued on page 5)

----- pull-quotes -----

WE WANT ACTION NOT PHETO