Stuart Murder Case begins.

Responding to his phone call, police find Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife in their car near 45 St. Alphonsus Street. The Reading resident claims they had just been carjacked and shot after leaving a childbirth class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Stuart’s wife and son, delivered prematurely, die of their wounds, and Stuart barely survives. He subsequently describes their assailant as a raspy-voiced, African-American man, and, after an investigation focused in Mission Hill, police arrest a suspect that Stuart seems to identify in December 1989. But soon after, Stuart himself is implicated in the murders, and his body is found in the waters below the Tobin Bridge on January 4, 1990. In the aftermath of the bizarre case, police and city officials are criticized for having believed the husband’s story and for targeting African-American men as suspects.