Pregnant Carol Stuart was shot in the head by her husband Charles Stuart in their car in Boston's Mission Hill area after a childbirth class.
On the night of October 23, 1989, Carol DiMaiti Stuart, then eight months pregnant with her first child, was riding in a car with her husband Charles Stuart after the couple had left a childbirth education class at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. As they drove through the Mission Hill/Roxbury area, Charles Stuart shot Carol in the head at close range and also shot himself in the abdomen in a staged attack designed to look like a robbery gone wrong.
This act would set off one of the most consequential criminal investigations in Boston's modern history. The location of the shooting, a predominantly Black neighborhood, was not incidental — Charles Stuart deliberately chose it to make his fabricated story of a Black assailant more believable to police and the public, exploiting deep-seated racial prejudices.
The attack represented a calculated act of domestic violence disguised as a random act of urban crime. Carol, an accomplished attorney, was targeted by the very person she trusted most, in a crime that would not be understood for what it truly was until months later. The shooting set into motion a chain of events — a false 911 call, a citywide manhunt, wrongful arrests, and ultimately Charles Stuart's suicide — that exposed profound fissures in how race, crime, and media intersected in late-1980s America.