Boston pays $150K settlement to Black men falsely accused in Carol Stuart killing

The City of Boston paid a $150,000 settlement to two Black men who had been falsely linked to the killing of Carol Stuart in 1989, years after Mayor Michelle Wu issued a formal apology on behalf of the city.

The city will pay $100,000 to the family of Willie Bennet and $50,000 to Alan Swanson.

The Boston Herald first reported news of the settlement.

Stuart, a white pregnant woman, was killed by her husband, Charles, in October 1989. But Charles Stuart told officers at the scene that a Black man wearing a tracksuit was responsible for the crime, leading Boston police to frequently stop Black men on the street.

The settlement comes two years after Wu formally apologized to Swanson and to Bennett’s family, a move she said at the time was “long overdue.”

“The mayor’s office, city officials and the Boston Police Department took actions that directly harmed these families and continue to impact the larger community, reopening a wound that has gone untended for decades,” Wu said in 2023. “If you knew or loved a Black man in Boston, you feared for his life. There was no evidence that a Black man had committed this crime, but that didn’t matter because the story was one that confirmed and exposed the beliefs that so many shared, from residents and reporters to officers and officials at every level.”

On the night of Oct. 23, 1989, Charles Stuart called the police from his car in Mission Hill, saying that he and his pregnant wife had been shot during a carjacking after leaving a birthing class at a nearby hospital. When police arrived, he told them the perpetrator had been a Black man wearing a tracksuit. Carol Stuart died the next day and their child, delivered by Cesarean section, died a few weeks later. Charles Stuart survived the shooting.

In the following weeks and months, the Boston Police Department frequently stopped Black men on the street, spreading fear through the city’s Black community. Swanson was arrested five days after the shooting but released several weeks later, and Bennett, who had been convicted of other crimes in the past, was arrested based on rumors and picked out by Stuart in a police lineup as the shooter.

Around the time of the lineup, however, police learned that Stuart himself was linked to the murder and had lied about the supposed carjacking. Stuart died by suicide on Jan. 4, 1990, when he jumped off the Tobin Bridge.