Two Black men have received a formal apology from the mayor of Boston decades after being wrongfully arrested on charges of killing a white woman.
While their families expressed gratitude for the apology, they want compensation for the 34 years their loved ones have carried the burden of being the one-time accused killers of a wife who her husband had killed in a faked carjacking.
Mayor Michelle Wu formally issued an apology on Dec. 20 to Willie Bennett and Alan Swanson on behalf of the city. She acknowledged that the two men did not get fair treatment because of the overwhelming racism in the town at the time.
“There was no evidence that a Black man had committed this crime,” Wu said. “But that didn’t matter because the story was one that confirmed and exposed the beliefs that so many shared.”
She added, “From residents and reporters to officers and officials, at every level and at every opportunity, those in power closed their eyes to the truth because the lie felt familiar. They saw the story they wanted to see.”
Wu said to the press that “a false, racist claim accusing a Black man” for the woman’s death “unleashed” terror on the Mission Hill community, according to the Boston Herald.
After her remarks, she presented the official letters of apology to the family of Bennett, who was not present, and Swanson.
In addition to the mayor, Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox apologized on behalf of the police department for the “hurt and pain and suffering” caused by the department’s handling of the case, the murder of Carol Stuart.
On Oct. 23, 1989, Carol was fatally shot, killing her and the unborn child. At the time, she and her husband, Charles Stuart, were leaving a birthing class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and getting in their car. Charles Stuart, who was also shot in his stomach but survived, told police they were carjacked and forced to drive to the Mission Hill district of Boston and then shot.
Stuart told police a 5-foot-10 Black man in a black tracksuit with a gravelly voice was the shooter, leading to the wrongful arrests of Swanson, then 29 years old, and later Bennett, who was 39 years old.
Swanson was arrested after police got a tip from locals in Mission Hill that he was the shooter, and they found clippings from articles about the murder in the bathroom of a vacant apartment on Cornelia Court and a tracksuit similar to the description the husband gave. However, within days, Swanson was cleared.
Bennett was later apprehended after police, acting on a tip from neighborhood teenagers, arrested him as a suspect. Within weeks, Stuart identified him as the killer in a police lineup in December of the year.
Both Black men consistently denied any involvement in the shooting.
A surprising break in the case shocked the world. In January 1990, Charles’ brother, Matthew Stuart, revealed that Charles was the real murderer and was trying to collect his wife’s life insurance. He also confessed to helping discard the murder weapon. Before authorities could arrest Charles, the widower jumped off of the Tobin Bridge and ended his life.
Two detectives working the case, Robert Ahearn and Robert Tinlin, immediately suspected that Charles was the killer because of discrepancies in his account of the shooting. But their decision to pursue him was voted down by superiors in the department. The Boston Globe reports that it is estimated at least 33 people knew that Charles killed his wife before the case broke open but never made an official report.
Bennett, who was subsequently convicted on an unrelated robbery charge and spent a dozen years in prison, sued the city, and his mother received a settlement of $12,500 in 1995.
Bennett’s daughter Ebony Bennett-Nelson spoke at a news conference last week and said, “Asked my father what he wants. I asked my father if he wanted to come here today and what he wanted out of all this. He said, ‘Pay me, man.’ That’s all he said.”
“I need housing, reparations, I don’t have anything,” Swanson said, according to CBS News. “I’m still homeless and still in the same position.”
Other leaders say more things should be done to address the racial profiling that led to the wrongful arrests.
“Anybody who grew up in Roxbury in the ’80s and ’90s — everybody in every neighborhood — had one of those things [tracksuits]. So that was an all-call to any Black male between 4 feet and 7 feet: ‘You’re under attack, and you’re a suspect,’” moderator Dr. Rufus Faulk said last week at a panel meeting about the case, according to WGBH.
